Princess Fiona’s Weblog

Well, Rome wasnt built in a day, and every cloud is supposed to have a silver lining.

guess i just have to hang in there..

*sigh*

In between all the grimness all around – blasts, and more blasts; stampede killing >150 people!!; the economic crisis.. deaths and depression – PhD comics comes up with another gem (as always)..

i know  i have less than 36 hrs left to finish and upload the grant, and i still have to *somehow* get it down to 6 pages.. from its present length of 8. AND do that in time for my boss to be able to read and comment (and hopefully not suggest too many changes!).. 

yeah, I shouldnt be spending so much time in reading news/comics/writing a blog post either! The economy, after all, is only for real ppl! 🙂

Jokes apart, how long will this gloomy phase last for India? too many innocent people have died already.. how much longer now??

its probably just the fast approaching deadlines.. nothing else.

Hopefully everything will soon fall into place.. Hopefully i’ll manage everything.

Time to put on some music.

serial blasts in delhi.. again!

floods in bihar, hundreds of ppl with their lives washed away.. fear of epidemics looming around the corner..

death and destruction all around..

but we r preoccupied with other more important issues.. like did somebody ‘insult’ my language by saying that they should use their own mothertongue also? what all should i do to get political advantage out of it? or, which major scientific experiments can i sensationalize and predict the devastation its going to bring without bothering to understand anything abt it?

good. way to go!

😦

wow.. its been more than a month since i last posted anything!

Guess i’ve been REALLY busy – running to catch up with my own life, as i had told a friend some time back.  

And as another friend told me, i should stop complaining that i have a life. :p

There’ve been a lot of thoughts and topics that i wanted to write abt, though..

One of them is this article abt the importance of education on making US one of the leading economic powers of modern times. Is India listening?

26″, 18-speed mountain bike: $90

‘essential’ accessories: $60

the thrill of biking to and from the institute everyday, feeling the cool wind on your face: Priceless.

I LOVE my bike! The ride (however small it might be! :p) takes away all worries and tensions.. and fills me with hope and happiness. The freedom that i feel the moment i ‘take off’, is just indescribable.  Awesome is the only word i have for that feeling..

its been more than a month, and i m still loving it.. 🙂

… a lot of stuff. Including many blogs which i’ve been reading quite regularly for varying periods of time. Some of course, belong to my “real” friends. But many of them belong to people I’ve never met/spoken to/interacted with in my ‘real’ life.

Some of these blogs have been on my ‘reading list’ since such a long time that i feel i know these people better than i know many of my ‘real’ acquaintances.

Its time to acknowledge their presence in my online life. I’ve added a list of these links to my blog under “Blogs i love to read” (Besides, of course, the list under “Buddies”). Thank you all for writing so well. 🙂

In case anybody doesnt want me to put up the link to their blog on this site, please let me know. The link shall be removed promptly.

We’ll hopefully be submitting the first mainly-our-lab paper soon. A post-doc in our lab has done a lot of work for this. But a big chunk of work has been done in collaborations with many other labs.. there are at least 3 other labs which have done something of significance for the paper, besides one company. All these are important contributions which have played important roles in shaping the final story.
But the issue now is authorship… rather, the order of names. Boss explained to me why the decision is not simple and why it cannot be fair. It’s a political issue and lots of things – present and future – have to be kept in mind while deciding who goes where.
And he said something very interesting – “the best decision in some cases is the one which makes everybody a little unhappy.”

Its true, if u think abt it.. u cant make everybody happy. so rather than making some ppl very happy and some very unhappy, is better to make everybody a little unhappy.
He was talking abt science and collaborations, but this statement can fit in a much wider context.

So very often we find ourselves at the crossroads of life. Not sure abt which way to go. Anything that we do is bound to make somebody or the other unhappy. All those ‘somebodies’ and their (un)happiness means a lot to us. Standing there forever or retracting ur steps is not an option. a decision has to be taken and some move has to be made – very soon.
Higher degrees of connectivity also mean fewer degrees of freedom, and a bigger disturbance in the network if one string is pulled a little harder than the others.
So peace is clearly the last thing to expect. The questions then, r –
1. how much struggle are u ready to put up?
2. is the reason to put up the struggle strong enough?
3. r u prepared for the general unhappiness which comes with the struggle?
4. r u sure u actually disagree with whatever u r going to fight against?

Or, the available options can make different ppl happy and different ppl unhappy. The thing to decide in that case is..
-whose happiness means more to u?
-is making the other ppl unhappy the right thing to do?

Sometimes there are just no right answers.. hope we manage to find the best ones in such situtations..

Same occasion, (almost) same people, one year later..

Funny how weeks and months zip across in the blink of an eye, while minutes and hours linger on for ages..