Another day, another blog...

It's been just about 2 weeks since the exams ended, and as expected, I've been making several attempts to engage in the ancient and honored art known by the quaint Indian English term 'timepass'.

Unfortunately, attempts to practice this art for a prolonged period are inevitably cut short by various events, mostly due to the upcoming departure for the US. I still have plenty of time, just not enough to waste profitably. ;)

My visa interview was on Saturday. Went through without a hitch - only about one minute long, in fact. The painful part was waiting 2 hours for the bloody 1 minute.

Now busy trying to get other stuff arranged - need to find a place to live in Orlando, find a flight that isn't already booked, buy stuff, and so forth.

Speaking of buying, I was dragged off to Shopper's Stop yesterday to buy a bunch of clothes. To my great amazement, it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be. In fact, the ending was positively fun, when I found me a cool Tantra t-shirt, which read "Hard work pays off later. Laziness pays off now."

That's practically the motto of every CS grad student. B)

Got me a pair of cargos. Man, these things are a lot lighter than jeans. Perfect for this disgustingly humid weather, which I'll be encountering in Florida anyway.

TCO t-shirt just arrived! It looks incredibly awesome, but for some reason, it's one size too large. Which is odd, since my two Google Code Jam shirts fit perfectly.

I've been learning Lisp for the last few days. It's simply the most amazing programming language I have ever seen. Programs written as s-expressions, code and data melding seamlessly, programs writing more programs using the devastatingly powerful macro feature - it's like learning the language of the gods. I strongly recommend Peter Siebel's Practical Common Lisp. Very nicely written, and full of these incredible examples - MP3 database, ID3 parser, Shoutcast server, HTML generator and what not...

Also got back into the TC groove today. I've been neglecting that side of things ever since SRM 302. The last two matches have been tougher than usual, and I'm actually pleased I didn't take part. :D

My 3 MU TopCoder pals are off on internships - Nishant is now enjoying himself at Google, and vociferously advocating that I chuck the US plans and go there post haste. Vishwesh and Arijit are off in Hyderabad at Microsoft's India Development Center. We're all waiting to see how long Arijit waits before installing Ubuntu Linux 6 on a bunch of Microsoft machines.

Or worse - he might use Gentoo. :D

Congratulations are due to Nishant - he's been on a pretty good streak in the past few SRMs. For those who haven't been following along, he's now ranked number 1 in the country. Rock on, dude!

And he even gets to do the next few SRMs from the Google office. Lucky bastard...

Now, on to weightier matters... ;)

First off, it's my sister's birthday! Happy Birthday, sis! It's the last one we'll celebrate together for a while, so let's make this one to remember, eh?

Birthday present - I hereby introduce my sister's blog to the world: People - go here and wish her a happy birthday. Or else.

And let's give it up for Sharon and her new blog! Welcome to the blogosphere, girl! If the first post is anything to go by, this is gonna be pretty interesting. Note to prospective readers - don't make the mistake of praising Hyderabad in your comments...

So now, at one stroke, I've added not one but two females to my blogroll. Score one for gender equality...

And with that we come to the end of another dumb and uninspiring blog post by yours truly. Mostly because I'm not in the mood to write more stuff. Like Popeye once said "That's all I can stands - I can't stands no more!" (*Spinach eating fanfare*)

Btw, I've made a couple of minor changes here and there, and added emoticons. They're still slightly tacky, but I think they add a bit of expressiveness to the large reams of text I tend to spout...

Toodle-oo, people!

Freedom

It's finally over. Four years of the torture that is engineering have finally ended. And to all those who were expecting a certain cliche, no, it does not feel like just yesterday when I was a mere fresher wondering what the world of engineering had in store for me.

It's still difficult to get used to the freedom this entails. Strange feelings, which are only just beginning to sink in, even though it's been 3 days. Here are some of them:

There's a conspicuous lack of guilt about not studying for some exam, the sheer exhilaration of having no assignments to write, and the knowledge that those kind of exams and those weird assignments will never come again.

Bit of anxiety about what the future holds - visa interview on the 17th, skilling up with all the things I'll need to learn to survive on my own in the US, getting things set up properly. The odd combination of slight fear and confident expectation that comes from knowing that for the first time, you'll be going it completely alone, on the other side of the planet from the people who were always there earlier.

It's also suddenly sinking in that I basically have two more months with my family. After that, I'm not going to be seeing them for a long time.

You know what they say about absence making the heart grow fonder? The expectation of absence does that too.

On the other hand, it's still two whole months. Plenty of time to freak out and revel in the sheer joy of living for a bit.

I think I'll go and do some of that revelling now. :D

PS: GO BRAZIL!