rohitj's domain

Author : Manu Bansal
Copied from his IM status message, with permission.

Who comes, who goes
Why, where, nobody knows.
But the corridors,
they itch my nose,
the gap I close.

The desks are full,
the stacks are high,
lo and behold,
its pizza time!

I eat a slice, I fill some more,
why free food, nobody knows
back at work, I wonder still,
but on my cup, Microsoft grows!!

Reminds me of last 2 semesters at IITK. But I guess PhD aspirants working in labs day n’ night might relate to this better.

2008 :

• Graduated from IITK. I miss those days.
• Got into Purdue. For Phd. So, now I am student for another 4-5 years.
• No papers yet.
• Wasted summers in coding. Should have gone to some hill, and should have camped there for a month.
• Deleted Orkut account
• started using facebook.
• Bought Guitar and DSLR
• got 3.85/4.00 in first semester here. Not so happy about it.

2009:

• No web2.0 (mainly facebook), apart from little blogging.
• A little bit of photography
• Research
• Rare movies.
• Take Quals.

There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything:

• I am alive.
• Nostalgia has been replaced by load of technical work. Thank God!!
• Proposal for NERD (a new magazine in IITK which is going to talk about research and development and FOSS and Free Culture) has been approved. The magazine will be released under a CC license (probably CC-BY-SA). Final Compilation of the articles is going on.
• I am admin for some Windows machines now. Can not make the company shift to open source, its impossible. And its a family affair, so I can not deny the work. But this made me believe it even stronger that shifting from windows to linux is as difficult as shifting from linux to windows.
• finally made a flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohitjiitk/ ….. there are 1-2 photos from my small, yet dangerous hike near a national park
• I have got an XBox. Its bulky, so I can not take it to US, otherwise I would have installed xebian on it. I do not know what to do with it.
• Finally a family trip seems to become reality. We are going to Manali and Rohtang Pas. A 5 day trip, with all luxury.
• Lot of Mangoes …. after 2 Mango-less summers. ….. and before 4-5 mango-less summers
• Finally met my old and gold friends Aakash and Sachin
• The “personal” stuff here, no more exists.
• deleted my orkut account. Only gmail left.

Its a great pleasure to announce that Tata guys have come up with a supercomputer which is ranked 4th fastest in the world, and fastest in Asia.

I am happy for 2 reasons

1. that India did it again. (remember param2000?)
2. that the computer uses Linux

Tata is the only company that has maintained its reputation for long time now. Even when TCS is criticized sometimes, Tata has maintained its reputation. Those who do not know, Tata’s most of the money goes to charity work. I am using the word “goes” not “will”. I love this group.

For more details check the original post.

Last week was a different week for me. My schedule was all screwed. In general, I slept at around 4PM (IST) and woke up at 11PM. But, this wasn’t that bad schedule as I got good peaceful lonely time to work. Though, last week I slept for just 30 hours. I had exam which is screwed big time. Then had assignments and the biggest part was used for BTech Project. I had some tough time doing the work my guide gave to me. Though it was interesting at the end. As, I got to learn lot of things. And then yesterday’s meeting went well. I have now a lot of things to do. Most of it are the things that even my professor himself have no idea about. I think I am going to enjoy my BTech Project.
And yeah, I have started another blog to write about the work I am doing in the project. Check out  www.rohitj.net/researchblog/ . It’s again powered by wordpress.

So, I pulled all-nighter because I needed to understand 3 research papers and was supposed to compare them and then meet my BTech Project Guide. And to my surprise I couldn’t even complete a single paper. Of course, after all I am daring enough to work under Dr. Ganguly. Of course, I am still hoping that this ‘dare’ will give fruits . It’s interesting to work on something which you know you can not do. Isn’t it?

So, after this night, I had class at 02:30 UTC. To enter Academic Area there are mainly 4 gates. I usually take a gate which is usually not taken by other students. Each gate has a Security Guard. Of course we never notice security guard, and I assumed that security guards never give any attention to students. But today when I was rushing for the class, this security guard at the gate said, “Sir, aapki chaal mast hai”. Which means “Sir, your walking style is good/interesting.” I was shocked. First I didn’t even notice that he was there. Second that he must be observing me for quite sometime. Third that he said something like this. I said “kya?” (”what?”) and he replied “aap chalte hue achche lagte hain.” ( “you look good when you are walking”). wierd!!! I am sure he wan’t hitting on me, but still, its weird.
Then it comes out that there was no class today. And I need to complete an assignment by tonight. And I need to complete some formalities by 06:30 UTC for placements. So, I have no time to sleep in day time as well. On thursday, I have got  2 exams, need to do preparation for that as well. And then BTP work.

By the way, my BTech Project is about “Compressed Sensing”. I will be starting a new blog to talk about it. Stay tuned.