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June 28, 2010 Dear Karthik Tripurari: I would like to express my appreciation for your submission to CICC 2010 of the paper entitled: ID#: 231 Title: A Digitally Controlled CMOS Phase Shifter with Frequency Doubling for Multiple-Antenna, Direct-Conversion Transceiver Systems With the large number of submitted papers and a limited number of time slots available for presentations, the committee had a particularly challenging task this year to determine which papers were accepted. I regret to inform you that we were unable to include your paper in this year's program. I look forward to seeing you at this year's conference and hope that you will consider submitting a paper for CICC 2011. Sincerely, Tom Andre Technical Program Chairman

"2 States- The Story of My Marriage" is a novel by Chetan Bhagat about love, struggle and marriage of a Punjabi boy from Delhi and Tamilian girl (oops should I say Iyer?) from Mylapore, Madras (also called Chennai these days). Act I: The Boy ('s family) and the Girl ('s family) Meet The story begins in IIMA dining hall, where Krish (the boy) meets Ananya (the girl) and develops a crush instantaneously. On the other hand, Ananya finds him to be a "safe-zone guy", who is content with just friendship with girls (There can never be a safe-zone guy in this world. That is inhuman.) and deal of "friendship" is made. With time, additional benifits get added to the deal and it evolves into love. Behaving maturely, they decide to marry only with their parents consent. Their parents meet during the convocation ceremony but Northie-Southie incompatibility issues surface. Act II: The Boy Impresses the Girl's Family Having failed in their first attempt, Kri...

I upgraded my OS to Ubuntu 10.04. The update went smooth except for 2 glitches. Wifi did not work initially but it got sorted by itself upon restarting the system. Secondly, youtube videos played without sound while amarok worked just fine. The problem turned out to be a conflict between flash 9 and 10. Typing about:plugin in firefox address bar confirmed this and rm ~/.mozilla//plugins/libflashplayer.so solved the problem. Also, I installed the Mac OS theme for my desktop. The desktop is as shown in the screenshot below. If you like it and want to try for your desktop, just follow the instructions on http://maketecheasier.com/turn-ubuntu-lucid-mac-os-x/2010/06/01

2010 FIFA world cup started on June 11th. Thirty two teams compete in this month long event for the coveted 5-kg gold trophy. In the past, Brazil has been the most successful team of the competition with 5 victories, followed by Italy with 4, Germany with 3, Argentina and Uruguay with two each while England and France have won it once. There are other strong contenders which have not opened their count yet; The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, to name a few. So, who is most likely to win the tournament? On paper, Spain looks like the most complete team with star performers in every position. It is important to note that they are all in prime form and confidence after a Euro victory. Thus Spain would be the obvious favorite to win this tournament. But they have always been an under-performer at the World Cups and there is no reason to believe that it is going to be different this time. Soccer crazy Brazil is a favorite anytime. The talent in the country is so abundant that a team of any ra...

I flew to San Jose on May 25th from NYC. This was my first trip to West Coast, discounting the one day trip for an interview at Broadcom. The difference from NYC is immediately obvious: Great weather, great roads, thus great dependence on cars and not so good public transport; intimidatingly polite people, and so on. My internship at Broadcom started on Jun 1st and I came to Irvine on May 31st. I am staying in UCI housing with a group of Indian grad students. The house is conveniently situated, within walking distances from Super Markets, Post Office, Cinemas, etc. Broadcom is 1.7 miles away from the house and I use a bike for commuting to office. I work in the Tuner group at Broadcom which designs chips for set-top-box applications. To be specific, I am designing a Power Amplifier which would go into the transmitter module; the one that transmits signals into the cable. The experience of working here is good so far. The engineers are very smart and work efficiently to make the job loo...

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been making the headlines for more than a month now. The gravity of the situation is best explained by the graphic images here . One of the reader writes, "I am heartbroken after seeing these pics... so sad... this creature has done nothing to deserve this.", reflecting the sentiments of many of us. However, the main stream media has focused mostly on the political and environmental repercussions, ignoring the engineering challenges; thereby making BP a public enemy. Through this article, it is my intention to create an awareness about the methods employed by BP to tackle the situation. The Problem Deepwater horizon was an ultra-deepwater offshore drilling rig. In September 2009, the rig started drilling the deepest oil well in the history, measuring more than 10km in vertical depth. On April 20, 2010, an explosion occurred in the rig, leaving the well gushing, causing a major oil spill. According to the estimates, 5000 barrels or 210,000...