New Wallpapers - Matheran, District 9

Matheran (Created 3 Oct 2009)

Matheran is a popular tourist destination, located around 100km from Mumbai. Went there with a couple of friends from college soon after our end-terms got over. It was a thoroughly refreshing trip, and the horse-riding (vehicles are not allowed in Matheran) was a fun experience!

This sky and the landscape in the above image are from two different photographs I took of the place, blended together in PSP.

District 9 (Created 15 Oct 2009)

A wallpaper I made of the very unusual, grungy, science fiction film District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. There are some who hated the movie, but I for one loved it!

Antichrist Movie Poster Competition

CHUD.com had this snippet the other day about a Movie Poster Competition for the upcoming Lars von Trier flick 'Antichrist' (starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) —

IFC is looking for you to design a poster for the film. The prize? They will use YOUR POSTER in actual marketing for the movie. If you're into design this could be a major way to beef up your portfolio. How many other chances will you get to design the one sheet for a major motion picture? And if you're not into design but just good with the Photoshop, this could be an incredible opportunity to show the floating head poster makers that the little guy knows how to do it best.

Since I had nothing better to do, I actually spent the better part of the day making a poster for the movie. The original image was really huge - 5400x8000px! But you obviously don't have the time to watch a 54MB file load, so here's a much smaller version —

But when CHUD turns evil,
True tragedy awaits...

So I finish up the poster, upload the huge file to my site and go back to the post about the movie poster competition to find the email address to send it to. And what do I find? That the competition has been CANCELLED, due to some legal issues with IFC. Argh!

Oh well, I must keep telling myself that I had nothing better to do at the time I made this.

Internet Filter Fail

I don't know much about Internet/URL filtering tools, but the one we use here in the hostel (Cyberoam) seems pretty crappy to me.


Oh well, so much for my IT assignment on "Does IT Provide Competitive Advantage and Improve Performance?".

SIMSR Highlights - Induction to Midterms

The Swine Flu pandemic has caused quite a bit of alarm in Pune and Mumbai. It's freaky when you walk out on the roads and see half the people wearing surgical masks. Most public and private institutions have decided to close down for a week or two (how is that supposed to help?). SIMSR followed suit on 12 Aug and announced that it will be closed till 18 Aug. I caught a bus back to Hyderabad that evening itself, and reached the following day.

I noticed it's been more than two months since my last post, so here are some highlights from the recent past —

"The Big Debate" - UTVi Business News [29 Jun]

UTVi in association with CII-Yi organised a Pre-Budget Debate on 29 June at the National Centre Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai. The objective of the event was to chalk out a plan for the Indian Government to achieve a 10% growth target (more details about the event here). SIMSR was one of the several B-Schools invited to be part of the studio audience and participate in the discussion with eminent people from the indsutry.

The show was aired on 1 July (8pm-9pm), and since I happened to be sitting right in the front row, I got my bit of fame on national television. This I know because of the random "Hey, I saw you on TV!" calls from friends. I couldn't watch the programme myself as UTVi is not in the list of TV channels our college subscribes to. Damn!

Karthik's Engagement [2 Jul]

I almost forgot to mention this because the whole thing happened so fast! My brother Karthik got engaged on 2 July (congrats Karthik!). His site says "More information on that front will be revealed in due time", so I'll leave it at that here.

Impressions '09 [6-18 Jul]

Impressions was the culmination of a 2-week long induction process by our seniors. The first week was the 'serious' week, where we were given assignments related to areas of our interest. I was interested in doing something related to Branding, so I was asked to come up with ideas for the relaunch of Voices (a newspaper that is circulated to all the 32 Somaiya colleges) as an e-Newspaper.

The second week was the 'fun' week, where the entire batch was split up into groups and assigned to random events. I, unfortunately, was alloted the Group Dance event "Crazy Feet". So yeah, as incredible as it might sound, I actually danced on stage for the first time in my life! And surprisingly, people said I danced well. Apparently I even broke my 'intellectual' image (which I didn't know I had in the first place) at college after that performance. Not bad, eh?

