Up!

Today, I watched Up. An animation movie from Walt Disney. The movie is undoubtedly one of the better movies that came up lately.
The movie starts where the lead character is a 7 year old(around 7) who is fond of adventures.
There is an exceptional display of real life situations like love, responsibility, age and time.
I felt that I might end up the same way as the old guy if I don't do anything about my dreams now.
Anyway, a wonderful flick.

The ordeal of a viral

5/10/09: I was feeling that something was wrong with my body for the past day. On 5^th I went to the Web Services class at 1630 hrs. In the class I had this strange feeling with my jaw. I had a minor headache that was persistent and was feeling terribly bad by the end of the class at 1530 hrs. 

I came back to the room and by 1800 hrs I realized all the symptoms pointed towards fever. I decided to quit the evening class and ate curd rice that night. By 2200 I was having what i assumed to be 103F body temperature. I reluctantly called home telling them that I may have fever and the usual advice was given and I was asked to come back home the next morning. 

The entire night was a horrible spend. I watched some movies till 0139 hrs and finally slept for half an hour before I had to getup to pee and by then I was feeling the full heat. My entire body suddenly felt as if it was 75 years old. I literally had to take the support of the wall to walk till the toilet. I called Phani to open the door of his room so that I could take one more parasetamol he brought for me. I could not sleep for the rest of the night. I got a call from home at 0730 by which I decided I need special medical attention. I requested my dad that I would like to stay at Srinivas babai's home for a day or two for which he agreed. I reached there by 0815 or so. I went to hospital and the doc put me on the antibiotic course for 5 days.

I came back by and started watching  pretty things movie o Star Movies. I would like to watch that completely once again. The story was realistic and my body condition was horrific. I didn't have enough energy to walk till the toilet to take a leak.

Babai and pinni took good care of me. I felt absolutely no difference in the amount of care I would get if I were at my home. My mom came there the next morning. I was a little better by then and could walk till the toilet. she reached by 1100 hrs. I was happy that I could shout at her for silly things. I know it is stupid and am not helping myself but it somehow made me feel better.

She  stayed for the next day. During day 3 I had this terrible health condition and she was visibly worried. I had some blood tests and everything was quiet normal in them. 

I finally went home on day 5. I stayed there for another 5 days by the end of which I thanks to the doc killed most of the virus and have started the long journey of recovery. 

AFAIK this is the worst health condition I've experienced in my life.The ordeal lasted for 10 days and after 5 days more I returned to my cousins room.

The room was like a dead planet this time. There were clothes thrown every where and thought that room was excavated to find some hidden treasures. There was no running water that day. Our room had a short circuit so the fuse for our room was down and so is it today and possibly stay that way for the coming new year too.

We in the room are like bacteria. When ever life becomes difficult, we move to different locations and prepare to stay in new locations despite them being inhospitable. We moved the bed to the living room and finally granted the room independence for the red-ants that were the local population before we colonized that room.

I am still trying to gaining back my lost energy and Jenna, Tiffany, Nella, and the crews of ALS, KEEZ, and other social organizations are helping me out on this (Indirectly (For the record)).

Today, I've started to figure out what I had missed in the classes and am working on it. This time without the help of any social organization thanks to nature. ;-)

I've lost 1.5 kg by the way.

Time for a change.

I bought myself a new Fastrack watch.
I had a good look at all the watches on the deck. I had a strong like for digital watches all along, and had already decided to take a digital watch.

I was thinking that a digital watch damages the formal attire I would probably have to be in a few months(hopefully), but this pick seemed rather simple. This was contrary to my previous watch..an AthleticWorks sports model that was rather fancy looking and little towards the extreme side.

The watch's build seemed strong enough for me to last a good year. I particularly liked the thin orange inner lining of the screen. It has chrono, alarm, timer,chime and is water resistant.

Here is a pic of it.......I hope you like it.

The sacrifice

I have reached my cousins apartment in Amerpeet by 7:00AM. It is a three bed-room flat about half a mile from the institute. I skipped the class that day. All of my cousins friends seemed fine and all of them left the house by 10:00 AM.
I went to the Institute, negotiated a further 400/- fees reduction had lunch and later went to Big Bazaar and Chermas for shopping. I bought a couple of t-shirts and a Pyzama.
The first day ended with a lot of work and fuss but on a happy and a promising note.

The quest for knowledge

With an unquenched thirst for programming, I set out to find the right place to learn it.
The first stop was NIIT. I and Gowtham went in to the get the details. The Lady present remembered Gowtham, she first told us about the advantages of joining there and then went o in detail about the course of our interest. Everything was promising so far. Then came the cost perspective of the course. It was an unnegotiatable 62.000(INR). I hardly stopped from bursting to laughs on her face.

WTF....this is education dude, not vacation. With the same amount I could redo three years of my education(graduation).

I later thought of doing Java in BeSoft Technologies. I loved it when I went to core over there. But the concepts covered there seriously lacked depth. So I've started to look for better option.

