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 :D. 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 :P. 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 :D).  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.

Well, this post is a bit late actually. I haven’t been able to find time or the patience to write lately. Intesy is the Instrumentation Technical Symposium, organized by the Electronics and Instrumentation Engg. Department (i.e., my department) at college.

This year’s version was announced quite a while back and is on the 19th and 20th of this month. We’ve invited people from other colleges for presenting their papers and projects, and the winners earn hot cash.

We also have two more events for the participants. Once is a technical quiz, and the other one is a simulation contest called Simtrix. Well, I do think the name of the simulation event is stupid, but people like it when we disorient words to produce fancy names.

I designed a very quick website for the event using wordpress. It has been up at http://intesy.info for a while.

Now that the event is so close, life is really becoming hectic. We’ve just finished the reviews and intimated the selected people about their selection.

We’re working hard towards it, and I hope this year, its bigger and better than last year.

MediaWiki is good software, commanding a decent amount of respect among the FOSS community.

Nobody can ruin it better than these people: http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

I wonder if partimage.org corrupted by Microsoft or something.

Shyam Shankar was the guy who introduced me to Rock music. He was one of my most favourite seniors at college, in his third year when I joined college. Only Third years and Final years are allowed individual rooms and can have their own computers at our hostels. He used to listen to bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and Linkin Park, but with his tiny speakers, they sounded like hell to me!

He always used to notice my annoyance and would let me hear Lucky Ali or some other soft music for some time, but would switch back to Rock soon. Maybe he thought by making me listen to it again and again, he could force rock into me. But he didn’t succeed then.

Only an year and a half back, I bought a really got pair of head phones and started listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Soon after, I was listening to all sort of modern rock - Linkin Park, Creed, Lost Prophets, Cold Play, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, U2, Greenday, Snow Patrol.

I was slowly starting to realize that I couldn’t stand pop anymore, which is exactly what Shyam had predicted. I used to really love pop when I was at school. Even during my first two years at college, I used to listen to a lot of The Corrs, Natalie Imbruglia, Spice Girls and others. But now, if I hear any western pop music, I’ll run as fast as I can from the place.

Then came the 90s bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. And eventually, I started listening to classic rock. Since then, there has been no turning back.

Right now, Led Zeppelin are my all time favorites, and then I have monthly favourites. There have been so many bands classic and metal bands I’d find really impressive for a while then lose interest and find a different band. There have been several bands like Guns n Roses, Rammstien and others. But Evanescence and Metallica have been exceptions, because I’ve listened to them for more than a month because of the ultra heavy voices of the singers. And Metallica’s guitars may be distorted, but still they’re melodic. I’m listening to Metallica even now. As I type this, Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters is playing. This song has become another of my all time favourites. And Metallica too. I love their music, but hate the way they look.

I’m not sure if Shyam has too much time for rock these days. His work is like that. I had promised to call him more than a month back, but I haven’t done yet. He must be mad. I’ll give him a few Metallica discs when I meet him next. That should do the trick.

There are very few authentic tests that certify us to be cool people. I happened to come across this link and I scored 67/100. That’s a decent score and I’m happy with it. Try it. It is really accurate! Click here to take the test.