Winter skies were always a source of inspiration... My old Samsung phone (actually that is my main phone now..) was handy for such occassional shots of a pretty evening sky... This was on my walk back home from school...
I took the phone everywhere... I went jogging along the Schuylkill often... One fine day, I jogged all the way to East Falls and back... the farthest I'd ever been along the Schuylkill banks..
After a year of relative hard work, I decided I needed to visit a new city and introduce myself to another part of America... Nothing like a quick trip to Portland in October to refresh the spirit... near the HI hostel.. Portland has since become my favorite city in the USA...
During that trip to the Northwest, I stayed over with Anupan and family.. Anupam is a friend from COEP and currently work with Microsoft...
I spent some time in remote Washington state with Pinkesh at LIGO... We went around to see some landscape scarred by the Missoula floods thousands of years ago...
We even went on a hike to Mt. St. Helens.. It was quite an entertaining walk through a landscape that was on a comeback after getting obliterated during a ~30-year old eruption...
Aai always sent Diwali faral! It was great! Munching on faral sometime before 2008 Election Day...
UPenn owned an Arboretum out in the Chestnut Hill suburbs... So that spring, I took the suburban rail line and walked a mile to the entrance to enjoy the sights of spring flowers...
Every spring, the city would spruce up with flowers almost everywhere... Bulbous flowers in downtown Philadelphia enliven the atmosphere around City Hall..
As always summer brings stormy weather in its wake... Here, an offshoot of a Gulf of Mexico hurricane makes its way across the high skies over Philadelphia...
2009 was a tough year.. working hard to get research done.. and conference submissions followed as reward... Enroute to Prague for the FPL conferece... a stopover at Oslo, Norway.. Here's the Opera House..
On top of Prague's own private Eiffel.. Walking around Prague was quite entertaining... its got a nice, quiet, unobstrusie charm..
During the trip to Prague I took some time out to go hike around Divko Sarka.. a suburban hiking trail through some pretty valleys right on the edge of civilization...
Hikes soon followed in the Philadelphia neighborhood... Here I was, scampering around the battlegrounds of Valley Forge
We also went around planting Walnut trees on Ben's farm in Gettysburg...
A random Fall thundershower soaks the city...
In December 2009 I visited Australia for FPT and took some time out to meet Pallavi tai+family.. Here, we have the Kelovkar-Mandke family picture..
I also spent a nice sunny December day wandering around Brisbane... and enoying water rides in their awesome taxi system...
On the first day of FPT, we ate dinner somewhere in the Sydney harbour area... The waterfront was abuzz with activity..
We also walked around Coogee Beach at night.... Here we're experimenting with Ben's camera (taken on a Canon SD980 IS)
The FPT conference ended with a nice dinner cruise in the Sydney Harbour... we got some spectacular views of the Opera House but otherwise it was a pretty ok excursion...
After FPT, I went to Melbourne to visit Purva and her family... Here I'm posing with some stone sculptures at a nearby mountain peak...
We had two major snowstorms in the winter of 2009-2010... that broke all records and made the city all pretty and nice before the slushies came out..
We had a second snowstorm soon after... burying the city in yet more snow.. A nice winter overall.. We even got a day off from school..
After almost 4 years I finally meet Rucha in UK.. during my trip there for an interview at Imperial College..
We roamed around London and had much fun..
I also ran into Akshay and Ani...
Closer to home, we went on our annual ritual pilgrimage to FPGA in Monterey. Each pilgrimage is accompanied by a dinner at Nepenthe... sometimes we enjoy the company of lab passouts..
In the interveening years, a new CS department sprung up at Caltech.... Later that year I will defend here... The building itself is quite classy and well designed..
It becomes clear that much water has bubbled through the Beckman DNA fountain as it gets closer to graduation..