| Quiz!! |
[Mar. 9th, 2006|10:26 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  good | ] |
Had the opportunity to attend a quiz after a long time last week with the inception of a desi quiz group. Although it was a very small gathering, there do seem to be hopes that things will pick up and will be nice to spend time on more interesting things than coursework. Since most of us were amateurs, the quizmaster, Aithal made sure that we didnt burn our brains in agony. And a copy of the quiz can be downloaded here.
In reading news, I have to suggest a book which I read about a couple of months back called "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro. Often, I feel that I tend to enjoy a book just because the author has a good writing style rather than because I like to stimulate my brain with philosophical implications of the content the author has penned down. This was another book in which I loved because it was written with such a command of the language and the author could twist situations between comedy and seriousness with such elegance. I had got to read a book called "When we were Orphans" by the same author previously and while I appreciated his style of writing even then, the story ended up being a bit too macabre for a peace loving person like me. But Remains is one book which would surely be recommended. |
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| Reading over the past few weeks. |
[Feb. 15th, 2005|06:13 pm] |
One of the better books which I got a chance to read was "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan. Its an amazing book with some great writing. It really amazes me from time to time how well some people have a grasp over language such that every sentence seems to have been written perfectly!! I had felt that while reading "The God of Small Things" and I felt exactly that this time round. As for the plot of the book, it revolves around 2 generations of 4 different families. The older generation having lived in China and immigrated to America and the younger set being American citizens who have never visited China. Its a wonderful book in which there is a interplay between experiences in both generations. The imperfections in both styles of life and the inability of each generation to understand the other. Each situation has been viewed from multiple sets of eyes and you find yourself totally engrossed. A definite recommendation.
Other things I have been reading include
- Finally finished Catch 22. Painful book to start, but has some really good humor once u are hooked onto it.
- The curious incident of the dog in the night time. A very short and good book
- Combinatorics by Krishnamurthy - Had a real tough time going through this one. Started with a lot of expectations but though I tried real hard, I could never proceed past 2 chapters.
Got to start with Probability. Meyer and Feller are the books in hand for that. Hope to have a good time with those too. |
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| puzzle |
[Feb. 3rd, 2005|06:02 pm] |
since i spend a lot of my time with various puzzles , i thought i might as well post some of them here to make up for all the blank space :)
this one was part of office discussion today and when posed to a colleague , he cracked it with amazing speed. Am still reeling from the speed with which he solved it.
The problem was
A lattice point in 3D space is a point (x, y, z) with all x, y, z integers. All the points of the infinite grid
Take any 9 pairwise distinct lattice points. Join all the pairs up. Prove that at least one of these segments will contain a third lattice point ( ie - some point x1 , y1 , z1 so that each of those are integers ) in its INTERIOR i.e. excluding end points.Similarly show that for n-space lattice points, you need 2^n+1 to make the same claim
( Solution here ) |
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| Trip to mysore |
[Oct. 5th, 2004|07:05 am] |
Had to make a minor ( or so i thought ) trip to mysore to finish off some work which i had in college. Took friday off and thought i could be back in bangalore by saturday afternoon or so after finishing my work. But that was not how things turned out.
What was initially the first wave of nostalgia on seeing the alma mater evaporated quickly when i realised that i could not locate any of the teachers who i intended to meet. When i did meet them , they assured me that the work which done efficiently could be finished in the best part of 2 or 3 hours would have to wait till sunday at the very least and probably monday too. Agony!!! What on earth would i do in Mysore for 3 days considering that i dont know anyone there anymore ? ( Okay , am not blaming the teachers who were very sweet in accomodating time for me but more the ill luck which deemed my stay in Mysore necessary ).
So whats to do ? Attended a wequiz ( in part ). Was pleasantly surprised to know that the thing still existed. And more pleasantly surprised to know that i can still do well in the the thing ;). Attended a CSI meet where seniors were giving a talk on projects to do and how to go about them to juniors. And finally had the company of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kewldeaf , gauthampai and a few others whose lj ids i dont know :). Thanks guys for giving me company! Also had Dan Brown and "Da Vinci Code" as company ... was a pretty decent potboiler but wonder why it generated SO much hype.
