Abacus 2k5 kicked off!!!

I don't know how the other college delegates or the organisers felt, but to me the first day of Abacus 2k5 was a letdown. There was a complete lack of dynamism in the proceedings, and the fact that all the people who had come could fit entirely in the front half of the Audi hardly seems commendable for CEG's top tech symposium. Given the time investment and the magnitude of sponsorship, something better could surely have been done.

Maybe I'm judging prematurely, though, because I didn't attend the afternoon session: which included Impromptu and the Treasure Hunt. Now these would have been interesting, and the whole class could have been appreciative witness, were it not for a mule-headed PQT professor who insisted on taking class from 1 to 3. Poor Gopi, he had gone earlier to try and cancel the class but got his head chewed off!!

After an hour of Markov chains that all of a sudden, upon the satisfaction of inexplicable criteria, became Ergodic, we couldn't really stand any additional boredom being heaped on. We decided to give Abacus the miss-in-baulk, and went back to Vels room for the matinee (Matrix Reloaded).

And it had hardly reloaded when we got a summons from Balaji, and proceeded to the Alumni Centre to polish off what was left of the Gobi Manchurian (which was pretty good). But on the whole, an extremely boring jour.

PS: I got a 14 on the PQT second assess, which reaffirms my faith in miracles and has transformed me from a skeptic to a spiritualist:-)

5.Someone

I got my hands onto “five-point someone” finally (thanks Nithya!), a book I’ve heard loads about and have wanted to read for a very long time. The book was an OK read, but the author certainly got his topic right. There are going to be no spoilers here, and I suggest that you read the book first if you want to understand what follows.

I’m not exactly Ryan, but I sympathise completely with the guy. I mean, seriously, throwing up a work of pure genius just because a five-pointer of no repute came up with it? Some of the passages in the book, which the author must have thrown in to highlight the concept of conformity to the system, seem incredible at first: eg. Vohra’s design class: I can’t believe that any self-respecting professor would rubbish that work without even looking at it.

On the concept of the crappiness of the GPA system, Ryan and I are one! Luckily, no one in CEG takes the assignments and assessments that seriously!

The way Hari’s “issues” were brought up by the author was pure brilliance. One paragraph – actually just a set of questions, spoke eloquent volumes of explanation. Fantastic writing in that section, actually – I really thought it was the best part of the entire book.

On an aside, Neha seems real cute, but a bit unbelievable!!

Must-read!!

Watt a course!!

Electronics Lab is one of the most amusing courses this semester. I have never pretended to be fascinated by the virtues of pure silicon and germanium stringed together with the help of resistors and capacitances into a flimsy, unreliable circuit. But there is something purely comical about the theory when it assumes the concrete shape of fit-in-my-fingernail capacitors and “how-many-ohms-is-that?” resistors!

For today’s EC lab, Kalpana and me had teamed up with Mani and Malathi, which in itself is good for a few laughs. I swear, you must listen to the dialogue between these two to get some solid enjoyment out of life. She views him with bemusement, while he treats her with condescension. The combi is truly fantastic to watch, trust me!

Anyway, my jinx with modern electronics struck home once again, as all the other circuits (except the one yours truly had made) were up and working in no time at all. Forget astable, we felt that we were lucky enough to get something on the CRO. The squiggles on the LCD display looked as if an inspired Picasso had been let loose into the damn instrument, and we got everything on it but the wave we so badly wanted.

After three hours of pure electronics torture, with timely (and completely unhelpful) inputs from the oh-so-friendly lab assistants, we made the sane decision of relegating this experiment to the next lab session.