One day in life...

There were a lot of talks about FireFox 3 released a couple of weeks ago. I reckon, its one of the very few products from the open source world that's making its mark outside the non-geek world. It seems I always had a way different outlook on FireFox anyway. I fell in love with tabbed browsing the day I saw FireFox. Though tabbed browsing is credited to Opera and neither am I the only lover of it, but I quite feel there aren't may ppl who open as many tabs as I do on my browser. Here is today's story...

My PC hasn't been shut down for 3 days straight. Mainly because I had fallen asleep reading one of my 80 tabs that I had opened in the course of time. Get a look at the first tab. This is about SAAS, a wiki article explaining "Software as a Service", followed by 4 tabs, each of them telling how you could set up an Amateur Radio with household stuff ( pretty interesting yeh..). Then I see around 6 tabs that are apparently some basic Guitar tutorials. I remember my Mom recently suggested I learn guitar instead of trying to make one out of my Badminton Racket. Here is a tab on E-bay too. I was looking for an electric guitar. $1000 Fender, Never in my life Damn it! Following it, here is something which is not expensive. Its a Wiki article on R&B history. That's fine. I love R&B. One thing about Wiki. I think its one of the sites that have links very well appropriately placed that makes it luring enough for you to follow from one page to another. A result of this chain browsing is the next tab which is an article on a 60s English Band "Moody Blues" which might have resulted from a middle click on one of the links from R&B article. A Ctrl+Tab places me to woz.org, the next tab. I was reading Steve Woz replying to viewers about events in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley". I am surprised he loved that movie and confirms the events were pretty true. Whatever.... Next page is a google search on "Skirt length Theory" followed by a company home page that sells Wireless routers, a wiki article on Sun workstations, another wiki on Mike Pinder from the Moody Blues, John Lodge home page, a wiki on Gemini Dream, a file sharing site page from where I had to download an Apache manual may be, a series of orkut tabs, all of them forums of Accenture freshers waiting for a joining date, a BBC page that tells ( very precisely ) the reasons for a hike in oil prices, etc, etc. I thought I had reached the end. To my surprise there were equal number of tabs that were waiting to be described. Immediately following from where I had left were a series of wiki on Japanese cartoons like Detective School Q, Cardcaptor Sakura and ilk and interspersed between them are even some redundant pages such as my half finished blog and some google.com pages waiting for me to enter and search for something. And then are some wikis on Field Marshals Sam Manekshaw and K M Cariappa, Operation Gibraltar, Constitution of Pakistan, Operation Grand Slam, 2001-2002 standoff between India-Pakistan, R&AW, Medium machine guns, Mortars, Recoilless rifles, Punjab regiment, Nuclear Command authority (India), DRDO, some company home page making (again) wireless routers, a mirror site to download MySQL admin tools, a gmail page ( I wait to check if I'd got a new mail...No, I haven't), a youtube page hosting the controversial "lemmings" commercial of Apple Inc, my orkut home page. I press F5 to check if I have got a new scrap. No, I haven't (yet again :-( )..Move on. A wiki on Apple commercials, another on lemmings, one on the famous 1984 commercial, a Steve Woz interview, Indian freshers forum, a friend's blog, a google search on "Inuyasha", some youtube videos of Zu-mountain Saga, Brothers under the sun, Land of the condors, Blood strained intrigue ( Remember those Kung-fu serials they use to show on Home TV... One of the familiar was "Himgiri ka veer" )...An article about Kibbutz life in Israel finishes off the long series of tabs

There have been a lot of people who have been asking me lately whats keeping me on my PC day and night out and whether am using my free time hanging out in "hangouts" of Delhi. Well, with 80 tabs open on my FireFox and friends online on Gtalk, 127.0.0.0 is quite a happening place for me :-)

Five Point Someone

It takes a mild headache and a half drunk cup of coffee mug on my desktop to set the right mood to write a review of this book. Since this is the only book I have read describing "How one becomes an Engineer" stuff, I decided to kill sleep last night reading the book so that I can portray the dard of an Engineer well ("night-outs" as we used to call them in college times ). Its like Shah Rukh Khan getting actually drunk for a scene in Devdas to get the right effect. The story is something an engineering graduate can well connect to and is a rare piece of literature, if any at all, describing the four long years of training the poor souls undergo.

Precisely, the book is about three young 18 year olds who after rigorous hard work for two years made it to the most coveted institute in the country. The prestigious college though turns out quite against their imagination and soon they begin to realize their chances of survival in the competitive IIT environment are quite dim. The book starts with day one at the campus and ends exactly on the day they graduated. Enough background is provided to understand jargon, if used, but it still takes one to be an engineer to giggle at stupid idiosyncrasies or cash the essence of celebrating in misery of failing grades . The story begins with Mechanical Engineering freshers Hari Kumar, Alok Gupta and Ryan Oberoi landing up in adjacent room in Kumaon hostel when a ragging incident brings them together.A skirmish with seniors with Ryan taking the role of savior ensures that three remain best friends for the rest of their IIT days.Hari, the first person, narrates the story in rather pretty impartial manner before Ryan's and Alok's opinions on Hari start wrestling with your critical skills. Hari is fat, unassuming, shy, forever-follower types who if had not made it to IIT would have been this guy next door. A wannabe-Ryan, he just adds an affirmative to whatever his icon says and isn't exactly the guy who would take a unique initiative in his life. Ryan on the contrary would be a bold and flamboyant guy, sketching out new plans for the group to defeat the existing systems and crazy enough to design a radio in midst of a practical examination. Alok on the other hand would be the most studious guy and conservative types when Ryan would be trying to do revolution in IIT and Hari would be trying to be Ryan. Alok was perhaps one reason why the three guys ever opened their text books. Life wasn't exactly uneventful for the three in IIT. Once the seniors had done their part it was the time the proffs start showing their colors. Assignments, projects and surprise tests tormented the three little turtles to an extent that they never recovered from the falling grades ever in their IIT years. They usually got a grade of 5 over a scale of 10. Hence the name Five point someone.

The four year long graduation story goes through a lot of troughs and crests. Their falling grades, Hari's romance with Neha who incidentally happens to be daughter of the Head of Mechanical Department, friction between Alok and Ryan which eventually was mended, the trio's tryst with grass and vodka, Ryan's lube project and their final misadventure that almost landed them up ending their careers. The author describes what could be probably the longest four years in the life of an IITian.

The narration is at its best.The IIT-effect has been well portrayed. Nobody is perfect here. Characters are simply shades of grey.The engineer's penchant in Ryan for experimenting things keeps the reader stuck with a possible revolution-cum-disaster to happen. The anecdotes are interesting and pace is fast. Vocabulary is easy and size of the novel is 270 pages which makes it perfectly right for a beginner, content nevertheless would win an A from the Censor board of India.

The coffee in my mug is over and so are my graduation days. I am not of nostalgic types, neither do I entertain the idea of "those-days-will-never-come-back" and those tear shedding exercises that follow it. But yeah, the book does remind you of your formative years, a restless lifestyle, being with friends all the time and more heartening is the discovery of how being always broke and sleeping without pillow covers could still become the most memorable days of life...