Being Prejudiced ...

Each one of us has been prejudiced sometime or the other in his or her life and regretted it later.
I know I have ...

But I guess its more like a human emotion than a process which everyone experiences and something I really hate doing ... but it happens at a sub concious level nevertheless ...
The one thing worse than being prejudiced is voicing strong (and loud) opinions based on your (prejudiced) opinions ...
Its something that really ticks me off ...

People cannot help being prejudiced, but atleast they should save others the trouble of perceiving them as complete idiots when they go announcing that this thing is bad and I really hate that stuff ... and oh that is so gay ... even without having given the thing a try ...

I have come across people reacting very strongly to things that they have never tried ...
Like, take the famous Harry Potter for example ...

I had never read any of the books till just about some months ago - that too out of curiosity, because basically the fantasy genre was never my type.
But when I did read the first couple of books, I really liked it and realised what all the hype was about !

Recently in a conversation with a person about books, this topic came up and I enquired whether he had read Harry Potter ...
To this, the guy gives me a very weird looked (cocked eyebrows and all) and says : "Puh-lese ... I don't read such crappy children's books ..."

Whoever did say they were for children only?

People generally have a tendency to be rebels and NOT do things that the entire world is doing at the moment.
They want to stand out of the crowd and "try" to be different.
I know because I do it many times ...

They form false opinions about things just to defend themselves as to why they aren't doing something which everyone else is doing ...
And then later, these opinions turn to convictions and then they start despising the people who form the herd ...

How many times have I heard "Oh ! You love the Lord of the Rings movies? Man ... you're weird"
Or, "How the hell can you like Batman Begins? That sux dude ..."
And the latest has been ... "You listen to Celine Dion ... Umm ... are you gay?"
Can you believe this?

It's amusing actually ... and, after you have come to terms with the fact that people will continue to be prejudiced about things and form opinions about you from the things that you like or dislike, you can have your own fun by disgusting them even more with harmless things like ...
"Oh ! By the way, I also listen to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and N'Sync !"

Hehe .. Good times :)

Stop, start, restart ...

I don't know why ... but I just tend to stop doing things for no reason at all - take blogging for example.
I won't give reasons that I am too busy working nowadays and stuff ... because, I can, if I want, take some time out for blogging everyday ...

But then, every now and then, I just tend to stop it - and it takes a great deal of effort to start back - but once it has started, I am sure it will go the distance...

This did not really prompt me to write the blog, but its worth talking about anyways.
The story is about a little 6 year old boy who fell into a very narrow well type structure and was stuck there for more than 50 hours before the rescue team managed to dig a tunnel from a parallel larger well and rescue him ...

The child was going to be saved eventually and would be unharmed - everybody knew that, but what was really sickening was how the media made such a fuss about it with all the sensationalising, that it was worse than the hundreds of soaps doing the rounds on air these days.

A couple of news channels, showed nothing else but 11 hours of continuous footage of the scene while the army was trying to rescue the child.
The child was ofcourse rescued eventually and as I had predicted, got quite some amount in cash ... and I do believe, will get all his education and stuff sponsored eventually.

Then there was the other thing recently about the Govt. banning quite a few blog sites in the wake of the Mumbai terror blasts.
They originally wanted about 17 sites to be blocked, but as the technology to do this does not exist, the ISPs ended up blocking the entire domain and so, all the blogger sites ... this one included.

Apparently a couple of blogs were being used by SIMI activists to plan other attacks.
In my opinion, all this mess happens due to pure idiots existing in the Govt Technology dept who would not know the difference between an operating system and a web browser.

On the plus side, it turned out to be great business for proxy sites (esp. kproxy) and a lot of people ended up learning inadvertently, about proxies and how blocking of sites is just not possible in most of the cases ...
So much for sheer stupidness and tonnes of revenue loss ...

Anywho, this was just a wake up post for me ... nothing to really muse about in that sense ...
But now that I am up and atom, should have better things to muse about soon ... :)

Job and life as it stands !

Today was the "big" day - apparently - when you go to work on your first ever job - and all the works.
At home, everybody except you is excited - calls keep coming from distant relatives who are all like - "Your first day at work? Best of Luck !!!"
And though you were pretty excited at one particular point of the time in the distant past, you fail to see what all the big deal is about.

So there, amidst the worst rains of the season, I stepped out of the house to go to - where else - WORK ! (Sounds pretty funny now ...)

So, in as few words as possible - this is how it went ...
Well, reached there almost on time at 9:07 a.m (can always damn the traffics and the roads!) but nothing seemed to be happening till 9:30 - thats when we have our Day Start meeting.
Being the first day, all the freshers had to come out and introduce themselves and also tell a funny to make everybody laugh.

