Ragam through blogs..

Ragam '09, my (ex)college cultural festival, ended yesterday with a bang. 3 big pro-shows, more events, and .. well.. sorry, I dont know any more stats :). Truly having lived upto the motto : "Every Ragam is the best until the next one"..

So the NITC blogosphere is springing to life with Ragam blogs everywhere.. the whole place is flooded with them.. heres a link to the ones I've read so far.. Should give anyone a better idea than a post by myself.

http://ragam09.blogspot.com/ : The official Ragam blog

http://angadsarena.blogspot.com/ : A good photo walkthrough

http://vinithavasanth.blogspot.com/

http://nitlife.blogspot.com/

http://harshaddesai.blogspot.com/

http://life-in-nitc.blogspot.com/

Woooah.. what just happened to the NITC blogging community, eh !

Earth hour !

http://www.earthhour.com/

Today at 8.30 pm, you can vote Earth by switching off your lights, fans, ACs, Computers and whatever is possible, for one hour.

Sure, this gesture may not save us so much energy enough to save the world from impending doom, no. EH is more of a symbolic event than an attempt to save energy for an hour. You can save energy practically all throughout your life. By simply taking care of those small things that you often forget in your haste - turning off monitors.. putting your comps on hibernate.. switching off lights and fans..

Earth hour is more about the awareness. The faster we humans realize that we need to take bold steps before we become extinct altogether, the better.

So dont forget to turn off your lights at 8.30 !

Pre-Friday syndrome

In between catching my own zzz's at the back benches of another sleepy Probability class, I also manage to pursue my favorite classtime hobby : Sleeper-spotting.. On mobile blogger now.. Here are 4 of them caught fresh on cam :-)..

And now, Open Knowledge !

Any one out there depressed you couldnt get an education at a reputed IIT or IISc ? Or for that matter, foreign world class universities like the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT) or Stanford? Wait no more ! The concept of Open courseware coming up now is ensuring that the word 'Open' can be applied not only to software or hardware, but even academic knowledge.

Here are a few links for Open Courseware from some of the topmost universities in the world ! Apart from normal Engineering topics, even as diverse topics as languages, pure physics, modern physics (relativity, quantum mechanics), astronomy, geography, politics and humanities have been covered.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology : http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

For specifically the Audio-Video courses, you should follow
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm

The MIT ones are particularly good because of the video lectures available.. some of them are really great courses.

Stanford University : http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=stanforduniversity

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

University of California Berkely : http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

Yale University : http://oyc.yale.edu/

And last but not least, some of the best courses I've seen are from our very own

Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science Bangalore : http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=nptelhrd

All of the IIT courses are Video lectures and worth a watch if you're looking out for some course to learn more.

(Ofcourse, those of you who have escaped from the academic field and are enjoying life in your respective jobs now.. I think you'd better be looking at some sites like http://www.watch-movies.net/ :) )

Greatest secret in the history of the world...

... has been revealed !

http://www.nitc.ac.in/nitc/Convocation_09/Final_Convo_Ad_6th_Feb_09_WEB_only1.pdf

NITC announces its convocation.. that too on a working day ! Voila !

Notice that they used 'Final Ad' for convo.. seems like theyre pretty sure of themselves this time.. what a joke :)

Whats more, its right after our Cultural festival Ragam, which means half the crowd will probably still be 'high' (ahem.. Chathamangalam is at a high altitude u know) when we reach there to grab our degrees...

(courtesy Brittz for most of the observations)

Lingo or redefined language ?

We're entering that stage now, where we can truly be called 'Net'izens. We live on the Net. A daily dose of Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, and most importantly, Chat. 8 months ago, I used to chat like once every 2 weeks or so. Now I need a daily dose of G-chat, much to the point where I heard a joke the other day and said out 'LOL' instead of laughing !

Now you must be thinking, ROFL, right ? Or am I the only crazy one here?

A standard chat text might be like something below :

Me : hi man.. ssup.. u in lab nw?
Friend : s.. ssup..
.
.(a long chat ensues)
.
Me : k thn man, gtg
Friend : k.. cya l8r :)
Me : K, bye, gn, tc, sd :)
Friend : gn

Ok, I found just THREE normal English words in there !

Now I really wonder.. is this lingo? Or a whole new language by itself? We could name it Internet English, or 'Intlish'. If the Net is a place where we live, then this bunch of 3 lettered words are surely a language. A language that is now permeating everywhere. A language that I live on so much that my thought process tends to follow Intlish now. And dont u ppl rofl out there.

And not to speak of smileys. They are a whole new different story. I cant resist putting a smiley after every single sentence now, be it a :-), :-P or :-/.. that i get so tired of it. I even use it in blogposts nowadays ! :). No wonder all Chat messengers keep introducing new smileys, environments, themes, and what not.. New ideas towards the makings of a true customizable cyber chat world.

Well I'm not really happy or sad for it. Chat has allowed me to socialize beyond my wildest dreams. I wont say close friends shouldnt chat, but they definitely shouldnt replace face- to- face conversations with chats. Chats bring a sort of 'Internet distance' that can never replace the closeness of a face to face conversation.

So lets not forget the good old and more human way of 'speaking' to communicate :)

Neways.. Signing off.. cya ppl l8r.. bfn..

Going Mobile !

My first post on my Mobile! Im totally jobless in a boring desolate class of adaptive signal processing.. Moody Monday strikes again..