It has finally arrived!

Acer 5002, Amd64 Turion 1.6Gig, 256 MB RAM, DVD writer.

Currently downloading Suse 10.0 OSS for AMD64.

The Old Book Shop

A antique book shop in the heart of bustling bazaar... It is still there. I happened to take a peek at it. And the old guy was still there.

Usually in my summer holidays I used to go to my grandmother's place, which is the heart of Kolhapur city. And I used to get pretty bored, especially in the afternoons, when everybody used to go to sleep. I used to check out the creaky and dusty old attic in the house, checking out dusty old books, mostly my grandfather's who was a professor in Botany.

The wada is very near to MahaLaxmi temple, which is bang in the center of the city. There is a mandai, a bazaar, typical Indian style nearby, where one gets everything ranging from utensils, common household items to foodgrains and vegetables.

In the middle of all this is an old raddi ka dukaan. Sandwiched right in between two open air foodgrain shops, there sits an old guy, who is surrounded by books from all sides.

The old guy is an interesting fellow. He is not much interested in his business, he typically engrossed in reading some book. He buys books at radii rate, sells them at marginally higher costs.

I used to frequent his place. I would buy any books lying around. Most would cost something like 2-3 rupees. This was some 8-10 years back. And pretty soon I had collected a horde of books. Some fine books, Reader's digest short stories collections. Reader's digest issues from the 1950's - 1980's. In a span of a year and a half I had collected something like eighty ninety issues of RD. I still remember the old guy diligently searching for RD's in his pile of books.

I checked up on the old guy few days back. He was still there. Nothing has changed.

Gaim 2.0b1 released

Gaim 2.0b is released. Check out news here

Check out the change log. Stealth stuff has been implemented for Yahoo! it seems.

The Semester That Was

Lots of interesting events have taken place this semester.

Things started with the campus placements. Suddenly everyone stopped reading Jigar, and started reading Shakunta Devi etc for the Placements.

It was actually quite funny with people taking the placements as just another exam.

The problem in front of me was to sit for which company and leave others. Once I am placed in a copmany, I am out of the Campus Placements process, so I had to take the decision bit carefully. The lineup started with Infosys followed by Wipro, TCS, IBM and Amdocs.

I passed the first four. Perhaps the toughest decision I had to take was to leave IBM. My mom started getting a bit tense, c'mon the first four have lot of brand recognition. But my dad supported me throughout.

I checked out Amdocs. It seemed to be a good place to work in. I love telecommunications anyways, so I decided to appear for the apti's.

The test was a breeze, nothing difficult. It was a CBT of around 3-4 hours, covered a lot of sections, but surprisingly there was no verbal section.

The interview was held next day in Amdocs office. I was a bit tensed. I can handle any number of Apit's, but I was giving an interview for the first time.

Well, the interview turned out to be a breeze too. The interview lasted exactly half an hour; it was a combined HR+Tech interview. I must admit that I screwed up badly on some points, but otherwise it was a okey interview. I think the outcome of the interview was decided in the first five minutes. The first question put to me was what I had done since morning, to which I replied that I had gone through your website and read your financial report for previous year.

Overall, the entire process seemed to be very professionally handled by people from Amdocs, a quality that I admire.

Moving onwards, college started of pretty well, it was back to routine. I choose Mobile Computing as my elective.

I started another club in college, the "MIT Amateur Radio Club". I tried to do some activity regarding this in SE, but I couldn't find the time. The electronics people in our college seemed to be mildly interested, esp my peers. I had to literally do marketing of ham radio to teachers and in classes. Things have been set in motion, I hope this club remains active for times to come.

The second activity is of MIT Linux Users Group. I used to take up meeting on Saturdays after college, it started off as usual with what linux is all about, installation etc.

For both these activities, a lot of SE ppl turned up, and a bunch of them are enthusiastic enough. Hopefully they will keep on doing some activities in future.

I finally understood how the college network has been configured; the windows gateway was creating problems, which was replace by Linux one. So, now I have a machine in Server room :)

On the academic front, I was at odds with one of the proff's, I avoided the proff, and there was minimum interaction.

Project took up some of the time. TRDDC is one bureaucratic place.

PL was like any other winter PL. The papers kept getting progressively crazier, it is a never ending study. Sometimes I wonder f studying stuff in PL's actually help or not.

Well I guess 7 gone, 1 left.

A state of mind

Stress can be really a wonderful thing in mild quantities. It enables a person to focus the mind on some task, block away all other thoughts and sort of energize a person.

Once in a while, I reach a state of absolute concentration. It is difficult to describe this state, it gives a sort of exhilaration or *kick* to the mind. Things that are earlier considered to be *impossible* to understand are crystal clear on a single reading.

Everything else is filtered out by my brain subconsciously. It is as if I am one with the book. A sort of short circuit takes place, and I am placed in the same state of understanding as the author meant in his/her writing.

I am in total command. Knowledge is Power. I feel like God!