The Lonesome Road

Oh yeah - lest I forget (well, as if I could) - the 50th post is dedicated to Mr.Anshul Nigham who managed to get me off my rear end and got me back to writing - and making me realise I really do enjoy it.

Thanks bro!

Ah - the vagaries of life. I went for my practical exam with visions of dread - turned out I wasted a perfectly good worry. Rather than a chit system, the entire batch was given three programs - out of which any one had to be attempted. What was more enjoyable was the fact that all the programs were from compiler construction - which I’d done in full detail. Needless to say, the program - a syntax analyzer for C ran perfectly. The viva also went off well, and now I am relaxed. Just one practical left this year - and that’s in the next semester.

Preparing for my GRE as of now. Have my AI oral on the 1st and will be leaving as soon as it finishes for Bombay. My exam is scheduled for 9AM on 2nd morning. That is followed by TOEFL on the 3rd and then back to Pune.

You know, I was just thinking - our communication has become more selfish these days. I know when I pick up a call on my cell - even from a friend - that’s it’s usually a request for help or notes or advice on some college matter. I can’t remember the last call I picked up when someone called just for the heck of it. I don’t know - maybe I’m just over-reacting. Not that I’m not guilty myself - but I do call people just because I want to. Anyway, to be very honest - the number of people whom I like to call without reason is a very small group. But still, the whole thing saddens me a little.

India lost the ytest series to Australia - they have won a series here after 35 years. They came absolutely prepared and demolished our much halied batting line up. Anyway, there’s wnough and more written about this series and I have no wish to say more.

I just realised I’ve finished 50 posts (this is number 51) - whoopee! Never really expected to hit a half century. Rest assured - I will be going on.

Finally - the Gallery has been updated. Three new photos in Misc and one in Divinity . Hope you like them

Later…

I’ll keep this post short and sweet.

Wish me luck - good luck - am off to face my first practical exam tomorrow morning at 9AM IST. Just 12 hours more. Getting the usual nervous feeling that invariably creeps in at this time.

Ah well - gotta go. One more round of revision beckons.

Later…

The title of this post means : Come, the call has come! Why the question mark? Well, that will become clear soon enough. There is a Vaishnao Devi temple in north India and it is said that unless She calls you to come, visiting the temple is not possible.

It’s Navaratra ( nine nights ) festival right now and the Goddesses (or Devis) are supposed to be extremely powerful in this period. The festival finishes on the the 10th day with Dassera or Durga pooja. There is a temple a few kilometers from our house called the Chatushringi Temple. It houses an idol of Vaishnao devi. My sis, ,mom and mom’s friend wanted to go to the temple - and guess who drove them there….

Here it began. On normal days, there is car parking in the temple itself. But for these nine days, due to the sheer number of people who throng the temple, parking has to be found elsewhere. So, we went looking for parking. After some 10 minutes, we found an out of the way side lane and managed to park the car.

A few words about the temple. The sanctum sanctorium is situated on the top of a hill and there is a broad avenue running from the base of the hill to the top of the hill with steps cut into it so that devotees may climb easily. There are two flat areas where smaller temples have been made for Lord Ganesha. All in all, there must be nearly 500 steps from the base of the hill to the top.

So, we enter the temple and are immediately assaulted by cacophony. I’ll say this honestly - if there was a blind man in there - he would say he was at a fun fair and not at a temple. It was ridiculous - there was a mini circus, eateries by the dozen and shops by the score. And people screaming at you at the top of their lungs - only Rs.25/- for a darshan (viewing) of the devi. Oh - and when I say fun fair - I mean it - have you ever seen a ferris wheel within temple grounds? It was crass commercialization all the way. Well, we weren’t interested in buying tickets - so we started climbing the steps. As we went, we saw that the line for the darshan started right at the top and people were standing in a serpentine queue that stretched all the way back to the gate. When we reached the second landing - from here you can see the entrance to the main temple, we were politely told that if we wanted to go further, we had to buy a ticket and stand in line. WE told them we just wanted to go till the level of the main temple and return - but to no avail . So, we turned back and came home.

Well, that was that. Busy studying right now - have a practical exam and an oral withing one day of each other and a Lex & Yacc extra ecture tomorrow.

Jai Mata Di!

It’s with a great sense of relief that I sit and pen these lines - my submissions are finally done! Free at last from the regular trips to college to get assigments checked. But there has to be some history here to explain why I am so relieved - not happy - relieved.

You see we have three journals this semester - Computer Networks, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Laboratory (which includes programs from Operating Systems and Compiler Construction and a few systems represented as UML). Now, to be very honest, we all expected the Computer Networks journal submission to cause us the most trouble as the professor is very particular about the programs and the theory write ups that go with them. To our great surprise, submission went off extremely smoothly. Our batch turned up in the lab at the appointed hour, were called in the order of roll call. A ten minute viva followed and then the index and the certificate were signed. We were in and out even before we realised what was going on.

