.: Sabarish :.

Moving on...

2006-01-29T00:31:00.000-08:00

Just to inform you that

I have built my own website and it is located at http://sabarish.net

also this blog has moved to http://sabarish.net/blog

and my feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Sabarish

The new site has a lot more content than just the blog -

Home ¦ Blog ¦ Photos ¦ Photoblog ¦ Archives ¦ Contact

See you there!

This blog has moved...

2006-01-12T23:39:00.000-08:00

I have now pretty much moved out of blogger and into wordpress.

My blog is now http://sabarish.net/blog

My new feed address is http://sabarish.net/feed/

Goodbye blogger. It was good while it lasted!

Thats my life in the year 2005

2006-01-10T08:17:00.000-08:00

This blog post was due a lot earlier, but I was going through an Internet connectivity problem then and couldnt post this. Anyway this a brief recap of how the year 2005 was for me, month-wise.

January: I spent most of this month preparing for my 7th semester exams. Also gave a session at National Public School, Indiranagar. I won a USB drive in the MDC Bloggers Contest.

February: Quite an eventful month. Attended the Aero India show with Sharath, Sunil and Sashikiran. Went to Manipal Insitute of Technology, Manipal and NITK (formerly REC), Surathkal to deliver sessions on Microsoft .NET, thanks to Rohan for inviting us and arranging for the seminars. Started planning for anaadyanta (college fest at NMIT). Qualified for the zonal finals of the Software Design invitational in the Microsoft Imagine Cup! I got my broadband connection from BSNL.

March: BDotNETStudent celebrated it's first anniversary at the Birthday Bash with B.NET group at PESIT! 7th semester results were announced and thanks to all my prayers to all the Gods - I cleared all subjects! Planning for anaadyanta, work for Imagine Cup and project work at Perot Systems continued.

April: I got a new Canon Powershot A400 digicam. My college fest anaadyanta was held and was a resounding success! I was awarded the Microsoft Student Ambassador Award at a function held at Hotel Rama!

May: The academic phase of my life comes to an end and we have our college farewell party at The Country Club. We also had our farewell ceremony "Au-Revoir" from the CS & IS department at college. Our class students along with the ISE students gave our teachers a party to say Gracias. Our team failed to qualify for the national finals for the Imagine Cup at the zonal finals held in Chennai. Project trainee phase at Perot Systems comes to an end. Date with .NET v3.0 a technical fest conducted by us at BDotNETStudent is held at RNSIT. I write my 8th and final semester exams.

June: I shifted my house to Old Madras Road near C.V.Raman Nagar and moved out Malleshwaram, where I had been pretty much all my life. Went to Tirupathi with Sashi, Bhargav and Seena and had a great darshan of Lord Balaji. I also joined work at Perot Systems and training on Microsoft technologies commences. Passing the Baton is held at Microsoft GTSC office, which is my last day as manager of the Bangalore .NET Student user group and the Microsoft Student champ program in the Microsoft Academic Developer Program. The baton was passed to Sunil, Sharath, Garima, Ranganath and some more student champs. Business communication training is conducted at Perot Systems.

July: I get my 8th and final semester results and having cleared all subjects with a decent score, I have now positively completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering!

August: I turned 22. Kartik Reddy visits Bangalore and we go to Nandi Hills with Kannan. Training comes to an end at Perot Systems and our batch (TIP 2005 .NET Batch 1) is taken to ECC for various team building exercises. I clear my Microsoft Certification exam in Developing and Implementing Web Applications with C# and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. All of us from the TIP 2005 batch from office went on a trip to Bheemeshwar.

September: I cleared my second Microsoft certification exam on Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition. I took a sesion on C#.NET at the Student Partner training held at MSRIT. Allocated to an SAP project at work. Resource management group is confident of getting me into a .NET project soon, so I let Bhargav take my place and I back out of the SAP project and join the 'bench' to wait for the .NET project.

October: No project yet at office and so I watched more movies and read more books and went out to meet my friends more than I used to do over a full semester or two in college. Perot Systems pre-annual day celebrations begin and many events are conducted. I participated in quite a few events and won prizes in Tom, Dick and Harry (1st) ; Poster making (2nd) and Mad Ads (2nd). It rains cats and dogs in Bangalore. Roads and other infrastructure go for a toss. Perot Systems annual day postponed due to rains. Met with some close friends from Nitte. Celebrated Navrathri and kept "kolu" at home.

November: We get news that we may have to go to Noida or Pune on project work for 4 - 6 months. But the project does not get confirmed, so bench life continues. More books and more movies. I complete one year of blogging! Ethnic Day celebrations held at office.

December: Still no project in sight. Movie and book marathons continue. I attend the Bill Gates: Ready Launch tour of Visual Studio.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Decision to rename Bangalore to Bengaluru taken by government. Kannan and I decide to visit Kartik Reddy in Switzerland. Visited Mumbai with Kannan and had one amazing and unforgettable day. Swiss visa denied due to winter season and our profile falling in the high risk category! Kannan and I decide to go far east, but Swiss embassy delays in returning our passports so all travel plans scrapped. Visited relatives in Chennai after a long time. Partied like crazy the whole last week of the year. Finally got allocated to a project on 30th December, thanks to Chaitanya.

That pretty much sums up my 2005. It was quite an interesting one. Lots of changes and new experiences. I wonder how 2006 will be?!

Vaikunta Ekadashi

2006-01-10T08:02:00.000-08:00

A major festival of south India. The Vaikunta Dwara is opened in the temple on this day. Thousands of devotees pass through this gate on this day to get special mercy of Lord Srinivasa Govinda. Lord Srinivasa Govinda receives a gorgeous bathing ceremony and special alankara or decoration this day with sparkling jewels.

Was a good day overall. I went to a Krishna Temple in CMH Road, Indiragar in the evening and had a good darshan of the Lord on this auspicious day. Met a close friend after a long time, although for a very brief amount of time. And finally the day was made when my cousin brother called up from the US of A. When I wrote my earlier blog post about the new domain, I knew he would contact me after reading that and sure enough he did! Although I didn't expect a phone call and free hosting space I did expect him to try and convert me to wordpress and offer help with my website development! Thanks anna!

www.sabarish.net

2006-01-10T00:35:00.000-08:00

I finally got myself my own domain sabarish.net and have moved my blog to my own hosting server.

My new website http://www.sabarish.net/ - it is still under construction. And presently only this blog is up and running there. Soon I should have photo galleries and a tech blog and lot more stuff.

~~The new blog address is http://blog.sabarish.net~~

~~The new feed address is: http://blog.sabarish.net/atom.xml~~

Kindly update your bookmarks and RSS readers.

Sorry for the inconvenice. As they say in Kannada - "Swalpa adjust maadi!"

Update:

My blog is now http://sabarish.net/blog

My new feed address is http://sabarish.net/feed/

Broadband-less and party-full

2006-01-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

The year so far hasn't been good as far as Internet access is concerned. My broadband connection at home conked out for some reason about 2 weeks back and so I couldn't do much surfing/blogging/"flickr"ing/chatting/etc...these past few days, as a result of which I have a whole lot of photos to upload and also a whole lot of experiences to share and blog about, not to mention emails to catch up and reply to. I used to manage by checking my mail using my old modem and a dial-up connection. Good Lord! I had forgotten how pathetic the Internet connections were before the arrival of broadband and this temporary dependence on dial-up brought back some old, slow memories!

The week leading upto New Year's eve was one long party! I went out every single day and night and met a whole lot of friends and did a whole lot of fun stuff! That week, I went bowling four times (once at 10 in the morning straight out of bed); another day we went to Fun World (of all the places!) and freaked out on the amusement rides after a long time; I also went for two movies (Apaharan at PVR in Forum mall and Chicken little at INOX in Garuda mall - incidentally it was my first visit to either multiplex); I had dinner with friends at restaurants pretty much all the evenings and a couple of days I even had lunch outside; I also partied at a friend's (Aditya) place, his parents had invited some of us over for a barbecue dinner (yes there were vegetarian dishes also!) followed by a night long party that went on till 6 AM the next day!

That pretty much was a summary of that incredible week, and how did it all culminate on New Year's eve? Well, I spent it quietly at home with my parents and cousins!

Back to the Internet issue. The telephone guys came today and repaired the connection and now I am back online. It feels great to be connected to the Internet again. It felt kinda weird to be offline (or irregularly online) for such an extended period of time! Anyway, now that I am properly connected again, expect to see a flurry of activity in my blog with a whole lot of posts coming up shortly.

Goodbye 2005!

2005-12-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!!

Goodbye 2005 and

Welcome 2006!

Bangalore vs other metros

2005-12-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've been kinda busy and haven't been online much and have actually lost touch with some friends whom I regularly kept in touch with online. More on all the work I was doing in a later blog post.

I spent the last two weekends at two metro cities - the first at Mumbai and the last one at Chennai. I had some great experiences at both cities and will be blogging more about them in the coming blog posts.

I did notice a few things about these cities and compare them with Bangalore, below -

1. Local train/metro system - This was such a blessing and so convenient. I did most of my traveling in the trains at Chennai, and best part - no traffic jams! The rates were so cheap - I was shocked to see the train ticket cost Rs. 8/- for a two-way ticket that was almost Rs. 70/- one-way at the pre paid auto stand! When will the Bangalore metro go live? I hope it's not too far away.

2. Better roads - The roads were in a much better condition to a large extent and though there were bad patches and potholes the ratio of good roads to bad roads was much better and higher than in Bangalore. The roads were also much wider in these cities than in Bangalore.

3. More flyovers and underpasses - there were lots of these - cleverly planned and quickly constructed, at the busy junctions and over/under railway lines, thereby providing for un-interrupted travel. This is so needed in Bangalore where there are way too many intersections and traffic signals and where the construction pace is as slow as the traffic jams themselves.

