The last one from Japan ...

I think, and hope that this is the last blog of this trip from Japan ...
We had an awesome time ... and Japan is a great place ...

I really liked the place, the people and the culture ... and got to learn a lot from this place and this entire event ...
Only the language and the food was kind of a problem ... other than that, everything was perfect ...

Today was a tiring day ...
From morning, we were at the conference hall and after all the prize distribution ceremonies, had the flag exchanging stuff and all ...
It was all fun ...

It turns out, my predictions were almost right ...
I got all the three teams right ... but the order got mixed up ...

In the software design, Russia came first ... Followed by Greece and then China ..

In the short film category, our India team came second and the Mexico team won the event ...
The Canadian "Thoughtpulse" team came third ...

If you would like to know what each of these teams ( in the software design ) did in more detail, you can click here.

Night time, we had a fireworks display ...
Today was Japan day ( I think .. ) and all the streets were and the entire harbour was filled with Japanese in Kimonos and traditional dresses ...

All the roads were closed and all the people were on foot ...
I have never seen so many Japanese at a time ... the whole harbour side was jam packed like a rock concert ...

We got a decent show from the convention center ...

Anyways, tomorrow we have to catch a flight at 11:00 am and have to apparently leave the place by the 5:30 bus ... as the ride to the Tokyo Airport is 2 hours long and we need to go and check there whether our flight will actually take off ...

We are supposed to land in Mumbai ... and all the news that we're getting here is bad ...
So, we're trying to get to Delhi and then take a flight to Pune from there ...

I hope everything works out well in the end ...

As always ... some more pictures of the trip ...

Some shots from the fireworks show ... Not at all good ...

I got 2 mediocre shots after clicking about 40 odd or something ...
Didnt have a tripod and impossible to do without one...

The big Japanese rush I was talking about ... All the roads were just full ... of people ...

Anoter fireworks shot ... More decent than the previous one though ...

The entire Indian Contingent ... with the two teams who actually won something ...
The Short Film and the business plan team ...
Seen on the rightmost corner in black ... is Morris Sim ... the guy who started the Imagine Cup.

Lots of other dignitaries and Japanese organisers also seen in the shot ...

What's with Japanese food ?

Today was more of a chilled out day ... with nothing much to do ...
We went to the amusement park in the morning .. at about 12 and sat on the Ferris Wheel and the roller coaster ... which I dont think I will be doing again for quite sometime now ...

The Roller Coaster was uncomfortable and short and pretty scary ... the Ferris wheel was more of a sight seeing thing than a joy ride ...

Anyways ... the rest of the day, went in watching all the short films which were submitted earlier by the participants and the 6 finalists of the Software Design Invitational ... which were all pretty good ...

The 6 finalists were : Slovenia, Brazil, Germany, Greece, China and Russia ...

Russia had a really innovative app and China was scarily comprehensive ...
Greece tackled a social issue of creating a speech to sign language and sign language to speech app for the hearing impaired ...

The other team presentations were boring ... and the Germany app was not that interesting ...
Whatever they did, we could have implemented on our base system within a matter of a few hours ... We had all the back end ...

Only their presentation was slightly better ...

My prediction is : Russia, China and Greece ... lets see what happens tomorrow...

Note to myself : Next year, the presentation has to be awesome !!!

Anyways, we had this very sophisticated, formal, Japanese dinner in one of the poshest clubs in Japan ...
Again, all of us could just not consume the food.
Whats with the food huh ?
I think rest all people from all over the world can still eat it ... but we Indians just cannot ...
We had an early Indian dinner before we went to the one at the club ...

The dinner was supposed to be 5 course ... and by the 2nd course ... we had excused ourselves to go to the bathroom ... and ditched the entire event ... walking 25 mins to get back to the hotel ...

Had two glasses of ( not so good ) starbuck's cold coffee on the way back ...
Anyways ... next year's Imagine Cup is going to be in India ... so there is going to be a flag handing over ceremony and all of us are supposed to be on stage ...
So, we have some sort of rehearsel at 10 am ...

Thats all from me for now ...

More pictures ... :)

This was supposed to be our main course .. some boiled carrot and some seeweed look alike vegetable ...
We had 9 types of cutlery out there !!! 9 types !!!

