Acknowledgements

I was glancing through my dad's BE project report (Random Trivia: Dad had won the gold medal for his BE project. Yeah... his university (U o Roorkee, now IIT Roorkee) used to give gold medals to the "best project" kind of a thing.) So, after multiple cursory glances through it over the years I decided to read it for once, now that my report is all printed and all. And as against a very "prim and proper, mind your P's and Q's" sort of an acknowledgement from our report, his has stuff like "without whose able and consistent guidance this work would have ended in a mess of complexity and perplexity"!!!! (Emphasis mine)

So, what should have my acknowledgements page actually read? Here goes.... !

We would like to foremost thank Mr. SP and Mr. KPM of M/s IEI for being voluntarily coerced into sponsoring our project. Although Mr. SP had personal interest in sponsoring this project, as his daughter would not have otherwise been able to complete the degree course in E&TC Engg., and all the money he spent as college fees and overheads in the last four years would have gone down the drain. We further thank Mr. SP for personally giving the print command for 7 copies of the report, giving us colourful pens and letting us use his office and the company conference room to make ourselves comfortable with paper and paper all around.

We like to thank Mr. KPM for not protesting against taking up the project and personally guiding us through out the project. It was surprising that he made no protest against us using the company server as our little toy box and downloading everything from Firefox 1.0 to Yahoo Messenger onto it along with the IDE, but the IDE of course was secondary. We also thank him for letting us play with the paper in his shredder, eating all the stocked kurkure, coded appams (I still can't pronounce this, so "coded" it is), the murukku, the good day biscuits and other assorted snacks. We also thank him for using his cabin as our base camp and the visitor's lounge as our bedroom for afternoon naps. We also thank him for entertaining us with pictures of his scuba diving and flying trips and for the chocolates we polished off after lunch every day. We further thank him for accepting empty chocolate wrappers and accepting the fact that chocolate isn't good for him and so we should finish it.

We would like to thank Mr. RM of IEI for putting up with us for an entire year and even laughing at our non-jokes. We further thank him for "accepting" our calls after office time on his cell phone and hot hitting "reject". The number of times he printed and reprinted our diagrams is highly humbling for us. And then taking care that all the components we need are available as well as personally taking the PCB films for development.

We also thank Mr. D of IEI for not letting us touch the solder iron lest we damage the verrrryyyy expensive PCBs or ourselves in the process. We however appreciate his restraint when we used the solder metal to make funky designs out of solder metal and jewellery out of resistors and capacitors and crabs out of ICs that we blew because of subjecting them to extreme current.

We would like to thank Prof. CVK for accepting the fact that we would not report to him till the end of the year and the other staff and lab assistants for putting up with silly questions that are not becoming of the 3rd and 6th rankers of the college.

We next like to thank all the other people who were directly or indirectly a part of this endeavour of ours. Notable among those,

We thank Mr. Mathivanan-only-chats-while-at-powerway-Subramaniyan for sodding off all his colleagues who wanted him to help them with the work and giving company to Kathak throughout December-January while the PCBs were routed at night India time. We also thank him for keeping company throughout February and a good part of March while the software was being developed which was anyway scrapped by hitting "delete" on fine frustrating afternoon. However his contribution in talking about important matters ...errr... generally klj* specific and a hell lot entertaining is highly appreciated.

We would also appreciate Mr. Kiten for making time to be a part of conference chats with Kathak, AgentR, Danny and Mr. M from the above paragraph and not understanding what "khopcha" we were talking about and the "Beta Mathi" funda or about Maha Danny Devi's maha kripa and refusing to bow down before her. Which saddened us a lot but it was highly entertaining at his expense of course :))

We further like to thank Charlie, who conspired with Kathak and Danny against Agent R and Agent Smith.

Thank You all, without your constant support this project would have been a royal screw up operation with nothing to ever remember in life. Had it not been for you guys, probably 10 years down the line we'd look back and say "Err... project. Yeah we developed a fucking sexy project. No, we don't have any memories"

Thank You!

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P.S: People, while writing the last part of this acknowledgement (Which on the onset was just two sentences in my mind) I think the "No, we don't have memories" is already void... these memories are going to last a life time. And I guess, Agent R shares my sentiments on this one!

P.P.S: "klj" was coined on June 13th, 2005 sometime in the afternoon during a chat with Charlie and it means "nothing" i.e "klj" and "nothing" are synonyms!