After everybody had their turn, the day kicked off officially.

Lots of stuff was going on today - from setting up your workspaces to tonnes of meetings in which each of the project leads came and explained the projects they were working on.
Couple of forms to be filled up - setting up of company email accounts, working environments and stuff like that.

We also had an interesting coding challenge - which I managed to figure out partially - which was followed by an excruciating open book C# test - which I must admit was extremely difficult.

This test took most of the day - along with the occasional meeting and some formalities to be completed. And the pace of answering the test questions came to a crawl towards the end ...

Towards the end of the day, there was a birthday party with two awesome cakes - so it was fun. Then we helped out going through some papers before finally heading home at 9.

But even now that life has taken a huge turn with 10+ hour working days under artificial lighting and temperature control (with no bunking possible whatsoever), the place where I am working at is a darn good place to be.

The thing that hit me just as I was leaving was that - I have to go home now, hit the sack, get up and come back - aaaaarghh !!!!

All said and done, this is probably one of the coolest places to work.
All the people are young, in our age group and extremely friendly.
You don't have to bother about wearing a T Shirt which does not have a collar or that your jeans are blue in colour.
You can walk in wearing floaters and steal one of the many bean bags lying around to work on.
You can have all your instant messengers running throughout and even catch up with friends elsewhere - as long as you get your work done on time.

So it begins ... I guess :p

Finally done and over with ...

Today probably marked a pretty important day for me - college is finally done and over with !
I know this has been said before, but we had our project demonstration today, and so (considering I clear all my papers), I should not have any official reason for going back to college ever (except for collecting my marksheet)

Anyways, even though all these past four years have had many pleasant memorable experiences, I would be leaving with sort of a bad taste ...

The only requirement for our project demonstration that we had off the college was access to a decent internet connection - we were carrying our own notebook (mainly because the college computers would not be able to support our development environment :p)

Anyways, our project guide from college called us personally a day before and informed us that the college was having some trouble with their internet lines and asked us if we could make some arrangements ourselves.
We ended up carrying a CDMA Wireless phone which gives dial-up speeds internet connectivity. It did get our job done, but was painfully slow and frustruating !

Anyways, on reaching college, we realised that the internet connection had been down from a couple of days and no one had many arrangements to fix it - or even call the customer care support for that matter, even though many teams needed an active connection to demonstrate their projects.

Moreover, all the computers were infected with worms and viruses which caused unexpected behaviour on the systems - adding to our misery.

The final 'real' downer - was that the examiner who came to check out our project was very, very unqualified to do so ...
I'd go as far as to say that he was a complete idiot and had no idea at all about software development.

The college is not to be blamed for it - because the University sends these people - but c'mon, there has to be atleast some level of competence!
The guy who came to us, asked us questions like:
- What are the number of classes have you used in your project?
- How many tables are there in your database?
- How many pages does your site have?

It was very apparent that the guy knew nothing at all within the first five minutes, and to save his blushes, he had to ask us questions - many of which could clearly be termed as 'stupid beyond belief'.

The demonstration did go past 60 minutes and he kept interupting us with his moronic questions throughout - half of which we had to strain to make sense off in the context of our demonstration!

It actually hurts when people spend months in completing a project - with the time, money and energy spent - and the person who is supposed to assess the project turns out to be a complete moronic idiot and does not even make an effort to understand what you have done.

With everything said and done, my other project partners feel that we did the best we could with this sort of a guy and we should be happy that its gone well.
I guess so ... but the Pune University really needs a wake up call !!!

Out for a while ...

Should have put this up sometime ago ...
Exams going on till the 9th and as such, have substantially reduced the time that I generally spend on the PC - so there wont be to blog for a while till the exams have passed ...

ActiveCiti goes LIVE

This post is coming after a fairly long time - and for good reason too...
The last week was pretty hectic - I was very busy studying for my exams and more busy in trying to get our Final Year Engineering Project done and released.

Well, I am happy to inform you that we went live today at 5:30 pm (thats when our faulty registration page got fixed) :p

Presenting ... ActiveCiti
(clap clap clap clap ... )

Unlike so many other Final Year projects that we had seen - which mostly are very, very niche and no one ever seems to use them, we decided to go and do a complete product from scratch - however insignificant it might be, or no matter how many people use it.
We wanted to go through the entire site of developing a product ...
So we wrote our own spec document, did our own database designs, did all our own interface designs, chalked out flow diagrams and made our own mistakes (which are quite a lot actually)

And to tell you frankly - the feeling is brilliantly awesome.
At the other end of the road, seeing the number of registered users increase by the hour is damn awesome :)

As of writing this - 7 hours into launch, we now have 50 registered users.
I know that this will now decline exponentially, but we hope that we make 100 atleast.

