Amit’s Blog…

The final year engineering students from Pune University have been expecting there results now for two weeks. After waiting everyday and spending days in expectations finally, PU declares our result!

I was at office when I got message from a friend informing me that the results will be out at 5. After that, as expected I could hardly concentrate on work and hence went back home early. But then again, as expected the results were not declared on time. By the time they declared the result it was 8 and before I could get a call from my friend who was supposed to tell me about my result, I found it out on the PU site and it was First Class. Really wanted to know my marks but they did not show.

Thanks darling for all the motivation!

Thanks to everyone who were with me and wished all the luck to me throughout.

P.S. : Finally showed the result next day.. Distinction in the final sem, first class over all.. more than expected.

Today was my first day at work [HWB Nepal]. Got a little orientation session but the rest of the day was rather vapid, did not have much to do. Hope its going to be worth it and I have a nice experience there.

Yes, this is the reason why I have been away from the blog. Or is it? I really do not have anything to write about right now. These past few weeks have been pretty boring as I have not been able to take up any work because I SHOULD BE ‘studying’ and hence I have following this very boring routine (not that my routine otherwise is totally FUN, but still)! For those who know me well are aware that I cannot study until the exam’s right round the corner. I might open my book here and there and sit around it for hours, but all this in vein. I am just waiting my time. Who am I kidding? I just cannot concentrate until the exams are right on my head.

As with everyone during exams, everything on TV seems to be interesting; all blog posts made by bloggers you don’t even know seems to be very interesting; you want to watch more movies, go out for dinner and what not! Why can’t I just concentrate on exams just like some other people do?

Anyways, that’s the way it is. Just gave two (Network and Information Security.. and Software Testing and Quality Assurance.. both very interesting subjects but at the sametime with the exam pattern that we have there were a lot of things to mug up because of which I ended up hating both of them) exams this week and looking forward to finishing up by giving two more (Distributed System ..and Advanced Computer Architecture.. We had covered a bit of DS, thanx to the oral exams! But I have no clue about about ACA.. we do have a week’s leave for that so it should be OK) in the couple of weeks ahead. The two exams that I have given so far this semester have gone good and I have tried to put in an extra effort to improve my ‘acads’ which suck! Only time will tell if the effort was worth it.

For anyone who reads this WISH ME LUCK!

Four years – Forty Subjects! If that does not sound crazy enough, there’s more to it; the practical and oral exams. Every semester we take up five subjects, some of which we will never need! But if you want to get a degree you need to know about all the subjects. As long as you manage to score a 40rty in all of them, you are safe.

Clearing the theory paper is pretty easy, scoring is tough. As long as you know what’s in your syllabus and you are not very unlucky to get an arduous paper you are fine.

While it might be easy to get away with the theory papers is easy, it is not the case with the practicals and orals. It is not like in some colleges in Nepal where the marks that you get for your practicals depend on what the ‘external’ got to eat for the breakfast in your college!! Here, for practicals you really need to know your stuff AND be lucky. After doing all the assignments during the semester, you need to know all of them unless you are banking on some luck! You are supposed to pick up a chit which decides what you have to perform that very day. Even if you know your stuff, sometimes, you get unlucky and you just can’t get the damn code working! Luckily, this never happened to me during the four years. All my practicals have gone great, finishing most of them within an hour or a couple of hours max.

On the other hand orals have always been scary. You just cannot be prepared enough for an oral. The ‘externals’ here don’t come to check what you know they just want to show you what you don’t know. Although, most of the orals have been good for me, I did screw up one of them. Having a good reputation with the teachers does help and hence, as I had been a decent enough student in college, I was spared. Not all are that lucky, there are students who give the practical/oral over and over again.

Anyways, MY practicals and orals are done. I won’t be picking up any more chits or answering any more questions. The last practical and oral exam of mine went great!

Have to wait until June 5th to give my theory papers. It’s going to be real boring and long 3 weeks ahead.

27th oh April, 2007… Today, we had the photo shoot for the outgoing students in the evening which was followed by a farewell program later. We thought the photo shoot will be boring and that the farewell dinner would be awesome. Surprisingly, it was the other way round, we had fun during the photo shoot… clicking all sorts of pictures, bashing up people, scribbling and signing friend’s shirts with stupid and funny comments. IT WAS REAL FUN! On the other hand, the farewell dinner full of speeches by the board members of the college and by a few of the students were a real drag. The dinner too wasn’t upto the standard. All of us were indeed disappointed and hence decided to go out for dinner. It was already very late (around 1 AM) so we did not have any choice but to go to a restaurant in the highway. We were there for long until 4 AM. Finally, we decided to leave and come back… reached home and slept. Next morning I came to know, one of our friends was left stranded on the highway as went to the loo when we were leaving… and to add to that, that very day his phone was not working :). .. poor guy!

