I accept you guys are computer engineers but this crap certainly is not called creativity. Anna collge has ruined everybody!
You guys can’t suck better!

PS: For the uninitiated the 0001011:0111… shit is the binary equivalent of the current time(11:50)!What is the purpose?!?!?!

The International Cycle Race on the East coast Road was my first cycle tour/race and i had good fun. Thanks to kiruba for letting us know about it and great thanks to sagaro for accompanying me and providing good hospitality. The day before the event we changed our category and decided to compete in the mountain bike category(30 km) and thought it would be an easy finish as we had planned to do a longer stretch before.

The previous day we both went to a stadium in Kilpauk and after waiting for long time and many confusions we completed the registration and got the riders license. The best part was one guy comes and tells…
A: You both are now representing Tamilnadu…
We: Oh!!
A:He is your coach and Mr.John will be your pilot.
We: Thats nice!

Earlier, i never knew how to go to Kilpauk and thought i could take a bus to some distance and then take an auto. I was reminded of…
Inda bus Kilpauk poguma?
Nee yerina enda bus vena pogum!
Fortunately that didn’t happen!
I decided to stay at Ganesh’s house since we had to leave at 4 in the morning. It was Vicky’s birthday and we called him at 4:30 AM and ganesh spoke like Vicky’s senior official and vicky was not able to understand what was happening. We then conveyed the wishes and started. A truck was supposed to carry our cycles from chennai to Mayajaal and unfortunately it left. So we had to cycle all the way from Thiruvanmyur to Mayajaal which added some 15 km just even before the race started. We reached there exhausted and the race started just 15 minutes later adding fuel to the fire.

There were a good number of foreigners in our category and almost everyone had the geared mountain bikes excepting us. We used the ordinary MTB. The race had awesome prize money and all those professionals were highly focussed and were beating the shit out of their asses. It was 15km up and 15 km down and by the time i did my first lap someone would have finished. The best part was we went to a kaiyendi bhavan and had our breakfast in between the race! 6 dosas and 2 vada costed 18 bucks….dead cheap and they were pretty decent and clean also.

Me and Ganesh at the small hotel…

Ganesh at the finish line….Everybody started clapping and people thought he finished first! Even till the evening lots of people shook hands with him thinking he won!Since he has stopped blogging, i will have to stress the fact that he got more claps than the winner

Exhausted…Just after the race.

For more pics check HERE

I learnt a lot of lessons from the race and met two really inspiring people. Mr. Venkatesh was the man behind the NGO which conducted the race and we had a good chat with him. This man is doing something great and i wish i could do my little help in achieving his goals. Then there was this 53year old foreigner who rode along with us in the 30KM category and completed in the top slot. Then i was amazed to see this guy at the start line of the 140km amateur race and he completed that race too in the top 20. What a man he is! I wasn’t able to even imagine riding a cycle at his age.

After completing this i have planned to take part in the chennai marathon and also try rowing. We even found some guys at ICR who were interested to do rowing. The best lesson learnt was to cushion your seat else you will not be able to use your ass for the next day and will have to sit on the bag in the classroom

Are you a person who craves to know about the latest developments in the technology arena. Are you planning to be an entrepreneur in the future. Here is proto.in for you. Proto will be India’s first technological showcase event and the best part is it is organised by enthusiastic team from The Knowledge Foundation of which i am a part of.

It is going to happen on the 20th and 21st January (Sat and Sun) at Indian Institute of Technology, IIT Madras. There will be 30 start up companies from around the country who will be pitching their product in front of a elite group of Venture Capitalists and technologists. If you wanna be there to go ahead and REGISTER.

TANSTAAFL, so entry to the event is nominally charged. It is priceless and i bet it is worth every cent. Dont worry high class lunch will be provided and there are a lot of freebies which will be worth more than your entry fee;)There is also a discount for students who are willing to witness the estimable presentations. Do check if the registrations are still open.
Please feel free to buzz me if you have any clarifications or want more details

Although i am very late to blog on this topic i guess this makes a little sense. 2007 is supposed to be the year of broadband and wish the broadband sector lives up to the expectations. When Dayanidhi Maran announced about the 2Mbps shift without increase in charges people seldom believed and at last it somehow became a reality. The increase in the bandwidth doesn’t make a big difference. With limited downloading there is no value addition.

Under the Home 500 plan download is free from 2 AM to 8 AM and Mahesh said me that the average download speed during that time is 100 kbps which is far better than the other providers. But check this out, there are innumerable people bitching about it. I use Airtel but anyday i would not prefer shifting to Bsnl as it lacks customer service. Airtel has got to wake up and increase the speeds.

