I've just got hold of a huge cache of music from my pal Rohan, who handed me his USB drive a couple of days back, so we could exchange cool stuff. And the greatest thing of all is the absolutely fantastic collection of Yanni's compositions, from 1987 to 2000. Probably not exhaustive, but enough to keep me occupied for weeks. There's nothing like Yanni for a nice afternoon of coding and general messing around. Doesn't distract you with words, and subtly improves your mood too. And all those incredible nuances in his music - it's astonishing that someone can even think of them.
Now Playing: If I could tell you, from the album of the same name.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I'm alive! I'm alive!
Incredible. Once again luck has chosen to favour me. And every other final year computer engineer in MU, of course. Our Multimedia Systems exam was actually easy. Looks like I spent the last four days worrying for no reason. Silly me.
To Satan - the deal's off, I want my soul back...
The next exam is 8 days from now, which is why I'm sitting up this late blogging. Not that I wouldn't be doing it if it was 4 days from now...
Currently listening to Ichibyo No Refrain. It's in Japanese, for all you music lovers. I heard it with the closing credits of Get Backers and thought it sounded good enough to download. Absolutely worth it, even if you don't understand Japanese. Especially all that nice female style Japanese pronunciation. Rather sexy, actually...Music is pretty rocking too.
I'm not really in the mood to produce another mammoth post, so I'll sign off for now. Ciao.
To Satan - the deal's off, I want my soul back...
The next exam is 8 days from now, which is why I'm sitting up this late blogging. Not that I wouldn't be doing it if it was 4 days from now...
Currently listening to Ichibyo No Refrain. It's in Japanese, for all you music lovers. I heard it with the closing credits of Get Backers and thought it sounded good enough to download. Absolutely worth it, even if you don't understand Japanese. Especially all that nice female style Japanese pronunciation. Rather sexy, actually...Music is pretty rocking too.
I'm not really in the mood to produce another mammoth post, so I'll sign off for now. Ciao.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Ladies and gentlemen - the worst textbook ever!
Multimedia Systems Design, by Andleigh and Thakrar, Prentice Hall India.
Disgusting.
Sickening.
Third rate pile of incomprehensible, disjointed, incoherent shitty nonsense.
And that ain't the half of it.
At some point between the 19th and 23rd of May, every single final year computer engineer of Mumbai University will open this terrible tome and be bodily plunged into a pool of miserable melancholia. Most of them are already six feet under and sinking fast. Some have already succumbed and are nothing more than brain dead zombies. Many of those who are not will be before the exam ends. Only the toughest will emerge with their sanity. Not a single one will emerge unscathed.
Yeah, the book is terrible. It's the worst piece of writing we MU engineers have ever seen, and we've seen books so bad they kill people. This crappy book goes off on tangents, wanders aimlessly around the point, repeats the same thing over and over, and then suddenly drowns you in a deluge of useless specifications and technical details. There is not a hint of a unifying principle anywhere.
To the insane idiots in charge of deciding what we budding engineers will learn - take my advice and jump in a dry well. Head first. Preferably with your asses on fire. You're so useless it's almost pathetic. What kind of dream world you inhabit is beyond me, but perhaps you should come down to earth and look at the stuff we're being taught, and just how royally you've screwed it up.
And for god's sake, read the textbooks you prescribe for us. Three times, at least. I don't care how much you suffer. It will save millions of engineering students a lot of pain. Your puny lives are worthless in comparison. Not that they weren't worthless to begin with.
Andleigh and Thakrar - we hate your book. It sucks so bad it's worse than quicksand.
And without further ado, back to work. It's a dirty job, but the bastards in charge don't give you a choice. I shall suffer silently now, keeping in mind the fact that soon, it will be over. I'll be rid of their painful meddling once and for all.
*Gives the finger to aforementioned bastards*
I would say good night, but we know that would just be a lie. Bad night, then. Make the best of it.
PS: I'm not overreacting. It really is that bad.
Disgusting.
Sickening.
Third rate pile of incomprehensible, disjointed, incoherent shitty nonsense.
And that ain't the half of it.
