I am sure you would like to read something about my recent activities here. And actually there happened a lot during the last 2 weeks. But unfortunately there are unit tests upcoming in 3 days. Furthermore I have been to sunny Goa in the last 4 days which is why I haven’t studied much so far. Hence I need the upcoming 2 days to prepare myself for the unit tests.
Please be patient, I will update this blog as soon as the unit tests are over.
Thank you 
Good day ladies and gentleman I proudly present the satara city adventure.
On Monday this week Abhishek asked us (Anton, Alex and me) if we would like to join him on a crab and rabbit hunting trip close to Satara City. For Anton and me this offer came just at the right time: Lectures are cancelled due to placements going on in the college and hence loads of lectures are cancelled. The schedule was to leave Pune by 5 PM bus on Monday and return by somewhat 8 AM on Tuesday morning. So we would not miss any lectures even if they’d take place.
Anton and I reached the city on Monday 20 minutes to 6. Then we took a rickshaw to Katraj Dairy in the southern part of Pune. There this trip started. I headed towards Satara city as pillion rider whilst Anton had the comfort of a Land Rover. The journey was interrupted more than once for several reason. Just 5 minutes after departure the bike I was sitting on was running out of fuel. The driver dragged the bike to the next fuel station which was fortunately only 700 meters away. Here I bought some India travel basic necessities: biscuits and chips. Another interruption was when Abhisheks bike broke down short before Satara city. The engine of the bike suddenly stopped and the guys were not able to make it running again. This is why Abhishek dragged the bike to the next hotel – Hotel Mahendra Executive. Due to these interruptions our departure in Satara city was not as planned at 7 PM (haha who planned that?) but at 11.15 PM.
We had nice dinner in the hotel (for me Chicken Hakka Noodles) and discussed further plans afterwards. It took us another 45 minutes to arrange transport to another hotel outside of Satara – Nivan Hill Resort – because there are not many rickshaws at night. We reached there at somewhat 2 AM in the morning. The plan was to wake up at 5 AM and go for some rabbit hunting. I slept very well and woke up first time at 7 AM but nobody was awake at this time. So I decided to close the eyes again and have another rest for an hour or two. A voice waked me smoothly at 8:30 and said that a bus leaves to the Plateau of Flowers which is somewhere near. Unfortunately we missed the bus. Another option was a rickshaw but there was only one coming down hill and this did not suit for 7 people. Right I was a bit pissed and so decided to have breakfast. The bus to the Plateau of Flowers at 11 didn’t come.
People decided to repair the motorcycle and organise a fourth motorcycle to have transport for everyone. Finally the transport was organised at 2 PM. How we used the time between 11 – erm actually between 8:30 – and 2 PM? I ordered more and more food, had some naan, cheese-veg sandwich, sweet lassi and more nice things. Prabha and Shreya motivated us to do a photo shooting in front of the picturesque landscape which was visible from hotels veranda. I also learned System Programming for about 45 minutes.
Once the transport was arranged we headed towards a lake called Kaas. The water/weather was everything else but inviting for a swim: It was raining, cloudy and not even warm. Abhishek and Prabha used the chance to have a swim in the lake. Afterwards we had hot chai to reheat our extremeties. I allowed myself a corn on cob before heading towards Satara city again. Once in Satara city it was to decide how to get back to Pune because one motorcycle had to stay in Satara. Hence there were 7 people who needed transport but only six seats on three motorcycles.
The solution was Anton and me boarding the bus whilst the others were going with their bikes. I reached Pune city shortly past 9 PM in the evening. Anton and I tried to negotiate a price for a Rickshaw back to the hostel and agreed for 1.5 of the price of the meter. Even though the rickshaw driver has seen the address on my college ID card he drove in the wrong direction. Hoping that my mobile battery will last I showed him a map of our destination. Finally he turned around and drove in the right direction. Another problem turned up when we reached the Pashan circle: The headlight of our rickshaw striked. Our rickshaw driver organised another rickshaw and negotiated a price with the other driver. We ended up at totally 800 rupee when reaching the hostel.
I haven’t counted the minutes we were waiting on the trip but it was not hard to count the minutes we actually enjoyed. Lets say there were 30 minutes enjoying the view from the veranda and another 30 minutes at the lake drinking chai and having corn on cob. To sum up, the trip was from 5 PM on Monday to 11:30 PM on Tuesday which makes a total time wasted of 1830 minutes minus 60 minutes of joy and 390 minutes of sleep.
I think we just go for the yellow bus we had for the Malshej trip next time to not freeze during the journey. And so enjoy the rest of it even more
Enjoy the pics!
Its been a long time since I wrote. I can say that you are waiting for the next entry has been worth it. There happened a lot on campus as well as off campus!
Food and Beverages:
Campus hangout: I added another item to the list Tasks on campus: reading the book “Chemistry of Death”. I also did some walks in the evenings, had several food bathes, watched Mohits Pictures from Germany and enjoyed afternoon chit chat with tea accompanied by some mates.
Sometimes we went to a place called “Chillax” close to the hostel simply to treat us with Momos.
Apoorvas birthday (in May) was celebrated belated last week. Her friends gifted her a birthday cake. Cake cutting is a tradition in girls hostel. Then one piece of cake is rubbed on the face and hair of the person whos birthday is celebrated. Apoorva sent Anton, Alex, me and Mohit each a piece of her cake! Very very nice cake! Thanks again.
Wohu – this week there was someones birthday on our floor. They bathed them in the hallway with the content of more than one 10 liter buckets. The water ran through door and floor into our room. Such a huge mess! See pictures:
Being out to Pune: Again I went to the city several times but recently more to meet people and to eat there. Not for shopping.
