digital curry

my recently increased activity on blogger is the result of inspiration of some super active bloggers in our lab - and so any benefits and more importantly repercussions (read my grades next semester ;) ) can be backtracked to them - nicolas , mauro , and fabien (not necessarily in that order ;) ) Although, being inspired is not really being fair since instead of blogging about news from the world of research and technolgy that matters (for which i religiously scan their blogs everyday!) all i do is blog about ...err 'other stuff'. however i'm quick to realize that i must move on to more important meaningful things ......and hence as a result of a 'scholarly' discussion held one afternoon - over some delicious 'orange' wine !! -ok i'm new to wine ;) - my next blog will be a lot more academic. Its focussed on a futuristic organic helmet ( the first user test for which has already been conducted and i'm holding back posting details for some IP rel...

i'm very proud to post this piece of information here. " Dear Friends,It givesme pleasure to inform you that our students have won theprestigious Agilent All India Best BTech Project Award 2005.Students: S. Venkataramanan and Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury (ECE, BTech 2005)BTP title: EOG Signal Acquisition, Processing, Applications, andOcular Bio-systems ModelingSupervisors: Dr. Harshal Nemade and Dr. J. S. Sahambi The project was short-listed from 24 BTech projects from all over Indiafor the final presentation on 24th June at New Delhi. Venkataramanan andShubhodeep presented the work and went through an interview at New Delhi.According to the award, the cup to the IITG will be given in September in afunction at New Delhi. In addition, the students have an offer for a onemonth internship at the Agilent Technologies, UK or USA.A BTech project from IIT Kharagpur gets the second place. " and thats when our institute is only 12 years old and the youngest IIT ;) watch out !!!!!!

talking of travelling cheap ......i managed to finish my entire lugano trip under 15 francs . Yeah thats right....from lausanne to lugano ...a night stay by the lake and an entire day in lugano. Then fort exploring in bellenzona...all for 15 francs* well conditions apply ...but then they always do ;)... I'll be back with the details and pics later. In case you guys in india dont find 15 francs cheap ....travel in switzerland is DAMN EXPENSIVE ...and Lugano is FAR !

speaking a language when you only know a few words in it can be dangerous, or hilarious ..depending on whether the other person has a sense of humour ;)...and writing even more so . I haven't yet had any experiences with french yet but some rather, hilarious/embarrassing depending on whose side you are on ! , experiences with Estonian :). So one fine morning, fresh with the hangover of a two hour french class and an informal estonian learning session the linguist in me took a deep breath and i felt the inherent urge to communicate. My landlady is swiss and she speaks some weird version of french which is so different from the one our french instructor speaks that i found it wiser not to shower my french on her. Iiris, the estonian girl, was still asleep. Never the one to give up, i picked up a pencil and wrote the only two estonian phrases i remembered. good morning -terrehomickunst and i love you (!!) - Ma armistan seent . (its a kind of joke between us so ;) ) and with the smug, ...

oh btw the first surprise was pretty sweet too...but will write about it a little later !

shit happens....and to be fair so do sweet surprises. Yesterday was one such day. i mean the sweet surprise one. I got two wonderful surprises and spent a lovely evening. And i didnt even have to ask ! Well this reall sweet estonian flatmate of mine asked if i wanted to join her to a cafe and then we headed out. The only problem we had no idea of where the cafe was, her only contact for the cafe was a geogian girl whose phone number she didnt have, and both of spoke little french. Err... the little here is sort of relative because my 'little' is two basic french classes ;) and her's was a lot better although she remembers hardly any french she studied(her view. i personally think she has a great french accent with no french vocabulary :D ). Not that i have not found my way to places i had idea about in a place where nobody understood what i was talking about ..but this time i was in no real hurry. And her georgian friend conveniently erased her number from her phone (talk ...

for some reason, well actually (and probably !) the reason is beacuase the blogger system recognizes my computer ip to be that from switzerland, it automatically shows me the entire site in french ! and whats worse i dont seem to have an easy way to reset the language to english . So much for smart systems ! and my last post ...quite aptly titled irrational ramblings was an interface failure (the user is NEVER wrong ;) ) for blogger - dont ask me how...it just was - and so i ended up with a post that says nothing - ah well thats irrational enough !

oh make up something will you !

i've been thinking for quite some time to document my trip to switzerland, however for one reason or another i have been unable to do so. And with evey day passing it gets more and more difficult to write about past events. I bought my first digital camera yesterday a Canon A-510. it was a tough choice to make between the other offered by Sony, Olympus, Nikon and of course Canon. The winning points for the Canon A510 were its manual focussing and the 4X optical zoom. The manual however was in french - but since i'm going to attend french lessons from the 20th i guess i should be okay ;). by the way if anyone else faced the same predicament of reading the manual in a language he's not well versed with despair not ! the manuals are avialable online as pdfs.... ;)