It’s just who I am

Walkin by the river, have you ever seen people throwin stones into it?
Why? What makes them do so?
Is it such an interesting action which can keep you mind busy for minutes?
Or is it the point blankness of the mind, lack of surity on anything in particular.
I live in that blankness every minute, throwing my thoughts into the river of life.
Watchin everyone do somethin for a reason, for some goal attracts me the most. How can you all do this? What’s the use?
I doubt if I’ll ever grow like you all or is it me who’s doin right?
Questions and thoughts like these keep popping in my empty head. They keep bouncing against the walls of my skull.

Every eye asks me questions, I look away…
I guess I dont want more stuff bouncing in the empty room, or do I fear bein dragged by the eyes?

I dont know if I avoid people or their questions,maybe I dont have enough head to figure that out.

I dream it over and over again……
People flowin with the river. Some floating, some getting drowned some just getting dragged. They keep fighting with each other for some strange reason, dont know what it is………………
Waiting with a rope

2010
07/08
CATEGORY
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Snipe List

“I wish (s)he would just be dead”
This is one of the most common lines you’d hear after 2 friends had a fight. But rarely do you meet people for whom this feeling lingers. In-fact, you don’t even need to meet that person. It can be someone who indirectly made your life, a living hell(Some crappy daily soap director for instance)
The other day, Arun bhaiya was talking about a movie called “Bucket list” (the movie from which Dasvidaniya is inspired, in its true sense. Nothing was copied and the movie was perfectly Indianized) after watching Dasvidaniya. In the movie, the lead is about to die in some days and makes a check list of things to do before he dies. So like any other Indian, we started discussing our bucket lists and slowly it turned out that almost all of us wanted to kill one/more people before we died. Bucket list got a new baby called “Snipe list”. As the name suggests, given a sniper and a free pass, who are the people you would shoot before you die.
I tried imagining the whole scene in slow-mo. Black bullet proof vest, black gloves, commando cargos and a M107. Setting the baby up on a terrace, looking through the scope and catching the unsuspecting target just as they had pounced on me time and again when I was least expecting any upset. Watching their last moves> closing my eyes> thinking of all those times…> Thinking “you messed with the wrong guy, and its too late to apologize”>Loading> Closing an eye to take a proper aim> sweat running down> index finger on the trigger> having a rush of adrenaline> feeling dopamine rise in my brain giving the pleasure of a lifetime. Thinking “This is it, the moment where I get to take it all back. Hadn’t you thought you’d get away with another stupid guy with the power that this system resided in you? I can feel the same power in me now. The power to destroy you as you had… I can kill you @$$#()!3″

And then simply unloading and walking away…..

Do you really need to kill the person after having felt that power? To me, thats the difference between that person and me…

2010
07/07
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Who is the Culprit?

Today I went to the town with a close friend/bhaiya of mine. Lets name him Karan for the sake of simplicity and privacy(though most of the people around me will know it from the details).
I had met him when we started playing of Age Of Empires II (Conquerors Expansion). One of my friends said that he was the pro player in our college…
We got n touch and were soon discussing details of the game. All known strategies, timings etc. Soon I realized that he is a great guy and that I really appreciated a lot of things in him. One of which being that he always took sane and right decisions based on morality and rationality and didnt fake for who he wasnt. With time I knew him more and figured out things like he didnt care for the middle path generally he either chose to follow a rule or to break it completely because that felt like faking to him.

So we went to the town and he was searching for some cyber cafe there. I couldnt get the point of coming to the town to look for a cyber cafe when you have 2 back papers everyday…
I got my answer soon. We entered a cafe, it was a small room just enough to hold 3 cabins and a photocopier. Karan asked the shop owner for his microcopy!!
For a few seconds I couldn’t get the point of what was going on, because Karan would never cheat. Not in a hundred years, no. The shop owner hadn’t done the copies yet. We went to the ATM, got some money out, went to our favourite bakery, had some grilled sandwiches  and my favourite pastry. Then on my way back, I remembered the brief talk we had the day before. He wanted to do a lot of things in his life and this constant fear of getting another year back was taking its toll. with atleast 9 out of 13 papers to clear and with 2 papers everyday for 3 straight days he didn’t have much of an option. He just couldn’t leave anything to chance this time. I hadn’t seen a bit of confidence in him in the whole past year except for when he played his guitar or played AOE with us.
The system had successfully broken another man into feeling that a little corruption doesn’t hurt. Suddenly, the whole meaning of having back papers changed.

