See how the mighty Arabs spam my stats page.

Who else has a monthly stats curve as beautiful as this? Show it to me, and I’ll add you to my blogroll!!

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Tags: MyActivities, Blogging, Funny

I’m really surprised to see my blog getting so much traffic. It has crossed 500 hits a month, for the first time in its life. Its 504 hits for this month now! And there’s 10 more days for the month to end!

I’ve written only 3 posts this month, which is unusually low.

Most of the traffic has come from Google. The search terms that brought most traffic were like,  ‘ubuntu for winamp‘, ‘matlab alternative for linux‘, ‘path variable in ubuntu‘, ‘sahasranaman‘, ‘accel animation recruitment national engineering college‘

Well, I know 500 hits a month is absolutely nothing. I mean, A variable with 32 bit precision wouldn’t be enough to store my site’s rank based on number of hits. But I’m excited anyway. When was the last time you had so many of your blog posts listed in the first pages of Google search results for the first time?

I’m not telling you that I understand exactly what Paulo Coelho says in The Alchemist, but, just like the Shepherd boy, I guess I have found my destiny too . Animation was one of my most favourite activities during school days, one of my biggest passions. (Yes, another one )

College changed everything. Though I did some animation during my first year, I started to get more into programming, as there were already a few people who were good at programming, and I was finding great company. By the end of third year, my animation dreams were totally out of my mind.

A few weeks back, it was announced that Accel Animation Studios would be visiting our college for campus recruitment. I was very surprised, to see a non-ITES company to visit us, but still very happy, and I signed up too.

The program was on the 10th of this month, and 108 students took the written test, which had two sections – a general aptitude section, and a C++ section. The questions were not exactly easy, but not tough either. But only three people managed to qualify for the interview. There were three interviewers in the panel, and one of them was an aluminus of our college, and another one was a teacher at our college.

And I was the only one to clear the interview, which lasted for only around 15 minutes! I am extremely happy I got it, but more people could have made it. The word is that they are comeing again for a second round of selection. I wish that they take more people next time.

I was not expecting such a sudden change, but I’ve already started enjoying it!

The placement and training officer of our college, Mr. Raja Singh, called me up to his office last week. I was not sure what it was about, the last time we had a discussion was at Empower.IT, more than a month back. And when I went to his office, there were quite a few familiar faces waiting already. It was the team that won second place in web designing at Empower.IT!

It was about this Web design contest from Microsoft, for college students, in which, you get to keep the free hosting and domain name, even if you don’t win (We have to send them a draft for Rs.1000 as registration fee, to cover the cost of hosting indirectly anyway)

I knew I was expected to participate, and I could protest neither on grounds of principles or on lack of time. God has made me that way, I’m really bad at saying ‘no’.

After reading all of Richard Stallman’s articles on how Microsoft is capturing the markets by giving subsidies to schools and college, I’m here participating in one of Microsoft’s contests, intended to get colleges to use Microsoft technologies. Can you believe it? Why didn’t my placement officer know FOSS enthusiasts don’t like to work on Microsoft technologies? Not that I’m anything like bad on Microsoft stuff. Infact, I’m much better at programming on Windows, than on Linux. Still, I’d like not to do this if I had a choice. But I’ve ventured too far, and if I try to get back now, it might just be enough for them to screw me up totally. And now that I’m in it, I’ll have to give it a good shot . The prizes are too tempting too.

It is called the GoAlive Challenge, where the task to design a website for our college, with Windows Live mail integration, and integrate other Live technologies like calendar and stuff too. Each college can have one team of 3 to 5 members.

Our college has its own domain, and fortunately, its hosted on a Windows server, so that’s one problem solved. So, the first thing we are supposed to do is create individual email ids for the students and staff (you know why), using Microsoft’s equivalent of Google Apps (Sorry, I don’t know what it is called yet ).  The higher the number of email ids, the higher the points we score. Once that is done, we can get on with the development. We’ve got around 3 months to get it done.

I hope we get innovative enough to win something in this contest. And people, please don’t let anyone else know

If just reading the non-fictious plot summary of the novel on Wikipedia can give me goosebumps, I wonder what it would be like to read the real thing. I hope it would be available at the libraries here.