Home at last...

After two months of self inflicted torture at Jaipur, I've finally made it home, at last! On the 23rd of last month, I was informed that I'd been selected as the Sun Ambassador to my institute. Awesome! I'd almost forgot what joy felt like until then. As Sun Ambassador, I get trained in a multitude of Sun Microsystem's technologies such as Open Solaris, Java, Netbeans, Sun Toolkit and a lot more. My job is to conduct tech demos and events in my campus to promote all these technologies among both students and faculty alike. The coolest part is, I even get to code on specific projects of their's and hence get to contribute to open source. And as if that's not enough, I even get paid to do this! What more could I ask for? Four days later I was on a train home. For the first time in two years, I was super excited about going home because I'd really worn myself out throughout my fourth semester and on top of that, I stayed back at Jaipur so that I could continue my work with the institute network. I also thought I'd complete my RHCE examination training from Linux World for which I'd got a 100% scholarship for; although it (sadly) turned out to be a complete waste of my time (since I don't intend on spending 12k to get a certification). Two hours of classes everyday for which the very young and inexperienced teacher of ours teaches only for an hour. He keeps getting things wrong and the sad part is, his working knowledge of Linux is confined ONLY to Red Hat. He hasn't experienced the sheer awesomeness of distros like Debian or Gentoo. Plus, his knowledge was restricted only to whatever he'd learnt after attending a couple of similiar courses. And, he has no developing experience. In my honest opinion, Linux and everything else related to computers, is best learnt alone. But anyways, my decision to stay back this summer has been one of the most rewarding decisions I've ever made in my life. I came to know about the Sun Campus Ambassador post being open and my working knowledge on networking and system administration improved by a factor ten :) . I also worked on firewalls, name servers, proxy servers, SMS alerting systems, VPN and high availability clusters, all of which contributed to a steep learning curve. Apart from the one week of nonsensical politics we had in college during Gaur sir's absence, I'd say these two months have been the most productive months for me so far. Anyways, I hadn't actually reached wonder land yet as I'd just embarked on a two day journey which, as I was to realise soon enough, was without any doubt the closest thing to getting a nine inch nail hammered into your skull. And why was that? Anyone who knows me well enough would guess one out of these three things: brats, brats and brats. You guessed right? Awesome!

Yes, my coupe had a family with a very little 5-6 month old brat and his big sister who had to be the brattiest fucking brat ever (not to mention the fact that the neighbouring coupes had a brat each). The stupid piece of filth could not sit still for no less than 2 seconds. And if you think i'm exaggerating, kindly ask her parents who told me that she couldnt sit still at all. tiI can understand that the little brat couldn't do much but cry, because that's the only thing little brats can do (right?), but that darn swine of a sister of his kept crying for attention while her unfortunate parents tried to attend to the routine diaper changes and what not. I'm sure they must have sinned like crazy to get a kid like that. Her folks tried 'asking' her to keep quiet, but in vain. If I were the parent, I wouldn't resort to words to get the job done. I'd be quick to toss her out of the train, preferrably off a bridge so that the chances of survival are grim and that there is no possibility of some unfortunate passerby having to find her and take her in. For most of the trip, I confined myself to my upper berth and thought of ways to get rid of the brat. I even thought of ways to get rid of the little brat just in case. You can be sure that he'll grow up to be just like his sister. I'd share those thoughts with you but it might end up being too graphic and is hence not appropriate for any age group at all. Luckily, there was a Malayali guy and his mom on their way to Calicut on the side berths. The guy's name was Nikhil and he'd just complete his twelth grade from KV Pattom and hence, I could open up a conversation with him. We talked about how crazy our batches at school were, about the people in Jaipur and a lot of other things. The blasted brats and their incompetent parents (after long last) got down at Madgaon the next evening. The train was running pretty late (five and a half hours to be precise) owing to an engine failure which happened close to an hour after it left Chiplun. I finally reached Shoranur junction at 7:00 AM on Sunday morning. After a wreched two hour long ride by bus, I finally reached home! Mom, Priyamma and Ammamma gave me a warm welcome with nice, long, crisp dosas and stew for breakfast. I mowed down six dosas.

Dial-up blows by the way. For signing into blogger and putting up this post, it took me no less than forty minutes.

