The summer semester started for me and this time I am taking just two courses: one of them is a mandatory accounting course and it is killing me. While it is very useful and something that I have never done before but to get my head around what it is that they are trying to teach is something else. The language of accounting is not the same as everyday English language and it is just unbelievable to me how a credit and debit mean exactly the opposite to accountants. Either way, I am struggling a bit with the terminology and the way the whole thing works.

During my previous degrees, I used to undertake research in modeling human behavior on complex systems and had tremendous fun doing it. I find myself doing the same thing again with a important project. All the fun that was had is coming back to me: I would highly recommend reading Complex Adaptive Systems to get a sense of the techniques I use this other book too and is a good read also. It has a whole Matrix like theme where agents (not necessarily intelligent) interact with one another and these interactions are modeled and the system learns from them.

The other day I almost ordered some very funky fiber optic lighting for the house from these guys but decided to postpone it till after I am back from the sabbatical. Ever since I moved to this new house, I had this thing in my head around Fiber Optic lighting for it because I have a fancy staircase inside and a wall that is just begging to be lit up and the other day came across this fantastic work done by some of the students at the University: The Cloud and right after that I was one click away from placing a order for the lights. I then decided to hold it back.

I have been very fascinated with architecture and came across the dynamic tower skyscraper and I so want to buy a house there. If only I had the money.

The summer has been fantastic. I have seen more parks here in the last two months than I had in the past two and a half years. There are days when the weather is a bit variable but there were some days when it was just fantastic around 20C and sometimes even more. A measure of a good summer for me is the use of flip flops. I was very used to wearing them before but here there is no chance mostly and this time I was able to wear it to work a couple of times and I suppose it is a good measure of the weather.

I did buy MarioKart more than a couple of weeks ago love the tiny wheel that comes with it although still not impressed with the graphics. I don’t know what I was expecting on the Wii anyway. But it is good fun none the less.

Lately I have been binge buying on Amazon. I have bought a number of books and have been reading a lot for work and otherwise. I suppose it is one of the phases but because my work does not accept postal deliveries, I have them delivered in the house and inevitably every week, I have to take a walk to the collection center. The post office guy knows me by now. The thing is that the way zip codes work here is quite arbitrary: I moved a 100 meters from my old house and I am in a new Zip code that is not even close to the old one and the collection center is now almost two miles away so every week in the morning, I have to make the walk to the collection center.

Firefox 3 is quite good both for Mac and the PC. I use it with delicious, Flashblock and Adblock Plus and the browser experience is pretty good now.

I have to think about the Fall semester and plan for a whole number of logistical issues around that and I do it with mixed emotions: one hand excited about the experience and apprehensive about what I am going to leave behind.

Personally, it has been a very interesting time for me. I have been meeting many new people and I realize over time I have developed some very close friendships here which I suppose is not that unnatural. I am not going to write about my meditation and some of the progress I have been making but one quote by Bob Thurman quoting the Dalai Lama is quite apt for the moment: “When your mind gives birth to idea of compassion you finally realize that your feelings: if you are happy or sad, if you feel like this or like that and generally the ego-centric perception is too small a theater for your intellect. It is quite boring really.”

There are a lot of other things happening but this is not the space and time to verbalize. But my last.fm profile will do the talking.