How not to live your life @IISER Kolkata : Act Two

Holler m'fuckas (/Greetings, Ladies)! Time for another discourse, a lesson for life, a priceless nugget of information emerging from within the depths of the ocean of drivel you float around in. Or, as eloquently put by The Viento, do the rest of my bitching over here.

I hadn't planned on the order of my lessons in HNTLYL101 (hints, anyone?), so this post will seem anachronistic. But hell, you'll 'get a life' for reading this. So, lend me your imagination for a while (money is a perfect substitute, though).

Lesson 1: Never categorize people @APC ROY into

a. Roommates, and people who you'd consider sharing a bed with
b. People next door, and on the floor above with high-speed internet connections
c. Sanmoy Mandal, and his elk. (which surprisingly has had only one distinguished hall-of-famer till date)

The what, and the why : See, category a and category c are pretty relevant sub-divisions of the 'Batch-mates you're bothered with' branch. They'll help you lay down a consistent protocol for communication with people around you. Presented with an infuriating 70 odd candidates to live out your fantasy of squeezing toothpaste into someone's pants while they're blissfully asleep, or have a who's-got-game-bitches competition at bathing time @bathrooms, you'll be better equipped to filter out the dross and the mundane, and embark on the aforesaid adventures with like-minded fellows.

It's category b, that kinda 'lured me down the path of sin'. Legendary story, though, that one. It had tropes on friendship, revenge and redemption. Throw in some drama, the 'twist', a big showdown, and the bit about a geeky kid with a laptop who's actions fall into the moral grey area - and you have the makings of a bestseller. I'll save recounting it for sometime later, though!

The aftermath saw me lose out on a couple of friends (forever?). But I try stacking it up against the awesomeness of the whole thing, and it stops giving answers.

Remedy : Just relabel category b as 'People next door, and on the floor above with high-speed internet connections I won't steal internet-access from', and you should do just fine. Ooh, and just so you don't fall into a similar classification, try and come up with something more imaginative for a password. (Example, if your WLAN's called World Wide Item, meriitem as a WEP passkey would probably be a bad idea. How bad? 8 hours, 23 minutes on a 29-line python script ;)

Go home, chew on that.

Cheers,

Abhinandan.

p.s. I think now would be a good time to apologise for keeping category a in the dark about http://www.iiit.ac.in/admissions/undergraduate/ntsekvpyselected . I chose CND over CSD, and will now pursue a B.Tech in Computer Science and MS by research in Computational Natural Sciences (folks, we're looking at Quantum Computation here) over the next five years at IIIT-Hyderabad.

Also, please direct your attempts at sending me down a guilt-trip towards my project mentors at IIT-Delhi, and later at DIPR. Had it not been for those two amazingly wonderful pieces of code I wrote over the summer (and IISER's assessment of my end-sem project - surprise! it wasn't burning_trees.py), I'd never had dragged myself out of the self-loathing rut I'd slipped into. It wasn't exactly fun to be me :P

To everyone who matters, be happy for me.