At some point between the 19th and 23rd of May, every single final year computer engineer of Mumbai University will open this terrible tome and be bodily plunged into a pool of miserable melancholia. Most of them are already six feet under and sinking fast. Some have already succumbed and are nothing more than brain dead zombies. Many of those who are not will be before the exam ends. Only the toughest will emerge with their sanity. Not a single one will emerge unscathed.
Yeah, the book is terrible. It's the worst piece of writing we MU engineers have ever seen, and we've seen books so bad they kill people. This crappy book goes off on tangents, wanders aimlessly around the point, repeats the same thing over and over, and then suddenly drowns you in a deluge of useless specifications and technical details. There is not a hint of a unifying principle anywhere.
To the insane idiots in charge of deciding what we budding engineers will learn - take my advice and jump in a dry well. Head first. Preferably with your asses on fire. You're so useless it's almost pathetic. What kind of dream world you inhabit is beyond me, but perhaps you should come down to earth and look at the stuff we're being taught, and just how royally you've screwed it up.
And for god's sake, read the textbooks you prescribe for us. Three times, at least. I don't care how much you suffer. It will save millions of engineering students a lot of pain. Your puny lives are worthless in comparison. Not that they weren't worthless to begin with.
Andleigh and Thakrar - we hate your book. It sucks so bad it's worse than quicksand.
And without further ado, back to work. It's a dirty job, but the bastards in charge don't give you a choice. I shall suffer silently now, keeping in mind the fact that soon, it will be over. I'll be rid of their painful meddling once and for all.
*Gives the finger to aforementioned bastards*
I would say good night, but we know that would just be a lie. Bad night, then. Make the best of it.
PS: I'm not overreacting. It really is that bad.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Once more unto the breach...
For some reason I've been finding it really hard to blog these days. Every time I decide to blog, it inevitably slips my mind or something else comes up, or I'm just not in the mood. Maybe it's just laziness. Anyway, I've broken out of that long enough to manage this post. As I write this line, I still have no idea what I'm going to talk about. Guess I'll just relax and let the words flow on their own. Apologies for any incoherent babble that might result.
First off, Google just offered me a job at their Bangalore office. With a pretty devastating pay package for a guy just about to graduate. Apparently I didn't screw up those interviews after all. What's really scary is that if I do take it, I'll end up getting paid anything from 3-8 times more than everyone in my class. That is just scary.
I never really expected to land a job at Google even before graduating - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - they're easily within reach(unless they get wind of your GRE score :D). But Google, as we all know, is in a league of its own.
Most of the credit goes to TopCoder - if I hadn't discovered them, I would never have reached the level of skill in CS(that's computer science, not Counter Strike) that I have now. Problem solving ability is fine, but each discipline has its own flavor of it, and I hadn't really seen the true nature of it until I started TopCoding. Ok, so it's a little unrealistic for real world stuff - code at breakneck speed, think even faster, and so forth. But you can't do any of that without knowing at least some CS, and the more you know, the better you get. Maybe that's why so many reds are in graduate school. It's the same box of tools, you're just building something different.
And speaking of grad school, that's the second thing. I now have to decide between going to Google, or going to the US and getting that PhD. The university of Central Florida actually offered me a doctoral fellowship(what were they thinking? ;) ), so it's equally attractive. And grad school really is my scene. I've been waiting to get into that kind of environment for years.
Not that Google is very different - as Alan Eustace said at the Google Code Jam tech talk "We aim for a university style environment, but our food is better".
To be perfectly honest, I've already decided what I'm going to do. Of course, being the sadist that I am, I'm gonna leave it hanging and keep you poor readers in suspense. Some of you already know, though, so please shut up.
The question that's really been going through my mind is "Why have I been so lucky the last few months?" It all started with the GRE, and TopCoder. That really seems to have been the magic lamp that brought out the genie, because I've been kicking ass ever since then. All this stuff - Code4Bill, the Google CodeJam, the fellowship, now this Google offer. It's like my life is charmed or something. I can still barely believe that it was me that did all this. If someone had told me that I'd do all this stuff 2 years ago, I'd probably have laughed in his face.
My gut feeling is that it has something to do with heightened confidence levels(after the GRE) and finding something(TopCoder in this case) that I'm really passionate about. People who aren't obsessed with something - take my advice and find an obsession now. There is no other way to live. Pay no attention to people who tell you to have a sense of proportion - that's for normal people. And normalcy is overrated. Find something you really love doing and life will fall over itself to help you out. At least it feels that way to me.
