In my quest for excitement, I am beginning to wonder if excitement itself can become so routine as to spark boredom.

One of those 'Must Be Done' things when you begin working in the US (as a non-citizen) is getting a social security number. You can live without it, but you can't get paid without it, so you might as well get it as soon as possible.

Of course, just because you need it doesn't mean they make it easy for you to get one. You don't need to stand in a line, but you do need to sit for a while with a token in your hand - which is a notch better than how things get done in India, but the novelty wears off pretty soon.

Perhaps it was a busy season when I came to Seattle and applied for an SSN. I had to wait for almost a month before I got mine. But this long wait led me to some interesting discoveries.

First, I found out that it is impossible to get an appointment with the social security office over the phone for such a matter: their automated system requires you to supply your SSN, and that's exactly what you want from them.

Second, I found out that it is impossible to avoid the long wait by personally visiting the office and getting an appointment for a different day. That's because you need to wait in line in order to speak to the officer at the counter to get the appointment in the first place, and in that case, you might as well get your work done rather than get an appointment.

After I actually got my SSN, I found out that it takes some time to percolate through the system, which means that you can't use it to open a bank account, or use it for any kind of verification.

When I finally got my SSN working properly, I heaved a sigh of relief, which of course, was short-lived. When I tried to open a bank account online, it turned out that my SSN wasn't enough. They also wanted my driving license number for verification purposes.

I visited the licensing office last Saturday. There I found a queue that was twice the size of the one at the social security office.

To start this story backward, I finally have some furniture in my house, thanks to a weekend trip to Ikea.

It had been two months since I moved to Seattle, and I figured it was now or never. So last Saturday, I took the plunge and bought myself a neat little corner workstation where I could keep my desktop computer and work (?). That wasn't quite enough, so I also got a chair, and a sofa that doubles up as a bed.

The most interesting part of buying furniture from Ikea is that it needs to be assembled. When I finally had time to do this, it was something like one o'clock in the middle of the night, but that wasn't going to stop me now, was it? I started assembling the table first, but I reached a point where I needed to hammer in a few nails, and being a good and kind neighbor, I desisted. The rest of the table was left for the morning.

There are a few words of wisdom I would like to pass on to the reader. These are:

• Before inserting any metal screw/object into a hole, ensure that it is the right size. Especially if it can only be removed with the aid of a coat hanger.
• Do not use a hammer early in the morning when you are partially asleep. There is a good chance that the hammer will wake you up in an unpleasant manner.
• If you buy a sofa for your living room, make sure there is something that the occupant of the sofa can look toward. If you don't have a TV, at least get a coffee-table.

That's all folks!

James Michener's The Drifters is an exhilarating and timeless novel that describes the lives of a group of young men and women who set out to discover the world for themselves. More than just a story, it is a presentation of the lives of the young and the old, and the relationship between the generations. Although it was written in the 1970s, the narrative maintains its relevance even today. In part, this is because the problems and prejudices that are gradually revealed by the author can be easily seen all around us today.

The narration begins with the background stories of a variety of characters, each extraordinary in his or her own way. Chance brings them together and they set out on a journey through Europe and Africa, in the search of meaning to their lives. Eventually, their journey is seen to be a spiritual transformation, rather than a mere exploration of places and people.

The appeal of this novel may be different for each kind of audience. The passage of time gives the current reader the benefit of hindsight; there are problems and problems, but will there ever be solutions in sight? The diverse group portrayed in this novel also raises the interesting question of allegiance - when it comes to the 'crunch', who will side with whom? If we can take away an important lesson from this novel, it is that the world as we know it today is the result of the choices made long ago: will we make the right choices today?

This theme of society and choice always lingers somewhere in the background, never quite raising its head until the very end. Until then, the author treats us to a world of excitement, rituals, sex and drugs, a world always in motion.

When I chanced to look at the map of the world today, I noticed that Seattle (where I am currently located) is almost level with many European nations in terms of geographic latitude, even though it is one of the Northern-most cities in the United States.

One of the striking differences in day-to-day life when someone moves from India to the US is the length of the day. Back in Mumbai, a long summer day meant thirteen hours of daylight, but up here it would mean something like sixteen hours of bright daylight. Winter nights are just as long, and certainly as dreary as you would expect.

This made me wonder if there was some kind of human disposition to flourish in a certain kind of climate. Is the routine of the tropics better for the biological clock? Certainly, summers and winters are far more conspicuous in the temperate zones, providing a clock of sorts to keep track of the years. ("Another winter has finally passed....").

I always loved the ever-so-moderate climate of Mumbai, but now I think the variety offered by an extreme climate is almost as likeable.

Guess this one. When I woke up in the morning today, what do you think was this first thing I did? That's right, I tried wearing a necktie.

If that sounded strange to you, try having a dream in which you attempted to wear a necktie for an hour, but couldn't get it on right. The fact that the necktie was a part of my old secondary school uniform might have made things worse. And if that wasn't enough, the darned thing, inexplicably, had four possible 'front parts' - one design for each school 'house' - and the wrong one kept turning up at the fore every time.

I've heard that dreams are the brain's way of preparing for possibilities. I am fairly certain I won't be wearing something like that any time soon.

And in case you are wondering, I succeeded in tying the perfect knot (in reality) on my very first attempt.

Web pages try to make life easier for website visitors. There are, however, instances where this is Bad Thing.

Take for example, login pages. Many sites use Javascript to automatically focus the cursor in the 'Username' text box as soon as the page loads. But sometimes, the page loads slowly, and the user may have started typing a username and password even as the rest of the page is loading. The result is that the cursor jumps to the 'Username' text box when the password is being typed - which means that if the user didn't notice, the password (or at least part of it) gets typed in the 'Username' box, in plain view of the nasty folks looking over his shoulder.

Winter forced me to hibernate for a while. There I was, enjoying heavy snowfall and mildly subzero temperatures, and all of a sudden the seasons have changed and those pesky insects are buzzing around my windows again. And boy, is it hot in here - eight degrees Celsius!

I'm forcing myself to write something. There are three reasons for this - first, I'm tired of seeing the same old page on my blog, second, I'm too lazy to change the homepage of my browser so that I don't, and third, I need to write a long project report and this seemed way more interesting. I think of this as an appetizer.

There was an interesting piece of news that I read about today: Hans Reiser, the guy behind the popular ReiserFS filesystem that you probably haven't heard of, has been convicted of murdering his wife. Interesting piece of cross-domain gossip.

(Aside: In "ReiserFS filesystem," the word filesystem is redundant. Isn't there a technical term describing such usage?)

Anyway, I hoped you noticed the pointless sarcasm at the beginning of this post. Now that the weather is pleasant enough for the average human to cautiously wander out of the house, I've done the exact opposite and stayed home to watch episodes of House, M.D. If you don't know what that is, then you definitely should. And by the way, that was a pun. Laugh.

One of the labs in Phillips Hall, Cornell University

Spring break is here, Mattin's Cafe is closed, Duffield Hall is deserted, and it is six degrees Celsius outside. I would have gone to Starbucks, but just fifteen minutes of free Internet is not exactly appealing.