Well my semester just got over and it was a good one. It went much better than any previous semester especially academically.

But well now it is over and the news is that I will be going to Ecole des Mines, Nantes, France next semester as an exchange student, something I am really looking forward too. So, I will be in Delhi over the summer learning French along with other exchange students.

News apart, now I come to what really prompted me to write this blog. Ever since the semester has finished, I have this feeling inside of gaiety and happiness that I haven’t felt in a long time, maybe since my first semester. I feel so enthused, revitalized and rejuvenated. Now that I don’t have anything in particular to do, I have all the time to whatever I want. And just this realization has awaken my enthusiasm that had been dormant for a while.I am enjoying my music to the full extent. At times I just turn it on, lay down, enjoying the beauty of it. I have also resumed reading the Atlas Shrugged and am enjoying reading just as I used to before I did a course called “Contemporary Fiction” . Like before, I am reading purely for the fun and thrill it gives me, without having to analyze the writing style, without having to think why the author wrote it thus, just reading it from the narrators point of view. Like before, I am able to associate myself to the protagonists and everything I read just connects with me.  Apart from this, the most important thing is that I am enjoying every moment I live, without a hint of boredom. I am just hopping from one thing to other. In short, LIFE’S GOOD. Totally loving this phase. Will make sure this continues…

Signing off

Equivalence aka Abhinav

So here I am, at IGI airport in Delhi. As usual, my parents insisted that we arrive well ahead of time in case any hiccups don’t cause us to miss our flight. So we arrived at the airport at 5:30 for a 8:00 flight. Now the time is ermm … 7: 33 p.m and over the past two hours i have been thoroughly bored. This is what i have done till now to get rid of boredom:

• First, i just sat down and relaxed, waiting for sleep to come, but surprisingly i wasnt able to sleep, even though i was quite tired. I thought that after so many hours of practice of sleeping while sitting on a chair, it would take me no time, but it seems the ambience that of a lecture theatre, is a crucial factor. And since there was no-one around whom i could pretend to be my prof at IIT, I dropped the idea and moved ahead.
• Then, I roamed around a bit, but that too didn’t last more than 5 mins, mostly because there was nothing (no-one) worth seeing.
• After that i decided to call up someone, so i chose Dahiya, and asked him abou the DotA game they were playing when i left the hostel. But alas, it wasn’t one of those eventful games (Sanket was not playing). Basically Dahiya raped Ravi in a 1v1 ardm match.
• After checking in, I roamed about again, but even the aquariums and the budget news on TV (without sound) could not hold me for long.
• Then I turned up the music on my cell phone and just sat down. I admit that this was going ok, atleast better than most of my other attempts.
• But then mom told me about these kiosks, which brings us here, and this is what I have been doing for the past 20 minutes or so. That familiar feel of the keyboard and the mouse never brought me so much joy. It somewhat subdued my burning desire to have my laptop with me, which started the moment I entered the airport. After all, there was a sign that said FREE WI-FI. After that constricting proxy in IITD this would have been like heaven

And now the boarding for my flight has started. So i’ll be off.

Abhinav

PS: this would have been posted earlier, but there were some “technical problems” with the kiosks. Guess nothing in life is really for free.

Finally, the third and the most backbreaking semester (yet) has come to an end. As for academics, well my cg has improved ever so slightly. I have moved out of the 8.6 bracket and scored an 8.7755 this semester. It would have been better if I hadn’t missed an 8 in EEL 201 (Digital Electronics) by a whisker. I do take some plus points from this sem. I finally have a steady quizzing team (me, Sidharth and Gaurav aka Gainda) and we have started making the cut in most non-comp events in IITD. And, my pool skills showed vast improvement towards the end of this sem. Also, I have put on some weight this semester, though I still think it is not enough for people to start calling me pregnant.

