Closing Time

Its been over a month since the last blog - in between the shifting back to Bengaluru, joining Oracle and no broadband at home - there seemed to be no time for blogging...

So here is a long shot recap of my last days at IITB - of which I mostly remember stuff related to Food alone: Zaffron pay-for-yourself-no-treat, Red Olives send-off treat by my considerate professor and who can forget - Mess food the uncomparable :D

Apart from that - nice to have experienced first flight - the feeling of being on top of the world - with the clouds and the sky forming different imagery around you is surreal!

All things said and done - a lot more do remain. Least prominent of  which are three more blogposts in the drafts that are never going to see the light of the Internet day. No real senti-stuff to express as such - feels good to be back in Namma Bengaluru; duly excluding the fact that Namma traffic is a nightmare!

As for my M.Tech - it was a bumpy ride - but I lived the undergrad way during my M.Tech - so not much to be dismal or ecstatic about; but I am surely glad it is over!

So, time to bid adieu to Blogging - atleast for the foreseeable future(and remove that from Special Interests section of my resume!)

Bye Bye Blogger..

Time for a few lasts and a few firsts

The End is here - well, the good kind of End - End of school :)

Project presentations, reports, classes, academic life - the few lasts for many of us. All of them are being backed up in memory archives - making way for the newer things coming ahead in life.

Also the time to recap the past two years - orientation, friends, courses, projects, holidays, TA duty, fb fights, labs, research, placements, tensions, treats, farewells and everything ending well...

Talking about farewells - good to see that there were no teary eyes and goodbye hugs this time around ( seen a lot of them the past 3 times!!) - or might have missed all of them staying at my den :D

Coming ahead - First job(or.. new job), first true monetary freedom, first professional environment and much more. Time to prepare for all that is coming !!

Not much can be said with certainity about the future - but lets have fingers crossed for a few things: less nightouts, fun weekends, time for a social life amidst the busy worklife, finding that special someone and getting hitched - or delegate that job to the parents, catch up with friends and basically enjoy whatever you do!

Wishing everyone all the very best; or Spock style - Live Long and Prosper :D[Thinking of adopting this line as a standard goodbye message...]

Afternote:

Phew - Writing has been real tough these days...

Explains why it seemed so ridiculously hard to modify just the Project Abstract - Time to revive a few of those gray cells!! 

A late late late late realization

It is so simple and obvious - Keep away from distractions, Go to work, Try your hand at a few things with effort and consistency, Take small steps towards doing something meaningful, Earn your fun, Keep Calm and Enjoy!

Easy steps to a decent living, or in my case - a decent MTP; yet something I have repeatedly failed to keep up in the past few months. After months of degeneracy, the D-day is here and I am utterly clueless - not just for now but for the coming future as well...

Anyway, without jumping the gun, let me make my point. In a bizarre parallel universe - getting work done is just like writing this blog post. You may think of a hundred things, or you may think of nothing - both are essentially same and lead nowhere until you actually start writing. And once you do start writing - its important to keep consistency and clarity throughout - or else the end result turns out to be a gobbledygook. And the end is important - make a point before signing off..

And that is it - The End!

(See what I did there :D)

The Giving Up syndrome

As a man of immense personal experience, here is me sharing a few thoughts/rants on the classical art of giving up, of being the opposite of "When the going gets tough, the tougher get the going" thing!

The first sentence gives a fair idea that this is going to be a boring post - that I am writing for no obvious reasons. Hoping that it does not kill too much time of the reader..

The issue starts small - not wanting to spend 10 more minutes on a problem, postponing a homework until the deadline comes, bunking a class because it is boring etc. And slowly it hogs on the bigger things - things like courses and decisions. Laziness acts as a great catalyst to it!

Coming to personal experience - dropping Mrudamgam learning, leaving cisco( afraid of commiting to work life so jumping back to the familiar raft of education - somehow sounds like 'giving up' inside my head!!), and the impending doom - MTP. For the past months, I have been kind of avoiding the project and meeting my guide - now leading to the Give Up stage: Time to turn hypocritical and hope that there is some higher power to help me out :D :D

Anyway, I am not the self-advice or advice others kind - and there are tons of material out there that help people in getting out of it. However, I do want to say one thing before giving up on this give up post - once it sets in, it is tough to get rid off!

Thus ends another pointless post. 

Behind Proxy Lines !!!

" I want to grow up, but netmon won't let me!"

Quite a famous quote this one - on the T-shirts of many IITians. Apart from the pretension and humor in the quote - sometimes 'netmon' - the IITB proxy really pisses you off!

It tags along a whole bunch of extra work!

There is the ritual of setting up the proxy for all applications accessing the internet, the extra hit of Enter/OK to authenticate the proxy each time you fire up the browser, and then with the Aakash tablets - rooting them and installing ProxyDroid to make the wi-fi device usable(plus Connectify Me on laptop for sharing the ethernet connection as wi-fi).

But you get stumped when there is a software you are installing that demands internet connection, but does not have proxy authentication feature!

So coming to the background for this post - A bunch of my school friends started a Group chat on WhatsApp - and asked me to join. Here lies the problem - I dont have a smartphone!(and for incompatibility reasons, I couldn't install it on the tablet..)

