Jan 7, 2006 - 
personal 
2 Comments
personal 2 Comments Broadband-less and party-full
The year so far hasn’t been good as far as Internet access is concerned. My broadband connection at home conked out for some reason about 2 weeks back and so I couldn’t do much surfing/blogging/”flickr”ing/chatting/etc…these past few days, as a result of which I have a whole lot of photos to upload and also a whole lot of experiences to share and blog about, not to mention emails to catch up and reply to. I used to manage by checking my mail using my old modem and a dial-up connection. Good Lord! I had forgotten how pathetic the Internet connections were before the arrival of broadband and this temporary dependence on dial-up brought back some old, slow memories!
The week leading upto New Year’s eve was one long party! I went out every single day and night and met a whole lot of friends and did a whole lot of fun stuff! That week, I went bowling four times (once at 10 in the morning straight out of bed); another day we went to Fun World (of all the places!) and freaked out on the amusement rides after a long time; I also went for two movies (Apaharan at PVR in Forum mall and Chicken little at INOX in Garuda mall – incidentally it was my first visit to either multiplex); I had dinner with friends at restaurants pretty much all the evenings and a couple of days I even had lunch outside; I also partied at a friend’s (Aditya) place, his parents had invited some of us over for a barbecue dinner (yes there were vegetarian dishes also!) followed by a night long party that went on till 6 AM the next day!
That pretty much was a summary of that incredible week, and how did it all culminate on New Year’s eve? Well, I spent it quietly at home with my parents and cousins!
Back to the Internet issue. The telephone guys came today and repaired the connection and now I am back online. It feels great to be connected to the Internet again. It felt kinda weird to be offline (or irregularly online) for such an extended period of time! Anyway, now that I am properly connected again, expect to see a flurry of activity in my blog with a whole lot of posts coming up shortly.
Welcome back Mr. Anderson. We missed you. :)
[...] Thats my life in the year 2005 Published January 10th, 2006 in personal This blog post was due a lot earlier, but I was going through an Internet connectivity problem then and couldnt post this. Anyway this a brief recap of how the year 2005 was for me, month-wise. January: I spent most of this month preparing for my 7th semester exams. Also gave a session at National Public School, Indiranagar. I won a USB drive in the MDC Bloggers Contest. February: Quite an eventful month. Attended the Aero India show with Sharath, Sunil and Sashikiran. Went to Manipal Insitute of Technology, Manipal and NITK (formerly REC), Surathkal to deliver sessions on Microsoft .NET, thanks to Rohan for inviting us and arranging for the seminars. Started planning for anaadyanta (college fest at NMIT). Qualified for the zonal finals of the Software Design invitational in the Microsoft Imagine Cup! I got my broadband connection from BSNL. March: BDotNETStudent celebrated it’s first anniversary at the Birthday Bash with B.NET group at PESIT! 7th semester results were announced and thanks to all my prayers to all the Gods – I cleared all subjects! Planning for anaadyanta, work for Imagine Cup and project work at Perot Systems continued. April: I got a new Canon Powershot A400 digicam. My college fest anaadyanta was held and was a resounding success! I was awarded the Microsoft Student Ambassador Award at a function held at Hotel Rama! May: The academic phase of my life comes to an end and we have our college farewell party at The Country Club. We also had our farewell ceremony “Au-Revoir” from the CS & IS department at college. Our class students along with the ISE students gave our teachers a party to say Gracias. Our team failed to qualify for the national finals for the Imagine Cup at the zonal finals held in Chennai. Project trainee phase at Perot Systems comes to an end. Date with .NET v3.0 a technical fest conducted by us at BDotNETStudent is held at RNSIT. I write my 8th and final semester exams. June: I shifted my house to Old Madras Road near C.V.Raman Nagar and moved out Malleshwaram, where I had been pretty much all my life. Went to Tirupathi with Sashi, Bhargav and Seena and had a great darshan of Lord Balaji. I also joined work at Perot Systems and training on Microsoft technologies commences. Passing the Baton is held at Microsoft GTSC office, which is my last day as manager of the Bangalore .NET Student user group and the Microsoft Student champ program in the Microsoft Academic Developer Program. The baton was passed to Sunil, Sharath, Garima, Ranganath and some more student champs. Business communication training is conducted at Perot Systems. July: I get my 8th and final semester results and having cleared all subjects with a decent score, I have now positively completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering! August: I turned 22. Kartik Reddy visits Bangalore and we go to Nandi Hills with Kannan. Training comes to an end at Perot Systems and our batch (TIP 2005 .NET Batch 1) is taken to ECC for various team building exercises. I clear my Microsoft Certification exam in Developing and Implementing Web Applications with C# and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. All of us from the TIP 2005 batch from office went on a trip to Bheemeshwar. September: I cleared my second Microsoft certification exam on Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition. I took a sesion on C#.NET at the Student Partner training held at MSRIT. Allocated to an SAP project at work. Resource management group is confident of getting me into a .NET project soon, so I let Bhargav take my place and I back out of the SAP project and join the ‘bench’ to wait for the .NET project. October: No project yet at office and so I watched more movies and read more books and went out to meet my friends more than I used to do over a full semester or two in college. Perot Systems pre-annual day celebrations begin and many events are conducted. I participated in quite a few events and won prizes in Tom, Dick and Harry (1st) ; Poster making (2nd) and Mad Ads (2nd). It rains cats and dogs in Bangalore. Roads and other infrastructure go for a toss. Perot Systems annual day postponed due to rains. Met with some close friends from Nitte. Celebrated Navrathri and kept “kolu” at home. November: We get news that we may have to go to Noida or Pune on project work for 4 – 6 months. But the project does not get confirmed, so bench life continues. More books and more movies. I complete one year of blogging! Ethnic Day celebrations held at office. December: Still no project in sight. Movie and book marathons continue. I attend the Bill Gates: Ready Launch tour of Visual Studio.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Decision to rename Bangalore to Bengaluru taken by government. Kannan and I decide to visit Kartik Reddy in Switzerland. Visited Mumbai with Kannan and had one amazing and unforgettable day. Swiss visa denied due to winter season and our profile falling in the high risk category! Kannan and I decide to go far east, but Swiss embassy delays in returning our passports so all travel plans scrapped. Visited relatives in Chennai after a long time. Partied like crazy the whole last week of the year. Finally got allocated to a project on 30th December, thanks to Chaitanya. That pretty much sums up my 2005. It was quite an interesting one. Lots of changes and new experiences. I wonder how 2006 will be?! [...]