Looking back…

DynamiX Clan (Dec 2006)

There was one time when I was at school you know.. and I met two interesting guys called Roshan Shariff & Rahul Seth (in different ways.. Roshan because of an Intel project we did together, and Rahul ‘coz of one SchoolNet Website competition.. then me and Rahul jointly started and ran an online media portal called Big-Anda.com for a while). And before long we all met up and one thing led to the other and we setup up a Computer & IT Club/Klan called “DynamiX”! We were basically fed up with the lack of anything being done at school for identifying and encouraging talented students in the field of computers. The teachers had this attitude that our school wasn’t any good in computers, and that we didn’t have students here good at computers. We thought differently. My reasoning was that it physically wasn’t possible for them to know each and every student in the school and also know whether they’re any good at computers, or any particular field. So we decided to go deep among the students, of almost all classes and spot people with talent, and people with an aptitude for computers and a desire to grow and do things differently!

We had immense support from our Principal, Mrs. Meera Balachandran, and basically were permitted to do whatever it takes to get it running. We started off with Mr. Umakant Pandey as our chief mentor, who was the faculty in-charge of the Intel Lab, soon re-christened “The DynamiX Labs”. The rest was quite a rush, recruiting students, getting them to work, getting ourselves to work, competiting at the tech fests of many other schools (and winning several of them! ) and holding our own events & fests.

My point is that even though our fests never really played up to our expectations and planning, personally I have grown a lot as an organizer, manager as well as team-player, and the experience I gained due to DynamiX has been invaluable in my college life, ‘coz when we read about managing events, managing people, working in teams, division of labor.. for most of the folks here its just theory, whereas I can actually relate to it from my personal experiences and be better at organizing and working in teams.

Anyway, this post was just a bit of remiscence of my time at school and my “DynamiX Days”, and was sparked by the recently concluded (and very successful) “DynamiX 2007″, one that was almost entirely organized by the young talents (that the school believed didn’t exist before DynamiX started) with help from Rahul & Anshu. Kudos to the new DynamiX team!

Shashank

GOing in Boeing...

Just recounting some experiences of yesterday morning.. when I was fooling around inside the New Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport, and I ran into some unexpected expected trouble. :-)

Before anything, I must complain about the names that our airlines have been taking.. we started out with Indian Airlines and Air India. Now we have Spice, Deccan Airlines, Indian, Jet Airways, Kingfisher airways, Go Airlines, IndiGo Airlines, and whatnot.

Predictions for the next few airlines: Jet -> AirJet, TailJet, Jet-on-the-left-wing, Jet-on-the-right-wing, Cinnamnon Airlines, RedChilli, GreenChilli, Go -> GetLost, Exit Airlines, Jump-out-of-the-plane Airlines, and what not..

Anyway.. First of all, I "unconciously" skipped the luggage X-Ray, and full credit to our Indian Government that I did not get lynched by CIA-lookalike Men in Blacks. I was politely told by the check-in staff to get the X-ray done and then return. Great! It already felt wierd.. everybody was polite to the point of exhaustion... all these guys were really out to please everyone, can't figure out what everybody was so happy about. Anyway, X-ray done (needless to mention that it was inside a small cramped enclosure inside a HUGE HUGE hall [with those wierd Police DO-NOT-CROSS tapes enclosing the four sides] ), and I obviously found it hard to steer the trolley outside that HUGE 8x8 ft enclosure-inside-the-HUGE-HUGE-hall. So I was trying to exit when the X-ray guy caught my eye (or my hair which nowadays protects my eyes), and asked my to X-ray my bag (very politely of course). I said, "I have to Go to get my check-in done", and he politely shouted above the din, "You travelling by "Go Airlines"? This is not the X-ray for Go Airlines!".. and I tried to convince him that I wasn't travelling by "Go" airlines, I was merely GOing to the check-in counter. Only me pulling out my SpiceJet ticket convinced him of my honesty.. which left him wondering why I claimed to be travelling by Go Airlines earlier. Honestly...

Delhi being Delhi, I had to wait in a very LONG queues, find space in the lobby just to exist, and then catch the Bus to the plane a.l.a. DTC city buses.. stamping on others and trying to find space, yet again, just to exist.

Plane was uneventful, except that I accidentally kept pressing the "Assistance required" button each time I wanted to switch on the Light switch.. which led to the airhostesses finally giving up on me, tired of walking upto me and politely asking me for the nth time if I needed help, only to found out that I had a bad sense of button-direction. :-) I must mention though, the AirHostesses could do with a little less make-up.. they look so 'white' that they remind me of Ozzy Osbourne in his concerts.

Rest of the journey from Bangalore to Vellore (in train now) passed uneventfully too, except I kept getting woken up in the train that by adventurous cockroaches that crawled up my sleeve or worse, my pant. Lots of fun...

