One

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other

Carry each other

I'm too busy to blog

Just a note: I've not left the blogosphere. Taking 16 hours of classes, which is the maximum allowed, is no mean feat. Plus with the World Cup going on, I hardly have any time to blog. When things have settled down, or maybe after the end of the summer semester, I'll start blogging again. I'm sorry for the inactivity.

Back in School

So here I am, back in school for the summer semester. I'm taking maximum load allowed by a student for the semester, but I'm going to push myself for it. The end of a rough road is near. Anyway, it's been a rough prep to the summer, as I extended my work for an additional week, as my replacement could not come in due to some paperwork issues. Kinda makes me glad that I'm a permanent resident, I don't have to deal with all the paperwork problems, saves me the headache too. So it's kinda like since last summer, where I've basically had no proper break in between semester switches, but I guess I can't complain at this time. Courses for the semester looks good, and so long as I follow my plan, which is to stay ahead and be on top of stuff, I should be good. I've made several mistakes during my time here and I've learnt it the hard way. I'm determined not to let that repeat. It's only for 12 weeks and once that's done, it'll be another semester of work, so it's a good sacrifice.

I had to move into a new room, as everyone is expected to move out at the end of spring. It's basically a building right opposite where I stayed over the last year and not far at all from my new assignment after the summer. I kinda hate this room already. Due to impending increase in humidity and temperature in the coming months, Housing leaves the AC running in full to combat the growth of mildew or mould. And since I'm only one of the 4 or 5 people living in the floor, the whole floor is freezing. It reminds me of the times I spent back in the chilling environments of Chicago and it really sucks, as I'm living in a warmer part of the country, yet I have to deal with it as if I'm living somewhere up north. Worse still, Atlanta has unusually been chilly. Wind's somewhat cooler and the heat isn't as hot as it used to be, so I don't exactly feel like it's the summer as of yet. I'm sure it'll get warmer in the coming days, but at the same time, this winter hasn't exactly been that cold. As a matter of fact, it's been erratic, suddenly getting warm and then dropping over and over. The weird weather activity that we've witnessed over the last year or so is something to be taken seriously. There's been drastic change in weather patterns and weather strengths and intensity, there's something serious going on.

On another note, due to my heavy downloading spree and the depletion of my available space, I scouted for a good deal for a massive external hard disk. Eventually my brother found an excellent deal and I'm finally the owner of a 300GB external hard disk. I used to download movies then delete them once I was done, as it was rare that I'd watch a movie again, but from now, I will be storing it remotely, so that if a friend or someone else asks for it, I can access to them easily. Also, I've managed to find some really good torrent sites, so there's going to be a lot of downloading and storing of some nice files. I'm about to own the complete series of 'Friends,' something that has eluded me for the longest time.

Napster has deployed the experimental approach of providing whatever they have in their library for free, up to 5 times per song, as long as the listener views advertisements in the player window. ABC tried that just a week earlier, where they basically uploaded some of their hit shows a day after it aired on TV for free, the only stipulation being that the viewers must view a mandatory 30 second ad about 3 times or so, depending on the 'break.' I thought it was an awesome idea, but at the same time, had no idea how huge internet advertising was. I've grown accustomed to the junk that I see almost everywhere I go, so I thought it was useless to pay for online ads, as I assumed that most other people would ignore them too. But then when you think about the increase in online purchasing and whatnot, maybe it's not that surprising. Nevertheless, I get to enjoy their shows (most notably, 'Lost') and on-demand music at work or at school at no costs. There seems to be more upside to it if I just ignore the ads, but I think it's inevitable that I view these ads, and I think they're shooting more for awareness and exposure as compared to hard sales.

I probably did not blog this, but 2 weeks ago, I made some last minute arrangements to see P.O.D., as the tickets were pretty cheap and the venue not far from campus - within walking distance. Plus, I was getting tired for the semester and needed some serious venting, so attending a really energetic performance by the group was a well needed activity. Only problem was that there were way too many of the younger generation around, but then again, P.O.D. is a Christian band. It was amazing how many young kids there were, when the group asked for kids to get on stage for the song 'Youth of The Nation.' Then last week, I attended a Jason Mraz gig with another friend. It was held at the Tabernacle, which, in my mind is the best concert venue. Jason Mraz was definitely a performer, he played nicely and the atmosphere fit in well with the music. My only regret was that I hadn't exactly paid too much attention to his music prior to this, and as a result, only recognized few of his songs. If I had been more aware, I think I'd have enjoyed the gig much more.

Goo Goo Dolls announced another gig in Atlanta on Sept 3rd, and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on Oct 26th. The RHCP tickets were selling really fast within 10 minutes of it going on sale, but I managed to secure 2 tickets. I'm not sure who wants to go at this point, but I'm sure I'll find someone, as I expect it's gonna be a packed event and a lot of people would want to go. Goo Goo tickets go on sale in June, and this time, I will not miss it, unlike the one I missed in April.

I guess that's all I've got for now.

Thank you Alan Shearer

So it was confirmed today - the inevitable after the injury he sustained in the game against arch rivals, Sunderland - Alan Shearer announced his official retirement from football.

Without a doubt, he's been the top striker of his generation, and to have been consistently performing well for 17 straight years, that's almost unheard of. He retires holding the record for the most number of goals scored in the Premiership, as well as the record number of goals scored for his beloved hometown, Newcastle United. He broke into the game with a wham, as a 18 year old debutant for Southampton, came in as a substitute and scored a hat trick in his first game - against Arsenal of all teams. He moved to Blackburn for then a British record fee, and his firepower netted Blackburn the Premiership title. He then moved to Newcastle for then a world record fee, and realized his dream of playing for Newcastle for the next 10 years.