4. Much bigger - the other cities are so much bigger, especially Mumbai - it was huge! Everything seemed so far away, but ofcourse thanks to the good local transport system distance was covered quickly. I shudder to think of such distances in Bangalore without a decent local mass transport system.

5. Night life - Need I say anything about the pathetic 11 PM shut down of Bangalore? I was embarrassed to talk about this in the other cities, where such restrictions don't seem to apply or are atleast better and at a later more understandable time.

6. Taxis - Mumbai seems to have more taxis than any other vehicle. Bangalore on the other hand has tons of autos and only has the call taxis, and not like the taxis in Mumbai.

7. Auto - Mumbai autos were fine, in that they atleast went by the meter, like in Bangalore and so unlike Chennai, where the meter is just a fashion accessory!

8. Weather - this was probably the only area where Bangalore scores better, but in the larger context it doesn't seem to be much of a factor. I think people would rather stay in a hot and humid city with good infrastructure than a place like Bangalore where they'll end up sweating in the long traffic jams anyway.

I will update this post as and when I think of more points for the above comparison.

"Bangalore" got "Bengaloorued"!

2005-12-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

The Government of Karnataka has now decided to rename the city from Bangalore to Bengalooru. While this is good for local sentiments and culture preservation, etc. I wonder what difference it is going to make to anything? 'Nothing' is my guess.

Today, I had to drive down to Jayanagar from Whitefield and it was really horrible. The distance of 24.9 kilometres took me 1 hour and 55 minutes (yes, I timed it and checked the distance of the drive) - that roughly works out to an average speed of 12 kilometres an hour, which is pathetically slow! The worst part of the drive was that there are some obvious bottleneck spots along the route, which are easily solvable, but no government has bothered to do anything about it. Anyway enough has been said about the bad roads/traffic/footpaths/general-infrastructure conditions here in Bangalore (it officially becomes 'Bengalooru' only in Nov 2006), in various blogs and newspapers.

Is the name change going to make our journeys any better? Is the infrastructure going to get any better? Are Kannada organizations going to get any benefit? Are we going to be proud of a name change at a time when the city is struggling on so many fronts?

I was just thinking about the cost factor involved in this whole process and realized so many things will be affected. Right from maps to legal documents to sign boards to train/bus boards to events to brandings to brochures to any and every thing associated with 'Bangalore', every thing is going to be affected and the government and private organizations are going to spend a whole lot of money on this process of re-painting, re-printing, re-branding, etc. etc.

And after reading the papers, I don't think it will stop at Bangalore. Already we hear reports of many other cities (Mysore, Belgaum, Shimoga, Mangalore to name a few) being considered for name changes. Being a highly political subject, where will this end?

I know this is a very touchy and sensitive topic, but a simple decision like a name change is not as simple as it looks and is going to cost a whole lot of money, which can be used elsewhere, like developing some local Kannada culture groups (who can surely use the money for cultural activities or other forms of culture development) or giving scholarships to poor Kannadiga students or even just developing the roads (which is surely going to benefit us all)

Anyway my conclusion is - it will be ok if the name is changed now, but it will be really great if the name is changed at a time when Bangalore is flying high after solving all (or atleast most) of its existing basic problems. That way the changed name will reflect a new, clean, efficient and proud city, rather than one down in the dumps. I can picture that historic moment - Bangalore going through a radical change - infrastructure in good shape, traffic and roads in good condition, the metro up and running, airport ready in record time...all this is doable with efforts put in the right direction rather than just on cosmetic effects.

Only then will the city be truly worthy of such an important name change and then all its citizens will feel very proud of 'Namma Bengalooru'.

Exposing ourselves on the Internet

2005-12-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

The web is quite a different entity now, compared to how it was a couple of years back. One can do so much on the net today, apart from emails and searching for information, we can now socialize, auction, shop, earn, blog, SMS, share photos, etc. Everyday more websites spring up, offering some new feature and service for hungry surfers.

There are way too many sites, where it is almost mandatory to become a member these days. Some examples are orkut, hi5, yahoo! 360, sms.ac, flickr, del.icio.us, blogger, technorati, birthday alarm, etc. etc. It is a major pain to remember the usernames and passwords for all these sites and sometimes its easy to forget even which site we registered in! We end up registering and not visiting some of these sites. Or we post a query in some community and forget all about it the next day!

One thing that is common to all of these sites is that it exposes us further. Through every one of these sites, we are revealing more and more of ourselves to the world. I wonder what makes us want to scream out loud "I'm alive! Look at me" through these sites?! It is so easy to find out the entire life history of a person, including photos and info about their schools, colleges, parents, friends, company, holidays, etc., on the web, through some proper searches.

Why do we have a hit counter (or two or three) to check the number of visitors to our blog or website and feel happy to see that someone, somewhere is reading about us? Why do we feel happy to see a comment or two in our blogs? Why do we upload our private photos to flickr and let people around the world see them? Why do we blog or have a website in the first place?

Most people seem to have more of a life online than offline. People tend to be more open and expressive on the world wide web, than their own homes.

It's as if we are almost afraid that we will be lost and forgotten and more frightening is the fact that all of us seem to be very lonely nowadays. The days and nights that we spend feeling truly lonely seems to be increasing, inspite of being active on all these sites and making new friends every day!

The net has become a very addictive place for most of us and seems to give us a better high than anything else. It is almost as if we are given a new life online and we are neglecting more and more of our offline lives!

And with more and more companies starting to focus more of their research and development on the new web, more online services are coming up that is only going to increase our dependence on the Internet. I don't know if it is good or bad to be so dependent on something that is not even real, a big virtual world.

Neal 'n' Nikki & Naked Guns

2005-12-10T02:26:00.000-08:00

Like I mentioned in the previous blog post. Yesterday wasn't over as yet, Sunil, Ranga, Sharath and myself made more plans for the rest of the day. We thought of going for a movie and decided to go for Neal 'n' Nikki.

Sunil and Sharath came to my place by around 8:15 PM and waited for Ranga, but he unfortunately lost his way and so we decided to meet him at Inovative Multiplex itself. So once again at around 9:30 PM we went to the same hotel as last time and had our dinner before dashing next door to the theatre just before 10 PM.

The movie was quite ok. It was very sweet and sexy (although a tad too sexy!), just like Nikki sings in the title track. The movie has some its cliched moments and traces the life of Neal, who wishes to have some fun and 'action' before he gets married in 21 days time. His goal is to meet 21 women in 21 days (or rather nights), but runs into a drunk Nikki on the first night itself, who from then on manages to turn up at all the wrong moments for Neal and spoil his 'action' plans! Nikki is this sweet, naughty and very sexy female (who dresses up like that on a daily basis?!). There was this one scene in the movie (a spoof of DDLJ) where she wears a salwar and all of us were shocked that she had worn so much!

Anyway after this short and fun movie, we returned to my place and since it was only 12:15 AM, and the night was still young, we thought of seeing some more movies! We thought of seeing the rest of the hilarious Naked Gun series and saw first The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and then Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. Both were awesome comedy and we laughed, literally, rolling on the floor!!

Thus came to end a very interesting day, first with the Bill Gates launch tour and then the movies!

Bill Gates: Ready Launch Tour

2005-12-09T20:44:00.000-08:00

I attended the launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006 yesterday. Being a Microsoft Student Ambassador, I got special reservations (thanks to Deepak Rajendran at Microsoft) for the ready launch tour! The main highlight of the event was ofcourse Bill Gates!

A huge crowd was expected and the community members (including me) were asked to come early, so we met at the entrance by around 10:30 AM. Security was very very tight. My car was stopped four times from the entrance of Palace Grounds (the venue) till the parking spot and there was more to come. There were umpteen restrictions - no carrying mobile phones, cameras, bags, books, jackets(!), etc. etc. There were many disgruntled developers who had to leave all their belongings in their cars or at a counter. Getting inside wasn't exactly a walk in the park - it was more like walking into an American airport after 9/11. We had to carry a print-out of a bar-code that we got when we registered online. There were security checks every ten feet or so, where we were asked to show the bar code printout, a photo id card and a business card. Then there was a metal detector check and a frisk and after getting a wrist band at the registration desk, we were finally let into the venue. Phew!

it was around 11:45 AM now and we were taken straight to the food counter! We were each given one huge cake box, consisting of a veg puff, cake, frooti, chips, sandwich and some paper napkins. Like the paper napkins, the rest of what was in the box was also inedible.

We were then taken to our "VIP seats", right at the front and after an initial confusion as to which VIP area was for us, we settled into our proper seats and devoid of mobiles, books and only with each other for company, we started our nearly 3 hour wait for the event to start! They were playing some good music to keep us occupied and I had a great time cracking jokes with Ranga and Ghana. Also spoke for a long time with Nitin and Pratheek.

Finally at 3:00 PM, there were some announcements and the event started with a special performance by Parikrama, who sang a special song for the Indian developers

After this song came the moment everybody was waiting for, the announcer made a nice announcement...then drum roll...And onto the stage walked Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates! It was a nice moment and he got a very warm welcome and standing ovation from the assembled developers!

Bill Gates spoke for a while about the products that were being launched and then went back stage. There were some presentations by other Microsoft employees and then Bill G returned with Sheila Gulati for a Q & A session. People from around the world had submitted their questions at the Microsoft website and a few of them were picked for this round. Lots of interesting questions were asked like when was the last time Bill coded (apparently quite often to learn, but a completely shipped product was long back - 1983); what his foundation is doing; advice for Indian developers and entrepreneurs, etc... Bill was once again given a standing ovation after this round and he then left for another meeting. Next there were more cool demos about the new products.