After quite some people referred Naresh Technologies, I thought of giving it a try despite its distance. I and Abhi went to Amerpeet to the institute and were sort of glad when we came out with details. The course contents seemed comprehensively covered and the the price was down to earth. Something like say the tax I would have paid if had joined NIIT(Slightly exaggerated).

Few rather insignificant days passed before we started to go there for demos.

Abhi dropped out because of the distance factor.

I went to my home town and later joined the institute with a plan to stay local to the institute to avoid the journey.

Trip to my hometown: The start

The final decision of my departure was taken by 1400hrs on 28/5/2009. I started off to Gowtham's place and met Pruthvi there. We managed to get to a matinee show after searching several theaters a movie called EE Vayasulo (thanks to Pruthvi).

We went in 10 min after the show started and came out 90 minutes before it ended. The Hero was a zero. Watching him and his co-stars act was an awful experience. The Heroine was also unbearable.
We came back and got a couple of CD-ROMS of telugu movies.

We started of for Vijayawada at 2200hrs. The bus was absolutely maintenence free. Thank god that both mine and pruthvi's seats were able to incline. They played the first half of "Athadu" in the bus.

I managed to get sleep after 2 hrs of struggle. I slept for roughly halfanhour before Kodad came(mid course halt) and couldn't sleep from there on. We reached Vijayawada by 0545hrs.

The day passed fine except for a matty feel over my skin due to the unfamiliar moisture in the air. I finally called day off after small snack at Temptations and dinner later on.

Judgement Day

The day started at 00hrs when jeev sms'd me that the results are out for the project and seminars.
I got a staggering 296/300. I was more then delighted for the mark and instantaneously filled up with gratitude for my teachers.
I woke up at 0900hrs and learned that the results are completely out.
I was afraid that I may retain a couple of subjects for some stupid reasons but when I learned the score I got, I was extremely disappointed by the marks awarded.
Before this, I learned of an unfortunate thing that happened to my friend.

No matter how hard you try, there is an element of uncertainty(divine interference?) involved. This is a very hard fact we have to accept as we have no options here.

I got 78% as my score and was quiet satisfied with that by the end of the day.

Moblie phone specs

We come across a lot of specifications for a mobile phone that are rather confusing or abstract.
I here attempt to explain a few of them.

Battery:
Mobile phone batteries do not perform to the levels as specified by the manufacturers most of the time. This may be due to several factors.
-The battery has a definite expiry time. So older models have under performance then latter ones due to this.
-The specified talktime will be considering ideal situations. This varies on signal strength, local phone settings,bad charging and maintenance practices. We should never keep our battery in hot surroundings or charge it for extended periods.
-Every battery has a specified mAh. One ampere-hour is equal to the electric charge transferred by a steady current of one ampere for one hour. So a higher mAh means a higher battery performance.

Display:
The display can be described in two parameters.
1) Resolution
2) Physical size
3)Number of colors.

-The screen is generally available in resolution of 128x128, 176x220, 240x320(QVGA) among a large variety of others.
This represents the number of pixels a screen can display. The more pixels here, the more clarity the display will be of literally.
-The physical size means the length of the diagonal across the screen. This has little to do with clarity but effects the overall presentation of the screen. We should be sure that the above two parameters are balanced in a particular screen. The normal screen sizes vary widely depending on the mobile.
Eg: 2 inch, 1.8 inch etc.
-Number of colors means the color differentiating capability of each pixel. This consumes more battery but greatly enhances the quality of the display.
This is typically about 4k, 64k, 256k, 16M etc.

Camera:
A mobile phone camera cannot compete with a dedicated digital camera(as yet).
All the buzz about higher Megapixels is only a cosmic improvement most of the time.
The most important thing that separates mobile cameras from dedicated digital cam's is the sensor.
A digital cam is equipped with CCD sensors. these are very sensitive, relatively large and

relatively expensive. A mobile is equipped with a CMOS sensor which is less sensitive, cheap, small and less power hungry.
Apart from sensors, the lens used greatly improves the picture quality. Some mobiles are equipped with Carl-Ziess optics which offer a good image gathering capability but still the ones on digital cam's outperform the mobile ones.

The video option on a mobile cam is also a cosmic option. Most phones offer a basic QCIF resolution which is very un-viewable. A resolution of VGA quality will be minimum that would be viewable.
The refresh rate( FPS) of a recording must match the resolution. If not the video may become even worse due to increased sluggishness of the recording.

I hope you got a brief idea about the most important parameters we generally look at firt. If you have any specific doubts feel free to contact me.

Connectivity:
Most midrange phones come with a decent connectivity options.
This means our phones capability to access data services like WWW on our phone itself( Or as a Modem).
The basic connectivity option is GPRS. It stands for General Purpose Radio Service. It has different classes, which specify( over the air) the connection speed which typically will be around 32-64 kbps.
EDGE or EGPRS is another technology that provide enhanced speeds around 300kbps.
The 3G, which is yet to make a strong mark in India( other then BSNL 3G) provides still higher data rates. This makes possible high bandwidth applications lile videoconferencing, video streaming etc possible.
For short distance mobile to mobile communication, Bluetooth and IR serve the purpose.
For higher performance LAN level connections Wi-Fi and WI-Max come to play.
Java:
Java support is almost universally present mobiles. This means third party software's written Java ME can be used on the mobile.

