The Other Side of "M-Mountain"

Beauty?

Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
— Confucius

Back to spring

The snowfall didn’t last until afternoon. It is chilly now.

Second day of Spring

I woke up to a nival day. What a contradistinction? Officially, spring started yesterday and today it is wintry weather. The irony is that this is the first snowfall of the season for Socorro. Nature has a weird sense of humor.

Spring Break

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today is the last day of spring break and the school campus is a paragon of beauty. Nature adorned the campus with different colors to welcome the students back to school after spring break. Most of the trees on campus have grown leaves to provide shade to the tired students. The trees are so thoughtful that they have decorated the spring with different colors for the leaves. It ranges from different shades of green to different shades of brown.

Brown

Green

After St. Patrick's Day

Yesterday, I went shopping to Albuquerque after a long time. Albuquerque has become busier and beautiful. I did not expect much traffic as the day before was St. Patrick's Day. Apparently, I was wrong and there was pretty good traffic on a Saturday. Even though the city roads and highways had been decorated, there was no hint of snow in Albuquerque. I felt weltschmerz by looking at the mountains in Albuquerque. I had lunch at Bombay Grill, a very good Indian restaurant. Even though we are not munificent in tipping, we felt bad that we could not tip the waiter with cash. With regard to shopping, Gap had a good sale on T-Shirts. Foley‘s was closing its store in Coronado and there was a last day closing sale. Finally, Talin had ‘BRU’ coffee back in its stock. The weather was pleasant. It was cloudy with favorable shopping conditions. I went to Bernalillo and was taken aback by the manses out there. Here is the picture of mountains in Albuquerque taken from Bernalillo.

Plants

Even though, there are chilly crops back home in my village. I have never seen a potted plant of chilly. I took these pictures at Mayuri's.
Chilly


Tulip

Remembering Einstein

On this day in 1879 was born a rude, but genius, Albert Einstein. I list some of my favorite Einstein quotes.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours that's relativity.

Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Flowering

Few Good People

One day I came to my office and found my head-phone set broken; the wire was cut. I thought that maybe it got entangled in my chair. The janitor apologized for cutting the wire when he was operating the vacuum cleaner in my office. I told him that I understand his actions were not intentional and I would buy a new one soon. He enquired every day about them until I bought a new one. Charlie is ingenuous.

It was a Friday evening. I was working late in my office. The police officer on duty locked the exits to the building as usual. Passing by my office door, she notices me working. She is very thoughtful and informs me that I could call the campus police to let me inside the building should I go to dinner and decide to come back for work.

Two weeks ago I decided to defend my PhD proposal. One of the members of my advisory committee was advised by his doctor against teaching. He quit teaching classes. I sent him an email two weeks before the defense about my intention and enquired if he could make it. He replied in the positive and flew from Europe just to participate in my defense. I was shaken by his social commitment. He is one of few people that I know who has a true engineering mind. I am very glad that he could make it to my defense.

My neighbors were locked out of their home at 2:00 am in the night. The maintenance personnel have a master key and we could wake them up in the morning. But, one of the neighbors desperately needed to get into her house as she had to catch an early morning flight. Feeling sorry, my neighbors repeatedly banged the window and door of Carlos' house. Carlos, who usually appeared to be full of mulligrubs, did not even flinch at them that night.

Severe Weather

After a dry winter, weather department is positive about snow this weekend. I am hopeful of some wintry weather. I am eager to get out of my circadian activity and shoot some pictures of the snow. Today, it was very windy and the town was fogged by dust.

Notebook and Television

With the advent of broadband networks large sized files like videos are volitant all over the Internet. Most of the movies/videos are available in compressed formats hosted by servers/hosts. The DVD players that are available on the market do not cater to all compressed formats. Even if they do, they are expensive and cannot play directly from the Internet. Nowadays people watch digital movies on their computers with software players.

A friend of mine has a Sanyo flat screen television and recently got a Compaq notebook as a gift from her sister. The notebook has S-Video output and the telly has S-Video input. Bingo! We got ourselves a media player that can be projected on to the big screen. We spent five bucks and got ourselves a four-pin S-Video cable. Now, Rajani can watch any video in any compressed format. The quality of the picture is as good as it is available on the laptop. In other words there is no degradation in the signal from laptop to the television.

My TV is an old model and does not have any S-video input. So, I have to buy the S-Video-RCA cable from Radioshack to connect my laptop in a similar manner.

Homeschool

A drastic change seems to be happening in children education.

Homeschooled students prove themselves to be no less than their counterparts in regular schools. Last week, The Albuquerque Area Home School finished first in the middle school division at the New Mexico Science Olympiad 2006. While I had the misconception that many parents preferred homeschooling because of the expenses incurred on education this article says otherwise.

Parents cite many reasons for deciding to opt out of formal education and teach their children at home. In the NCES study, 31 percent said they were concerned about drugs, safety or negative peer pressure in schools; 30 percent wanted to provide religious or moral instruction while 16 percent said they were dissatisfied with academic standards in their local schools.

Respite

The Socorro Waste Management decides that the stench is harmful for us. They are hauling the waste out of the neighborhood. Finally, I can see some fresh air at the end of the tunnel.

Stench Controller

The roof of our office building (Speare) is being repaired. This whole place reeks of tar and the air is polluted. A lot of faculty and students just want to get out of the building as soon as possible. Some even left the exit door open to the Speare building in the hopes that circulating air would reduce the malodor.


But, my office is much better than all other office rooms. Thanks to a smart move by Hide (my officemate) with his ingenuous idea of using the remains of coffee powder from the coffee maker as a stench controller.

CATEGORY: Pictures

Drama

After a long break and telecasting winter Olympics for 2 weeks, NBC aired a new episode of Law & Order: SVU yesterday. I am eagerly waiting to see Conviction open this Friday on NBC. Walk the Line DVD was released yesterday. I will try to watch it tomorrow.

CATEGORY: Drama, Movie