There is one site that gives me goosebumps whenever I visit it. The Dead Letter Office. You should visit it too. Here are two of the letters I like the most: 1 2

Its a collection of letters written from the point of view of dead people. Several of them are very inspirational. Its like dead people telling you how to live life. Its really appealing. There is this general belief among Hindus that dead people would always want the best for those alive. And that’s exactly what you see in this site.

You can add your own letters too. I’m in the middle of writing one, but I guess I’ll just keep it anonymous.

My four years at National Engineering College has come to an end. My final semester exams ended yesterday and I packed up my stuff from hostel and came home.

Four years back when I had finished schooling, I had managed to score an engineering entrance cut-off of only 226 out of 300. I should have done better but I was bored of physics and chemistry. (Chemistry was the first paper in which I got an arrear at college. ) Since I was from the Forward Community and looking for a seat in Computer Science and Engineering, I knew Anna University Counseling was not going to help me find a decent college.

My father had plans to get me a management seat in Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi but they said they couldn’t take me because my marks were too low. We finally went to National Engineering College for a management seat in Computer Science and Engineering, but we were too late for that. All seats were filled and only a few seats in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering were remaining.

I don’t know how I managed to say yes right away when my father asked me if I wanted to take it. I could have taken a CSE seat in some other smaller college, but I went for EIE. And I guess that’s the best decision I have ever made in my life. College taught me a lot of new things (well, atleast there were quite a few good books in the library and I had time to read).

Though I can’t say I made the best out of the what college had to offer, college is where I got started with several things, a few of which are Blogging, Linux, Rock music, Embedded systems, Cryptography and ofcourse Instrumentation and Process control. My department had the best staff in the entire college and my class was the best and most fun loving class in the entire college. Well, I don’t have too many good memories from first and second years. I remember wanting to just get out of the hell, but right now, I can’t explain how much I miss the place and the people.

Daily tests are the one thing about which I disobeyed my staff the most, but I don’t regret it because I know that if I had spent every evening studying for the next day’s test, I wouldn’t have been able to find time for all the stuff I have learned. I hope they understand atleast now.

My only prayer now is that the days ahead are at least half as good.

We have created a mailing list for out class and I hope all of us stay in touch and meet often. I also have plans to give back a lot to the college, but I don’t want to disclose any of that right now.

I have a few more weeks to join work at Accel Animation Studios and I have planned to read Salman Rushdie‘s The Moor’s Last Sigh. I managed to find a copy at a second hand book store here. And I also have to improve my animation skills during this break.

After all this activity, having nothing to do for weeks together is bound to make me sick, I know. I want the future to come right now. I can’t wait.

Though I updated my wordpress installation to version 2.5 almost a month ago, this is my first post after the upgrade. My college project has been keeping me busy, but its over now. My final demo was on the 19th of this month. So I have to update my blog with the past month’s events.

Version 2.5 of WordPress has got several changes to the appearance of the admin pages. The admin pages look much cleaner, better colours and easier to navigate. The post-editor is also improved, with buttons to add images, videos or audio with a single click. And Plugins can be upgraded automatically, which makes life much easier for people like me who work using dialup connections slower than 56k.

This is a welcome change for everyone who decided to quit wordpress.com because of its hard-to-use interface. I’m sure this would take the popularity of wordpress to much greater heights.

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!!

Blogged with Flock

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.

This post is pretty late too. Here is what I managed to do using script.aculo.us for the proceedings CD of Intesy. It’s not much. It’s not even close to good. Download the zip here, extract and open index.html. And do tell me what you think.

The day was totally hectic. I spent most of my morning working on the Proceedings CD. I’ve used script.aculo.us to design the interface, and the effects look cool. Sort of. I’ll put it up here after a few days.

And most of the evening was spent on walking. Most of us had to. And the juniors did really great. Especially the second years. Things were up and rocking in no time. But I guess the final years could have done better. I, in particular, could have done much better. I wasted most of the afternoon on things others were already working on and so, we’re now lagging on hall arrangement.

The event starts at 9:30AM tomorrow, and I have to reach there by atleast 8:00AM for the computers and projectors to be ready. And I’m supposed to help setting up the computer lab to conduct Simtrix, which is the simulation event.

I hope it all goes well. Pray for us, people.

And surprisingly, I have planned to crash very early tonight. Have to get up early tomorrow.