Friday, January 30, 2004
http://www.danasoft.com/sig/
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Getting your resume read.
I read an interesting article by Joel Spolsky, from a link on Mindful Musings, about how to get your résumé read. I could not help smiling as I read it. A job hunt is way far in the future for me, but looking for summer internships couldn’t hurt.
Spolsky says that making the message more personal would certainly help, since it makes you look more human, but I guess what you write could work against you, if the person who reads what you wrote could take a dislike for you, as a person.
This really made me laugh hard…
From Getting Your Résumé Read
OK, this one really bugs me. Learn where spaces go in relation to other punctuation. Attention, the entire population of India: whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it’s always after the comma and never before it. Thank you.
I see my friends applying for jobs, and I should say Indians believe the message matters more than the envelope, but I think presentation could make all the difference between getting a job, and not even getting an interview call.
I thought you might want to read the article.
Filed by Carthik at 12:23 pm under General No Comments
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India’s Lofty Ambitions in Space Meet Earthly Realities
Thursday, January 29, 2004
“We will not depend on others,” declared Raj Shecker, 21, an engineering student. “It’s just an Indian feeling.”
Forty years after the launching of a small American-made rocket marked its humble beginnings, India’s national space program bills itself as thrifty space exploration for the common man.
With a budget of only $450 million a year — one-thirtieth of NASA’s $15.5 billion annual budget — India has 13 satellites in orbit, produces some of the world’s best remote imaging satellites and is planning to send a satellite to the moon by 2007 or 2008.
But unlike space programs in other developing countries, including Brazil, low costs have not meant catastrophic launching failures. Only 6 of India’s 37 satellite launchings have failed.
Read more, from the NY times article by David Rohde.
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Qualified.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
“I’m sitting in the corner feeling glad.
Got no money coming in but I can’t be sad.
That was the best cup of coffee I ever had.
And I won’t worry about a thing,
Because we’ve got it made.
Here on the inside, outside is so far away.”
Thats what my friend from my recw days was reminded of when he read the previous post of mine. And its apt, and fits the mood I am in right now to the C
In other news, a certain girl I know 
passed her Ph.D. qualifying examinations today, both written and oral, and if my chest were to expand anymore out of pride, I would have to go home and wear a new t-shirt.
So yes, happiness is amplified.
I had a fruitful discussion with my adviser, and now all I have to do is give a semblance of order to my jotted-down thoughts, and start organizing what work I have with regard to the paper in progress. He was helpful with teaching techniques and the kind, related to my teaching, of course, and I can try some new ideas out.
Filed by Carthik at 5:17 pm under General 1 Comment
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Blessings
Monday, January 19, 2004
1. I have a bath tub, and piping hot water on tap, to spend an hour or two immersed in warmth, though I am not rich.
2. I am free to go wherever I please, and since I am a student, I have more oppurtunities and holidays.
3. I can wake up at 12 noon, and still have a productive “day”, working at my pace, and do what I want.
4. I have access to a huge library at UCF, and free books.
5. I have friends who will cook for me
6. I am loved, and I can love in return, freely.
Life smiles at me whenever I open the door to a world renewed by rain overnight.
I read this quote somewhere : “The past or the future, choose one and stick with it.”
Give me the present, free of a past and a future.
Filed by Carthik at 1:38 pm under General 2 Comments
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Weird Wide Web
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Out of boredom and then some, I was checking my Technorati link cosmos, when I saw some new blog, morag ivers says links to my blog.
The claim that I was the first to link to that blog made it all the more mystifying, when I did track down the entry that linked to my blog.
The mystery was resolved when I learnt that it the Waypath thingy at the very bottom of the entry of mine that links to the said morag ivers blog is the one responsible for all the trouble.
Moral of the story : I wasted 20 minutes finding out why/where/how the moragiverssays blog links to me, another 10 writing all this you see here, and still, I am bored. I wish I had more things to hunt for.
I am tired of reading, thinking endlessly about a problem that increasingly resembles a bowl of noodles, in which each noodle is a variable/phenomenon I need to take into account, and all I seem to have is a mind which resembles a fork with only one tooth.
I was thinking about the same problem with my one tooth mind-fork while I was in the Design and Analysis of Algorithms class, when something that the instructor wrote on the whiteboard caught my attention. He had written that the expection of X is 5/3, and that the maximum value of X is 3 with a probability of 1/2 or something. So I asked him, “5/3 is 3 and 2/3 rds, now how can that be the average of a bunch of numbers, the maximum of which is 3?” Half the class stared at me, the rest at the instructor, when he said, “5/3 is 1 and 2/3.”
I want to drop that course. How can I walk in to the class again, and accept being “the-5/3-equals-3-and-2/3″ guy?
I should sleep now.
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Balance/Imbalance
The way (Tao) says there should be balance between opposites in all things/ in the universe.
Assuming you have acheived a perfect balance, are you not obliged, by the same principle to try to acheive a perfect balance between being (perfectly) balanced and (perfectly) imbalanced?
Is there is a state of perfect imbalance, just like there is a state of perfect balance?
That would be the state with maximum contrast between opposites.
