Interactions

For the past few days, i have been interacting with a lot of techie colleagues at Broadcom, people with 10-15 years of experience in industry. We had discussions on various topics ranging from : how to start a "startup",IT, cultures, economy, war, Indo-US nuclear deal, spiritual, etc. It has definitely given me a new perspective to look at things. Here I have met people from all over the world, in fact true amru's are in a minority. It helped me to see how different people look at the world politics and state of affairs. One of my colleagues is deep into spirituality; he knows more than me regarding Hinduism, meditation, yoga and the vedas. I was amazed and a bit ashamed too! The talk on US economy, federal interest rates ,etc enlightened me. One of them is deeply interested in academic work and what we learn in our Masters program.

Looking at all this, i am getting some good inputs here, ..abhijit..welcome to the real-world!

Ghum jao

The past 2-3 weeks have been pretty good at work and at home too. I managed to learn some good concepts from my internship at Broadcom and I am slowly getting a feel of things. It was just 6-7 months back when I ventured into the kernel space, I thought this is the core work i wanna do...i possibly cant go deeper than the kernel...but here at Broadcom, i realized that the kernel came to life much later..there was a whole lot of hardware and board level bootloader which then transferred the control to the kernel...good to see how bare metal (silicon as they call it) comes to LIFE.. I saw the entire process from board bootup to an actual video being played on the HDTV using our board and it was amazing. Embedded definitely seems to be an intersting arena to venture in..

I also visited a few places around Irvine. The most striking among it being Beverly Hills, It was like heaven with all the goodies spread around...a must visit if u plan to goto LA. Every street has countless Merks, BMWs and all the exotic cars running around. The scenic beauty is enjoyable. Shopping here can drill a big hole in the pocket though!
The week before, I visited the Wild Animal Park @ San Diego. It was a perfect 1-day trip...drive for 80 miles on I-5 and enjoy the entire day at the park. We also did a Balloon safari, the balloon takes us 400ft above ground to get an aerial view of the park span. The train ride along the park was informative.
I also visited Laguna beach, Huntington beach over the weekend. Plan to learn surfing if time permits.

A lot of time was also spent in watching sports - we had a wonderful NBA season with Miami heats stealing it from the Mavericks. World Cup fever is heating up and my favorites are Argentina this time..they seem to be playing well so far. Ghana struck a surprise and secured place in the 2nd round...lets see what they have to offer..

Overall, fan(aa) in California

All set and rocking

The busy days are back with the first week of internship starting a new period in life.. my first corporate experience in america. Its been good and I am enjoying the work so far..ah..this kernel programming is sehr gut! The long weekend was spent by a short visit to Los Angeles and parts near Hollywood. I must mention that it was my first long drive of 100 miles, and I enjoyed the car drive thru the mountains. Had a good Maharashtrian lunch and went to Walmart for some shopping. The rest of the weekend, I just relaxed at home watching some good English movies like The Terminal and Minority Report. Bachelors party in Vegas has given the perfect setting to plan a visit to Las Vegas in the near future.

Orange, continued...

Just landed in my dream county, Orange which also is the 2nd most expensive county in United States. Things are settling down and I enjoyed the 4 hr Delta flight. Feels good to be on the West coast, close to San Diego, Las Vegas and Los Angeles and yes the Rocky Mountains. I had a glimpse during my flight and it was an awesome sight. Oh and I was all alone on the 3 seats, it was a sparsely populated crowd .. so enjoyed my space. Watched Hoodwinked on the flight and ate some excellent cookies. I recently rented a car here and my driving experience has been good so far. While searching for a parking spot, I landed on the San diego freeway and had no clue of what was going on. Suddenly, vehicles in full speed and I had to step on the pedal to maintain...then found an exit and came back to Tustin, only to land right in front of an Indian restaurant - Haveli.
Ate some delicious gulabjamuns, Paneer, Pakodas and delicious fruit salad. Then drove back to my home and finally found parking much closer to my house.

There ends my 1st day of enjoyment in Irvine..lots to do on weekend - a visit to the beach maybe.

