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...

The male dominance in Male' was at no time more apparent to me than the first few hours I walked around the streets of Male' after returning from UK this time. Everywhere I looked, the field of vision was guaranteed to be 95% dominated by mammals with XY chromosomes. More interestingly, everywhere I looked, male non-Maldivians occupied about 30% of those in an eyeful.

Be it the early morning, the evening or late night, the streets are littered mostly with testosterones on motorcycles or behind the wheels of a Maldive-pimped up second/third hand cars. And be it the early morning, the evening or late night, anyone sitting down on a wall, a public bench or using legs for locomotion is likely to be some expatriate male worker sporting a tough moustache and lovingly holding hands with a fellow male colleague. Well, that maybe a bit of an exaggeration but you get my drift..

I'm not sure about the latest statistics but if I recall correctly, the numbers would give a ovaries-to-testicles ratio of 2/3!

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. I was totally exhausted by the time I 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 I 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.