How True ??

Charles Colton

"We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them."

P

Passion, Power, Pleasure, Poise, Purpose, Pride, Pure, Pronounced, Prominent .....

Thats enough P's in justifying its worthiness as a good buy :) ...
Hence i have made a resolution that the next picture that comes to my orkut album is gonna be me sitting on this bike.

Oh yeah this is Yamaha R1 2007 model, 998 cc and 6 speed transmission ...The right mix of power and beauty ...

Good Luck to me

Shantanu

PHD

Well ever since i got into computer science i mean as science (somewhere in third year college) i have had this craving to get involved with active research in the field. I personally think that a lot of concepts from the subject come naturally to me. Well yeah i can say this after i have studied them from the books but i shall be honest and a lot of concepts from computer science come more naturally to me than many other courses like magnetic fields, electricity etc. etc. (strange coz my father is an electrical engineer and going by genes these should have come to me naturally). I do not want to brag but i feel these concepts come more naturally to me than a lot of my peers. Maybe Comp sc is more easier than its counterparts, easier or not I can certainly say its based on simpler logic and reasoning.

I think computer science is a derivative of Maths, well if you go back in history it surely is a child of maths (but with time it has certainly digressed from maths to a great extent). Being good at fundamental maths and calculus is another reason i think computer science seems more natural to me. Often this feeling of natural attachment to the subject has given me the feeling to pursue a PHD in the field. For I might be able to contribute something back to the field which has given me so much happiness and joy in life. (I wish i had had this blog when i wrote my first computer program(was in c++ of course) ).

When i was making applications for my M.S. the only interest i had in doing so was to prepare myself practically for the software industry and get myself a job with a major industrial power in the field. Back then i related PHD to nerds and to be honest i would have been rejected at almost all decent universities had i applied for a PHD instead of M.S. .But then in the past one year the "natural affection" has grown exponentially. I appreciate concepts much better than what i used to in college, I see the maths in action much more(maybe still not enough) and above all i love every bit of these discovering and learning things part. ( I wonder whats the origin of this "every ""bit"" " phrase)

Hmmmmm everything sounds good and nice till here. Inspite of all this i am still not able to decide wether i should make applications for a PHD program or not. To be honest for once in life i am afraid of making my decision. Thanks to my parents since very young i have made every decision of my life on my own but i am just not able to make up my mind on this one. Every 2-3 months this question comes to my mind and just to avoid answering it i stop thinking about it and try to make myself busy somewhere else. I know i cannot linger it forever and even if i do it can prove disastrous for me. Now that i am only six credits away from ending my grad school career i think i cannot linger the question anymore. For its not right and ethical to live your life on doubts and unanswered questions.

Very soon i shall be coming back to this blog with the answer to the question and a solution to all the hindrances.

Shantanu

Promise

Well today i made a promise to myself. I decided to buy myself a new beauty and i hope my girl friend wouldnt mind but this thing is really hot. To cut it short i am obsessed with Yamaha R1 and i have decided to buy it as soon as i can afford it and the next picture i put on my orkut account is gonna be me on that bike.

Some creative shots of the hottie

Ubuntu and Beryl-- Sweeter than i imagined

Well recently i finally decided to switch to Ubuntu as my "Navigator" in the ocean of my computing machines. Not that i had any issues with windows but i was certain of the fact that this way i shall learn more about operating systems and practical issues related to them. Windows always left me confused with the error and warning messages it gave but then the majority of Microsoft Windows's target audience is not a computer science graduate student so i agree with their dilemna.

And boy oh boy i am glad i made the switch UBUNTU is as fantastic as an operating system can get. It gives you all the choices to be as light you want to be on your overheads towards software or be stringent and finicky about your box. Package Managers are fantastic concepts and i love that about linux a lot. Also its like way too easy to google stuff about ubuntu with its own wiki system and the active community out there. I still am struggling with making some of my gadgets work flawlessly with UBUNTU but with each new gadget i learn like ten new things so i am not complaining about the overhead.

BERYL was a big motivation to switch. BERYL is as sweet as my girlfriend buying me a DUCATI for my 60th birthday. It works like a charm of course after u have learned how to tame the tiger and the taming does take some time with all the features and options it gives.

Here are some screenshots from my current desktop

The rain effect

The desktop cube


More Cubing



Desktop Snapshot kinda thing, all open applications being displayed


Thats the popular "BURN" animation ,happens with every minimize action.I love this one a lot.

BURN again


Fade Effect--happens with every close action..its like windows fade out of the view when i close them.

And if you see beryl videos you would be shell shokced with its powers. Its really a DUCATI(sweet and strong) for the desktop world.


CIAO

The Best Days of my Life

Nothing in my life seems to be going according to the PLAN. Long story told short nothing in my life is as i would like it to be right now. I am broke, do not have an internship, i am homesick, my results are not proportional to my efforts, and above all my health is deteriorating for the lack of good food and of course exercise.

And yet each morning (ok noon and sometimes evening) i wake up and i hope to make it better somehow. Each day i think of doing several things that could improve my life on some of these fronts. So i say to myself what else could i ask for from life. I am in the best spirits possible for a human being. Fight till your last breath for each day is a new battle, you shall loose some but if you fight hard enough you shall win too. Even if you dont win you shall always have the satisfaction of trying hard and to the best of your potential.

Hope to write some good news some time in the near future.

Happy and willing to be more happy ...

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.

Another semester ended outta the four i ought to spend at Syracuse University. As much as i enjoyed(if u enjoy work and pain) living these 4 months but nevertheless it did not end without any regrets. To top it all i dint get the grades i desired nor did i get wat i deserved(in a relative sense). I am not sad because i dint get the grades, last time i got sad over that was 12th standard(a good 6 years back). I am sad because i got four semesters to prove to myself that i can be a good student(good=grades at least the world thinks so) and i already lost two of them loosing more time than the ground i made on the front. Secondly i ignored my health as much as i could during these last four months both with the crap food and no exercise regime :D. Thirdly i did not read as much as i would i have liked to. With so much books around me in library stacks i wish i had 48 hours a day and i could go through all the books on paris, rome etc ....But i guess life is not about what you did not do yesterday rather its about what you are gonna do tomorrow.

So as i say on my profile space on orkut i shall fight till the end. I look forward to the next two semesters where i have some extremely challenging courses lined up. Specially the one called Parallel Programming in Java, its being taken by Dr.Per Brinch Hansen and he is amongst the gods of the field. Internet Security by Dr.Du is gonna keep me busy for the summers and i am sure its gonna be one hell of a summer.

For the tech-savvy people, just before writing this post i ordered the Creative Stone
Its being called as Creative's answer to Apples's Ipod Shuffle(80$), and at a mere 40 bucks(30 for me,courtsey google checkout) i think its gonna be one good answer. With features being the same on both the devices the only difference between them is size and weight where the shuffle outshines by some margins though for the price difference they are easily ignorable.
For all those who are wondering what am i gonna listen to on my new player, yours truly just got his hands onto 13GB pure gold. Yes its nothing less than less than gold when it comes straight from theeeee master's heart MOZART .Its all compositions from mozart clubbed into one collection unless he created some secret ones which seems a high probability to me giving credit to the love of medieval Renaissance-age Europeans for secrecy.

As i am without any internship or considerable hours at my work place so i decided to make the most of the luxury by reading more books from the library. I promised myself that i shall read at least half an hour each day a book that shall have no relevance to my grad school. This week's book is The collected short stories of Khushwant Singh. I don't mind if people wanna get judgmental on me with the book but i am really really liking it as i am going through it.

Thats it for now ...ciao

Shantanu