Things I bet you didn't know about IIIT'ans :)

I am rather disappointed that people are not gossip mongering these days. I hope this post encourages other people to do some factual gossip mongering. The following facts are true (afaik) and fun :D

1. It's past the first mid sem and Kulbir Saini is still not officially registered as a masters student. He has also been eating Biryani for 5 days in a row now.

2. Jyothish Soman, A 2nd year masters student working under Kishore Kothapalli on parallel algorithms, has 2 publications. Both are with Abhijit Mitra and are on biology. An ECE student pursuing a MS in CS publishing papers in Bio.

3. IIIT has only 1 student sysadmin now. That is bitgeek. When Zenwalker last asked him to send person X to the compilers lab, bitgeek replied " I'll SCP him to you." Rest assured, our servers are safe.

4. Pranav Kumar Vasishta has not only submitted his Masters thesis but also grades for Gandhi and India. Needless to say both submissions were many semesters late.

5. A certain Mythalez has submitted his PhD thesis. Looks like very soon we will have to announce his arrival with a loud "Gentlemen Dr.Dodo in da house"

Happy Birthday IIIT

After reading Maroo's post I too have decided to join the bandwagon of writing a b'day post for IIIT. In 2004, foundation day was celebrated properly. Sadly there isn't much hulla this year. I would usually write what we should do and look forward to and some more pranav-ish blah, but I'm deciding against it :) Somebody recently asked by somebody to give me the highlight of each year I spent at IIIT. I think it's a wonderful thing to do.

The best thing from my UG1 days would definitely be all the hell raisin that was done in GHEB. GHEB was a unique hostel. Imagine a completely isolated building with only ug1 guys :) The awesome part was the birthdays. Birthdays starting on one floor would eventually spread to all three floors and end with pepsi/mirinda and cake all over the place. It was the purest chaos I have experienced. Highlight: Birthdays in GHEB

For me second year was about football. I became part of the college team and our batch officially went football crazy. The year ended with an amazing come from behind win against UG2k3 where we came back from 2 goals down to win 3-2. Highlight : Inter-batch football finals

Third year did not start well at all, but we eventually started to get over it. The first half of the year spent frequenting Ohri's for midnight biriyani and also included a certain record 19 slices at the pizza hut iftar meal :O Then came felicity and lots of work. Highlight : Making an amazing new Felicity

My fourth year was not a usual one. I spent more than half of the year in Bangalore doing an intern. I loved the excitement that placements generated but only because i didn't have to sit for them :P . Every day we used to have a bunch of people coming back with big smiles on their faces knowing they now had jobs. I also got a job this year. I became a Sysadmin. It's a job that perhaps entails only abuse from other people but I found it to be an awesome challenge. Highlight : Seeing all my friends getting placed and kicking them in the aftermath :D

My fifth year was all hard work. I got my first publications. And the best thing for me this year has been the why I've been able to run every morning and play. I've managed to lost quite a bit of weight actually (I know it's a drop in the ocean....) Highlight : Writing papers with 3 people from 3 different areas and being the glue that keeps it all together.

This might be over-nostalgic, but it's a neat exercise. I tag SKP, ORB, mythalez, Sultan of Samarkand, @nks, Daka, Turbo, Raina, Bordeaux, Aniket, Maroo, Himank, Zenwalker and Bitgeek to all write similar posts. Some of you could really do with a post :P