January 2002 Log

1 Jan, Tue

• The first day of 2002. The first entry in my log. Nice.
• There's payasa for breakfast.
• I've decided to start this log / diary of my activities after seeing Ravi's.
• Tomorrow is my last chance (3rd internals) to get some marks in CPS, so I better start studying.
• Started writing the assignment for CPS.
• Amogh sent one amazing egreeting for New Year.

2 Jan, Wed

• CPS test over, performance - quite OK
• Met Ashwini in the library. Due to her prodding finished half of the Compiler Design assignment.
• Met Bond just before the buses left, to talk about the completion of the project reports. He also agreed to get the printouts of the reports.
• Had a nice afternoon watching some good songs on MCM.
• Went to sleep instead of studying for CD.

3 Jan, Thu

• Dosas with palya inside, for breakfast! Nice!!
• Started to go through the chapter on Run Time Environments. The first chapter in CD I'm finding to be really interesting.
• Created ER and schema diagrams for our project report listening to Lobo. Gotto send it tonight to Bond.
• Time check : 9 pm. Have finished just one chapter in CD and still the CPS asignment is pending. All this by morn!

4 Jan, Fri

• Finished CD assignment in library. Had lunch in canteen. Ate the worst lunch I've ever had here.
• Did quite OK in CD test.
• Buses are gone by the time test ends! Abhilash drops me home, Amogh drops off Varsha. Dunno what Sai did though ;-)
• Checked mail from BLUG. 87 mails!!! Sat and cleared them.
• Finally got FreeAmp for Linux playing! The music of Freedom ;-)
• Did a source install of LICQ. All this compiling is interesting :-)

5 Jan, Sat

• Got up pretty late - 9 AM.
• Lohit calls up and I can't make out his voice on the phone :-) It sounds so different.
• Called up JJK to ask him to mail his TFTP report. Find him sleeping (10:15 AM).
• Weeded out the files LICQ had put all over the place. It had a make unistall but still some files were left. No more source installs for me!
• Checked mail to find Bond already done with his CGI report. I still have to start on mine today.
• Done with the Java report by evening. Mailed it to Bond.
• JJK sends me his TFTP report. Just in time! What a pal!
• Finished the TFTP report (just modified JJK's). It's 2:30 am, I better go to sleep.

6 Jan, Sun

• Woke up at 9:30 am. Pretty early for a Sunday :-)
• Sent Bond the TFTP report. Remembered in time to mail the Java project and report to Nalina.
• Bath over at 12 am. Skipped breakfast and opted for lunch at 1 pm.
• Finished reading Ravi's activity logs upto Oct 2001. I'm really influenced by reading this stuff.
• It's evening and still no response from Bond. This has me really worried about tomorrow. Tomorrow is last day to submit reports and I have no contact with Bond.
• Tried to understand programming a Swing application. Found it tough to just generate one empty window. All the damn Swing tutorials concentrate on Swing applets.
• Checked mail at 11 PM, and saw Bond's reply, finally! He had got all the reports and was coming to college tomorrow with them. I am relieved.
• Listened to Dire Straits as I tried to make sense of using Swing in Java. Liked Sultans Of Swing and Twisting By The Pool.

7 Jan, Mon

• Went to college at 10:45 AM. Got the printouts of the Network Lab programs.
• Checked Internal marks for CPS. Was relieved to see 25!
• Loafed around in college waiting for Bond. Pestered Vaidya to help me out with our Java project which was still giving us headaches. He gave some pointers that I think will help.
• Bond came eventually with the reports at 12:30 AM. But, none of the lecturers were available to get the reports signed.
• Came back by the noon bus. Bond said he would stay back and wait.
• Remembered that I had to mail Ashwini some pictures for her project. Sent the stuff. Hope she gets it this time.
• Watched Congo on HBO. Nice story, bad movie. Must read the book someday :-)
• Monday evening means Monday Comedy!!! Watched That 70s Show, Everybody Loves Raymond and Dharma And Greg.
• 7:30 PM Tried a hand at the Java project. Shucks! It still doesn't work :-( Have to catch hold of Anand tomorrow.
• Built my first RPM from a src RPM - Quanta HTML Editor. Yoo Hoo! Building from source rocks!! All it needed was a rpm --rebuild
• Installed Quanta Version 2 from the handbuilt RPM. Looking good :-) I needed a HTML editor like this badly.
• Removed the IBM Java SDK 1.4.0 (it was giving problems) and installed Java JDK 1.3.1

