Pranks

College life is filled with pranks and pranks made it all fun. In the hostel, when there is a power outage, some guys form a train going from room to room making lot of noise and waking up everybody. Sometimes, they draw moustaches and goatees to guys in deep sleep.

The senior hillbillies don't play pranks a lot, seems they are a mature lot. But the noob hillbillies are pranksters. They send messages to everyone in the network talking something or the other. Sometimes they knock on someone's door and run away.

One of the guys, let us call him "jackfruitboy", is the butt of some jokes which you thought ended in school itself. His neighbours would paste a post-it on his door whenever they pass by, writing things like "I © <Arbit girl's name>", or "I am watching porn, don't disturb" or such silly things. Instead of pasting a "kick me" sign on his back, it is on the door.

Last Vacations

So, the vacations started for the last time for the senior hillbillies. Most of them are going and I was supposed to be one of them. But, I had to cancel my trip at the last minute because of some 'changes' in the timetable coming from the top of the hill. They were changing our TTs like there was no tomorrow, announcing scheduling of evening classes late in the afternoon, playing ping-pong with our exam schedules, etc etc. Term ending dates fluctuated wildly, originally it was 20th which was changed to 19th then again to 20th. Some hillbillies had to change their plans atleast twice.

I got fed up and finally cancelled my ticket, so I will be spending the vacation here. With 3/4ths of the class not here, the internet is going to be real fast - they rectified the internet troubles I talked about a few days back. I have decided to utilise this time to brush up what I learnt after coming here and download all the stuff I have always wanted to - the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection. The flipside is that my block will be almost deserted and it will be scary.

The scheduling was such that many had only one class a day and some had a 'vacation' for a couple of weeks. The last few weeks were crammed with classes while we were free most of the term and some subjects are being pushed into the next term. In fact, the first two weeks of the final term are supposed to be the most crammed in the history of term-beginnings. Yesterday and today were very tiring for me, in particular. Yesterday was an end of the term exam, one internal quiz, one presentation and two classes. Today were two end-term exams and one class. I was so tired that I dozed off for 15 minutes in the middle of a 2 hour exam. This was unusal; I usually sleep only in the classes while managing to stay awake for the exams.

And it is also official that my two cells are now property of some guy in another PHB School. He assured me that he will return my cells to someone before leaving but did not keep up his words. Kicking my hind starts tomorrow and will continue all day.

Managerial Accounting

During the first term, this is how accounting looks to engineers. Some go on to master it while some (like me) have recurrent nightmares even after that stuff is long gone. They said accounting is just numbers. But double and triple integrations coupled with triple partial differentiation and approximate methods seem so simple compared to 'just numbers'. This might give an idea of how the cases, problems and the exams looked to me
Question: Count the number of dots in the figure below.

IT Infrastructure

The last few days (or weeks or months, depending on how your memory is) are really irritating me. It is the IT infrastructure on the manager mill on the hill. Before we joined here, we were told that we had very highspeed internet connection 24x7, complete with telephone connections in every room. When we arrived here, we did not have any of the wires in place. After the students here (god bless them!)literally fought tooth and nail to get the basic wiring (only the local network) in place, that too after months of stonewalling by the powers that be. A few months later, we fought again for our internet connection. At first it was veeeery unstable, connection dropping (even between switches) at the drop of a hat. A small battle again, and we got some improved internet connection.

Then, we changed ISPs because of 'some reasons'. This time, we were promised the full 2mpbs (as promised in the brochures) but what we got was (according to reliable sources) only 1mbps, shared by more than 240 computers. Things went on well for a few months. That is, till a few months back when the new bunch got hold of p2p clients and then the speed went down. The student-IS guys said they disabled p2p for good; but now they seem to have come back and the pages are literally crawling. My pages get downloaded at a speed between .3kbps to 2kbps. Moreover, the connection drops every other minute. Basically we are back to square 1.

My neighbour has put his yahoo messenger to connect automatically and every second minute, I can here the 'twoossh' sound of YM connecting and proclaiming 'You have x new messages'. Thankfully, most of the guys have disabled that noise.

I could not get past the blogger login page for over 2 hours now (publishing through email, good thing those good guys at PyraLabs thought of this). I have typed orkut.com in another window and after 45 minutes, it still is not opening. Hotmail too has not opened (after login) for over 30 minutes now. *smoking out of my ears*. I am wondering whether this post will reach blogger or not.

Update After 30 minutes: The post has reached blogger after 30 minutes and I am trying to remove all the line breaks my email client put in. It feels like I am back at home on my PII 400MHz, with a slow dialup internt connection. I have cancelled my trip back home based upon only this internet connection. Let us hope things get better in a week when more than 3/4ths of my class will be at home.