2014 - The Year of the Lost Hobbies!

The year of the lost hobbies and revolutionary changes has arrived! I was destined to start the year as an extremely bored PhD student and end it with a new life and a hot start to my career at The MathWorks! The year has seen renewal of long lost hobbies. Astronomy, astrophotography, aeromodelling and a new start to electronics. On the personal side it hasn't changed much. Apart from a plethora of geeky acquaintances, nothing better had happened. Cycling almost became a part of daily commuting and long rides have almost totally died out.

January began with a new surge of energy. Amogh wrecked my second quadcopter and I had to build a third one. January was done in simply building the quad. Dr. Deepak Kapur from UNM had come to visit our lab and we had a good meet with him. Incidentally, I had been following his work for quite some time by then. I started auditing Dr. Kanade's automated verification course. Little did I know that I'd be working with a model checker 10 months later!

February wasn't all too spectacular. Amogh returned from the US with a Beaglebone Black, an Intel Galileo and an RPi Camera for me. Start to new hobbies and interests! Feb 21st saw me turn 25. Dad had come to visit me at IISc and he gifted me the costliest pen I ever owned (a Ferrari). I tried building my own ArduPilot Mega using an Arduino Mega and crafting a shield over it. It worked, but was too bulky.




March saw Jithin leave IISc. Frustrated with his work, he finally took the call and quit his PhD. March was also the time when I bought my Cubieboard 2. The dual core ARM board was to work as a torrent downloader for many months to come! I also got a MultiWii SE V2.5 to replace my drone shield. It worked fine for ground trials. But the props weren't spinning in unision and the quad really never took off. But I got an opportunity to experiment a lot with it.

April came with the scare of a comprehensive viva. My research area took an orthogonal turn. I had come up with an algorithm to perform quantifier elimination on monadic second order formulae. But all the work on quantifier elimination was shelved and my adviser asked me to start working on something more mainstream. Like non-commutative Grobner bases. And a subset of it, noetherian non-commutative Grobner bases. I absolutely loathed the area from here! It was no longer elegant and simple. It was mired in brutal algebra! Dr. Vijay Natarajan asked me on April 25th whether I'd be able to submit my previous work on computer graphics to the conference ICVGIP'14. I readily took it up as it offered a relief! I got an Agilent oscilloscope in April in return for work done for Sujeet (from IotaCell).

May saw my hamster, Nibbles', demise. He was terminally ill with intense hairfall and died on the bus from Hyderabad to Bangalore. With the help of Roshan, I got my third hamster, Minie, from a person in Banashankari. Minie is a very active little girl! One of the most lively animals I've yet seen! I got a new graphics card by the start of May. An AMD Radeon R9 270. At a whopping 3 TFLOPs of computing power, it gave a whole new dimension to my hobbies. A long lost hobby re-emerged. Gaming! The end of May saw me reintroduced to astronomy! A chance sighting or Jupiter in the evening sky brought old memories back. Memories of myself at home with the Celestron 50mm refractor, gazing at the Jovian moon system and Saturnian rings. I immediately ordered my first refractor in years, a Celestron TravelScope 70. A cute little scope, it still serves the purpose it's been bought for. A versatile, portable scope, with an extensive viewing angle and decent options.

June saw me prepare for my viva. I began reading automata theory and algorithmic algebra. While I understood automata theory better, nothing much improved on the fronts of discrete structures and algorithmic algebra. My geek gang and I spent a few nights on the terrace of the hostel watching Saturnian rings and a few binary stars. Manisha Mahajan arrived for her internship by the end of June. She quickly became friends with my entire gang. Especially with Roshan and Gokul.

July was filled with linear algebra and a 5" reflector. I spent most of the month reading linear algebra in the IISc library. Was extremely boring. The massive reflector made its way to my room by mid July. The southwest monsoon started just then. Massive clouds crammed the night sky, giving it the characteristic orange glow. Absolutely nothing would be seen. I submitted the graphics paper to ICVGIP'14 along with Vijay and Talha on 21st July. 31st of July really sparked my astronomical interests. I went skywatching with a professional astrophotographer. Had terrific views of several galaxies and star clusters. Trifid, Lagoon, Orion, Eagle and Crab nebulae. Andromeda galaxy. Lots of star clusters. Pleaides. The milkyway. Cygnus rift. Eventful night, along with a few monsoon showers and holes in the thick cloud cover.

August got the comprehensive viva near. It went really horrible. I was grilled in linear algebra, without ever touching my research area and the relevant subjects. This is when I really got fed up with my PhD. I felt I was a misfit in the area I was supposed to work on. I increasingly became alienated from algorithmic algebra and I started becoming a systems geek. The rest of the month was spent mulling on whether I should quit PhD.

September was one of the turning points of my life. I finally took the call to quit PhD. The second shot at the viva went bad as the panel thought that my mindset didn't fit that of a researcher in mathematics. I wholly agree with their suggestion! I had offers to change my adviser but I decided to quit PhD altogether and enter the industry. Amogh helped me to get a call from MathWorks. I also applied to select teams in other companies, like Nvidia, Cisco and Aerospike. I had a phone round with Prahlad for MathWorks by the end of September.

October saw MathWorks interviews in full swing. I felt really relieved after quitting PhD. I went home for Diwali after a really long time. The quadcopter got revived and made its maiden flight this month. It was charming to see it fly. I was accompanied by Navin on that day. Later that month, I bought an EasySky Drifter R/C aircraft and a P-51D Mustang scale R/C warbird. Roshan lost the Drifter in a freak accident and ended up giving me a 50mm EDF L-39 jet in return. I got placed in a booming startup called Aerospike with a hot package. I had to reject it for the better mentorship I would get at MathWorks. I moved into the new house at Mahadevpura by the end of October. Roshan helped transport the luggage in his car. I had Surendra Salke, Prasun and Pramendra as my roommates. Pretty cheerful chaps! I had a lot in common with Prasun as he was from a similar academic background. Salke and Pramendra were largely systems guys from IIT Bombay.

November started with the MathWorks offer letter. I finally joined MathWorks on November 17th. It was a great learning curve. I found a very capable mentor in Prahlad and Manoj. And with Amogh to watch over me at all times. I started loving my new job. Everything was new to me and I tried my best to grasp things and learn my way around. I opened my salary account with HSBC by the end of the month. Dad came to visit me by the month end. He gifted me a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. It was probably costlier than all the phones I ever had put together!

December saw me settling in my new job. I was an apprentice to Manoj, working under his aegis. On December 14th, I changed my house yet again. This time, to a 1 BHK house in Bellandur. I was to stay alone! I wanted to setup a geek capital, after the close down of 7, S-Block. I bought a R/C helicopter and assembled it in the second half of the month. By the end of the month, I got a nitro engine and an aircraft to carry it. The first flight is scheduled to happen by the end of January or the start of February.

2014 gave me several pleasant surprises! Overall I ended up in a much better situation than what I began with. A charming end to a great year of my life!