Tu khursheed hai, baadalon mein na chup
Tu mahtaab hai, jagmagaana na chhod.

Tu shokhi hai shokhi, riayat na kar
Tu bijli hai bijli, jalana na chhod.

Abhi ishq ne haar maani nahi
Abhi ishq ko aazmaana na chhod.

- Kaifi Azmi

1. A spiral with a hole
2. Discovery of a new prime number. It's a mother-freaking 9,152,052-digit-long number.
3. The coolest picture from Mars.
4. A new pill to stop women from menstruating. Is that even possible?

I woke up at like 1 again even though it was christmas. I looked outside the window and everything was wet. I think this is the first christmas I've seen where all the snow disappeared. I went downstairs and found my present under our christmas tree. I didn't know I was gonna get a present this year. We did presents last year but I didn't know we were gonna do them this year. But it was a nice surprise when my mom asked me yesterday what I wanted for christmas. After having lunch at Udipi, we went to Best Buy to get my "Best of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" DVD but surprisingly they were sold out. I didn't know there were other people besides me who watched He-Man too. Then we went to Circuit City to look for it there and had no luck. So then I just got the Live 8 concert DVD that I had wanted for so long. I watched the first disc (out of four) today. The first disc itself is about 3 hrs long! The whole set contains about 10 hours of music, and all that in DTS surround sound!! It sounded fantastic on our set up. I can't wait to watch to disc 3 which has the Pink Floyd reunion!!

Anyways, after watchin disc 1 I watched "March of the Penguins" in my room. I thought it was gonna be a boring documentary about penguins but I was simply blown away!! The cinematography was unbelievably gorgeous. It was incredible to see how carefully the penguins' journey was captured on camera in a harsh place like Antarctica. And the whole time while I was watching it, I felt like I could relate to these penguins just as if they were humans. The way they behaved, the mating, the protecting of the egg, the nurturing of the chicks, it was remarkable. I really hope this one wins an Oscar.

Then I had to get ready to go to a family friend's place for a little dinner party. Normally I don't go to those cause I have nothing to do there, but I had nothing to do at home either so I thought ah what the hell. The kid there named Rohan (no...not that Rohan) got a Nintendo DS for christmas. So I got to play mario kart on that. Then he showed me his toy guitar, which was an actual guitar but a lil kid's size. So I tuned it for him and then played that for a while. After that we were having dinner at like 11pm and just talking. Usually, I don't participate in any conversations at such parties, and the adults don't care to include me in their conversations either. For some reason I become very anti-social when I go to these things. I think it's cause none of their conversations are interesting to me. The uncles will talk about their jobs and the aunties will talk about tv serials. And when they all talk together it will mainly be bitching about the socioeconomic conditions in India and how to improve them. But today something strange happened. The uncles decided to actually include me in their conversation!! Not only that, the conversation was about their love affairs (more like how close they came to having one) before they got married. For the first time they were having an interesting conversation and I was a part of it! At first I didn't believe it. I was like "huh? u talkin to me?" But then they complimented my hairstyle (ah-ha!) and asked me who I was growing my hair for. Why do I have to be growing my hair for someone. Is it too weird that I wanna change my hair now? Anyways, then they asked me about Indian girls at OSU. "Haha...well...now that you mentioned it," I thought to myself. They wanted to know how the college culture had changed since they graduated. Specifically, whether Indian guys still revolve all their convos around girls or not. I told them that sadly it was still true. What more can I say? Girls are such tricky and mysterious beings. Generations have passed and still no one has figured them out.

All in all, it was nice to see that my presence was given some importance there. It was quite interesting to hear the uncles talk about their college days. They always mentioned parents and families when talking about compatibility with women. It was always about what they talked about with the girl's parents, not what they talked about with the girl. Something very strange and I don't understand yet. Maybe when it's my turn one day. But not yet, not for a while.

After a long hiatus, Mike's blog is finally up and running again! So now you can go read that while some of us are being lazy and not updating frequently.

Winter break is half way over and I've become so nonproductive. Having my computer in my room has spoiled me so much. All I do everyday now is sleep around 3AM, get up around 1PM, watch some movie, play call of duty 2 or vice city, download music, sit around the house, have dinner, then watch some other movie, and then go to sleep. I stopped watching LOST cause the disc keeps freezing on me. And I haven't learned another song on guitar since "Is There Anybody Out There." I guess I have lost all my motivation since the day all my grades showed up :( I hate that they can do that to you.

Grades are the worst part about college. My grades never reflect my actual knowledge. I get good grades in classes that I don't care about and don't learn anything in and average grades in the ones that are meaningful to me. I think I've realized that studying throughout the quarter doesn't really matter. All that matters are the few hours before your exams and how focused you are during your exam. You can read the whole textbook and do all your homework and still get a bad grade on exams just for being a bad test taker (like me.) I wish I cared more about my grades and my GPA. The problem is that it's nothing more than a number to me at the end of the day. To me, it's more important how much I have really learned in a class and how much I will remember in the future. Who the fuck cares about how long I take to solve a circuit problem or how quickly I can write a program for a microcontroller.