8 Jan, Tue

• Woke up at 9 AM. Almost missed the bus.
• Had a very interesting discussion in the bus with Bajpai, Jaggi and Ajith about Swiss banks, terrorism, Pak, Nazi gold and Euro.
• Kavitha maam signed the Network Lab report without a fuss. What a relief!
• Did some reading in the library about Swing from a nice book - Java Swing
• Hung around in the lab trying to get our Java project going. Usha gave some suggestions, but didn't work out.
• Usha showed their CGI project website. Wow! It rocks :-D Ours is a poor orphan in comparision. Thank God we have the exam before them :-)
• Shobha maam dropped in and asked us to register our elective preferences for next semester. We went to her room and chose some 4 subjects randomly. I can't even recall them now.
• Returned by noon bus. The discussion continued with Bajpai, Jaggi and Harsha about the international media, mid-east conflict, Kashmir, Nehru and such. Bajpai makes a discussion about anything interesting.
• Tried to sleep when Amogh called up. Discussed the reasons to give our project guide Sudarsh for having not yet started on the project.
• Checked mail, lots from BLUG. Am surprised to see Atul and Chyrag tearing up each other on some simple mailing problem.
• 10:30 PM Started looking into Adv Arch. This book is huge!

9 Jan, Wed

• Went to see my eye doctor about the constant irritation I feel in my eyes. Turns out it is an allergic reaction and I can't wear contacts for a long time :-(
• Still in Adv Arch's first chapter and looks like I'm not making much headway.
• Did nothing much the rest of the day.
• 1:30 AM The date has changed. Still up.
• Sent Amogh a prelim draft of the mail he wanted to send to our project guide. About time I hit the pillow!

10 Jan, Thu

• Woke up at 9:30 AM. Must try to get up earlier (and sleep earlier too ;-)
• Konga dropped in at 11 AM to take our TFTP report. Reminded him to return it by evening.
• Slept through the noon. How blissful!
• Got up at 5:30 PM. Some sick movie on cable, with puppets killing people. I hate such movies. Later watched Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. Will is always watchable :-)
• Remebered that Konga still hasn't returned the report. Called up Priyank and asked him to tell Konga to return it.
• Finally, Konga drops in at 8 PM! Seems that he had gone to Siemens for his final sem project. We talked about it for sometime since, we were also doing our project there.
• 1 AM - My mind starts to behave crazy at such hours :-) I decide to try to learn to use Qt Designer to build a frontend for our TFTP client.
• 2:30 AM High time I ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz

11 Jan, Fri

• Up at 8:30 AM. Not bad.
• Now that we get TOI instead of NIE, I miss YES that came every friday.
• Since, HOD is not signing our reports, we get it signed by zulu (not before he scolds us about the certificates)
• In the NP lab Bond studies the TFTP code closely, while I try to make a interface for it.
• Noon bus. Jaggi discusses about HLL and P&G and their market share. We conclude that every Indian will be using atleast one of their products.
• I spend the noon watching MCM - always enjoyable.
• Check mail, hundreds from BLUG! Ashwini confirms that she got the pics. Reminds me that Shankranti is not far away.
• 1:30 AM Mailed the source code pages for printout to Bond.

12 Jan, Sat

• Mom tells me it's time I woke up - 10 AM.
• Idli and sambhar for breakfast. Damn! the sambhar is too good.
• Mom and Shilpa have gone out to watch K3G.
• Wasted what was left of the morn doing TOI crosswords (someone was on my mind all the time :-)
• The comedies on Zee English are good for a change.
• Read a very interesting section on cryptography in Computer Networks. Tanenbaum is good!
• For once watched a good movie on cable (can't recall the name though)
• Added support for error packets in our TFTP project. Listened to Def Leppard as I hacked (thanks to Guru). Liked Hysteria and Rock Of Ages.
• ZZzz by 1:45 AM

