Well, I’m getting into a routine now… it’s been one week of classes now, and I’m starting to get things in order! So, let’s start with the general report, shall we?

Well I moved into my new apartment with Viral and Akshay on Sunday, and did some of the mandatory shopping around for small little stuff that is required for getting any new place into gear and running! That went on till late Sunday night…

Monday morning I woke up and attended a lecture on Software Engineering and Economics by Prof. Barry Boehm. Barry Boehm is a name that most Software engineering (SE) people would be familiar with, because he practically pioneered the concept of COCOMO which is a fundamental concept in SE. I am not enlisted in this course… but till then I had no idea where I’d be and what I’d do… so I had to go and sit in some selective lectures at least… so I attended this one!

The lecture was nice… he’s a very senior person and very knowledgeable too… and it was quite an experience sitting in his class.

That was all for that day… so I went home… put in my resumes for some of the jobs… and slept…

On Tuesday… I had to attend two classes… so I went to my first class on Database Systems (taught by Prof. McLeod) at 2pm. His classes are really a lot of fun to attend… his style of teaching is unique… his first words in class? “I gotta tell you, I’m a Mac user… I hate this Windows crap… so I’ll be asking you guys about trivial things like ‘how do I close a window here?’” and sure enough… he did ask us a lot of questions about how he should go about doing things on the comp…!

It was a lot of fun in his class.. and he teaches really well too!

Then I had a class on Wireless Communications at 4pm. This class is taught by Prof. Dan Goebel. Now his history is pretty interesting…! He’s done his PhD from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has even taught there for a while. After that he was recruited by Hughes and he worked there for a while and then transferred to Boeing, where he was working on Satellite Communications. He holds a patent in how DirecTV works… for those that don’t know… DirecTV was a pioneer in the field of Direct-To-Home (DTH) Television. He also holds a patent on how Sunglasses are made. He developed the technology on how fine granules are to be combined with the lens of sunglasses, and he holds the patent on that and even had a company that dealt with it! Other than this, he has designed most of the amplifiers that are used by Satellite Radio companies like XM Radio, etc. He’s currently teaching in USC and also working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He has published around 100 papers and holds around 40 patents.

That is how accomplished he is and his teaching style is amazing..! Well… to be honest.. ever since I’ve been here, I’ve attended 5 lectures.. and I haven’t felt bored in any of the classes I have attended… inspite of the fact that these lectures are of 1 hour and 20 minutes duration! Back home… sitting for a 55 minute lecture was a pain (with some exceptions)!

I’ve been working on getting jobs, and I’ve been attending lectures and completing assignments! For the wireless class, the first assignment was to read 200 pages on cellular networks! For the Database Class, The first assignment is to read the first 3 Chapters from the Book on Databases authored by Elmasri and Navathe. So hitting the books right now… hoping that everything will be properly settled down academically in another week or so.

Yesterday, Viral invited me to go out with him and his friends on a little outing. They were planning to go to the ISKON Temple in Venice (Near LA) since it was Janmashtami. Now let me tell you about the people I was with. We were around eleven people, from various branches and some were new, while some were seniors. We had people from Mechanical, Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Science (CS), ISE (Information Systems Engineering), etc. It was a jolly group of 9 guys and 2 girls.

We went to the temple and took darshan. It was a very nice experience. The temple is very well done on the inside with the Gods seeming very elegant and calm. The place had a very divine sense of spirituality there and it was an amazing feeling! We sat there for a few minutes, and it was time for the temple to close and so we had to leave.

We then decided that since we had some time to spare, we’d go to Venice Beach. And so we did.. we went to the beach and spent quite a lot of time there… we were at the beach till around 8pm. From there we decided to have Thai Food. We went back to near the temple to a restaurant called Natalee’s, which seemed to be a very popular joint. The food there was amazing… I was chatting over dinner with the new friends that I had made, while Viral was sharing his knowledge of “how to eat with chopsticks” with some of the guys. It seems like he’s rather experienced with them! So it was fun! The food was pretty good… the funny thing is, a few of us asked for the asterisk (*) marked dishes, which meant that they were extremely spicy, and they turned out to be total duds compared to the richness in spice flavor of Indian food that (almost) everyone was used to!

After dinner we were heading back home, and it was already 11pm. We were waiting for the bus… one of them came about… and just passed us without stopping… because it was jam-packed already! Luckily we got the next bus which came about in 10-15 minutes. We reached home last night around 12pm. I then had to talk to mom and dad about some things.. and after that Akshay came home with lots of stuff he had bought for the home. We were awake till around 2am just sorting things out and putting them up at the right places.

In the morning, I woke up rather late… close to 11am if I guess right! Viral and I went to the college gym at around 1pm. We jogged for around 800m to reach the place. We then worked out… and man, the college gym is very well equipped, considering some of the private gyms back home in Nasik. Lots of jogging machines, walking machines and an amazing set of utilities! We worked out for around an hour and came back home.

So that was the first week… and I hope that I will be having a lot more things to report as time goes by… Until Next time… bye!