Day 260: 21st Mar, 2010

A Sunday - and one with 2 classes of ADA! :( . Though I shouldn't really be complaining because I (and most of us) never attended the morning ADA lecture, thanks to the great gamble yesterday.

Lunch in the mess were interspersed with discussions about the hot topic - who got which course? It's funny how we keep discussing things that we know cannot be changed.

Resumed the 11.00pm meets. Kisaan brought up "one little thing" to discuss in between and we ended up spending more than two hours arguing about it!

Day 259: 20th Mar, 2010 - boli lagao!

360 students .. 1000 points .. and mayhem! That was what today was all about!

There have been days here about which we have heard stories from seniors, but still the intensity dawns only when it actually occurs. We had our electives selection day today - and the frenzy has been unprecedented! Till last year, the choice was mainly dependent on the concentration of courses. This year, we had the added element of 'bid points' which made the whole thing .. well.. interesting!

Game theory was at its best - every student making his or her own strategy to get the courses of choice. Expecting a lot of people to bid in multiples of 5 or 10, the smart ones placed bids ending in 1s and 6s. The smarted ones, anticipating the move by the smart ones, put bids ending in 2s and 7s :D . 

Every year, there are always a couple of courses which get into a massive bull run. This year, the courses in high demand were SBN - closing bid 302 (good course, chill exams) , MSD (great prof!) and AOC (ideal filler :D). But the show stealer was a course called FIRE - closing bid 364! - in which students would be taken to a resort for a week and have 6 hours worth of 'discussions' each day - and that's it! Ironically, this highest bid course was a half-credit one!

Without getting into too much detail, my own bidding strategy was OK. Fortunately I made a couple of important changes in the 5th round, failing which I would have found it difficult to get my choice of specialisation! I did end up losing three courses of my initial choice though. Atleast I was aware of it - unlike Chatur who realised the shortfall only on fortunately bumping into a group of friends at the mess!

Anyways, not getting everything in the first stage didn't turn out to be so bad. Did another couple of hours worth of timepass to the game to which many of us were now addicted :D . Took a couple of arbit courses..

What would be really interesting is to think - one year down the line - was it really worth the 8 hour (10pm to 6am) fiasco?! I may not be sure of that even then, but one thing, it was surely a fair bit of fun :D

Day 257: 18th Mar, 2010

How many times do you think to yourself that you must backup your data? And you never do it. And then one fine day your PC stops working and you curse yourself.

Similar thing. Somehow, my appointment with some personal IT issue never ends. It has often been due to my desktop, sometimes due to my phone and these days with my laptop. Yesterday after watching the movie, as I was closing all the folders, suddenly my OS hung and Windows Explorer service stopped working. I wasn't in much mood to explore it so I slept off. Unfortunately the problem continued today as well - so I spent the whole morning and whole afternoon trying to take backups, as I thought I'll have to reinstall the operating system. And since I could not open any folders - I had to share stuff on DC - then run all the way to Praveen's room (wake him up!), and transfer data. And miraculously, after all this running around and effort, my laptop started working fine :| . The good thing is atleast I have substantial backup now!

Went ground hunting in the evening. Some real quick action required there!

Came back to be a part of the game the entire PGP clan was playing - the dry run for the electives allocation. Am choosing a lot of 'nice-sounding' courses as of now. I am still not sure if they are the ones I'll take up after 2 days. Lets see..

Day 246: 7th Mar, 2010 - Choices!

Choices. Life is a lot about choices. Either crying over the lack of any or complaining about the presence of many. Today we had to choose electives for the 2nd year - in the field of your interest. Field of interest - an option that I had asked myself when I filled the CAT entrance forms. A decision I was quizzed about in my mock and the actual interviews. A thing I repeatedly thought about during the summer placement process. I only went on being more unsure. And so I still had to think today. And that's not the worst part. Worst part is - I am not yet done thinking about it at all! (And I doubt if I ever will be :D).

Continued with my sleep marathon today too. Woke up at 12.45! That's sleeping through the extra alarm that I had set. Continued to be docile and sleepy. Dealt with a small stomach upset I had (most probably 'cos of yesterday's visit to Ma Durgama), skipping lunch. Transferred a few more songs to my ipod shuffle, though unfortunately I couldn't find time to hear them, thanks to the elective choosing session that followed.

Had a nice long chat with Sud - pretty cryptic conversation for most part of it. One that I am especially bad at. Something for me to improve upon. (Amongst a lot of others..)