Sudipta's Life

Issues, assumptions, and show-stoppers... if you are a manager in some software organisation, they set your heart aflutter. If you are a software engineer, you keep smiling secretly because you can relax till that all-important-entity called the 'client' comes in and resolves them. And if you are blogger, well, you just plain get sad, because you have to put blogging 'on hold' :( Yes, you got it right, I am going to stop blogging. Why? Because I don't have time. I have to apply to the best possible places, I need to finish my SoP and my Recos, and need to finish a lot of other associated things in the application. If you have gone through this process, you'll know. And the icing on the cake is the AGRE or the Computer Science Subject GRE that I need to take to prove my mettle once again. Oh, I am already getting the creeps because I don't even know the entire syllabus now. To clear it well, I need to study. To study, I need to shut off distractions, and to d...

Yes... I got my final scorecard today, from ETS, and they had succumbed to my tricks and awarded me 297 out of 300, (not out of 1000, you sicko!!) on the TOEFL. Well, yes, thanks, that is a good score, I know, and thanks once again for the congratulations you may be telling me right now :) I have dutifully called up everybody I know today... and will also be posting that on all the Yahoo groups I know soon. Among the people I had called up were my grandparents, and then someone had just asked me from the other end, "Where did you lose those three marks?" I know it is difficult to digest that, but well, they are accustomed to all chunnu-munnu-tunnus scoring 100/100 on maths in our family, and so that question is well, expectable. The answer to that question is what you can find out below... It happened this way... Everything was sailing smoothly until I lost just one question in the listening section. There was this man, who seemed to be lost in the university campus (I hear t...

What are the different occasions when you burst crackers? Diwali, Ok. India winning a match, Ok. And maybe some other festivals, like the current bout of Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations here. Essentially, the crackers are supposed to celebrate, right? And if they cause grief? My friend (colleague) Kunal was driving home yesterday and on his bike and an airborne cracker exploded quite close to his eyes, causing some 'barood' (gunpowder) to enter his eyes, and leading to swelling, reddening, and bed-rest for at least a couple of days. And the worst part is that he had to drive his bike amidst crowded streets for another half-hour (with one eye shut) before he could reach a doctor. I really got chills after hearing that... Kunal, please get well soon. I was wondering... how do we celebrate things? Do we ever think that the way we are celebrating may cause problems to others? Are we careful at all? I have seen people using any water, be it an acid factory waste or sewer-puddles or a...

This must have happened to you some time or the other: you settled down after a loooong time, all set and ready to surf and play. You boot your machine, login, and then check your blog, or maybe check mail. Then once you are in the mood, you start typing away a real juicy mail or start ranting on your blog about a particularly hilarious or touchy topic you wanted to write about and have been planning for some time. After about 15-20 minutes, you have finished typing, you go through the mail or post once or twice, tweaking a word here, changing indent there... and then you hit "Send" or "Publish post". And voila! "This page cannot be displayed". Connection lost!! You get desperate, you frantically hit the "Back" button on your browser window, and pray all the time that all should not be lost. You have never been this desperate, and never prayed like this, from the innermost recesses of your heart. And when the page finally loads, there is the com...