Christmas Lights and New Beginnings

It's December. The Holidays. Not as cheerful as one might imagine what with all these exams, assignments and projects to lose sleep over. However, with a great guy for a roommate who is set upon celebrating the Christmas season the way it should be celebrated, we went about decking out the apartment as best we (cash-strapped grad students :P ) could. The blog's been taking care of itself in the meanwhile with 47,000+ pageviews but I thought it was time I freshened it up with a new post.

Christmas lights, a little tree and plenty of cheer brought to this otherwise gloomy exam season. With a DSLR, a cooperative roommate and no tripod (a roll of cleaning paper would be my best replacement) I took to the task of taking a bunch of photos that I could hopefully compile into a veritable high resolution panorama.

Took me 23 pictures at 24 megapixels each using a brand-new Nikon D3200. Following that I mucked around with a bunch of Panorama-making programs that would either run out of memory or threaten to blow my laptop up. Hugin finally worked (though it did take a good amount of time when it finally did), but then Facebook wouldn't accept a panorama that's 21719 pixels wide and 4149 pixels high. Surprisingly, Google+ does take such large pictures. Strike 1 for Google, I guess.

Still, the only way to create a panorama that you could spin 360 degrees around was to put this picture on 360cities. And here's the result:

Christmas Lights at Tenth and Home in Atlanta

Now that Christmas is taken care of, there's a few more days before the end of my formal academic studies for the near future. The words "insanely hard" would be understatement when used to describe engineering grad school at Georgia Tech, but I'm better off for it. Less than 2 weeks to graduation with just a few exams in my way and I'm off into the 'real world' to work. Of course, there's a bit of travel involved before the latter happens.

After Tech's been through with me, I doubt anything else will be too hard to handle. 2 years of ups and downs, the lowest of lows and the highest of highs, through which the closest of family and a few friends have been my best source of support - both moral and material - and in 2 weeks when I walk - literally on that stage to receive my graduate degree and figuratively to a new beginning - I'll have those people to thank, to different extents, for helping me get through this.

Hope everyone reading this has a wonderful holiday season!