Life is such a beautiful game, that time and again the legends leave us, the ordinary, crying for them and begging’em not to leave. This time, it’s lara. Think of Poetry. Think of art. Think of magic. Then he is the legendary poet, artist, the musician and a lot more. And such an irony, I wanted to ’see’ the last poem of his, I find myself undeserved. Watched some of his great(the greatest) innings today. What else can we do? Adore them, let them to be part of our lives, sing their stories. And all that they do in the end is leave us without even caring about the amount of pain. I cannot even dare to think of this to Sachin. It might be that I am and will be trying to deceive myself,that heroes as these should not go, no matter what, it might be that I am cheating myself. Let men go larger than the game. It might hurt the game. It might make me live me in an illusion. It might be so. So be it.

Cricinfo – Lara looks to the future
The last king of Trinidad
Tony Cozier: Lara treads Richards’s path
The art of leaving

Good bye, hero!

technorati tags:misc

Blogged with Flock

Now, this is beauty! I thought of many to be living in dungeons, this time I was questioning myself where I was. I could not know about ‘Flock’ till someone else who is famous decided to imitate the flock. What a pity! Better late than never. This is my post from inside Flock. And for some of you like me-before-a-day, here is the news.

“Welcome to Flock, the safe, spyware free web browser that makes it easier to connect with your friends. With Flock it’s a snap to upload, comment, and discover new pics. Read all the news you care about, in one place. Blog freely. Get search results as soon as you start typing in the search box, and much more.”

Flock Tour

I’ve always wanted this kind of feature, to mark information for blogging as soon as I see it, and to tag links whenever I find them. Flock makes it possible. I just cannot wait for my favourite to mozilla to implement this. Till then, I will flock the way to glory.

Blogged with Flock

These days, blogs that write about blogs themselves are turning out to be too interesting for me to resist, one that is close to what I myself wanted to write and the second ‘un that is answers section in the google’s blogger help center.

While all of’em, teh tricks I mean, really sound intersting, I am still not convinced why and how I , at present, should push myself hard to get that daily update.

One more thing I am still unclear about is whether to add my recent blog reads to delicious or post them on my blog as suggested by the above blogs. Given the little time delicious takes and the minimal distraction it incurs, it seems to be a better solution.

In teh mean while, more than reading blogs and writing posts, somethin else really caught my attention and gulping in some of my precious time. Some part of the rest is taken over by Mr.Dilbert.

This was a story, I always wanted to write, but never did. All of a sudden, while managing folders on my computer .153 at IMG (this is gonna be temporary dot7 while we format that for the good of the world, more about this latter), I found this half-post well written, but never finished. Time to do it now. Here it goes -

“Well, I didn’t write about’em until this long for quite a few reasons.First,I am lazy to write,its that simple and straightforward, and I don’t try to make it an issue for I know that it’s common.And then, almost all the time I set out to write a log, I find myself connected to the internetwork and no one can deny the distractions the net has up in its sleeves.Lastly, I felt that there are many other stints of higher priority and importance that need my immediate attention every minute.But realising that even after this much time since then, those two days are still clear in my memory evincing the fun they’ve created, I finally set out to document(or rather ‘blog’) it. You might as well ask me why I don’t have those higher priority issues,the answer you can safely get though,is that I am sitting before this dumb screen now, yet not connected to the internet, I’ve my test series in a couple of days and I am not in any mood to prepare for them now.

So,now that the clarifications needed are dealt with it,let’s get down to the fun section.I am still fumbling for words for summarizing those two days and of what happened then.It all started with one of the second yearites making a mess by deleting one of the programs of the news management system(:-o ).It is pretty good a system, conceived by ojha and properly taken to its completion by ankit, after some days of labour.I was particularly interested in the idea.Even if we forget about all that, deleting some of it means that many of the announcements and news posts from various departments and centers of the institute would come to a halt,either permanent or temporary(if only we succeeding in getting it back to operation in time).First he startled ankit and myself that he has deleted the files…”

……..(to be continued)

WordPress has got a brand new look and imagine what.. I am on Technorati!! (My Technorati Profile)

Hello!! Welcome to new year ! (You might very well wonder whether I was living in a dungeon !)

There is something indifferent with this new year, no resolutions and no planned actions. Well, may be this itself is the plan of the year. And the reasons why I am back again after such long. Firstly, we now have computers at our rooms networked and connected to internet!!! Secondly, I’ve read an article(slashdotted) whick talked of a group discovering some damn formula for procrastination, and so here I am set to disprove their theory that they have a formula to determine my penchant for procrastination!

And the point of discussion. Oh yes! an egg. Hellow, I am talking of chicken eggs( though I wish to talk about others as well, I’ve never tried others and given an opportunity, I would like to have a ‘mouth’ at them also.). I just love them tooooooooo much!. One can only imagine about the degree of insipidity of our mess food. On an average, we do get some decent food on some days of the week, but at the end of the week if we look back and ask ourselves – o.k. how was last week’s food, only one thing comes to mind – why don’t we go out throwing eggs at these mess managers? But, as we all are trying hard be called true disciples of gandhigiri, most of us settle with eating eggs, instead of using them for extremism.

And yup.. you may ask me how we get over eating an egg every day. First point to be cleared is that we dont an egg a day, instead we have 2.5 eggs a day(OMG!). And what drives us? The variety! We have boiled eggs, fried/cooked eggs, omlets, bhujiya (egg fry), full/half fries(alternate versions of omlets) and then we have rice fried with egg bhujiya, with boiled eggs and the list just goes on. Missing all this variety in my opinion would just be curse. I still remember the grief and the travails I had gone thorough when this #$%^^ bird flu attacked, and I pray God, no other IITRian should ever suffer the same ever again. If I were to name one thing that can be regarded as the greatest gift given to us by God, I would term this very cute little oval shaped thing, and I am sure, every other student going to mess and eating the bland mess food would not hesitate to agree with me.

