Microwave Experiments

Hard to believe that a whole year of my MBA course is over! My 9-month stint at Wipro definitely felt a lot longer than this. I guess time flies when you're having fun, and when you're too busy with college work to watch the time go right out the window (as Mike would put it).

I will be in Hyderabad till tomorrow and then I'm off to Bangalore for a 2-month Summer Internship at Lenovo. What better place to spend the summer than the city with the best weather in India, and the city with the highest density of CVR population I know (no wonder I get a warm welcome every time I visit)! Ironically, it is the same city I said goodbye to not too long ago.

So what have I been upto the past two weeks here in Hyderabad? Well, mostly experimenting with the new microwave we bought at home. I tried my hand at baking a cake and some biscuits. Here are the results —

Experiment #1: Plain Cake

It looked perfect when I took it out of the microwave, it tasted just fine when I had a piece too. But as it cooled, it became real hard, and not exactly eatable — either the batter was too thick or I must have left in the microwave for too long. Whatever the case, the cake finally had to be thrown away.

Experiment #2: Shortbread

The second experiment didn't turn out as bad, thankfully. In fact, these biscuits came out amazingly well — crisp, buttery and yummy. If only I had a biscuit cutter, they would look as good as they taste!

Apart from baking stuff, I've been reading a book which I would have never imagined myself reading some months ago, and have started watching this intriguing series (with barely an opening sequence) about a bunch of people stranded on an island. I'd say I have enough to keep me occupied for quite a while, wouldn't you?

Goodbye Bangalore, Hello Mumbai!

Picking up from where I left off in my CAT 2008 post, both K J Somaiya and TAPMI announced their final selection list by the end of April, and I made the final cut at K J Somaiya!

I was happy with the result and all, but then came the important decision I had to make — to go ahead and do the PGDM (Post Graduate Diploma in Management) course, or stick on at Wipro and get some more work experience. Now this was a difficult decision to make. I quite liked my current job and there was no particular reason I wanted to leave, and more people I spoke to actually advised me to gain another year of work-ex at Wipro and join a better institute (reminds me of the 'Go for a Masters, or not?' article posted at Slashdot a while ago).

I was brooding over the matter for a couple of days, and these questions were running through my head —

1. Are you ready to go through another year of preparation, while balancing the 11-13 hour work days?
2. Are you confident of scoring more than 95 percentile next year and getting admission into one of the Ivy League institutes?
3. Few years from now, would you still like to pursue the technical line?
4. Are you sure you would be a good project for the next two years, considering that many of your batchmates are either on the bench or have been asked to come to office twice a week taking a 50% pay cut?
   

My answer was not a confident 'YES' to any of them, and after much consideration I decided to take up the course at K J Somaiya.

I informed my PM the following day (he didn't see this coming at all) and submitted my resignation letter. I was to be relieved by 22 May, so I had around three weeks to complete the transition to the people who would take over my role after I left, finish up some of my own tasks and complete the resignation/separation formalities.

21 May was my last day at office. I sent everybody a farewell email much in advance (to be on the safe side in case something like this happens). My team mates organised a small farewell for me later in the day, and they presented me a bag and said, "Here's a little something from us so that you don't forget Wipro" — apt words for what was inside. Much thanks!



The next day I travelled to the Sigma office at the other end of the city to complete the separation formalities. By around 3pm I was no more a Wiproite. Oh and speaking of long distances, it turns out I've covered quite a bit of Bangalore during my short stay of nine months! Check out this screenshot from Google Maps (the circled areas are the places I've been to) —



Karthik came to Bangalore on Saturday to help me shift all my luggage; never realised I had so much stuff! Went out for lunch with friends in the afternoon, wearing the shirt they gifted me (thanks guys!).


Caught the bus from Madiwala in the evening and reached Hyderabad yesterday. I'm going to miss the Cloud team at Wipro, the friends I've stayed with for the last nine months and all the fun times we had, but I look forward to what Mumbai has in store for me. The PGDM programme at K J Somaiya starts mid June, so I'm going to relax the next couple of weeks. After all, once the course starts I'm going to have a pretty hectic schedule over there!

Klaatu Barada Nikto

Well, to put the last three months (can't believe I've been here this long already!) in a nutshell — my entire technical training was waived off thanks to the final year project I did for Wipro. I only had a week of Corporate Induction, a couple of sessions on programming and dealing with emergency situations, and by the first week of September I was allocated to a Cloud Computing project.

My present role involves developing a web-based interface to access the various services provided by our Cloud solution. For the more technically inclined, I'm developing portlets on an open source Enterprise Portal called Liferay. Work has been pretty good so far. It does get a little hectic at times, but then that's expected.

Oh and by the way, I'm staying here in Bangalore with a couple of friends from college, so it's fun. The week just passes by going to our respective offices and coming back; all the fun, the parties, the clothes-washing and random cooking experiments (experiments because we don't know how to cook) are usually reserved for the weekends.

