2007

Happy New Year

Yeah.. I know.. belated post. But still I mean it.. Happy New Year

I'm experiencing some major issues with Blogger.. ever since I upgraded to the new Blogger Beta which is now Blogger Beta

So that is the primary reason I haven't been posting. It's too much of a pain to add a long post.. or one with much media. So becoz of that I've missed out on a couple of important posts. So this here should serve as an IOU for:

-Post about the wonderful (surprise) birthday party
-Happy New Year + Party
-Zeynep's gone back to Turkey leaving us all bored and bleargh

Anyway.. Let's see how Blogger holds up.. else I might be redoing this whole thing and putting it up on a real host on WordPress or something.

Or maybe I'll stop altogether.

Merry Happy Happy Happy Happy and Elves

Merry Christmas
Happy Hanukkah
Happy Kwanzaa
Happy Festivus
Happy New Year

And so, to greet you all, I elfed myself:

http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=4f6d12723feb3433712d871G06122114

ENJOY!

Thanksgiving 2006

This year, again, Jake and Alenka hosted a wonderful Thanksgiving with their lovely family. They took in all of us far away from home and made us a part of the family. As usual, there was excellent food.. Turkey, Duck and the likes.. excellent company.. and this year we were also treated to a Wheeler Family Thanksgiving Tradition, a little skit based on the story of the guy who cried wolf. :D

This year Dan and Alex brought in this huge jigsaw puzzle, but unlike last year there was no finished picture to refer to.. so unfortunately the jigsaw puzzle was left incomlete this year. :(.. We also watched the documentary about the Mayflower produced by the History Channel, in which Dan had a big role. Follow this link for Dan's interview. :)

Here are some pictures from that night. I didn't take all that many photographs.
Here are some from Alex's site.

I'm waiting to get some pictures from the hosts.

Halloween 2006

Steph hosted the (pre)-Halloween party on the saturday before the actual day.

I was the zombiefied rasta-man...



:D

Click here for some select pictures from the party...

Macbeth - July 2006

Hartsbrook School
Hadley, MA
Shakespeare under the stars...

I was fortunate enough to catch the last show.. and it was a brisk, beautiful evening, with a full moon.

My first attempt at catching this play was when Chaitali was visiting, but we were unlucky coz of rain, and so we had to watch it inside. It was still good, but no real sets and the actors looked very restricted inside the small auditorium. Outside was way way better...

Dan Kennedy, our friend from Down Under, is playing Macbeth.. and he did a FINE job of it!!

Enjoy the pictures...

Click below for the album..

Shakespeare under the stars - Macbeth - July 2006

Rushdie speaks: Heraclitus, or, Character and Destiny

September 21st, 2006
Bowker Auditorium,
UMass - Amherst

I meant to write about the talk a long time ago, but I was probably overwhelmed from the barrage of literary references which did succeed in making me feel like an ignoramus, totally worthless and unread! A journey through literature... from Samuel Richardson to Charles Schulz (yes, of 'Peanuts")... from Heraclitus, ("part wise man part fortune cookie") to Popeye - 'I yam what I yam', or 'Character is Destiny'.... Melville (Ishmael as Dylan (Bob) in Pat Garett and Billy the Kid) to Ragtime's Doctorow.. Cervantes, Shakespeare, Joyce, Austen, Nabokoff...

I'm not gonna try. Just recording the moment.

And yes, picked up "Shalimar the Clown". Wanted to get a copy of Midnight's Children too, signed, but they'd sold out! Should have had the foresight to bring along a copy!!

I am so moved !

all the way from

261 Belchertown Rd, Apt B, Amherst - 01002

to

336 North Pleasant St, Apt 2B, Amherst - 01002

macavity's not there!!!!

Yesterday we got lucky and found tickets to the last day of "Cats", brought to the Mullins Center by "Broadway In Amherst". We got grand seats, right up in the front and finally got to see Cats. Now I know what the fuss is all about. They are brilliant! I'm not going to go into raptures of description but it sufficeth to say that it was really thrilling and worth every dime (with student discount, hehe)!!

"Macavity" was by far the most enjoyable.. also coz of my vague recollection of the poem from a long long long time ago. I remember my brother memorizing and presenting the poem for an Elocution contest ages ago. :D

As for the cast, I think the most popular of all was Rum Tum Tugger.. and I came across a bit of trivia: "Andrew Lloyd Webber has stated that the part of the Tugger is intended to be a homage to Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. This homage is apparent in the way he moves on stage in the original Gillian Lynne choreography and the costume styling."

Grizabella the glamour cat's rendition of "Memory", before she is selected to "journey to the heavyside layer", was haunting. Betcha most of the audience were humming that tune when driving back home! :)

But I was humming this one...

....

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square -
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's.
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair -
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair -
But it's useless to investigate - Mcavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
`It must have been Macavity!' - but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums.

....

I know I still owe you a description of the Kenneth Miller Lecture. ... maybe it'll happen, maybe not.. keep checking back. ;)

Sleepless weekend... Rafting and more

April 14, last Friday, was the Nepali new year.

April 13th was when we had dinner at Zeynep's and had a great cultural/linguistic experience communicating with her folks in Turkish aided by 2 dictionaries and an electronic translator, which led us to discussing common words/etymology and the Ottomon empire/Ghenghis Khan connections! Anyway, now that I think back, maybe it was that strong Turkish coffee that kept me up..

