The strange feeling

The strange feeling as the title suggests is quite strange indeed. I am a big fan of it, and I experience it quite a lot. The familiar sensation of your eyes burning while they become blood red due to lack of sleep, and the momentary lapses of concentration are the fun parts of the strange feeling. As against common belief that this occurs only when a person does not sleep for long hours; the feeling creeps in even if you have had terribly low amount of sleep.

As an example, I was up till almost 6 am yesterday night working on my internship homework [Yes, I do pile up my work till the very end :P ]. I had to get up at 8 and push off for work after that. The feeling had crept in once I got up from bed. The following data is what I have collected from all my strange feeling experiences. The times that are given are approximately after 20-22 hours of lack of sleep, followed by a maximum of 2 hours of sleep.

0-2 hours: During this time, a bath or the simple act of washing your face can make u forget the feeling, although the burning eyes are hard to get rid of :). Interestingly, your calves start hurting a bit, I have never understood why.

2-4 hours: This time is the best, the feeling does not interfere in your normal work.

4-8 hours: The feeling starts returning, and a nice lunch can solve the issue; considering in my time table this is lunch time. The lunch gives you intense satisfaction, but then leads to a strong pull to sleep.

8-12 hours: This a generally lazy time. It is hard to do anything productive in this time, and there is a slight risk of going off to sleep.

12-14 hours: This is the toughest part. You will feel sleep overcoming you so strongly, that most novices can’t get past this point. Even veterans sleep for sometime at this point if they have nothing interesting to do :)

14-18 hours: Once you are past the 14 hour mark, its a easy ride for sometime, a good meal [not too heavy, too heavy meals are dangerous :P ] can help you concentrate here.

18-24 hours: This is the fun part. You start feeling you are in a dream sometimes. Your mind slips in and out of reality as it plays games with you while you work. The lapses in concentration widen, and it takes some time to get used to this. I would not suggest driving past this point, unless you are taking strong help from caffeine :)

24-30 hours: This is where you can work, but this is where I start thinking “why the hell am I awake for so long? Nothing is this important” My limit is reached somewhere around here, and I collapse, and give in to the strange feeling.

Right now I am at the 15 hour mark, and relaxing, writing my blog, listening to music, as I prepare myself for the ride ahead. As and when I reach new points, I shall release a new version of this post, with my new experiences.

PS: Anyone who has reached further, which I am sure most of you must have, kindly let me know of the dangerous points of time to stay alert :P

Nostalgia

Just came back home 3 days ago. My parents, completely and totally bored without their kids at home, decided to turn the house inside out and give it a “new look”. So, on account of that, my room was turned upside down, and that is what led me into stumbling into things from my past. Out of the million things I found at various places, one big thing which led me down the memory lane was:

My School T-shirt. Now this one was a biggie. This is more like a tradition (in my school at least) that on the last day of school, we maul each other’s t-shirts with crap written allover it. Now, my class strength in school (Xth) was around 60. So that t-shirt had around 40 lines written by 40 different people on it, with their respective signs below it. One of the few times that I have regretted leaving the city. I realized that I have no idea what more than half of these people are doing. Basically, a reunion is long overdue.

Its weird how fast time passes by. On counting, I realized that its been 4 years since I passed out from my School. Some random memories from school would be:

1. Going to have a “misal” during lunch time. Ahhh Anna’s misal [warning: this anna is not the name of an english lady or any lady for that matter. The double n is to indicate a marathi sound. Refer to your local marathi expert for details]

2. Being offered tea by the “maushi’s” in school. That too, while bunking classes [like Hindi] and loafing around in the P.T. sir’s room.

3. Those long walks to the Ground for P.T. and the effects of Kondre and More on the Dynamics of the whole “line” of people going.

4. Those desperate bicycle-sprints to get to school at most 5 min. late. [going on time was never an option for me, unless I had somehow learned traveling at c.]

5. The evening hangouts. Every guy coming in has to skid his bike or stop it in some style, just so that he climbs up the so called social ladder.

6. The overrated “friendship day”. It was more like a statistics problem to qualitatively, and to some extent quantitatively try to estimate levels of liking amongst select individuals in class. Or otherwise it was just a day when a group of girls used to come and tie some bands on my arm. Somehow, the number of bands on your hand also had something to do with the social status back then. [Also, the guys never indulged in buying such stuff, not to my surprise, but just a random observation]

7. The Dedications counter at the Fun Fair. The only thing that made the fun fair “fun”. Enough said.

8. The eagerly awaited “Raksha Bandhan”. Also a very interesting day to see what and all people [girls] will do to make “the teasing” go away. From whatever little experience I have about this whole issue, I have learned that embracing the teasing makes it go away faster than anything else. But thats just my point of view.

