Romantic Patterns

Ever since my efforts of applying statistical methods to more than a hundred thousand records, I have been trying to find patterns in everything and my latest muse being the most romantic scenes in big fat novels. I have been mentally making a list of all the romantic passages in different novels and my results were as always surprising ! When the current's out on a warm summer afternoon, there is nothing better than enjoying the feel of a fat book in your hand, a device that can transport you to a world, totally different from your own, more challenging, more adventurous and the most important of all, bolder than your own smooth and simple life.


Margaret Mitchell went on to weave the turbulent love story between Rhett Butler and Scarlett O Hara, but it is the scene where Rhett bids for the widowed Scarlet clad in black that sparks my interest. Although Ayn Rand has shown no restraint in penning down a number of pages describing the intimacy between Dominique and Howard, it is their first encounter that is embedded forever in my mind. Another concept that totally amazed me was that of a handsome priest, bound by the vows of chastity, falling for little Meggie in "The Thorn Birds". If you are wondering what connection these three have, all have a common element of taboo in them, an act of feeling or doing something forbidden that grasps the mind. Our indigenous epics are storehouses of such events that make every page a thrilling read.


I call my results surprising because it is expected that the first kiss or something beyond should be the most romantic of all, but from all the books I have read, I cannot remember the description of even one such act although there have been a number of pages dedicated to the sole purpose of sensuality. Romantic has come to mean the quotidian meaning of loving, but it is always that is different, out of the socially accepted norm, more adventurous which is usually the most romantic.

The TGMC Experience

Having figured out how the IBM tools worked was one of the main driving force for taking forward my project for The Great Mind Challenge 2010. True to its word, the experience was challenging indeed. We had mailed the preliminary project on the very last day of the deadline by hurrying to the Speed Post in Abids struggling in the very long line. The mailing done all right, I had even forgotten about it when the results of the top 300 teams selected for the next round were announced. I was more than shocked to find our team name among the long list of successful teams. The next step was to give a demo of the project. Little did I know that giving the final touches to make a project work successfully would be so difficult.


The project that I had sent was developed in a huge RAM eating trial version of the IBM developer environment called Rational Application Developer. As if the task of improving the project was not big enough, the horror of finding that the trial version had expired was a considerable blow to me. I spent another week running two parallel endeavors. One to somehow again download a copy of the 8GB RAD and another to make the free software Eclipse to work with IBM's WebSphere Application Server. When I was just about to give up my futile efforts, I suddenly got the whole thing working. I could sleep in peace on that day after several sleepless nights of anxiety.


Juggling between my internship and trying to improve upon the existing project, I successfully gave the User Interface a major re vamp. However the testing required more time and much to my guide's disappointment, I took a week off to focus on the project. Working almost 18 hours a day, I tried to add new features and made sure that they worked all right.


On the day of the presentation, it was raining heavily. The venue being Keshav Memorial Institute of Technology, I entered a little drenched and carrying my laptop safely in a plastic cover. (Here unfortunately you cannot go green). The demo went not as good as I had expected it to be. They asked us if we could show the entire project in Linux within 3 hours and we rushed to find a place to download the software. The University being our only resort, we went there in the rain only to find that it was a bandh and the whole campus was closed. Understanding that it was only a wild goose chase, we gave up the attempts and just went to have a sub.


As you can expect, we could not make it to the top 20 teams in India. Despite the many disappointments, this project will always remain close to my heart as I have learnt a lot from it. I put all my efforts into it and it is in every sense my child although flawed.




If you need any help with the SRS, JSP Programming, DB2 design or setting up Eclipse with WebSphere on Windows Platform, feel free to contact me.

The Good, Bad and The Ugly

A cliche for a title, but possessing enormous scope for debate. As much as Clint Eastwood makes me go weak in my knees, its not the movie I wish to write about, rather a general debate that I keep having with my inner self.

One day I heard my old neighbor pass a comment, "Such an indecent dress for her age" and as I turned to look at what really that woman was wearing, I saw that she wore a loose chudidar which in every angle looked to me more sophisticated and refined than the cheap artificial fabric sari draped around my corpulent neighbor with her ill fitting blouse showing more than is intended in a sari. That day I had realized something very important. That one incident taught me that we human beings are too unstable to decide what is good and what is bad. We who are so carried away by the our own whims and opinions on a person based on their behavior towards us, I find it excessively ridiculous to brand someone as good, bad or ugly.  When I say bad, I do not talk about heinous crimes but I stick to the quotidian experiences of a middle class man. It so often happens that you find the difference between good and bad is just a fine line and your discerning capability is in a fix.

If we gave in to the every tenet laid down by our over conservative society, then we wouldn't be leading much of our life the way we want it. Given a choice between having the best possible image and living life on your own terms, I would undoubtedly prefer the latter because as long as YOU are convinced that you are right, it doesn't matter what people think. Good and Bad are two sets of the same Venn diagram of life with a considerable intersection portion which is the most difficult to make out.

Surpassing good and bad, it is beauty that is given more importance in our society and it stands tall in full force especially during matrimonial matches. Some people demand only fair, slim, educated (only in top universities) and rich girls/boys without as much as taking a glance at themselves in the mirror.  I am surprised to see even girls making such demands and them even being met as the girl's father ready to do anything for the marriage agrees to any enormous amount and the fair boy gets sold to the relatively dark girl for a 2 crore rupees. One such wedding I attended left me dumbfounded. Why is beauty given so much importance? What fun is it to get married to the most beautiful psycho in the world, I do not know ! Life would be a much better place if profundity weighed larger than superficiality.