Moving on to Artificial Intelligence - we have a great prof here. Knowing fully well that this subject has an oral and not a practical exam, he did not cause any trouble with the journal other than insisting that some of the programs (like the Travelling Salesman) should have graphical outputs. Both these submissions were completed on the 11th.

We have two divisions in Fianl year computer engineering - B.E - I and B.E - II each with it’s own set of professors and lab assistants. The trouble is that the BE I attendance has been pretty low this time and their staff-in-charge decided for Computer Laboratory - two days before the submission date that they should have to do extra assignments to make up for their lapse in attendance. That would have been fine - but then the unexpected happened - the assignments were extended to our class as well. The problem is that our professor is very junior and she cannot countermand the order of the senior staff. Thus, we had no choice but to do the assignments. That was part one. The next blow came when they told us that our programs to implement Interprocess Communication (Dining Philosopher’s Problem) and the Concurrent Access (Readers/Writers Problem) were wrong, had to be redone and then checked by a different prof. So, now we had 11 new assignments, 2 to be redone and if this wasn’t enough - we also had to make a preliminary project report. Why? Simple - unless that was made, signed by the project guide and submitted, the journals would not be signed.

So, work began on the 13th for the great Computer Lab project. Work was divided and we started coding and hunting down different implementations for the problems. All this while making UML and DFD for the project report. Now come the kickers -

a)the staff in charge of BE- I had an accident and could not come to college (she still isn’t back to this day) - thus the journal signing of the other division also comes to our professor. Imagine - 140 students and one prof to sign the journals.

b)after we finish all the assignements, today when we go to get them signed, we are coolly told that they are no longer required and should not be put in the journal. Man talk about a pain!

Anyway, 6 of us had decided that we were not going to waste any more time in getting assignements checked. Even then - for the last two days, we have spent nearly eight hours standing in line to get the journals checked. So, today we finally managed to finish - and not a day too soon. It seems that we have the Computer Lab practical exam from the 28th-30th of this month and the AI orals from the 29th - 31st. The fun part is that I am 10th in the roll number listing and so will have to attend on the first day, in the first batch. Fun what?

Anyway, in less depressing and irritated news, I borrowed a friends Worldspace radio and tuned it to and old hindi film music station. It’s been so much fun that for the last three days I haven’t run any songs from my computer

Oh and one final note - it seems that people have stolen 7 computer mice from the Unix lab. So, we all had to pay a “breakage fine” of Rs.15/- per person and take a receipt - otherwise - you guessed it - our submissions would not be accepted. What can I say….

Well, that’s all from me for now. Will start revising in earnest from tomorrow. Today I shall just bask in the relief of a job taken to completion

Adios amigos!

Well, as you can see, it’s nearly a week since I last posted. Posting will be sporadic till the first week of november - it’s submission time. The thing is that no one wants to sit and write journals when they should (of course, I also am a member of that horde ) So now it’s all last minute rush to write - manually of course all the assignments and take all the relevant printouts. Let me quote Carol, the PHB’s secretary from Dilbert here : “Goodbye paperless, Hello clueless.”

As you can imagine it’s not fun to sit and write journal assignments. Especially when you have three such journals. Actually speaking, two of them are not all bad. The write ups are pretty short. It’s only the Computer Networks journal that has the potential to be a major headache with each writeup running from 10-15 pages. At this point of time, two jouranals are done and the CN journal is half done. Hopefully, it should all be complete by the end of this week.

Even though I haven’t managed to post - I have managed to take a few nice snaps. You can find them in the Gallery. The updated areas are in Scapes, Trees and Plants and a little something in Misc. The Misc section has the cover of a book I bought yesterday - The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I had a copy of this book - but the bookworms ate it and when I saw it for Rs.195/- yesterday - I just could not resist

The entire family was at Shopper’s Stop the other day. We were doing our Divali shopping in advance. After making the purchases, dad and I went to the sales counter to get the items billed so that I could give the pants for length alteration. There were three clerks in the section and and two of them were busy serving customers. The third dude was looking into space. We went and asked if he could handle our billing. Dude goes - This line is for First Glow (a scheme in Shopper’s Stop) customers only. Dad looks around - there’s no one standing in line - and asks - So you’re just going to sit there waiting for them? Dude gives us a sour look and starts billing. Come on - you’re in the service industry - can’t afford to be doing things in this manner.

This is actually a dual post. I was trying to upload this yesterday - but it kept giving me a [500] server closed connection error. So I did the smart thing and copied the post into notepad so that I don’t have to type it all over again .

Anyway - I’m off. Adios amigos!

[Update : A newer set of photos are up on the gallery]