Chronicles of Gautam

The song 'Phir Dekhiye' from 'Rock On!!' is so beautiful. The lyrics go something like this: आंखों में जिस के ... कोई तो ख्वाब है। खुश है वहीँ जो .... थोड़ा बेताब है । जिंदगी ... में कोई , आरजू... कीजिये, फिर देखिये... । I just love this song.

Here is a list of movies that I saw after coming to Bangalore (in July). These are movies which I had not seen earlier. Given besides them are my ratings (out of a maximum of 5). 1.When Harry Met Sally (English) *** 2.Jannat (Hindi) *** 3.Satya (Hindi) **** 4.Money Hai To Honey hai (Hindi) * 5.Kismat Konnection (Hindi) ** 6.Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (Hindi) **** 7.Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (Hindi) (Black and White) *** 8.Iqbal (Hindi) **** 9.Yuva (Hindi) *** 10.Padosan (Hindi) **1/2 11.Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Hindi) **** 12.Arth (Hindi) **** 13.Dostana (Hindi) ***1/2 14.Fashion (Hindi) ***1/2 15.Heroes (Hindi) **1/2 16.EMI (Hindi) ** 17.The Terminal (English) ***1/2 18.Rock On!! (Hindi) **** 19.A Wednesday (Hindi) ***1...

Gmail has added a theme feature . Its great. This is what my gmail looks like now :)

So did I bell the CAT? Unfortunately, no. DI&LR pretty much sucked for me, where I am getting only 17/100 and the expected cut-off is 32-35 for 95%. Math was ok, getting 37/100, expected cut-off being 32 for 95%. And Eng was pretty good, getting 72/82/82 (CL,TIME,IMS) out of 160 which will be pretty close to 100% (expected cut off is 47-49 for 95%). So My total is 126/136/136 (CL/TIME/IMS). Which should be around 98-98.9% according to CL. But sadly, no calls :( It would have been good to get some experience in GD/PI had I got a call. And who knows, I might even have got admission in an IIM! Sigh.

Tomorrow I will be taking the CAT. For the uninitiated, the CAT is an acronym for the Common Entrance Test, clearing which might open a path leading to admissions in the coveted IIMs. Like lakhs of others, between 10:30 am to 1pm, I will be ploughing through excruciating passages in English, trying to comprehend the tangled and hidden meanings and inferences in them. I will be solving problems in Math like what is the remainder when 21^(21^21(..(21 times) is divided by 25. (BTW, the answer is 21) . And I will be trying to establish conclusively whose father is whose son and whose aunt is whose sister as an exercise in Logical reasoning. The CAT is not a test of what it seems to be at first. Nobody cares whether you can sucessfully find out the remainder when some x is divided by y. You have calculators to do that. I sincerely believe even the author of the passage will not be able to answer the questions that are asked on her work. Rather, the CAT is a test of how you prioritize you...

I know it has been a long time since my last post, and even now I am just going to quickly publish some updates of what is happening in my life. 1. I totally cracked this SimCat - cleared all sections with overall percentile of 99.85, and a national rank of 24 :D. I just hope I can do as well if not better on the third Sunday of November. 2. I really liked Rashmi Bansal's " Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish ". It is a compilation of 25 success stories of IIM A alumni's who have made it big on their own. Reading it kinda puts the keeda of entrepreneurship in the mind and also inspires to do well in CAT - see earlier point. :) 3. I bought the book "The Complete Reference - Linux" (see photo). I am learning a lot about Linux and am really happy about it. It burnt a Rs 525 sized hole in my pocket though. I was actually planning to buy "Brisingr ", the third book in the Inheritance Trilogy by Christopher Paolini, but then realised that Linux is more important ...

White and Brown Tigers. Majestic . Butterfly Park. Picturesq ue . Elephants. Cute . Zebra. Arrogant . I have some stupid problem in Firefox where I am unable to upload pics to blogger. So I had to use IE to create this post :( Current favourite track: "Paigham" from Lakeer.

On Saturday I visited Banerghatta National Park, and on the way riding on the cheapest public transport I have ever used in my life. I traveled in BMTC's Vayu Vajra bus, from Majestic to Banerghatta (A distance of at least 15 kms ), with AC and all, for a mere Rs. 1. It turns our the BMTC had a scheme for 4 days to sell all AC bus tickets for Rs 1, in an attempt to divert the public's travel preferences from private transport to public. I am not sure that's going to work, nobody in the bus (filled with giggly school girls and awed adults) seemed interested to continue once the fare returned to their normal astronomical selves. The National Park is really worth visiting once at least. It has a Grand safari where one can see lions, tigers, white tigers, bears etc. They also have a unique butterfly park and information centre. The zoo is also good and the animals seemed to be well taken care of. I'll be posting some pics in a later post. I saw the movie 'Memen...

One of my friends had the following status message on Gtalk: "I had to google for the meaning of JFGI, and the irony of it was overwhelming." It indeed is.

This picture shows what it is like inside the huge Philips Innovation Campus (PIC). And this is what my office looks like from the breakout area. 'Dream on' by Aerosmith still going strong. Dream on, dream on, dream on, Dream on till your dream comes true...

I just found this incredible video which is a must watch. Its inspired from 'We didn't start the fire..' Heres the link: Here comes another bubble ... Please do see it. My best part was about the blog paragraph. I can't resist posting the lyrics here: "Blog, blog, blog it all, Blog it if it’s big or small. Blog at the cineplex, Blog while you’re having sex. Blog in the locker room, Babies blogging in the womb. Blog even if you’re wrong, Won’t you blog about this song?" Well, I did!

