I Ain't Jobless Any More

Wipro conducted campus recruitments at our college on the 26th - a total of 85 people were selected from our batch, and I'm one of them!

There were three rounds in the selection process. The first was a written test which had three sections - Verbal, Analytical (Quant+Reasoning) and Technical. The technical section was damn tough (wanted to post some questions here, unfortunately my brain only remembers this one question about BIOS Shadowing). The other sections were very easy. Then there was a technical interview. Was pretty nervous about this round after I heard they grill you left, right and centre in all the subjects that evaporated out of your head soon after you wrote the exam. But thankfully I was interviewed by this guy who asked me the simplest questions imaginable. I managed to take a peek at his Interview Assessment form - one of the comments said "Very good in OS and programming languages". And the only OS-related question he asked me was "What is a deadlock?". And when I started my explanation along the 'circular wait' lines, he asked me to explain taking only two processes!

Okay so after the technical interview, we had to fill up this huge application form and then go for the HR interview. The HR round didn't start off so well (partly because I was asked questions about the Pre-Placement presentation, which I didn't bother paying attention to), but once they started asking me questions about my hobbies and all, it was fine. It was around 4:15pm by the time I finished all my rounds of interview. Then it was a super long wait till 11:15pm when the results were announced.

(L-R) Ravi, Varun, Me. Pic courtesy Yugs.
Time: 10pm

The seven hours in between were such a drag - nothing to do but sit/stand around and make idle conversation. Finally when the HR guy came out with the list of selected candidates, there was anxiety written all over people's faces (that anxiety turned into joy when they heard their names called out, of course). Reached home at 00:15am that day - I've never been in college that long before!

Since then, days have been passing by with me doing absolutely nothing all day. Oh well, I guess that makes me a jobless person with a job...

Nine Inch Nails - "Right Where it Belongs"

Made a new video today! A music video for NIN's "Right Where it Belongs". Check out the video at Youtube here —



The video is made from random clips I shot with my digicam. Might not do the song justice, but it was fun making it!

Here's the list of locations seen in the video —

• Vishveshwara Museum, Bangalore
• Ooty (and enroute to Ooty)
• Ooty Hotel
• Chamundeswari Temple, Mysore
• Home (broken bulb through magnifying glass and ants)
• Allepey Backwaters
• Tank Bund, Hyderabad (Buddha Statue)
• Rock show at Rock Heights, Shilparamam

Comments welcome.

Assortedness

Semester exams are over and I'm finally jobless again! Okay not really, this break is going to be more of a long study session than anything else. If I don't start my CAT preparation soon, I might as well forget about writing the exam in November. We also have some on-campus recruitments the next couple of weeks, so yeah, busy times ahead.

Rajeev wanted me to make a good post, so I'm going to try doing that by putting together all the random stuff that comes to my mind right now. Randomness is good, right?

10,000+ Visitors

If you look at the little counter at the bottom of this page, you'll notice it has crossed 10,000! That works out to what? 20 visits per day? Considering how infrequent my posts are, that's really good. Wondering where all the visits come from? Well, according to Statcounter, a lot of the hits are from people who get here by searching for phrases like "lip twitching", "why is my lip twitching", "upper lip twitch" and the sort. People's lips actually twitch? Weird. Welcome to India seems to be a popular song. A lot of people get to my post searching for that song. Then of course, there's my nanoaudience (which most probably includes you) who take the time to read and comment on my posts. Thanks! I wouldn't be writing if I didn't have readers.

CNN-IBN "Rising India" Photo Contest

The results of the CNN-IBN "Rising India" Photo Contest was out recently. Watch the video here.

Obviously I didn't win, otherwise I would have posted sooner. The contest was open for months, so they got loads of entries. Unfortunately, the whole contest was by judged by just one person (ace photographer Raghu Rai) which isn't a good thing. Photography is very subjective, after all. Besides, Raghu Rai seemed pretty clueless about the theme which was "Photographs that best define why we love India". I don't quite see how the winning photos fit that theme, but like I said, photography is subjective.

Videos on Youtube

I always thought Indians were clueless about composition. These two videos prove me wrong.

"Incredible India" Campaign
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWuGEbPALy0

"I am India"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2qZEiZMgWs

"Tales of Mere Existence - Procastination" by Lev Yilmaz - Pratyusha pointed me to this. Hilarious!

"Le Petit Bonhomme en Mousse" - Way better than any puppet show I've ever seen.

"Drawing a Perfect Circle" by Alexander Overwijk - Would have been a useful skill back in school (remember the time you used to draw loads of circumcircles, incircles and excircles?)

A Flyer in a Newspaper

Been a while since I made a jobless post, so here's one. Found this flyer in yesterday's Deccan Chronicle —



Now if only my English was that good.

One Way Out

Ciencia went great this year, was way bigger and better than last time. I wanted to make a post about it, but I had no photos with me (I was too busy to be unofficial official photographer this year you see) and a post without pics is boring. I did manage to get a few from here and there, you'll find them posted down below.

First let's talk about something important - remember the flash game One Way Out I talked about in my last post? We could only accomodate 70 people in the lab where we conducted the event. But the people who played the game apparently enjoyed it and told others about it, and then the others who didn't get to play the game wanted to play it. And since we couldn't resist keeping our eager fans waiting (I'm hyping this really well, no?), we decided to make some minor tweaks to the game for general 'home' playing, and as a result, it's now available for download!