9. Some moments like the one where my P.T. instructor tried instructing me about life, love and love life, all together at the same time. All this, when my alleged girlfriend  was standing right there along with me taking the most unique lecture the guy must have given in all of his career.

10. The long lines to the Principal’s chamber during “mass-imposition” for not doing German Homework. On top of that the look of our Principal when she went ballistic with fury at the guy standing 2 feet away from me. I’d say it was her fault. Who told her to shout out “Bimba” in front of us in the first place?

11. Last but definitely not the least, the fundamentally disappointed  look on my class-teacher’s face when she had a look at my last ever school report. That has been one of the most inspiring memories I have had. Every ambition I have is coupled with the factor of wanting to change that look, just that look. Something tells me its not gonna change :).

After all this, the conclusion I drew from the whole experience is that I should not go through old stuff, unless I have like an hour to live in the memory, and another one to blog about it later :P

Exam Accomplishments

Well as the title says it, these are the things I have accomplished while my exams were going on (they still are, but what the hell, its almost over)

• Complete Max Payne 2 in 3 hours flat
• Complete Commandos: The Strike Force overnight, playing for the first time
• Watching 3 movies, one of them being Hindi
• Completing Quake 3 all levels at Hardcore in one sitting
• Realizing that I am still a kid, and I cannot not play games
• Never switching on my table lamp
• Having a bath everyday
• Doing actual physical activities like playing Football till the ball fell outside the corridor, and on the lawn
• Watching The IT Crowd, complete series
• Using a single pen for all exams up to now
• Eating more biscuits than my monthly average
• Finally being able to write in a perfectly horizontal line on the bloody blank exam answer sheet
• Taking an additional sheet for a paper like Principles of Management
• Knowing enough stuff to sit through the entire length of all my papers
• Last, and most probably the least, writing on my blog on consecutive days

Exams do hold a lot of importance in my life, is what I have just realized. Cheers to exams.

Free

The word used as the title here is a highly abused word is what I personally feel. There are a lot of ways in which it is used. Interestingly, every meaning that I know of the word free has a very interesting meaning. As I just said, all the types of “free”s are highly abused by people during talking. The word free, when searched for on wikipedia, gives a page asking what type of “free” am I looking for. The options given over there are broadly classified into:

Computer Science
Intellectual Property
Literature
Mathematics
Philosophy
Popular Music
Public Services
Other

This is much much much more than what I had expected, but then it seems that my experience with the word “free” is very limited, and there is much more that I need to learn. From what I know, the various uses of “free” are:

Free as in no cost price:
This is every marketing person’s favorite type of free. It is the thing which draws crowd, which sells other stuff, and is very powerful and attractive. I am guessing most people use free in this sense. It is the most searched for word on www.google.com, or any other search engine, is what I am guessing.

Free NOT as in free beer:
The title is self-explanatory. Any guy who is even minutely “Open” minded, will guess that this free refers to the “free” of the Free Software Foundation. This is another wildly abused free, all over the Open Source and Free Software community. It is used and explained in every instance where anything related to FSF is mentioned.

Free as in freedom:
This is the philosophical take on the issue. It is also a very talked about free, in history, civics and god knows what other places. The only thing that I think of when I hear freedom is the lyrics:

With Silence comes Peace
With Peace comes Freedom
With Freedom comes Silence

-Illusion and Dreams, Poets of the Fall

Somehow though, today when I saw the word freedom, that is not the first thing that crossed my mind. I was afraid when I heard the word. Its been a long time since preparation for QUARK ‘08 began. I realized that I have never had freedom as such during the whole time. Although it has been the best time I have had in college so far, I still think that freedom was one thing I was denied, due to the overbusy state I was in constantly.
As I sit here at my comp typing away leisurely, thinking about life after 2 days, when the tests are over, and finally I am left in the “post-QUARK” trauma, I realize that its gonna be hard.

As I had mentioned in my earlier post, doing such stuff has completely blocked any chance of my social life improving, no wait, its not even kept the same, its decaying slowly. As some sort of compensation to the whole situation, I guess I had gotten involved in this to a point that it was my social life. Its funny though. Its all over, and now the weird time starts.