Thus ended the formal part of the event and coming up next was more performances by Parikrama. It was rather sad to see that most of the Indian developers don't appreciate good music and most of the 5000 strong crowd dispersed, eager to collect their take aways for the day (a copy of VS 2005 and SQL Server trial edition and a belt pouch), except for around a 100 or so enthusiasts, who stayed back for some awesome music and a totally rocking performance!

We finally left by around 7:00 PM after a Student Partner meet outside in the Palace Grounds, but not before making plans for the evening! More on that shortly!

Movie update!

2005-12-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

Over the last three to four weeks I managed to catch up on quite a few movies. Some good, some watchable and one absolutely pathetic.

As I was writing down this list, and I hope I've included all the movies I saw, I realised this is probably the first time I have seen so many movies in the theatre in such a short span of time(10 movies, to be exact, in 3 weeks time - well it's a record for me!). Looks like the "multiplex bug" has caught hold of me.

Sunil, Ranganath and Sharath have also been infected by the movie bug and joined me for some of the 10 movies at the theatres. They stayed back at my place one night after an impulsive plan around 8:30 PM to go out and watch Deewane Huey Paagal (10 PM night show at Innovative Multiplex). They reached my place at 9:15 PM and we rushed to some hotel near the theatre by 9:30 PM, our order came by 9:50 PM and we literally ran from the hotel to the theatre at 9:58 PM and just about reached it when the movie was starting!

We returned home to my place at around 1:30 AM and we then watched Naked Gun on DVD after watching episodes of Coupling. Yes, the theme for the evening was comedy and we laughed our guts out the whole time! We forced ourselves to sleep by some 4:30 or 5:00 AM, only to wake up by 8:00 AM as they had to go back home, but not before we took a photo!

Sharath, Ranganath, Sunil and myself: After staying up the whole night watching movies!
Sunil is holding the torch like a mic similar to the character played by Vijay Raaz in DHP!
Actually Ranga should have been holding the mic!!

Anyway the movie list for the past three weeks is as follows -

English:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Went first day, night show! Quite a good movie. The director has done enough justice to the book in the time available, but could have done more, as Deepak writes.
Schindler's List - Need I say anything about this masterpiece? Very moving movie.
Heat - Features two great stars - Robert De Niro and Al Pacino - and it had a good pace and story to it. You almost feel sorry for the villain towards the end! But isn't that always the case, when there is a brilliant villain in a movie?
Van Wilder - Time pass teen comedy. Taj Mahal Badalandabad, played by Kal Penn was hilarious!
The Naked Gun: From the files of police squad - Ultimate comdey! ROTF!!

Hindi:

Garam Masala - Great fun, like all Paresh Rawal movies.
Hanuman - Very nice animated movie. I loved it!
Salaam Namasthe - barely okay time pass, especially when you're seeing it for the second time.
Home Delivery - AAARGH!! Puke! The worst movie I have _ever_ seen. Read more rants here, here, here and here!
Deewane Huye Paagal - Great comedy once again starring Paresh Rawal and Akshay Kumar.
No Entry - Very good time pass.
Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena - Nice twist to the twist in the story!!

Tamil:

Sivakasi - Starring Vijay! A favourite! Good action movie. The second half of the movie was much better than the first half.
Manmadhan - Good movie.

Malayalam:

Nandanam - Nice movie.
Anandabhadram - Good Science fiction and fantasy movie. The movie is an adaptaion of a famous book with the same name. I haven't read the book, but a friend who has, told me that the book is better, which is usually the case, except for probably LOTR!

Apart from the movies, life is rather boring. Not much to do at office, so I managed to read quite a few books! Will write about that in a separate blog post.

One year of blogging!

2005-11-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

I was browsing through my old blog posts and realised that I've been blogging for a year now! The following is a graph of my blog posts on a monthly basis and as is evident, I started with full josh with a blog post every other day and barring a couple of dry months, the number has now stabilised at one entry every four days or so...

Incase you're wondering if the graph looks familiar, I got the idea here!

Blog Posts

123 posts in a year at an average of 10 a month

It has been quite an interesting year, filled with a lot of ups and downs, not unlike the graph above! As I was browsing through my old blog posts, I thought I shall present links to some of the posts that I found interesting -

Get set ... ready ...Go! - My entry to the blogosphere with my first blog post!

Coincidence - I celebrated Ethnic Day last November at college and this November at office!

What 'flavour' is your keyboard?! - a whacky post on what happens when you're addicted to coffee and computers!

It's December 31st and I'm in a contemplative mood as... another year goes by...

I was considering anonymous blogging at one stage. A place where I can pour out my emotions behind the mask of anonymity. So did I start the anonymous blog? Well, if I tell you, I'd have to kill you...!

Got a digi-cam finally!

I delivered a lot of technical sessions at various places, including Manipal, Mangalore, Bangalore, to name a few.

Book review of Transmission by Hari Kunzru. One of my favourite books and a must read for any IT professional.

aloha - I get the Microsoft Student Ambassador award and my college fest anaadyanta concludes and is a big hit!

"Au-Revoir": Class of 2001 - 2005 - Graduation day at college

Lots of Changes in my life...

Sabarish R (B.E) - My final semester results are announced!

I went on a few trips here, here and here

Book review of Prince of Ayodhya. A wonderful start to the Ramayana series by Ashok Banker.

Movie marathons here and here

The deteriorating infrastructure and increased traffic problems makes me ask this question - Is Bangalore getting 'Bangalored'?!

Ethnic Day

2005-11-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

Ethnic Day celebrations were held at office today and it was nice fun seeing everybody in ethnic clothes. Ofcourse not everybody came in ethnic wear and for the many that were in ethnic clothes, there was a contest at the end of the day to judge the best dressed men and women.

Kundan and me

Kundan and Vinay

Kundan at the "best ethnic dress" contest

Enjoying the "ethnic" view
(L-R): Yathi, Manoj, me, Kundan, Roshan, Praneeth

The trio from Nitte: Bhargav, Ajith and myself

All in all it was good time pass and we were told that more such events would be held at regular intervals.

What kind of blogger are you?

2005-11-24T06:06:00.000-08:00

You Are a Life Blogger!

Your blog is the story of your life - a living diary.
If it happens, you blog it. And make it as entertaining as possible.

What kind of blogger are you?

Calling all Old Cottonians!

2005-11-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

The 1st Gen. K. S. Thimayya Memorial Lecture is being held on Saturday, December 17, 2005 at the J. R. D. Tata Auditorium, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore 560 012, at 6:00 p.m. for an address by Mr. Nandan M. Nilekani on “Corporate Social Responsibility: Emerging Leadership Trends & Issues".

The Lecture shall be followed by a Fellowship dinner. The event commemorates the 40th death anniversary of one of India’s greatest Generals.

Click here for more details

Nec Dextrorsum Nec Sinistrorsum

New National Portal of India

2005-11-12T01:41:00.000-08:00

The Government of India has launched a new National Portal for the country and it looks good. Most of the information on the site was already available on other government websites - but now it's all put nicely together in one website.

Still in Bangalore (with Banville)

2005-11-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

My trip to Noida is not yet confirmed and might take another week or so to get confirmed. So me still in Bangalore!

I recently read John Banville's 'The Sea', which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. His prose style is simply awesome to read. Quite different from most books I've read. His writing transports you to some sort of "musical" - it just fills your mind and all your senses and holds you captive. Very nice.

Miscellaneous Ramblings

2005-10-31T10:36:00.000-08:00

Vortal – Should have blogged about this earlier itself, somehow slipped my mind. Vortal is Ashok Banker’s online fantasy serial. Ashok is blogging his entire new novel on his website and posts the chapters as he writes them. The chapters go up thrice a week. It’s an interesting read about alternate worlds and revolves around the ‘Vatsals’, a family living in Mumbai. Well, I am not going to give too much away here – so better visit Ashok’s site and read the novel as he writes it! The latest chapters go up here, but you can read from the first chapter at the Vortal archives.

Advertisements – There are quite a few good Indian ads on TV nowadays and a couple that are on now that I really like are the Coco-Cola “Piyo sar utha ke” ad and the Titan Raga ad, both incidentally, featuring Aamir Khan (another favourite).

Sri Lanka - My elusive trip to Sri Lanka continues to remain so! For probably the 3rd or 4th time in as many months, my plans to go there have been cancelled!

Noida – I may be going to Noida for about 4-6 months, on a project assignment, along with 4 more from the TIP 2005 batch at Perot Systems. Now, I’m really excited about this, because I have never been to North India (check out the image below to see which states I have been to) and have never lived away from home (maybe alone for months - but still at home). If we get confirmed, for this project assignment, we may leave on the 10th or 11th of November! Will post more on this as and when I get more information.

Which states in India have you been to?

I hope to visit more states in the North, in the coming months, once I go to Noida!

Also most importantly:

"Happy Diwali!!"

and for everyone in Karnataka:

"Kannada Rajyothsavada Shubashayagalu"

Bangalore getting 'Bangalored'?!

2005-10-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

It has been raining cats, dogs and every other animal in Bangalore and other parts of South India for a while now.

As it is we in Bangalore were struggling with pathetic roads and bad traffic conditions and the rains are making things much, much worse.

I had a harrowing experience driving home this evening, and what normally takes me around 15 – 20 minutes took over an hour and a half. The roads were flooded with water, at some places around 2-3 feet of water. The water was so deep at one place that it actually entered my car.

“Bangalore” is now in the news the world over for its excellent infrastructure (the lack of, i.e.). And if it continues at this pace, I am sure more and more companies are going to think twice or even thrice about whether to set shop in this hyped up, crowded city.