To sum up all this is crap, few weeks back i was reading the PC world (UK edition) in the British Council. I was not able to control laughing at our situation after reading an article. People were complaining that a certain company promised download speeds of up to 8 Mbps and people were getting only 4 or 5 Mbps. What the fuck! I am speaking of download in terms of kb in a country called India where 128 kbps is called broadband. We have got a long way to go.Unless Bsnl/airtel increases the speed for the unlimited plans the upgrade is bull shit.

Overall computers have developed massively in the past decade. For instance check this out,in the episode “One with the List”(Nov 1995) from the sitcom Friends where Chandler gets a new laptop….He sounds like he got the best configuration for his system
Chandler: Alright! Check out this bad boy…
12 Megabytes(MB) of RAM
500 Megabyte Hard drive
Built in spread sheet capabilities and a modem that transmits over 28000 bps!
Phoebe: Ah!ha…What you gonna use it for?
Chandler: Games and stuff!

Compare it with the current scenario, guess we will make good progress in the Broadband area also few years down the line.

Siddharth in his latest post has unearthed this wonderful site for watching movies online. It has got a hell lot of movies, TV shows ,comedies , cartoons and stuff. The video size and the quality are also pretty decent. I watched a FRIENDS episode and the print and sound were also ok. Buffering would have been better if i had a 2 Mbps connection!!!

I am not finding time to blog these days! Am I that busy…NO, God only knows what the hell am doing without a goal. At least i should get focussed on some important things from now on. Ignore the above few lines if you found them way out of my normal way. It was just to get a feel.

Coming to the point the near future is gonna be flooded with cultural fests and i being in the later half of my engineering career have decided to hunt as many as possible. SAARANG 2007 will be the biggest of all. The dates for Saarang which is like the mother of all cultural festivals has been announced. It’s really going to be great fun. Don’t miss out if you are in Chennai from the 25 to the 29 of January 2007. The peeps have also come up with a proper blog this time rather than the one hosted in blogspot last year. I liked this blog entry much.It’s actually pretty decent.
Yet there are a few things which i find really sucking this year.
The logo(I loved the previous year’s logo), although they have given some great explanations for the logo i donot find it that appealing. The website in which many parts are missing with less than 20 days to go and the pro shows….WTF!
But it is all expected that the IITians live more than the expectations!

These two days i visited Kurukshetra conducted by the anna univ and it was nice. I took part in the two open quizzes and both were held with jam packed audis. Overall good job by the CEG guys.

The new year dawned but i am still ridden with the cough and fever starting the year on a high note. All for good! Thought of blogging about many things this week but many things screwed me up…the system crash,the hard disk failure, the internet bill which fucked up again this month(now i have switched to unlimited plan!), the ill health and not to leave aside my laziness. The holidays have also ended and i have got to go the college from tomorrow and one more unproductive holidays went off screwing up all the plans.

The bloggers meet this weekend went off well. Although many were known faces met a bunch of new guys. Around twenty people turned up and the beach provided a good place.
kiruba, kausik, Ganesh, Raghuveer, Sandhya, Sheky Jammy were the known faces and later sudhish joined the meet. Ravages didn’t feel in place and felt that we were all a bunch of new generation bloggers.
Govar the modest IIM guy, nirenjan, philip,sudhon, vimal, swetha, sangeetha were among the others who attended.

Check out the photographs of the meet HERE

Witchoo has generously tagged all the pulla poochi bloggers and am one among them! And here goes “Five things which you would not know about me….though mostly weird!

1)I can never open a PUSH/PULL door in the first attempt. If it says push i do the reverse, it gets struck and i then open it in the opposite direction. Now a days it is getting better, 50% of the times i do it right!

2)I keep my watch 15 minutes fast and have some egjact time calculations. If you set it 1 minute lesser i will have to leave my college bus.

3)I am a mint freak and i can devour 1 roll of polo in half an hour. I usually have mint/chewing gums in my pocket. Snatch it next time you meet me!

4)While studying for the exams i start a new unit/chapter only in a round off time. That is if i complete second unit at 11:42 i start unit-3 at 12 o clock. This has become a habit and so i intentionally drag the ending.Summa vettiya irukka nondi saaku!

5)I cannot swim and last week when i went to the pool, small kids less than 2 feet were cruising like mermaids and i was gripping to the rubber tube. Avamanama poochu! I have been trying to go to the summer camps right from the school days but something or the other made me drop it.
I am gonna learn to swim(properly) at the earliest!

I think WA has tagged every single soul in the blogosphere and who ever has not got tagged consider yourself so.

I was once an active member of the scouting organisation and have camped a lot under woods, cooked in the back woods, trekked and all those stuff. I miss those days. I really want to be at this World Jamboree. 40000 scouts in one place….check out the agenda, nothing can be more fun.
Is anybody willing to sponsor me a few lakhs!!!!Wogay,wogay…yaarum kalla eduthu adikadeenga ba!!!

Wishing you all a HAPPY NEW YEAR!