Required/Necessary Credentials: If you are goingto earn here as a legal alien allowed to work (L1, J1, H1, O1, these are guesses but I am sure they are correct) then you will require a Social Security Number (SSN) for everything. The things here do not move unless you have a SSN. The procedure of obtaining the SSN is not very complicated but it is a very ‘sarkari’ process and it is extremely time consuming. The best time to go there is early in the morning. The Social Security Administration (SSA) offices usually open at 0900 hours and they will allow you to enter around 0830 hours. You will find that just like in India people come very early, as early as 0730 to stand in line. The day you have to go to SSA, make sure you start early and reach early. It is best that you go to the SSA for your SSN at least a week after you have been in the US and at least some formalities at your place of work are completed. If you go too soon, they will simply refuse to entertain you. The forms for the SSN are available online and are really easy to fill. You will need to carry your passport with I-94 Departure record, your VISA request letter that you got from your employer, for J1 VISA holders this will be the DS2019 form. It is usually about 1.5 hours wait and then you get a receipt for the SSN. This is a important document till you actually get your SSN.

Expenses: There are more than one ways you can reconcile your expenses. If you are of the mind-set that you will multiply every dollar you spend by the current currency exchange rate, the figures you obtain for even simple tasks are so enormous that most likely you will freeze and will be unable to get anything done. That is one trap that you definitely want to avoid. A reasonable amount (if you want to multiply the dollars spent) to assume is Rs. 15/- for $1. Then the amounts become much reasonable. Infact they become almost equal to what you would spend in India for similar goods/services. That definitely makes life much easier. Also keep in mind that if you are spending in dollars, you are also earning in dollars, and whatever you save, is also in dollars. So really stop whining about spending dollars. That said there are some things here that are really expensive. One might even say prohibitively expensive. One of them is the mobile telephony. The operators here (all of them, no exceptions) fleece you. The pre-paid mobiles are of course much cheaper to own but really expensive to operate. There is supposed to be free market here but you realize suddenly that there is actually only one player in a given region, and therefore there is actually monopoly !!! As hard as this is to reconcile it is a fact and its best if you prepare yourself for it.

Communications: Because everything here requires a SSN, you will be really hard-pressed to get a phone. There is a simple way around this. You can buy a pre-paid phone at BestBuy. It will cost you anywhere between $19.99 to $39.99. Usually you will get a hand-set, simcard and about 300 minutes with 30 day validity for this cost. You have to activate the phone online. I am assuming here that you will have a internet connection readily accessible.

I will write more later as i get some time.

The next step in using google voice is an access to a normal phone.  Of course being in India it was impossible to have an access to a US phone number.  So I bid my time, thinking “I will use google voice when I go to the US”.  Fortunately I did not have to wait long.  I came to US a couple of months after I had chosen the number.  This is the time when I really discovered the goodies that google voice had to offer.

Imagine the situation I was here in the US very new.  I didnt know my way around but I had my own phone number.  Whats more, I could actually configure that number to ring a normal phone line near me — always!  This was wondrous. So I configured two numbers to work with my google number, one was a work number and another was the land line of a friend.  I know that I have barely scratched the surface.  But I do seem to discover something new often!!

I wish to congratulate the google voice team for this splendid effort, and a product that actually makes life of many people easy.

Another aspect you cannot miss the cleanliness.  Especially when you compare it with back home.  The air is clean.  Everything looks fresh.  The water tastes different though.  I guess it is going to take some getting used.

Update: Another thing I noticed (this could be because I am in Maryland) it is impossible to get a clear sky.  It is impossible to look at the sky and not see a plane.  A plane either in proximity or in distance.  A plane leaving behind contrails.  It is only after coming here have I realized how much ‘gas’ does America guzzle.  No wonder they are afraid of the oil crisis, this country will just grind to a halt!!

I have been a Idea Cellular (henceforth referred to as IDEA) customer for more than 8 years now. I never thought of going to another service provider before today. I pay their bills very regularly. However all that changed today after I received a ‘legal notice’ from IDEA for non-payment of my bills. The worst part, they sent me a notice for non-payment of bill for the month of November 2009!! The date on the notice is November 12, 2009, and the reference number is Idea March -1684!! And most interestingly, the envelope that I received the notice in clearly mentions that the letter was actually posted on 23rd March, 2010!  I wonder whats the deal, does IDEA actually expect its customers to be able to ‘time-travel’ ?

There are a couple of things that I dont understand, how come IDEA sends me a notice today if I have not paid the bill 4 months ago, and how come I was never intimated about it before! Worst, not only they sent a incorrect legal notice based on falsified facts, the notice actually says that I am supposed to pay Rs. 1000/- as the charges for sending this notice.

