Hyderabad Hues

All India Microsoft Boot Camp (6th-8th March)

It all started with a mail from the Microsoft Academic team, mentioning about the "All India Boot Camp" that was gonna happen in Hyderabad for all the Microsoft Student Partners (minus the ones in their final years except for a select few)

Just the thing i wanted ;)

Was all excited and eager, after i successfully scraped up 150 activity points(one of the criteria that had to be satisfied to be eligible for the boot camp)

Time was moving ridiculously slow ... but eventually the day had to come and it came :)
We Chennai MSPs lot gathered up at Chennai Central and took the train to Hyderabad.

i was sound asleep by around 10 pm, but then one really caring friend of mine decided to wake me up somewhere in the middle of the night to wish me for my journey (Sigh!)
looked around and found that three nocturnals were still actively talking and talking and talking.(Sigh! again) With some difficulty, i switched back to Sleep mode.

Next morning, me, JG and phoenix were all having a conversation by the open door of the rail coach, feeling the wind gently slapping our faces;
me and phoenix then took out our digicams and started snapping. With some tips from phoenix on aperture, exposure and white balance settings, i was suddenly snapping away psychedelic beauties.

Check em out over here->

My Flickr page

People were suggesting that the Charminar express had a reputation of running late. But surprisingly, ours was early.
Me, JG and Kanishk got down at Secunderabad and parted ways ...

Phew! Thanks to my mediocre hindi speaking capabilities, i was able to manage with the autorickshaw-walahs ...








Reached "Ellaa Suites" in the evening, a lil bit late. Got the electronic key to my room from the lobby, asked them to take my luggage over to my room and hurried out to get onto the last shuttle bus to the Microsoft-India Development Center (MSIDC) ...
I thought i'd be missing the Internship test, as it was supposed to start at 5pm and i was still at the hotel at 5.15 ...
Got some company to talk to in the bus, in the form of one Chennai MSP(TEK) and the other, the most happening MSP in India, the one with the highest number of activity points, the "then naattu singam" lol ;)

MSIDC was just a kilometer away from Ellaa; was glad to find out that the test hadnt started off yet (i dunno if i was really glad :|) ... The MSIDC campus was a treat to the eye. The Interiors were so out of the world (atleast from what i'd seen so far) ... After a small presentation, finally came the Internship test.
Just 3 questions; 75 minutes. I wondered why they had given us so much time.
But at the end of the 75 minutes, i wasnt wondering :D
Lets just say i did the test pretty well except for a Data Structures question involving Circular Queues.
All rite, All rite!!! i'll not get into all that stuff :D

We had dinner at the IDC and then got back to the hotel ...
Incidentally, my roommate, an MSP from Mumbai was a tamilian too ...
After watching tv for some time, i dozed off smiling to myself with memories of all that had happened in the day ...


The Next day at the IDC was full of techie sessions.
Starting with a keynote from Pratima Amonkar(Director-Academia)
Then came a session on SQL Server 2008, which was as dry as my friend hari's bath towel. lol :D
The next session was delivered by Abhinav Gujjar on Windows Mobile Application Development. The guy was racing against time to cover everything within the allotted time and yet did an impressive job ...
Next came a photoshoot with all the MSPs in the amphitheatre ...
Followed by "networking lunch" with Microsoft employees. We got the opportunity to have candid discussions with some of them :)

We sat for a sessions on Cloud Computing(Windows Azure to be specific) by Archis Gore and Application Security by Varun Sharma with our stomachs full and heads fuzzy. :D
The last sessions for the day were on Windows7, IE8 & a 9 question survey by the three Musketeers.

A surprise party was announced for later in the night.

We got back to the hotel and headed to ASG's room.
What happened in there was bloody violence! Each of us guys were lifted one-by-one and our asses were made targets of football practice. I wriggled out of their hold the first time. But then they caught me again when i least expected it. Ouch! :D

Later it was time for MSPs to rock the dance floor. I was wearing the best party attire ever experimented with - Shorts :|
Anyways, the time at the dance floor saw me completely freaking out !!! \m/ :)

We had dinner by the poolside. I had scoops and heaps of icecream :D
This particular jackass got 2-3 of us drenched in water ... (i eventually had my revenge though ;))

We all watched KungFu Panda on the plasma tv (Phoenix had interfaced it with his lappie) before signing off ...

The final day at the IDC was devoted to Q&A sessions on MS academic programs and other stuff ...

Me, Sid and the jackass left the IDC campus halfway through and we headed out ...
Sid and me had one hell of an experience, travelling ;)








Later, i got on the train back to Chennai ...
Some freakomaniacs (have to give Watson, a mention here) were still discussing the internship test questions and trying to solve them. (Sigh! yet again) ...
I mulled over the events of the previous days, sitting near the coach door and with my legs hanging out...