I was forced to shift my house a few months back to a place closer to office, so that I can spend more time at home or else where, instead of spending 3 hours (or more) traveling in bad traffic, like some of my friends do. Although this moved us out of the place where I’ve been almost all my life, I have never regretted this move. I now spend less than an hour on travel and this gives me more time to do other things – like watch movies for instance!

The government has announced that they are releasing some 100 crores for immediate relief. I am sure that this money will disappear faster than the water dries up and there won’t be much to show for it (apart from more badly repaired roads, cheap road material and ultimately more pot-holes.)

Agreed the government is doing ‘something’ for Bangalore but that is only fit for some small town and definitely not enough for a city the size and importance of Bangalore.

Anyway, it’s about time (actually it was about time a year or so back, but we Bangaloreans ~~have~~ had a lot of hope and patience, which ~~is running~~ has run out) the authorities in Bangalore better read the writing on the wall, which is so loud and clear for everybody else, and do more (lots, lots more), lest Bangalore gets ‘Bangalored’ (a term it was responsible for creating).

The joys of working - Free Time!

2005-10-20T23:31:00.000-07:00

The good thing about office is once I’m home I’m jobless and totally free! No home work to do, no assignments to complete, nothing. This is so unlike school/college, where there is always some work or the other to do and deadlines to keep.

Anyway back to the office situation – now I suddenly have all this free time in the evenings and weekends and so to use up this time, I now indulge (big time) in some of the many forms of entertainment available, mainly - movies, music, books and friends.

I was never completely into movies earlier and used to watch around one or two (max) movies a week. I hardly watch TV and prefer spending my time with my girl friend ( my computer! ;~) ). When I was in school I used to read a lot of books. The frequency dropped while in college, but never stopped.

My parents always complain that I have too many friends and this is true to an extent, but I am not complaining!! I have so many groups of friends that sometimes it gets hard to cope with all of them properly, but its a lot of fun. I like to make friends and though I am slightly reserved initially, once enough time passes, I come out of the shell and my friends will remain so for life. I still keep in touch and regularly meet with my 1st standard school friend!

Anyway, over the past 2 – 3 weeks, I watched more movies and read more books (ofcourse some of these movies/books I’ve watched/read earlier also) and went out to meet my friends more than I used to do over a full semester or two in college!

Some of the movies that I watched are -

English:

Equilibrium – Good to see once.

Pulp Fiction – Awesome movie!

Philadelphia – Nice movie and nice acting

Reservoir Dogs – I love Quenton Tarantino

Shawshank Redemption – Beautiful movie!

The Usual Suspects – Great ending!

Transporter2 – Ok

Sahara - Ok

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Not as good as the book. Not even close.

Batman Begins - Wokay

The School of Rock – Rocking movie!

Good Morning, Vietnam

Tamil:

Anniyan – Great acting by Vikram – one of my favourite actors

Manmathan – Nice story with a twist!

Hindi:

Paheli – How the hell did this get nominated for the Oscars???

Bunty Aur Bubli – Fun Fun Fun!

Chocolate – Copy of The Usual Suspects – but not half as good

Iqbal – Nice movie

Some of the books that I read are -

The Mahabharata by Chakravarthi Narasimha – Came highly recommended and was a great read, especially to understand the main story of the epic, without any distractions.

Ka by Roberto Calasso

Valmiki Ramayana by Arshia Suttar – One of the best translations of the original Valmiki Ramayana.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling –Time pass.

Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok K Banker – Awesome! Read my review in an earlier post.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – Need I say anything?!

Siege of Mithila by Ashok K Banker – Roller coaster ride with the Princes and the Seer!

The Icarus Agenda by Robert Ludlum

Demons of Chitrakut by Ashok K Banker – Fascinating! Watch out for my review.

As far as I remember, I’ve managed to put down all the movies/books, but I am pretty sure I have missed out on a few items that I could have added to the above lists. Anyway it was incredible fun ‘living’ the above lists!

As I write this blog post, I've already made plans for another movie - Hanuman! I will be going to watch this movie with a friend this evening!

Life as a professional is good!

Power of blogs

2005-10-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

Blogs are majorly in the limelight nowadays thanks to various exposes and opinions being freely expressed on the Internet for all to read.

So many bloggers are coming out with their experiences and the truth about various people/organisations/agencies/etc...

This is true freedom of expression...or is it?

Visit http://www.desipundit.com/ for most recent updates on the iipm vs. the brave and uncompromising Gaurav Sabnis and Rashmi of JAM and now Varna and tons of bloggers from around the world are supporting them. You can even visit here to sign a petition!

Prince of Ayodhya

2005-10-09T02:42:00.000-07:00

I have always been very interested and fascinated by Indian culture and mythology, especially all those stories about our Gods and Goddesses, and when at some book sale way back in September of 2003, I saw this book titled Prince of Ayodhya – Book One of the Ramayana by Ashok K Banker, I immediately picked it up. That was one of the wisest purchases I have ever made!

My friends all thought I was crazy to be reading the Ramayana of all books. Somehow everybody has this misconception that you read the Ramayana and Mahabharatha and other such books, only when you’re old?! I get this all the time, even as recent as last week, when I was reading this abridged version of the Mahabharatha by Chakravarthi V Narasimhan (recommended to me by Ashok K Banker, himself!).

Anyway, Prince of Ayodhya was a roller coaster ride and I loved it! Never before had I read or thought of the Ramayana in this way! I loved the book so much that I felt I must tell the author this. I searched the internet and the book publisher’s website and found a link to Ashok’s website – www.epicindia.com. I left a comment on his website and was in for a shock when a day later, the author mailed me!

That was the start of a series of conversations about the Ramayana and various other epics and also the start of a friendship with the author. I have never heard of another author, anywhere, who is more accessible to his fans.

The Ramayana is being told in a 6 part series, of which 4 have already been released –

Prince of Ayodhya,

Siege of Mithila,

Demons of Chitrakut, and

Armies of Hanuman

Books 5 and 6 (below) will be released in Jan 2006 and May 2006 respectively–

Bridge of Rama,

King of Ayodhya

Prince of Ayodhya is the first and the last book I ever bought of Ashok K Banker! Ashok has been kind enough to send me autographed copies of the rest of the series! He also honoured me by acknowledging me in the Armies of Hanuman! Thanks Ashok!

A few days back, I decided to re-re-read the 4 books, but this time at one stretch! It was great fun and over the next few days I shall post my reviews of the same here.

The following is a review of Prince of Ayodhya that I had posted on amazon.com. Read on…

Rama.

Thus begins the retelling of The Ramayana, one of the most holy epics of the Hindus, and that one word, I feel, conveys infinity.

Ashok K. Banker has taken upon himself the task of retelling this mammoth epic and the first book “The Prince of Ayodhya” gives us a very good idea of what to expect in future volumes and that feeling is a very good one. What an amazing writer!

Ramayana is an epic with many characters with complex histories and the author does a splendid job of introducing us to the characters and their past. He literally transports us into the world of Rama and spares no detail of the world we have been transported to. His style of writing makes the book a ‘un-putdown able’ book! Once you start--you’re addicted, the author captivates our imagination and senses and manages to hold our attention right till the very end, where he leaves us in a state of hunger for further volumes.

Readers must realize that the Ramayana is not just this one book, but the entire series as a whole. We can only begin to comprehend and appreciate the Ramayana once we finish that final 6th book, until then we have to go with the flow and enjoy where the author takes us, which is probably even beyond his control, but the author can make the trip a pleasurable one, which I believe Ashok K Banker is doing very effectively.

Some western readers complain that they find the use of Indian words a little trying, but I say to such people make the best use of this opportunity to learn something new! The usage of these words makes the book complete, because certain words and phrases cannot be translated and even if they can be translated, they may lose their essence.

On the whole the book is simply brilliant and is a must read not just for Indians, but just about anybody who wish to read a story of love, brotherhood, dharma (duty) and not to miss the evil that lies in wait…The Ramayana is of course all this and much, much more.

I say get this book now and join Rama on an adventure that should not be missed.

For more details visit Ashok's Website - www.epicindia.com - and also visit his blog - http://indianenglish.blogspot.com/

Jai Shri Ram!

MCAD...almost there

2005-09-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

I cleared my second Microsoft certification exam earlier today -
Exam 70-229: Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition.

I now need to write one more paper to become a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD), which is the XML Web Services and Server Components exam. Two more papers after that and I will be a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD). Hmm...lots of exams coming up for me...and I thought was done with exams after graduating!

Office trip!

2005-08-28T05:27:00.000-07:00

The TIP 2005 batch from office went on a trip to Bheemeshwar today...

It was a welcome break for all of us and we had a great time in the river!

We also went on a small trek to a nearby hill -

I would have written more about the trip, but my colleague has written a detailed description of the trip here. I took some great photos of the trip, which you can see here.

Training ends

2005-08-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

It is now just over 2 months since I joined Perot Systems. The last 2 months was spent in undergoing various technical and non-technical training. The technical training was primarily focussed on various Microsoft technologies and .NET in particular.

It was an interesting and at times tedious 2 months, especially the 9AM to 8.30PM Monday to Saturday schedule, but I learnt quite a lot! The batch (TIP 2005) I was in, was good fun and we had a lot of good times together!

Today, our batch was taken to ECC (a very calm and beautiful place at Whitefield) and had various team building exercises. Major TP!

TIP 2005 Batch 1 - Perot Systems

Last Saturday, we had our first Microsoft Certification Exam -

Exam 70-315: Developing and Implementing Web Applications with C# and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, after clearing which, I am now an MCP -

I also have my second MCP exam coming up shortly -

Exam 70-229: Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition.

This is going to be my last day or two as a trainee and sometime this week I will be allocated to a project, along with my batchmates.

I guess my life is starting a new phase now as the last two months were more like a 9th semester rather than work.