Seriously, how much more can you ask for, for a hometown boy to return? He amassed 379 goals in 733 games in his career, 260 goals in 441 Premiership games, and the record 206 goals for Newcastle in 404 appearences. He also scored 30 goals in 63 games for England. He's probably the only person who was equally impressive in normal shots, headers, free kicks and penalty kicks. He was also the captain for Newcastle and England for the longest time. Showing that not only did he have skills, but also leadership.

I can't even describe how much respect I have for this man - he's the reason why I started supporting Newcastle since 1998, and it's going to feel different from now on when he's not going to be around. I really hope he comes back as the manager one day, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen for some time as he takes a break. He had the chance to move to Manchester United, to win a lot of titles and cups, but loyalty and dream took him to Newcastle, it's just a great pity he never succeeded in winning anything for Newcastle. Nevertheless he brought them to heights we would otherwise not have enjoyed. We came really close on couple of occasions though.

What is going to happen to Newcastle from now on? The future's cloudy - will Roeder get his licence to become a full time manager next season? Who will become the new captain? Who will replace Shearer as the main goalscorer?

Let football decide. It is unpredictable and that's the way many would like it to be.



I think it's just a fitting finale to his career that he had to end it against Newcastle's most hated rival Sunderland. Not only that, he went out of the game after scoring the goal that gave us the lead to a game we eventually won. I don't think you can end a story better than that.

Thank you Alan Shearer, for a great 10 years of service and memories which probably cannot be eclipsed.

The Georgia Tech Terrorist

I had a major scare yesterday, reading some articles off CNN and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (the articles are HERE and HERE respectively) where supposedly someone was caught. The descriptions being the following:

21 years old, Georgia Tech student, Engineering major, Bangladeshi, lives in Atlanta.

All of the above descriptions fits me. BUT it wasn't me. Imagine my relief.

Some dude got caught for harboring some terrorist intentions and whatnot. I was so afraid FBI or someone was gonna call me up or knock on my door and take me for questioning. I don't know the dude who got caught, neither have I ever heard of him. I don't know other Bengalis around in campus except for this other guy who's in my fraternity and it certainly isn't him either. Except for that, I don't think there's more than a handful of students who fit that description on campus, so there was good reason for me to be afraid for questioning.

Even though there is no link or information that I can provide, I thought I'd get in serious trouble just for being against American foreign policies, but hey, who isn't guilty of that?

It's been pretty fun in ATLanta. There was some suspicious item found in the airport on Wednesday which caused the airport shutdown for like 2 hours, delaying all flights and conducting a search, etc. On the other hand, some kids from Riverton, Kansas were planning a Columbia High School massacre style shooting, but one of the guys posted something on MySpace which led authorities to unveil the plot. Seriously, how dumb can you get? You're planning something like that, thinking you're all so smart and cool and then you give it away on the net. Real smart.

It's another example where what you post on the web isn't exactly private, no matter what you think. Blogs, social websites, etc are all on the World Wide Web. Anything on the web is visible in one way or another. Always remeber that: you leave tracks everywhere.

The Amazing (Logistics) Race

The Logistics Institute of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech conducts a 'fun' experiment each year, where they send out identical packages to different couriers to a particular destination.

This year, they used FedEx, UPS and DHL to deliver identical packages to 4 locations:
1. Ouadadougou, in Burkina Faso
2. Split, in Croatia
3. Surabaya, in Indonesia
4. Punta Arenas, in Chile

Needless to say, the goal is to find out which courier service is able to deliver the packages to its intended destination in the shortest time, which in Industrial Engineering terms, is a measure of how their logistics & freight network infrastructures are set up. So far, DHL seems to be in the lead. You can track the race by clicking here.

In 2003, the sole destination was Singapore, in which UPS and FedEx tied (the story being quite hilarious, where both the FedEx and the UPS man was infront of the door at the same time, the FedEx guy got to open the door first, but the UPS man got the signature first, hence a tie) and in 2004, FedEx was the clear winner. Somehow there wasn't a race in 2005.

Am I the only one (apart from the people in The Logistics Institute) who finds this amazingly interesting? Or am I just a geeky Industrial Engineer in training?

:: UPDATE ::
UPS is in the lead, by winning 2 of the 4 races, beating DHL to Split, Croatia by 3 minutes after first delivery attempt was unanswered. However, they had some major problems with 2 of the other destinations.

8 Movies

I managed to watch 8 movies over the Easter weekend. Quite a bit considering it was like any other weekend. I guess the fact that this weekend was the first time this year that I was completely free allowed me to catch some great movies this weekend.

Friday
Samy Y Yo (Samy and I)
Broken Flowers

Saturday
Al Otro Lado (The Other Side)
Ellie Parker
Paradise Now

Sunday
The 40 Year Old Virgin
The Ice Storm
A Clockwork Orange

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.

Quick Update - March

I realized I have not put in a single entry for March, so before March ended, I wanted to put in at least a single entry so that the archives won't be messed up.

I'm currently taking a leave from work, spending time with the family at our new 'home' in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is technically Phoenix, Arizona. I'll be returning to Atlanta, Georgia tomorrow morning, so I guess I'll type up a longer entry during the flight, and then upload it when I get back.

Quick Update

I'm not gone if you were wondering where I went after my last update.

My apologies, I've been pretty busy with work, fraternity, academics and a lot of movies. I'm happy in a sense that I'm getting a lot out in a single day, waking up everyday at 6:30am, work for about 8.5 hours, come back, shower, eat and hang around at Delta Sig or do my online class readings and assignments, then go back to sleep around 12 or so. I'm starting to survive yet again on a short sleep cycle, but since its consistent, I don't feel as tired. Plus, there's the weekend quality movie watching run that has continued for some time. Really good movies the past few weekends.

So that's what I've been up to. If you wanted to know. I'll try blogging more often.