Memorable evening

I am just coming back from a party arranged by my prof Dr.Madhav Marathe and his wife Achla. It was a really memorable evening. Originally planned a pizza party, but we students decided to add some spice to it and prepared the famous "Bombay Bhel", Chicken and Pudding to top it all. The Amrus and Germans just enjoyed this Indian stuff and believe me they hardly ate any pizza. In fact, we had to prepare another round of bhel due to excessive demand. We also got a few gifts for the kids and I was amazed to see the kids singing "Kal ho na ho" and playing it on the Piano as well....i always repent not learning to play any musical instrument in my life.. its just so simple to impress everyone in a party like that!

The house was decorated well and in a pretty serene locality..felt like we were in UK for a while with the mountains just behind us.. i felt i shud have a house like that.. and a laptop to work on my thesis in such awesome conditions.

The desserts like cake, pudding and ice-cream were different too and I had loads of it! Achla also prepared tradiitonal Indian chai, which i cudnt deny at all.. after all its my ekach pyala.. the 1 cup keeps me going day in and day out.

In the end, lot of pictures taken and lot of enjoyment. Hope to have some more parties like that next week after the semester ends!

Orkutting

The Orkut fever has been rising for quite some time now and the time had to come to break it - orkut recently introduced a new feature called profile views.
Boon or a bane?

Well, the smart guys at Google wanted users to know who is viewing their profile and it will no longer be a secret. There is an option to disable it - but then it comes with a penalty for you too - fair enough! even the refresh time has been set to a day to avoid ppl from changing this setting often! - a well crafted plan indeed..

On one hand, it prevents u from simply surfing on orkut for obvious reasons :-)
But as Karyzma and me discussed this the other day, we can always have a secondary profile created exclusively for surf purposes - smarter than the Googleites thought!!
I personally feel this move is to promote the Google romance stuff they released on April 1. They now want the serious users to shift to that product rather than hanging around on Orkut.

Happy aur kut!

Phases of life

I just received an email from a prospective VT student...and the thought passed by my mind.. i was sending similar emails last year to my seniors here..nice to see the cycle repeat and being on the other side of the world this time. Its so beautiful to find that the same month can mean so many different things to each person like--

for a baby - all days are the same.. enjoyment throughout
for a school going kid - mid-April is holiday season and again lots of fun
for a college guy - hmm,, engineering exams, submission and PL round the corner
prospective grads - funding milega kya??
for 1st year Grad students - internship hunt?
for 2nd year Grads - job search and thesis completion?
for PhD studs - qualifier exam; paper publish hoga kya?
for a construction worker in US - time to get to work, these sunny days dont last long!
for employed guys - will I get a promotion?

the list could go on.. what phase r u in currently??

Patchy

Dont be surprised to see another blog from me in a span of 2-3 days, but things are going in such ugly manners and beyond my controls that I cant help it. Just another glimpse in the life of a self-proclaimed "kernel programmer". Its been a week now that I am debugging this matter of spinlock recursion and all efforts to solve this problem have proved futile. Even after implementing some debug tricks suggested by "Sweet Hit" (email me to find out what this means as i cant disclose this in public), spinlocks keep troubling me and giving me sleepless nights and sleepy days! This is a second blow to my dreams of becoming a kernel programmer - the first being when I took an entire semester to port the VTRR patch on 2.6 kernel. Mailing lists dont seem to help either - confusing me more ...and as i write this blog, dont think i am doing timepass bcoz the kernel is undergoing another brutal compilation in parallel...to end up hopelessly in failure again!

Why?

This ones gonna be a bit abstract and a mixture of random thoughts - so beware!!

Sometimes, I keep wondering why ? - for everything like why am I in this world?, what is the purpose of life?, why are we supposed to earn money? , why did I land up in America?, why am I doing masters?

So many questions and no concrete answers really..i also wonder how man cries over petty things - if u take the bird's eye view -> we have a huge solar system with Earth being just 1 small planet, India being such a small country and above all myself being just a small individual in this whole Solar system!!.. and then we men wake up everyday, perform our daily activities in life and go to sleep each night ..waking up the next morning to do almost the same stuff..i sometimes feel there is some external entity governing our actions -> who indirectly treats mankind as Robots -> and we try to invent robots ourselves leading to a recursion!

I know that i dont want to sound like a saint delivering sermons, neither do i want to be one, but i mean is that all we HAVE to do in life? If you guys reading this .now understand that u have been fooled by me in this unique way. could answer some of my questions or at least agree to my thoughts, plz dont hesitate to post your comments.