Addicted!

I'm now officially addicted to su-doku courtesy an addicted 14 year old bugger!

I'm also managing to pass on the addiction to people at work (evil grin @ "work")
Feel welcome to join the club!

Random Trivia

#1
Today I claimed that the technical interviewer guy who interviewed me for Wipro weighed 20 kgs. Then I discovered a friend's kid brother (like 7 year old brother) weighs 20 kgs. So I claimed that the fellow weighed 40 kgs. Then I discovered my cousin all of 21 years weighs 48 kgs. So I claimed the fellow weighed 50 kgs.

Moral of the story: 20, 40, 50.... it's all the same weight!!!!

#2
I'm scheduled to join Wipro on September 23rd, 2005. Another two months and the holiday comes to an end! Ironically, the date you start working and earning, your planning for retirement also starts. %&#*@$#@$@ I say! There goes that jazzy cell phone with no value for money that I was planning to buy out of my first salary!

#3
There's lots of good food at home. Like lots of Nani ke ghar ki lauki ki barfi and besan and aate ke laddoo. And dabba's full of homemade chiwda and assorted snacks. And I've been stuffing my self to the extent that if I see another morsel of food, I'll fall sick. Well, stuffing yourself to that extent itself is sick. Yeah, Whatever!

#4
Just when I left my cell phone at home so that I can get wet in the rain properly, the rain god's decided that it was enough rain for the day. Talk about bad timing.

#5
I have to teach C++ tomorrow morning 9 a.m. Interestingly the last I looked at C++ code was March 2003. And I can't much recall what C++ is all about!! Why do people bother with it when there's something as nice as C? Silly people, I say! Lets do pointers and data structures in C... why C++??

I need to study. Sigh... talk about "education is a never ending process"!?!!!!!! Irony #(I lost count) On one hand I conducted a test on Saturday which required people to study, and today I have to study before class tomorrow. I never studied this much even in college or examination days!?!!???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, my cue to exit! Good day, people.
Pray for me, and pray for C++
Let's hope neither of us manage drastically weird things with the other.

Day 4 !

In the last four years of engineering every conceivable problem on planet earth could be explained with

1. Noise.
2. High/low frequency spikes/transients.
3. Bandwidth/data rate/transistor switching speed
4. Line delay
5. Line of sight
6. EMI/RFI
7. Power factor

Among these 7 points each and every problem, regardless of the subject could be explained. In worse cases a scenario like:

Examiner: So, when you do have a limitation on the switching speed of the IGBT, why don't you use MOSFETs that switch at a much higher speed. While the answer should have stayed clear of point 5, you do come up with smart arse answers like "Sir, could it be because of line of sight?"

And then we wonder why those examiners give us the "you're not fit to be engineers looks!"

However, when this young lady tells me "I want to declare 100 variables and not use an array because I don't like for loops and I'm more comfortable.... blah blah" I wish I could tell her, "And if you do, there would be high frequency spikes that would interfere with the signal and increase the RFI making it necessary for you to use bulky filters and power factor correction!" And then with sadistic pleasure watch the expression on her face.

That was Day 2 at the job!

No no, not the high profile code generating job that I was placed at in college. That's still way off. And the only solace is that it's probably high profile. So I get myself a part time job till then. No no, not the high profile... shit... I'm repeating myself. Talk about pain. Extreme pain. No, I'm not random blabbering. It's the pain I feel at my job not being high profile. But please don't ask me to define high profile. I really can't. Okay? And I'm not even over the pain of destroying my note books.

Anyway, my job.
So I got a telling from my boss for reading the newspaper on the job at 9 am.
Like Hello... I wake up, goto the gym, rush to this place and I still haven't seen news. That's so screwy!!
So I tell him "But there's nothing lined up to do, so what am I supposed to do?"
And then he tells me "Whatever, but you shouldn't read the newspaper"
And I was thinking "Right dude. You're not thinking IIM-A 2007, I am"
The keyword of course being "thinking". Let's not even get into 99 percentile and those talks!

I didn't even tell you guys what the job is. It's at the local Aptech. Yeah those computer institutes that at the height of the IT revolution made zillions of rupees into fooling poor B. Com graduates that they can be software engineers. Yes. I do have this superiority complex. Engineers are superior creatures regardless of the fact that they can score distinctions without studying. And I hate *inferior* creatures like those lowly B. Com grads into thinking they're software engineers. Fortunately they cannot be mechanical engineers. No people, I don't have a mechanical engineer boyfriend (but don't discount the affinity I have towards mechanical engineers), though I almost had one - the mechanical engineering boyfriend I mean, years ago... only hitch was for one he didn't take up mechanical engineering and then secondly, he wasn't my boyfriend at all. So much for a story!

So, I was at the job. Teaching poor unsuspecting kids about functions in C.
1. So I explain what are functions
2. Why are they needed
3. Library and User defined functions
4. Fill in whatever else you think i could have told
5. Then finally I write this nice little code with a function to add two numbers.
Yeah, right. Very cliched and all that. But it wasn't Kashish #2 that I was writing, it was a C program for kids!