Of course, there's still going to be some terribly boring stuff that you'll have to do. Get it over with and get back to what you love, and inevitably you'll have one of those incredible moments of achievement which will make all the boring stuff fade away. It's those moments that you've got to live for. In the end, that's all that life is really about. (Yeah, I read a lot of Ayn Rand. And yes, she's right about this sort of thing)
In 4 days, it'll be time for the 8th semester exams - the final trial, and then an end to this bittersweet saga of engineering. It's been an interesting four years. Not always happy. But interesting. I've learnt quite a few lessons, though a disproportionate amount of them seemed to be about dumbness and stupidity - either about avoiding it in myself, or escaping the effects of it in others...
It's time I returned to studying System Security. This time I shall make no promises about when I'll blog again, because they inevitably end up being broken. Public opinion helps, though. Toodle-oo.
First off, Google just offered me a job at their Bangalore office. With a pretty devastating pay package for a guy just about to graduate. Apparently I didn't screw up those interviews after all. What's really scary is that if I do take it, I'll end up getting paid anything from 3-8 times more than everyone in my class. That is just scary.
I never really expected to land a job at Google even before graduating - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - they're easily within reach(unless they get wind of your GRE score :D). But Google, as we all know, is in a league of its own.
Most of the credit goes to TopCoder - if I hadn't discovered them, I would never have reached the level of skill in CS(that's computer science, not Counter Strike) that I have now. Problem solving ability is fine, but each discipline has its own flavor of it, and I hadn't really seen the true nature of it until I started TopCoding. Ok, so it's a little unrealistic for real world stuff - code at breakneck speed, think even faster, and so forth. But you can't do any of that without knowing at least some CS, and the more you know, the better you get. Maybe that's why so many reds are in graduate school. It's the same box of tools, you're just building something different.
And speaking of grad school, that's the second thing. I now have to decide between going to Google, or going to the US and getting that PhD. The university of Central Florida actually offered me a doctoral fellowship(what were they thinking? ;) ), so it's equally attractive. And grad school really is my scene. I've been waiting to get into that kind of environment for years.
Not that Google is very different - as Alan Eustace said at the Google Code Jam tech talk "We aim for a university style environment, but our food is better".
To be perfectly honest, I've already decided what I'm going to do. Of course, being the sadist that I am, I'm gonna leave it hanging and keep you poor readers in suspense. Some of you already know, though, so please shut up.
The question that's really been going through my mind is "Why have I been so lucky the last few months?" It all started with the GRE, and TopCoder. That really seems to have been the magic lamp that brought out the genie, because I've been kicking ass ever since then. All this stuff - Code4Bill, the Google CodeJam, the fellowship, now this Google offer. It's like my life is charmed or something. I can still barely believe that it was me that did all this. If someone had told me that I'd do all this stuff 2 years ago, I'd probably have laughed in his face.
My gut feeling is that it has something to do with heightened confidence levels(after the GRE) and finding something(TopCoder in this case) that I'm really passionate about. People who aren't obsessed with something - take my advice and find an obsession now. There is no other way to live. Pay no attention to people who tell you to have a sense of proportion - that's for normal people. And normalcy is overrated. Find something you really love doing and life will fall over itself to help you out. At least it feels that way to me.
Of course, there's still going to be some terribly boring stuff that you'll have to do. Get it over with and get back to what you love, and inevitably you'll have one of those incredible moments of achievement which will make all the boring stuff fade away. It's those moments that you've got to live for. In the end, that's all that life is really about. (Yeah, I read a lot of Ayn Rand. And yes, she's right about this sort of thing)
In 4 days, it'll be time for the 8th semester exams - the final trial, and then an end to this bittersweet saga of engineering. It's been an interesting four years. Not always happy. But interesting. I've learnt quite a few lessons, though a disproportionate amount of them seemed to be about dumbness and stupidity - either about avoiding it in myself, or escaping the effects of it in others...
It's time I returned to studying System Security. This time I shall make no promises about when I'll blog again, because they inevitably end up being broken. Public opinion helps, though. Toodle-oo.
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