I was very agitated and I called up the IDEA call center, and all I got was some lame excuse of “system error” and some such BS!

I hope there was some legal course of action I could take to force them to pay me some compensation for the “mental agony” and this serious breach of contract on their part.  I hope I get at least a written apology from them!

Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated.

Now the difficulties part. If you don’t have a passport with your current residential address, and your place is not owned by you, you are out of luck, sorry mate!! The only way around is the have the learning license made with old address and then apply for change of address.

Following is the list of documents and items that you need

• Passport
• LIC policy document with address
• PAN card photocopy
• Lease agreement if you do not own the place
• Electricity bill photocopy
• Two copies of latest photographs

All the documents have to be presented in original too.

I shall write more about the actual nature of the test for Learning License after I have taken it tomorrow.

The Actual Procedure

It is usually advisable to go through a Driving School. If you go on your own it costs much less though. The actual procedure is as follows:

• Get your from and the related documents attested by the Traffic inspector.
• Pay the fees at the designated windows, and get the receipt.
• Take the receipt and form to the ‘Biometrics’ room. Get yourself photographed, your left thumb impression and your digital signature.
• Take the form to the test-room. The actual test is a computerized test with multiple choice questions. The test is fairly simple and passing is at 60%. Actually there are only 10 questions, and 10 seconds to answer each question.
• You come to know about the result then and there.

You are then asked to pick up your learning license the next day. You can apply for a permanent license after one month but before 6 months.

Update:

It is important to understand that you should really learn to drive. A lot depends on the instructor.  I was lucky to have a good one.  It is a necessity that you drive for 26 x 4 kilometers.  It generally works out to 4 Km per day for 26 days i.e. about a month with one weekly holiday.  Once you have done enough driving you go for a test.  This test is held at the Alandi RTO.  These tests are totally fixed and if you have gone to take the license through a driving school there is very less probability that your license will be rejected.  You get a receipt that acts as your license.

Having said this let us walk through the steps in ChIP-seq analysis. The analysis of ChIP-seq data has two components

1. Determining the ‘locations’ of the reads. This can be further extended by generating meta-data for the given location such as: Nearest genes, nearest sturctural and/or functionl segments of the genome etc.
2. Generating ‘motif’ for the putative binding site.

The basic steps in analysis of ChIP-seq are

1. Determining the locations of the reads and converting this information in a ‘visualizable’ format. As discussed in the previous post, the tools are part of the tool-kit developed by the ABI-SOLiD. This information can be loaded as a ‘Custom Track’ to the UCSC genome Browser (For comprehensive tutorial on how to use the USCS genome browser please visit their home page at the http://genome.ucsc.edu.
2. The motif detection is carried out by the MACS tool box. This tool box is decribed by Zhang et al., Genome Biology (here). The paper describes the tool in detail. The help available with the tool is also very good.

The SOLiD data is read in ‘color-space’. For most common analysis we need the sequences in base-space (as nucleotides). The reading of color-space data and its matching to the reference genome database is carried out on the on-machine cluster. It is a absolute requirement that the reference sequence be given at the start of the SOLiD run. It is possible to installed the corona_lite tool box available here. The corona_lite tool box contains many tools and accessory scripts that are there to make your life easy. They also come with extensive documentation. Reading that documentation takes a lot of time though. It is usually most helpful to have a ‘linux’ machine for running these tool boxes.

Let us now run through the basic steps of the analysis pipeline:

1. The data is obtained as .csfasta file.
2. Match color-space data to reference genome in colorspace to obtain the .ma.<readlength>.<allowedmismathces> file.
3. There is a tool that will conver the ma file into gff file. This filefomat contains the location information but not the information in base-space.
4. There is another tool to ‘annotate’ the GFF file. This tool converts the gff file into ‘annotated’ GFF, which now also contains the sequence information in the base space.

Upto these four steps the entire analysis is identicle, after this step there are other specific tools for the analysis of ChIP-seq, whole-transcriptome, small-rna molecules etc.

We will discuss about the tools for the ChIP-seq next.

So I realized that the Hibernate works quite well with Fedora.  Nothing is dropped.  The Wireless is picked up directly without delay.  There is full support to the entire hardware that was working before going into hibernate. The startup time is slightly more than bootup.  I dont have the exact numbers, but i will try to get them soon.

I think this is the best Hibernate I have seen so far.

Just read about this.  This is something we were taught as future when we were doing our post-graduation.  Finally seems to have come of age.  If this is true.  This is a true boon to major burn victims, and diabetic people especially those who suffer from diabetic sores.  This technique induces ‘regeneration’.  This has been the dream of all the burn victims and the doctors treating.  The original post is quite detailed.

Cheers to modern technology