Well, I took a real big break from blogging. There were so many things to do for the last few weeks. Finally I am catching up with some work and trying to enjoy myself as best as I can.
Just for a quick recap of my life for the past couple of weeks. After putting in a lot of effort I finally managed to run gentoo linux on my laptop. There was a time when I was in IIT Kanpur, when I would only use linux for my everyday work, falling back to Windows only if I was in the mood to play some games. But after I got my laptop here, things have changed a lot. Windows behaves so nicely with laptops I did not miss linux at all. Especially I like the ClearType fonts on my LCD. I really had to work a lot to make to fonts in linux look good. It is true that I have finally managed to configure and tweak the system in such a way that the fonts now look real pretty under linux, but there is always this font mismatch between GTK and QT. (Yes, even after using qt-gtk). I am planning to note the different steps that I had to take to make most of the systems fully operational under linux and put it in one place in my webpage. ( and hope someday somebody will benefit from it).
well, that concludes the linux for now. Nowadays I try to be in linux as much as possible, but sometimes the numerous configurations, mail archive etc that I have on my almost 10 month old windows configuration is too rich to ignore.
Last weekend went to last Vegas. My good friend Sayantan’s elder sister, Sruti di (henceforth referred to as Didia) lives at Henderson with her husband (Ruben da). Consequently, I did not have any problems regarding accommodation. They have bought a nice little house at Green Park, Henderson. Didia’s family has this tradition of decorating their house in an artistic manner, and this was also no exception. It reminded me of the first time when I entered their house at Makhan Chatterjee Lane, Chandannagore. I was quite young then, (maybe in class VII), but I still remember neat, clean and quasi-simplistic way in which their drawing room was decorated.
I enjoyed Las Vegas a lot. I dare say it even surpassed my expectations. The sin city is beautiful at night – seductive. The grandiose of the casinos and hotels are truly marvelous. Moreover, before Las Vegas, I have never seen people gamble with a minimum bet of 1000$ in front of my eyes (BTW, I learned to play BlackJack). That was a weired feeling to say the least. I was just pondering over my own financial status, and the result was maddening. Even the cocktail girls serving drinks to gamblers, in all probability, earn more than I will ever be able to. Didia hospitablity was awesome – and contrary to popular belief, she cooks quite good there days. I was genuinely sad whan I was starting the car to begin my return journey. This kind of thing usually does not happen to me – maybe the loneliness here at San Diego and the wonderful time that I was having there were the reasons behind that sudden emotion. Here is the link to my photo album (if you are interested in the pictures): ClickClick.
And I should not forget to mention that I drove all the way to Vegas and back all by myself. That is over 700 miles drive. My first looong solo drive, and I really really enjoyed it – and this sparked one more ambition for me: i *will* someday do a cross country drive here at United States. This country is amazing in its natural beauty.
Now I have to go back to my report + paper… and then sleep.
The iitk homepages still exists though. I wonder when my account and the homepage in the cse dept of iitk are going to be deactivated…