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!