I know, the worst sort of thing to keep the blog active is to post the description of a journey, rather than some philosophical Point-of-View which will cause even serene white-haired wise old men to jump out of their skins uttering "Blasphemy!". Really cheap trick I know..

So here I pronounce my philosophical, anatomical and spiritual Point-of-View: Michael Jackson is a man.

About suspension threats and selections..

Been a while since my previous post, and for general information, the raiding party of CAM exams are here again.. :-( Start on the coming Tuesday.

As the title suggests, suspension threats are not related to the engineering suspension mechanisms, but basically administrative suspensions, where you're chucked out of the hostel/college etc.. :-) So me and 15 guys got one hostel-suspension threat for an "extended" birthday party which was held at 3 in the morning.. story goes something like this:

A guy had his birthday (obviously), and it started around 8 PM in quite a subdued manner i.e. an SMS message chain through the hostel about getting free ladoos etc to whoever give him birthday bumps at 12 midnight. That was sort of started in my room, with me having a substantial role in its creation and spreading.. :-) That guy could only watch helplessly as message after message poured into his cell regarding confirmations. Heh. Basically we all get a special Airtel Students' Pack with 100 SMSes free *everyday*, so the messages spread really fast. Now at 12 midnight, we all landed at his room, and he got his share of birthday bumps, which for some inexplicable reason ended up with giving him friendly kicks on the butt, while hanging in mid-air him with two guys holding his arms and legs. This wasn't really anything "hooliganistic", and something even the Birthday Boy enjoyed. But since it had rained really heavily that night, and we had given the bday bumps in the badminton court and ensured that he landed perfectly in the slime and puddles, we all later decided that he had to be given a bath. This means that the victim is locked inside the shower cubicles with his clothes on, and water is thrown from the other cubicles in calculated projectile motions. :-) This was where things began to spin out of control, since nearly 15 guys cramped inside a small 12 cubicle bathroom and naturally the din and noise wasn't small. The trouble came with the fact that the shower cubicle-room is right next to the Warden's room, and in the spur of the moment when the warden-room's light came on, in anxiety that bday boy also ran back to his room like the rest of us, the only difference being that he was dripping wet and wet the entire ground floor as he ran. This provided a natural trail to his room, and the warden is no fool. Soon he was being asked to "prove" that it was his birthday (haha), and demands of how his friends came to know of his bday (sheesh!) etc. That was indeed quite a lot of foolish questions on the part of the warden, but anyway, we were all called out and threatened with suspension from the hostel.

Story would have ended, but the fools we are, we resumed his bday party after coming back from classes at 1 PM the next day! Started with a very simple cake-cutting "Happy Birthday to you" chanting ceremony, turned into a cake-smearing fight, and soon another water-fight which started with one guy launching an entire bucket of water on me in front of my room . I retaliated with a bottle of chilled water, and soon World War III was on with the rest joining in. The guard obviously caught us all.. all unrecognizable in our cream-smeared faces and dripping bodies, and threatened to inform the warden. But he was sort of enjoying our party, so he told us to do the water fights only in the bathrooms, and not outside the rooms in the corridors, and we finally decided to end the really memorable "extended" birthday party before we all got kicked out of VIT. :-)

Whew... as for the second thing, I got selected to the IEEE Executive Board.. one of the 7 people who made it through the interview of about 100 odd. The sad part was that I had to quit ISTE to do so, because of clashing domains and difficulty in attention-management.

Now I must scramble back to my, now dry, room and prepare for the CAMs.. this time I'm really screwed. Started preparing just 3 days ago.

And... one more post!

I really must change the pattern of naming my posts I've started developing... one more, and yet another, and another.. sheesh!

Ahem, it appears that *trumpets sound*, my CAM exam results are out. Well, almost, since our History paper, which I think went quite well, has been neglected in the hustle of other papers, and no-one finally got their History marks. The others... ah.

I need to start a new paragraph to describe them. Maths was devastated, English quite catastrophic, Chemistry measures 100 on the Richter scale.. total devastation, and Physics apparently good... atleast topped the class in physics. Need I give my marks? Let me start with what gives me some relief, Physics with 43/50, which makes me the topper in Physics. Don't get too many ideas, take a look at the other papers... Chemistry is 34/50, English 33/50 (a low scoring paper, I think I have the 5th highest or something in a class of 130), Maths is 42/50 (devastated, as I previously mentioned). The overall total puts me probably in the contention for the top 15, if I'm lucky in the top 10 out of 130. The top 10 guys get some good cash as a reward, which might allow me to go and splurge something on the excellent coffee I can get around here. But that's like a distant dream.. not sure. None of us know our exact standings, and History marks will be the deciding factor. I did the paper fine, but so were the rest. F**king!