Do we have back papers so that we understand and learn the subject better or are they in place so that someone who has atleast some bit of goodness in him left starts turning into the monster he sees in everyone around him?
Who is to be blamed here? The student who broke under this pressure and otherwise hates his course and this college? The parents of the student who cant let him quit this place even when they can see that this place is literally killing their son just because its a shame to be a drop out? The teachers who are more concerned in showing students how stupid, useless and irresponsible they are rather than really making efforts to understand and resolve issues that students face and help them overcome their barriers? The system of education which focuses on teaching things that are available at the touch of a button on google rather than things that we cant find on the Internet and need to cultivate within ourselves? Or the society which doesn’t let students learn things that they really enjoy and makes them run the stupid rat race?

2010
06/29
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Plans for the new year

Confused?? What are you thinking?
New year? Its more than half the year over… Why now? Oh man! this guy is running six months behind everyone??
Its not the solar new year. Not even some lunar or Indian calendar new year…

Its the new year of a student. Yup! you got it. Its the academic new year. Though, I am not sure there is anything academic left in most of ours.
Whatever may be the case, here it stands before me, challenging me right on my face. Asking The Question

“What is it that the mind of this mortal thinks it can do worthy of me?”

I passed out of my school in 2005, seems I lost my ability to answer that question too.

Every year, like any other B.tech. student, I brace myself up to go to the same classes again.
See the same faces getting worse, wrinkled. Ageing [Americans read Aging] faster than their natural course under this ultra flawed system. When they joined in they seemed like in their early twenties,due to the previous flawed systems, but now they have fast forwarded to early forties (may be I am imagining things but thats how they look to me)
All I see is lack of any sense of where we are going and a complete disaster of another of the Supreme Species(Will write on that in another post). Sometimes it feels like living in some zombie land. We have been trained to believe in this system and most of us are trained with such an excellence that we cant even see that the system is flawed. May be the same excellence in hardwiring other things in our minds would have done us more good but thats a different story altogether…

While for most of them the cycle is “yaar is saal padhai karenge”->”abey kya classic movie thi be!” AND/OR “Ki maal toki be!! [censored]” AND/OR “Chal dhaba jiba” AND/OR “Saale us teacher ki [censored]“->”Abey mid-sem ku 7 din rahila be, kichi padha sarini”->”ma [censored] mid-sem. semester re bhala rakhile mid-sem ku kehi khatir karibeni”->”[tom/dick/harry] ku dekhilu? nungu sala mandu dhari fest saara bulu thila”->”haba haba haba”->”Tara [tom/dick/harry] lab lekha sarichi?”->”Viva re [teacher] [censored] dela be”->”Semester aarambha re bhabithili, e thara padhiki [censored] pakeibi” OR (reply)”Sabu seiya bhabanti”->”[teacher] [censored] kichi patha janini saala ma [censored] ku [censored] hou thila”->”[censored] End-Sem ta saru gharaku jiba”->”haba haba haba”->[holidays]->”yaar is saal padhai karenge”

For me, it was more of “bas 3/2/1 aur saal. ho jaayega be”->”sab class kar lunga”->”kuch to kar hi lunga”->”nahi hota yaar. grrr”->”abey kuch karna padega be nahi to nahi hoga”->”projects karte hain”->”mid-sem aaya be. phew aadha sem gaya aur adha bas”->”Attendance banane ki try maarta hoon”->”please mujhe ye fest me mat ghusao be”->”nahi be I should try for them atleast”->”bhak saala, help karne jaao to zabardasti ka natak”->”bhag jaaun beech me se?”->”projects karte hain”->”lab records kaun likha hai?”->”Viva? main acha  phenkta hoon be” OR “Viva??…..”->”projects karte hain”->”Attendance… sigh! kaise samjhaun kyun nahi hota”->”End-sem end-sem end-sem”->”back nahi lagwana hai be jaise b yahan aur nahi rukna hai”
Coming back to my question (Dont mess with the zombies!!), Its been five very long years and with each passing year, my answer to The Question grew progressively feeble.
Every semester I would get back to college atleast 3 days early and then I would stay here thinking of some decent reply… This year I have planned to make an opensource framework which will be the heart of EnjoyStudies and any other website that I develop. Will appear for Zend PHP Certification(aint sure on that). Will try to get stable with my projects and earn enough to get a place to live in when(hopefully) I pass out of college. Then I have to try and get in better terms with my teachers. Work on atleast 5 different websites thru this year. Get a plan for having a sustainable source of income so that I can concentrate on creating…

Its just two more days for the official start of our new semester and the final year of our B.tech life. This is the year everyone will get into the next level of their lives. Discussion(read “Division on the basis”) of jobs, payscale and higher education will be all around me now.
Hope everyone around me has thought his/her reply to The Question and will do something to do justice to this year…

2010
06/28
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Coolest project ever

I was surfing freelancer.com for projects today and I came across this project specification

https://www.freelancer.com/projects/PHP-SEO/Profitable-website.html

I was like woah !!!!

do have a look :)

2010
06/08
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Protected: Vacation Planner

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2010
04/22
CATEGORY
Ideas
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Enjoy Studies

24th March, 23:09 IST

Kushal bhaiya(hindi for elder brother. Full name-Kushal Shah ) and I were doing our usual baseless bakwaas (hinglish for baseless chat). there’s something with this guy(Kushal bhaiya), you just sit with him for 30 minutes and you just cant avoid being a your creative best. Ask anyone of the stupid-seven( students who went to “study” at bhaiya’s Asha Institute of Excellence batch2005-2007 11th-12th). :)

I was buying the domain for his school website(http://www.sanvid.com).
We both have this strange overwhelming feeling of  promoting knowledge and we started planning a site for it.