Although it feels great to be visiting relatives and friends (after a long time!) I kind of wish I was back at college. Guess I got used to the hectic lifestyle I'd led back there. Hope my mom doesn't see this or I might get bludgeoned with a rolling pin or something. Cheers!

IV Sem: All good things must come to an end...

Well... It's been ages since I've put up a post here. A whole semester to be precise. I wouldn't attribute it to a lack of things to write about. That most certainly is not the case. I could have written about my resolutions (not for the weak hearted) or the golden night/freshers we gave our juniors. I could have even written about the new meaning to the phrase 'looking for *insert name here*' which I learnt on my birthday. I could have even written about our awesome road to clinching the 3^rd place in the IMS Quotient quiz: Jaipur finals. That was an awesome experience and I thank my team mates Kanjan and Abhinav Kumar for the same. Am I done yet? No ways. Then came along a decent performance (after a long long long LONG time) by me in the 1^st mid terms. But that spree didn't last long because I couldnt have got owned worse in the second MT or the end terms itself. I guess I'm halfway through to being an engineer now unless one of my teachers decides to leave me a 'you-can-rot-here-extra-time-during-the-summers' present. Moving on, I had a lot of fun interacting with the team from NIT-Trichy who'd come to our college as part of a project called NIT-Connect. The idea for the project was simple, but it's kind of surprising when you think WHY no one every thought of it before. It's nothing more than a mere webpage which serves as a common platform to all NIT's where each institution can put up news, photos and videos and interact with students and faculty from their sister institutions. The sad part was, they only wanted users from our side and not developers. And furthermore, their source code wasn't open. Kix kind of owned them when they mentioned that. Cheers man!

I guess I never blogged through all these months because I never had the time to do so. I don't know how, but I NEVER had any free time. This inspite of the fact that I cut down on gaming, hanging out with friends and a whole lot of other things. Perhaps, I was turning into a social outcast but fortunately, a certain lucky charm came along and I kind of snapped out of the blindness I was in. Thanks for everything Kay!

And how can I not write about the IIT-Roorkee trip? Although Cognizance wasn't even half as good as last year, it certainly came with its own moments. Of all the times they could get their project evaluations to get scheduled, the final years had to get their projects evaluated during the Chaos weekend. And hence, both our Dota teams got dissolved. Since I was planning to go for NFS:MW as well, Sat joined GaP and hence, my clan GoD, which is yet to be defeated, couldn't go to Roorkee. But unluckily for Sat, GaP got eliminated in the second round itself. Maybe they over estimated their opponents, we don't know. On the other side of the Chaos arena, I was having an awesome time with NFS:MW. I felt intimidated by some of the other participants, including a bunch who were last year's winner, runner-up and semi finalist, who carried around a little book in which they'd jotted down the best performance tunes for the Lotus Elise, the pro's choice. I'd never even tuned a car till date. But throught the tourney, I learned and made my way up the ladder. And the greatest moment of satisfaction for me, came when I was told that my games are being tracked and that I'm a seeded player! Talk about beginner's luck.

*WARNING: BRAG MODE ENABLED*

Beginner's luck my ass. I simply owned the competition. I ripped apart player after player. I'll even take some time to tell ya'll how awesome my competitive rounds were (rounds 4 and above). Round four was against a guy who insisted he played with his Xbox controller and be given headphones by the organizers. Ok, I can understand he needs his controller, but the headphones? When the organizer asked him how it's going to matter, he went on to say something about getting into the mood (???). They could only salvage one pair of headphones but when the race began, I simply left him trailing in my dust. Wonder if he got into the mood then. My split times were somewhere around 20 secs! (which means, if I stopped where I was, and he continued at his current speed, he'd take 20 seconds to reach me). In a racing game, thats comparable to the time we all took to evolve from apes. The 5^th round was similar with my opponent telling me how he's got better scores in Bay Bridge than the defending champion himself. Just before the race started, he did act kind of humble though. He told me that he's a fairly decent player and he can give me a good fight. Oh well, it didn't take me too long to beat him either. I could have called it a good fight IF I'd seen him on my screen for at least 2 seconds. But alas, he wasn't even on my minimap.

*yawn*

*END OF BRAG MODE*

Then came the 6^th round where I got owned by last year's runner up. Not too much to say here. N20 was disabled for the semi finals and I've never raced without that, so my strategy was ruined and hence...

Anyways, being in the top 4 ain't that bad is it?