Yes ... you can rub your eyes again ... but this is Gaurang in formals !!!
Didn't think that would happen before the world imploded in itself .. did ya ?

The Roller Coaster ride that we sat in ... which solidifed my belief that these things are not for me ...

End of dream run ...

Okay ...
First, the bad news ...

We didn't make it to the final 6 teams of the Software Design of the Imagine Cup ...
It's okay ...

I think our presentation was the best we had given till now and the software was also working properly ...
Only, the idea didnt click well with all the other international judges ...

I'm happy for the fact that we atleast made it all the way here ... and got to present our solution ...
Would have been really depressed if we had got stuck up at Mumbai itself ...

On the bright side, we still have one year to go ... and besides, winning World two years in a row would be kinda hard anyways ...
So, we'll just win it next year ... promise ...

The other teams to make it were Japan, China, Greece, Slovenia, Russia and one another team which I don't kinda remember now ...

I seriously have no idea what the other solutions are ... so, I have no basis for comparison ... but we'll come to know about it tomorrow ...

Anyways, the entire ceremony was like an Academy Award dinner kinda thing ...
We had round table reservations and all the short films were shown on the screen and we had a 9 course "Vegetarian" Japanese dinner ... which honestly, I could not consume ...
Nothing personal ... but except the noodles, which I ate with a pair of chop sticks for the first time ( Yay !!! ), couldnt think of eating anything else ...
Most of the veggie stuff ... was ... just bamboos ... It tastest okay ... no taste actually ... something like boiled wood ...

Anyways, as soon as the entire thing got over, we hit the Indian restaurant and packed some desi khana ...

Thats all for tonight ... just before I push off ... picture of the day ... clap, clap, clap !!!
We'll hopefully be riding that thing tomorrow ...

The giant ferris wheel ... second in the world only to the one in London ...
Comes with its own Roller Coaster ...

Me thinks, Microsoft India is going to pick up the tab on this ;)

Day 2 at Japan ...

Hmm ...

Day 2 at Japan ... Yokohama ...
Today is supposed to be a relaxing, chilled out, picnic day ... and we'll come to know whether we will be making it tomorrow or not for the finals ...

We had a trip planned to the Sankeien Gardens at 9:30 ...
We woke up at 9:20 ... and made it to the bus departg for the gardens ...

The gardens, as you would imagine were very beautiful ...
Apparently, it is about 10,000 sq mts and was a private garden of a person ... Sankei Hara ...

They had also lunch there ... but we vegi Indians had to fruits and salads and chocolate pastries.

We later came back and pigged out at a buffet at an Indian Restaurant ...
The place is only about 5 mins walking from our Hotel ...

We have a digital theatre program in the evening along with the preliminary results of the Software design invitationals ...
In the digital theatre, they will be showing us all the entries from the Short Film category ...

There is also a team from BITS Pilani among one of the 6 teams ... so we will be rooting for them ...

Check out some more pictures below ....

Until later then ... :)

The Sankeien Gardens ... Entrance

Lawns at the Garden

Our ADE ( Academic Development Evangelists ) taking a nap :)

More garden shots

We guys ... and Tejas and Pratibha ( 1at and 3rd ) from the left ... They're Microsoft ADEs from India accompanying us for the trip

Bamboo plantations

Our Hotel ... Pan Pacific International

Hotel Lobby

The Giant Ferris Wheel opposite our Hotel

The Imagine Cup welcome board at the Hotel

Pictures from Japan ... I ...

Some pictures that we clicked today from Japan ...
Will be putting up lots more when I get the time ... and when I click it ...
Clicked them only today after we got into our rooms ...

The harbour ... the bridge can be seen clearly in the background ... from our balcony :)
We have some very nice views ... yet to come ...

Our hotel room ... I've tried to hide most of the messy part of the room ... but it still shows :)

Night view of Japan from our balcony again :)

The Pacifico building opposite our building ...

And it rained on my parade ...

Finally ... writing this from the comfort of my hotel room in Yokohama, Japan ... but this trip has not at all been easy ...
It has been an adventure ... sort off ... here is an account ...

We were supposed to fly to Japan on the 26th night at around 11:30 from the Sahar Airport in Mumbai ...
Just to be safe, we decided to leave early morning on the 26th by train ...