I guess all of you must be aware of the situation India is facing in terms of good teachers (I don’t mean knowledgeable). We have too many students getting into colleges for our present teaching strength to handle. You might think that its the case with just lower level colleges. If you think so, ask an IITian. The problem is same everywhere… There is a huge reason behind this mess but I will get to that later.

We started talking on the basic aims of the website…

26th March, 17:25 IST

We had to go down from education for all to education for just btech electrical n possibly rest of btech coz of limited resources(we need a community of like minds for other courses)

Finally it was decided that we start a knowledge chain reaction kinda thing. We provide list of good books in each subject, references to good video courses, create discussion groups of max 4 ppl to avoid clutter. Create basic rules for a discussion group and try to find supportive teachers to help the doubts that arise from discussions…

A semi-public wiki is another option to create a good course material but I think we shall have that feature later on…

We had to drop SanviD as that was being maintained by a panel of investors and they may not approve of the idea.
We had to get a new name now (grrr)Luckily, I was on call with pooh(Poonam Prusty) and she got in the name searching as well. She suggested the name Enjoy Studies, bhaiya agreed and I got the domain :)

27th March, 14:39 IST

Kushal bhaiya suggested the nick “e-stud“  and thats how we got our nick :)

29th March, 18:35 IST

We started working on the actual specifications of the site.
Whiteboard came up as a great tool for discussions. (We need an actionscript and flash developer help for this)

Basic site layout was discussed that day

3rd April, 17:16 IST

The basic design parts were finalized. I know I am a noob designer. Whats more? I was trying to make it html5 css3 :P

4th April, 13:52 IST

Mr.Splashy Pants :P
We started finding out our pics that would suit the site. hehe it seemed funny yet important to be on the front page of our dream.
Felt like we are going to rock the world. hehe, I wasnt high guys, was just a bit senti…
Colors and gradients were added to the layout, we were making good progress yay!!
“Does this look good?”, “Should I put this image here?”,”Where should the rounded corners go?”
Questions flew and were answered :) . Design was edited and re-edited and it finally reached our first beta stage…
I added the name and e-mail basic survey for the site and we were up.

2010
04/16
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CGB Plugin test

I am testing the new Comics gone bad plugin here

Comics Gone Bad

If you see an image above then the plugin is working fine

The plugin basically downloads three images of different resolutions from the main server and embeds it in the site at various places. You can set the image size from admin panel and also embed the daily comics into the sidebar as a widget…

for more info and downloading the plugin visit http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comics-gone-bad/ :)

2010
04/09
CATEGORY
Plugins
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Roundup

#6 (go back to main post)

This is actually where my basic goal ends for GSOC2010. I am trying not to get over excited and bite more than I can chew. I just had a brainstorm for 3-4 days on it and found out many issues(half of them arent mentioned here because I found solutions and am running out of time to fill in details). I can imagine how many issues I may face during the course of this project. If all goes well and I have time, I will surely work out ideas with my mentor and go beyond to #7 and #8. Here I will try and add move plugins too and may be work with the community on the documentation for plugins to support WPmove.

2010
04/08
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Progress bars

#5 (go back to main post)

I think that the other project in the idea section will be of great help here. As we are making this for the novice user, we cant leave him getting frustrated seeing the “please wait” text or the huge list of actions going on like the plugins( I dont mean that the plugin progress text idea is boring or bad but a progress bar is cooler and also that plugins have very few steps and dont seem like the whole kernel at work)
In case of file transfers or total number of files to the number transferred and in case of multi user blogs, total blogs completed, posts out of the total posts undergoing replace and the whole WPmove net progress in steps with some way of giving weightage to the various steps involved.

The best thing about thinking of it this way is being able to let the user have checkpoints like in standard mission games. So that even if some process goes wrong, the user gets his progress from the last “SAVE”
(lol I know this sounds funny but acc to a TED talk anything can be made into a game and the users love it. I bet providing “steps to move” like checkpoints will promote users to save at a checkpoint and re-assume later thus lowering the server load use :P )

2010
04/08
CATEGORY
Ideas
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