Good, Bad and Ugly are words that are so relative that I no more find any real value attached to them because I feel that among all the living forms on this world, the human brain is probably the most biased. So, it is always safer to follow your own intuition than to rely on colored statements made by others.

I Wish..... From the bottom of my heart !

           I vividly remember a comment that my Dad made when I was very young. He told me, "if you want something real bad, from the bottom of your heart, then no one can stop you from getting it, only you need to have a very deep desire for it". At an age where the deepest of desires were wanting a chocolate or a new frock which I got without much effort I thought that it were really true. But as my cerebral acuity grew, I started finding that it wasn't true at all. The first experience I had was when my German Shepherd fell ill and I prayed desperately, wishing from the deepest hollow of my heart for him to recover but in vain. He died the same evening. That day I questioned the statement that my Dad had made long ago. It kept coming to me again and again yet I didn't dare to ask him.

           After a decade, during my inter days, as I pondered over it again I thought that perhaps I was told so to drive home the importance of hard work. That I did flawlessly but just for the heck of it. I never had the deep desire to get myself to the narrow range of three digits. yet I ended up with something that I hadn't even dreamt of. That day I made up mind thinking that the opposite seemed to work for me which I believe in partially even now. I changed the statement to suit my experiences, "if you are obsessed with something, it will never cross your way. Don't think about it and even before you realize, it is within your immediate reach and all you have to do is take a little leap."

              

          The reason why I am still writing this is because I am not convinced. In a sea of life, predictions often fail. Fortunately hard work has always worked for me, but when I think about a poor old man who spends days to carve the most exquisite of sculptures and a painter who makes abstract pieces of nude art, I am addled again. It is evident as to who owns the most inexhaustible of cornucopias (Yes, today money is the measure of success to an extent). Like a lightning, it dawns upon me the mistake we always tend to make, how we try to find a pattern in life. But the truth is, life is so capricious that even the wisest of sages have not been able to come up with a perfect mantra. 

          How many times has this occurred to you ? You take a new pencil case to an examination and you ruin the examination. The next time you take it, you ruin your exam again. You are convinced that it is unpropitious for you and you would probably burn it to ashes. But what if the next time you actually wrote your exam well ? Is there a way to know ? Would you take it to your next examination ?  All this while we have been making the same mistake of trying to find symmetry. Nature is full of asymmetry and so is life! The faster we understand, the better. No matter what, destiny seems to have an upper hand at times. Until the next meander in the course of life when I broach this subject again, Chow !

How to make your own RC boat ?

After a week of searching the internet and countless errands to Koti to get all the electronics at the minimum of cost, we could finally make a non-sinking RC Catamaran! Now you can make it in less than two hours provided you have all the material needed. I will list down here to the exact detail as to what you will need and also the price they cost.

One Stop Shop:

To get the above mentioned electronics, head to Koti, The electronics lane after Women's College (if its your first time, you need to ask someone)

After taking a peek into every goddamn shop from morning till evening, we found these shops in order of preference to have all the stuff we needed and at the best price.

Roland Electronics

Kishore Electronics

Starting Off !

Before you start on, decide on the design. Ours was inspired by the catamaran because of its simplicity. All that we needed were two pipes and a wooden plank to hold them in between as shown in the picture. Be ready to bring yourself to the workshop to do the necessary cutting of pipes and wood.

Get all the stuff you need. Find a proper place to assemble things together. Also find yourself a pond where you can test your boat.

Step 1: Making the body

We got two pipes of size 60 cm long and a wooden plank of dimensions approximately 25cm X 20 cm. We made slits into the pipes so that the plank could snugly fit into the pipes. Later we had to use M Seal to fill the gaps in order to make the entire boat water proof.

Step 2: Making the propellers

After getting the body of the catamaran ready, it was now a challenge to make the propellers. We didn't want to use the ready made ones that we found in the market, rather we made our own with wheels and pieces of CD by inserting into the slits we made in the wheel. Look at the picture for more detail.

Step 3: The heart of it all, The Circuit.

We used the circuit to make our boat. Since we were dealing with a RF Controller for the first time, it took us some time to figure out the working of the poles inside it. 

RF Module (Receiver)

RF Transmitter

Step 4: Putting it all together 

Once you are done with all the above steps, its a piece of cake. All that remains is to assemble everything onto the wooden plank. It is necessary to place the the batteries at the center of gravity, otherwise the boat will sink. For that you need to test the boat in water and know it from trial and error rather than make actual calculations.

How does the end product look ?

Advantages of this design:

This design provided a lot of stability to the boat as opposed to other light weight boats.

Disadvantages of this design:

This boat is not suitable for taking steep curves as it is too big. So if you want to participate in a competition in which the arena has many twists and turns, you need to reconsider your design.

Improvements:

1. You could use more powerful motors for the boat to move faster.
2. You could place the propellers on the outer side which would enable the boat to take relatively sharper turns
3. You could also use a rudder behind for better steering, but you need to reconsider the circuit in that case, as you have to also control the movement of the rudder.

These links help you understand better

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4565622_relays-work.html

http://www.botskool.com/tutorials/electronics/general-electronics/building-rf-remote-control

http://www.howstuffworks.com/rc-toy.htm

This boat could serve as a ticket to you winning a competition or you could also make this a personalized gift for your younger brother. We had fun making this little boat. Hope you have too ! All the best..

Thanks to my team mate, Nithin Reddy Gaddam, Sai Teja (for his help) and Mr. Somasekaran Sir.