Early to bed and early to rise

For the last few weeks, I have been travelling early to office. I am in office by 8, and I have started to love this routine. It is much less crowded in the train and bus in the morning, it isn't very hot either. All this makes for a very pleasant atmosphere for reading, and thinking. Plus, I can catch up with friends in the evening train - and even squeeze in some fruitful chats during the day. I can avoid reaching home late enough to just drop into bed, and avoid having no time to do anything. Spares me getting a scorn from Mom that I am not spending time at home. This solves a lot of problems. A return to the IIT days when I could be in lab by 8.30 in the morning. Nothing better than that. Early to bed and early to rise :).

Update to A Helluva week

Well, this is an update to my previous post. I forgot to mention something important. I planned a vacation to Kerala too in the week, for Feb. Now this is the third December in a row that I have planned a trip to Kerala. Hope I get lucky the third time around!. My last visit was four years back, and that started a wonderful journey. This visit could be a watershed too - and bring the journey to a logical conclusion .. before I embark on the next ;).

Puzzled ? ... I somehow like metaphors ...

A Helluva week

Last week must have been one of the most exciting and topsy-turvy weeks of the year. Rank two to be precise, don't ask me about the first ;).

In office, I did a presentation, a release and an installation-cum-training session for the customer. Finally, we had a prototype for extracting information from text that is giving promising results. However, I felt that the presentations never helped the client appreciate the good work we did, hence I went ahead and wrote a report on evaluation of the prototype we did. (Turns out I am not the only one who thinks powerpoint-style presentations suck, more on that later.) Now, I am waiting with bated breath for evaluation from the client side.

Here's another incident of the week worth mentioning. I had an experience like that of Santiago in 'The Alchemist' . Santiago travels far-and-wide in search of a treasure, only to discover it at his starting point; but returns a wiser guy. After efforts to find out text mining work in Pune, I thought there were few groups working on text mining in Pune, and I was surprised to find there is a text and analytics group in Persistent itself. A community closer home is easier to interact with :).

Finally, over the weekend I attended ICON'08 (International Conference on Natural Language Processing). Its quite a big conference with language researchers from all across the country atending. This was a good chance to catch up with Om Sir, Pushpak Sir, Mitesh, Vasudevan, Ramanand and others from IIT. And ofcourse, I did one more presentation ;). That was on the paper we had submitted from my M.Tech thesis work. I was never very comfortable making presentations and writing reports, but after doing so many of them, I am now getting a hang of it. Writing the paper was a good experience. Om Sir's suggestions and the venerable 'Elements of Style' were quite helpful. Organizing ideas for presentation is an interesting matter, and I will save that for another post.

For all the anxious moments, this week was worth it. Yet the real moments to cherish manifest themselves subtly, and need some "flights of thought" to feel them :). It also takes a "leap of faith" to build on those moments ;).