Birthday Bash [20 Jul]

20 July was my birthday, and what fun I had! First there was the midnight celebrations in the Boys Hostel which went on till around 2am, and then later that afternoon there were celebrations with the entire class in the hostel mess.

A big thanks to everyone who called and wished, especially all you US folks! I know how irritating it is to get those calls connected.

Life at SIMSR

PPT is the way of life! You need a PPT for literally everything. If you're doing a book review, make a PPT. If you're doing a Statistics case study, make a PPT. If you're giving the Marketing news roundup of the week, make a PPT. Heck I even had to make a PPT on myself for one of the committee interviews I attended!

Faculty aren't mindblowingly great or anything, but they're good. Classes are fun, especially Operations Management. Our text books are pretty cool too — after all, it's not too often that you get to see stuff like the Rorschach Inkblot Test (from my favourite graphic novel) being mentioned in a Post Graduate text book!

We are locked down in our hostel by 10:30pm, and you're not allowed to go out after that. So much for treating us like adults.

Our room (215) is the Flip capital of SIMSR. Poor souls who enter our room invariably get flipped (as in lifted upside down) by our very own resident Hulk a.k.a. Anand, till their face becomes red with all the blood gushing downwards!

CS is an addiction. I've lost count of the number of "join cs" messages I get on IP Messenger everyday. On exam days the "join cs" messages are usually replaced with more polite, almost pleading messages like "anyone for cs... please..." and such. I have never played CS, so I wouldn't know if the game really is that addictive.


That's about all for now. Hopefully I'll catch a movie or something over the weekend before I go back to Mumbai (I leave on 17th), because a hectic schedule awaits once I get back!

Sleeker, Faster and More Informative

VarunAbhiram.com now displays an entire stream of recent activity, similar to what you see in social networking sites like Orkut or Facebook. So if there's a new upload or a new comment, you won't miss it. I wanted to aggregate activity on a particular item (like say, if two people comment on the same photo it displays both the comments together), but that became too complicated to implement.

For the UI, I used the jquery.scrollable plugin for jQuery. The ability to scroll through the content using your mouse wheel, arrow keys or the page-wise navigator is pretty neat! And since it's jQuery, it's unobtrusive and cross-browser compatible. Getting the functionality right was a simple copy-paste of the example you see to your left; customising it to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the site, on the other hand, was a major pain. Took me the better part of a day to customize the CSS and replace all the images to get the look and feel right.

VarunAbhiram.com now also displays all the latest posts made on my blog in a neat and elegant fashion!

I had initially thought of writing a PHP script myself that would parse my blog's RSS feed and generate a list of the most recent posts, but a little crawling through Google and I came across a lot of little widgets that allow you to read a site's RSS feed and display them on a webpage very easily. They all had one problem though — they were not customizable at all. After some more searching, I found exactly what I was looking for — the Google Ajax Feed API. Very easy to use, very little code and highly customizable. Have a look at the final result on my site, it blends in so well!

Apart from the revamped homepage, there are a couple of other changes/enhancements as well —

• No more Snapshots. Most people I know found the floating dialogs annoying and removing it improved page loads by a couple of seconds.
  
• The Artwork Page now shows both the Traditional Art and the Digital Art together by default. You can use the Filter option to uh, filter content by Artwork Type.
  
• There's a funky new About Page with all the content that first time visitors will be interested in.
  

Please feel free to leave your comments — I'd love to hear what you all have to say! Oh and by the way, the drawings are courtesy Karthik (much thanks!), the comics were made by me.

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!

The Mega Update at VarunAbhiram.com

I've just made a major update over at VarunAbhiram.com with all the new photos, wallpapers, drawings and videos that I have created over the past year. The following sections of the site have been updated —

Photography
Angels and Demons · Face of Evil · Concentric
Father and Son · Open Wide

Digital Artwork
Aeon Flux · Deep Into the Code · Palette · Corrosion

Traditional Art
Iron Man · Aeon Flux

Videos
Drawing "Iron Man" · Spaces · Z and the Remixes

Except for a couple of new photos, I don't think there's much new for people that frequent this blog. For those who don't, I hope you enjoy viewing all the new content! Comments welcome, as always.