Something about the project
The entire project is a web application which makes planning a piece of cake.
It removes all the hassles of calling so many people back and forth while planning anything - a movie, a trip or even just planning to hang out at a local coffee place.

Though the content on the site is Pune Centric - that should not be a drawback and everybody anywhere should be able to use it - as we let users customize and add to the already existing content.

The entire application is done up in ASP.Net 2.0 with SQL Server 2000 as the backend database.
It took us about 4 months to get this done - working part time, managing college and stuff.
But it feels awesome now ...

We did have some anxious - adrenalilne pumping moments when 2 hours into the launch (we actually did it at 3 pm) we found out that the register page was not working.
Then later quite a few pages started acting up and were not working as expected ... but we managed to fix them and as of now everything seems to be chugging along nicely (touchwood)

We still have some way to go before this is finalised and polished.
Have got tonnes of feedback and our list of todo's has already gotten filled.

Anyways, please do visit the site and register there.
The address is : http://www.activeciti.com

Any feedback would be deeply appreciated and you can drop it off at : http://www.activeciti.com/contact.aspx

Yay ! ActiveCiti is LIVE :)

Windows Media Player 11

I've always used Windows Media Player 11 because it has got awesome library management capabilities.
Yes - it may not be the lightest or the fastest players - but its library is plain, simple, clutter free and very effective.

I got to try out Windows Media Player 11 beta for Windows Xp - for a couple of days now and here are some screenshots.

In short, it is much sleeker, looks a lot better and takes its library management duties more seriously.

This is the main interface screenshot.
As I said, it is sleeker and more pleasing to the eye.

Different things to notice are the controls in the bottom of the screen and to the bottom left, they have some sort of graphic equalizer display kinda thingy which looks cool.

On top you will notice a button called URGE - which is an online music store that microsoft has tied up with. Something that iTunes is to the iTunes Player.

This shows the Albums that I have on the player - it displays any album art very nicely and looks damn nice.
The albums are categorized alphabetically with each letter getting its own group.

This is one very nifty feature.
You can select an album, right click>Update Album Info and it downloads the album art and album details from the internet and updates the stuff on the fly.
Damn cool.

This is another interesting feature - the artiste view shows CDs stacked for artistes having more than one album.
And the number of CDs depicted here equals to the number that actually exist on your PC.

Very nice.

I heard the Vista version allows you to fly through the stack - though I could not manage it on the Xp Version.

And finally this is the mini player which comes onto the taskbar.
Its all black.





Though the installation was smooth - it installs over your Windows Media Player 10 and updates the library - it took a hell lot of time (maybe coz its still Beta)

Also one main feature that its missing is the Auto Playlist feature from Media Player 10.
Hopefully it will make a comeback in the final release which is scheduled for the June 6th.

Surprisingly, the player was just taking 7 MB of RAM in the minimized mode and 13 MB in the full screen mode while playing mp3s.

The beta version was a 23 MB download.

Another first time feature in this release is a "Search as you Type" feature.
Overall, its worth an upgrade if you are a Windows Media Player fan.

Remember remember ...

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.

Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah! Hip hip hoorah!

"V for Vendetta" is an excellent movie.
Apart from the brilliant acting, direction, cinematography and everything else which made it such a treat to watch, it had a very, very strong message ...

"People should not be afraid of their governments ... The governments should be afraid of their people ..."

PS: The following blog contains references to the movies "V for Vendetta" and "Rang De Basanti" ... Though the references might be obvious to the plot of the movie, it may turn out to be spoilers for the majority of the people who haven't seen the movies.
So, if you do intend to watch the movies, I must sadly ask you to skip this post ... else, please carry on ...

Though, we as Indians cannot relate to the movie a lot, I think most of the americans will be able to ...

Michael Ironside who does voice acting for Sam Fisher - an NSA agent in the game "Splinter Cell" says that there are only two primary emotions that every animal understands : more so human beings - "Love and Fear"

What America is going through or went through (atleast from what we hear or see here) corresponds in some way the Britain in the movie "V for Vendetta" is going through ...
I remember - after the 9/11 attacks, people were petrified beyond belief ...

In the movie, "V", which is an analogy to the Guy Fawkes incident, V (Hugo Weaving) successfully bombs the parliament building (without killing innocent people).
Though actually blowing up a building does not solve much of a purpose practically, it does bring hope and faith to the people and shows the government that people are not to be taken for granted.
According to him (V), its not the act of destroying a building, but the ideology behind it and what it (the building) stands for that you are destroying.

Strength through unity! Unity through faith!

Anyways, the problem with the government in the movie was that it was bullying its people and using fear as a method of controlling them.
That got me thinking whether a similar scheme of things would work for our country ...
The problem with India is that its not bullying its people in a way that blowing up a building (parliament maybe?) would solve .