Nonetheless, I will continue to read my textbooks and do all my homework and study for exams. I'm just gonna have to do it better and more often this time. These bullet wounds (in the form of bad grades...metaphorically speaking) have slowed me down, but I haven't turned around and run away yet. I'm still on the battlefield and marching forward. The war is still on!

Apes in the lot. I don't know what Mike was doing though. I think he was excited for some other movie.

After enough monkeying around (pun intended) in the parking lot, we decided to go inside the movie theater. As we were walking in, we saw that there was no guy checking for tickets. We were confused but we just went inside to find our seats. We found really good seats fairly near the center. I was still trying to figure out how we could just walk in without having our ticket stubs torn. Then, being the (corrupt) Indian that I am, I thought to myself, why not try to return those tickets back? So I went to the counter and told the lady that I had extra tickets that I didn't need so I wanted to return them. A little bit of improvisation and the lady gave me $15 cash back. Not only did I get my money back, I made a total profit of $6! Sometimes I can be so smooth...

The previews began. They were supposed to show the X-Men 3 teaser but I didn't expect them to since they never showed the Superman teaser last time. But then they did show it! It was cool to see it on a big screen. Then came the Superman teaser!! FINALLY I got to see it on a big screen. Didn't make it any different cause it doesn't show anything in the first place. Then there was a pleasant surprise. They showed the first full length trailer for The Da Vinci Code. I couldn't believe it when I realized what movie it was. The preview looked awesome! They might actually pull this one off. I can't wait!

The movie began with a wonderful montage of the New York City of 1933. It's probably the best opening scene in a movie I have seen since The Two Towers. There was no need for a timestamp or a voiceover. The images on the screen did all the talking and immediately took the audience back to the depression era. It's hard to believe that the story takes place in New York City but not a single scene was filmed there. After seeing the opening scene, I knew that we were in for a delicious visual treat.

All the bad reviews for this movie complained that it was too long. Personally, I don't know what they're talking about. Never during the whole movie was I bored or felt that the story needs to pick up its pace. Yea it took a while for them to get to the island. But it needed to be done in order to have some character development. Otherwise it would've just been like a jurassic park movie where people get eaten by dinosaurs left and right and no one really cares.

But once they get to the island, holy crap. It's just a nonstop ride with a really spooky-looking tribe and their freakish sacrifical ceremony, followed by some running through the jungle with the giant ape, then the dinosaur stampede, V-Rex fight, creepy bugs and spiders, and so on... And if you thought Gollum looked real, wait till you see Kong. You can feel his fur in your hands. His roar will shake you up. You can sense the anger in his eyes. Kong is a real living, breathing creature. Weta Digital has once again kicked ILM's ass. I really don't have any words to describe the visual effects of this film. Our theater was barely half full, but every single person was gasping during all those fight sequences. People just couldn't believe what they were seeing on screen. I have never seen any audience react so wildly to a movie. It was just magnificent.

I can go on and on about what a great time I had watching this movie. It really was one of the most memorable cinema experiences that I had wanted for so long. It has its flaws, I admit. It's not the perfect movie of all time. But the sheer excitement and thrill that this movie induced in me is something that I haven't felt in a very long time. It was well worth the wait.

The 9 minutes of credits were over and we were ready to leave the theater. On our way out, there was no guy to collect the parking pass. Another dollar saved there. Three tickets to a movie: + $6, Parking: Free, Having an unforgettable movie experience with your friends: Priceless!

It's about damn time!! I need this break so badly. The last few weeks of fall quarter were so exhausting. Sometimes I wish we were on a semester system. Being on the run for ten weeks straight can get pretty hectic. I know I certainly was busy and focused for most of this quarter. Too bad it doesn't show in my grades. Oh well...there's always next quarter. I think my theory about how studying doesn't always gets you good grades might actually be true. However, I didn't fail in ECE 301 like I was expecting to so that's one good thing that came out of it.

But now it's three whole weeks of doing absolutely nothing!! Well, not exactly, but three whole weeks of doing whatever I want to. Which means I'll get more than sufficient amount of sleep, lots of good home food, and tons of time to watch movies, play video games, play my guitar, spend time with my family, watch LOST, waste time online, and last but not the least, update this blog!! It's only been two days since the end of exams and I've done a pretty good job of trying to stay busy with leisurely activities. I have already seen three movies and learned one song on guitar. Speaking of movies, I saw Chronicles of Narnia yesterday. It was really good and once again the SFX were so seamless!! I would recommend it to everybody...people of all ages. There are some biblical allegories in there (that's how the book was written) which could annoy some people, but I didn't mind them. Next is King Kong on Wednesday which I really can't wait for any longer for because I know it's gonna be one of the most memorable movie experiences ever!

Well it's time for me to go to bed now. Yea it's pretty early but I stayed up till 6:30AM last night and I didn't even take a nap all day! So until my next post, g'nite!


Mood: Sleepy
Music: Jagjit Singh - Shaam Se Aankh Mein Nami Si Hai

I know it's been a while since the thanksgiving weekend but I got these pictures from Adip and I thought I can post some of them since he isn't going to.