Skyward Fire

Now Playing: The Ramones – Street Fighting Man

The thing about living away from friends and family is weird. For me, it has been a decision that has eventually changed my complete lifestyle. Quieter evenings, boring afternoons, and depressingly laid-back weekends is now the story of my life. What used to be numerous lovely night-outs and charming classy evenings is now limited to staring blankly at the computer screen in the college hostel or sleeping. I speak to my friends back in India who’re in their second and first year college, have told me of similar stories of their own very similar college lives.

Frequent dining with friends is now limited to sitting on the hot cornice all by myself eating the cheapest food available. Watching movies with a wild, screaming bunch of friends is now limited to watching it alone. Sitting and talking with friends for hours without counting them is now limited to chatting online. I can’t take a stroll outside in the terrible humidity and heat outside. I can’t drive thanks to the lack of a driving license. Even if I had one, it wouldn’t make much of a difference because the way I drive would just make the Department of Traffic Fines really rich. The daredevilry will only get me into a whole lot of trouble.

Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but the free-spirit I used to be back home is now shrunken to a blur.

King of metal, Ronnie James Dio, passed away on the 16th of May 2010. The man was a legend, known for his work with Black Sabbath, and in his own band Dio, and was also known an the father of the famous finger metal sign.

Your voice is immortal. You will be remembered for ever.

So that’s it. The third one is down too. Nothing worked out, and it all fell apart in the end.

My third cycle test for the second semester have just begun, and with not much of a promising start. As much of a terrible excuse as it might sound, I blame the teachers. Partiality and bias towards a few is dooming the rest of us. And in some cases, teachers taking frequent ego trips are dooming us. Today, the class had it’s Data Structures Lab exam. The process is simple (not so much, really). You have submit a hand-written lab record (with over 20 long C programs and algorithms) which we’re asked to right not that long before the exams get close. And another handwritten assignment on one of the 19 programs. And you must also have 75% attendance in the lab if you want to write the lab internals. If your attendance is below that even if it is the fault of the person who takes the attendance who probably didn’t hear you on your roll call, you’ll eventually be the person to be blamed.

If you do not satisfy those conditions, you can’t write the exams. If you’re lucky enough to get through the first great wall, here comes the beamer. You choose from amongst 19 of those programs as a question for your exam. Whatever you get, you have to first write the algorithm of the program on paper, then write the code on the paper. Once the invigilator approves your code which you wrote on a piece of paper, only then will you able to log in to the machine and type and compile that code. That too if you’re in luck and Turbo C++ 4.5 isn’t corrupt on the machine you’re sitting in front of. This particular scenario comes up due to the fact that many students use USB drives to copy programs to the exam machine and cheat. A step rather well needed.

But really? This is a lab exam. From my past experiences, writing code on a piece of paper and then copying it on the computer is the most disastrous thing a computer science engineering student would ever have to do. Coding on C should be done on a hit-and-trial mode directly on the machine specially when students are doing it. But then again, we know how outrageously vulgar the Indian education system is. The discussion to this topic has no end and I’m no expert on it so I’d rather not say much.