My tryst with GRE extra score reporting

I was reporting my GRE score to ETS tonight. When you appear for GRE, ETS ( the institution that conducts GRE and other tests) allows you to send scores to 4 university without charging a single dollar. But as I am applying to more than four, I called up ETS to report extra scores. I actually planned to do this before 4/5 days, but as usual my laziness stopped me from doing it. Now that I am on the verge of missing a deadline, today was the D- day for me. Generally ETS takes 5 working days to report your scores to the respective universities and that means from 20th Oct it will take around 31st Dec. to reach my scores at the concerned universities. It's because, they have a holiday on X-mas (23rd and 24th Dec) and I suppose they don't work on SAT-SUN. So, if I would not have called today, there would have been fair chances of missing the deadlines of 2 universities, one of which is 'safe' for me. FYI, safe in GRE aspirants world means some university from where you are cocksure to get an admit.

But it was not the end of the story. When you call ETS, it allows you to send your scores to 8 universities in one call. Again, I made a blunder there. At the time of taking my test, in free score reporting, instead of applying to University of Texas at Dallas, I applied to University of Dallas. And to my utmost insanity, I did not notice this while calling. When I hanged off the phone, and cross checked the code with that of Kedar's, I came to know about the stupidity. Now, I could have called ETS again to report the score to UTD, but thought I will send it by fax. Anyways, UTD's deadline is not yet close.

After this incident, I came to one conclusion. Whenever there is an critical moment to act comes, I make a mistake. That has became a characteristic of my personality now. I thank myself for at least knowing my mistake (some time later though). If I would not have understood the silliness, I might not have sent the GRE score to UTD, and will be happily waiting for a reply from their side.

One more bitter lesson from life !!!

Think, I need to keep the "thing over my shoulders" very cool, otherwise one day it will sink me down .... :-(

Fantastic Link

Today Mohsin sent me a link The Programmer's Dress Code . One of the most hilarious and informative things I have ever read. The author of this post has got a great collection of some of the legends in the computers. Out of those, I liked Jaron Lanier's photo and especially the witty punchline 'No Woman, No Cry'. Must be showing the realities behind the virtual world. ;-)
Others are also quite good. Look at the smile on Dorothy Denning's face. How pretty and original , those spects are just the reflection of fashions at their times.

Anyways, thanks Mohsin for a nice link. I have forwarded it to all of my colleagues and they are really appreciating it.

Latest Obsession : Algorithms

These days I am reading 'Introduction to Algorithms' by Thomas Cormen. I wanted to take DAA ( Design and Analysis of Algorithms) as my final year elective but my project partners forced me to take AI ( Artificial Intelligence), so that our group can remain in the same class. In fact there was no logical reason behind leaving DAA and taking AI, but that time I didn't give it a thought. And as far as getting good marks are concerned, I am a total waste in AI as well as in DAA. As per the new syllabus , University of Pune has made DAA a compulsory subject and I believe that's a good decision .

Now that I am reading the book, I am finding a different chord of interest there. I have just read Insertion Sort and loved it. The language looks okay except few 'bouncers', but that's accepted. When someone does a deep research in a profound field like Algorithms, the 'tangents' are bound to be there. Similar things happen when I read Kerninghan and Ritchie ( fondly called as K & R), so it was not new to me. After reading so many engineering books, you get kind of expert in digesting things even if you are not able to grasp it properly ;-). But Algorithms are not that easy, unless you are damn clear with what you MEAN by something, the corridors of uncertainty can trap you anytime.

The real fun comes when I start writing code, that's the thing I love the most. Backspace is the key which I use most of the times and sometimes I get so bored looking at code,wondering what have been written, I wipe out everything and start from all over again. I am looking forward to take a course in Algorithms during my MS, with a hope that this latest obsession will turn into a life long passion.

Wish me best of my luck for completing the book and implementing the assignments with some intense coding sessions.

Bug?