Recent Movies

Yes, I have managed to catch a couple of movies during the past few weeks —

A Wednesday — 9/10
An odd title, but definitely a must watch. The movie is short, well-paced and to the point. No songs either. A very impressive first for debutant director Neeraj Pandey.

Kung Fu Panda — 9.5/10

Po: I just ate, so I'm still digesting, so my kung fu may not be as good as later on.

Po: [breathing heavily] I know you're trying to be all mystical and Kung Fu-ey, but could you tell me where we're going?

Absolutely hilarious! Can anybody not enjoy this?

Fashion — 7.5/10
The gay/effeminate designers were annoying and the second half could have used some trimming, but overall the movie was well made. Apart from the ramp shows, the style and fashion, Madhur Bhandarkar adds realistic flavour to the movie by weaving the story around a lot of incidents that we've seen on TV or read about in the papers — wardrobe malfunctions, casting couch, wild lifestyles and the like. He did over-dramatize the whole thing, but then nobody would watch the movie if he didn't.

Body of Lies — 5/10
Didn't expect it to be very good, and I was still disappointed. I wonder why they didn't title it 'World of Lies' instead — after all, the plot takes you from Iraq to Qatar to Jordon to Turkey to Syria (with a couple of places in between?), and if someone were to ask you what the story was at the end of the movie, you wouldn't have a clue. I have no idea how this movie has a 7.6 rating on IMDB.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) — 8/10
After seeing the amazing footage of the 2008 remake, I just had to see the original. Very well made for its time. The robot reminded me of the old Lost in Space episodes though — very clumsy-looking, and the least bit intimidating.

The Abhiram Websites

VarunAbhiram.com is finally back online! All the content has been re-uploaded to the new host at Answerable. Must update the site soon with the Spaces video and the new wallpapers I've posted here in the past few months.

Karthik82.com is also back, with a brand new design! The site looks much better now (the three-column layout rules) and the content is a lot more organized, with emphasis on the blog and the artwork. Most of the old, static content dating all the way back to 2000 has moved to the archives.

Assorted Links

Prince of Persia Animation Reference (1985)
Jordan Mechner, the creator of the original Prince of Persia (brings back memories, doesn't it?) has started posting old journal entries about the development of the game on his website — this journal entry I found particularly interesting. And I'm sure you will too.

Virtual Barber Shop
An excellent example of Binaural Recording. Wear headphones, turn up the volume, close your eyes and listen. I wonder how they managed to retain the audio quality while uploading it to YouTube. I found a MP3 version of the clip on Andy Coates' blog.

How to make money with free software?
Stani Michiels explains the making of his Architecture Five-Euro coin using entirely free software. I haven't gotten around to reading this article fully yet, but it seems interesting.

G-Speak Spatial Operating Environment
Funky Minority Report-ish gesture-driven computer interfaces. Came across this on Slashdot, and then in The Economic Times a few days later.

Crib It! - An Ode to Bollywood's 'Inspired' Finest!
Would be awesome if someone actually sang this.

Shifting to Bangalore

Wipro Campus - Electronics City, Bangalore — that's where I'll be working at for the next couple of months (years?). I'm leaving to Bangalore today and will be reporting on 13 August for the joining formalities.


Will be a while till I settle down over there and get myself an internet connection, so there won't be much activity on this blog till that happens.

Oh and in case you noticed, VarunAbhiram.com is currently offline. Karthik and myself are shifting our websites to a different host (Net4 is absolutely pathetic), so it'll be a few weeks till they're back online.

That's about all for now, will update again when I can. Wish me luck!

Palette, Sexy RPMs and 30,000+ Visitors

I had an online C Assessment Test at Wipro two days back, which went pretty well. There were 40 questions to be answered in one and a half hours. Most of the questions were the typical "What is the output of this program?" kinds that tests your understanding of the concepts and the quirks of the language, rather than your programming skills. So you probably wouldn't fare too well in the test if you thought the size of a structure containing two char members is 2 bytes or that int (*ptr)[3] was an array of integer pointers.

Anyway, with that test out of the way now, I will hopefully have a couple of weeks to myself until I officially start work.

Some days back I came up with this very crappy piece of art using Karthik's oil pastels. Now if I was as popular as Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney people would probably buy that for millions of dollars, but sadly I'm not.

I wanted to make something more presentable out of it, so I back-lit the drawing using two emergency lamps (to highlight the whites) and took photos of different sections of the drawing.


I finally selected two images I liked and overlayed them to get this final result —


Speaking of oil pastels, you should check out Karthik's latest drawing of The Incredible Hulk. It's damn good! The movie was good too, far better than the other movies I've seen at the theaters recently — Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Happening.


In other news, I was trying to get my printer (it's a HP LaserJet 1020) to work on Fedora 8. Apart from installing foo2zjs, I had marked the HPLIP package for update, but for some reason Yum Extender marked all packages for which updates were available and began processing the queue. While the queue was being processed, a couple of packages caught my attention. Click the thumbnail on the left to see what I mean.

Amusing. I had no idea such packages existed.

Oh and by the way, this blog has now received over 30,000 unique visitors!

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...