So now that I have "wasted" a paragraph on CAM results, I have nothing much to say. Life is as such boring and hectic. Same old jobs to be done for getting the events up and running, except unlike the earlier times in school when I used to allot jobs to people and coordinate the event, here in college, as the first year, I'm given jobs to be done, and mostly the routine mundane stuff like making the brochures, banners, sticking them around the campus, getting more recruits, etc.... all stuff that event administrators love to give.. (I used to take sadistic pleasure in giving them to hapless juniors in my days.. hehehe). Talking of a full circle eh?!

The real interesting thing that I used to do, The Band, is currently not reachable, because all my "band-mates" have gone off since its TechWeek and therefore one week devoted to competitions without any classes or attendance. Infact, 90% of first years are off, and my hostel block is like a graveyard. I'm therefore going to get an experience of staying in a 6-bed room converted to a single bed for one whole week. Ah.. the whole room to my will! The hostel is really empty now, infact no-one screamed and threw dustbins from the 5th floor when the power went off, which proves that this hostel seriously needs more people.
Cya, more later..

Here I am, with a post again

So here I am, with yet another post.

"Just to inform you, I have a chemistry exam tomorrow and have got quite a substantial portion left, and the time as of now is 10:20 PM, and if I start working on it now, I'll probably finish at 3 AM, and the exam is at 8 AM. We have 5 exams in a row, from Monday to Friday, and tomorrow's the second last, and though I have been sleeping at 2:30 AM - 3 AM for the past three days, this neglect of studies to waste time due to sheer boredom is a first for me in VIT. Have done this before, but... "

and so my mind goes back to the beginning of the loop. *Beep* I'm damn bored. I never liked studying for exams.

Basically, I've been busy studying, trying to fit in ISTE and Phreak 2006 work when I can, and jamming with a *band-mate* in his room with an acoustic guitar. I recently hit on to a cool guitar riff (progression of chords that can form the backbone of the song and are repeated through the song) while messing around with the guitar, and soon I wrote an entire song based on the tune along with the lyrics. The song's called "Bogeyman/The Devil's all I got". Its a nice, slow and depressing song about an outlaw, though it might be time before we actually set about practising it seriously. Presently, its just a personal item. :-) We're planning to start practising "We Rule the Night" by Bon Jovi soon, infact within a few days once these bloody exams finish.

I think I really need to study how Municipal Water is treated, so will write more soon.

Finally another post..

Alright, its been quite a while since my last post, but I had warned you of these "disappearing acts" in my very first blog post. :-) Though this time, it wasn't really a disappearing act which occurs due to boredom, but I have been really busy getting adjusted to the new college life. For information, I have joined Vellore Institute of Technoloy (site) with Comp. Sci and Engg., which is quite a good institute in terms of infrastructure and facilities. The campus is really big and nice, though that means that there is an enormous amount of walking to do to just get from the classrooms to the labs. The library is one entire 4-floor building, and it has something called a Digital Library also along with paper books, you can figure out the meaning of that.

We're going to have our first round of exams in just a week now, from 21st August to 26th, to be more precise.

I've been busy studying, designing sites for the various student-chapters of prominent organizations (Check out ISTE. Open the board members' page), and trying to find members for my rock band. This is the real interesting part. I have found most of the required members for a basic band, and we'll begin jamming together after 1st semester when we all go back to our homes and get our instruments. There are some really great student bands here in VIT, really talented ones. You can hear them jamming really hard every evening-night from 5:30 PM to 11:30 PM in the music room.

This is all for now, will blog more later, and try to pick up the threads of the blog again. I just don't get the time to blog anymore.. never did anyway, but now its even less.

Interesting observations..

I was just poking around my webstat interface, and I found this script that tells me the search engines people have used to reach my blog directly, and the keywords they used. I was quite surprised to note that nearly 30% of the traffic I get is because people land up on my blog while searching for variants of the keyword: "BITSAT 2006 cutoff". Its surprising because my blog contains absolutely no information about BITSAT cut offs or anything. Then I remembered my post about my experience of giving the BITSAT-06 in Noida (Remember the post: Marooned with a computer in Noida?). Quite funny, the search engines of today still have a long way to go before achieving decent relevance-rating. Oh and the Webstat interface also confirmed one thing: Google is the No. 1 search engine, since people have used only Google to reach to my site.
Now, I'll be a little smart. Since it is driving traffic to this blog, I'll actually put up the real cut-offs for BITS and some info. ;-)

The First-Iteration cut-off mark for 2006 is 317. The people above 280 are in the first-iteration waiting list. So this year the cut-offs appear to have gone higher. I have heard that last year's first-iteration cut-off mark was 290 or something. The next three iterations went at 260, 250 and 245.

The last seat at BITS Pilani last year went at 252 (MSc. Bio) and in BITS Goa at 245 (MSc. Bio), and Computer Science at Pilani went at 351. Engineering finished in Pilani at 301 (Civil) and in Goa at 289 (Chem).