Orange, CA

Ha ha.. a perfect plan to spend the summer at Orange county, California. A 10 mile drive and i step into office, work hard for 8 hrs and then spend the evening at Laguna beach..with the pacific ocean. Eat some sea food and drive back home..sounds too good..and after all its in line with my CA dream. There's Disney around to spend a weekend. Los Angeles and Hollywood are close too. As one of the movies says..nobody comes from LA, everybody goes to LA. I think the summer will be just gr8 and will pass out soon too, just as all good days fly and then I will be back to school, my own little Blacksburg (kalewadi, as we marathi crowd call it). Hope to spend some quality time and have fun...abhi...CA se bulawa aya hai!!

Corporate America

The last week has been pretty hectic for me trying to step in the world of corporate america. Some tough decisions have been made and i have tried to follow moral standards in making them. A lot of people including me were hurt in this issue of principles, but finally I think its the right decision. Its only a glimpse of what might happen before I graduate, and I already have some lessons learnt out of this experience. Jaan jaie, par vachan na jai!..ppl who track me closely will mostly understand what all this is about, others can keep wondering or drop me a email to find out !

People try to catch god! and god catch says catch me if u can!

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.

Industry vs Academia

Its taken me a while to realize this....but better late than never ..i found quite a bit of similarities between Industry and the academia. The calendar for a typical industry would look like hire, train, design, develop and sell your product. At each stage we have deadlines and targets. The academia has similar stuff - admit new students, teach them courses and get them engaged in research .. u might wonder well whats the output.. here it is -> lots of publications in renowned journals. The calendar of academia for any Prof is lined up with various conferences and workshops for that year and which ones to target for publishing research. Coming to targets -> masters students have fewer publishing requirements - typically 1 to 2, whereas PhD's cant graduate without at least 5 publications. Isnt this similar to giving a new joinee a small target and the people at the top a higher goal?
Academia runs like a corporate powerhouse too, with promotions for Professors based on their research output, number of students who graduate under them and so on.
It feels great to have experienced both sides of this equally for almost a year now!
I coin a new term here - the Duality of academia and industry.

Anubhav vikat ghetla

Today I really got to know the meaning of the Marathi proverb - "anubhav vikat ghyaycha asto". I wanted to try something fundu after my midterm, so walked straight to the most expensive on campus food court - Sbarro. Didnt want to eat the regular cheese pizza, neither wanted to try non-veg stuff - although all this is excellent at Sbarro! I ordered a "Spinach Strombolli" - just thought of Popeye the sailor man, thought of gaining some instant strength with this. But alas, it tasted horrible - i couldnt eat more than 2 morsels, the accompanying sauce was much better ..

At the end of day, I had shedded $5 (Rs.200 approx, cant resist this conversion even after 7 months in Amrika - passing thought -> cud have had a great Gujarati thali with sweet dish at Bhola near my house) and I remained hungry - thanks to Sbarro!

Lesson of the day -> u need to buy experiences , hope it is not that costly in the future!!

Live at Blacksburg

The last week has been pretty normal, life picking up after a week long Spring Break - a refreshing one indeed!
The weathers been good in general, with Amrus leaving no chance to wear skimpy clothes when Sun God is out.
My research continues at a slow pace.. i can best describe it as the TCP congestion window algorithm, where it grows exponentially until I reach a point where i am stuck (the congestion phase) and then I drop down to half of my original enthu, sometimes even forget about it for a day (like the TCP Tahoe)..a typical saw tooth curve!!
The Holi Hungama organized by ISA is the upcoming event this weekend - i really appreciate the organizers for finding time to do all this and keep the Indianness alive!
Midterms round the corner and i can smell that the questions are gonna be tough.. better get going and improve my throughput..

Ich lerne Java

I finally got the motivation to learn Java programming - our Networks project!
Socket pogamming in C was done ages back and I wanted some real take aways from the project besides learning about network parameters and its working. That drove me to explore Java APIs for networks - and they are amazing. Java beautifully has everything to make a programmers life easy - one liner statements (use Eclipse and u dont even need to type one line completely).
The outcome - faster development cycle and GodCatch ends up learning Java, adding one more arrow to his resume.
Its the feel good factor, i "finally" have "synchronized" with the "thread" called Java!