So if the world and everything in it varies from 0 to 1 — For example, if white = 0 and black = 1 (not the otherway round, since white is “nothing taken away” and black is “everything taken away”), and a perfect balance is the “color” 0.5, then in order to acheive balance, one needs a 0.5. Then again, applying the principle of “the way”, on a meta level, there should be a perfect balance between balance (0.5) and imbalance ( 1 or 0) which gives us a 0.25 and a 0.75. So how can you be both 0.25 and 0.75 at the same time? You can’t, so you balance the two and stay at a 0.5, but then, where is the imbalance?
Or is perfect balance = perfect imbalance? , which is equal to asking, are balance and imbalance the same thing? If that is so, what is the significance of perfect balance, is that not the same as perfect imbalance?
Another way of looking at it is as follows :
Prescription for happiness, contentment and success — Balance
Since we should balance “balance” and “imbalance” perfectly, we should never be in a state of perfect balance, which means you are always somewhere on the way to being balanced, you could say you were balanced, but you really are not.
Thats the state I am in. This being the way it is, why, then, am I not happy, content or successful?
I could say I am happy, but I am not, so too for the other two goals, contentment and success, and so I have acheived the perfect balance between being happy and being unhappy, where does that leave me?
Go ahead, invert my skull.
The question remains - is one not obliged to find a balance between balance and imbalance?
Meta-questions, like, who polices the police, are bothersome.
If you find Buddha (or Lao Tzu) on the street, kill him. (No offence intended, and besides, I am just reproducing a sentence I read somewhere else.)
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Just another day
I thought I would describe today as an example of just another day in my life, these days.
Met a friend who is now back from India.
Came to the department at 11:30 AM. Slept late and woke up late.
Sat around reading up on some combinatorial group testing to find some direction for the paper I am authoring.
Signed the contract for this semester.
Read some more, and wasted a little time on the Internet.
I wish there was something interesting I could write about, but contact with new human beings is a statistical improbability when you sit in the same room everyday with the same people who share your feeling of deja vu, and have nothing strange to say or do.
The internet is pretty dull too, coming to think of it.
I will soon start reading again. A book a week should be good, if I can do it.
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Changes
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
The beginning of a new semester has brought along some changes.
I am now the instructor of a course. The department refers to me as an adjunct faculty member now. The pay is the same. What has changed is my room. I now share an office with other adjunct faculty (a term which refers to Ph.D. students, who also teach). I can only work for 20 hours due to my Visa status, else I could have been a full time employee with the same designation, officially.
I taught my first class on the 7th of January. It was fun. I hope everything goes fine, as the semester wears on. Teaching is much more informal, and the students are more involved and they contribute a lot more, when compared to back home. It is a basic microprocessor/microcontroller course and so its interesting to teach. I received a warm compliment at the end of the class, and that inspires me to do better.
The first few minutes were shaky. “….just a kid…” is what I heard in the background as I walked in. That was only expected. I tried not to be too humorous (like I have to try…), but I forgot to introduce myself. I am experimenting with the class website, trying to use a modified blog of some sort. I think it will make things easier on me.
I got some cds today for 2 dollars apiece.
*Filter Title of record
*Jerry Cantrell Boggy Depot
*Limp Bizkit Three Dollar Bill, Y’all
*Nativity in Black - II
*Korn Follow the Leader
*Rob Zombie Hellbilly Deluxe
*Soulfly
Nice!!
I am now using WordPress for my blog at Carthik.net. Its much better than MovableType. I still use MovableType to power the static pages on my homepage, ’cause it will be a pain to change all that yet again, and it makes the editing easier. Mark was my window to Wordpress. Setup took exactly 3 minutes, and since its all in php I feel more comfortable with the whole thing.
Filed by Carthik at 7:57 am under General 3 Comments
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Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Filed by Carthik at 4:15 am under General 20 Comments
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Watch
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
So I bought this timex watch since my old timex had to be retired.
Then, after a couple of weeks I returned to Walmart to exchange it for another watch, since the analog part of the watch was not working.
The sales representative in the jewellery section called a manager, who swapped watches for me.
Then a wizened old lady (aren’t there ever so many grandmas and grandpas at walmart these days?) came and gave me the old watch, which was working perfectly fine.
All she had done was depress the crown of the watch so the hands start moving.
D’uh. Just a moment before that, I had let on that I was an electrical engineer at UCF, and that I thought it probably was the battery dying or something.
A significant low in my life.
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Work Ahead
Monday, January 5, 2004
I will be back to doing what I like a lot - teaching, this semester, after a one and a half year break. Actually I have been a TA and graded homeworks and handled labs and all that, but teaching a class is way better, in my opinion. So I will be teaching Computer System Design - 1, a course that revolves around the Motorola 6811 microcontroller. I cant wait to get started on Wednesday. I had applied for this a month ago, to be turned down since some one else had been found to teach it, but then, at the last moment, the instructor was unavailable and so I got this oppurtunity. This also means that I don’t take a pay cut which would have followed the cut in hours from 20 to 15 hours per week for “fellowship” Ph.D. students.
I know I haven’t updated the blog in days, but its only because I was immersed in life, the simple, interesting, renewing kind. Now the break is over and I am back in front of the computer in my lab. Good to be back, and some of the thoughts and events will eventually find their way here, I guess.
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