The problems that India faces (from its government) is mainly of corruption and apathy and having incompetent fools who don't know what they are supposed to do.
Unlike the U.S, there is no restriction on the number of times someone can come to power, so the main agenda of the politicians is to please the majority voter bank before the elections so that they can be elected again.

A prime example is the government trying to impose another 27% reservations for the OBC (Other Backward Classes) (taking the total reservations to 49.5%) in the Education sector. The main reason for doing this, as blatantly mentioned by many of the politicians is to please a section of the society.
Thanks to the election commission, this matter has been halted for the time being and now the government is giving thought whether the move would be politically feasible for them.

In such a scenario ... another movie comes to mind which I recently caught - "Rang De Basanti".
In the movie, some college students go and assasinate the defence minister of the country because he was corrupt.
Again, the movie was brilliantly made and a treat to the eyes.

In the movie, after they have knocked off the defence minister (which is a relatively easy thing to do) - and not get caught, the government puts the assasination blame on terrorists (India has plenty of them to pass the blame around) and work of Pakistan's ISI.

However, our protagonists go to a radio station and broadcast saying that it was them and not some terrorists who knocked off the minister - also giving complete reasons as to why they did it. This is the best part of the movie and apparently brings the government down to its knees.
However, unfortunately, these unarmed students are gunned down by the special task force with orders from higher authorities that there should be no survivors left.

Again, though going and knocking off corrupt politicians one by one may seem to some - an excellent method to rid the country of idiots, it will take a very long time and is not at all feasible. (because India has just so many politicians ... we are the largest democracy in the world)
Besides, you also run the risk of getting killed soon...

This actually got me thinking and being the conspiracy theorist that I am ... what if ... just what if ... the Parliament Attacks on Dec 13, 2001 were not actually done by millitants, but a couple of kids who just wanted to change something ...
(some sort of a Rang De Basanti meets V for Vendetta)

But the bottom line is ... change by the constitutional means ... going to vote, electing a new government, etc etc ... takes a very long time ...
We need a V ;)

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Of education and jobs and you know ... money !

We had our final practical exams today - which went relatively well.
The external examiner, apart from being a jovial fellow, turned out to be pretty much entertaining also ...

Anyways, I did finish my program (assignment we are supposed to code in 3 hours) well before time and was left musing on some issues, which finally resulted in this post.

A recent news article flashed through my memory - one which in 4 ISB (Indian School of Business) graduates were offered jobs which paid salaries of approximately Rs. 10,400,000 - the highest that any MBA graduate from the country.
Now, ignoring the fact, that the salaries are actually in US Dollars (USD 233,800 to be precise) and these students will probably be abroad (where it is much more expensive to live), the salaries ARE pretty high. More so, when you are starting in a company.

Now comparing this to the salaries that we (Engineering graduates) from the Pune University make - which is more or less in the range of Rs. 200,000 to Rs. 450,000, it would take us approximate 20 years to make the same amount that one of these ISB guys make in 1 year.

Which in more harsh and simpler terms means that one of these 4 guys will make more in 15 days of working compared to what we guys will make in a year of working.

A pretty compelling reason to do an MBA, ain't it?

However, IIM-Ahemdabad, which is considered one of the toughest schools in the world to get into and which is also one of the better IIMs in the country, has a national average package of Rs. 1,000,000 (10 lacs) and their highest Indian offer was Rs. 3,400,000 (34 lacs). I'm not aware of their international packages.

Makes you do some thinking ...

Doing some more research on this subject, brought me to this very interesting artice by the Hindustan Times - titled : The Jobs Paradox

A quote from the article states:

They are qualified engineers and MBAs, but they have no jobs. India had more than 60,000 unemployed graduate engineers at last count, according to government figures. No official figure for unemployed MBAs has been published yet.

And yet, India also has a shortage of skilled technical manpower. The country will face a shortfall of 1,50,000 IT engineers in 2010, says a Nasscom-McKinsey report released four months ago.

The article further goes to say that though India produces a LOT of Engineers and other graduates - many of them are "unemployable".

The only standard body governing technical education in the country is the AICTE - which sadly cannot maintain standards ... Most of the institutes certified by them are not upto the standards at all - and it does not take an expert to notice this.

Another problem (which the article also states) that there is big shortage of good teachers. The main reason being that teachers don't draw a big salary in most of the colleges. Freshly placed students tend to make as much as the teachers - if not more ... one reason, why teaching is not such a lucrative option and why there is such a dearth of good teachers.

Even in my college, though we always tend to get good overall results every year, barring a few teachers, others don't make a case for joining the college.
This is the case with most of the colleges around Pune - even the so called better colleges.

