The Do-Something-New-Everyday Project

So I'm back in Gainesville and settled in the new apartment. As decided earlier I wanted to start a time bound project for 4 months to enjoy the Fall sem to the fullest. After a lot of brainstorming and soul searching (well not really) I came up with the Do-Something-New-Everyday project - the DSNEP

So I'm gonna start with yesterday's activity since DSNEP started yesterday (not a very good start for the project to blog late about it but always look ahead :D )

Yesterday I assembled a chair by myself!

What is so great about this you ask? Well firstly for a Mumbai gal like me, furniture shopping means going to the store and picking out what I need, paying for it then coming home to wait for the shop people to deliver it home either all assembled and ready-to-use or assembled by them when it is delivered.

The Workshop course in engineering was pretty much a joke because by the end of it I learnt 3 things -

• Crying sometimes helps you get your way - I got out of having to do a lot of metalwork that way.
• Rats like living in wood shavings - I remember screaming a lot in this class for this particular reason.
• Pretty journals earn lots of marks - We wrote a huge file for workshop with lots of hand-drawn pictures of tools we never saw and the neat and pretty files got high marks in workshop (not the neat and pretty workshop artifacts!).

Add to all this the fact that I have never actually played much with Legos and my primary source of knowledge on Lego blocks is Vamsi.

So taking all of the above in consideration I didn't know how to put together anything except perhaps jigsaw puzzles and source code.

My chair however came from Walmart in a million pieces... well ok I won't exaggerate but about 10-12 pieces. It was fun screwing together the various parts and slowly building the whole chair. I built the seat portion and backrest portion separately so when the seat was done I was thrilled to sit on it and spin around! Ofcourse I tested it first by putting all my soft toys on the seat before I myself sat on it :)

Even more exciting was sitting on the chair when the whole thing was ready. The smell of a new chair and the thrill of having assembled it myself was a new and nice experience!

I have to give out a few credits here though.

First a large credit to Nikhil for helping me get my study table and chair home. Then again to Nikhil for helping me build the study table on Sunday. He did about 80% of the work on it and I learnt about assembling stuff by watching him. The table literally was in a million parts with so many screws and bolts but Nikhil pieced it together very fast! Hooray for mech. engineers!

Also credit to Divya for helping out with the table. She started the initial struggle with me before Nikhil came and took over the assembly job.

But credit for assembling the chair I can claim all for myself! Lesson learnt from this: Scissors can replace a screwdriver if one isn't available!

Another DSNEP for tomorrow coming up soon...

The Chaitali/??? Project

So its "haven't blogged in a long time" time again. This time I won't bother explaining why but I will certainly mention 2 internships in 2 biggies (Intel, Google), shifting from coast to coast then state to state, a trip to India and several power vacations to great places!

Sadly Twitter and FB didn't work very well. I guess I ain't the micro-blogging kind of person. But I'm back! And hopefully will be around for longer this time.

So this post is an inspiration from Julia and Julie (or was it Julie and Julia?) - a movie I saw recently. The Julie/Julia project got me thinking that perhaps I should also start a time-bound project for something apart my normal work. It'd give me a higher purpose in life (now wasn't that a good dialog?) and probably lead me to fame like it did for Julie Powell. Ofcourse I have a shortened timeline of 4 months or 120 days in the Fall sem and this is after counting in the vacations or exam days!

But what am I good at?

Cooking? I like Indian food but not enough to work my way through Sanjeev Kapoor's book and blog about it. Besides the thought of trips to Gainesville's Indian store everyday and lugging back groceries in the bus is dizzying. Maybe we could have the Megha / Chaitali Project since I know Megs' recipes better!

Then ambigrams? There isn't really a countdown here when making ambigrams. Perhaps using Facebook as a base might help. 196 ambigrams 120 days to go! Boy am I glad I got off Orkut. 400 friends 120 days to go... I might as well become a fulltime ambigrammar!

Coding? That is my main occupation but I enjoy it so maybe it qualifies for this project! Julie picked up one of the most popular books as aid for her project. What would I pick here? Cormen? 120 days, god-knows-how-many exercises to go! Well it'd be a very popular blog for sure since it'd show up in every Google search for "Cormen solutions". I'm sure that is searched very often! (considering I've done that search myself so many times :| )

There is actually another thing I've gotten good at recently. Moving! I've been shifting houses every sem since coming to US a year and half ago. Regency Oaks, Tuscan Bend, Elan Village, Bowe Avenue, Pacific Inn and Tuscan Bend again!

I've become extremely fast at packing and unpacking. I know all the best deals and tricks to shipping stuff. I know all about U-Haul services. I can make an exact list of initial groceries and household things to setup a new place. Basically I can get a house up and running in just about 2 days of shifting into it!

Unfortunately it isn't something I can countdown to for this project. So I suppose I'm out of ideas for now. Any ideas for the Chaitali / ??? Project? Hopefully I'll come up with something soon!