I finally spent 2000 Rupees entrance fee on the last weekend – the fee was converted to a beverage voucher. Even if not planned it was spontaneously decided to go to the Miami club on 01.09.2012. The club is part of a 5 star hotel. This time I had proper foot wear and hoped for another reason which would deny me entry: The entry was for couples only. But our group had somehow the “German” bonus and we were let in (4 boys, 1 girl). The music was quite good and the ambiente was not bad either. Finally I drank a Mocktail, a coke and roughly 1 liter water for 1000 Rupee before we left the club. Alex was so kind and gave me 750 Rupees because the group spent more money on alcoholic drinks than I did on non alcoholic.
Spontaneously we decided to go Bowling on teachers day. Instead of taking the 5 pm bus, we took a lift to the Pashan Circle. This should save us some time. Then we had to wait approx 5 minutes for the government bus to arrive. The bus was a very old one but it did a great job: the bus brought us close to the railway station without breaking down. From there we took a rickshaw to the InOrbit Mall. The whole ride from the university to the Phoenix Mall took about 1,5 hours but felt less like that. I never thought that this plan will work out and it was a great experience! The bowling was a whole lot of fun. I scored the 2nd space.
Cultural Event: Ms Amrapali invited me to an cultural event at Symbiosis Vishwabhavan Auditorium SB Road. I was able to witness the beauty of the rich culture n cuisine, dance n drama, lifestyle n ethnicity of India. The program contained power point slides, videos, music samples, life dance, one shortened Bengal wedding and a lot of crafts from the eastern states of Bengal (Kolkata), Odisha and Assam.
Teachers Day: I was not sure if I should introduce a new category for that but I did. This is annual on 05.09.12. This event was introduced to honour the first president of India who was a doctor and teacher. The students gift their teachers a cake on this day and ask for all lectures to be cancelled.
The paper: We finally improved the basic algorithm. The professor got really excited about the project now and he believes that this project can grow to something big. Hence: Top Secret from now on.
The study process itself: I guess there has not been one day where the lectures took place as scheduled. Lectures are cancelled and rescheduled for countless reasons: professor off duty, students mass bunk, Teacher Day, Open House and countless more.
A mass bunk is something quite unusual to me. One student decides that a lecture should not take place. Then he tries to convince the rest of the students not to attend class. So the class room is slowly evacuated before class and when the teacher arrives, noone is there. So class has to be cancelled. This is tried at least once in a semester. Our mass bunk failed because some students felt bad not attending class. Also there is a fine of 100 Rupee per student which can be applied for a successful mass bunk.
The internet: It looked like the IT crowd is applying random filters to block contents from countless categories a few days ago: void, Multimedia&Entertainmend, IP-Forwarding, news and much more. This is why I installed a web-proxy on my webspace. Youtube is working but still some things like web-radio is missing. Now it looks like they removed some of the filters again. Anyway the speed of our internet has decreased and also Skype is not working properly.
Mobile access: Still working. Only sometimes difficulties to connect.
DS: I still have not written the first Assignment by hand. I have to do that in the following days. But I wrote the first chapters in the journal book – that was 11 pages hard work. There are a few more chapters left to complete the journal book.
Now we started with the Queue. There are several kinds of queues: normal queue (First in First out), then circular queue, double ended queue and priority queue. I implemented all these in C-programming language. The next topic will be recursion.
NS: The next program we have to develop for this subject is MD5 Hash. The MD5 Hash Algorithm was explained by our professor in the lecture.
The professor gave Anton and me his script because we explained that we hardly understand him when he is dictating text. With his script I completed my notes and copied them in a word document.
Uh, I feel guilty. The teacher was explaining about the MD5 and used the words “Little/Big Endian”. One student complained and asked what is meant by that. Actually now one raised his hand to explain so the professor asked Anton and me. I knew the answer and had to explain to the class. This made the professor scolding the students that they should be more interested in their subject and that they should self motivate them to learn such things.
CC: The last lectures were mostly about the IaaS (Benefits, Examples etc.) and the two kinds of a cloud which are private or public. Another discussion topic was Cloud Storage and Virtualisation.
Up to now I copied the assignment into the journal book. The 3 MS Word pages expanded to 5 handwritten pages in the journal. But still the other students told us not to submit until they have written and submitted theirs. This will still take up a lot of time because the other students wait for the faculty to equip them with the journal books. Anton and I bought our journal books at the XEROX shop on campus.
ADBS: Here I also received the notes and a power pointon the first unit.
The last few lectures were about I/O Parallelism and sorting techniques for bulk data such as range-partitioning sort.
I handed in the first assignment. The questions on the assignment were about Database Parallelism.
SP: Our professor is really helpful regarding his subject. Especially on Friday when he is preponing the lecture because WEB-Technologies are cancelled he give us a ring. If we can’t make it to his lecture because of preponing he teaches us in his office.
The contents of the last lectures were LEX and YACC. Lex helps write programs whose control flow is directed by instances of regular expressions in the input stream. YACC simply stands for “Yet Another Compiler-Compiler”.
The professor handed out a presentation about the assembler and Lex/YACC and also forwareded the notes regarding these both units.
Police story: Has not ended so far. International office said that they will call me as soon as they have some more information about where are my documents. But they still didn’t call me. I asked them twice to give me information but I am sick of it to ask again and again. I let it go and wait for the call.
Unit Tests: They are supposed to be next week but due to placements ongoing in the university the unit tests will be post poned one week. Better two weeks because if they are postponed one week only it crashes with our trip to Goa.
Injury: Healed – no more words necessary.
Book of household accounts:
Pictures:
