The classes have begun and so has our penury as we try hard to gather ourselves to keep up with the pace of instructor. A 2hr introduced us to balance sheet, another 2 hrs to statistics and yet another two hours verging on 20 yrs took toll on our brains when we were being pushed with lot of very basic terminologies related to IT. Having spent close to 3 years in IT industry that was the last thing I expected. Slides after slides kept on explaining multiuser systems/DOS/Windows/LAN/DBMS...as I looked to duck the very same stuff that I thought I had left behind. No case studies for this course means its going to be a monologue. The lecturer had done an excellent job at making the presentation as he made sure that all the details are mentioned in a presentable way. It was the most meticulous presentation that I had ever seen in my life. Perhaps it is the nature of the course and my assumption that I know all about it that tuned me to Venus in the class.
The scene is quite different in the other classes where there are ample case studies or the teacher is quite happy to give lot of opportunity to the class to speak. A few enthusiastic souls it seems have made it a point to speak out whatever terminologies they have come across before joining the course, relevance of the utterings seem to be irrelevant, others take every opportunity to cross question till the hilt, not willing to let go, lest they lose the opportunity to clarify an issue till the very end (Sometimes I too get dragged into this, working on resisting the temptation). The class is often left praying and hoping for the progress in the lecture. Perhaps its the newfound B-school student status or perhaps purely the zeal to learn as much or perhaps just timepass yaar - when everyone is speaking let me blabber out something too or maybe asking my question might help me out of deep slumber - or perhaps its just the openmindedness and knowlegebility of the profs here that encourages the students to probe deeper and deeper into the subjects, as they feel assured of gaining something out of it. Whatever!! I am enjoying my return to SCHOOL and plan to be one of the perpetrators of all the crimes mentioned above. I hope i become a good criminal and have a fun time.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Back to School
Whats behind bikini, i meant the story :D
Got this interesting info somewhere on the net. Worth a read.
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After 60 years, the string bikini still serves as a platform for innovation by ZDNet's David Berlind -- So, here's a question: 60 years from now (or whenever your favorite operating system was born), will there still be room for innovation on today's computing platforms? Or, will the string bikini -- now 60 years old -- outlive them all. As Reuters reports, Canada-based Solestrom has a new bikini that fetches $190 and no, [...]
Monday, July 24, 2006
Citizens lose yet another right
Welcome to one more shock to the nation by this UPA government, which seems to spare nothing for the citizens of India and moreover makes a mockery of the person at helm who is supposed to the most qualified PM in the world as he makes compromises after compromises with his intellect and integrity to lead 1 billion helpless people who have been exploited by the people they themselves have elected.
The latest missile from cabinet comes in form of the the proposed amendment to the Right to Information Act. The amendment seeks to take beyond the purview of public, something called as file notings. A government file has two parts : papers under consideration (PUC) and file notings. File notings contain the comments, reasons and other details pertaining to the deliberations about PUCs. Therefore this acts as the trail of whole decision making process. Thus one can easily make out details like who agreed/disagreed with the decision, who all were a part of the decision making process, what factors were considered and what were not considered etc. And this laid bare the whole decision making process of government bodies. Transparency is a government official's biggest enemy and so it had to be taken on.
Lots of citizen had benefited by this powerful and empowering act. Citizen groups across the country were promising freedom from bribe and injustice doled out by government bodies by using this act. The ray of hope has met the obstacle. Perhaps this is going to be another step backward similar to the recent retrograde reservation ruckus.
RTI was the supposed to be the most progressive RTI act in the whole world and made India noticed and recognised for this pathbreaking ACT. It had held the Indian head high and promised to make the current equation betwween the government and the citizens better.But this government had proved earlier and can indeed go to any lengths to see its vested interest through.
But as was said about mumbaikars after the recent bombings in Mumbai, the Indian spirit will go on. Perhaps we need to go ahead despite the government. Perhaps India will just remain yet another country in the world. Perhaps we will become more adept by learning to work with the 'system' like many successful Indian entrepreneurs. Or perhaps India will be doomed!!. Best of luck India, tough times ahead.
For more information check out this article.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Michael Jackson Mix
This is by far my most favourite video. If you were wondering why people were crazy for MJ this is the perfect answer for it. The choreography, by MJ himself, is breathtaking. Be patient video might take longer to play with max wait time 5 mins. It plays in infy network so I am sure it will play thru other companies' networks too.
Ninja's comment about Matrix action funny
Check out what ninja community have to say about action in matrix!! Its outright funny.
CeBIT 2006 - Municator
| My search for free softwares led to this serendipity. Check out the video for the demo of this product. The video is 11 minutes long and might take some time to play if your net connection is slow. Nevertheless it is worth the wait.This product is a 146$ Linux computer from China that does all the basic things most people need, like browsing (firefox), emailing (thunderbird), instant messaging (gaim), skype, word processing (chinese open office), audio/video playback (mplayer), e-learning, all through a very user-friendly very basic interface and is software upgradable. It has got 40GB, a 400mhz/800mhz VIA processor, 256mb ram, 4 usb2 ports, VGA-output, ps2 input, tv-output and weigths something like 400 grams. Their slogan is "Say no to Wintel". So again let me reiterate - "There are free lunches :D" | |
There are free lunches ;)
Its time to head back to school after a 2 yrs in industry. These two years have turned me into nothing less than an epicurean in true sense of the word. Used to free internet/coffee/21 inch monitor/super fast PC/free softwares just a click away/free local and international phone calls/ lots of money at the end of the month/...the list continues. It has to be back of austerity of college days, where each penny spent bites. Being a software engineer in the company of other software engineers have ensure that I dont have the financial security as I truly believed that penny saved is fun sacrificed. As I open my excel sheet titled 'finances' again and again and try to calculate how much money do I have to spend in the coming two years at my b-school the furrows on my forehead deepen. Still I hope to get the loan for laptop a luxury in which I indulged just for the heck of it. That would bring some sort of respectablity to my bank account.
My laptop has the meanest of all softwares. Mean featurewise. MS has made sure that its philanthropy with software is not to compare with philanthrophy of its Chief Software Architecht and his wife. What I get for free is Microsoft Works + Outlook Express and both suck. The moment you try to indulge in something slightly fancy they remind you that its a free ware and one should not be expecting anything out of the bare necessity from it. So much for free software. So I thought can we stay free of MS' bread crumbs??? Thus began my search for free softwares on net. And i have just started using them.
For now I have tried the following softwares:
1. Open Office 2.0.
2. Mozilla thunderBird.
3. Mozilla firefox.
4. Google Earth.
5. AVG antivirus.
6. Webaroo.
7. Google Desktop.
8. Google Picassa.
Well I have been able to live without any licensed softwares for now. I was ecstatic when I was able to create my resume with tables and all fancy word formatting and was able to export it to a pdf using openoffice. Impress, the open office equivalent of powepoint seemed powerpacked to.
For now atleast I think I can live without any costly softwares.
Reviews:
Excellent review of mozilla thunderbird vs. outlook express
http://www.beust.com/weblog/archives/000118.html
http://beust.com/outlook-thunderbird.html
http://www.physorg.com/news2292.html
Google Desktop vs. Windows search
http://www.website101.com/arch/archive158.html
AVG Antivirus reviews:
http://www.tonytoews.com/editorial/avgantivirusreview.htm
http://www.software-antivirus.com/program/avg-antivirus-review.html
