Saket Vora

Wow. It’s 4:20am. My apartment (nader was over too) just had a six hour chat…one of those meandering discussions that can go to places you’d never expect. Nader scored two microwaves and he gave one to us (we have one that actually turns). Simon observed the existence of holes in the rear shaped precisely like electrical sockets on the back of the microwave, and naturally we being engineers on a Saturday night spent a good 20 minutes (to Luke’s chagrin, even he was sort of participating!) debating this, even taking a photo of it and enlisting the help of Wikipedians. Gene came in, horrified and amazed that we would be doing this instead of going to a party to meet people, which got us talking about how we hang out, the art and importance of meeting strangers and talking with them, nice ‘lounge’ places in the City, girls, the nature of the Russian front in World War II (via a mention of an indian girl here in russian studies), to the Holocaust, the persistence of Eastern bloc and Russian grudges, the motivations behind the Bolshevik revolution, the cyclical nature of war and peace, ‘peace’ under occupation, speculation of a third World War and where it would be, the status of China’s military might, the relationship between China and Australian, the tense relationship between Indonesia and Australia, East Timor, international law and justice, the turning away of chinese immigrants at the northern Australian border, the encouraging of Cuban boats here, the broken immigration policy for skilled and talented workers, labor, educational attainment in the US, societal justice, and economic drivers for welfare in Australia and the United States.

My EE 414 labmates have been doing a fantastic job shouldering the load while I’ve gone AWOL to tackle this embedded project. I fixed the problem with the GPS today and felt pretty good about that. Tomorrow I’ll split between the 414 lab and the project.