Back from the absence

I'm terribly sorry I haven't been updating. Here's an entry to explain what I've been up to for the past 4 months or so. I realized this is the first weekend in 2006 that I have absolutely nothing obligatory and whatnot. Usually I'll have to do some sort of work, assignment, go to a meeting and the such, but this seems to be the first ever free weekend I've had, so I decided to take the liberty to sit down and just go at this.

So... What happened this year? I'm working, I guess that's the most important one. I have 3 more weeks before I return to school for the summer semester, so I guess I can say I'm pretty excited. I'll be taking my first set of my major classes, so I'm really eager to do that. Once this summer is over and I may include the fall semester (which is my work semester again), the rest of my time in university is expected to go extremely smoothly. I guess I planned everything right in my first two semesters where I juggled quite a bit and overloaded myself, but it's definitely paying off. It's really hard to imagine that half of my university like has flown by. It's a sign of good things to come, hopefully.

I've also been taking distance learning classes, to cut down on the amount of classes I'll have to take before graduating. Okay, let me explain what I'm doing. The School of Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech has announced a major overhaul in curriculum near the end of 2006, so I was still mulling over what exactly to concentrate in - I've been reading about Health Systems, which seems really interesting. It's about management and industrial engineering application in hospital settings, like cutting down on patient wait time and more efficient flow of equipments and human resources being used and such. However, that is currently completely set up at the Graduate level, and the undergraduate program won't be set up before I graduate. So I decided to concentrate on three areas that are kinda overlapping, something that's related with what I do at work as well - Supply Chain Logistics as my primary, and Manufacturing and Quality Engineering as my two other. I figured out a way to get the 3 tracks without having to take a single extra class. On top of that, I'm doing a certificate program in Nanomaterials as well as Engineering Entrepreneurship, which requires me to take 3 additional classes on top of what I already have. Hence, I decided to take some classes which I consider to be a waste of my time or clases that I really aren't interested in outside of Georgia Tech while I'm working so that the class credit can be transfered and the grades won't affect my GPA (I tend to do badly in social sciences) All I need is a C, so there's no pressure to get a good grade, it works out well. So I'm almost completing one of the classes, I signed up for another one, but I kinda got a little too busy, so I'm postponing that til the fall, since the deadline to complete the class is in December. I'll take accounting in the fall as well.

Now what got me so busy this semester? I joined a fraternity - again. I really had a good time when I was with a fraternity in my first semester, but because I didn't really know what I was doing or what was going on, plus I had all these other stuff that I wanted to do, I thought it was the best for me to leave then. Now that it has calmed down a little, I decided to go for it, for many reasons I shouldn't bother to explain, but most important reason was that it's really a good organization to be part of. So I had no doubt that I wanted to go anywhere else but the same one that I was part of. During the spring, the enrollment of greek organizations are relatively low, so there was only two new members, the other being someone I already knew and I was the one who told him to check the place out. We get along great, so we had fun. And since there were only 2 of us, there was added responsibility to do all the things that a new member class would have to do. Which is the main reason why I went missing. My daily schedule was to wake up at 6:30AM, get ready for work, go to work, come back from work around 5:30PM, take a shower, and then if I had class work or paperwork to deal with, I'll do that and then head over to the fraternity house to do all sorts of things and by the time I came back to my room to sleep, it was like 12:30AM or something. It's okay initially, then it hits you, like hard. Since I'm working abour 42 or 43 hours a week, it takes a toll on you. But I've been in many situations as stressful and tiring, that I almost got used to it. So I just took it all in and it all came out fine. So yeah, as I said, everything is sort of settling into place.

I've managed to keep my film watching streak going, though not as much as it used to, just because I had so little time. But I've seen some great ones, Tech recently had 2 film festivals, one for Russian and another for Latin American ones, I managed to catch 2 of the Latin American ones, which were pretty good. I just watched 'Paradise Now' and that was something.

When I went over to Phoenix for my spring break, my brother brought along the entire first season of the TV show 'Lost.' I initially resisted watching it, but out of curiosity, I caught the pilot. I was definately hooked to it, so much that I spent whatever free time there was catching the episodes and I actually managed to finish watching the entire first season during my 1 week stay there. The moment I returned, I went and downloaded whatever season 2 episodes there were available on BitTorrent. I'm officially up to speed and my buddies from my freshmen year get together to watch the show every Wednesday, so I'll be joining them. I also went ahead and downloaded every single episode of 'Grey's Anatomy' and was on my way to downloading '24' but my hard disk space ran out, so I have to put that off for a while. I have enough shows to keep me entertained over the summer. I'll suspend my Netflix account for the summer and just study, watch the World Cup and watch episodes as much as possible.

On an unrelated note, Big Boi, half of the rap duo Outkast came to perform at Tech few weeks back, together with the indie band Cake. Everyone was disappointed that Andre 3000, the other half of Outkast, did not come, but since it's rumoured that he stopped performing public shows, it was understandable. But in my mind, Cake made up for that. It's funny, I was waiting for two of my friends from Emory to come over and we just decided to head over to the stadium a little early, as I was crossing 5th street, I see this guy walking pretty fast behind me. He was wearing a hat like the one Fidel Castro wears, with a face full of beard, and a pretty thick jacket. It was pretty hot that day and I was wondering why he was like that. He walked right by me and headed on to the direction of the stadium. I thought, okay, he's going to the gig, I suppose he felt he was being late, after all, it was already 20 minutes past the gate opening. After a while, when we were scouting for seats and getting ourselves comfortable, I looked towards the stage and guess what, that dude was the lead singer of Cake. I didn't really follow Cake before the gig, only heard few of their songs, so I wasn't aware of how their band members looked like, but they really did impress me, I liked the tunes that they were playing, mix of a slight jazz, light rock and interesting lyrics. Big Boi was sensational, without a doubt, and I just went ecstatic when they played my favorite Outkast track, which is 'Bombs Over Baghdad.' I think to get two major artists to come down and provide a pretty good gig was a sign of really good success for the concert this year.

So yeah, nothing too special going on with me, even though I've not blogged. Things hasn't really changed - it's just work, movies and hanging around with friends for dinner or late nights. Just the way I like it. I guess there could have been more that I said, but nothing else is coming to my mind now, so I'm just gonna leave this post here and may get back to it at a later date.