Belated Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all my teachers back at school really missed those carols in this month and none on the internet could match the melody that the school choir made. Miss you S.A.S.

And well now i have a guitar after a long wait of 3 months. Is a Yamaha 310 (i had to mention cause i toiled a lot for that brand and Ashish was to lazy to take the hands off the brand name in the pic- blow him:-/). The guitar sounds just great. I've not much prior experience in the field but i can tell that a beginner could not go wrong with this choice. Let the music hummmm..... 

Merry Christmas and have a geeky new year

How Computers Work - By Ron White
I bought this book a few days ago and I should say this is by far the best book I ever read. The book has some cool graphics that explain in layman's terms many of the geeky thing about a computer. It's mostly about hardware and software's interaction with it. No C, Cpp or Java. But the pretty graphical explanations do their thing better than most animated videos you'd find on YouTube - Believe me I know what I'm talking about.
The book is one of the few ones that are recommended for the Harvard CS50 course (that's how I came to know about it in the first place).
The course itself is another jawdropper - It begins afresh on the first of Jan 2016 on EdX.
P.S - Ignore the photo, Ron paid me a few hundred bucks for advertising it ;-P

Cinderella

https://youtu.be/20DF6U1HcGQ
If you change just one thing about yourself that you think that needs to be changed after watching this movie, the purpose of me sharing this post with you is fulfilled.
The old classic with just a single beautiful message the world needs the most. Just spend an hour from your busy schedules to be small again :-)

Views change

I've always despised apple because of it being a all closed source secret and only upper class/non-affordable products but now looking at some of it's awesome features makes me rethink! I couldn't stop myself from liking the promo videos of three 


 
Appleproducts in a row. All i could say for all of them was WOW.
The next thing that's needed for the world is the openness of opensource with the awesomeness of propitiatory products.

The last one is what technology is for. It's meant to dissolve in your life without you knowing - to make you life your life just a bit better.

Letters

I found this piece of text in my dad's pen-drive -

I am writing this to you because of 3 reasons......

1. Life, fortune and mishaps are unpredictable; nobody knows how long he lives. Some words are better said early.
2. I am your father, and if I don't tell you these, no one else will.
3. What is written is my own personal bitter experiences that perhaps could save you a lot of unnecessary heartaches.

Remember the following as you go through life....

1. Do not bear grudge towards those who are not good to you. No one has the responsibility of treating you well, except your mother and I. To those who are good to you, you have to treasure it and be thankful, and ALSO you have to be cautious, because, everyone has a motive for every move. When a person is good to you, it does not mean he really likes you. You have to be careful, don't hastily regard him as a real friend.
2. No one is indispensable, nothing in the world that you must possess. Once you understand this idea, it would be easier for you to go through life when people around you don't want you anymore, or when you lose what / who you love most.
3. Life is short. When you waste your life today, tomorrow you would find that life is leaving you. The earlier you treasure your life, the better you enjoy life.
4. Love is but a transient feeling, and this feeling would fade with time and with one's mood. If your so called loved one leaves you, be patient, time will wash away your aches and sadness. Don't over exaggerate the beauty and sweetness of love, and don't over exaggerate the sadness of falling out of love.
5. A lot of successful people did not receive a good education, that does not mean that you can be successful by not studying hard! Whatever knowledge you gain is your weapon in life. One can go from rags to riches, but one has to start from some rags!
6. I do not expect you to financially support me when I am old, either would I financially support your whole life. My responsibility as a supporter ends when you are grown up. After that, you decide whether you want to travel in a public transport or in your limousine, whether rich or poor.
7. You honour your words, but don't expect others to be so. You can be good to people, but don't expect people to be good to you. If you don't understand this, you would end up with unnecessary troubles.
8. I have bought lotteries for umpteen years, but I never strike any prize. That shows if you want to be rich, you have to work hard! There is no free lunch!
9. No matter how much time I have with you, let's treasure the time we have together. We do not know if we would meet again in our next life.                                                                Always affectionately yours father"

My letter back ;-|

Dear father,

Wish you were my friend…

Your son.

TLDR? well the gist is the same as the previous post - You just have to get the mix right.

I had to share this...

This is a beautiful peace of music form the students studying music at Berklee. Found it on the EdX music course. Lovely. You just flow with the music. You need not go to a good Music school to make top class music as is evident from majority of our favorite pop stars today but just in case you didn't know something called a - 'Major in Music' exists in the education system and people who do that make some pretty cool stuff like the video below.

Just Sitting here on the corner of awesome and bombdiggity.: Simply You

Simply You:                                                                
I don't believe that it is "time" that heals all, because ....
-By Samridhi Maheshwari, PICT, Pune.

Dream (Public Edit)

A Short Story (Movie scene)...
There was a couple living on the outskirts of a small town. One day the girl saw a kite hanging out there on the chimney of their pitched roofed house and a little boy was standing there staring at the kite. The girl climbed on the roof immediately with a ladder and at the same time, her husband just arrived at the gate. He wanted to stop her but didn't. The words were just out of his mouth - Honey probably you should get down but all that he said was - careful. He went to the other side of the house from where he thought she could fall if she lost control. She looked down for him and wondered where did he go. Turning around she saw him lost her control and tripped. He was just able to grab her waist and was worried if she damaged her head but thank goodness she didn't. They lay there on top of each other pretending like nothing had happened.

