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.

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 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.

I noticed that the English lab at our college has been upgraded. It must have been done at least 6 months back. The lab has been nicely furnished with cool looking tables n chairs, and around 40 new computers, all with dual-core processors and lots of RAM and hard drive space. They’ve also purchased English training software approved by the university for all the computers.

I’ve been in this college for more than 3 years (I’m in the final year now), and during this period, there have been several improvements in infrastructure. Still, we find if difficult to get resources where we need them.

For example, the common computer center here has some 75 computers and the students can browse during non-class hours. The problem is that all these computers were bought at least 3 years before I joined the college, and are vintage items now. They have Celeron 700 Mhz processors, have 128 MB of RAM and run Windows 2000.

Well, even the Windows 2000 thing doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is that all these computers have only Internet Explorer 5.0 installed. The technicians say all other browsers are as evil as hell. Nobody cares if IE5 doesn’t support AJAX. Why does it matter to them? The entire computer center is not capable of display in the standard gmail interface, and they don’t have the slightest idea of installing at least a newer browser!

And moving on, even while opening normal HTML pages, these computers won’t let us open more than 3 browser windows at a time. If we do, they will slow down terribly or worse, stop responding completely!

Why does the English lab, which runs only training programs need such nice computers while the common computer centre has vintage computers? What is sickening is the fact that the college has nice computers, but not where it is actually required.

This college would have been at a much better place, if they had learnt to manage the resources properly. I was wondering if their idea of creating a nice learning environment is different altogether!