13 Jan, Sun

• Today's wakeup time - 9 AM (It must be almost 2/3 weeks since I've seen how the world looks at 6/7 AM :-)
• Had a nice, long hot bath. Felt very refreshed and looking good!
• Worked on an interface for our TFTP project through the noon and all night. Atleast we have something to show now :-)
• Sleep at 1:30 AM

14 Jan, Mon

• Today is Sankranti and I wake up at 10 AM. This is becoming worse each day!
• Since, it is so late by the time my bath is over, I skip breakfast and go for the festival feast at 1:30 PM ;-)
• A nice nap in the noon :-)
• Read a chapter on Code Generation. This is interesting stuff!
• Wasted time in the evening. BTW Shilpa was wearing a saree and looking nice and so is my sis :-)

15 Jan, Tue

• Woke up at 8:30 AM. Feeling very jolly today (for no reason :-)
• Tested our network project in the lab. Works!
• Just went with Bond to the hostel. What luck! I met Anand who cleared the major bottleneck in our Java project in just seconds. Way to go!
• It turns out that what Anand told didn't work :-( But, I made a crude hack around it by using JButtons.
• Added IFS fractals to the Java project. Now it is starting to look good :-)

16 Jan, Wed

• Tomorrow is the big project demo! Wish me luck!
• Bond came home at around 4. We discussed about our project presentation until 6.
• Had some nice fun reading stuff I got from Anil's CD.

17 Jan, Thu

• Arrived in college ready for the exam. Delip gave some frights showing his knowledge of CN. Poor me!
• Bond came late as he had missed the bus. No problem, there was still lots of time for the exam.
• Browsed through some sections of CN along with Bond to prepare for the viva.
• Though our exam was at 10:30, we were called in early.
• The project exam turned out to be unimpressive. I was pretty disappointed with our method of presentation (so was the examiner :-) she was yawning a lot)
• Bond goes to the bank for some work and disappears.
• I decided to get some sleep in the library.
• Noon bus. Never seen this bus so empty. Jaggi and me are the only males in the bus.
• Checked mail and spent the afternoon watching Total Recall on Zee MGM, nice songs.
• Crashed at 5 PM and woke up later at 7:30 PM.
• Read some stuff on Pipeline Processing.

18 Jan, Fri

• Woke up pretty late.
• Priyank called up and said that he would come later in the evening with Konga.
• Slept a little and got an idea of how to implement zoom on our fractals. (You get good ideas only in your sleep)
• Had lunch and sat down to add zooming feature to our fractals. Turned out to be pretty easy, though it made the code ugly. Also, the display speed dropped dramatically as zooming increased (it practically hung after 3 zooms).
• Priyank and Konga dropped in at 5:30 PM. We talked about rlogin and how they were extending it to their project.
• Watched a lot of TV later.
• 10:15 PM Mom started to have severe pain in her stomach and we took her to the hospital. She was OK later.

19 Jan, Sat

• It's very sunny today and feels good.
• My song of the day - Side by Travis. The sounds feel so different.
• Rohith dropped in at 6PM and left at 9PM. We talked a lot about everything and anything.
• Read some stuff in CN on JPEG and MPEG. Quite interesting.

20 Jan, Sun

• Up at 9 AM
• Designed some images for our webpage project. Now bookWeb is looking good :-)
• The electricity goes poof at 11:30 AM. I realise I still haven't had a bath!
• 12 AM Boring upittu for breakfast.
• Worked on the CGI project all noon.
• Saw today one of the worst episodes of X-Files. The script must have been written on a Post-It.
• Called up Bond and talked about the ppt for our projects.
• There's a new single by Linkin' Park called In The End on TV. Very good sounds :-)
• Late dinner at 10:30 PM.
• Started to read Linux From Scratch. No! I'm not building my own distro but just find it interesting.

21 Jan, Mon

• Woke up at some late hour. (Nothing unusual about that :-)
• Did some fixing on our project.
• Bond had to come at 3:30 PM, but he's not here yet.
• Vedavalli called up and asked about somethings about the CGI project. She's has even done a shopping cart for their website!
• Bond comes finally at 6 PM. About time ;-)
• We discussed about the way we should go about our project presentation. Sachin called up, seems the external examiner is a major pain asking stupid questions seriously! Dunno what'll happen tomorrow for us! (fingers crossed)
• Dreaded about our floppies going bad tomorrow, so sat down and scanned each one of them. This is boring!
• Postponed reading for the viva to tomorrow.

