I left for Makunudhoo earlier today to do some work and try have some fun at the same time (or vice versa!).

The jump upto Haa Dhaalu atoll (Hanimaadhoo), for the sake of cutting down travel time and cutting down on sea-sickness of my trip mates, was taken on a plane and another jump from there to Kanditheemu (via Kulhudhuffushi) done on a speed boat and the last leg upto Makunudhoo completed on a traditional "Masdhoani" admist rough sea.

There's no bloody publicly available Internet here except via GPRS on my Dhiraagu mobile, which turns out to be extremely slowwww. I've just given up after trying to post some pictures of the day.

Adios for now...

Last week, my mum found a caterpillar ravaging her young lemon tree. It had, like most caterpillars, camouflaged itself and blended in so smoothly that it managed to live unspotted right under her nose for days before the damage to the plant was too apparent to be missed. The caterpillar had eaten much of the leaves and shoots in a span of just 2-3 days and so my mum considered the fellow to be more active than any of the other caterpillars that we occasionally find on the plants at home. But that wasn't what caught my curiosity when she called me over to show it - the caterpillar was different from any that I had seen anywhere in Male'! This caterpillar was larger (~1cm across and ~3cm in length) and really sinister looking.

I decided to put the caterpillar under observation, afterall a caterpillar is just the larva stage of a butterfly and should go through the various stages over a few days to become a full grown adult butterfly. Over the course of almost 2 weeks, I watched as it first continued to consume leaves all day and then go into stasis for the pupa stage and remain apparently lifeless for several days, before (quite suddenly and unseen to me) the pupa metamorphosized into a beautiful large adult butterfly. The fellow had red spots/blotches on the hindwings, few white streaks on the forewings and was black everywhere else and sported wings with a wingspan of ~10-14cm.

The butterfly was of a specie I had not seen here in Male' previously, though its existence does necessitate that a butterfly laid eggs on the plant recently - quite unlike the way of the sudden-uncaused-creation ("gudhurathee ufedhun") of caterpillar larvae that some of our visitors and neighbours claim(ed)! I still am not sure what these butterflies are called but from all the web searches and butterfly indexes that I've gone through since, I am pretty sure this butterfly belongs to the Swallowtail Papilionidae family in the Papilionoidea class of butterflies. The most similar looking butterfly that I could find was the Common Rose butterflies which bear striking similarities. It might also be related to the Citrus Swallowtail specie too since the larva was found on a citrus tree plant and the caterpillars look very similar but the adult butterfly looks different while the Crimson Rose family has adult butterflies that look very similar but different caterpillars. This is, ofcourse, all just speculation simply based on my (very) crude and limited phenotypic observations and I could be wayyyy off mark...

Here are some pictures I snapped in keeping up with the development of this beautiful insect. The latter three stages (of the total four) of a butterfly have been captured to my best ability: the larva, the pupa and finally, the adult. Enjoy!

Yippeee! The results are out and I'm through to the next year. Best of all, my grades met the criterion required for switching my study programme to the MEng version - MEng Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics - as I had been hoping for. The MEng means I have to work harder and do more in the future and also adds an extra year of study at the university - something I actually quite look forward to!

Now to bore my head out with "the art of doing nothing" for the next few days, atleast...

Time flies! I didn't realize so much time had passed since I last blogged but then again I've been quite strapped for time all this month...

My end-of-year exams, 8 mildly gruelling ones, ended the very last day of May. The exams didn’t go without incident as one would ideally have it as I (somehow) managed to do the wrong paper at one of the exams! Anyway, that seems to have been sorted out now since it turned out that it wasn’t entirely my fault. Uni has, since then, (almost) ground to a halt and I’m a bit relieved that I don’t have to attend 20+ hours of lectures now... and won’t have to atleast for a few more months. I had to deal with my third (but not final!) year project selection right after exams and a good couple of days were spent pondering over which project to select. There were so many projects from different supervisors we could choose from where some of them were a bit straightforward and some were a bit challenging. The project I settled on finally is one that I hope is a bit of the latter - it deals with the application of a type of swarm intelligence known as Stochastic Diffusion Search towards real time web search. It mixes two things I love: AI and the Internet/WWW, so I am hoping I don't fall asleep out of boredom however much I have to toil at it!

Sadly, getting rid of uni work wasn’t enough to grant me some free time since my tenancy agreement was running mid this month and I had to move out of the apartment. As ever, moving house was really tiring. Nadha and I were totally exhausted by the time we had gotten everything neatly packed into boxes, moved everything into a storage unit and cleaned the apartment till it was spotless. Luckily, it all went pretty smooth...

Anyway, I am now in Male’ (and things had it that we arrived here on my birthday!). It's good to meet up with my parents and close friends and hang out with them... but I'm missing UK already. Sigh.

Apparently we humans are the only mammalians kinky enough to drink the milk produce from animals other than our own species. Cow's milk is squeezed out of their udders everyday all year around to feed the millions who are hungry for a little bit of milk. I used to be one of those consumers, drinking dairy milk since I was young like everyone else but as I grew older it started making me queasy and vomitish. Eventually, I bid farewell to raw milk, powdered milk, cheese, milk rich cakes and everything else with cow's milk including my beloved yoghurts. I realized that I must have either a milk allergy or had possibly become lactose intolerant.

I had tried a few of the milk alternatives (often used by vegans), namely soy milk and rice milk, but none of it appealed to my taste buds. I had been off milk almost entirely until few weeks ago when I decided to give goat's milk a go. I was pleasantly surprised to find that its actually pretty good! Needless to say, goat's milk cartons have since managed to earn a comfy spot in my fridge. It tastes as good, has almost the same nutrient composition as that which the cows eject out of their mammary glands and most importantly it doesn't give me any bit of trouble. So here's to the goats and their milk. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be drinking this cup of "kiru sai". Thank you!