A good teacher is recognised instantly and respected by all the students - so we do get to hear accounts of "good" teachers - but these have been too far and few ...

This finally brings us back to the question of how the results tend to be good irrespective of the teachers?
There are two points to the answer - students who are sincere and/or brilliant from the beginning who carry themselves through and a very redundant and predictable education system - the latter of which I'll leave for discussion on a different article.

Hence, this creates a catch 22 situation.
Colleges, in order to do well, need to pick good students from the starting -- and good students only go to colleges that are doing well.

The case with our college is slightly different - its more of a proximity thing.
Our college is located in the heart of the city - and thus is more or less close to every corner of the city. ( The average time of getting to college is about 15 mins)
This draws more or less the good students from around who probably don't want to spend their lives travelling to colleges - and hence, the college is doing well.

But at the end of the day, all the colleges are failing to produce engineers which companies can use - so much, that the companies, given up all hope of finding good people, have started picking up good students early (before graduation) and training them on weekends - so that, by the time they pass out, they can start working immediately.

Then there is the question of reservation - and with it now poised to reach 50%, I pity the students and more so the companies - because finding good talent will become even more difficult.
One of the recruiters who came to our college mentioned that they prefer "a particular college in the city" over others - because they have no - or very low reservation policies.
Hence, the probability of finding brilliant students is much more there.

Other colleges do have brilliant students, but they are more difficult to locate and generally lost because of such reservation policies.

Something for everone to ponder about ...

By the way, do give the original article a read. Very worth it ...
Links here : The Jobs Paradox - Hindustan Times

Social Networking ...

What started off sometime ago as just filling out a large form for kicks ... (it was quite a novelty back then and the term social networking was probably not coined) has become a huge phenomenon today.

I never really went back to my orkut account for quite some time actually ... probably a year atleast.
For me it was just something that would help some old classmate find me - if ever the need be ... I did not feel the need to even update my profile ... except for some very rudimentary contact details ...

I even forgot I had an account there ... I had friends on orkut in single digits and no one really cared about the site.

And nowadays, I'm hitting the site almost everyday ... sometimes more than four to five times ... and everybody I know is on orkut ...

Over the past few months, orkut has just propelled into a the next big "2 point O" thing on the web - so much that google bought it - and now you log in using your google account.

Honestly speaking, Orkut is very poorly implemented - but its a great idea.
The reason it is so alive and kicking even today - and after the gzillion "No Donut For You - Bad Server" messages, people are still using it.

The conditions have definitely improved, because at one point of time, I remember people would not sign up, coz Orkut would keep rejecting their registrations due to server problems ... and filling out those huge forms was a pain in the rear.

Saying all this, Orkut is still much better than the many other sites that have sprung up in its wake ...
Google has a huge task on its hand - cleaning up a lot of bugs and getting a more stable release out. Orkut has had its share of security issues ... which is even more scary considering the large amounts of personal information stored out there.

I had recently read a movie director saying that a good story generally sells even though it may not be very nicely shot ... which I think is the case with Orkut.
Good idea, bad implementation.

But with google now in the picture, things have already started to look bright (slightly though)

In the end, you love it or hate it ... but you find yourself being drawn to it so often ... and this will probably be something which would help us friends and classmates communicate more easily once we're on our own and the common college grounds cease to exist ...

Goodbye college ...

Today, unfortunately (for some) or fortunately (for most), was our Engineering College Farewell to all the final year students ... Something to explicitly tell us - that its now officially over - end of student life for the most of us ...

Most of us who have been placed, have to join by the first week of July - so its a big step, moving onto a job and whole new world ...

Anyways, as I turned up for the farewell at 6:30 - there was the usual, the boring principal speech and the yada yada ... Something which nobody enjoys ...

As the evening progressed, the motley crowd of students that we are - some were enjoying it thoroughly while others were getting bored ...

After the speeches that were given by members of the staff, there were some contests organised by the juniors ... of which some were fun, and some weird ...

I was dragged into taking part in two contests - one which involved recognising a junior student and being able to give out his full name - these guys brought in front of me, a guy - whom I had never seen before - and thus guessing his name was way out of the question - much to the embarrasment of both of us.

The only solace was that the best anybody got was one guy guessing the last name of his junior.

The second contest which I was dragged into - which I would never have gone into - on my own free will was the Mr. College Contest ...

Here things got a bit awry ...
The guys who got called up (there were about 12 of us there initially) did not like the fact that the compere was dictating rules very sternly to the participants ...

The contest was supposed to be a fun contest - nothing was at stake and the rules could be bent a little.