On my return, followed a series of events which include a little chat conversation with Kay on the 1^st of April, a little message from her on the 11^th and finally another chat conversation on the 18th and guess what? We're going out... :p (I assure you the process was as boring and simple as I made it sound back there).

And that, was the cherry on top for my awesome semester.

I guess all good things must come to an end. So here I am, back to the server room, building up my Debian from scratch. Maybe I'll be a bit more regular with the posts now that I'll be spending the summer here working on the Campus Wide Network. In these two months, I'll be learning all the technicalities about networking while I go about setting up a DMZ for the CWN, and making high availability clusters for all our services. I've already made a cluster for the Netmon service of ours which seems to be doing fairly well. Anyways, I guess I'll start posting technical updates from now on.

Anyways, the summer heat wave awaits. Do wish me luck people.

So adios for now. Guess I'll go dig into the awesome mess food that awaits me. I'm sure you're all jealous. Suckers...

Hypocrisy

The reason I choose to turn this into my first blog entry, is because of the sheer amount of hypocrites I know personally, and otherwise. I fail to understand why people actually maintain double standards. I don’t think a public services officer who is to abide by the laws that he has sworn to protect, just isn’t supposed to be doing the straight opposite of the little sign in his office that says “Do not give or take bribes.” There’s hypocrisy for you, people. Now the corruption at the political stage isn’t the only true example of this my friends. Let’s move on to pretence over a more, wider scale.

Example number 1:
I belong to a country where a majority of the population are Hindus. I myself was born a Hindu. I say ‘born’ Hindu, because it didn’t take me too long to turn atheist. Steering the discussion back to the topic, I always couldn’t help but ponder over the fact that, in spite of having thousands and thousands of temples built in honour of goddesses in all forms, in spite of worshipping these very female deities for wealth, knowledge and what not, the plight of women in our country well…sucks? Why is it that in many parts of this beautiful land of the Aryans, regardless of the fact that females are being worshipped, atrocities like female foeticide and the torture of the girl child still takes place? Why is it that they are denied their basic right to education and schooling? Why is it that they are expected to remain confined to their homes and to simply service the men? Why is it that they don’t have a say in important (or rather all) matters regarding the household? To me, this is the saddest example of hypocrisy I can point out. Although anyone who’d be reading this might not have seen all this for themselves, it is true for a good part of our nation, for many of our fellow brethren who’re still living in the dark ages.

Example number 2:
Now didn’t Aishwarya and Hrithik get the shock of their lives when they were subpoenaed by some glory seeking loser just because they kissed on screen? Before I saw Dhoom 2, I was pretty much curious to see that shot myself. Heck, if a scene can generate that kind of hullabaloo… it’s got to be something else! And there I was, holding on to my popcorn, my mouth wide open telling myself “WTF?That’s it?!?” All this fuss over something like that? That’s obscene, indecent and dangerous to the youth? You can’t be serious! Is this some kind of a joke? Another famous example of ‘shitty cases’ was when Richard Gere was summoned to an Indian court for going all over Shilpa Shetty at some event. I wonder how our honorary courts have the time to entertain cases like these when there are murders, rapes and what not happening every minute or two on in this land. Shouldn’t they be going medieval on people who actually come up with cases like this? The only way I see it is that our courts need a break from all these serious cases. Everyone needs to relax and chill out? Don’t you think? Maybe the guy who decides the next hearing says something like “Hey guys, enough of murders… lets have some fun! How about a stupid-shitty case like this where we get to be on TV? Should we pick the Richard Gere one, or the Aish one?” And meanwhile look at all the bedlam Mallika Sherawat and some other hotties in the industry brought about for showing off a bit too much skin and pulling off some bold roles.

Now can anyone please tell me why the f*** is it that this country, where sex is a four letter word, somehow, has the 2nd largest population in the world? Ironic isn’t it?

My country is full of hypocrites. The place is littered with them. Check out my college for instance. There’s this person who literally cried and begged a teacher to get her marks increased, and when it seemed that her efforts were in vain actually coaxed the teacher into cutting down a more deserving guy’s marks instead(the most deserving one in the batch, actually). The same person complains a few months later about teachers giving away marks on the basis of impression. How very interesting. And its funny when I’m being called a CC by some of the most letcherous and perverted oafs in existence.

Man, this sucks.

But wait, the fact that I am writing this should imply that I am not a hypocrite isn’t it?

Isn’t it……?