Last night I decided to join some of my friends to help hand out food to homeless people in Holborn. I'm rather ashamed to say that it must have been a year since I've done any volunteer or charity work, but it's a sad fact that most of the intervening time I've been too busy to even contemplate doing such work, let along go out and do it.

After dinner around 7pm, Jason, Reuven, Alvaro and I went over to Holborn close to LSE. We were originally supposed to first go to Bond St. to help pack the food, but we were a bit late so we were told to go straight to Holborn where it would be distributed. We got there at around half-past, and although the food van wasn't due to arrive until 8pm, there was already a crowd of homeless people milling about. I must say I felt vaguely uncomfortable, as usually one sees homeless people in ones or twos but not a whole crowd of them. It might also be something to do with the fact that homeless people tend not to put personal hygiene very high on the priority list.

In any case, we waited in the chilly evening air until the van arrived. The moment the van arrived, the homeless people started crowding the vehicle as the organisers (not very successfully) tried to get the crowd into a queue. I joined in to hand out the sandwiches and miscellaneous items (which were obviously products about to go off and donated by supermarkets). There was something vaguely resembling a queue by now, but still there were people trying to cut in, and it was disruptive when people requested for specific things ('Do you have a bacon sandwich' etc). The behaviour of the people were rather varied....some of them were polite and thanked us, while others were demanding and brusque. I can understand that their life isn't very peachy, but surely it can't be too difficult to at least try and be a bit more civillised (to be fair, some of them were probably not in full control of their mental faculties).

I particularly felt for a guy in a wheel-chair who could not join in the crush... by the time the crowd had thinned out enough for him to get food, there were only bread-rolls left. Still, he seemed very grateful for what we could give him, which made me wish even more that we had more to give.

I was treated to a show of bureaucratic 'logic' today. I went to apply for a visa for my 5-day trip to the US at the end of this month (which incidentally went quite well, as I only waited a bit more than 2 hours, mostly indoors, compared with 3 1/2 hours shivering outside 2 years ago).

The last time I went to US was for my STScI internship in Baltimore back in '04, and I had all the supporting documentation and forms from STScI to support my visa application. The internship was supposed to be 10 weeks, and the embassy granted me a visa which lasted about 5 months. This time, I am travelling to the US for 5 days, and the embassy officer informed me that he was granting me a visa for the duration of......1 year.

I would like to remind all and sundry that my other blog is regularly updated as well, and I'm rather tired of double-posting material from there over here (this blog is only intended for people who know me personally, and I intend on making this dichotomy more clear from now on in my posts). So my opinions on science and physics would go into that blog, while more personal stuff remains here.

I am not a morning person, period. Back when I was in school, I waking up at 6.30am was a daily struggle. For my parents, on the other hand, it was a natural thing to do. My father wakes up every day at 7am to practise Tai Chi, and my mother wakes up around that time as well. I, on the other had, could rarely get up before noon if there is no particular reason to.

In the middle of night, on the other hand, my brain activity seems to fire up. I enjoy studying in the peace and quiet of the night, with no distractions to bother me. I took this to a rather weird extreme during the Easter break of my first year in uni, when I was studying late at night and waking up rather late in the day as well, with the additional caveat that I started sleeping and waking up later every day. After a couple of weeks, I had reached the point of going to bed at 9am and waking up at 4pm (!). This was rather disorienting, if for no reason other than the fact that I had no idea what meals I should be taking, and eventually I did fall ill from this, I suspect from a combination of this punishing studying regime and the spring flu spreading around.

Nowadays, I have reached a fairly happy compromise of going to bed at about 2am, and waking up before 10 to study. In Netherhall, we are required to vacate our rooms at around 10.15am for cleaning to be done, so I'm forced to get up no matter how lazy I'm feeling.

This few weeks ahead are going to be nasty, however. I have my research project dateline coming up in 3 weeks, and I submit my project report of about 10,000 words by the 24th, and a major headache is that the code I'm working with is still buggy, and the run-time of the code itself is extremely slow. I actually enjoys studying the material I'm learning in my lectures now, however I cannot afford to let my project slip up. I may have no real competitors for top student in my department, but standards have to be maintained...