2010 !!

The last I blogged here was Dec last year. Time for me to get in the one blog for this year, and this one will be about next year.

First off, the goals -

Professional goals

1. Graduate!! Be known as Dr Pratik Ray the next christmas.
2. Get a job/post-doc/anything that pays the bill and gets me some food.
3. Over this past year, I have become a bit of a self-taught person on Monte Carlo methods and ab-initio calculations. Hopefully, in 2010, I will be able to get my work involving both these methods published.

Un-professional goals ;)

1. Work harder on my pencil sketching. Continue my portrait series of physics icons (Feynman and Einstein done, plenty more to go, lol).
2. Photograph Yellowstone! This is something I had wanted to do for quite some time. Now that I have a nice new digital SLR + access to some cool lenses and filters, I should head off to Yellowstone in summer. Should be a nice road trip anyway.
3. Get my lifts up to Class II level, raw, for the 181 lb category. Class I or Masters level would be nice, but I will take Class II as well. I am relatively new to powerlifting, with my current total being a pathetic 770 lbs (Bench - 185 lbs, squats - 280 lbs, deadlift - 300 lbs), raw, this just about makes class IV. Class II has a minimum total of 1012 lbs, so this is going to be one hell of a struggle. A rough target break-up: bench-245 / squat-365/ deadlift - 405 (total-1015). All this, while staying in the same weight class (at 174 lbs, I can afford to go up 6-7 lbs and still make the class).

That' the lot for now. Will be back in 2010, write about my postdoc hunting and thesis writing experiences (and lessons learnt). 2009 was rather sedate. 2010 promises to be much more exciting. Anyway to whoever is reading this - wish you a very happy and prosperous new year.

Postscript: For those who are unaware, powerlifting is a sport where you aim to move unnecessarily massive amounts of weights using three specific movements - the flat bench press, the parallel back squat, and the deadlift. At some point, if I feel like it, I might put up my lifting routines as well, although this being a slightly different kind of blog, I might keep them separate.