Added to the fact, that the Final Year students of our college (and a good percentage of people on the stage at that time) are NOT the most affable, the guys decided to screw up the event.
So one common line was thought, and everybody introduced themselves as : "Hi ! My name is so and so ... and I'd like to be known as XXXX" (XXXX being a common joke that we have amongst us)
So, basically - the Mr and Ms. College Contest got completely ruined

Anyways, what struck me at that time was that farewells are pretty difficult to organise ... especially in colleges like ours where there is not much interaction between the juniors and the seniors at other times of the year.

The thing that screwed up the last Mr. and Ms. College contest was that people thought that they were being dictated rules - rules to a party which was being thrown for them.
This is the difficult part in organising such a thing ...

I have organised a couple of things, but never a farewell of such sorts - nor have I thought about how I'd do it ...
The difficulty comes in drawing the line between doing it well and over doing it a bit ... and mostly in catering to the people whom the party is for, making the rules - and at the same time pulling it off without making the people think that they are being bossed over.

Then again, we have a pretty rowdy crowd - which makes it even more difficult to organise such an event. But at the end of it, it was fun nevertheless and people should probably be grateful to the organisers for atleast taking the initiative to hold such a thing.

Anyways, so long MESCOE ... sort of mixed reactions for me ...
Technically, still a long way to college "officially" being over - there are submissions, and exams and projects to demonstrate - so shall write an "official college over post" once all those things are taken care off ...

Haaaave you met Ted ?

There is this new comedy on air nowadays - happened to catch one of the episodes, thanks to a good chum of mine, and now have fallen in love with the series.

The series is just in its first season as of today, with about 18 episodes aired.
Sadly, the show has not come to India (and I pretty much doubt it will) and we generally get to see it due to the magic of bittorrents :)


Anyways, the show is called - "How I met your mother" and tells us the story of how the protagonist - Ted (Josh Radnor) falls in love. The series is kind of a flashback in which he is telling this story to his kids - and hence the weird sounding name.

Anyways, the cast also includes Neil Patrick Harris - Ted's friend Barney - who I feel would be the primary reason for watching the show.
His character and the way he portrays it is brilliant - something that Chandler was to friends - but with no ethics ... which makes it so much more enjoyable.

The second reason to watch the show would be the utterly cute Cobie Smulders - who plays Robin - Ted's on and off love interest in the series.

The other two people who make up the team of five are Jason Segal - Marshall (Ted's best friend from college) and Alyson Hannigan (from American Pie) - who plays Lily - Marshall's fiancee.

The chemistry between the five is very good which eases you into the show at once and makes you feel right at home.
The show is like Friends in some ways, but still very different in its own way which is very refreshing ...

If you're a fan of friends, you'll love this show ...

Anyways, what prompted me to write this blog today, was that I came across Barney's blog : http://www.barneysblog.com

In the show, Barney talks about blogging many times and all those incidents are right there.
Its nice to see that the producers take that extra effort to do these things which gives the show a more real feel to it and makes the characters a bit more believable.

Be sure to check out Barney's Lemon Law (even if you haven't watched that episode)

Aeon Flux

Was unfortunate to have ended up going for the movie today.
What could have been our only solace that it had Charlize Theron - wasn't worth it ...

Spending a hundered bucks on the film still hurts and will do for sometime now ...

Will have to watch a couple of good movies just to wash the bad taste down ...
Just goes to show that even Hollywood can churn out utterly crappy movies ...

This one, just had a lot of budget to add to it the slickness (and also Charlize Theron)

Which makes this movie, in one sentence - "An utterly crappy, slick flick which also happens to have Charlize Theron" :p

Catch my review of the movie here.

Life comes a full circle ...

For all those who wanted to know, we didn't make it to National Finals of the Imagine Cup this year.

Now, unfortunately (or fortunately) the BE Project that we guys were doing and our IC submission was one and the same thing (for the sake of our sanities) - so atleast we will be seeing this thing through (hopefully)

Our theme and ideas were kept somewhat hushed up (which feels kinda stupid now) but anyways, will be letting the cat out of the bag soon enough.

In other news, came back from an awesome two day picnic to Nagaon (which is about 8 odd kms from Alibaug) and it was awesome fun. Will be posting pictures of the trip soon.

Perhaps the last with the guys from college - everything went off nicely and everybody had loads of fun.

For starters, here are a couple of images that I took on the beach ...

Low tide at the Alibaug beach at sunset - small kid with his dad

A family of four moving towards the Alibaug fort which is accessible by foot during low tides

The Constant Gardener

I caught this movie recently, after a friend of mine "highly" recommended it to me ... and I'm glad that I caught it.

This is one more addition to African Centric movies - though this is of a different nature.
The last african centric movie that I had watched was Hotel Rwanda, which to be frank, was brilliant.

