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Archaeological Dig At College

It looks like my college has found the ancient remains of a long lost civilization behind the CSE block and set up a dig site to unearth buried artefacts.

Seriously, my college keeps building something or the other and they take ages to complete it. The front of the Mechanical department is still not complete two years after they inaugurated and started using it. There are three separate buildings under construction here and there around the campus. The annoying thing is that they start stuff but take forever to finish it. Most of the time we don’t even know what’s coming up at a construction site.

Boring Classes, Time Passes

Ah, excellent. My mother acquired some Reader’s Digest magazines that I am now packing them to read in college tomorrow. This should help pass the time while the lecturers are going on and on about something topic that I simply don’t have the energy/interest/patience to listen to. Not anymore.

After tomorrow we have 12 days of holidays! Pongal took out the Monday and Tuesday we have college on next week and provided us with this mini vacation. The hostel buggers, recently arrived from all parts of Tamilnadu are already planning to set off home again. Haha, this is how college should be!

Last Semester, First Day

The last semester has started. The good news is we have only two days of college. The bad news is we still have to go to college.

Our lecturers have enthusiastically started classes on the very first day regardless of whether people are actually paying attention. I spent a lot of time discussing our Counter Strike matches and reading about the U.S. presidential nominations in the Deccan Chronicle that Naresh regularly buys and brings to college (thanks dude!). The elections are in the U.S. but the whole world watches. Kind of scary… for the candidates, that is.

The last few periods were spent fixing up the banner and the letter to be presented to sponsor. Now everyone refers to as this letter as brow-chur (’brochure’ mispronounced) and annoys me. It’s not a brochure, dammit!

Check out the posters we’ll be using. LN got it done from somewhere and we were customising it. This is how it looked initially:

I did some fiddling around for some time and ended up with this:

I stuck to a grey silver white theme and it looks kind of dull. We’ll work on it in college some more and add some colours.

First Review Is Done

So I woke up all groggy (I did go to sleep at 3.30 AM and wake up at 6 AM) and somehow managed to catch the college bus. Actually it was a different driver today and not the usual inconsistent bastard who rushes through Besant Nagar as if it was a leper colony.

We got a little work done yesterday at my place when Vinod and Bala came over and by the end of the day we had finished a bit of the document. After some polishing up in college we went and presented it for the first review and got away without too many questions from the lecturers. Finally, it’s done.

Now we can slack off till the end of the month until the second review is due.

Project Reviews - Dates and Requirements

This stuff is lifted from Narayanan’s blog.

Review 1 - 03/01/08, 4/01/08
*Introduction about the project
*Literature Survey
*Analysis
*Hardware, Software specification

Review 2- 31/01/08, 01/02/08
*Design(Diagrams, Algorithms)
*Module-I Demo
*Unit Test Report for Module-I

Review 3- 14/02/08, 15/02/08
*Module-II,III Demo
*Unit Test Report for Module-II,III

Review 4- 07/03/08, 08/03/08
*Remaining Modules Demo
*Unit Test Report
*Integration Test Report
*Future Enhancements
*Bibliography

Review 5
*Model Exam - Full Demo (21/03/08)
*Project report submission (22/03/08)

Just like the Anna University syllabus, this stuff is vague and not very helpful.

Don’t Wanna Go Back!

The holidays are running out! Only about 4 days remain. I don’t want to go back there again! Even though we only have two days of college it’s still such a pain. I’m not going to carry any notebooks for a few weeks. I have never ever read from any notes. In fact I hardly bother taking them down in the first place. I should have spent all the time I had in class writing novels and getting them published instead of listening to some… I’ll stop there in case some lecturer does end up reading this.

Sundar Speaks Out

Looks like Sundar got really really bored and sat down to write a long article about engineering. Good post, but his title could use some work.

He’s mostly right and I agree with that he says about his college. It is indeed surprising how they manage without those huge sums of money. MNM can be silly at times but they don’t charge lakhs of rupees as capitation and they actually have cultural events and stuff unlike my college.

Read the post here. I’d write a long post about engineering but no doubt many others are hammering away at their keyboards as they speak and I’m simply too tired. I’ve managed to make most of my classmates admit that engineering is crap. Even the most stubborn ones are seeing the truth. My work is done.

The Zeroth Review

Zeroth. What a strange word. Sounds like Vinod. Maybe I’ll call him Zerod from now.

I went to college today to submit what we had hastily prepared a few days ago. Almost all my collegemates turned up with their preliminary project worked which ranged from shoddy to over complicated. We would rate ours somewhere in between. You want to know what it is? Perhaps Vinod will explain it.

One of the groups was submitting their project about analysis of bird calls to determine bird population and they were really surprised when I told them that it involved DSP. Some projects involved MANETS which seemed to be the latest thing for everyone to rave about without knowing anything about it. Last year it was nanotechnology.

What the hell is MANET anyway? Let me look it up…

Mobile ad-hoc network? That’s it? I thought it was some complicated thing. Bah.

Anyway most of the submitted projects were shot down by our lecturers, including ours. For some, the problem was not the actual project but presenting it in English.

CS CZ - From Noobs To Semi-Pros

A few months ago my classmates were total noobs at Counter Strike. Having played simple dumbed down games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 they found the game mechanics and weapon-buying concept of CS hard to grasp.

Some people didn’t understand how to plant the bomb.

Some tried to defuse the bomb by shooting at it. How could they possibly expect that to work? (Must have been watching too many Tamil movies.)

Some people forgot (or didn’t know how) to buy ammo for their primary weapon and then claimed ‘de gun is not shuting da’.

Others consistently fired upon teammates and claimed that ‘i tot u wer enemi’.

Well, we’re past all that now and most of them have learnt to play the game correctly, if not brilliantly. However we still get our asses kicked while playing against Expert difficulty bots in maps such as Aztec. Sometimes we get bots with names such as OBiT and MYTH while adding bots and these must be super elite bots or sometime because they usually take out two or three of a 5 member human team. Two of those bots usually end up wiping out all the human players!

Damn bots.

Read Gowtham’s post about this here.

Semester 7, Exam 6 - Information Security

What a bad day.

For the first time ever we had an exam in the afternoon session. That meant we could either go to college in the morning by college bus and sit there for over 5 hours waiting for the exam to start or we would turn up in the afternoon.

I had planned to go by bike to college later in the morning since no one knew if we had college buses or not. Unfortunately it started raining in the morning. I got caught up in the rain at Tiruvanmyur but the skies cleared as I travelled the 25 kilometres from one district to another. Thanks to the extra shirt I had bought I didn’t shiver to death. The roads had been completely destroyed in parts on the OMR and vehicles at to move at 10 kmph. Very annoying. Some managed to get to college, cold and wet.

And then the exam. They asked stuff I hadn’t studied (though Ganesh and the others claimed that they had in fact studied those very questions) and so it was story time. Ended up with right index finger and thumb hurting like mad at the end of the exam. (I use only those two fingers to hold the pen.)

Drove back after the exam on the crappy roads. Atleast it didn’t rain.

So not worth it.