Thats my Windows desktop! Cool isn't it? Possible thanks to Yod'm3D (Yet anOther Desktop Manager). "Yod'm 3D is a virtual desktop manager available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It is notably the first program to offer a cube-style virtual desktop management feature on Windows operating systems.It offers a "cube-effect" like e.g. VirtueDesktops for Mac OS X or Compiz and Beryl for the X Window System when switching between virtual desktops. It's the first desktop manager that makes this feature available on Microsoft Windows. Yod'm 3D makes use of and requires DirectX 9 in contrast to most other virtual desktop managers that use OpenGL. It does not require installation to run." You can get it here . WinFlip is another application that you might want to check out if you like desktop effects. It provides for Vista-like flips between running applications, and does it really well. But it is a bit unstable crashing arbitrarily sometimes (doesn'...

The Biggest news of the day: Google is launching an open source browser ' Chrome '. It promises "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers". Have a look at their official comic strip here Can't wait to get my hands on it.

No, this is not a post about the Big Bang ( although it is interesting enough to merit a separate post itself ), rather it is a post about The Big Bang Theory, an American situational comedy created and executive produced by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady. The story revolves around two nerds who are particle physics scientists, their two friends who again are similar nerds and a simple (and hot) girl waitress who comes to live across the hall. I liked the series from the first episode itself. The dialogues are really witty and they use a combination of good English and complex sentence constructs to create the laughs. There is a lot of scientific jargon thrown in, and I have a hunch that me being an engineer might have something to do with my liking the show so much. I am not quite sure the Average American would appreciate the jokes. The character Sheldon especially likes to use scientific arguments to prove himself right or to prove someone wrong, and it is done in a very amusing way. S...

Please click on the Image to enlarge it. What seems so special about the screenshot? It seems that somebody just clicked on "start" in windows. So whats the fuss and why am I writing a post about it? Well, it turns out that (surprise!) it is not windows at all, but an operating system called ReactOS . To quote the ReactOS site verbatim "ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture". ReactOS is doing something unimaginable to me till some time ago, reverse engineering the whole windows opertating system itself! . And all the while maintaining compatibility with windows. Right now it claims that it is in pre alpha stage, but already it has many features like remote desktop, e...

Microsoft has finally released the much anticipated Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 today. It can be found here . Apparently it is receiving rave reviews from all around the planet. ( Review1 , Review2 ). One of the new "feature" is the " porn mode ", or so it is nicknamed. Ahem. I personally haven't tried it yet, (by "it" I mean the browser you pervs) but the reviews all say that IE8 is "catching up" and that "There is not much difference between FireFox and IE now". Some are even predicting that this might be the end of Firefox! Well, it does seem that Microsoft has done a good job, and I think the consumer is the ultimate winner here. An interesting thing to notice is that this is a major software that has been copied from the Open source world to the proprietary world. Generally it is the other way round - Open source applications aim to imitate their more established/feature full counterparts. Recently one such software was acquire...

This is a screenshot of Amarok , the best music player in my opinion. How can one see the player and not fall in love with it? I just loved it from the day I saw it. Its highly customizable, plays every format once the codecs are installed, and generally does all that can be expected from a top notch media player, and then some more.I quite like the Moodbar feature- it is the colourful bar that Amarok generates for each song that corresponds to the 'mood' of the song. You can see it at the bottom right corner in the screenshot. Sadly, it is not available on Windows, though there is an official project to port it . Hope the binary for windows comes out soon. I have tried all kinds of softwares for windows, ( Windows Media Player , Winamp , Quintessential Player , Mediamonkey , Itunes ), but none of them really gives me the feel that I get from Amarok, if you know what I mean. Just for comparision's sake though, I felt Quintessential was one of the better music players. Thou...

I am really proud of my laptop- I never had to format it due to a virus/spyware infection. (Though I did format it quite a few times due to my Linux addiciton). Here I would like to share some of the softwares which I use, most of which I am really fond of, and free. (I rather like to use free software unless there is a compelling reason to use a paid one.(Did I say paid ? :P) Firefox : Oh it just gets better and better. Version 3.1 has all I could ask. My fav Firefox add-ons: NoScript, flashgot, colourful tabs, google preview, cooliris, piclens, Mcafee siteadvisor, pdf download. CDBurnerXP : Its a CD/DVD burning software for Windows. And needless to say, beats Nero is every aspect. Did you know that a full installation of Nero 7 actually creates 35 entries in the Startup menu? Yeah you read it right. Thirty-five . IrfanView : Cool software for viewing/editing photos. Try it out. Google talk : I love google talk. Gmail : Best mail facility out there. Beats Yahoomail by far. 1by1 : It...

The happening of the following sequence of events is why am I posting on blogger and not Wordpress: -I forgot my Wordpress password (quite rare, me forgetting passwords). -The 'forgot password' link on Wordpress mailed to my Bitsmail account. -I couldn't open my Bitsmail account on account of it being currently inaccessible from outsite BITS. BTW I am in Bangalore from 2nd July, and here are some curious details about the place I live in: 1) It is within a hundred meters from a railway line. 2) It is within a hundred meters from a National Highway. 3) It is about a kilometer from the nearest Indian Railway Station. 4) It is within a hundred meters from the nearest KSRTC bus stop. 5) It is within a hundred meters from a 5-storeyed Big Bazaar. 6) It is around 500 meters from a Cafe Coffee Day. 7) It is around 500 meters from a Food World outlet. 8) It is around 500 meters from a Reliance Fresh Outlet. 9) It is around 500 meters from a Subhiksha outlet. 10) It is within a kilo...