I wonder how it will be...

Well lucky you! You needn't wonder so much, because you can read all about it here, as it unfolds, straight from the horses mouth!

Bill Gates' House

2005-08-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

Check out Bill Gates' House!

Great weekend

2005-08-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

After a long time I met my friends - Kannan and Karthik - on Saturday. We were classmates at KLE College, where we did our PUC course. Karthik went abroad for further studies, while Kannan did his engineering from Bangalore. Karthik owed us a big treat and we went to Tandoor on MG Road for dinner. The place was packed and we had to wait for almost 30 minutes to get a table, but the food was good and it was well worth the wait.

Me, Karthik and Kannan

All of us went to my place and we spent some time talking about the past and then tried to see a movie from selection of over 30 good classic english movies. As was expected we ended up not seeing any movie that night!

On Sunday we wanted to avoid the city and its crowds and wanted to drive down to some place around Bangalore and return the same or even the next day. After much debate we finally settled on Nandi Hills - according to a guide some 60 kms from Bangalore. We left around 2PM and had brunch on the way at some dhabha. The food costed a third of what we paid at Tandoor but was just as good!

The sceneray started getting beautiful and green once we left the city limits. We were pleasantly surprised at how beautiful it was so close to Bangalore.

Road to Nandi Hills

The road to Nandi Hills passes through Devanahalli, where Bangalore's International Airport is coming up (for the last so many years). The roads were great for most part of the trip and I had a blast driving the distance (some 73 kms from home).

Road diversion to Nandi Hills

The road near Nandi Hills was quite bumpy and there were quite a few un-tarred stretches that tested the limits of the car suspension and to make matters worse it started to rain and we were afraid the rain might ruin our visit.

Rain on the windshield

But the rain had a very positive effect on the weather and when we reached the hill top - it was very cool and the climate was perfect.

Nandi Hill

When we reached the hill top, it was a major anti-climax. Being a holiday - half of Bangalore was there. It was very crowded and dirty and there was hardly any empty space to sit down alone.

People and shops everywhere

Apart from the people there were lots of monkeys and dogs!

Nearly 75 kms from home and we were wondering what the hell we were doing here!

What was our plan (to escape the city crowds) again?

Nonetheless we wanted to make our trip worthwhile and tried hard to ignore the crowd and the crap and focussed our attention back on the great scenery that we were treated to right from the time we left the city behind.

Breathtaking view from the top

Me near the edge!
Behind me is the road to Bangalore City

I took a few more pictures around Nandi Hills. See them here.

We left before the sun set and in the end felt the trip was a pretty decent one. The drive was good and the hill top was fine - but could have been better if there werent so many people everywhere. The scenery was awesome and the company was great and I spent some quality time with my friends!

We returned to Bangalore by around 7.30 PM and had dinner at Casa Picola, where we met my school friends - Aditya and Deepak - and then all of us went on to have a nice evening! Kannan and Karthik went home from there, while the rest of us went to Aditya's house (or should i say palace?) and stayed over there.

I returned home today and slept like a log. Went to Indiranagar for dinner and to buy some much needed food stuff for the week ahead.

Back to work tomorrow and I have a Microsoft certification exam coming up on Saturday, for which I am yet to start preparing! Our training concludes this week and our project allocation at work might also happen, for which we will meet some of the project managers. I hope I get into a good project and team.

It's gonna be an interesting week ahead for sure, one that will (hopefully) match the excitement of the past weekend!

And yes everybody - Happy Independence Day!

Calling All Bangalore Bloggers

2005-08-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Bloggers of Bangalore group is organising a meet for all bloggers of Bangalore.

For more details of the meet - visit here and here and if you're a blogger and from Bangalore - then do become a member of this group, for more details visit -http://groups.google.com/group/blogbang

Mangal Pandey - Aamir Khan's MSN Space

2005-08-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

Talk about utilizing the power of blogging for advertising! Aamir Khan is actually blogging about his latest movie - Mangal Pandey and answering (selective) fan comments!

Check it out - Mangal Pandey - Aamir Khan's Space

I'm kinda excited about this movie and am really looking forward to seeing it this weekend.

Happy Birthday to me!

2005-08-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

I turned 22 earlier today! To be precise at exactly 9 AM or thereabouts. This year my birthday falls on the same day that I was born - a Sunday!

Can you beat that for timing? I was born on a Sunday morning at 9 AM! Ever since, I was doomed to be a late riser and have really lived up to that reputation! My friends actually call me 'goobe' which in Kannada means 'Owl' - since I'm up all night and asleep all morning!

Today was a good day. Spent some quality time with my cousins and went out for lunch and a movie (Stealth).

A big warm thanks to all my friends and family who have been kind enough to remember me on this day and have wished me! The rest who haven't better watch out when we meet! :D

I'm really sleepy now and tomorrow is a (sigh..) Monday and that means back to the training at work.

Update: I was really sleepy when I wrote this post and accidently pressed 'Save As Draft' instead of 'Publish Post'. I kept forgetting to publish it and today I finally published it - the 11th of August, which also happens to be my sister's birthday! Happy birthday Ramya akka!

Ayrton Senna by Alain Prost

2005-08-02T04:38:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on Ayrton Senna, by his biggest rival - Alain Prost.
Read more here - prostfan.com - Ayrton Senna by Alain Prost

Imagine Cup ends...

2005-08-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

The 2005 Imagine Cup came to a close today at Japan. A journey that started last November, when the registrations opened - all over the world.

It was great to be a part of this contest, and my team is still very dissappointed at not getting past the zonal finals, thanks to some misconceptions about Bluetooth. Read more here

The Indians did pretty well at Japan and won prizes in 2 events - The Short Film and the IT Business plan. The software design team didnt go too far, unfortunately and failed to be a part of the final 6.

Read more at the following links -

Sunil Jagadish (my team-mate)

Saurabh J (from the Indian Software Design team that went to Japan)

Microsoft Press pass

Tom's corner

IC 2006 will be held in India! This was officially announced at Japan.

After a long time I went out for a movie - The Island - on Sunday, with Sunil and Sharath. Quite a nice movie, and was some sort of a mix of ideas from The Matrix and Sixth Day. Good TP.

From office

2005-07-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

Blogging after a long time. Still at office - now on a break from our training.

Nothing much happening to blog about.

Life is now very monotonous. I am at work Monday to Saturday 9AM to 9PM.
Sundays are spent doing various odd-jobs. Catching up with friends and the pending activities.

The weeks are just whizzing past...

I am re-reading Armies of Hanuman by Ashok Banker now. It is book 4 in the Ramayana series. The book is great and the story resumes 13 years into the exile of Rama and Sita. There are more interesting battle scenes, which Ashok is so good at writing (I just can't wait for the big battle of Lanka). The book soon reaches the point where Sita is kidnapped by Ravana in disguise, while Rama is chasing the golden deer, and Lakshman leaves Sita to look for Rama. The love between Rama and Sita has been portrayed very beautifully by Ashok and Rama's angst and distress at the loss of Sita has also been dealt with properly. Finally one of the most loved characters of the Ramayana - Hanuman - makes an entry into the story. Ashok has described in detail and in a very touching manner the interactions between Rama and Hanuman. The book goes on to describe how Rama helps the Vanar Sena and they agree to help Rama get back Sita.

On the whole a great book. If you still havent read the Ramayana Series by Ashok K Banker, then I suggest you do so immediately! Check out the author's website at: www.epicindia.com for more details. And did I mention that Ashok has acknowledged me in the Armies of Hanuman?! Thanks Ashok for the honour!

Me at the highest point in Tirumala

2005-07-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Me at the highest point in Tirumala
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

The view of Tirumala

2005-07-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

The view of Tirumala
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

The view of Tirumala town from the highest point in the hills.

Deer at Tirumala

2005-07-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

Deer at Tirumala
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

Deer on the hill. During our walk up the sacred hill to the Temple of Lord Balaji.

Hot Hot Chinese!

2005-07-13T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hot Hot Chinese!, originally uploaded by sabarishr.

With Sashi at the famous and our favourite "Gobi" place in Malleshwaram.

Sabarish R (B.E)

2005-07-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

Yup!! I'm finally an Engineer!!

I got my 8th and final semester results last night and having cleared all subjects (phew!) with a decent score, I have now positively completed my graduation!

So here's 'Goodbye!' to a very interesting phase of my life and 'Hello!' to the start of another important and (hopefully) equally interesting phase!

Now I can also sign off as -

Regards,

Sabarish R (B.E)

:D

Hopefully I can also add a post graduation degree to that signature in the coming years.

Hello?!

2005-06-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

After a long gap, I am finally back!

I shifted my house a couple of weeks back and was disconnected from the net because my phone line was under shift. BSNL finally setup the connection here on Saturday. It took them more than 2 weeks to do this. Talk about service!

I also joined work (Perot Systems) last Monday and am now a full-time professional! Gone are the student days...but only the title has gone... We are now under classroom training (which will go on for the next 40 days or so). It is extremely difficult to sit through the training sessions, since I am not used to attending classes for such a long time and acting so professionally (no cat-calls, rockets, food, novels, etc...during this training!).

Nonetheless the training is very very good and I am learning a lot of useful things which I am surely going to need in the days ahead as a software engineer.

Lots more iteresting updates to my life. But I shall keep them for another blog post.

Keep reading this space for more on me and my work and life...in the days ahead.

Till then...so long!

CS Rocks!

2005-05-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

CS Rocks!, originally uploaded by sabarishr.

A whole lot of parties!

We had our college farewell party @ The Country Club today.

Find more pictures here

Changes

2005-05-26T04:12:00.000-07:00

This week and the weeks ahead are bringing a lot of changes to my life. Life is rapidly changing lanes and going in a totally new path...

