Coming from Nepal, the first experience of Daylight Saving was pretty interesting for me. You go to sleep and think you have woken up at 10:00 in the morning just to learn that it is just 9:00 as the time has been adjusted to make for day light saving. Wow! even though I have slept for 9 hours I can actually claim I slept for 8 hours.
Hmm, that will be the other way around when they go back to normal time! Sad!
First let me correct a mistake I had made earlier. You spell Choo as Choo and not Chu, which interestingly means pig! Hmm, now Choo definitely isn't one. Well, with that done, let us all wish him a "Happy Birthday!" Actually, his birthday was on 26 October, but we are celebrating it today as he was busy looking at some cool cars yesterday. Hmm, men and cars. We would love to buy one for him, but it has to be a toy for now.
Anyway, as a celebration he treated us to real nice Chinese cuisine. As usual Daniel missed it. Hmm, it is becoming a habit now. Remind me to get his mobile number so we can call him. Oriental Canteen is pretty near to the place we stay and quite a nice place. I had Roasted Duck with Rice. Not bad at all. Thank you Choo. Now, whose birthday is next?
On Friday Ananta got his work permit! It is a great relief for him; obiviously he was very happy about it. I was happy for him. Now, there is no reason not to be happy considering the fact that he was treating me to a cool Indian restaurant. Well, actually a Pakistani restaurant with all the cool Indian food. Khans Restaurant at Bayswater. Now, I would definitely put a link to their webpage for you to check out how they are even if you don't consider eating there, however, the link they gave, http://www.khansrestaurant.com doesn't really work.
Checking the web I learned that there is also a high-end version of their restaurant at Kensington. Hmm, so near!
Anyway, it was great to have Indian food after a long time. Actually, it was nice to have those well cooked, spicy gravy, the butter chicken and nans. Well, after eating the stuffs I had been cooking(?) in my microwave, it definitely was much better.
Thanks Ananta!
Now, I am sure I spend just too much time in front of the computer. While I was busy chatting away at MSc study room, I did not realise Karmesh was trying to get hold me to invite me to the Dashain party he had worked so hard to organise. As I learnt later from Ananta, he had spend most of the day cooking a great dinner!
While, I don't really think, I didn't enjoy the chat, I must confess the party would have been fun too. La aaba, arko kunai din! May be this weekend to celebrate the birthday. Let's see!
Two days I spent trying to figure out what was wrong. Two days I could have saved if I had bothered to read my handouts properly. Well, MatLab isn't really so difficult, so naturally my code as such couldn't be wrong. However, I was certain what I had done was incorrect. The error of the adaptive filter should decrease with each iteration, I new that around the end the filter weights should be very close to the ones of the unknown system. Yet, I realized my figures were way off. Running away like an unstable system.
Eva had her implementation running. I looked at the code. Not compact like what I had done, yet hers was running fine. I knew something was wrong with my implementation of LMS algorithm. There it was, the first mistake. I with my bad habit of seeing every thing as an array (or a list) had gone and done element by element multiplication of the elements of the vector. I should have transposed and done a vector (matrix) multiplication.
Okay, that was done! Still I didn't see any difference. Well, well, well. With hours of different implementations and versions I finally found my error. I just had not bothered to read the handout. Since the error calculation equation had a subtraction, I just went ahead and wrote the weight calculation equation with a subtraction when I should have done an addition!
Finally, after two days of fooling around I have a correctly working version of LMS algorithm! Cool!
It has been almost a week since my last entry. It isn't that I did not have anything to post. The problem had been with the web server on which this site is hosted. The IP address of the server had changed, however, the DNS of the network from which I connected still had the old IP address. This meant I could not locate the server from my network. The funny thing is that the DNS of the network I connect to cached the old IP address for more than a day. I thought a day was generally the default cache age.
Anyway, it is nice to be able to access the server again, and you can expect me to be more regular with my posts!
Well, it has nothing to do with Aman and Anuraj's war of CDMan high score! Being used to an American keyboard layout and coming to UK and suddenly having to work with the UK layout of the keyboard can be pretty confusing. Since I am a touch typist, may be not 80 wpm but definitely 60+, typing the @ and # is pretty confusing. I always end up typing " and £. Similarly, when I want to type " I end up doing @. Few other such silly stuffs. But I guess I am learning pretty fast.
Just a reminder of how so many things have changed. Many of them are pretty small, yet together they make life totally different from what I am used to.
Comments
how about getting a US layout keyboard ?? shall i send it from ktm ?? ;)
Posted by: adu on October 3, 2002 10:29 AM
It is something that I used to do in India and now I am doing in UK is convert everything to Nepalese Rupees. Well, converting Indian currency to Nepalese isn't really that bad. But converting Sterling Pounds to NC Rs. can be pretty heavy. You really wonder if all that is really worth it. May be instead of using a quick multiplication by 100 (well, come to think of it, it is actually a multiplication by 123), I should do a multiplication by 10 for the sake of sanity.
Hopefully, ones I get some sort of part-time job and start earning in £££, I will not really find things that expensive and be able to survive this habit of converting everything to NC Rs. May be then I too, like Karmesh and Triratna, will be able to pick a jacket look at the price tag and say, "Now, this is really cheap!"
Food is one of the biggest concern. Since I haven't bought any utensils, and don't really intend to do so till the weekend when I plan to go out for a major shopping, I can not cook much in my kitchen that I am sharing with my flat mates. That means I have to go out to eat. Eating out is mostly fast food or those cold sandwiches. While the sandwiches at Thamel were definitely great and I felt I could pretty well survive with these, I wonder at the idea! I really long for warm, well-cooked food. Tired of eating sandwiches in the morning, afternoon and evening.
Well, I don't seem to find any supermarket nearby either. At least if I could go and buy something better. So I can take it to my flat. Something like noodles would be pretty nice!
Leaving home and staying alone so far way with no immediate friends can be pretty lonely and at times frustrating and disorienting. While the first two days with Karmesh didn't seem so bad, staying alone at Imperial for the next day was pretty rough. Pretty lonely. Had me wondering at the sanity of my decision to come here.
Well, now that I have net access it isn't really so bad. Emailing friends is nice and chatting is even better. It is some consolation to be able to be in touch with people you know, friends and family.