To finish it off, I just hope you wont resort to egging at me after this post! May every day of this new year be full of eggs and I wish a happy eggy day! So, that’s it, its good bye for now, I am off for another mouth watering eggy dinner

1..2…3…and voila!! I’m back.O.K, this time, I happen to revisit before a month turned its back.In fact,the last few week,I kind of caught in a ‘bloggers’ block’.
Two weeks before, I’s almost done with any more contemplation about my further studies, and was about to start the actual procedures one by one.It then happened to me,while I sat down for starting my SOP,that there is no way I can start it without having to dig myself deep into my past.Then the refulgent idea of taking the SOP ‘project’ all the way to an autobiography occured to me. There was no way I can mention any of my memoirs without my sir, Dr.Umadhar Patnaik, an extraordinary teacher (there is no extravagance of language meant here) who is virtually the only one reason,beside my family members,for whatever I am now.

I’m going to talk a lot about him in my future posts(in his words ad infinitum..,anything less said fails and falls short in describing his greatness).But for the time being,a small story from him. This particular narration is not firsthand,I heard it from one of my seniors who in turn heard from sir himself – one day he was teaching and somehow digressed from the actual topic of discussion,he started describing this story.

There is this “Dragon Masters” university where people are taught how to deal with dragons – dragons are perilous,it’s hard to exert control over them, at the same time escaping adroitly from their anger flames.So,he says,all through their stay at that university,young men are taught about the tricks of the trade,how to become masters of their job,with the capital source of inspiration coming from the professors themselves.The way the professors proceed about their didactic business itself acts as a huge stimulus for the men being trained.But the real twist and turn evinces to a student after he graduates from the university,he is exposed to the real life, where there are in actuality no dragons !! So,as it turns out that the young man cannot do a living elsewhere with the knowledge he accumulated at the university(!) , he moves on to join the university back again,but this time as a person with highly reverent skills of managing dragons and who teaches to train many more young men aspiring to become ‘dragon masters’!

After he is done with the story,he revealed the actual reason behind this raconteuse.While he was a student,he pursued math not just for studying purpose or to make a living out of that.He has always loved mathematics ,as it is.And then he went on with his graduation,travelled across the world,met with the best people of the field and finally after all this,now,he finds himself teaching to senior secondary level students,which he quotes as quite similar to the ways of those young people at Dragon university . He says he loves his job.But sir,we love you!!

Lot more is left to write..I save it for future…

After that initial hullabaloo of creating a vlog and then leaving it into the wild for itself, here I come back after this long,once again to have a go.

I just happened to realise that it’s been one full month since I’ve written my last post.So,here I start.

Well, few reason for my reluctance to write, all these days: one I am too busy and head deep in so many things,I toil hard to keep up with the multitude of happenings going on at the class and in the institute, two there is nothing too significant to write.All the trivia go on into the diary,the one which even now feel is more accessible.We don’t have immediate access to the network at arms length,and moreover a log is something I feel should be written in a relaxed mood,which I can’t find sitting in these labs.

Coming to what I am doing these days…I,for all the wrong reasons,thought that first semester of the fourth year would be leaving me with sufficient time to breathe,but my plans backfired.Along with the regular academics,I find myself deeply involved in a project,one that is improperly planned,but eagerly sought after.BTP title is decided,kinda continuation of what is done during the summer, a question answering system in the closed biomedical domain.

I think that’s enough for today..Will come back soon..have TS from this very Thursday.

This records my exhilarating working experience during the summer of ‘06.It was at Hyderabad,my first visit to the city.Though I am from Andhra and have been to places quite distant(as far as Roorkee!) from my home at Srikakulam,I never happened to be in Hyderabad.And this first visit left in me quite a variety of impressions and experiences.

First things first, about the project..It’s at IIIT Hyd, its pure luck that I happened to be there. I decided to go there on the last day of the semester, I was busy with GRE throughout the sem(may be not,atleast I have something as a pretext). My work’s related to multi-document summarization system and it’s scaling to the web as a question-answering system. I don’t boast of coming out with a new research idea-the framework was already setup properly by them,but my work is nonethless nontrivial and helped me in improving their system as well as myself.They have done exceedingly good work in the field and still are.For me what actually mattered is that I have learnt how to things go on when one is in research,how to do documentation (papers) of work done and so on….The details of the work can be found elsewhere.

And yes..Hyd..there’s good and bad. I can neither forget those journeys on the heavy-rush hyd buses,running on the roads to catch one,experimenting(and getting screwed) without asking anyone as to where the bus takes me,nor the serious illness(Chikungunya prevailing in Hyd at that time..my god!) that stuck and crippled me from doing my work.And, the traffic made me sick each day of my bus travel and in my brain have burgeoned so many doubts about my future(probably in one of such or even worse cities).

And yeah!! IMG .It might not have rightway won the race(my summer project) for me,but it ensured that I was not going to lose any more..

Oh! right .I need to mention what ‘lordoftheflame’ stands for.I am a die-hard fan of the film Ice Age, have seen it some odd 15-20 times.And the character Sid, a ground sloth–I just start laughing even at a sight of that guy.

And the name stems from one of my favourite dialogue..

Sid: From now on, you’ll have to refer to me as “Sid, Lord of the Flame”!
Manfred: Hey, Lord of the Flame, your tail’s on fire.

it’s just fun and for fun.