Earlier this week the academic phase of my life came to an end with the farewell ceremony at college. Now my project trainee phase is coming to an end, with the completion of my project at Perot Systems.

My association with Microsoft India's Academic Developer Program also draws to a close. Our last event will probably be DevCon this weekend.

Next week will see me move out of the locality (Malleshwaram) that has been my home, pretty much all my life. I will be moving to C.V.Raman Nagar that is more conveniently located near my office. It is going to be a whole new experience and I am going to miss a whole lot of people and places in my present locality. Lots of friends and memories.

My last final exams will be on 4th, 7th and 10th of June. After which I have a very short holiday and then starts the most important phase of my life - as a professional.

This is it. Something that the past 18 years (2 years Kindergarten + 10 years School + 2 years College + 4 years Engineering) have been spent preparing for. I just hope I have learnt enough in these 18 years to survive in the Industry.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or
present are certain to miss the future - John F.
Kennedy

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal - Arthur
Schopenhauer
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines - Unkown
Life is a progress, and not a station - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Au-Revoir": Class of 2001 - 2005

2005-05-23T07:50:00.000-07:00

We had our farewell ceremony "Au-Revoir" from the CS & IS department today at college.

Computer Science Class of 2001 - 2005

We also had our class photo shoot (above) and tons of photo sessions with friends and staff! Check out the pictures here

We are having another farewell party from our college at Country Club, later this week! Looks like our batch is really loved! Well after all we are the very first and best batch at Nitte!

College started with just 2 buildings - one rather sad, small canteen and a common block (that had in it the administration + office + classrooms + labs, etc...etc...) and it has now grown into a huge campus with lots more infrastructure and a better and much bigger canteen!

Our final exams start on 4th June and the last exam will be on 10th June 2005, which would be our last day at Nitte as its students...

new look

2005-05-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to change my blog template for a long time now, I finally found the time and patience to do it!

Thanks to Blogger templates and quite a bit of tweaking I ended up with what you are seeing.

So how is the new look?

Update

2005-05-21T12:02:00.000-07:00

After a long time I started seeing movies again! Yes you read it correct....it has been ages since I saw any TV or movies.

I finally managed to see BLACK, and as expected it was a masterpiece. Sanjay Leela Bhansali truely has raised the bar for Bollywood and one movie which fell far short of this bar was Mumbai Express. I made the mistake of watching it and it helped put me to sleep, for which I must be thankful!

Our class students along with the ISE students gave our teachers a party to say Gracias...Thanks! It was a great and very memorable event and also quite emotional for some! Sigh...hard to believe four years have just flown past so quickly. Check out the photos of the event here.

College was ok. Lots of highs and lows, but on the whole a nice platform from which I was able to do quite a bit - apart from studies!! ;-)

Days in college are numbered and some of us were counting how many more days we will be going to college. 6 days - including exams, project seminar, farewell party, et al.

June 20th is my reporting date at PerotSystems! I will be working on .NET and will undergo a 45 day intensive training session before being allocated a project in August.

Un-Imaginative Cup

2005-05-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

Our team failed to qualify for the national finals for the Imagine Cup at the zonal finals held in Chennai.

The whole event was highly dissappointing. Read Sunil's post for more info.

Team BlueCQ with Seena

2005-05-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

Team BlueCQ with Seena
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

At Sunil's house preparing for Imagine Cup along with my good friend Srinivas.

We are leaving to Chennai tonight for the Imagine Cup Zonal Finals to be held on 14th May. Hoping my next blog entry is about our success at the event.

IC team-mates

2005-05-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

IC team-mates
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

My Imagine Cup Team mates.

(l-r) Sunil, Deepthi (alias Drao) and Sharath.

We will be going to Chennai shortly for the Imagine Cup Zonal Finals. I hope we get selected for the national finals, which unfortunately for my team is going to be held at Bangalore.

Date with .NET v3.0

2005-05-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

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Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

The DWDN team

2005-05-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

The team that made Date with .NET possible!

Date with .NET v3.0

2005-05-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Sunil, me and Ghana at Date with .NET v3.0,
that was held at RNSIT on 7th May 2005.

My car-pool team

2005-05-03T03:59:00.000-07:00

My car-pool team
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

My car-pool team to perot systems. (l-r) Bhargav, Lakshmi, Swetha and me.

It is great fun and very convenient and cost effective having a car-pool rather than using the bus facility.

We are four college-mates and luckily all four have a car and since we need to go to work four days a week - each one of us bring the car on one day.

I'm "Tuesday" and it is always cloudy and cool when it's my turn to get the car, which is great!

Some of my close friends

2005-05-03T03:48:00.000-07:00

close friends
Originally uploaded by sabarishr.

In front of Sashi's house, which also doubles up as the meeting place + temporary parking place for the four of us who car pool to perot systems.
(l-r) Lakshmi, Swetha, Sashi and Bhargav

photo-blog?

2005-05-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my new digicam and the rechargable batteries and the 128 MB memory card - I am now clicking away to glory! Since the camera is still pretty new - I am eager to test and try it out in all possible ways. Understandably I am very excited about getting this camera - it has been a long standing dream of mine to get a digicam.

So far the results have been really nice - infact they have been great!! I am very very satisfied with the camera and its features, considering its price. It is not a very expensive camera and is an ideal "first" digital camera.

I will be regularly posting many of my adventures with my camera here and at this rate I am afraid this soon might become more of a photo-blog than a regular one!

Some of today's random clicks are as follows...

phsychadelic highway!

2005-05-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

Bangalore traffic

2005-05-02T11:58:00.001-07:00

Random shots with my Canon

2005-05-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Deer at the Perot garden (ok ok - they are fake!)

Clicking away with my new Canon Powershot A400 Digicam!

2005-04-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

The view from my bedroom window!

2005-04-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

my (majorly messed up) desk!

2005-04-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

I got a new Canon Powershot A400 today!!!

English Language

2005-04-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

You are a MASTER of the English language!

Huzzah. While your English is not exactly
perfect, you are still more grammatically
correct than just about every American. Others
admire the way you speak and could learn a lot
from listening to you. Still, there is always
room for improvement...

How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)
brought to you by Quizilla

geek?

2005-04-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

Do you know that the actual meaning of geek??

Check out dictionary.com for the definition of geek and then read the definition of computer geek.

aloha

2005-04-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

hi! Long time no see!

As usual tons of work and I have this wonderful habit of keeping everything for the last minute...

My first internals are in progress now - which is why I finally found time to blog! ;-) Management in Engineering and Cryptography are the two subjects for this semester. Got my text books only a while back and I have absolutely no idea what is in either of these two subjects.

My college fest "anaadyanta" was held succesfully on 6th, 7th and 8th of April 2005. It was a great hit and saw a much better response than the previous year. More than 550 students from 28 colleges in Bangalore took part in the various events of the fest! It was great to be a part of Team Anaadyanta for the second time and I am sad that this will be my last fest since I graduate later this year. It has been a huge learning experience being a core committee member of the fest.

Along with some of my fellow Student Champs, I was awarded the Microsoft Student Ambassador Award at a function held at Hotel Rama. It feels nice to see our efforts being recognised by Microsoft. All 6 of us got cool Student Ambassador Kits and have our profiles listed on the Microsoft India Academia Site:

http://www.microsoft.com/india/msdn/academia/Ambassadors.aspx

There was a secondhand books sale near my house and along with some of my friends, I "attacked" the place and found some great books and I walked away with a cool deal of 7 books for Rs. 270/-. That is an average price of about Rs. 38 per book!! Keep looking at my Recent Books section on the right to see which books I'm reading.

My technical seminar presentation date has been fixed as Monday - 18th April. My topic is XML Web Services and I need to submit a 40 page report latest by Saturday and a 30 minute power point presentation on Monday - so more last minute work for me.

In the middle of all this, I also managed to fall ill (I suspect - thanks to a curse of a certain "Un-Handled Exception"!) and was bed-ridden for two days.

All these distractions and my project work at perot (mon-thu all day) have reduced my time for the all important imagine Cup :-(

I seriously need to learn how to manage my time better. I really want to do a lot for IC - I even though of leaving Perot to concentrate only on IC, but unfortunately some wierd rule in VTU prevents me from doing that...

Want a gmail account?

2005-04-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

Check out this site where you can invite yourself to a gmail account!

Bytetest.com - Free gmail inviter

Also if you have extra gmail invites you can donate them to this site. Just mail them to Xenolith0@Bytetest.com

Transmission

2005-03-30T00:52:00.000-08:00

Finally got my hands on Transmission by Hari Kunzru. Loved the book. It is a must read for any computer/software engineer. The book is about an Indian software geek (Arjun) in the US who literally gets conned into working dirt cheap and is unable to do anything about it because the only alternative is to go back to India looking like a loser in front of his family and friends.

Arjun's fortune changes slightly for the better when he gets a dream job at an anti-virus firm but is soon laid-off when the company goes cost cutting. Unable to come to terms with the lay-off he decides to get back by writing a deadly virus (Leela01 - which features a dancing Leela - a popular bollywood actress and Arjun's favourite). He hopes to give the company the cure and come away a hero and with his job reinstated, but it doesn't work out that way. Soon many variants of Leela are out and they cause a lot of damage including to Leela - the actor whose face adorns the virus.

Arjun is soon discovered as the creator of the virus and an FBI alert is sent out, but he mysteriously manages to flee the country. Leela also meanwhile gets bugged of being a puppet under her mother and the rest of the industry and runs away. What happens next is a surprise! The ending is fast paced and with more twists and turns than the western ghats and leaves you with a feeling that the 435 rupees for the book was well spent.

Next book - Yuganta: The end of an epoch by the Late Irawati Karve. Came highly recommended and so far it's great.

