Saket Vora

Friday’s circuits midterm was alright. It was a good exam, but I did make two stupid mistakes. It’s frustrating to lose points on easy stuff. I went to review session for the probability midterm and spent Friday night working on the take home midterm exam. I didn’t get to bed until late, and ended up waking up at around 1:30pm Saturday. There was another review session from 2 to 4 where the TA went over the solutions for the practice midterm, which was helpful. Why am I so concerned about this midterm? I don’t think I have had such a poor grasp of the subject matter before. In circuits, there are physical behaviors — I can ask myself “what would an electron do?”. With probability, I often have no idea how to setup the problem. I spent the rest of the day going over old homeworks. After the 2nd cup of coffee at 7pm, decided to gun it and kept working through the night. Did laundry at 3am. Made it until about 8am, when I took a 2 hour nap that turned into a 4 hour nap. Did some grocery shopping with Luke. Spent a while cooking chili and dal makhni for the upcoming week. Luke was filming a video for his research project. Later that night we watched the finale to the the South Park story arc ‘Imaginationland’, thoroughly enjoying it.

It sucks that Indy lost to the Patriots. NC State beat Miami in OT, crossing my fingers for this week’s game against Carolina. Stanford lost to Washington. Did a lot of thinking about the Krispy Kreme Challenge too, with frequent discussion with Thomas Finch, Greg, and Kelly. Thomas has been really good about learning from the experience Greg and I have had doing this race for 3 years and our knowledge of the web. It’s worrisome to me that the other four members of the organizing committee aren’t doing the same. The room for error when an event starts to involve more than 2000 people decreases very rapidly. Hopefully this conference call on Tuesday will be give me more confidence.

My parents finally arrived in Mumbai after being delayed 4 hours in Raleigh and another 4 hours in NYC. Fortunately it was a direct flight from New York to Mumbai, but two of their bags are missing. They’ll be arriving in Akola, the small town in central India where my Dad was born. This is a photo I took in 2004 of the building where he spent most of his young childhood.

Donny seems to be settling very well to the east in Bangladesh, making me feel embarrassed cause he’s schooling me in a South Asian language despite me having a huge advantage. Looks like Greg was Extra Number 7 in a commercial that Siemens shot at Cambridge (maybe Donny too gets to be in a commercial?) I wanna see those on YouTube.

What’s coming up next? After midterms are over, we’ve got one more hw in circuits (due this friday) and then our Project will be assigned. I’m staying here over Thanksgiving and will be working on it full time. Looking forward to it…that class is great.