Microelectronics

Just had my 4th paper.. Microelectronic Circuits. Its a beautiful subject. Its amazing how you can control devices at such small scales. The sad part is, you have to everything on your own. Faculty crunch hurts here the most. Not enough people is one reason, but what about those who are here? Shouldnt there be some quality control on teachers?
A big step in that direction needs to be evaluation of teachers by students, not the other way. Coz lots of times, I am more interested in learning than that guy is interested in teaching (or more likely, its the lack of ability on his part) :(
Anyway, got no paper for next two days. So peace...

Does it matter?

Life is not about constantly worrying how it would turn out to be. It is about making the most of the moment. And the sooner I come to grips with this, the better

Bob Dylan

Have recently started hearing a bit of Bo Dylan.. Blowin in the Wind is too good. And yesterday heard another of his songs.. The lyrics go something like this:

Clowns sittin to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you...

And I am wondering what it is I should do,
Its so hard to keep that smile on my face...
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you!

Am I?

An eventful day for the world...

Nawaz Sharif was exiled from Pakistan in contempt of a Supreme Court decision... More importantly Britney made her long awaited comeback.She sucked from what I hear, read and see. Her dress would make any pornstar hide in shame. She has lost her shapely curves too. :(
Her transition from a nice teen icon to a nervous wreck has been heartbreaking to watch. She never was a great singer, but she was a heartthrob of millions for the way she carried herself, the image that she had... They say fame is fickle, but now-a-days its more troublesome than that. It would have been better if she had faded from the public conscience, rather than the dissection of her every action that is carried out by the unforgiving press... I pity her...

THE ARC

Starting a club for encouraging students to start with amateur electronics and robotics has been a long standing dream of mine. Especially, at this campus,it is a requirement, which despite all all the amazing things it has taught me, still lacks that technical bent of mind, which you would expect as a must at one of the premium engineering institutions in the country. Now as I start of this club - THE ARC (The Hobby Electronics and Amateur Robotics Club), I actually dream of the campus, getting better and better over the next few years, competing with the best in the world...

Lack of time!!!

As expected, life in the third year is quite hectic.. Its insane to try n juggle so many things. Its no longer like in second year, when you think that you will plan out your third year better... The time is NOW, the place is HERE.
Anyway, its fun being in the midst of something or the other all the time. You don't have the time to brood upon what could have been and what isn't. You are actually doing something all the time. Enjoying every moment of it!

Two idlis and a wada.. life at IGCAR, Kalpakkam, TN

Doing my B.E. at BITS-Pilani, Goa gave me this wonderful opportunity of doing an intern at Indira Gandhi Centre of Atomic Research, Kalpakkam – one of the top research institutes in the country. Now that its over, and I got some free time, I ll pen down some of my observations.

1. The first thing to notice at the place was that it has practically infinite funding. It as THE most amazing library and a 1 Gbps LAN connection.. Awraa..

2. For a ‘top’ research institution, real high end work goes on only a few of the departments. At other places, people are typical govt office lazy. Lethargy stinks through many of the departments. Its not that people there are not intelligent, but when straitjacketed and asked to complete the given work, and only the given work, even the brightest minds will be disillusioned. Then life tends to reduce to a dreary routine, with days after days of pushing through.

3. The department I worked in – Radiochemistry Lab (RCL) was one such dreary place. Still with some amount of push, we were able to get work done. Literally, we did a bit of pushing – there was no one, but us, to shift the comp from one room to another!

4. At still other places a huge amount of research is on, places like the Research Physics Laboratory, or the Reactor Safety Division will surely be interesting for people in that field.

5. Despite being in a not-so-gud dept, I did get an amazing project. I got to learn lots. Apart from working on the actual 8051 related hardware, the LabVIEW part was also very interesting. LabVIEW is a totally different idea. A graphical programming language, not a single line of code, it’s the most amazing thing I have worked with.

6. In my last week, I went to see my contact at the Safety Division. Got to see the weather prediction model software he has developed. It acquires data from the World Met Council (or something like it) and uses it to predict the radioactive fallout that would happen if there was some leak from the center. It was awesome. You could predict weather with a resolution of 2*2 km.. Talk about cool…

7. Also saw the Instrumentation Dept there. They work with a higher end software similar to LabVIEW – DasyLab. Wonder how it would have been to work in that department…

8. Now for the title: it was my standard breakfast at IGCAR. There was variety, but this was the stuff that I found to suit my palate. Seriously, the only negative aspect of life there was food. Didn’t exactly like it. Still, eventually, by the end of PS-1 found out a couple of good (more like, not bad), places. But walking 40 min way to reach a restaurant isn’t exactly the most sought for luck now, is it?