I am having a lots of problems while adding a friend in my 'Blogger Friends' list. Posts on forums showing howto's of manipulating the template were of no use. As well as the official help from Blogger.com is not worth. The problem was, when I tried adding a friend in a list, it could not add him. I initially thought that there is a limit of 10 friends but it wasn't true. We can add as many people in the list. After Mohsin's suggestion, I even upgraded the template to see if something useful comes up or not. But again, the effort was futile.

When I clicked on Page Element tab, I could see a nice layout of everything but after clicking on edit button of Blogger Friend's tab, I could not really edit the things. "Add Link" tab could not do what it is supposed to do. Also I could not delete few links on my blog. It was so irritating that I eventually tried removing the complete page element. But that also did not work. ;-)

My other friends did not have similar problem with their blogs layout. Frustrated, I went to try out my luck on Internet Explorer and to my surprise, it worked. I could easily manage the things from IE but had hell lots of problems in doing the same on Firefox.

Probably it is a time to add a entry in blogger's bug database. They should have a consistent behavior irrespective of the browser that I use.

Hollywood vs Indian Film Industry

I wanted to write about this topic way before this post but somehow it didn't happen. Now since I am much into movies, the thought popped up again.

I am not a specialist or something but being a person who likes to watch good movies, I wish to compare Indian Film Industry with Hollywood. Now, someone might say that its totally a waste of time as the situation in US and in India is too different and one can not compare them. But I am in total disagreement of this point. We must admit that our film industry is often ridiculed by the name 'Bollywood' a similar connotation to that of Hollywood. And it is because of a major number of 'INSPIRED FROM XXXXX' movies from Hollywood. Our movie makers get furious when they are called as Bollywood's director than a Dream Merchant of Hollywood. But believe me, there is a bitter truth behind this word 'Bollywood'.

How often do we see a beautiful script equally presented by a connoisseur eye of a director? As far as the ones that I watched, I could separate out a very few. To name them, from oldies, it could be Sholay , Anand, Deewar , Bawarchi, and almost all movies of Hrishida . And about the latest ones, well, we know them very well. I might have missed upon few, but at this moment I don't remember all of them. Except these movies, all we see is an attempt to make a movie. I haven't made any movie yet but have read a lot about what it really takes to make a movie. All I want to say that if you are anyways doing it, why don't you do it with all your hearts and heads? What is the point in making a straightway copy of a Hollywood flick? Don't we have great authors and latest technologies? Don't we have enough money ?

The real problem is the lack of a good script and real actors... Actor here means , someone who gives his 100% in acting, who might not have inherited "so called" traits from godfather actors / actresses or in some cases both, who might not have dude / cool/ hunk / macho looks, who hadn't ever taken part in or won a beauty pageant, instead who has an extremely clear voice and pronunciations, who HAS a knowledge of what is called as acting. How many of these actors / actresses do we have in our industry today? I bet, we could not cross a figure of even 20. All we see here is a bunch of useless people who have got money and know nothing about acting. There are few exceptions though, I am not at all leaving them. On the contrary, in Hollywood, we see different shades of life in their movies. Be it romantic, action, Sci-Fi film or be it a drama full of emotions or a real life story inspired from a lovely novel. I am not saying that there are no flops and BS movies there, but what I see is at least they dare to show something different, something original ( which is very rare in 'Bollywood' of course with few notable exceptions).

50+ years of experience is much more to be a versatile film industry. I am not only blaming the film makers for this situation. We, the people are equally contributing towards this nonsense. We could not differentiate between the real gem and some haphazard sequences of ostentatious display. Otherwise, all those crap beauty contestants and miss / mister universe / world / galaxy/ milky ways / comets / or whatever hadn't been established here as a actor / actresses.

Show some maturity and originality man, and then hope for the prestigious Oscar. It's not a boys game out there. And if we really want to see that our movies getting a world wide recognition as a fantastic movie, we should better stop our current stupidity and seriously think of doing something really original.