Anyways, after a grueling December, i have finally found time to update my blog, maybe i will make this a daily thing this vacations. So here goes the first of my daily digest :

I’d start off with what I love the most when I come home i.e eating and sleeping. So, after sleeping for more than 10 hours, I had my favorite Dal Parathas for breakfast, complete with malai and milk. For lunch, I had authentic Punjabi Sarson ka Saag and Makki ki roti, with adrak ka achar and gur (just thinking of it is making my mouth water). And dinner, was of awesome seviyan that i ate too much of for my own good. The rest of the day was interspersed with me having generous doses of pinniyan.

Ok, now for the rest of the day. First, found out that for some reason internet is not working on my ubuntu even though it is connected to the wireless network. Maybe, i will fix that tomorrow. Then spent the morning and afternoon watching season 1 of The Bing Bang Theory. Really liked the characters-ultimate nerdy. Sheldon is a real laugh. Though Raj has stereotype written all over him. Will catch up with the rest of the episodes in the days to come.

Read some linear algebra in the evening. Hopefully, will be done with binomial forms in a couple of days. Will start with Hilbert spaces after that. The night was spent writing this entry and chatting with friends.

I think that I beginning to like the pattern emerging. Maybe I will add a nap in the afternoon. I’d like to time it to match the hour long power cut. Thats all for today.

ToDo for tomorrow:

• Wake up for gym
• Solve internet problem in Ubuntu
• Get a haircut
• Register for TOEFL
• Start with Bilinear Forms
• Start looking for summer interns

Abhinav

First of all, for those who don’t know, I wasn’t smoking the whole day, Hukka is what we call humanities courses here at IITD. I know it would come as a surprise to people over here, but yes; I did spent an entire day ( A holiday in fact!!!) studying hukka. No, I don’t have a minor tomorrow. But as I said before, tomorrow is my presentation on Forgiveness and Guilt. My day started when Nikhil called me to decide on our “plan of action for the day”.  Right after having breakfast he came over to my room and we started seeing the movie Schindler’s List as a part of our preparation for the presentation. I had already seen the movie once, though it was the first time for Nikhil as well as Anshul aka maggu (though he claims it to be a ghost of his past) who is my roomie. We saw two thirds of the movie before lunch, and the last one-third after it. By the way, I had my lunch in Nilgiri, where they had scrambled eggs (bhurji) and mah ki daal plus nicely done (i.e. not burned or undercooked) tandoori roti which actually had ghee on them, which for us people is the best we could ask for. I guess, I would start going to Nil on monday afternoon as well as soon as they stop serving lassi in our hostel.

After finishing the movie, which all three of us loved, I just lied down and thought about the movie and the characters, while Nikhil started working on the presentation. Meanwhile, Anshul watched some Nelly Furtado videos on Anubhav’s Laptop, followed Naruto and DotA ( more to come on the rising dota fever in following posts). Then I started searching the net for stuff relevant to the presentation. After a while, naturally for me, I felt sleepy so I took a nap for about half an hour. I woke up at around 5:30 pm and resumed searching. I found a nice but lengthy article on Forgiveness and Guilt, which I started reading. Though in the end, only the initial part of it was of much use. So while i was looking for more material, Nikhil was jotting down his points, and created the general format. Then, after having dinner, we sat together, combined our material, and made the final draft of the presentation, while making the presentation more organised. We were done by 10:30 and then we gave a mock presentation to Anshul; and Srijan (anyone better when you need someone to ask you arbit questions! ) . Courtesy of all the questioning, (as expected), the mock presentation took us almost an hour, and closed the lid on the presentation.

So, I spend more 13 hours of my day (except for the very few and short breaks in between), working for the presentation. Obviously, I was thoroughly exhausted, but still didnt want to sleep, and since I couldn’t thing of anything fun (and not time consuming) to do, I decided to write this blog entry. So now, I am going to sleep. Wish me luck for tomorrow.