On Saturday , i persevered and finally managed to extract enough pity from the lecturers who finally wrapped up the work in the evening. Headed back to hostel to find some of my baggage locked within Ashwin's room. Have to collect it sometime.
Journey back was even more painful. The bus crawled to Bangalore over a whopping 4 hours and 15 mins !! ( Did it really make the trip in 3:330 once upon a time ? ). Got a bus which dumped me couple of stops before my house apparently due to a truncated late night route. Walked the rest reached the room at 10:40. Found that roomies have gone to some concert or theother , woke landlord up for the keys, apologised profusely :) and managed to make my way into the house.
Phew !! Not as a uneventful trip as i imagined .. Gotta do it again sometime |
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| Disk Crash |
[Aug. 24th, 2004|08:09 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  irritated | ] |
Bah , Staying up late after a long time tonight. Stupid disk crash at on an important box at work. Thankfully we had most of the data backed up. But still a major pain in restoring it to production.
The worst part was that the effort that i put in bringing up the new requirements over the last week are all lost. And i dont have the intention of coding all of that over again.
Well this was really necessary i suppose to drive in the importance of backing up not most but ALL of my data. |
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| Lord of the Flies |
[Aug. 2nd, 2004|10:28 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cynical | ] |
Got round to catching up on my reading after a long time and am getting to scratch some books off my "yet to read" list. Last week was Golding's Lord of the flies. An extremely engrossing read. As with the "To kill a mockingbird" or "God of small things" the story is narrated from a childs point of view. This itself lends some amount of charm for me.
The children are shown to be barbaric on the island but i dont think that this is something they developed after escaping from the "civilised world". It is more of an innate human quality. Despite having limited his setting to a small island with children I suppose the emotions would have have been similar had a history of the world been written.
On to some more books now .. |
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| Cooling off at work |
[Jun. 8th, 2004|10:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bored | ] |
Work has been unusually quiet over the past coupla weeks. Get to go home at 8 and what not. In fact am passing my time and posting here while i wait for the taxi as of now.
Also canceled a trip to goa which i was supposed to go with friends. Planning to take it real cool and pamper myself with a lot of time doing nothing
Apparently the campus placements have started again for our junis and 130 have been placed in the first 2 companies. AND they are disappointed. Seems really strange that just 2 years back we were staring down the barrel with 120 being the total number of students placed among all companies.
Among other things the IISc proficience course seems something interesting. But on the other hand wondering whether anything good will really come out of it.
Okay taxi's here.. Will make a move |
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| Going home for a long weekend |
[May. 24th, 2004|12:47 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Joe Satriani - 8 . Why | ] |
2 days of weekend + 2 days leave = 4 days of uncomparable bliss. YAY !! :)
There are supposed to be some good movies like "Hours" this weekend on TV. Gotta make sure that i watch them.
Got a mobile again. Intend to monitor how useful it REALLY is. Then i can get back at all the people who pressurised me into getting one. |
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| "Having fun is a serious business" |
[May. 17th, 2004|09:54 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | America America - Nooru Janamaku | ] |
I feel somewhat like calvin during the weekends. The problem of how to utilize them in the most effective way. If i sit at home and try to read up something , then i feel like i am extending my week and stressing myself even more. If i go out with friends , then i feel exhausted at the end of it and think i should have made better use of the time. There definitely seems to be no solution to this one. |
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| Scaled KP!! |
[Mar. 12th, 2004|09:51 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Nirvana - Come as you are | ] |
Had been to the (tiring) trip to KumarParvat last weekend. This was one real good trip i have had in my life. I had heard b4hand that this trek would be among the more difficult ones in Karnataka. And boy ,was it a testing one !!