I had many pictures to be uploaded from this very day but then uploading all these pictures is quite a task. Finally, my dear friend ‘puki’, known here as ‘kalo tara’ sent me a nice collage of some of the nice pictures… making my job much much easier.

The day was indeed important, boring, happy and sad. All of us are going to miss Pune!

Here is the pic… THANX to kalo tara

Its been long since I saw the sunrise in the morning. I have that opportunity today, not because I managed to get up early but because I havent been able to get some sleep yet. I was busy finishing my Final Year project report. Finally managed to finish it all up by 4:30.. I tried sleeping after that…but couldnt. I havent had sound sleep for a week now, sleeping at 4-5 in the morning getting up at 9AM. Now, that I have finally managed to finish the crappy reports which runs into a 100 pages, I thought I could get some sleep. I was wrong… wrong, yet again! My practicals begin on 4th of the next month! Duh! when will I get any rest??!?!?

It has been a real hard, long, busy and tiring day. Just hope that the report I made today (although most of the stuff was done before hand I still had to gather them up.. Index them.. format it.. a lot of work .. boring work!). The UML Diagrams, Software Requirement Specification, Test Scripts, Risk Management, Performance Measurement have now taken a lot out of my brain. Cannot think anymore.. I will try and get some sleep again! Its 6 and I have to meet my project guide at 11.. 4 hours of sleep (ie if I wall asleep right away.)

Phew!!!!

There are two things that I cannot live without; those who know me well enough must have easily guessed it by now… the first being my phone and the second my notebook.

I have taken some time out to write a small review about the both.

Nokia N80 Review

A couple of months back, after I was frustrated with the tardiness of Nokia 6708 which came as a replacement to my O2 XDAii Mini I was on a look out for a new phone which was fast and had good connectivity features.

I read reviews of many phones and narrowed down my list to Nokia N73 and N80. Although I was used to touch screens I decided not to go for them because Nokia did not manufacture any good touchscreen phones at the moment and the other manufacturers like O2 and i-mate did not have good customer support… I did not want to repeat the same mistake again (buying O2).

I finally went for N80. N80 has an edge over N73, it is Wi-Fi enabled and I also like the slide form factor over the candy one. If you want a phone for imaging then your obvious choice would be N73 between the two.
Some features of N80.

• Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi… it has all that you could wish for. I use GPRS service provided by Airtel which is EDGE enabled and hence net connectivity is pretty fast… download speed sometimes reaching 10kbps. The best feature of this phone for me is its browsing experience. The web pages are rendered very smartly by the S60 3rd Edition Web Browser which is based on the Safari Browser.
  
   
• Camera: The camera of the N80 is a 3MP camera with 20x optical zoom (which is useless). The picture quality of the phone is excellent in the open. When it comes to taking pictures in the room or in dark, it isn’t that great but good enough to share pictures on the net (by that I mean not good enough for printing). As for the videos, the video quality produced by the camera is pretty bad… I have read that a ROM update would give me better video quality but I am yet to test that.
  
   
• Performance: The phone is very fast although it has its own issues. It does hang sometimes and gets slow. But most of the time a simple reboot is good enough to get it back to normal.
  
   
• Third Party Application: As its based on S60 3rd Edition, there are numerous number of good applications available.
  
   
• Ease of Use: Being used to touchscreen PDAs, it was a bit difficult using this phone in the beginning. But as always Nokia is great with its UI and using this phone was a breeze as well with time. Be it typing msgs or making calls, everything is very easy.
  
   
• Battery Backup: This is only an area where this great phone has disappointed me. It isn’t that great, at max a day. You cant go more than 24hrs without recharging it at any cost and on a busy day you might have to charge it twice.

That’s it for today. It has been a long day, I will continue with the review of HP Pavilion DV6114tx some other day.

P.S. As I write this post, the team I supported has lost yet again! Am I jinxed? West Indies loses yet again.. very sad for Lara’s last match… anyway, at the least the match wasnt boring!

I woke up at around 10 today and as soon as I woke up the electricity went off. After 5 mins, I struck me that it would come back today as stated in the new paper the day earlier. I used my laptop for as long as I could. After that, I had nothing to do.

We decided to go for a movie, Shooter. The movie was great.. full of action.. maybe a bit too much but it was good as it kept us away from the heat. On my way back.. I clicked a pic from the bike itself.. and played with it a bit in photoshop.. I like the pic.. here it is..

It has been busy day with project reviews, mock exams and submissions all coming up tomorrow. Anyways, it rained again for a bit today evening and there was no electricity… took a couple of pics before it rained.. Yes! I had nothing better to do.