Sourabh’s blog

Its been a while since I last scribbled anything on my personal blog. So here it comes.

A lot has been happening around to keep me busy. The most important part: Just 5 more tests of the final semester and I’m out of college for good. First one didn’t go so well, so here’s hoping the rest of them do. Can’t believe in a matter of a few months I would graduate with B. Tech (Civil) degree.

Dad and bro have now realized how easy things are with a laptop. More importantly, lesser worries. Except for a couple of office PCs, all systems have been replaced with laptops. Looking forward to buy a WiFi router after the exams to surf wirelessly anywhere in the home.

I’ve been kicked out of my room again. This time around I’ve shifted to the store room on the second floor. Took quite a bit of renovation but it turned out great. The room still looks empty but that will soon change as I move my stuff to this place slowly. Would upload some pics later.

More updates coming soon. Just rushed on this one to ensure minimum 1 blogpost/month on this blog.

1. Te^st Successful.

• TEST SUCC_ESSFUL.

test successful

Okay, let me begin this by admitting that there was no real need to get this for my personal use. It wasn’t so long ago that I got a Dell Inspiron 640m as my main PC. I had absolutely no problems with it after upgrading the RAM to 3GB. But as it turns out, I was was being very opportunistic and offered dad (who btw needed a new laptop for his use) to take my Inspiron 640m. And I got a reason to buy a new laptop. Win-win deal, right? Yeah, I thought so too.

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Hey you, check out my new laptop. It definitely looks better than yours!

Nevermind the LQ pics and poor PhotoShop work. I’m really pressed for time right now. Will update this space with other details and description if I feel the need.

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Thank heavens that the writers strike is over and now they can get back drafting those super crazy story lines for TV shows. I guess it has been three months now since they stopped doing what they’re supposed to do. Suck it up, enjoy the new contract and get back to work ASAP. I desperately need my favorite TV shows back on air! It’s unfortunate that there would be some delays, major cuts in the episode list and some of the shows will have to be axed or dropped completely for this season.

It just has to be so unpredictable at the wrong time. The internet problem has turned from bad to worse. It was painfully slow for the last couple of days but now both the connections at my place are DOWN. Just goes to show the great backup Indian ISPs have in times of crisis. I am looking forward to a day where all the ISPs are down simultaneously and life comes to a standstill. Won’t that be some fun.

And guess what has come to my rescue? The dreaded Tata Indicom dialup. Perfect way to enjoy this weekend. 10 hours of it. It’s great to relive your glorious past every once in a while connecting to internets at speeds of 33.6 kbps.

In other news, I finally managed to get the old number working on my new cellphone.

Last couple of months left before I say good bye to VJTI. The old Acer laptop needs the fourth power adapter. This time it blew up and melted on desk due to excessive use. It really hurts to spend soo much on old hardware. Looking forward to buy an ASUS Eee PC in the coming month. The thought of a third laptop for personal use is frightening but I really need something like an Eee PC in my backpack.

Enough of blogging for this session. Can’t just go on doing this over a dialup connection. There are so many other things to do right now. And now I hope, that the net connections are back again soon, so I can download LOST S04E01.

I think I may have dropped the phone (accidentally) during a good nap on my commute back home from college. Apart from the pain of losing some of your old, non-regular contacts, it feels nothing. As a matter of fact, I am happy to live a few days without the annoyance of the same. Getting back the old number on a new handset would turn out to be quite a task since I am taking about Reliance CDMA here. The handset which I lost was an old one having no RUIM (SIM card), so not sure what the actual procedure is.

I guess, I will have to do a bit of research for CDMA handsets. More of them are poor in battery life with complete lack of features.

Last 30 odd days have been real busy. So many things to look forward to, so many things to do, so many ideas exploding in my brain and so many people to be in touch with. All this sometimes makes me go insane, but I live to fight another day or think it never happened.

Officially, I’m on vacation till college resumes for the final semester (yay!) sometime mid-Jan. So, the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing what I enjoy the most - sleeping (during day time), web surfing and watching TV Shows. Just when I thought, life was going great doing nothing, came in this spoil sport news from my project colleague. The news that we’re gonna have special sessions for an unknown software demonstration throughout this week from 10-to-5.

At first though, I knew it would suck badd. But I was so wrong and I’m glad that I dragged my lazy ass to college and attended this ‘workshop’. The good thing is there are only 8-10 students and the session is specifically for GIS. GIS is the only part of Civil Engg. academics which comes to me naturally. Of course, it involves a computer and that in a way gives me the proverbial ‘upper hand’ but still it’s one interesting subject with some real world use not-involving excessive site work (read: no standing tall under the sun, observing construction workers do their work and designing super complex structures)

This 5-day workshop is being conducted by ESRI India (big name in the GIS field). Basically, what they are doing is teaching us their software (ArcView, ArcMap, Arc…) which costs more than a million rupees and indirectly, shamelessly promoting it to future engineering masterminds. Don’t judge me wrong, I appreciate their initiative to come down to VJTI and give us a glorified demo but you don’t have to lick your product to such limits. Anyways, I’m not complaigning. I’ve got this chance to learn something which I’m really interested in (for a change) and I will do everything to not let this go down the drain again.

Another great aspect to this story: I asked the guy if he could install a ‘genuine’ copy of ArcInfo on my laptop and he said yes. But then I also managed to quickly copy the installation files on pen drive, so doesn’t matter much after all. Yes, I will take my laptop to college the entire week and use it in real sense of the term. That’s it for now. I’m super busy this week, in case I don’t reply to your messages, you know the reason! Thanks.

Oh, red-and-white Techtree. This is so ridiculous. I understand you’ve got automated newsletters & mailing lists at work here. But when you are forwarding your super exclusive daily newsletter to thousands of real users, the least you can do is take the pains of going through it once. Don’t just forward updates for the sake of sending newsletters daily.

You don’t have control over what junk some people post in the form of comments. Agreed. That answers why the site is filled with hilarious and off-topic comments left, right and centre. How about some moderation in what you send to thousands of inbox? Some of us are mortals who do go through the newsletters. After all, that’s one (somewhat) ad-free way to get the contents of your website.

Sucks when you have a huge break between the exams. The only good they do is let you relax and tell you that there’s still enough time left to study. But right now, I just wanna go through these exams, put them behind me and move on.

Good thing, the next batch of exams are back to back.