Category — college prep.

Woohoo, I’ve managed to clear the hurdle at 220 Anna Salai. But let me tell you guys, Chennai can drive anyone mad. Here is what I recollect from my trip (I do not have a camera so no pics):

• We drop in at a 3 star hotel named Dee Cee Manor ( who rates these hotels by the way? 3 stars is like overrating this establishment’s ridiculous rooms/food ).
• The autos suck. Oh yes! Spencer’s Plaza is a cool shopping center and it is about 2 kilometers from Dee Cee Manor. The first auto driver I met said 120 rupees. F*ck, 120 ? For 2 kilometers? Right, I ask the bugger to put on the meter. He says no. The next guy I meet charges me 60. I climb in and realize that auto drivers in Hyderabad are better than most others
• I then purchased two albums I had been dying to get my hands on, Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full and the #1 Beatle’s (I spent all my music aware days listening to the Beatles).
• I then go to the consulate and the doors impress me.
• The VO looks at my i20 and scribbles on my DS156 and then says in 1 week, your passport will be with you. Wee ! No questions !
• Then I went to Tirupathi ( no stupid comments on my religious beliefs. My faith is my own ).
• I took a train to the aforementioned location. A marwari family climbed and make a mess of everything, moving people around to accommodate that king sized, 20 member family of theirs. Bah, they kept shouting, put on music at 100 decibels ( and promptly earned abuse from my mother ). I know a marwari family myself and they are bloody educated and know how to behave in public. I still think people in our nation need to understand the notion of Public property and how all citizens are entitled to silence and deserve as much space as they have paid for ( which is limited to one seat in this case ).
• I then realized that Tirupathi wasn’t something I could survive. Did nothing there.

Oh by the way, I solved a problem ( albiet an easy one ) from the YSU-ACM High School Programming Contest - 1991 ( The best I could perform when the silence was under siege by this bloody family) on the way to Tirupathi. Here is the question: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/programming-contest/ysu_94.pdf (the inverted triangles sum).

Here is the solution:

Done. Expect an increase in post frequency now. Phew, the consulate appoinment gave me nightmares.

I am particularly sad today. I didn’t attend the Open Source Roundup at TWINCLING Society. Well, lets forget it. I went to HPS Ramanthapur this morning as I had some free time. Seemingly Parag is holding some position of importance in the HPS prefectorial committee and so is Saurav. Saurav is as tall as me and is sprouting a beard. The school has a new principal who served in the Indian navy. I was surprised to see class 10 C (class 8 C when I was prefect) grow quite tall. What’s more, most of the teachers who taught me have resigned. But I did meet a few teachers.

BTW the NIPL wiki that was hosted on Argo which got closed recently has now been moved to another server and is up and running. Good news from the NIPL camp after some time.

Pavithran S. from NRCFOSS who works on KDE translations will be coming to Hyderabad on the 30th to talk about mukt.in. We plan to meet at Osmania University’s astronomy building again. This time our meeting will be aimed at mukt.in version 2. The mukt.in blog is being updated and artwork in flowing in. I have to make a few more stickers. I have been so busy with this admissions process.

I’ve got to go and draft those essays now.

After a lull of 10 days (no internet), I am finally back, 512 KBps and unlimited download is what I picked. Now loads of things to do. I am working on making my very first firefox extension and I’ve found this: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/My_Chrome_Oven:_Generating_XUL_with_Python

So we now have no troubles whatsoever making our extensions. Apart from this I am going to put up a few podcasts for twincling’s school division. I will be posting more on my adventures with firefox soon. Let me give all my readers (I am sure there are very few of them) an idea of what all I’ve been up to in recent times.

I got my SAT 2 scores, 2270. Seems decent and hopefully tests won’t be there to worry me. Debian has undergone some more of my torture and I have discovered a few good books that have interested me.

My first book was ‘Remarkable Curves’ which dealt with properties peculiar to conic sections, like the pascal’s theorem etc. I couldn’t really figure out any coding ideas from that book. I am now trying to get around the theoretical barrier (the random variables part) that is hindering my progress with the book on the Monte Carlo theorem.

I am also going to dump all I have written on my nipl hosted site, hopefully it will be of some use to someone. I am eager to kick off with firefox hacking, so I am in a hurry to leave. I will write again later.

The Shriphani Conjecture states that:

“If something is judged by you to be impossible, then it is sure to happen to you.”

Well here goes. Two days ago I chanced to look at my Toefl iBT profile on ets’ website and clicked on the “View Scores” button and wonders of wonders, 117 on 120. So I am safe I said and moved on to read Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Today I sat for SAT 2. A comedy scene took place at the center.

Scene 1:

(Enter Shriphani Palakodety and Mother)

Shriphani Palakodety: Hmm… from what I gather by looking at the contents of the bag, I seem to have forgotten to get my calculator.

Mother: WHAT !!

SP: Yeah, I am without the electronic device that seems to be so needed to write this exam.

M: We paid more than a 100 dollars for that calculator!

SP: It will be useful at some later date.

M: It won’t be serving the purpose we got it for !! You made us go through a lot of trouble to get hold of this calculator

SP: Relax ! I can write the exam.

M: You wasted money ! That calc. was for your SAT

(I still think that calc. is for playing minesweeper and figuring out why the look-to-us-if-you-want-to-learn-about-open-source-and-linux company doesn’t have a linux version of their calculator-pc syncing software. I still managed to copy the binaries using pyserial to play games on my calc)

SP: Sorry.

M: hmph

So I went in and wrote my name, encircled the dots and came out. I did leave quite a few. I will probably cross 2250 easily. I should have taken the calc. DAMN !

Yes I got my SAT scores a month back and sorry for not having posted about them. Anyway 2060 was my SAT score. The individual marks were:

640 Critical Reading

720 Math (one world class goof-up here)

700 Writing (who would have thought)

Anyway let us move on. Naresh Shah ( someone at FIIT-JEE) called me up soon after the results were declared and bitched about having screwed all his chances of making it to MIT and Caltech and I at my end was helplessly listening to his moaning. After a good 1/2 hour when he decided to hang up, I went back to education (a.k.a coding).

I made a goof-up in the toefl registration. By mistake I registered for the Paper Based Test and got to know from Uniti-Foundation that I had to write the internet based test as ETS planned to kick out the PBT the next year. I then registered for the IBT. What a waste of money. Anyway TOEFL promised “not to” refund me completely and told me that if I sent the ticket back to them within the admission deadline I would be eligible for getting back a small percentage of what I paid.

Anyway more on this later.