What makes the story worth telling? We have some people in our life whom we love and all we want is their betterment. But at times we snatch their free thinking, thinking the what we are doing is for their own betterment. This is mostly the case with parents. On the other hand in some cases we want our soul mates to be independent thinkers. Have their own thoughts and rules. You might slip a slight suggestion at some point in time but you are happy to see them happy. You set them free but if you think that they are doing it wrong you are always there to help them out without and comments.

A father tries to give everything that he was not able to get in his childhood to his son but he never asked if he ever wanted all that. He asked him whether he wanted to take engg. or medical and that he thought was his son's obvious choices as his child got good marks in those subjects - the truth being the boy himself was not sure where his interest lied at that point. The father might have trouble getting a job and so he doesn't want me to face that and forces his son to get a campus placement in a fine college - secure and foolproof. But what does the boy want? Father never asked and son never told because some part of him says he won't understand.

So what kind of relationship is right? I think both the scenarios with the right proportion is ideal. You just have to get the mix right - that's the secret of a happy relationship with your loved ones

Course Mash

EdX Udacity MIT and the list goes on and on for ever. These infinite courses came into existence on the internet in only 22 years. Before that just about 30 websites existed in total(as per a documentary on YouTube). Now that's awesomeness!
But it also confuses me - which among them is good enough. I found the EdX website a few days back - The courses there come from different institutes and foundations. Again they have about 500+ courses in total and scrolling through all that in their mobile app took me almost an hour. The life of the next genius would be much easier than Einstein, won't it? We have all the resources at our disposal and now its upto us to form and invent our own theories from them.

CS50 Rocks!

I was up all night yesterday and found some amazing stuff on the internet, the most awesome one being the Harvard CS50 course which i'll take on EdX(which is another cool site i found) form 1st Jan 2016.

Yesterday night i got a few things cleared about myself after a geeky chat with a repeater JEE in FIITJEE from my hostel(and i have to say the guy knew a whole buch of stuff about computer hardware and basic electrical and electronics in day to day life - it's always a pleasure for me to meet such people in life who have an idea of what is going on around them and how the heck it's going on).

• Google - There's always a scope of improvement and maybe that's the case with Google. If google had been that almighty giant that i some times think it to be, it would not have taken me so long to find out bout the course as is obvious form my google searches i'm always hungry for some cool tutorials and lectures online. The best result presented to me was form MIT-OCW which i was not quite able to keep up with. It got fairly complicated and boring real quick and there was nothing the professor would do to make it mare interesting. The learning process had an important role of the teacher to keep us on track and make the sessions live and interesting even for the last benchers. I don't know about the college rankings given on the internet but if i had to choose between MIT and Harvard OCW i'll go for Harvard as for now.

• CS50 - I just saw on lecture yesterday it had most of the stuff which i already knew while some of it was new. The format was close to traditional - The professor speaking on and on and on but some how it all seemed interesting. I read some reviews about the course on internet which were mostly good. This is the kind of course which will get people interested in CSE... Looking forward to join it officially form 1st Jam 2016 on EdX till then i have access to all the course material on the CS50 website. Love it.

  

  CS50 reviews on coursetalk

• Guitar - It makes my simile when i think the the CS50 lectures kept me up all night and motivated me enough to go out for a morning walk with full enthu. Well nothing(including my recent taste in music was able to do that!) more on it in my drafts...

• Linux - The open source community has always attracted me. That explains my interest in Google's Android and Linux more than Windows of Macintosh. I found a free course on EdX which is a sort on Working with linux guide and the most beautiful thing about it being one of the course makers is the guy who made Linux! Pretty cool right? really looking forward to this course.

For me - Education is some thing magical. The enthu to know about things, that happiness when you figure things out, it's all just amazing.

Cheers to all the open source knowledge on the internet and all the great teachers who make all that interesting to grasp.

Two engineers

Two engineers were watching a video entitled - The world fifty years from now.
E1- I don't know if I'll live that long to live this life.
E2- I'm not watching this video thinking that I'll live this life I watch it thinking that one day I'll create such lives.

Learning is eternal

I had 17 years of my life to decide my subspecialties, now I got 1 year to check if I made the right decision and then I get three years to decide my major. Let me make a really mad statement for most of my audience - May be the education system is not that crazy if we think about it in the long term.
There are a whole lot of things that could be done and yes the first year did give me a faint understanding of where to ask for help if I need it. I can easily need a mechanical engineer or any other for that matter at some stage to help me with the details of the field in which they specialize. That's the thought when you complete your semester not when you are trying to get a tough electrical circuit simplified.
Let's continue with the adventure...
PS- I'm planning on watching a good documentary on YouTube everyday, it kinda fun watching the future of technology or the how stuff works videos.