Friends - happy coding!

Techie wars

Every morning in Seattle, Bill Gates awakens. He has only one thought on his mind: To be able to earn faster than the fastest competitor - Google. If he cannot, then he will be eaten.

Every morning in California, Larry Page awakens. He has only one thought on his mind: To be able to earn faster than the fierce competitor - Microsoft. If he cannot, he will be eaten.

Whether you choose to be with Microsoft or Google is of no consequence. It is enough to know that with the rising of the sun, you must code and earn. And you must code better and earn more than you did yesterday or you will die (ur job will be Banglored).

"This is the race of money."

Spring Break

Hurray! its time for Spring break - which means half of the semester is gone..can u believe it!
U ask me plans for the break - definitely not Florida again, though this is the ideal time to be sun basking and bird watching on Miami beach. For me, the break will be much better than the Thanksgiving one I had in Fall, when there were 3 courses and 2 projects due and lots of other stuff like writing a paper on my research, etc.

This ones surely a bit relaxed - might plan a cricket match with desis in Blacksburg, plan to go to my favorite research space VBI - its a lot of fun when all friends like Lele ( i actually call him "aho Lele" bcoz he is a typical Mumbaikar), our annadata - Seth (aka HokieSam aka Sameer Tupe) - who has made VBI his first home due to thesis overload or shud I call hotel with eatables like chakli, khakra, wafers, donuts, etc specially from his India trip) and Farid, Kash and Aseem who hang around occasionally. As you all might have imagined, I am the one disturbing all these guys by dropping in to say hi and eating up their precious time by talking nonsense.

Other plans include doing a Networks project, thesis and Advanced systems paper reading. Hope to spend a decent break in Blacksburg and hope i dont have to spend the summer here ( those who know me will get this)!

Enjoy Hokies!

GodCatch - Caught on the wrong foot!

Today I interviewed with the world's no 1 software giant - Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). Feels awesome to blog this on Google's own - Blogspot!

As the title of the blog goes, I was "caught" on the wrong foot. Mera bad luck hi bad tha! I messed up the once in a lifetime opportunity. All my hard work on preparation for the interview went in vain; even my thesis stuff didnt seem to click this time and I was unable to impress him. It was one of those evil days in my life.

The evening was spent drinking Dr.Pepper to add "jale pe namak" (already have a sore throat still). The night was wonderful though, with a call from NetApp for an informal session at PK's.

My resolve now is stronger..i will complete the scheduler this year. going at this rate, the file system, memory management, drivers and UI wud take another 4 yrs. Including the time to integrate all this together, I will be ready with my GodCatchOS in 5 years from now..and maybe will do this as my PhD from Berkeley or Stanford!

Shud I dare to say this: Microsoft, u have another Google coming in the next 5 years.. BEWARE!

God Catches Cold!

I caught a bad cold and even worse sore throat infection yesterday. That too when I had a thesis meeting with my prof and another paper discussion and research at VBI and HW due the next day and IBM info session and my cooking turn. Oh what a bad timing to fall ill!

I somehow managed to go to campus and do ALL of this pretty well in fact. But at the end of the day, I fell in bed at 10pm, too early as compared to my normal standards these days. I got up today morning felt a bit better and as the day passed, I almost forgot that I was sick at all.

Was this bcoz of Valentine's day effect?

Cooking is Fun!

One good thing I learnt here is cooking is fun!! I dont see the reason why most females (especially wives) complain about the pain of cooking. Well i agree, its a bit difficult in India, bcoz you need to actually cut vegetables, knead the dough, etc. In the Americas, everything is packed and frozen..(may not necessarily be healthy, but who cares when u r already eating a lot of cheese and chicken to compensate)so much easier to just cut the packet and ur done!

I have become an expert in most Indian recipes like the famous Maharashtrian zunka eat it with tortilla and u will keep eating, rajma, moong dal are my other delicacies. Want something real quick, fried rice and Maggi taste awesome.

I must admit that i havent tried a lot many breakfast recipes like upma, pohe...so thats still an OFI.

Happy Cooking guys.. enjoy it and u'll like it!!