A tryst with VISA

There, there--hello again! Tryst with VISA-s can be very irritating; as I am sure people who apply to the US already know. But even then small countries, trying to cook up austerity drives to reduce their national deficits, can be so nettling at times! Anyway I am not trying to make general statements here about big things; but I am trying to point out a small case which exemplifies some general features on a much puny scale. Okay so here's my story.

I am going to travel to Italy and Germany for some conferences and both organizers have graciously provided me with all possible documents to help me get my VISA. But of course, the problem with the Italian consulate was that the person sitting with the phone (who was unfortunately an Indian) thought it was too much to listen to what I had to say--all he could happily say was---Go the the VFS and get rid of us. Okay, I decided, that is probably the best instead of wasting my time. But then it turned out that the great VFS, whose job is to provide information on what type of VISA to provide drew a complete bank look at my covering letter. "Sorry sir",---they very politely told me,"we have to send your application to the Consulate to decide on the type of VISA"--etc etc. You cannot imagine the feelings I had after I had travelled to that place wasting so much of my time and money and in the unbearable heat. So what do I do? Nothing, but meekly go back again the next day! And what do they do then---accept the form as it is--and now all because the Consulate has told them. What a big fallacy! And why, because some stupid Indian guy at the Consulate had thought it was beneath his status to talk to the ordinary public. Maybe, I should write a proper letter of complaint to the Consul General.
But anyway---sometimes I wonder whats the point--in today's world, it is the first of the many VISA related frustrations that I am  probably going to have! :( !

24+15

This was an interesting week for me..and extremely intense. There have been only several stints in my life when I have been so intensively involved. One thing was to make the SU3 program running; which I guess I already have described before. The other thing was finishing the rewriting of the draft of the paper on the screening masses. I managed to polish the paper quite a bit and also managed to write quite a few somethings on the introduction, and modify nearly all the figures. On the whole I think it looks quite nice! :) But let us see how much of the modifications I still have to do. The 24 + 15 in the title refers to the 24 hours of work it took on the paper followed by the 15 hours of sleep I needed to refresh myself.

Links and more

Yes, links and more...that was that was keeping my time occupied for the last few days. I did the upgrading for SU2 to SU3 and with some occasional help. But it was as rewarding as it was hectic! It really was ecstatic feeling that I had when I got correct results. Now I feel nice: I have experiencing in programming from scratch all scalar theories (Z2, O(N) models) and gauge theories (SU2,SU3) with a host of updating procedures! To me, quite an expeirence and expertise.
But this is only the beginning of the things that I have to finish before the month is over. Yes, let me go back...

Hunting for treasure

This is the first time I am trying to put some topic into my post. This essentially meant to focus something important that happened to me during the time in between the posts and doesn't necessarily mean that the post will be about the topic exclusively.

Well anyway, although the treasure hunt was important for me, since I was playing this time with a lot of friends, we lost by about a minute. It might be of interest that the winning team took about 40 minutes to decide that the sequence 3 14 15 ... has anything at all to do with the fabled $\pi$. But it was fun and it was tiring.

Back, I have a lot of catch up to do despite the fact that I worked pretty hard yesterday. The SU3 prog is coming up from the SU2 one; and am trying to think the correct tuning for the multilevel process. I was told that the optimum no of sublattice averaging in the latter case might go up to thousands but I didn't appreciate it properly until I saw the Koma et al paper that does the same. That does bring up the question where are we going to get so much time? Another thing that was pointed out, was that could we do any calculation in the strong coupling limit of the theory? Well, it is time I tried to understand the Laine et al paper much more seriously.

Have been away to Kolkata last week. On work. Therefore no time for play. Yes. Honestly, I mean it. But on the whole it was pretty enjoyable! Of course, the absence of Internet was pretty frustrating and the experience of getting absolutely drenched in the local storm "kalbaisakhi" was superb. However was anxious all the time because the tickets had not been bought, neither the registration not the hotel booking was done. By the way all this is for the LATTICE conference, to which I will be most probably going this time. South Calcutta seemed pretty much changed:beautification projects all around! The South City mall was big and nice, but not as great as some of the malls you can see in Bombay.
And yes, got to see a lot of wonderful sights from the plane. The sight of Bombay, as the plane was taking off----that of the Worli sea link was particularly wonderful. The roads were tubelights of light! So was Calcutta while getting down. It seemed so "cute"! While coming back, the most remarkable were that of the Western Ghats: you can make out where the ranges start, grow taller, some parts of the plateau sandwiched in between the mountains, and finally the mountains giving way to the narrow valley and finally the sea----mesmerising. You could see deep gorges when the river is in the mountain and ox-bow lakes as it is moving on a flat land: geography should be taught on the air like this!
Working hard on the Diffusion coefficient. Need to see how much the multilevel improves over the standard result.