college-life

I was recently asked to write memoirs of my college life for a guest editorial for my alma mater’s alumni newsletter, and I jotted down a few thoughts while reminiscing the past. Long-time readers may not find these stories new. For the others, I have hyperlinked the related old

Cal Newport, one of my favorite bloggers ever, wrote about the upside of deep procrastination last week. I had a few thoughts on the subject. So what is deep procrastination? You know you’re in it when “No matter how dire the stakes, starting work becomes an insurmountable prospect.” I

39 people have asked me “The case for master degrees. Should or Shouldn’t ?” This article is for those 39 people. Well, the correct answer almost always is “It depends.” But let me give a few points to think about. Obviously, I’m answering from the perspective of CompSci students.

A while ago, I was asking myself Where are the killer applications on the web for India? Today, when I read ReadWriteWeb’s article on The State of Innovation in India, a thought struck me about the relationship between innovation and universities. Everyone knows the story of about how many

Last Thursday (24th November, 2005), there was a FOSS Day at PESIT, my alma mater. Typically, I managed to leave office and reach PESIT at 4.10 when I was supposed to be there at 4. The venue had shifted from the hall in the “new” building to the MCA

When Atul commented about open source being “seen as some kind of ‘hobbyist’ thing” in India, I was reminded of another incident in college. In 6th semester of VTU B.E., we had a DBMS (Database Management Systems) lab. We were supposed to write some software that demonstrates database design,

The VTU letter exhorting principals to motivate students to attend foss.in is a far cry from my college days, and perhaps even farther from Kalyan’s days. I remember asking our department’s Assistant HOD (I don’t remember his exact designation) whether our semester laboratory internals tests could

I have completed nearly one year and one month as a Yahoo i.e. including my internship. I even have a blog post on that on the day I joined. It’s hard to remember that just one year ago I was just a college kid. Just one year ago,

Travel I travelled to Trichur (also called Thrissur) in Kerala on Friday to attend Renaissance 2005, a FOSS festival at GEC, Trichur, Kerala, India. The festival was conducted by the MCA students of GECT. It was a 3-day event but I attended only the 2nd day – I was there to

I just wrote the only paper in our last semester of B.E. – Cryptography and Network Security (CNS for short). It was a tough paper! The questions focused on small things such as Hill Cipher for 20 marks! And the others were questions where we were clueless. It’s not

Yesterday was the last official day of our college (B.E.) lives…I’m feelin’ kinda sad. I wrote the following poem dedicated to all my classmates and friends: Never Same Again I don’t know how these past few years flew, But one thing is true, And I say

I logged in casually in the afternoon to check my mail and suddenly Yashwanth tells me that GATE results are out! Then Krishna was also online and told me he got 90 percentile. Congrats, dude! The website wouldn’t open for me as it was swamped with visitors, so, Krishna

Yesterday morning, I attended the GATE exam. I did very well considering my (lack of) preparation :-) . Paper was quite easy actually considering that it consisted of what we have already studied … but I still feel that the probability of me solving a probability problem is …. I don’t know,

My website is up and I have 7th semester final exams going on! I have to study Perl/CGI and Java today – the problem is the borin’ syllabus books and the Balasubramaniam Java book literally put me to sleep. Sad, but true.