When will you get married?

I have been on Facebook for about 6 months now, and although it has helped me a lot to keep in touch with some of my long lost friends, I have to admit that I've come across the most ridiculous applications ever imaginable! First there was a host of vampire invitations that really irritated me, then there were zombies, hugs, roses, angels, you name it.

Very recently one of my closest friends sent me an invitation to this "When will you get married" application. Here is a screenshot of that:


Notice that it says "Patented Wedding Algorithm A.I" :).
Anybody with even a teeny bit of common sense should be able to see that this is an attempt to get your personal information, and popularize this application by asking you to send this out to at least X number of your friends . But still, people try this out
! I find this fact (i.e. how psychologically we are tempted to try out these kind of silly applications even though we have a feeling that there might be an adverse consequence for us at the very end) really interesting. Don't you?

My debut with sushi

Well, I have never in my life ever tried to make sushi.. Actually to let you know a little secret I am even very clumsy with the chopsticks! However, last Friday I was part of a team which made sushi for 80 people (this was for CSAIL GSL). Isn't that cool or what?? :)

The team was Paul, Jen, Thomas and Yoong-Keok. Paul was the master chef, and out of all 5, I guess I was the one who was most alien to the sushi preparation :). However, I now know how to do it, and I'd soon try it on my own. And I think I'd even become a huge sushi fan!!

Sushi preparation is not that hard. However, it is bit time consuming and requires a bit of patience. We spent about 8 hours on Thursday evening cooking rice and wrapping up the sushi. We made California Roll, Shrimp Inari Sushi, Eel roll, Sweet Egg roll and Cucumber and Avocado roll along with the Miso soup. I was a lot of work, but it was loads of fun too!!

Here are some of the pictures Paul took...

Everybody serving themselves the sushi at the GSL:

Paul did a nice job in laying out the sushi very attractively:

This is my favorite :)

We had a quite a bit more rice than we anticipated. So we thought of being very creative with the leftover rice. Thomas made the 'castle' (on the top), I made the 'face with seaweed as hair' (middle), Yoong-keok made the 'turtle' (left of the face), 'penguin' (south of the face) and a 'ginger-bread man' (right of the face). Of course we put signs asking people not to eat these!

Web 2.0 in under 5 minutes

My knowledge on the subject is also very much limited. But by far this is the most accurate, short and visually pleasing presentation I've seen on the topic:



Taken from: http://www.mediatedcultures.net/mediatedculture.htm

Holiday Adventures

I am back from a short trip to several states in the east coast. I went on this trip with two Sri Lankan friends I met here - Varuni and Radheeka, studying at Boston University and University of Southern California respectively. We went to New York, New Jersey, Washington DC and Virginia. We visited so many famous places, museums and even got to see two Broadway shows including Lion King and the Blue Man Group.

The trip was lot of fun and I had loads of experience (both good and bad). The good stuff were the amazing sights and sounds we got to experience (including the 100th anniversary of the crystal ball dropping at Times Square, getting FRONT ROW seats at the Blue Man Show, etc), having got to stay in 'real' houses which I so dearly missed, and getting to taste Sri Lankan food. Bad experiences were delayed flights and lost baggages ruining some outing plans, getting sick, and sometimes feeling that luck was never on our side when it comes to the weather and timing :(.

However, we had an awesome time, and we are determined to go on similar kind of trips in the future covering all 50 states of the United States!

Here are some of the pictures we took on this trip:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oshanis/sets/72157603681600152/show/

And here are some of the sights and sounds we got to experience.
(Fair warning though.. these are amateur videos, so you might get giddy after watching those for few seconds :)

Lights near the Rockefeller Center:



Ice Skating:
(tried and failed twice, and now scared to death to try again :)



New Year's eve at Times Square:

R-Store

R-Store is a Java library which converts RDF data into a relational database schema. Check out the R-Store project home page for more details about what it really does. But here's a sneak peak of what this software is capable of:



This project was carried out as part of the Database Systems class I took this semester . Doing this project was pretty fun! I was kinda venturing in to unknown territory, but it turned out pretty well. Of course I had 2 interesting team members... Angelique Mosciki and Sergio Hererro. And this wouldn't have been possible without all the contributions from all three of us.

Please feel free to check out the code and experiment. It is all open source, and you are more than welcome to contribute in any way to make this software any better!

Bubble : : We didn't start the fire!

The first snow fall

Just looked outside the window, and I saw this:

Man, tomorrow will be a pretty cold day :(