swimming and flying

Visited the pool today. Its a pretty good pool, very good quality, water, lifeguards, showerstalls and all. It is around half the size of the Basavanagudi pool, but has the same depth range (3ft - 16ft). I plan to stick to the 1845-1930 batch. Had to get a medical test done to ensure that I am low-risk. As for the actual swimming, I now realize that I am out of shape, and out of form, and out of energy. Plan to work on each of them with swimming, cycling and a controlled diet. Lets see whether it works. Will test it on innocent Bangalore folks when I visit in May 2005.

Academically, the course merry-go-round is going on, with everyone frantically trying to optimize their courses in terms of load, final year projects, grades, weekly timings etc. I am still debating whether to take Combinatorics or Applied Economics. Other than that, I will be sticking to Hypertext Mining, Data Mining and Approximation Algorithms this semester, coupled with one dud lab, making it a very heavy course indeed. I might also be working with a startup here on some cooL stuff. Will update as things take shape.

Now, for the best part of my post. My flight from Bangalore to Bombay. For a long time now, I had had these expectations, awe, and a feeling of anticipation for flying. It lived upto every bit of my thought and more. Flying is probably as commonplace as driving to many, but for me, it was a new thing, and I haven't felt many new things for sometime now. I loved the initial acceleration, the first few moments of flight, the view of the city fading as we climb, the oh-so-fantastic clouds - in all their myriad shapes and sizes, the tilting of wings, and as we landed, I could recognize a few buildings in Bombay, and we flew so close to a slum, that I could actually make out urchins playing on the gullys, and the feeling of floating as we get close to landing and the sudden feeling of speed as we hit the ground.......overall, a great experience, and I am glad I took the flight this time.