These movies paint a very sad picture of Africa, and honestly, even India, with the gzillion problems that we face everyday, seems like heaven compared to what some people out there go through.

Some parts of Africa, are really, really bad - which results in the more well to do countries treating them like expendable guinea pigs - a premise on which the Constant Gardener is based on.

I've heard that the promos of the movie are very misleading and you'll be better if you've missed them completely - and if you have not, don't go according to what they say.
But a movie very well worth watching for its underlying base.

BTW .. the movie has Rachel Weisz (Mummy, Runaway Jury) who is brilliant and won the best supporting actress for her role in the movie.
Also has Ralph Fiennes (Schlinders List, Maid in Manhattan, The Prince of Egypt) who is equally brilliant.

A definite watch.

My review on the film : Here

Gdrive ...

I was surprised to see a pretty big article in the Indian Express talking about Google's GDrive. For those of you who still haven't heard about it, GDrive is supposed to be google's entry into the online file sharing business.

This news however, was not supposed to be released to the public, but as the story goes, a presentation made by Google for its investors on GDrive, got placed on Google's investor site by mistake and was downloaded by many people and the news spread like wild fire - thanks to the blogger community.

The presentation, has since then, been taken off the site and Google has kept a "no comments" policy on the entire thing.

Anyways, the GDrive is to offer its users, unlimited file storage - including many different file formats.

I did some lookup and found out that GDrive was infact a product of a thrid party company which had created an app by which you could store files of a max size of 999 MB in your gmail account using their tool.
They even had the domain name (http://www.gdrive.com) registered with them.

The version 0.6 of the tool can be found at this site : http://www.puremango.co.uk/cm_gdrive_109.php

Now, the reason why I am posting this is that all this thing about gDrive and unlimited storage being awesome and all, does bring up the entire issue of privacy and security.

How many people will trust google with their files?

In recent events, the Bush administration had forced google into giving them (anonymous) data on user search patterns.
What if tomorrow (though this is very unlikely) they make them give them access to files and stuff? After all Google IS a U.S based company.

Google is slowly, but surely, growing bigger and bigger - and they are becoming for the internet, what microsoft is for the personal PCs today. Even as of now, Google is pretty respected - with millions of people trusting its search, email, Earth (Google Earth) and many other such services.
All it will take for all this to end is one teensy weensy mistake ...
For my sake and everyone else's, I hope that this never happens ...

People are like ... crazy man !!!

While doing some webdev work today, I wanted to know what are the best methods to get rounded edges on layers, images etc ...

I know I am not very brilliant googling (it generally takes me some effort before I can zoom into the stuff I was looking for) but I was shocked beyond belief today.

I use firefox (which rocks by the way) and it has the google search bar with the auto completion feature turned on.
( for those who don't know, the google auto completion feature is something which fills in your search query by the most popular queries which other users have used - it is quite helpful when your brain is not working and you need to get a proper query in)

So, I start by query with "methods of ..." and before I could type further, the list gets filled up with suggestions.

(my actual query was : methods of getting round edges using CSS)

But these are things which google filled up:

methods of suicide - 3,410,000 results
methods of abortion - 1,210,000 results
methods of execution - 5,370,000 results
methods of mayhem - 29,000 results
methods of torture - 1,450,000 results

I mean - what the hell are people searching for?
There was an actual page in the "methods of suicide" search result which would be about 40 pages in printed pages - which talked about all the methods of killing yourself, along with tips, tricks and also an advice column.

Freak ... some people are just plain crazy (which is an understatement - it should be more like retarded !!!)


Please dont read the links above and kill yourself - not that I care much, but I don't have time to attend funerals :p
Hehehe ...

And if you're still wondering if you can get rounded edges in CSS, it will be supported in CSS3 - which does not have a proper spec - so will have to wait a while.
Till then, images are the only way to go ...

Education thingy ...

This semester, the college attendance for our class has been pretty low.
On a good day, the class attendance has been about 60% at best.

I think this stems from the fact, that nothing much is happening in college, we have crappy subjects and people are basically bored having attended the last 3 and a half years of their lives coming everyday to college -- so they want to cut it short.

Not to mention project work !!

Besides, we have only 4 subjects this semester and our time table has been put up in such a way - that we have Thursdays off for project work and then again Saturday and Sunday (which is normal college holiday too) - so we're basically working only 4 days a week.

On top of that, we have no practicals on Friday - which makes it the juicy day to bunk on - something I did this friday - with disastrous effects.

It turns out, that more than half the class had the same idea which resulted in the only the other half turning up for class which eventually resulted in a very, very *angry* (read pissed off) Head of the Department.

So in order to get us back on track, there was a long lecture (I heard about it via many people who actually were present) and we're having a test tomorrow on 2 chapters -- in which, if we score less than 75% (which is again a pretty impossible result to achieve), we will be chucked out of the class.