I woke up in Pune, at 6:00 am to heavy torrential rains ... like there was no tomorrow ...
When we reached the train station, it was still raining ...

We got into the Pragati Express and headed to Mumbai ...
The rain was unrelentless ... it was just pouring all the while with no letting down ...

On the way, the train stalled at the Vittalwadi station, as the tracks were flooded with water and the train could not proceed ...

We were stalled at the station for 3 hours ... before Gaurang's ( my team mate ) dad arranged for a car to pick us up ...
Gaurang's grandparents were also accompanying us ...

The car picked us all up and took us to Mumbai ...
On the way to the Airport, the road ahead got flooded and we got stranded ...
All the cars stopped on the road and there was a pathetic traffic jam ...

Somehow, we switched roads and ended up in front of a eating joint at around 5 pm
The rain was so bad, that all the umbrellas and everything was useless ...

We were stuck there till about 10 pm

Then, once the rain got a bit less, the water started receding and we decided to make our way to the airport ...

On the way, got stuck up at a very bad traffic jam ...
We then got the news that our flights had gotten cancelled ...

On our way out, we landed up at another water clogged place ... where the driver just stopped the car and let it stand ...
There were 5 of us ... trapped inside a car ... with knee deep water all around us ..
We even couldnt open the windows as the rain water would come in ...

Finally at 3 am, we started moving ... and landed up at a hotel at 4 am in the morning ...
We luckily got a room there, and stayed there for 2 days ... before Mumbai got back on its feet ...

The flights were still not leaving ... so we came to Pune, took a flight to Delhi and then to Japan ...
Though we missed one day, the people here, made arrangements for us ... so it was not a problem ...

More about the Japan trip later ...
Here are some pictures that we took of the entire rain onslaught thingy ... the next day ... once most of the water had pulled away and we could analyse the damage done ...

The worst thing was that people had left their cars ... thousands of them on the street and walked away ... many of these cars were still lying there when we saw it the second day after the rain ...

Motorcycle abandoned on way to hotel

Crap in car ... Leaves, sticks ... water hyacinths even ... that were stuck in car radiators, motors, etc ...

Yeah ... I'm still all here ...

Yes.
Sorry to disappoint you all, but contra-ry to popular mis-belief I am still alive and breathing ... and very much 'all' there ...

I've been in a cocoon kinda thing of late ... emerging out of the house, only in the search of that ever elusive job ... our college is having all the placements going on from week one itself ...

However, I have not attended a single lecture or practical in what has been my largest, ever, bunk exercise which has lasted for about 20 days as of today, and plans to continue till the 3rd of August.
My teachers have given their kind consent to let me ...

We are working the 'big daddy' of student contests ... the World Finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2005, and I'd stay home regardless of whether we got permission or not ...

We have to get flying in less than 10 days and we're still running to get lots of things done ...
So, I'll probably hit the blogging scene after I get back ... with loads of photographs from Japan ...

Till then, adios ... or ... umm .. err ... Sayonara ?
( hehehe :) )

That 'resulty' feeling ...

Do you remember that feeling ?
When you go up to collect your result ?

The anxiety ... butterflies crawling in the stomach ...
Suicidal tendencies ???

Today were the SSC ( Std X ) results for the Pune Univ ... and were of importance coz by bro was due to get his results today ...
From morning onwards ... he was tensed, harrassed by people calling to ask the results which he hadn't got ( results come out at 3 pm )
Anyways ... basically, he was pissed ... it was his first big examination results ... and it was showing ...

All his crying and self loathing eventually rubbed off on me ... and I was taken back to my time, when I got my 10th standard report ...

For all those of you who don't know, std X is the first exam we people give at the University level ...
At that age, it is the 'grand poo-ba' of all exams ... the very feared class to be in ...

Anyways, my results were pathetic ... considering how much I had expected and how much I had gotten ...
I had come home, miserable ... and locked myself in ... hating myself ... for a couple of days, without any social contact ...

Now that I think of it ... it was pretty stupid ...
I had gotten some 81% ... and I was feeling miserable because I had expected marks in the upper echelons ... 88%

Anyways, the feeling stays ...
Just before you are handed your results ... you study the faces and expressions of people who have got their results ...
Trying to gauge how badly you are going to get slaughtered ...