The train arrived late next morning, enough for me to skip college ... lol :)

P.S.: This Blog post is incomplete and some portions have been left blank intentionally ;)

Hi Tweeple, Start Twittering!

i've been hooked on to Twitter these days ...

A social networking service, ("micro-blogging" to be precise) with an estimated 6 million users, (trailing behind Facebook and MySpace), Twitter has been dubbed the "SMS of Internet".

i find it a fun way of staying connected; its like publishing whats on your mind or what you're doing doing right now ...

all u need to do is register, start updating ur tweets, find people whose tweets you'd like to follow and tweet on ...

here's the official twitter channel for the UK Prime Minister's Office http://twitter.com/DowningStreet

or u could follow the real 50CENT's status updates here
http://twitter.com/50cent

there are a lot of popular people in Twitter ...

but then who wants all that :|

Just bring in all ur folks into Twitter and stay connected the fun way :)

Start tweeting! Tweet Tweet! :)

--


P.S. - here's the link to my tweets http://twitter.com/viswaa88, in case you didnt notice the "My Twitter" widget at the top-left)

The Tour that wasn't !!!

Whew !!!
I'm back after a long time!
I've been longing to write about this so-called trip to Coorg(10-12th dec 2008), but it just didn't happen ( just like the tour :| ) ...
i had actually typed down all the events (read as mishaps) that happened during the trip in my mobile ... but i lost em.
anyways, I'm back here to try and retrieve all the data from the supposedly best means of storage that exists ( yea yea, I'm talking about the brain :D )

this one's gonna be pretty long, so brace yourself :D


Me, Ash, Mohan, Hari, VS and Srini first landed in Mysore Junction Railway station ( i had done my homework, looking up Coorg in google maps, finding that it was nearer from Mysore and that Coorg was a district and that Madikeri was the major town in Coorg, even downloading a map of Coorg district on to my mobile phone(all in vain ... :x ) )
We booked two pre-paid autos from the railway station and got to the nearest bus terminus ...

This is where the whole fiasco began ...
Not a single word of English in the entire bus terminus ...
Not a single word of English on the buses, showing where they're headed to ...
Ash (a half Kannadiga-half Marathi Madhwa), who proclaimed that he could manage with Kannada, took up the job of finding out how we're supposed to get to Madikeri ...
but he only encountered unfriendly faces all around ...
finally he gathered that there was no means of transport from Mysore to Madikeri and we were asked to head to another place called Tumkur to get there ... :/
a whopping 126 km.

D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R !!!

having no other options, we found ourselves seated in a bus to Tumkur and the conductor informed us that the same bus would head to Madikeri after a 30 min halt at Tumkur ...

after five ridiculously boring hours of bus travel, my sixth sense started pricking me.
we were supposed to be nearing Coorg, which is a hill station ...
but i never felt the need to take out the jerkin which i had in my bag ...
and all around was a barren rocky terrain ...
the bus conductor assured as that we were heading in the right direction.

after a while the conductor informed us that it was time for us to get down.

a yellow coloured board in the corner of the road caught my eye ...

Lo! finally something in English ...

BUT WAIT !

"MADHUGIRI"

WHAT THE HELL !!! :O

We all had a big laugh!
Told one local that we landed in the wrong part of the country, and soon our story spread like wildfire ... all the local people were buzzing with talk and pointing at us and laughing ... nice !!! :|

after some phone calls and a small G.D. (read as Group Discussion), we decided to head to Bangalore (another 100 kms away) :(

we were literally laughing at ourselves looking at the condition in which we were in ...

reached Bangalore at around 10.30 in the night.

it took around 90 mins to move from the outskirts of Bangalore to the main city (thanks to the traffic and all the new flyovers coming up ... hmph!)

checked into a hotel and after roaming around for a while, i hit the sack, still managing to laugh at the series of events that lead to us being in the place we were in.

Next day we arranged for a sight-seeing one-day trip around Bengaluru.

On the itinerary:

ISKON Temple (run by money-minded folks :/)
Bull Temple
Lal Bagh
Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace
Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum (fun place)

headed back to the hotel, packed up and caught a bus to Mysore (we decided to get back to Mysore, as we had to catch the train back to Chennai from there, the next day)

The Bangalore-Mysore expressway was dotted with Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) outlets every few kilometers.
(Yaarume illaadha kadaila yaarukku da tea aatharaanga? :|)

Was slowly getting back to a normal state of mind,

But it was not to be that way:

BUS BREAKDOWN !!!

thankfully the Bus conductor waved in another KSRTC bus within 20 minutes and got us all aboard.