Also, there were a lot of warnings about us getting very, very poor grades in our projects (which make up a good 150 marks) and term work if we didn't attend sincerely enough.
Warnings also on "how what we do for projects does not matter", as the marks eventually come from the internal and external examiner - whose good books we need to be in.

Using this logic, people who spend more time doing credible and decent work (and who happen to miss classes due to this reason) will end up getting less marks than other people who come up with some half baked projects BUT attend sincerely.

So, why should we bother at all?
As sad as it seems, this is how most of the places work - I think.
You need to suck up to the higher authorities to get anything done at all.

Luckily in our case, this fact has just been more "explicitly" mentioned.

Reports from a Bank ...

I don't know how many people will agree with me, but ICICI banks, generally, suck !

All the money they spend on the Amitabh Bachan ads and the stupid "Bharosa hai" campaign could be put to better use, buying some sense for the people running the bank.

My dad and grandfather both have an account at the Shangrila Garden ICICI branch which is quite near my college - and to my great misery as well.
The proximity of the bank to my college, accounts for my gzillion trips to the bank - mostly to deposit cheques and stuff.

These guys have installed a cheque accepting machine, which, hardly anyone knows how to use - and most people are afraid, would eat up their cheques.
If you want to withdraw money, you probably have to wait in line for 20 minutes atleast during anytime of the day - at the ATM adjacent to the bank - which most probably is out of cash and is being refuelled.

Many times, I've had to deal with their not so helpful employees who'd give you the "Oh - why the hell did you ever be born" look everytime I made a minor mistake filling out a form or something.

Once, they refused to make me a demand draft to pay my fees ( which I had to do in about 4 hours time ) because apparently, their central server was down.

So, basically, ICICI is one of the banks in my "I will not bank here off my free will" list and atleast for the time being, plan to keep it there.

So, today, to my awesome luck - I was to go and deposit a couple of cheques ( 4 actually ) in the bank.
I was already late for my first lecture at 8, so I decided to bunk it and go and deposit the cheques first. ( the bank opens at 8 am )

So, I enter the bank at 8:30 - and I learn that I cannot use the machine to deposit the cheques and I need to do it the old fashioned way off the counter.
Then to my surprise, I learn that they have changed the system and I now need to take a token to even do that ...
Agony !!!

Anyways, I do that and wait .... and wait ... and wait ...
With about 10 minutes left for my next lecture and still about 20 guys in front of me at 8:50 in the morning, I throw my token in the bin and decide to come back later.

Fast forward to 1:15 pm
I enter the bank again - and it seems like the entire population of Pune had decided to bank at the same time.

There is total chaos at the bank - with about gzillion people running about, with no place for a guy like me with his big college bag to even stand.
I knew I had it !

Luckily, the token generating machine crashed - and all the token numbers of the gzillion people there got mixed up.
When I went to get my token - the guard asked me to just go directly and give the cheques to the person at the counter.

There was a line out there - surprisingly consisting of only 5 people. I blessed the guard for having some sense and headed for the counter.

Now here is where the surprises start.
The female at counter number 5 - inspite of all the chaos and rush and madness was pretty chilled out.
She was actually genuinely smiling and thanking all the people for banking there.
She actually apologized when she asked another female to fill out another form which the other female herself had screwed up!
Hmm ...

When my turn came - I gave her the entire pile of 4 cheques - she flipped through them - and found that the last cheque slip did not have my dad's cell phone number.
The horror !
At other times, I would have gotten a look from the employee which would make me want to kill myself and everyone else in the room - but this time, this person at the other end of the counter, just smiled - and said "Sir, all the cheques will go separately - so you need to fill the cell phone numbers on all the slips."

I was dumbstruck! I just took the slip, filled it up, and returned it back to her which she promptly stamped and returned the counterfoil back to me.

I slowly made my way out of the maddening crowds - the counterfoils in my hand - wondering what was going on ...
Maybe ICICI got some employee etiquette program going on - or maybe she was just a nice person.
Anyways, need more such service around.

Even though I still don't approve of ICICI, just want to give credit where it is due ...
So there ...

Life on track ...

I haven't been blogging of late - have not had much time.

The last couple of weeks have gone in a blur actually. I was actively involved in organising our inter collegiate festival - and it was a mad rush of things ...

One thing that I learnt after the event got over was - to never organise anything like this ever again. Its very very painful.

However, the event went off decently well - and most of the people were happy at the end of it.

However, this saturday - the last day of the event, all our sponsor banners disappeared from the parking in broad daylight - due to which, this event hasn't gotten over - yet.

These things just never end.
Anyways, now that most of the thing is over and I have more free time, will be blogging more often.