There are only two feelings that one experiences when one peeks at the result at hand ...
One of utter disappointment ... the lowest you have felt of late ... or the sheer exuberance .. knowing that you didn't flunk out on that extremely dubious paper ... or maybe got the grade that had eluded you for the majority of your lifetime ...

Anyways ... the crux of this blog ... is 'the feeling before knowing'
Something, everyone should experience atleast once in their lifetime ...
( which we guys do twice every year now ... )

And after seeing so many summers, have wisely realised ... that in the end, marks don't mean a thing ...
They're just a crappy way of expanding the boundaries between people ... victims of a crappier education system ...

One of my favourite lines, which I sincerely trust in such situations ...
Everything will be alright in the End ...
If it's not ... it's not the end ...

And oh, by the way ... my bro got almost the same marks as me ... 80.66% ... ( I beat him by 2 marks ... hehehe :) )
That, after crying the entire day about getting 68% ... and he's not the scholarly type ... so we kinda believed him .... :p
Idiot !

When was the last time you enjoyed studying ?

And by studying, I don't mean members of the opposite sex ...
I mean, actual, practical, "hitting the books" kinda studying ...

And oh, by the way, I am back :D
( Encouraged by the fact that there are people actually out there who read the stuff I write about, I've decided to return ... )

Anyways, back to pressing issues ...
So, when was the last time you actually enjoyed studying ?
I can safely vouch for most of the people there, the answer will be never ...

Just gave the most pathetic exams of my life, just a couple of weeks ago ...
They weren't pathetic because I did not study for them ... but because, I did not, in the least bit, feel like studying ...

We had the worst subjects - ever !
And this made me think, why ... why are we tortured by the Ministry of Education into studying utter crap, which :
(a) : Has no significant use to us, in the least possible way
(b) : Is so outdated, that whatever use it had, has long passed its prime ...

The main reason, this happens is because, I think, we are made to study all this without understanding the application point of view of the entire thing ...

If we knew, where the stuff was applied, and where we could use it ... we would probably study with more interest ...

Instead, we get teachers who walk into the classroom - on the first day of college, and the first thing they do is, to scribble something on the board and speak in Greek and Latin.
This actually goes on for the entire semester ...

The practicals are mostly just copied ... and modified, and it is not until the last month before the exams, do we begin to understand all the stuff ... while hitting the books ...
But, it's too late till then ... the subject is dead ... and I don't think any person would even consider taking it up again in the future, just because of the initial fright - the entire thing gave him / her ...

This semester, we had some good subjects ... well atleast they 'sound' good.
We had databases, our first tryst with Visual Programming languages ( like VB / VC ), Microprocessors, System Programming ...
The syllabus of all these subjects were so bad ... that I don't think I want to databases again ... and I shudder at the thought of writing programs in VC++ with all the crappy MFCs and the like ...

We also had a subject called "Software Engineering" which was supposed to teach us how to 'design' software, before beginning to write it ...
This, I have realised, is a very, very important thing ...
But the way we were taught it, I squirm at the thought of drawing another UML diagram ...

The Ministry of Education is just doing the opposite of what it is supposed to - It is murdering 'Education'

Remember that famous T Shirt quote :
"I was born intelligent ... but Education ruined me ... "

Hanging up the boots

Honestly, I had seen it coming ...

Of late, I haven't been blogging nor have been having the time to read the blogs of other people whom I generally read ...

I could ... If I planned my time properly, but I don't see it happening ...

There is no point in blogging so infrequently ...

My last blog was on the 18th of April ...

Soo ... I've decided to call it quits ... atleast for now ...
Might decide to come back later ... but it all depends ...

I will be back writing reviews on Mouthshut ... which I can do as infrequently as I want ...
(http://www.mouthshut.com/userinfo.php?uid=sajain84)
So, until next time, this is adios and goodbye ...

Might start blogging again ...
Might be sooner than I think ...

Anyways, thanks for sticking around and going through the stuff I generally crap about.

Adios :)

To Blog or not to blog ...

Of late, blogging has been pretty much an off - on affair ...
My excuse being ... of no time ..

I guess thats what Engineering and Submissions does to you ...
And more often than not, its the teachers who create all the problems ..

So anyways ... now, that have completed with all the submission crap and stuff ... will try to blog more ...

The LAN partiee ...