15 days too long

2005-03-25T09:53:00.000-08:00

Hi folks. Yes i'm alive and well.

I know, I know 15 days of no blogging is unacceptable. This blog is after all supposed to be a 'peek into my life' so if I didn't blog for 15 days does it mean I didnt have much of a life for 2 weeks?!!

That could'nt be further away from the truth. I have infact had too much of life stuffed into the last 2 weeks that I have hardly got the time to do anything else.

Read on, to find out some of the highlights of the last 2 weeks -

As usual 7 AM to 9 PM, Monday to Thursday, every week, i am at 'work' at perotsystems. Life at work is pretty fine. The environment is great and the project is also fine but the travel sucks. We also had the privilege of meeting all the board-members of Perot Systems including Mr. Ross Perot Jr. - Chairman, who had come to Bangalore for their historic board-meeting. Read about it here and here.

On 19th of March went for a couple of nice birthday treats at Pizza Hut!

On 20th there was a BDotNETStudent UG meet where Mr. Manoj Ganapathy delivered a great session on the why and what of the .NET Framework.

Earlier this week our dreaded 7th semester results were announced and thanks to all my prayers to all the Gods - I passed all the subjects, that too with 3 gold-medals! For the uninitiated a 'gold-medal' is 35 marks, which is the minimum required to pass a subject. Not a very good performance I agree, but considering how many classes I bunked last semester and how little I studied this is a good result!

Finally managed to check out Forum Mall, the newest money-drain in town. Went straight to Landmark, a bookstore and read up the new introduction (author's notes) in the Indian edition of the Ramayana series by Ashok. Got lost amidst all the books and was finally dragged out by my hungry friends (it was well past lunch-time) but not without a copy of Transmission by Hari Kunzru and Yuganta by Irawati Karve, both highly recomended books by Ashok.

Today is holi and good friday and thanks to that is also a good holiday! Finally managed to get some serious shut-eye which I had missed so much over the past few weeks.

Other pending work include Imagine Cup, Windows ChallengE, student partner portal, student project program, anaadyanta, and loads of work with BDotNETStudent and the student champ program....

I wonder when I will find time for my next blog post in the middle of all that work :(

Attack of the Killer Gadgets

2005-03-07T22:54:00.000-08:00

Research suggests that mobile technology could very well lead to an early death. But the more important question is whether or not we care.

Read the full story here

Borrrrrring

2005-03-07T01:36:00.000-08:00

That pretty much sums up yesterday's F1 race. Not because Schumi crashed out after a 'racing incident' or because Narain had a poor start, but because of the new rule that disallows changing of tyres during pit stops. As a result most drivers were racing somewhat conservatively to preserve their tyres for the whole race and we didnt get to see too many exciting moves.

The qualifying sessions totally shuffled the race grid and we had a mix of drivers throughout the grid, with Schumi at the end! Narain did well to qualify in 12th, but due to a poor start slipped to 18th and then finally finished at a good 15th place. The important thing for him and Jordan was to finish the race, which he did impressively.

BDotNETStudent also celebrated it's first anniversary at the Birthday Bash with B.NET group yesterday at PESIT and it was pretty good. Had fun with all the skits and talent displays. The food was also good, although quite a bit was extra. We then had fun trying to find people who wouldnt mind taking the extra food. Finally found some poor souls at the Malleshwaram railway station who were more than greatful for the food.

vrooom

2005-02-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

Yup F1 is just around the corner and this time it's going to be very special with India's very own Narain Karthikeyan also in the race for Team Jordan! Narain will be debuting at the Australian Grand Prix on 6th March 2005, making him the first Indian ever to race in Formula One.

Go Narain Go!!

But as usual the Indian Government plays spoil-sport and in the midst of such joy brings in a dampener by banning Narain (and other sportsmen) from wearing the Indian Tricolour on their clothes/helmet. If I were a sportsperson, nothing would make me more proud than wearing the Tricolour on my shirt. I don't see it as a disrespect in anyway, Infact I think it is the greatest honour a sportsperson can do for the country. Read more on this totally unnecessary rule here.

Perot Systems

2005-02-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

Perot Systems - where I got placed during campus recruitment and where I'm currently doing my 8th semester project

2005-02-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

Perot Systems Campus

2005-02-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

Perot Systems recently won the Horticulture award for best maintained and beautiful campus!

some updates

2005-02-27T23:24:00.000-08:00

Well I was going through my blog and realised I hadn't updated some of the blog posts. Here are the updates -

1. MDC Bloggers Contest - Yup I finally got the USB drive! It's a neat 32 MB thumb drive.

2. College Website - I redesigned, updated and uploaded the new site - www.nitteblr.ac.in
Incase you're wondering what it looked like earlier, check this - click here

3. Imagine Cup - Our team DScube got through round 1 (the chess problem) and we are now in the zonal finals. Read more here

4. Student Project Program - Our internal review was accepted. Now it's time for the external review, sometime soon.

will add more to this post...

anonymous blogging

2005-02-26T02:56:00.000-08:00

I was chatting with a friend and we were discussing about blogging and he was telling me that if he ever started to blog he would start an anonymous blog.

I feel that is a good choice and so true. Even here in my blog you get to read about my work, my life, my activities, etc....but not about me. You get to read some of my thoughts, but not all of them.

What do i feel about somebody? What personal thoughts are running in my head? Am I in love? Am I not in love? Am I hurt? What do I feel about my friends, my parents, my life? etc.. etc..

I am unable to write any of this here. I just want to scream out everything, but not here.

a very 'broad' smile!

2005-02-23T21:36:00.000-08:00

I finally got my broadband connection from BSNL yesterday!! Which explains the very broad smile on my face :-)

Is it fast? Nah...it's super fast!

Finally all those downloads are within reach. After a long time my antivirus, spyware, firewall, etc. etc. are all up-to-date (no more pesky reminders to update)!

from office

2005-02-21T04:00:00.000-08:00

hmmm...at office now. Pretty decent place. Great infrastructure (but I guess all companies have that)

Got allocated to a project and for starters I need to read up on tons of documentation about the client, the project and Perot System's role in it. It is a huge project and only now, after getting to work in a company, have I begun to realise the size of some projects. This particular project is a seven year project and finishes only in 2010!! Basically we are moving an old very huge project, with several huge sub-projects that were developed in various languages and platforms, to .NET and SQL Server. But that sounds far more simpler than it actually is. More on this as time goes by. I still have a lot of documentation to read! This is another thing that surprised me - for every line of code, there seems to be so much of documentation! Phew...

aloha!

2005-02-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

I know. I know it has been a while since i updated my blog. What to do? Life does become quite busy at times.

It has been an interesting, busy and tiring week this one, not to forget the incredible time I had last weekend!

Last Saturday the BDotNETStudent team along with Mr. Kevin D'Souza went to Mangalore to give some .NET awareness sessions at two of Karnataka's best colleges - NITK, Surathkal (formerly REC, Surathkal) and MIT, Manipal.

After a hectic Saturday, Sunday saw us chill out at various spots in Mangalore. I loved the waterpark at Pilakula and the ice-creams at Pabbas! Read more about the trip here

We returned to Bangalore on Monday morning at 6:00 AM in a Volvo bus and unfortunately I couldn't even take some decent rest after the journey. I had to leave at 7:15 AM to Perot Systems, where my 8th semester project was to begin!

Monday was a long and tiring day. We had to fill lots of forms and listen to a lot of (mostly boring) sessions on the company policies and rules and I dozed off during one such session, only to wake up a few micro-seconds later with a jolt!

The rest of the week saw me leave to Perot early and return home late in the evening dead tired. The travel was killing - nearly 40 kms one way in maddening traffic. And since four of us friends are car-pooling driving was a big pain. We were allocated to our respective projects on Thursday and my college group is under a huge project for Cendant Mobility, working mostly on various Microsoft technologies (vb, asp, vc++, sql server and .NET)

Mid-week brought some good news, when I learnt that my team "DSCube" had qualified for the zonal finals of the Software Design invitational in the Imagine Cup! Yo!

Now that I have been assigned a work-station at Perot, I can update my blog more regularly, since I have access to the internet (and boy, is it fast!) :-)

A close friend recently joined the "blog-wagon". Read Indian English spoken here

2005-02-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

Developing .NET applications at MIT, Manipal

2005-02-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

Developing .NET applications at NITK, Surathkal

2005-02-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

Enjoying ice-creams at Pabbas. Mangalore ishtyle!

Aero India 2005

2005-02-10T21:57:00.000-08:00

I attended Aero India 2005 - the Air Show conducted by the Indian Airforce at the Yelahanka Air Force Base, Bangalore.

Incidentally my college is neighbours with the Airforce station and we get free air-displays every day, but I still wanted to get in to the station and watch the show, especially the fly-bys and other displays.

The event was simply amazing and the following photos prove it. For more pictures check out Sharath's blog Wow...

Russian Airforce Sukhoi-30 MKK

2005-02-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

Flares!! To confuse incoming missiles.

2005-02-10T21:54:00.000-08:00

Sarang Advanced Light Helipcopter Aerobatics Team

2005-02-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

Poetry in motion!

2005-02-10T21:52:00.000-08:00

Indian Airforce Sukhoi-30 MKI

BDotNETStudent UG meet

2005-02-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

Me @ BDotNETStudent UG meet, MSRIT on 5th Feb

long time no blog

2005-02-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

I'm blogging after quite some time. It has been quite a busy and interesting week.

Today is the submission deadline for the Imagine Cup deadline and team 'dscube' managed to submit a decently working piece of code. Lets hope it is good enough to get us through to the second round, which is where the actual Software Design action will start.

