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Showing posts from August, 2012

Blag Updated

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Wait. Is this inception?! As in my usual status msg indicating that I've updated my blog is (you've guessed it) blag updated. And now, the title of the blog is blag updated and the blog post is about me updating my blog. So anyway, I updated my blog. Not in terms of blog posts but in terms of the looks. I keep screwing around with the blog's theme and given the options in blogger and the customizations possible, It'll be a life time before I exhaust all of the available themes. Anyway, if you guys didn’t know, the blog's theme used to be dynamic and now it's just normal. If you want to change the look of your (blogger) blog and if you don’t know how to, go to layout>template designer or just template and select from the different options. If you're up for it, customize the blog's fonts, font sizes, background colors and background pic and what not! Go through this if you don’t believe that fonts matter! It all sounds too easy but just the o

HTML - an interesting start

Well, I've wanted to learn the language of the internet (HTML) for a long time now but I've been procrastinating (for almost 3 years now). And well, now I finally have the incentive to learn HTML. As i'm in my 4th year right now, I should start looking at my future career prospects, internship prospects and other kinds of prospects (I don’t know about what but I've been told that there are). And I've seen quite a few of my seniors who host their own personal webpages on their respective departmental servers (mostly CS & EE). and well, i dont see any easier way to convey to a professor your authenticity, your course work and your project experience. so, i finally started one weekend.  there are quite a few resources on the internet to learn HTML, just google for "HTML tutorials" and you'll see. and well, after a random coin toss, i chose to look at the tutorials from  HTML.net  for HTML, CSS and PHP. and in the process i found  Mozilla Deve

Science behind Science Fiction

I have a bone to pick with the science fiction writers of today. No, not the science fiction story writers but the scifi movie writers. The people who wrote Spider Man, Superman Returns, The Dark Knight Returns etc etc. To start with the new Spider man movie , I actually liked it. It wasn’t very boring, it had Emma Stone in the movie who I love and the science behind it was quite strong as well. Well, spider man's web in this installment doesn’t come from his body but is actually an artificial fiber which he is able to modify and use as a web! and using his sharp senses and strength, he uses the spider silk for the better, to swing around and to hold onto cars. But there was one thing that got stuck in my head. A big one at that. You remember the villain from the movie, who takes an experimental medicine and grows his arm back using some space age genetics tech? well, the space age tech is supposedly modeled on reptiles and their ability to grow limbs or specifically their t

The 3 'I's of Life

One of the things I've learnt in these 3 years is that there is one essential thing that drives every human forward.  Incentives. Give any man enough incentive and he'll do your job. And incentives are varied, depending on the person. There maybe financial incentives, social incentives, personal incentives and so on and so forth which drive a person in his day to day life. And the most basic incentive of all for a person is to live, is to maintain his dignity and self-respect among his family and friends. This incentive is too basic for us to notice it but like I said, give a man enough incentive and he'll do the job for you. Coming to the case of education in india and the many engineering colleges here, the basic incentive of all for the students (who join engineering colleges out of their own interest or out of peer pressure) is to ultimately graduate with a good grade point average(GPA) and secure a job in the IT sector which will pay you in lakhs. There ar

I didn’t do an Internship and here's why

Im a 4th year undergraduate at IIT Madras, currently pursuing a BS & MS in physics.  A couple of things that you know about me are that I am an extreme under achiever and that I have a lot of self-respect, which sometimes borders at ego. Having said that, I didn’t do an internship this summer and here’s why. Being in a pure science department in an engineering college, I never was fully into theoretical science. All through my 3 years at IIT M, I was running around conducting events during shaastra, volunteering for saarang, being an EML coord and handling the Astronomy club here. And in the middle, when I used to find time, I watched sitcoms, movies, animes and the whole lot. And then, when I finally got to my 5th semester when I had to start looking for a summer internship, I didn’t have a good enough CGPA to show off, I didn’t have any academic achievements on my resume nor did I have any good relations with professors to help me secure an internship. So, starting jan

My Experiments with Blogging

Well, i've had this blog for almost 3 years now. I created this blog in my first year just for the fun of it, then created a wordpress blog (tumblr hadn't come out yet). And i just let them be, not having the time to write or rather not knowing what to write. So, finally in my 3rd year i.e last feb, i wrote a couple of blog posts and starting this summer, i've resolved to write atleast 2 blog posts a week (though i haven't these last 2 weeks). And since i started blogging regularly, i've come across quite a few things which would motivate you towards blogging further. One of the things is Scheduling your blogpost to auto publish on the net at a certain period of time. I've realised that it will be hard to write 2 blog posts every week, or atleast till i get used to managing hte time. So, i now write as many posts as i can, save and schedule them to be auto-published at regular intervals. This way, even if im busy during a week and i couldnt write a blog pos