AB's Blog

This stub entry serves the dual purpose of documenting a phase of obsession in my life with NYT's Connections word game, and at the same time, memorializing a trio of college mates with whom I discussed the puzzle every day for almost an entire semester. If they read this, they know who they are. Cheers, A and S! In the recent past, my imagination has been gripped by the New York Times' viral sensation word game, Connections. It has become an affliction of sorts of mine to daily break my head over this puzzle; although the varying difficulty also causes you to feel a different genre of annoyance, succinctly expressed by the thought "Why was this too easy today?" accompanied by a momentary feeling of emptiness, because mentally you plan to allocate a certain amount of time to the thrill of solving the puzzle, and you then can't help but feel short-changed when the lack of complexity leads to a zippy solution. You won, but you feel lost. At the peak of my obsession ...

Some background for the uninitiated: I interned in the summer of 2024 at the University at Buffalo, North Campus, with the Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Applied Sciences (SEAS). I worked under the supervision of Professor Singisetti at his lab, with a stipend provided by the the Research Foundation of the State University of New York (RF SUNY). Work involved analysis of radio frequency high-electron-mobility transistors (RF HEMTs). I typically had the weekends to myself, which I devoted to exploring the city of Buffalo. This blog captures, in a more or less a photo journal format, the various places I went to and the experiences I had in Buffalo.     Funky exterior of Gabriel's Gate restaurant     Buffalo-style chicken wings at Gabriel's Gate          Large Iced Latte at Penny's Coffee Shop Church of Scientology  Parkside Candies : Caramel Toffee and Coffee Ice cream sundae with hot fudge and chocolate bits...