Saturday (5th Feb) saw a very succesful BDotNETStudent UG meet - we had a great turn up after our hiatus for the exams! Many new champs had come for the event and I hope they all become active champs and take BDotNETStudent to greater heights!

All concerned champs met with Kevin today and finalised everything about our Mangalore trip.

My college fest 'anaadyanta' will mostly be held in the April and the team met up today and discussed various issues about the inter-collegiate fest. Last time was our first fest ever and it was a great hit and we hope we can organise a better fest this time.

One more week to go before I start my project!

Freedom!

2005-02-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

Finally exams got over yesterday!! As Sharath has written - I've imagined this moment for long!

Now that the exams have passed I can concentrate on the more important ton of pending work at hand.

Need to get my hands dirty on the Imagine Cup chess program. Our Mangalore trip details were discussed and finalised today. I'll mostly be giving a session on ASP.NET and ADO.NET at the msdn@campus sessions.

I need to go to college tomorrow and make plans for my college fest - "anaadyanta" - (name given by me! - meaning 'without beginning or end' ; 'the infinite' ; also another name for Lord Shiva). The fest is a very personal thing for me because it was the first fest in our college and was planned and organised from start to finish by a group of friends including me. And boy was it a big hit!

one more to go...

2005-01-30T11:48:00.000-08:00

After much difficulty i've finally reached here. Just one more exam to go...

My last exam (client/server) did not go as planned. It wasnt too good. Hopefully the next and final exam (distributed computing) is not so bad.

Today is the 1st anniversary of BDotNETStudent!! It has been a great 1st year! Managed to do lots this past year (especially in the second half of the year!!). Lets hope we do more this year and climb greater heights!

TV has so many reality shows today. Almost every channel seems to have it's own version. From finding an idol to a super singer to a man-hunt to a race around the world - you name it - they got a reality show on it! Few are fine and most are serious Over-Kill.

four down...two to go

2005-01-27T10:28:00.000-08:00

The countdown is getting pretty intense now as the exams are nearing their end!

The computer ethics paper went on pretty ok! Lets hope the corrections are ethical!

I got my hotmail account space increased to 250 MB now! Finally!! Now if only there was some way of accessing hotmail through POP service it'll be fine. I've been using Outlook 2003 for the past few days and its great. I now dont need to waste hours online composing and reading my mails. It can be conveniently done offline (even posting messages to my blog!)

Next exam: Client/Server on Saturday 29th.

Computer Ethics

2005-01-26T00:38:00.000-08:00

I have an exam on Computing Profession and Society tomorrow, which basically deals with computer ethics and communication ethics, etc. Basically some pretty boring stuff but kinda useful at times. It deals with most likely issues that one would face in one’s career especially in the software industry. It’s nice to read and leave – but so easily forgettable…because every topic has been divided into a gazillion points that are so hard to remember.

Let’s hope I remember my ethics tomorrow.

Mom has gone to Chennai for a relative’s wedding – which leaves me home alone again – and it’s not very nice. I’m really hungry now but too lazy to go out and eat. Luckily she’ll be back in two day’s time.

Today is also India’s Republic Day – so Happy Republic Day to all of you!

Jai Hind!

half way through!

2005-01-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

Yup! I'm half way through my exams. 3 more to go....this time next week I'm a free man!

Our trip to Mangalore was approved by the team at Microsoft yesterday!
So now its official -

Microsoft and BDotNETStudent
presents
MSDN @ Campus
- 12th February 2005 -
NITK, Surathkal (8:30 AM) and MIT, Manipal (3:00 PM).

A team of students and Mr. Kevin D'Souza from Microsoft will deliver sessions at these colleges. We are also planning on checking out Mangalore on the next day!

Lots of work to be done in the holidays, starting with a BDotNETStudent UG meet in the first week of February, and then the champ recruitment and training. Followed by Imagine Cup and Windows ChallengE, etc...

Then my project work starts in the 2nd week of February at Perot Systems, I'm very excited about that!!

Got my hotmail account space increased to 25 MB through an innovative technique I found here.

addicted to the net

2005-01-23T00:27:00.000-08:00

The picture says it all...

...and mind you i'm on a 'dial up' account!

two down...four to go!

2005-01-21T08:06:00.000-08:00

Got rid of Java and CGI yesterday, when I wrote my Internet Programming paper. That was the end of the easy exams. Next comes the dreaded Advanced Computer Architecture on Monday.

As usual the news is filled with tons of crap and sadness. Switched it off as quickly as I put it on, but not before seeing Sania Mirza fight it out with Serena Williams at the Australian Open. Sania lost the match, but won. She was the first Indian woman to have actually entered the third round of any grand slam! Go Sania Go!

So back to my computer (what would I do without it?)
Got a mail from Microsoft Communities telling that the prize that I won for the MDC Bloggers Contest will be given at the next UG meet (which is tomorrow) or mailed to me.

Exams end in another 10 days...and what next? I need to start planning on what I should do in the very limited holidays that I'll get...I'm thinking of a trip to Sri Lanka (to be with Dad for a while) - but I'm not sure if i'll have enough time to go there. Lets hope I do...

one down...five to go (exams!)

2005-01-19T06:55:00.000-08:00

Yup it's that time of the semester when life comes to a standstill...the semester exams...2 weeks of hell and reading a lot of crap that will hardly, if ever, be useful to anybody anytime. Considering how outdated most of what we learn is. By the time the syllabus is updated the technology is outdated.

hmm...leaving that aside - I just finished reading the book Vertigo by Ashok K Banker today. I got a personally autographed copy of the book, yesterday, from Ashok K Banker himself! A great writer and human being and one of my favourite authors now. He has an awesome way with words and his books are really well worth a read (or two or even three!).
Coming back to Vertigo - it's a story of a guy trying to survive in Bombay. The book takes you through his life of dealing with his alcoholic mother, his (very demanding) girl friend, his job, money, etc... A very intense novel and definitely 'unputdownable' like all of Ashok's works. In fact I finished the book in two sittings inspite of having a final exam tomorrow!

I first came to know of Ashok's writing when I read an interview of his in one of the magazines about his plan to retell the great epic Ramayana (one of my favourite epics!) in a 7-book series. It is supposed to be the first ever re-telling of the Ramayana in English ever!This caught my attention and soon enough I got my hands on book one of the Ramayana - Prince of Ayodhya.

Rama. Thus began one of the best works I have ever read. Ashok's retelling was very well written and does a lot of justice to the original epic. Ashok transports us literally to the world of Rama and I couldn't wait to get my hands on the remaining books of the series! And there is more good news - he is also planning to retell the Mahabharatha! It doesnt get any bigger and better than that!

Well I doubt if even Lord Rama can come to my rescue if I don't log off now and start preparing for tomorrows' exam!

Pongal oh pongal

2005-01-14T03:03:00.000-08:00

Today is 'Pongal' or the harvest festival which farmers celebrate and its also the Tamil New Year. Today is also called 'Makara Sankranthi' which is the celebration of the sun entering the northern hemisphere.

I'm 'supposed to be studying' now but somehow just not able to that. Suddenly there are a lot of good shows on TV and there is a lot of pending work on the computer!

Spent most of yesterday outside. Visited a school (NPS) along with Kevin, Sunil and Deepthi (who came late as usual!) and spoke to some 8th graders about the latest trends in Microsoft technologies and showed them some demos and videos that made them go crazy! This was the youngest audience we had ever spoken to and the session went on really well! Contrary to our expectations these young students knew a lot and were well exposed to technology. We were impressed at what they knew at such a young age - many had programmed with C, C++, VB and some even with VB.NET! And these are 8th standard students (12 - 14 years old) mind you!

After the session at NPS we returned to the Microsoft Office to meet Ghana and Sharath. All of us then went to the Microsoft Global Technical Support office and filmed the place and interviewed some foreigners.

Returned home rather late and was too tired to study. Fell asleep after checking my mail and reading a few blogs.

Update: Oops! It was not the Tamil New Year - only the beginning of the Harvest season. The Tamil New Year was a few days before this update - on April 14th.

bored

2005-01-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

sigh...bored to death trying to study.

Was going through some pictures on my computer and found this -

With student champs on a trip last year

click to help...

2005-01-09T23:33:00.000-08:00

I found some really nice sites, which accept donations - but the difference here is they don't accept cash or kind - just clicks!

Yes, every time you click the 'Donate' button the sponsors of the site donate money or food or medical aid to the program.

I think every one of us should visit the sites daily and do our bit to help.

The sites are -
The Hunger Site - Give free food
The Breast Cancer site - Fund free mammograms
The Child Health Site - Help a child
The Literacy Site - Give free books
The Rainforest Site - Help preserve our forests
The Animal Rescue Site - Feed an animal in need

Remember all it takes is a click...

All the above sites are networked together - so you can visit one of them and find links to the other.

Also the Bangalore .NET student user group (BDotNETStudent) is accepting contributions from students in and around Bangalore for the tsunami/earthquake disaster relief - so if you wish to donate some money please visit this site (click here)

hmm...only 8 more days to go for my exams and I seem to be doing everything but studying... sigh...I'm just not able to motivate myself to open those textbooks and read stuff that I'm never going to use in my life anyway...how boring.

more space!

2005-01-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

I got my old computer table back from Dad's office today. It is one huge table that lets me put everything I need in one place - unlike my previous table which was too small and hence I needed another side table with it. I'm lovin all the extra space!

Still haven't managed to start studying. This is worrying me. Just about a week to go for my exams now - and I have 6 theory papers to prepare for!

Was hardly at home today - busy shifting stuff out of dad's office to our home and sister's place. Also managed to meet a friend and collect a letter regarding my 8th semester project work that had come to college. Then had to go with mom to sister's place and aunt's place. More time spent.

Tons of work is piling up. Not sure how to go about handling each task while still concentrating on studies.