20/2/2008 2100hrs:
[Im having maggi at Nescafe, and my Chief comes and happens to sit at my table]
Me: Hey
Chief: Hey
Me: So….., wassup?
Chief: nm, exams going on…
Me: [trying to do small talk]Oh….. what paper tomorrow?
Chief: Ah… Programming Languages, I have freaking 80% of this book tomorrow
Me: Be happy uve got only one paper…, I have 2, and im still in EEE 2nd year
Chief: [sudden spurt of enthusiasm in voice] Chal chuck that, tell me what have you thought of the magazine idea?
Me: [relieved, and totally into the convo now] We are going ahead with it, itll definitely help QUARK ‘09 in a big way
…and blah blah blah…

Its still weird to think that it is all over. I will be writing about my team, and its special members in the near future, as I am now officially “free”, it will be sooner than the average gap I have between posts.

PS: I had once in the past tried to write down what all I have learned from QUARK when it was 45 days away. Now that it has been 12 days past it, I realize that it is quite futile to do so. I believe www.wordpress.com will run out of space if I get down to writing what QUARK, and what the Organizing Committee have taught me.

Quark ‘08

The one thing that has gotten me high for the past few months. The day I saw the notice saying that I was selected to be in the Organizing Committee to today, lots of changes have taken place in my outlook towards it. There are a lot of things that I have learned from it. I learned:
How work is supposed to flow.
How Organizations work.
How people have issues regarding work [most of the issues being "i dont want to" types].
How greedy people are for certificates.
How to get people to work for you.
How I was pathetic at all these things.
How busy can a person get.
How one can still find time for “social” activity.
How CGPA gets screwed up when you do that.
How people’s roles get decided naturally.
How important is it to wear shirts (and full pants too, both being at the same time).
How it gives an unnecessarily “important” feeling.
How much is music necessary in life.
How to design websites in AJAX.
How to design websites using DHTML.
How to give kick ass presentations.
How management has killed my projects.
How, once blogging is hit, is very hard to start again.
How high can you get.
Thats about it, I guess. Well, all I can say is that there are still 45 days to go for Quark ‘08. I hope I learn a few more things from it. There are also some things that I did not learn, still:
How to study without feeling so at all.
How to prioritize.(In general)
How to be a good student (something I was sent to college to do).
How to delegate and trust.
How to ask girls out, successfully.
How to balance everything.
These are the things I haven’t yet learned, with respect to the things I have. Otherwise, the page would run out of space if I list everything. But its cool, im still just 19 years old. So, lets just hope that I do learn some of this stuff in time. I hope Quark teaches me this.

Also, in a Marketing attempt:
Official website: www.bits-quark.org
[Kindly do check it out]

Engineering

You know you are a budding engineer when:

1. You’re proud to be in engineering but completely hate it.
2. You have a knack for math and physics but when in class you feel like its all over your head.
3. You hate chemistry and are pathetic at it.
4. You are awful at spelling and grammar or anything english related.
5. After about a month of college a C in half your classes dont seem that bad anymore.
6. You recognize all 4 girls in engineering.
7. Instead of studying you spend your week before finals doing something stupid like writing this.(This was a pending post since comprees)
8. You laugh when other students complain about taking 30 credits in a year.
9. You believe that your best friend is the FX 991MS.
10. It’s 2am and your computer has:-
    • 15 firefox tabs open 4 of which or wikipedia looking up some term you should know, others include all your orkut, facebook accounts, some blogs and such junk
    • Text editor open with some stupidly long lab
    • at least 10 different adobe windows open with your lecture slides/ assignments
    • amaroK/winamp open with metal playing
    • Gaim/Trillian running with 4 chat windows, the four being the 4 girls in engineering.
    • Download manager running with the latest movie/episode of 24/heroes/scrubs/PB.
11. You wish that your college would start giving out Arts degrees as well. (Or is it just me?)
12. You analyze everything you see without thinking about it.
13. You have exams that are 3 hours to do 2 questions, and still run out of time.
14. You know the whole Greek alphabet.
15. You have fun talking about maths.
16. Your average sleeping time per day is 3-5 hrs.
17. You understand jokes like “I would like to be your integral so I can be the area under your curves” and find them hilarious.
18. You forget everything you learn as soon as you get home.
19. You do every assignment at the last possible moment.
20. You can fill up a 200 pages foolscap notebook in 5 days or less.
21. Your computer stays switched on for 4 days continuous, at an average.
22. You have finally learned that you’re not actually smart, high school kids were just dumb.
23. Though you will never admit it, you know we’re all losers.
24. You would rather do mutivariable calculus than have to write a paper or memorize anything.
25. You might not know shit about computer but can write a 5 page C++ code with ease.
26. No matter how confused you are you’ll convince yourself a textbook isnt worth buying.
27. Only reason you’re passing is because of those engineering friends that are way smarter than you, or whatever.
28. You depend on a curve to get a decent grade.
29. You are the only person that finds those stupid engineering shirts hilarious.
30. You hate engineering.

PS: This has been part plagiarized from a facebook group description that caught my eye.