Dreams do come true ...

On the 16th of this month, we had our last day at college - which was sort of an unnecessary extension due to the 'genius' of some stupid people from my class.
If life would be perfect, 13th would be the last day ... but anyways ...

Having a LAN party had been on our agenda for months ... we even almost had it 4 months ago ... but the stupid college got in the way and everything was washed off ...
So, this 16th, with a do or die attitude ... I left college at 10:30 and headed for the Comp Stores.

Most of the guys were already at my place and were setting up their comps ..
I had cleared the entire drawing room of its belongings and had put 3 large tables - edge to edge to house the 8 computers which were gonna come ...

Anyways ... so I went to the comp guy and purchased 30m of LAN cable and 20 crimps and headed home.
A friend of mine has a crimper and also a switch.

According to plan, we should have finished crimping the wires and setting up the Network by 12 and started playing by 12:30 .. but this was not to be ...
After a lot of loose connections and bad crimps and a lot of mess ... we finally got everything in order by 2pm

We then played CZ ( Condition Zero ) with a few bouts of Quake III thrown in till 7 - a good 5 hours of continuous gaming ...
The plan could have easily extended to an over-night affair .. but for a particular person who left early .. grr :@

Anyways ... we had lots of fun ... and if you would have walked alongside my house in between those 5 hours ... you would have heard all the expletives that have ever fallen on your ears in your lifetime ... and even more ... just in the span of 30 seconds !!!
Good times :)

Anyways, the thing is that its not amazing that we played for 5 hours and stuff .. but that we managed to pull it off ...
The first time - our first ever LAN party with a network of 8 different computers ...

Now that we have all the wires crimped and stuff ... next time shouldn't take more than 30 mins to set up.
For any help on how to set up a LAN gig ... feel free to contact me :)

Ambush at 32 Vidyanagar ...

Trickery, treachery, back stabbing even ...
I was ambushed today ...

Today, was supposed to be the festival of colours - Holi ...
A perfect day to get drenched, drench people ... be the very hated practical joker ...

I hadn't played holi for many years ...
Actually, I hate the dry colours ... the pain in removing them .. and the very chemical wet colours .. when, once your clothes are drenched with, you can use them as mops from the next day onwards ...

So, I hadn't played holi since many years ...
The joy that one derives from the festival has taken a quantum shift from drenching people to the good food that accompanies the special day ....

So, today, like the so many years before ... I went to my granny's place for the customary holi greetings and also to devour all the goodies ...
However, my uncle ( my mom's second brother ) is visting ... who is also a member of the Indian Army ... and is notorious from his childhood days for all the pranks he played ...

So, after all the greetings are done with ... I settle with a plate of food watching Sehwag clobber the Pakistanis ...
All the cousins were at my granny's place ...

So, my uncle comes in ... catches hold of my other cousin ( who is just 2 years younger to me ) and drags him outside ... with a lot of effort and pulling and resistance .. he finally ejects him out of the house ...
My cousin held on to dear life ... clinging onto 3 door frames on his way out ... before my uncle ... finally pulled him out after 5 minutes of resistance ...

Finally outside .. all my younger cousins pounced on him ... and gave him his worth ...
He finally came in sometime later ... drenched ... and his tail between his legs ... cursing me as I had my hearty share of fun ... at his expense ...

I was high and dry at this point of time ... though not for long ... read on ...

I had just finished with the food .. when another aunt of mine came to me and asked me to come out for a photograph ...
I smelt a rat ... ( my family members are pretty bad actors .. can't help smiling ... )
Anyways ... I thought what the heck ... she had a camera in her hand ...

Took off my watch and kept it on the table ... just in case ...
Peeped out and to my surprise, no one was in the vicinity ...

I couldn't believe that she actually wanted to only take a picture ...
No sooner I stepped out of the door ... I got it ...

It was an ambush ... I was trapped ...
All the kids who had been conveniently hiding in all the possible corners ... came rushing out with water guns, balloons, buckets of water ... all led by my uncle ...

In 20 seconds, I was drenched head to toe ... dripping with colour and with a face that would not have been recognized had I been on a coroner's table ...

I just stood there ... let the kids have their share of fun ...
Then, when the time was right, charged on my other two cousins who were in the range of my age group ... and had my share of fun ...

