An Introspection

This is one of the most beautiful raaga i have heard. There are thousands of tamil songs composed using this particular raaga. The most famous of these is the "pon onru kandaen pen angu illai". The description provided by Charulatha Mani in the Isai Payanam was excellent. I have become a great fan of this singer, even though she makes some songs look more carnatic, but still the program is about the carnatic music applied to film songs so i felt it relevant. The arohanam and avarohanam of this particular raaga is sa ri2 ma1 pa ni3 sa  || sa ni2 pa ma1 ri2 ga2 sa This is called as shudhdha madhyamam raaga since it uses ma1. I am not sure if this is playable in flute since i am not sure about Ni3 which is kakali. Need to ask my guru regarding this. The link to various arohanam and avarohanam for all raagas is  http://www.carnatic.com/carnatic/ragalist.htm The link to the video in youtube is  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTCavDzt9b8&feature=related

For the past few days i have been thinking about my career plan. It almost struck on my face that i dont have one till now. Hopefully my PhD should be completed in a year or so. What next?  The answer is bleak. I don't know if i would love to do a post-doctoral fellowship. If at all i do will i be interested in doing it in the field of study that i am involved in presently. I am not sure. This is a worrying issue but i seem to have decided mentally to move out of the field i am working in. What field i would be interested in working? That is yet to be decided and might take some more time for me to come to a firm conclusion. Pure AI, data mining or clustering techniques....let me leave it for the fate to decide it. 

Paper writing is one of the most difficult things in PhD. Even after having all the results needed to establish a theory or the application of theory to a real-time application, it is always difficult to write a paper that is specific to the audience of the journal. It is also amazing to find that human mind is capable of putting together all the thoughts within few hours when pushed to limits in the name of deadlines. Recently i face one....wasn't able to write two pages for 10 days and managed to write 14 pages within 28hrs...Literally continuous 28 hrs when given a deadline by my Prof. And by chance the paper has come out decently well.. Have submitted it to IEEE Transactions on intelligent Transportation Systems. Hopefully it will get accepted :-)

Lately i have been watching few movies on Figure skating. I happened to watch Ice Princess, The cutting Edge 3 and a few more. The amazing level of skill, discipline required really made me to look at thia sport with particular awe. I wonder how these people are able to make their body to be in sync with their mind. The balance and elegance resembles the "gamakam"(Used mostly when referring to carnatic music) given to enhance the musical notes. Hope one day i would have the opportunity of trying out some ice skating!!! :)

I wonder how people are able to update their blog on a daily basis. Even though i sit in front of the computer for almost 18 hours in a day, i rarely do the update. Probably this has to do something with the level of interest each person has in writing. I particularly feel bored of writing things. I prefer to jot down things on a small piece of paper and go through them whenever time permits. However some might question the use of the same in posterity. Anyways, i have somehow managed to write a blog today. probably it would be more interesting when i read this blog after a year or two. I happened to give a flute performance recently at Temple of Fine arts. It was more like showering praise on the lord for having given us the opportunities in life on 5th day of navrathri. The photos have come out quiet well. I hope to get the video of the same from Pravitha and Soma soon. The piece performed was an alankaram - Thisra Jathi Thiruputa Thalam in Chalanaattai Raagam. Sa Ga1 Ga2 Ma1 Pa Ni1 ...

I managed to find out that Chrome browser supports JAVA platform. It is essential however to install the JRE6 for this to work. The browser doesn't seem to recognize other JRE versions. Anyways for now the JAVA support problem seems to be non-existent. If the API-extension is also introduced into Chrome then this can really give a tough competition to Firefox and IE.

I was one of the people who were eagerly waiting for the much talked about browser from Google - Chrome. The chrome web browser was a huge let down. This was not the browser that i was expecting from Google. Though it is a beta version, it is far from anything close to Firefox or Opera. The only good thing is the incognito operation which allows not to maintain the history and block cookie entries. The overall look of the browser was average. Probably it would improve once people start developing the skins for this browser. Very decent plugins for media players. The file downloads are much similar to Firefox, except for the graphical version attached to indicate the beginning of the download. out of the box flash player support is a good feature. This said the browser doesn't support shockwave files yet.The major letdown is the non-inclusion of JAVA support. Most of the sites with JAVA won't work properly. Before the introduction of the browser, the main advantage that was high...