Reached Mysore very late in the night and checked into a hotel asap.

Arranged for a cab, the next day, for sight-seeing around Mysore with, thankfully, a Tamil-speaking driver ...

On the itinerary:

Chamundi Hill
Bull Temple
Tipu Sultan Palace
Mysore Zoo
Srirangapattana
Brindavan Gardens(the best of the lot)

then caught the train back to Chennai - Home Sweet Home -( Phew!!! ) after one helluva memorable trip ...

list of lessons that i learnt:

LESSON 2: Don't expect English signboards in Karnataka
LESSON 3: Never let people laugh at your mistakes, ALONE ... LOL ;D
LESSON 4: Unplanned trips = Adventure trips :)
LESSON 5: Kannada is a language with a delicious script (and i forgot to tell you, i like jalebis ... ROTFL :) )



P.S. -LESSON 1: Never trust Ashwin's kannada speaking abilities :D


Ciao !!!

The Aftermath

I'm back after a day of Internet blackout!!!

yeah, No 'I'nternet ( notice the capitalized 'I' in Internet? My Computer Networks text says that there's a big difference between 'I'nternet and 'i'nternet. Chuck that! And hope i wouldn't need to look at that horrible book ever again ... )

Boy! Yesterday was one heck of a day ...

i despised the cyclone for two reasons:

1. the obvious (power-cuts, being stuck at home, et cetera ...)

2. glued to the tv, the entire day, watching the situation in Mumbai

the news channels were telecasting Live, the "mopping up"(thats what they called it) operations at the Taj hotel and the Nariman House by the NSG ...

damn! look at the terrorists coolly walkin in ...

one glance at the clock ... it was 9 pm, i realised i had had enough and hit the sack, with a terrible head-ache actually...

now i'm not gonna use this blog to grumble about Mumbai's lack of preparedness to face such a situation or wonder why it took nearly 60 hours to flush out the terrorists or blah blah blah !!!

i'm seriously fed up with what happened, thats all i can say ...

moving on to the rains, a bit of a relief Today. Enough for me to venture out and take some snapshots of the St.Thomas Mount Subway.

what was so special about the subway???

here u go:

looks like a canal, doesnt it?

cudn't add a copyright, so decided to include myself in the snap :P



thats supposedly the top of a sunken truck



copyrighting my pic again! :D

the rains were coming back ... , so came back home and watched this movie
"A Few Good Men".
Chaps out there who think Tom Cruise's movies are rated high ONLY because of his good-looks will eat their words when they're done watching this movie.
Another movie i'd recommend is "The Last Samurai", one of my all-time favourites ...

Ciao !!!

Genesis Part-II

Here i go again ...

after a failed dig at blogging, I'm back again with this new blog.

if u wanna see the LENGTHY blog i created last time around, go here ->http://viswaa88.wordpress.com/

[i even got a spam comment for the blog ... a guy swearing at me in Hindi regarding the number of posts in it! :D]

My 5th semester exams got over just two days back, Yippeeeeeeeeee!

actually i'd say it got over five days back ... cuz i dint need to put up with mental torture for "Environmental Sciences" like i had to, for the rest of the subjects ...

but then, its been a soppy start to the holidays, ... thanks to "Nisha" !!!

Whoa!!! Nisha isn't any gal ...

i meant "Cyclone Nisha" ...

there's been incessant rains in Chennai over the past three days ...

its during these idling hours of being stuck at home, i decided that i should get on with creating a blog.

and here i am !!!

Of course there's more to it

i dint know what i would be putting in my blogs ...

personal???

movies???

music???

tech???

but then, there were other things to worry about ...

the title of the blog for instance.

Gawd!!!

i went to the extent of texting my gang of friends asking them for suggestions!

none of those busy-bees replied, as expected ...

thanked them for the overwhelming response and was about to get back to pondering, when this gal Jayashree[http://jaya28.blogspot.com/] suggested the title:
"How To Name It"

i jumped on it!

"How To Name It?"

no reference to the 1986 instrumental fusion album by Ilaiyaraaja, a dusty old audio cassette of which, is my dad's prized possession

decided to go ahead with the title , at least temporarily, only because it aptly portrayed the "i'm not able to come up with anything" situation i was experiencing!

then came the url part ...

had to be something cool!

was breaking my head again!

in my frustration i even tried the following:

"idunnowhattoputhere.blogspot.com"

"nothing.blogspot.com"

"ennakodumasiridhu.blogspot.com"

but guess what!

all of them had been already taken! :(

eventually came up "vishyvociferates.blogspot.com"

Phew!!!

Finally i was done ...