After getting one with a bucket of 'hard-to-remove' coloured water ... I got the other 'running' one with a carefully executed balloon lauch ...

Good times :)
Feels good to be back :)

An idea can change your life : Part 1

This blog comes in the wake of me having seen the movie : "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

I wouldn't say that the movie is brilliant, but I liked it just the same, for the entertaining manner in which it tries to teach us - from a chapter in History ...

The movie takes us from Steve Jobs' ( founder of Apple ) and Bill Gates' ( Microsoft ) college days to their current Industry Domination and how it all came to be ...

For those who don't know ... it was the researchers at Xerox who invented the Mouse and the Graphical User Interface ( GUI ) - which is the basis of any popular Operating system seen today ...

The Board of Directors at Xerox made a decision - which can easily be, the worst business decision ever made ...
They turned down the mouse and the GUI ... stating that - "No person in the right mind would want that ... "
They later, dug their own grave ... when they allowed Jobs and his team to take a peak at their non-feasable product and dissect their invention ...

The apple team goes back .. reproduces what they saw ... steals everything ... and releases the Macintosh ... with a mouse and a GUI ...
Then comes Bill Gates, convinces Jobs to let him have some Macintosh prototypes ... while they were still in development ... takes them home, dissects them ... and comes out with Windows ...

Apple steals from Xerox, Microsoft from Apple ... and today, both Jobs' and Gates are billionaires .. and Xerox is still there ... where it was a decade ago ... making Photo copying machines ...

Just makes you think ... if the Board of Directors at Xerox would have agreed to go ahead with the product, Apple wouldn't be where it is today ... and Microsoft would still be a 2 bit company in Albuquerque ...

How just one idea can change your life ... or ruin it for you ...
Being at the right place at the right time ...

Take the case of Sabeer Bhatia ... free email ...
The Ambanis, the Gulshan Kumars ... the perfect 'rags to riches' story ...

Was talking to my dad earlier today and narrated to him the story - about the Microsoft and Apple thing ...
At the end, I mentioned that ... it's all about being at the right place at the right time ...

To this my dad said that, the right time will come eventually ...
You just have to keep trying ...

I kinda agree with him ...

People don't fail ...
They just give up trying ...

Banner Banters ...

There is this thing going around in Pune ... which I had been wanting to blog about ... for quite some time now ...

Its about the amazing number of advertisement boards coming up ... all over Pune ... with guess what ... Birthday wishes for politicians ...

The board will be a pretty big one ...
And will be strategically placed at the corner of an intersection ... so that whatever view we got of the traffic coming from the left ... is blocked ...

The entire board will contain a huge picture of an ugly politician .. who looks like he's stepped out of Satya ...
The message will read something to the tune of "Heartiest wishes for so and so's birthday on such and such date ..."
The poster will then contain the photographs of the 3 to 4 people who are wishing him ... in bottom right ... which actually look like mug shots taken from the Tihar Jail ..

If the entire poster didn't look gooney enough ... the pictures of these 3 dumb-asses would complete the picture ...

Saw in the newspaper sometime ago ... about this dude from somewhere in the city ... who put up an equally sized poster with his Alsatian dog's picture on it ...
Below, he conveniently puts the pictures of a pom, a doberman and another dog ...

The caption reads ...
"Heartiest birthday wishes to my dog - Rocky ... from his fellow dog friends ..."

This deserves an applause :)
Bravo !

A new project ...

We're working on a new software project for this contest ... and have decided to keep an online blog for the same ...

Will be posting updates and whats new and progress made there ...
If you're interested, you can check it out at : http://citypulse.blogspot.com

Whats with the lights ???

Am actually pretty peeved right now ...
We didn't have lights for the entire day !!!

Ever since Congress has come to power ... we're having 3 hours of load shedding everyday ...
And ever so often, on top of that ... lights aren't there for complete days ...
Like today ... there was load shedding from 3pm - 6pm ... and then no lights from 6:10 - 8:00 and then again 8:10 - 11:30 !!!

I mean, whats wrong with these people ???
And on top of that, they are planning to give free power to the farmers !!!
From where is it going to come ?

Maybe, they should pick up some efficiency on the way and check out power thefts and do maintenance work more often ...
And whats with the street lights being on most of the time during the day ??

