~~Weekend Time~~

After four days of working hard, going to DC to spend time with my friends for the weekend :)

~~OC Cruise~~

Today there was a networking event in the Hudson river, since evening cruise down the liberty statue would be awesome I didnt want to miss it. I also told few of my class mates to join me. So by evening we reached the place and went in the boat.  Once the boat started I never had the mood to talk with people I came to the deck and started enjoying the view of the awesome city. It was marvellous to see the sun setting behind the statue of liberty and skyline glowing in night from the river. There a girl from Britain who was new to the city and I was explaining all the famous land marks in and around the city. Time went so fast that I forgot to go below the deck to have the dinner.
Anyways it was an awesome evening and I should remind myself to take my camera for these trips.

~~Scientist Doubt~~

   Since I work in the observatory I have chance to meet few scientists who work there and learn about the stuff they do. Today morning when I went to office my supervisor told one of the scientist needs a clarification with the research he is doing and asked me whether I could help him out. Once I said sure, he fixed an appointment with him for lunch.
  Since we used to bring lunch ,we met in the nearby park and sat in one of the picnic benches. He is working  on the project using  night time lights for which they use the services of the satellites. These satellites instead of taking weird pictures of stones in space takes pictures of different places of earth in the night. Using the intensity of a light at a place they predict the economic activity and carbon emissions at the location. They have data over the period last 15 years for all the countries. So the normal conclusion they derived was the light intensity has increased over the last decade.
  So while studying the data for India he found the erratic trend there has been light intensity increases in some regions but there were few areas where the intensity has gone down over the decade. He was asking whether some mass migrations have happened from rural to urban areas. It was easy for me to see the problem from an Indian perspective and I told him the reason. He told me my hypothesis is more meaningful than what others had told him and told the 30 minute lunch break was the time well spent.
 So guys can you guess what have caused this erratic trend?

~~Cool bus driver~~

  I am a big fan of public transport and New York city is one of the places well connected by public transport system. I have taken buses to Philly,DC,Charlotte ,Pittsburgh etc using different different bus services. My favourite is the megabus the double Decker bus with wifi connection. Though their schedules might be erratic sometimes its economical to go in that.
  Yesterday I was returning from Pittsburgh to New york, all these buses have intercom using which drivers communicate to the passengers. Mostly they will give normal instructions what to do, how long will the bus stop for a break etc. Our driver moved didn't give these announcement like a robot but gave instructions in his own way. Like "Drinking is not allowed in the bus if you really want to drink wait till we reach New York I would suggest you a wonderful bar" , "The bus will stop in this service station for 15 minutes ,make sure you are right back on time else your luggage will reach New York before you do and I will pick you up from the station same time tomorrow" and when the bus was in the city he started honking and told "I am honking not to clear traffic but just to let you know we reached NYC"
  Apart from that he drove so well that he reached the city 20 minutes ahead of schedule!

~~New mobile~~

  Last week I was charging my mobile phone and when one of my friend called, when I picked up the phone it became blank.I was able to talk with him but the display system was totally gone. I was able to receive calls but couldn't see who called , I was able to receive message but couldn't read the messages. I had similar issues with my mobile phones in India as most of them will some kind of issue in an year, it has become a vicious circle. So I took the mobile to the service center and as usual they did try do some gimmicks to make it work but after few tries they finally gave and told they will give me a new replacement.
 
 I was using the blank phone for few days until the replacement came, since I wasn't in home to collect it I went to the fedex office to get the same. Then I went to the service center again to activate the new cell copied all the contact details into the new phone. Fortunately I was able to get the information of people who called me whom I missed to call back.

I never bothered to personalize the phone and have used with its default settings. So when I took it Pittsburgh for the vacation Swetha asked me how can you have a phone even without a proper wall paper.So I gave it her to make it a better looking phone. She put a banner,changed to stylish font,created useful short cuts and finally put a pic which we took in NYC as wall paper.

So I m all set to use the new(replacement) phone! 

~~Trip to Erie~~

 We went to lake Erie today had a picnic lunch at the beach side park and then relaxed sometime in the beach.

My t shrit says it all :)

~~Birthday Celebrations~~

      Yet another eventful year has passed and as I look back there are lots of memories happened over the past one year. Coming to my birthday I went to Pittsburgh to celebrate my birthday with my cousins. I had given instructions to Swetha Siona Shreya and Rishi on how I expect the celebrations to be and  I gave few suggestions. They got up early in the morning around 6:30 which is unusual in the middle of their summer holiday just to prepare for the grand party. I saw them filling lots of water balloons and was told all these is for me. So I was thinking twice how my day was going to be.

At 2 o clock they started the party outdoor. First games was obstacle course where I had to hit a bulls eye with a ball,zip up a tent,go on a mini hiking, playing little bit of basketball,soccer,lacoste, hopping,skipping ,ball tapping and finally running to deadline. Then all the people did the same course. After that we had a mini battle playing with water balloons with me getting the maximum hit and everybody getting completely drenched. After that we had the three legged race as I paired with Sheila came second. 

  

Then we had the cake cutting ceremony .The bottom half was a cookie and the top was a chocolate cake. On the top of the cake there were marshmallows, baked  drizzled with chocolate syrup ,caramel and M&M as toppings. There were more candles in the cake as they aligned to make my name out of the candles.With all difficulty I blew all the candles and finally had the awesome cake.

In the evening we went to downtown , visited a fair and then went on to have dinner at a restaurant named Mexico city to have a good dinner. Then we went to the view point to have a good view of the Pittsburgh downtown. We later went to aerobic show happening in the city ,we stayed there for some time and came back home. 

Its been an awesome birthday and all credits goes to Swetha Siona Shreya and Rishi who made my day a memorable one!

PS: All pictures taken with new camera which I got as a birthday gift from Sheila :)