And I tell them to write me some code on similar lines. You know like a program with a function to add two numbers. So this boy, a very perceptive little boy comes up with a code that has

1. The function prototyped
2. The function call
3. Rest of the necessary code
4. Interestingly the function definition missing.

And then he asks me, why on planet earth is he getting errors on compiling!
And I think, "Irfaan Sir, I really miss you!"
I can't understand how he managed sillier questions and stupider mistakes from us girls when he taught us C.

And then one lady, wanted to define her function to add the two numbers itself in main()
She justifies, "if I can write loops in main, why can't I define my functions in main"
And I was still mentally moaning over not having my notebooks on me and not being able to read either the newspaper or my bloglines till 11:30 am!

Later in the day was the fun. The gossip about the boss. Hahahahaha! I wasn't actively into it. I was just listening. Swear! Then of course I was chatting with this woman about what's to be taught next. Getting all nostalgic about the days Irfaan taught us C. And about me acting like a bhatakti aatma bhatkoing through the lab sorting out other people's code since mine used to be written, compiled and executed before the others could finish writing the preprocessor directives! That's probably the only thing I have been successful in doing in engineering college. Writing code in C. Never mind if it wasn't the most secure code... errr.... it wasn't anything close to code all you buggers from whatever certified companies would define as passable and your QA guys wouldn't chuck into the shredder (or whatever they do to dirty code). But it worked. And getting code to work.... oh well... never mind!

So I'm blabberring and the woman asks "hey... were you a rank holder of your college?"
And I very modestly say, "not really, but yeah managed to stay around the 4th/5th position" what I didn't say was once it slipped to 6th or something like that! And they give me this look that could have asked "and what the fuck are you doing here?"

Tell me, and we'll all know!
Yeah. Whatever.
Time to call it a day, I guess!

Micro Story #2

Ironically, not many people appreciated Irony as you can see here!
However, I shall still march forth with yet another micro story hoping that some day it finds mass acceptance as yet another genre of stories :)

P.S: Danny, I shall write longer ones soon enough.
---

Love?

Everything about him read, "I'm Available"
Everything about her read, "I'm Available"

Like Nescafe says "One thing leads to another",
Sex lead to marriage led to kids led to grandkids and so on and so forth - together.
They managed to fool not only the world, but also themselves that this was "love"!
Or, was it?

Nostalgia #1

On 27th June, 2005 my association of 33120 hours (that is 1380 days) with engineering college that started on 17th September, 2001 came to an end.

And today the last of the *scrap* papers destroyed. All the papers and datasheets and graphs and diagrams that I had stored with the idea "you never know when I might need it", though I still wonder what the need might have been! Unless you consider a weird sort of an attachment with the papers!

Dear readers, you can ignore the rest. It's an exercise in self-whatever!
Also, on re-reading I don't think it's quite coherent and articulate, but that's what it is. Inarticulate feelings!

Out came visiting card size bunches of papers with all sorts of formulae written, right from first semester Mathematics until almost 5th and some 6th semester subjects. Admitted, that was all I would ever write but it was quite heartening going over every little thing I had written! And then suddenly feeling a void over all those notes taken down in class that were on their way to the raddiwala. I think it was the most painful thing on planet earth to destroy those notebooks! More painful than it would be for anyone to break up with their boyfriends! Trust me, it is simpler letting go of a person than it is of those notes!! One by one they would come out, I would flip through them, read the silly things I wrote in class in *chat* conversations exchanged with fellow class mates. And then remember details of what happened in what lecture and what the prof said while teaching what! And then add the books to the pile of raddi. By the end of it, it actually got too much for me and then I picked back my electronic design notebooks and my project(s) notes, under the excuse that "The notes are good. Ankita can use them when she does engineering". Only problem being, what if she never does get into this murky business called engineering. Talk about piling on scrap! But I still can't part with them. There's so much of me in them... Gawd, I think I'm going to go all sentimental just thinking of it all!

And then there have been these conversations with a friend whenever we meet up. The going over how "silly" M1, M2 and M3 were. And the crazy things we did in the papers, actually remembering each and every detail, every exam paper, every viva, every practical exam! I think I'm seriously going to do that series - This post truncated here, next post coming up soon!

No, the bombings in London haven't perpetuated to Pune

Dear Readers,
And dear nice reader who e-mailed me to ask if I'm alive,

I very much am alive, thanks for asking, though I sniffed a hint of sarcasm in the "Kathak are you alive" as the rest of that sentence read "or has the terrorist attack in another part of the world perpetuated to where they humanly cannot", didn't sound like genuine concern to me. I, however, remain thankful for your concern *evil grin*.

Since I have not yet been able to put into rtf a new post from the vague data floating in my mind, here's something to keep you occupied!
Insects and Entropy [Link via]

Cheers,
K!