A quick search on the met came out with a workaround - run the BlueStacks android emulator and install WhatsApp on it. Here is Hurdle 1 - Bluestack downloads some binaries online - termed 'runtime data'; and well - no proxy support yet as it is still in beta. Also, by the virtue of its beta status - the installer just freezes at this point!

To pass this hurdle, I had to use ccproxy - which is kind of a proxy in front of the netmon proxy for the computer. So there I spent around half an hour getting the settings right so that Bluestacks continued installation; and then revert back the network settings to the old ones(I personally feel ccproxy is kind of a messy business!)

Now things seemed well and good, but wait - The native application of Bluestacks cannot access internet, and as it is already established - No proxy support. One of the forums suggests the use of ProxyCap - another application that lets you specify those applications that use proxies. So - one more precursor was met - installed ProxyCap and added a 'rule' to allow the network access executable of Bluestacks to have a proxy redirection!

Things were not over yet - as ProxyCap allows setting of HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5  proxies. I wasn't sure what goes for what kind of requests - so had to do a trial and error - there went another hour.

The end result was this - To load the initial Top Charts apps in the home screen(well, there is the Retry or Cancel popup, but the Cancel button almost never works!), it uses HTTP connection, but to install apps, run network dependent apps or surf the internet via the browser, it uses HTTPS. This translates to me starting ProxyCap in HTTP mode for the startup of Bluestacks, and then switching to HTTPS mode for running Whatsapp(Standard non-marketplace installation; download .apk file and run it via Bluestacks application installer).

Oh yeah, there is that standard trick of installing WhatsApp on non-phone devices - Wait for the SMS verification to time-out, and then get the call with the activation code and use it. 

For some reason, Bluestacks refuses to use the HTTPS proxy during startup; so I have to do the start in HTTP mode and then switch to HTTPS mode to view Whatsapp messages all over again!

Anyway, did find out a few things - you can run WhatsApp on PC, although not in the most elegant way, and also I just found out that Whatsapp did not install on the tablet earlier due to space running out - so process repeat now :D!

3 Idiots - A Double Bluff message??

I usually watch repeats of one or two movies on my laptop - so I thought: Why not review one of my favorite movies that I watched tonight, in a new found light....

No doubt it is one entertaining movie - the earning figures spoke well for that claim. Its one perfect Bollywood recipe with all the tadka: comedy, songs, emotion, romance, message, alas - no fist fights - but still great. But ultimately - its no different than a fantasy themed film like Iron Man; which I also love by the way - in providing unrealistic yet gripping scenarios that keeps you captivated:

From delivering a baby using a vaccum cleaner run on car batteries(and god knows how the internet worked - assuming it was part of the LAN that also needs power), being lucky that the heroine is getting married the same day, driving a sick man on scooter directly into the operation theater, fultu honesty and nothing else getting a job - and many many more! 

The story - witty, great, funny and motivational and all that (I can go as far to say that it improves upon the Chetan Bhagat novel that it is based upon)  - gives a lot of know-how on the creepy things a person can do: Fake a heart attack, electrocute a guy's weak spot(ouch!), screw up a language-unaware guy's speech and make him a laughing stock, gatecrash a wedding and more...

That being said - its out and out hilarious - whether its Chatur's speech, the fake Chanchad confession, Farhanitrate and Prerajulization, Raju's home that looks like the 50s, showing the Gadhapan of Suhas, drunken adventure at Virus' home, and starting of an induction motor !

Finally, the point I wanted to make: The Double Bluff...

The Bluffs: The film goes in lengths to drive the idea, in the protagonist's words : "Baccha, Kabil bano, Kamyabi jhakh marke tere peeche aayegi". It shows the flaws in the educational system, that the futility and arrogance of characters like Chatur and Virus shall meet their match and all that typical Bollywood funda(actually, the funda of most movies).

The Double Bluff: But then, one cannot fail to notice that it is the Chaturs, Virus' and Suhas' that are successful, be it materialistic; and Ranchos are but an idealism that everyone adores but nobody intends to be. Whether it is Chatur's way of determining success by how well-off he is, or Virus striving to keep his institute number one: Its just the way the world works - Kab tak Kabil banta rahega Baccha ??

One also has to sympathize with Chatur in the end - who tries to prove himself better all the way through; but is outdone by the 'A faar Apple, B faar Bal' yet 400 patentee Scientist :D

To list or not to list - Thats also the question!

Its a funny circle of events - You make a list of things to do, then do some of them and leave out a lot, then make a list of things remaining and start with them, then scrap them out and back to creating the new list!

Over the past few months - thats what has been happening in my life. The above pic is a snapshot of the exact thing. Made the list of To Dos - and didnt follow up with any one of them in the right sense. Made a list of things to study - just glanced through few of them, left out a lot...

The whole thing makes you question the credibility of the process and yourself - why make lists when you dont follow up ? Let things stay chaotic - atleast you have something to lay the blame on! But again, you cannot let anarchy of things decide for you either!

Consciously or otherwise - you list out things to do and start working towards them - Thats one way to look at life... 

So here is my refined list, that I don't intend to keep: