I haven't forgotten you, my 3 year old blog. It's just that I have been rather distracted by certain important things. 'What?' you ask. Well I have been grappling with profound question. Question regarding me, my purpose in the world, and where I am headed...those kind of questions. Questions which are very difficult to answer, because you are never sure whether, the answer you have is the right answer, or whether there is in fact a right answer at all.
Ever since August, I have had this internal struggle, these innumerable doubts about my life, and the way it has been shaping up. I am not writing to say that I have found the answers to these questions, but rather to say, that I have found a helpful hint. I am quite sure that I will never be satisfied by any answer I get, so it's foolish to even suggest that. My revelation has been much smaller, but yet, it can be described as a 'paradigm shift' (I don't believe I just used those words).
You may be aware that I have eclectic taste...weird interests you might say, or even varied passions. I love reading, photography, traveling, adventure sports, conversing with interesting people, biking, eating and a hell lot of other things. I am currently at such a stage of my life, where I am officially stepping out from the role of a student, into that of a professional. You can well imagine, where all this mental torture comes from. I want to know clearly who I am. Now some post-modernistic physco-babble would say that I am a mixture of all these things, and much more than the sum of these things. But while that seems reasonable to the brain, the heart is not satisfied.
I had an insight out of this chaotic darkness today. I was generally wondering what I have to show for the month of November, the last 3 weeks. And my answer to that question, showed me the way out. Let me enumerate the things I have done, that I am particularly proud of:
- I wrote an Arcscript to make cartograms from shapefiles, which create maps like these.
- Not satisfied with that, I renewed my Knowledge of XML, explored Kml, and created a tool to enable shapefiles to be displayed on Google Earth.
- Wrote a bash script for automatically installing a programme from its tarball
- In another practical, I handled exception in JAVA programming, without using 'exception handling.
- Somewhere else, I presented a programme, which accessed a database using C# and .Net framework.
- I learnt the basic principles behind semivariograms, and understood where they fail.
- I manage to shrink a partition, and repartition another disk, and to make it work, I had to get my hands dirty with GRUB and fstab.
- I rewired a room, so that I could run a modem, on low voltage.
- Figured out a way to calibrate a projector on my own, after getting some hints.
- Beta tested Firefox 3, and submitted a couple of Bug reports.
- Corrected Philipp Lenssen
Do you see the pattern here? All of them are related to Technology in general, and computers in particular.
This is not to say that I did nothing else. I met some great people in Ashagadh and Pune, biked about 700 Km in 4 days, did something for the underpriviledged kids in the Rural camp, Spent some great days with family, shot some amazing photographs, read interesting books like Shame and 'Penguins stopped play', saw entertaining movies like OSO and Jab we Met...
Yet what are the things I am most proud of?
All these techy and geeky things.
I think I can now accept that my life lies in geekdom, and I am sure I will rule there. I will sleep comfortably today.
P.s. I think I can now assure my mother that I am doing productive things, when she complains of me being online the whole day. If she persists, and asks what is productive in all this, I will rehash the Feynaman quote that I always use: "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."