We people pay all our bills ... then why should we have power cuts ?
What we need is a system ... in which, our bill gets reduced by some amount every minute that MSEB is cutting power ... load shedding or otherwise ...

That way, either they will get efficient ... or bankrupt ... opening the doors to private players like TATA Power or similar ...
Either way, we should benefit ...

Bombay apparently never has power cuts ...
And the profit it generates, it will be suicidal for them to even cut power for a couple of hours ...

Pune on the other hand, also generates a lot of income ... but these really dumb politicians ... give away free power to farmers ... by cutting down on our power ...

Hows the country going to progress ?

Those darn spammers ...

Actually, the title should have been ... "Those spamming bastards ... " ... but I thought it'd draw a lot of attention ...

I don't really get it ...
I mean, what is with these people ?
How can anyone in their right mind, send millions of emails to people daily and expect to sell a product ?

I've been using email regularly since the time I knew Internet existed ... and still have my very first email address at yahoo ... which is n...

I get about 50 junk mails a day on that account ... which Yahoo mostly filters out ...
But, Yahoo's filtering rejection ratio is pretty high ... and sometimes, legitimate messages get thrashed out ...

I primarily use gmail now ... which is an awesome service ... with tonnes of free goodies ( which I hope stays that way ) and also another service called myrealbox ...
Both give me POP access ( which lets you download messages to your Outlook Express )

Sometime ago, when I had my own domain name ( tidesigns.com ), I would get about 170 spam messages a day ... that too in a mailbox which I was paying for ...
Had to use a filtering software and most of the time, was just deleting all the email ...

I cant believe, people still post their complete email addresses in posts or websites ...
If at all necessary ... put your email up like : abc_at_yahoo.com ...
This way, there are less chances for email reepers to get your mail and you to get spammed ...

Also, report spam if your mail service provider allows ... so that everyone is benefitted ...
And the best precaution is to use a completely different email address for signing up ...
Sigh ...

Some CD Flak ...

Have you ever wondered ... why the Principal is the dumbest guy in the college ?
He never seems to make a right decision ... atleast not from your POV ...

In my entire life, I've had exactly 3 principals ... 2 at school and 1 now ...
The problem with Principals is that they are very, very old ...

Talk about the generation gap !!!

I didnt have much problem with my school principals ... its the college one who is bothering me a bit ... mostly on the CD issue ...

Firstly, I was pretty much forced into making the CD Magazine ... which I knew from day one ... was going to be a pretty crappy job ...

Then the changes ... thousands of it ...
Actually, it took more time implementing the changes than making the actual CD ...

Throughout the entire process ... I always updated a few fellow companions with the CD .. how much it was done ... and they all gave me the ok tag ... just to make sure that I wasn't getting carried away ...

And, when we give the Princi to see the CD ... for one whole day ... he doesn't ... and then last minute ... more changes ...
And very, very stupid ones at that ...

And in my college ... the second you have to do something for the college ... you are completely screwed ...
You go to play for the college, take part in a contest ... even if you win ... no attendance ...
On top of that, they expect you to have completed all the assignments on time ...

The biggest burn was when we organised an Inter Collegiate Event ...
People who went to put up posters and announce the event in other colleges ( which is a necessity for any event ) were conveniently put up in the defaulters list ...

Too much restriction and the staff want to get involved in everything that we do ... even though it does not really concern them ...

When recently, we were at MIT-WEC for a game development contest ( which we won ... :) ) , the vice principal actually came, sat with the participants and asked us for suggestions as how the contest should have been and areas for improvement ...
Now, thats how staff should be ...

Story of my life ...

Phew ...

Finally the CD Magazine thing is over me ...
Now, have a race against time to finish up lots of college submissions in the coming 3 days ...

The CD Magazine took up a major chunk of my life, for the past month ... about 5 - 8 hours a day ...
Had to learn a totally new application - Director ... along with a bit of Lingo ...
Just crossing my fingers now ... that everything goes on well ...

Coz, most of the time, I really jinx myself pretty bad ... so ... I hope this time its all done properly ...

Also, noticed that it is better to blog smaller blogs ... more often, than larger ones rarely ...

So, from now on ... will write *try to write* smaller entries ... and now that all the CD crap is behind me, hopefully shall have more time ...