22 Jan, Tue

• The big day! Up early at 6 AM. Ready at the bus stop at 7:30.
• Today we have combined bus and I get to see a lot of new faces (old ones too). Try to read something on CGI in the bus, but sleep overpowers me and I wake up only in college.
• Did some reading on normal forms thanks to Delip and Gurudutt. These guys can give u the jitters with their knowledge. Never ever make the mistake of talking to them before an exam :-)
• We go through yet another sleepy session of project presentation. The examiner wakes up at the end of the JMaya demo.
• Harsha and myself are the only guys in the noon bus. Harsha talked a lot about our college campus network(?), projects and such. Looks like we're getting a fiberoptic campus network with the hub being in the ECE department. Now if they can provide us a better internet connection... ;-)
• Back home, was watching an interesting movie when the power goes off. Decide it's time I get some (more) sleep.
• Wake up and watch reruns of Fresh Prince and Full House.
• Life is so boring, I don't know why you are reading this???

23 Jan, Wed

• Got the two CDs of Mandrake 8.1. Now I'm ready to check it out :-)
• Due to a grid failure the power kept going off before I could complete the install.
• Finally completed the install at 11 PM.
• Tomorrow - more fun tweaking awaits :-)

24 Jan, Thu

• It got so hot during the night that I got up at 5 AM! Started to install the apps in the second CD. KDE 2.2.1, the new Gnome 1.4, Blackbox and IceWM - so many window managers to choose from!
• Due to some stupid bug in the autodetection of the soundcard I had to manually insert the module for it.
• Mandrake 8.1 rocks! It even has cool skins for XMMS!
• Oops!!! The whole day's spent. When do I read for the exams?

25 Jan, Fri

• Woke up at 6 AM. Realised that very few days were left for the exams! Went to sleep again and later gotup at 10 AM ;-)
• Studied a lot today :-) with breaks for trying out the new distro.
• Removed all the unnecessary packages from Mandrake. The install size reduced to around 1.4 GB.

26 Jan, Sat

• Today is Republic Day. From today we're free to fly the national flag whenever we want :-)
• Tried really hard to make sense of some Adv Arch, a really tough subject.
• 2 AM Tried my hand at understanding the X window system. Also did some tweaking in the XF86Config-4 file and resulted in a faster interface. (Looks like Mandrake's config utilities screw up a lot of things)

27 Jan, Sun

• The cable guys have shutoff all pay channels. All the good channels are gone! Still have MCM though.
• Spent the day reading for the exams. They're less then a week away now.
• Slept late noon and only woke up at night.
• Later in the night removed lilo on the disk and later realised that the rescue disk doesn't work! Had to use loadlin and get back on. Phew!
• Corrected all the lilo stuff and ended up sleeping at 3:30 AM! (My sleeptimes in the last one month must have destroyed my body clock ;-)

28 Jan, Mon

• Woken up at around 10AM (by dad!)
• Cable is still out :-(
• Akka's cooking skills need more improvement (found out during lunch :-) Thank god mom comes back today!
• Mom returned from Mysore in the afternoon.
• Studied later in the noon and evening.
• Discovered Nethack Falcon's Eye on Mandrake CD2! So, my old favorite game is back in full color graphics and music :-) Played a couple of mazes.

29 Jan, Tue

• Studied some Adv Arch sections.
• Cable is back! No good movies today though.
• Our kitchen is being painted.
• Felt very bored to read anything more today.
• Modem's power cable is gone :-(
• Designed some logos for my project webpages using Gimp (what else!).

30 Jan, Wed

• Nikhil Joshi is the cover story of this week's Taranga. This 5^th sem guy from our college is the first person in the world to play Carnatic music using a guitar!
• Some repairs going on in the kitchen.
• There's a new song Paisa by a band called Agosh. Nice fusion of western and classical sounds.

31 Jan, Thu

• Studied for CN in the morning.
• There's a nice song called Eternal Flame by Atomic Kitten (talk about strange names!)
• Watched the latter half of Planet Of Apes on cable. Why do they always put the good movies only during exams??? It happens every single time with each and every movie channel!
• Last day of Jan ... already!!!