The story of my Laptop...

After I reached U.S, I realized that a Laptop was an absolute necessity. I found that I had a lot of free time and I liked to watch movies/series online to kill time. An Internet connection with unlimited download was the motivation I needed to buy myself a new laptop, with a minority of its time being spent for my studies (Grinning...).So Finally I got a new HP 14'' laptop with 12 cell battery and a 128MB Nvidia graphics card. It was an awesome piece of technology that I used daily to play games like Crysis I & II, CoD: MWI & MWII, AOE & CS to name a few. Man... I used to spend more time playing games and watching movies... than studying with that laptop. The minuscule amount that I spent for my studies were also productive [Big grin again...] . It has withstood my continues barrage of buggy code and never had it given up on me. The laptop trusted me. But after 2 years... four semesters down and I am trying to finish my Thesis...my laptop just shutdown's down one fine evening.

The screen flickers for a few seconds and then it goes blank. I am thinking either the OS crashed or my program crashed, so I do the most efficient way to restart a windows machine.Give is a hard reboot!!. And so it starts to boot up and then the screen freezes again. I am like keeping my fingers crossed to hard reboot again. This time even the BIOS does not execute. F***, I am screwed. All of my data regarding my Thesis is on this laptop. I am cursing my self for not taking the backup.

Like any self-respecting Computer Engineer, I try to fix it by myself by removing battery, HD and even the RAM and I stop myself there, cos I couldn't go further than that. Since the warranty had expired , I can't ship it to HP for fixing it. So I paid an expert to check on my laptop and the diagnosis: "MOTHERBOARD, kicked the bucket!!".

It looks like, it can take only so much abuse...As I am writing this, my laptop is in the corner of the room stripped of its stomach( Hard Drive) waiting to be scrapped.

I am so attached to that laptop that I am refusing to give it up, even for scraps now. It has been there with me through a lot of tough times...(:D).

And that is the short & tragic story of my Laptop.

Spring 2010, A new semester....

Officially semester started for me this week and I have registered for only one class this semester.Cause I need to spend more time on my Thesis, If I want to graduate on time. Even after taking one subject, it feels so hectic. First week is yet to be over, and I am already looking forward towards the spring break, which allows me to sleep without an impending doom to wake up in the morning and goto class.

My class start at 11AM, so I need to pretty much getup at least by 10:20 ,so I can do the daily chore of brushing my teeth. I hope this time I do not miss my classes due to oversleep. Last semester I used to miss classes at 2 PM cause I overslept!! Well that is in the past and I am always thinking about the future!

yeah the future, lets c how it goes? Looks of it, I need to put alot of effort this semester apart from studying for my coursework. Keeping my fingers and Hoping for the best, waiting for God to do the rest! :P

Cause to research...

I have always thought ,that I had potential to do some research work & ofcourse in field of my interest computer science and it always been something elusive. Now it is final, I have to do Thesis to complete my Master's!!Nothing big like the stuff that they do in Phd, something thing in the similar line but really, I mean really small in comparison.

It basically means that I need to put more effort reading research papers and trying to comprehend the facts that the great minds in CS have laid forth. My work is gonna be in P2P & Overlay networks which I am really interested in.Hope I find something useful that could be used by others later.

Though I was hoping for an assistantship for this, but as luck would have it,I did not get it.But the best thing is my advisor.His name is Dr.Injong Rhee ,who had come up with BIC for TCP congestion control. This logic is used in all implemented TCP/IP setup, basically all computers. So it is pretty huge stuff for me to be his student.

So Fall 2009 has started and the days have started to roll by.Hope I do really well this semester and what not...Let's c..

-Alphy