Quotes

1. “pchk” (This is an onomatopoeia)
2. “aare ye naaaa” (Come oonnn)
3. “he bagh parya” (Tough to translate)
4. “tuzha flavour kay aahe?” (What is your flavour?)
5. “aajichi bhishi aahe” (My Grandmother’s V.C. is there.)
6. “shyaaaaaa” (onomatopoeia, shows disdain)
7. “I am a bad boy” (Well, its written in English, why do you need translation?)
8. “mazhyat kay dosh aahe?” (What flaws are there in my character?)
9. “mala packing karaycha aahe” (I need to do packing)
10. “kittiiii god aahe te” (It is soooo sweet)
11. “tuzhya aaichiii #%@^” (Your mom’s <Censored>)
12. “are baba nahi mhantayt” (Dad is saying no)
13. “tari pan tu tevis” (You are still 23)

These are the most common/most famous quotes by people close to me in school. Any guesses who is who?

PS: The release of a list of the recent quotes of these same people, as well as of new friends is in the pipeline, but as the list is big, it will take some time. Also, I might write up on these 13 characters individually some time in the future.

Why do people drink alcohol?

Well, I guess I have seen a lot of people around me drink alcohol, some of them even in generous quantities… I have had a taste of tequila myself, but I do not drink alcohol as such. I have been asked by people to have a taste of/drink alcohol(of a different kind), but then I have decided to wait till I am legal to drink, that is 21 years of age in India.
It would seem that I am holding back from drinking for some dumb legal rule, but then I never really felt the urge to drink alcohol, even if people around me were drinking. Also, I do not feel that the rule is dumb. There must be some reason why people chose 21 as the minimum age for consumption of alcohol legally.

After seeing almost all of my friends drinking (or hearing that they have started drinking socially), I thought that there might be something wrong with me. So I checked the result of some survey, as to why people drink alcohol…From research conducted in the Netherlands among 15 to 25 year-olds, the following answers came up:

• Sociability (71%)
• Like the taste (51%)
• Feel at ease (12%)
• Get intoxicated (6%)
• Get drunk (2%)
• Because everybody does it (6%)
• To forget problems (0%)

It was then that I realized that there is nothing really wrong with me, its normal to not feel like drinking alcohol.

Internship

Well, it turns out that somebody found my CV interesting enough to read and give me a call for a interview on the phone. The interview was held long ago, just before the first day of my comprees! It was decent, I mean that I really did not expect to clear the interview as I was told that there were a lot of applicants for the internships at Oneirix Labs , but then I got a mail on 5th may saying:

Hi Eeshan,

Congratulations! You are selected for an internship at Oneirix Labs. Please
intimate your acceptance of the offer and tell us when you will be able to
begin working for the internship project.

That was the happiest day I had in quite some time, as my exams were causing my slow and painful death… Well, then after I came home, I started on the internship on last Monday, and today I have completed one week of the internship.
The amount of knowledge I have gained(read as:knowledge not information*) in this one week of internship has been astounding.
I got introduced to:

• Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)
• Octave (Open Source equivalent of MATLAB)
• How Open Source Softwares are actually coded.(And their architecture)
• Working of Parsers(Lex+YACC)
• And well, editing all the above things, except Ubuntu

The most important thing that the internship did, is to tell me that no task is impossible to attack, its just a matter of patience and strong will to actually make in rodes into any problem out there. I would have laughed at anyone who told me a month ago that I was going to read, understand and edit a 4153 line C++ code in the next month…

*->There is a subtle difference, I shall write upon that in future posts.

Compreecation

Well, it is here now, the most boring part of the semester, the end semester exams, or as they are called in my college, “The Comprehensive Exams” (Comprees in short).
There are a few things that I have noticed during the two Compree times that I have had in my college life. The college basically undergoes a very Compreecated Phenomenon which leads to the following things: (this is according to my data collection, if anyone has any other observations, they are free to tell me)

1. Excellent weather conditions, compared to the sad weather we have to face in daily life in Goa.
2. Frequent power cuts, especially after sunset and before sunrise.
3. Clogging of the library… This is one time in the whole semester that the library is occupied by not only couples/to be couples, but also other students.
4. Change of nick names… Every CS server will have someone who was earlier named X, named as X|trying to stop CS.
5. Increase in lighting in the campus… As hardly anyone is sleeping… all people awake in the hope of studying, ending up watching a movie or something…
6. Opt Ins… most people who have opted out of the mess/ are reluctant to come to the mess, suddenly start crowding the mess during comprees.
7. People cannot do regular stuff (That is actually the reason why this post is coming in when I have finished my comprees and am at home)