We left Bangalore on friday night and reeached Subramanya early in the morning. By the time we visited the temple and started off for the trek it was around 9:30. We had started off with a lot of enthu but found within the first half hour that sitting in cubicles thru the day has made us unfit for this sort of work. AP ( who was initially elected lead for the trek resigned the lead immediately to Bala. The initial part of the trek to Bhattas house which is situated in the middle of the hill turned out to be the most difficult and depleted a lot of our resources.
At Bhattas house i could meet a coupole of seniors from my college ( Avinash Puttoor and Sendil who had also come for the trek. After lunch we continued on our way to the peak. The most exiting part was trekking in the night by torchlight. We even got lost in the forest and had to wait for dayto break.
Finally in the morning we resumed and reached the peak. this was really cool. I could not believe how high up i had got. After an hour we started back down. The journey down took far less time than
it took to climb up.
And finally back to reality on monday morning with legs paining to no end. Banking on the same excuse to ditch gym also as long as i can. Really keen for next outing in a couple of weeks time |
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| Goin for next trek :-) |
[Mar. 4th, 2004|02:11 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | excited | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Tujhse naraaz nahin zindagi | ] |
Full of enthu for the next trek to kumarparvat. Some 10 of us from office are going. It should be pretty tough but still looking forward to it.
On the work front .. things really dont seem to be moving forward ... Getting a bit frustrated myself by the slowness of the whole projects. Wonder what deadlines I will meet |
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| Douglas Adams rocks !! |
[Feb. 13th, 2004|02:27 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
Finished reading Douglas Adams' "Starship Titanic" ( which wasnt written by him .. Sounds like something out of an Adams book ). And was totally floored by the sheer humor in it. This thing was so good I was reading it in the office right in front of my boss ( shud find something to fill up my status report this week ).
Am incredibly keen to get my hands on Dirk Gently or any episodes of Monty Python now. |
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| I dont even know c syntax :-O |
[Feb. 3rd, 2004|01:17 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | aggravated | ] |
Had a real terrible time tonight... Middle of the night and i am struggling to find out why my code doesnt compile !! Well i had a tough time figuring this thing out. And guess what the mistake was ... !!
The code looked like this
if ( condition ){
...
}else (condition ){
....
}
I really should go to sleep |
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| Trip to Yana |
[Jan. 31st, 2004|12:58 am] |
Great Getaway from work last week. Six of us ( Me, Nidhi , Slummy, Giri, Sharre and Nand ) went to Shimoga for the extended weekend.
The initial plan was for some 10 of us to go, but what with work and disinterest among many we ended up as this small group. The tickets were booked by me and Nand and we left Bangalore by the 11:00 Shimoga Express and reached shimoga by 5 in the morning. I and Slummy stayed over in Nidhi's place.
On the first day Sharre showed us around Shimoga and we went to Mandgadde and Mahishi Matha in the evening in Sharre's van. It was a enjoyable experience for me as the waters were shallow in mahishi.
Next Day 5 of us ( apart from Sharre ) set out to Yana. We took the morning 4:30 bus to Sirsi. Me and Nand discussed some algos along the way ( geeky .. but it was enjoyable none the less ). We set out to Devanahalli from sirsi having packed sufficient amount of fruits , water and idlis. From Devanahalli wetook a jeep to Yana which is 18 km from there. It was quite costly .. 400 for the trip... In Yana we had a nice trek to the rocks ... Nice exercise after long :-). For the return journey , the jeep driver almost got the jeep the whole way to the rocks !! Was quite exiting riding in the jeep on the way back.
In the evening we went to Sahasralinga , which was also a nice place , the rock carvings were too good there. Shallow waters again but with lotsa rocks.
We left sirsi at 9 and reached shimoga in the morning .. Slummy left for Bangalore.
Finally slept the whole day on Monday .. hey!! here i am back at work again.
Looking forward to the next getaway |
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| Into the world of blogs |
[Jan. 12th, 2004|11:10 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | excited | ] |
So livejournal is free and finally i get a chance to start my journal here. I dont even know actively i will be updating this. Hope i can continue posting !!! :-) |
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