To know about how the presentation went go here

Throughout my 2nd semester, I heard from my seniors that the 3rd semester is a real pain in the ass. And although you would have night-outs, they wouldn’t consist of hanging out with friends, like the ones i had in my in the first year, but rather of coding in the lab. But until now, the going has been rather easy with not much workload. I have still found more than enough time to indulge myself (read watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S, playing DotA, and other stuff). But as the majors approach, I am really beginning to feel the heat. So this is my situation for the next two weeks:

1. CSL 211 (Computer Architecture) Assignment with deadlines on 28th October, 4 , 11, and 16 November

2. CSP 301 (Design Practices in Computer Science) project on task scheduling for which I already submitted the documentation on the 26th and 27th. The final code is to be submitted on 11 Nov.

3. HUL 237 (Contemporary Fiction) presentation on “Forgiveness and Guilt” on 2 Nov for which I am supposed to read books relevant to the topic and cite them.

4. CSL 105 (Discrete Mathematics) assignments. One was given today, which the professor says is tough, so much so that he gave us until the last working day of the semester (that will be like 19 Nov or something). There will be another assignment that will be given in the period between that.

5. EEP 201 (Digital Electronics Lab) for which I have to make a project on an FPGA and I have chosen to make a two player cricket game.

6. EEL 201 (Digital Electronics) – have to catch up on the last 3 lectures where they started teaching hardware descriptive languages.

Apart from this, I also have to appear for my Maths and Physics SAT on 7 Nov and am yet to decide on a date for TOEFL.

And needless to say, I haven’t started working for any of the above things. The curse of the 3rd semester has finally shown up.

Yesterday, I went with Saakshi for her birthday party to New Friends Colony market. The two things that I first noticed when we reached there were the eating places with Arabic (or well some middle eastern language) written on their signboards, and the ample number of “Wine Shops” and that got me real excited <wink>. So we went to this place called Al Bake famous for the Shawarma. The place i heard was rated as among the top 10 eating places in Delhi and it truly lived up to its name.  It is not one of those high end and all neat places. When I first saw it, I was reminded of the shops in Parathe wali Gali. So, shawarma is basically meat rolled up in a roti like bread. At Al Bake they serve chicken shawarma with mayonaisse. And wow!!! it is awesome!! ( person who came up with the idea of chicken + mayonaisse must have been a culinary genius). Like Shiti’s description of rogan josh – “It is like sex for your tongue. If you haven’t eaten it yet, your tongue is still a virgin.”  And at Rs 25 per piece it is a steal. Even Anupam would be full after having 4 pieces. I wanna go again, but this time with my mates, take a bottle of chilled beer, and (well cheesy as it may sound) let my tongue enjoy!!

I am not a very keen follower of blogs. Even now the only blog i follow is Nikhil’s. The problem was that Nikhil is not a regular blogger, so I wouldn’t know when he added a new post. Also there were a couple of blogs I wanted to follow but I didn’t want to bookmark them and check them out every time i open my browser. So, finally I tried the application that had been installed in my system ever since I installed Ubuntu – Akregator. The description says “A Feed Reader for KDE”. So, I just added the link to Nikhil’s feed and tweaked Konqueror (default KDE browser) proxy settings and voilà!! I had all of Nikhil’s posts right there. All this was done in Nikhil’s room and he got jealous (:-D). I went ahead and added some more RSS feeds (Chelsea, Terence Tao‘s Blog) and added a launcher to Akregator on my dock. Now I just check it once everyday and get all my updates there. And, if I can’t read any post that time, it is always stored on my computer so I can read it anytime later. So, I suggest all you readers to go ahead and download a good RSS reader and make use of the links like the one at the top of this page.

Akregator Screenshot

Happy Reading!!

After a suggestion from Nikhil, I have decided to start blogging.

This blog will mainly contain, as the title suggests, Musings, on topics that interest me like Maths, Movies, Music, DotA, Food, Friends, Open Source Technologies, Life @ IIT/Delhi, or any general stuff. I intend to be regular but might be hampered by studies, being away, or procrastination.

Happy reading.