OCR

Had some first hand experience today with OCR or Optical Character Recognition software today. As I told before, my old sprintpcs LG phone died a torturous death under a car. Went around in vain for a couple of days trying to get all the numbers out of the phone book, but it was in too bad shape for them to be recovered.
Then I went back to a old printout from December of a printout of all the nos in my phone that sprint store had given me - that was when i destroyed my previous LG phone! Just had the printout, so digitallly scanned it and created a image pdf version. Then tried a lot of free OCR softwares which gave a very poor recognition performance even of printed text. Finally found a Image2PDF OCR which worked pretty well. It worked well enough except messing up 0/o and 8/g. Got around the fact that they were only doing odd pages in the trial version by a simple trick :-) And cool, I now have a formatted text backup of all my contacts.

Razr

Guess what I got today. A Motorola Razr V3 A superb sleek and powerful cell phone. It started with me deciding to get a cell phone for my parents to use for 2 months, and I would take it over after they leave and my sprintpcs contract expires. And then Amazon offered this phone for free, and I grabbed it with both hands. and then, my old sprintpcs phone died a sad death under the wheels of a car in Napa valley. No, wine was not to blame. it just fell off my pocket somehow in the parking lot, and you can guess the rest. Still, the crushed phone could review calls suprisingly.

Short review: Razr is totaly awesome. exterior screen exits, as also a big interior screen. did web browsing and saw video for the first time in such a small device. It has a digital camera with zoom, voice recording, etc. etc. I finally found the business modle how motorola/amazon was giving the phone so cheaply. everything that the phone is enabled with, I need to pay or buy extra things to make them work. But, found a usb cable though, through which I can charge my phone from laptop. But, had to search around for quite a bit to get the driver for the V3. Also got the bluetooth to work just for transferring files TO the phone. Has speaker phone too, not that good though. the metal feels very cool on a hot houston summer day too. And i can download lotsa cool mp3, videos, jpgs, extra. and everything in the phone is programmable. Thats cool, but needed a lot of time to fiddle around and give the perfect look and feel.

Interviewing

Recently had been interviewing quite a bit. Want to get a good job offer in hand, to give the final push to my thesis. Gave some interviews for some very exciting positions - one almost a dream job. Exactly what i wanted to do afterwards. Hopefully will have something good to report by the end of this month. Till then, mum's the word :-)

Red eye flight

Checked out of my hotel in the morning itself and went for the talks. There was another nice keynote by the intel researcher who talked about very different sensor systems - one where scalability and management is important, and no resource constraints at all, as is assumed in classical sensor systems. After another heavy lunch with lobster sandwich, I found it had to concentrate on the talks. I am really suffering from very short attention span. Maybe I should start some yoga to relax my nerves. it was not helped by the fact that many of the talks were theoritical in nature. anyways, went out with a few friends in the evening for a stroll along venice beach, and had a whole tilapia for dinner at an awesome thai restaurant. One of the guys dropped me to the airport at 10 pm, and I spent the next 3 hours working on a paper revision, writing last 3 days of blogs, and trying to use this boingo wireless only to realize that they offer only monthly or daily service, not the hourly service I was looking for and would have paid for.

My parents had arrived today at houston in the afternoon. and as i would not be there, my bro and sil had come from DC to receive them. Talked with them quite a few times. My bedroom ac was not working, also it was 40 degrees+ temperature. they had even gone to the nearby fiesta and bought fish and groceries :-) and am now waiting in the airport, really wishing I had an earlier flight than this red-eye madness. had not seen ma-baba for over one and half years now. This was also my third red eye flight from california back to houston in as many months. and i have never been able to sleep in any one of them.