Nirenjan’s Space

Pretty long day today. Three hours of VLSI (yawn), two communication systems - one free (uh huh) and one taken by the Princi (zzz…), one DBMS (huge yawn) and one optic, or rather, a seminar on Hilbert transform. Tomorrow, we have a lab session, the India-Pakistan match, and most importantly for me, most of the guys will be bunking college to see the match. I could probably complete one experiment without Shiva & his gang’s destructive interference. I’m waiting to see KB’s face when she sees the strength tomorrow. She’ll probably go like this - “Ambi! Where is everybody pa?”

Nothing big at NIIT. They were giving a talk about .NET & J2EE. Greek & Latin to me. Well, not really, but all the same…

Good that India have beaten both Namibia and England. Atleast they have a good chance now of making it to the Super Sixes.

Sadly however, a first year student in the hostel committed suicide. He had received his results and had failed in one subject. The suicide came to light only today morning. Apparently he hung himself while everybody else was watching the India-England match. I don’t know why so many people get so depressed over a failure.

Yesterday, I got a call from NIIT, saying that my name was given by my college for an interview. It turned out that Salty & Sat had also got the same call. We think NIIT got the number from the slips we filled when we went to Hindustan. I might go there tomorrow and see what sort of scam they have in store for us…

Finally, India have performed well, beating Zimbabwe by a thumping 83 runs. Let’s see how they perform against Namibia.

My computer has just recovered from something which I can’t quite fathom. Till last night it was working perfectly. Apparently, today morning it refused to start up giving some error message about Disk Failure or something like that & asked for a boot disk. When I came back from my IIT class, my mom told me about it. I immediately got down to try to fix it without any success. I just left the hard drive’s data and power cables unplugged and went to see the match. When I came back about 20 minutes back, I just replugged the cables back in (without much hope of recovery) and much to my happy surprise, it began working!!!

I participated in my college day function in Rock mime. We had a mix of 5 songs - Stone Cold, Iron Maiden’s Another Life, The Ketchup Song, Limp Bizkit’s Take a look around and the grand finale, Rammstein’s Du Hast, in that order. We didn’t really expect a prize after our performance. Surprisingly, we got the first place. Probably due to the three special entries - Sridhar as Stone Cold Steve Austin, Babu as a washerman, and Venky dressed in a sari, more than our mimicry. We had a repeat performance yesterday with Raju, Satish & Chocku joining our group, the ECE Freax. The Freax should repeat their performance next year as well.

Just saw the match between India and Holland. Only one word can describe India’s batting performance - Terrible. The Holland team had a better batting performance, although they could not face India’s bowling attack. For that I am glad, for India have started off on a good note, with 4 points, tieing them with West Indies, Sri Lanka & South Africa at this stage. (Also, India is the first team to have bowled out Holland in a World Cup match).

However, the match was nowhere near as exciting as the match between Australia and Pakistan. Probably one the best match in the tournament till now.

Sadly, day 2 at Hindustan did not live up to my expectations. First of all, the quiz (hosted by Srivatsan) was really tough. Obviously, I did not qualify. However, the mock placement aptitude test was rather easy and I qualified for the GD. In the afternoon, I went to the IT lab for the Hardware debugging finals where I was told that they would be held at 3.30. I opted out since I had to attend class at 5.

I then attended the GD, with KK also having qualified. A rather interesting topic - “Love marraiges vs. Arranged marraiges”. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I did not qualify for the interview round and left Hindustan at about 3. My bus came speeding down the road at about 3.30. Sathish & I waved frantically while Salty & Chocku were waiting for their respective buses. Michael Schumacher (Mahadevan), our bus driver, was probably going at 70 or 80 kmph when he saw us and braked, letting about 2 or 3 buses past. We boarded the bus and reached home about 4.15.

Today, as well, Mahadevan lived up to his name (Michael Schumacher of the fleet) by covering the 30 km between college & Besant Nagar within half an hour, leaving even the fastest buses behind. However, his performance is hampered by the management. ;-). Oh well, atleast he gets one title.

I’m just back from e-Luminate ver 3 at Hindustan College of Engineering, Padur. It was a day full of fun.

First, at about 9.15 four of us, Tom, Sathya, Chocku & myself left the class walking towards the gate. Near the gate, we saw a truck heading for Kelambakkam. We hitched a ride in the back of the truck upto Kelambakkam with the cool wind blowing in our faces. After a 10 minute trip, we got down in Kelambakkam and caught a van heading for Kandanchavadi.

We then got down at Hindustan at about 9.45, registered ourselves and headed for the software debugging contest. Sathya & I scored 13 in the prelims while Tom & Chocku got 11. We then went for the hardware debugging contest. Although it was fully computers oriented, I managed to get 14 right, and successfully qualified for the finals to be held tomorrow.

Then we all went to the Fortune Cookiez contest. Tom & Chocku were really lucky and got a prize each in the Tambola round. Sathya got another prize in another round. I also got one question right. I had a double or quit option. I doubled and got that question also right, thanks to Achut. Unfortunately, when I was to pick a prize, I picked the box with a sheet, on which was written “OOPS! We’re sorry!”. I guess its a part of life.

After lunch, Sathya & I found out that we had qualified for the Software debugging finals and went for the competition. We were to complete 3 programs in 2 hours. But… all the programs were really tough. In the end we managed to complete only 1 program (find whether a number is a palindrome or not in each of its representations from base 2 to base 16). I guess we won’t even be considered, unless all the other teams did as hopelessly as we did.

In the end, we came home in the Hindustan buses, as it was way beyond 4 pm. All in all, a very enjoyable day.

My Linux CDs have finally arrived. I have successfully installed Red Hat Linux 8.0. I am currently making this post from within Mozilla! It’s cool…

My Linux CDs haven’t arrived as yet. I guess I have to wait a few more days for the CDs to arrive. Hopefully, they should arrive tomorrow or at most by Wednesday.

Unfortunately, Red Hat 8.0 does not ship with MP3 software. I have to find some third party software, or convert my MP3s to OGG Vorbis (the conversion process is BAD). At least some third party software is available…

Good, the publish worked. I guess the reason for that was the terribly slow internet connection that I had on Friday evening. At least that has recovered.

Looks like the last post didn’t publish properly. I guess I have to redo the publish mechanism..