One Way Out (FULL Version)
Filesize: 44MB
Details: Contains menu music and all the video questions. If you have a decent enough net connection, this is the version you should download.


One Way Out (LITE Version)
Filesize: 2.2MB
Details: No menu music. No videos included (answers to those questions are provided in a separate text file though). If you're just curious to see what the game is all about, then this version is for you.

Now that we're done with that, let's take a look at some pictures -

(L-R) Som, Me, Pavan

March 7, the day before the fest. We had to stay back at college (it's a spooky place at night!) to get everything ready for the next day. We finished all the work, but then we realised we didn't take any photos of ourselves at work. So we decided to fake it and take photos of each other. Som unfortunately couldn't pretend at all. The pic of me is perfect, but the Google page gives it away. Pavan was really on the phone with someone. Not sure who.

(L-R) Lekha, Me, Pandu, Pavan, Dinesh, Som, Harini

That's us sitting on the dais after the fest, for lack of a better place to sit. I have no idea what Lekha was trying to do with the glass.



That's almost the entire organising committee of Ciencia '07. If you're looking for me in the pic, I'm the guy with his head sticking out between the Principal and the Dean. If you're not from CVR and don't know either the Principal or the Dean, then I can't help you. Search, search!

Hallowed Be Thy Name

I don't enjoy metal, but for some reason I'm addicted to this song. In fact I'm listening to it as I type this post. I had this song lying on my hard drive for ages, but I only listened to it properly the other day, when somebody told me it's supposed to be the greatest metal song of all time! Well I don't listen to a lot of metal so I can't say if it's really that good, but nevertheless I like it a lot! Out of the various versions/covers, I think this version by Iron Maiden is the best -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4I4wwGJP0

I've been uninspired to write lately. Ok, I've been uninspired to do a lot of things lately. I can't even remember the last time I posted a new photo on my gallery. Or the last time I made a post here. It's not just me, I don't see many of my blogger friends updating their blogs often either. Some sort of endemic creative block perhaps? For me, I know that's not the case. It's just that my creative outlets have been elsewhere the past month and a half.

We have our college annual technical festival, Ciencia, coming up soon (8 and 9 March). I didn't want to make the poster this time, so I helped out with the official site instead. Most of the content and design is mine, the funky schedule and route map was done by Abhilash. Don't know where his creativity was bottled up before. I'm also working with a couple of guys on one of the other events we're having this year called One Way Out - it's a fun game where you have to answer a series of questions/puzzles correctly to find your way out. Make a mistake along the way and you'll find yourself exploring dead end paths. I love the way it's progressing. Shashank has been a fantastic asset to the team, he's coded everything using Actionscript (and he didn't know Actionscripting at all before this!). I, of course, am working on overall 'look' of the whole game. We hope to be done with the questions in another two weeks so that we can playtest the thing on a few people. Don't be surprised if you're one of the chosen ones.

The Ciencia site has all the information, so I won't write any more here. And by the way, my two animated videos Dark Machine and The Cybertech Incident are going to be put up in one of the stalls, so be sure to check them out. Even if you've seen them already.

That's pretty much it for now. I submitted four photos for the CNN-IBN photo contest, the theme is "Photographs that best define why we love India". I noticed there are shots of a cow smelling a dog, so I'd say I stand a chance. The finalists will be chosen on a show which is going to be aired on March 26, so let's see how that turns out.

Now I'm off to check out if the video ads are up on Pratyusha's blog...

The Cybertech Incident

I've been working on another stop motion animated short film on and off for the past few days, and it's finally done! The idea for making it came from this drawing Karthik did ages ago. The Cybertech Incident has less 'animation' per se as compared to Dark Machine - I decided to focus more on the sets and the overall look of the video this time. Took me way longer to shoot scenes for this, mainly because it's filmed in colour - it was extra hard to hide the fact that most of it was filmed in my room.

The Film

Download the video here (7.5MB)

Or you can watch it below. If you don't mind the crappy quality, that is.

The Sets

Ah what fun it was coming up with these sets. Well, they looked silly the way they were (I was filming kid toys in my house after all!) - that's where the lighting came in to create that much needed mood and drama.

Here are a couple of set-shots with the corresponding scenes in the film. World of a difference, no?

Notes

• The entire film was made in Windows Movie Maker. So technically, if you have a digicam and some patience, you could try this out at home yourself.

• The lighting equipment I used was a torch and two emergency lamps.

• The items used in the sets included a pen stand and a big blue drum.

• The map in one the scenes is my level for the Doom 2 WAD Reanimated.

• The font used in the video doesn't support capital letters so I had to manually fill in the gaps between the line and the dot in the small i everywhere. Wasn't possible to do this in the opening scene since that bit of text was inserted in Movie Maker. Everywhere else, the text was added onto the images themselves.

Edit: Here's a snippet of a chat conversation I had with Karthik today about the story (I never discussed it with him before making the video). Combining both our interpretations, this is what happens -

The cyborg goes in to battle the demons at the system core. Due to the fact that they've scrambled it, and as he's linked to it... he begins malfunctioning as well. The map and images are a kind of code that will help him stop his self destruction. But then he's also fighting the demons, and at the end, time runs out, and he dies [the end explosion is a shot of him dying].