Wolfram Alpha

Finally a hope is taking shape. A hope for an engine that could be better then Google. An engine that gives away more relevant information it knows complimenting web references that we get in search engines.

Let us welcome Wolfram Alpha which promises a better algorithm then Google. It is said to have revolutionary formulas that makes web based searches more rational and meaningful as talking to a person asking him about our search terms.

For example, Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information –- all properly sourced, such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.


Experts feel that

"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for".

Nikola Tesla

He is one of the greatest scientists the world has ever seen. Yet his name is known to very few people.
He is a person who struggled for the development of mankind but was betrayed by the very people he benefited. A person whose dreams for a better planet got engulfed by the desires of capitalists.

He is a remarkable genius whose inventions are still being experimented and implemented. These range from Ac, AC motor, Death ray, Wireless transmission to ion-propelled aircraft.



The worlds first wireless transmission tower the wardencliff tower.

http://www.ntesla.org/index.php
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Tesla.html

And now if I ask you who invented radio??

Watch out for what you watch

The day started at 900hrs. I called abhi to know his days plans. He answered me at 1200hrs that he has none yet.

I had lunch and started off for abhi and reached there by 1330.

Vam called us and told me that he and bhar are coming over. They reached us within an hour.

We saw the infamous Russell peters show later on.

That was the most disgusting show I have ever watched. Even disgusting then.........

That guy looked like a total looser to me...Take my word, you don't need to watch that.

After that, I came back home and started for my cousins place again.

The day of "Mitrudu"

I came to my cousin Gowthams place on 7th by1130hrs.

He attended college for his Semester exams. He came home by 1400hrs. We had lunch and decided to go for Mitrudu for matinee.

Attempted Review:

It was quiet different from what I thought of it. This was the second movie of Bala Krishna I watched in the theater.

It was good at some parts and horrible at few other places. He really tried hard to give a good dance show but was only in part successful. It was not a one man army type of movie but he was nonetheless a superhero indeed.

The songs were good and the girls better. The second half was better then the first and I did not repent going for that at the end of the show.

The RAM I never got

I and Abhi planned to get a new 1GB RAM for my system on 5th this month.

The day started with abhi waking up at 1200 hrs. Since it is scorching outside we decided that to start off for CTC by 1530hrs. I was sick by then(the mucus ) but I still fought to stand for the original plan.

I finally managed to start at 1700hrs and got down at my cousins place for a small work. I reached Koti(place) by1800hrs where Abhi waited for a full 45min. We boarded a bus there and it started to rain coupled with heavy winds.

Against all these odds we still hanged on to our original plans and got to CTC by1910hrs.

We went to our regular shop where we were told about the incompatibilities of 533MHz and 667 MHz RAM's. Worried we inquired about this in the HP store where we wanted to teach the staff the basics of computer(Darn).

We went back deciding to go with a 1GB 667MHz one we initially saw. Before I thought of saying "we'll take it" to the shopkeeper, I slipped my hand to take out the Rs.500 from my back pocket.

OMG! The note was missing from there. I checked, doublecheked, checked every place of my body that was socially viewable. The note was still missing...........

The singularity of Big Bang has happened again me. I didn't know what to do.

I initially suspected another infamous prank in the making by Abhi but it was not the case now.

I Argued with my dad for this, fought against my body for this, walked in the rain, ate all the dirt the wind brought and at the end of the day I failed to realize my plan.

The amount of money lost is trivial but loosing it at a time like this isn't.

The lesson is that your effort is not the deciding factor after all.......

I thought I could do everything if I wanted to.....But it seems it is not true everywhere.

Maybe GOD, or maybe I am wrong.

The Bhar house camp

I got 4 calls this morning from Bhar which I couldn't answer. I later called him up later asking why he called me and ALAS! there is an impornant meeting to which I need to attend immediately.

I went by there in a cab and dropped by. by 10:30AM.

The rest SLOWLY turned up thanks to Abhi and south central railway......

We had a good lunch at suruchi in Habsiguda where we ate chicken biryani, some noodles and some shezwan dish. We made a lot of mess at the hotel.

Bhar packed some sweetner we get with the bill in a tissue paper and bought it home, and Abhi left a 23/- as the tip there.

We later came home and abhi pressed some keyboard and we had some discussion after which we started some cricketing.

Thanks to Abhi and Jeev, the teams were very much dependant on these as they can potentially turn the tide in the other direction.

My batting capabilites were throughly displayed to the croud And I continued on to eat the morale of the bowlers by sticking on till the last over.....

Bhars mom finally returned home from office and cooked some snacks to us. We later started off for our respected homes.

And lastly I showed Abhi how to respect elders in the bus and got down.