.. so that next day, Friday, I was operating with no sleep and tons of coffee. And then staying up till 6am at the Nepali New Year momo making party at Lava's.

... And then Kotak and his buddy Sameer came in from New Jersey at 7am and we were off for the white water rafting up on Deerfield River, at Charlemont MA. CrabApple Whitewater Inc. is a small and friendly family run outfit. Thank God for the wetsuits and booties that they thoughfully provided, coz even though the day was nice and sunny and warm, the water was still COLD!! And there were more than one occasion to get drenched by that cold river water! But that was what helped keep me awake and operating even after 60+ hours of no sleep!!

The 25 mile run was pretty smooth with rapids classed from I to III.. the heaviest rapids we hit were the "Zoar Rapids" which were class III; other than that it was pretty smooth sailing. The paddling was tough exercise though.. and the bouts of water fights we had amongst 6 rafts.. flinging HEAVY bucket loads of ice cold water on to other boats... all that work made the lunch they provided at the end of the day very very welcome.

Brunch at Archita's next day and lazing about in the sun (pic below) with "saandiyeko bhogotey". :).. An hour at the Driving Range.. a movie - Scary Movie-4. Wrap up with dinner at Rajeev's and that was the "long" weekend. Pretty eventful I guess for a change. Bless the weather.


(Lava didn't wanna pose for this pic)

This is my update about last weekend.. I still owe y'all a post about the Kenneth Miller lecture I attended last Thursday and on "Night Watch" which I finally watched on Wednesday... all later though. My to-do list is over-flowing for now.

recent pictures...

Here are some pictures that I've been meaning to put up for ya'll...
Don't have much to write, so these should do for a while, eh?

During Burcu and Cesar's visit... A hike up to Skinner Park in the snow. Brrr..



Snowboarding at Berkshire East - March 25th. As you can see not much snow so all the more painful!!


The Team - Venezuela Bernardo, Turkey Zeynep, Australia Dan, Nepal Lava and Bhutan Anuj


Guess what this is....

all right...... it is an antique "spile" or "spout" used to tap maple syrup from maple trees. It was maple syrup season so we went to the North Hadley Sugarshack, a sugar house where they collected the maple sap and made maple syrup and other goodies out of it.

Here's one more...


More pics from the Sugar Shack...

In print...

Click on the pics for the larger images (will open in new windows).

News

From The Republican

Link to Story


Link To Pictures - Edit: Added this line later in the day.. :)

Computer aids driver's ed skills
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
By STAN FREEMAN
sfreeman@repub.com

AMHERST - A rite of passage endured by generations of teens, "Driver's Ed" may soon be headed into the shop for an overhaul.

Researchers at University of Massachusetts in Amherst found that novice drivers who used a computerized program to train them in recognizing risks on the road were much more likely than untrained drivers to look for those risks once they were on an actual road.

"This is the first time in the history of driver education that anyone has shown any effect of training on crash-related behaviors," said Donald L. Fisher, director of the university's Human Performance Laboratory and the lead researcher on the study that will be published in the journal Injury Prevention.

Young drivers are involved in a disproportionate share of fatal crashes. In fact, 16-year-old drivers have a fatal crash rate eight times that of drivers ages 45 to 64. Often, the cause of such crashes is a failure by novice drivers to scan the roadway for potential risks, such as a car coming out of a blind driveway, Fisher said.

While standard driver education teaches students the physical mechanics of driving a car, it does not seem to teach them to drive safely, he said. "There has been no study documenting the effectiveness of standard driver education in the reduction of crashes."

The study by Fisher, Anuj Pradhan and Alexander P. Pollatsek began with the training of novice drivers on a computer. They were shown still pictures of various driving situations, such as a truck parked so that it blocked a crosswalk, and then asked to use the cursor to mark areas of the scene where risks existed, such as where a pedestrian might walk into the path of the car. Mistakes sent them to explanatory screens and then they were shown new pictures.

Next, 12 drivers who had gone through the training as well as 12 drivers who had not were tested on a driving simulator and on actual roads in Amherst and Hadley to measure how well they identified risks. All wore equipment that tracked their eye movements so that the researchers could determine where they looked as they drove.

The study found that 70 percent of the trained drivers looked at places where there were risks on the road similar to those encountered in their training. Only 33 percent of the untrained drivers looked for those same risks. The study also found that 59 percent of the trained drivers looked at places on the road where risks existed that were not like those in their training. Among the untrained drivers, 39 percent looked for those same risks.

Fisher said, "For those scenarios that they were trained to recognize on the PC, the drivers did very good, but what was really surprising was how well they did in scenarios they were not trained for," indicating the training seemed to give them a general education to driving risks.

Despite the findings, traditional driver's education still has a place in training young drivers, he said.

"There is an important role schools can play. The drivers need to know the rules of the road and how to maneuver the vehicle. And during the time on the road, it's critical to have a driving instructor with the student. However, there is no doubt in my mind that driver education ought to include (computer) programs like this," Fisher said.

and bowling goes on...

t'was Raz'z b'day yesterday..

here are the usual rowdies at bowling.. :D..

If a Jimmy Buffet fan is known as a parrot head... who would be a parrot tail I wonder?

phonecam pic.. not so good!



read all about it here at Steph's page.