Rockstar

My version of the poster :D
The following text is not exactly a movie review. It is not for those who want to watch the movie in the near future as it will contain spoilers. You can refer this for the movie review.
I watched the movie today. Not among the best movies, but I did like cinematography and screenplay a lot. Though still found story a bit weak, as is the case with most of the bollywood movies these days. The movie-makers wants to show a lot of things, but always lack the strength of story which has to carry everything. I did not find the reasons strong enough for the actions.
This movie is about making of a Rockstar. As it is a bollywood movie, the making of rockstar has to involve a girl. Bollywood people should realise, it is not necessary that you always have a love interest for the protagonist in the movie. I would had been rather happy to see the journalist as the lead lady and our guy could have had some other reason and story. Two reasons for this suggestion - it would had been a nice change, and the other reason, which is a bigger reason, that girl Nargis does not know how to act. Yes, she can improve if she tries, but this performance was not acceptable at all. Ranvir Kapoor is surely going to be a big name in future. His performance was brilliant. He has been superb in all the movies in past too.
It was a good attempt, but at least in my view, the team failed to delivery what it (probably) is capable of, particularly the script writer(s).
According to me, the strengths were:
1) Ranvir Kapoor
2) Screen play
3) Cinematography
4) A.R. Rehman's music
And the weakness:
1) Nargis
2) Weak story and script
3) Total runtime
And yes, it reminded me of Delhi :). In almost all the scenes in the first half, I could not restrain myself from telling the person sitting next to me that this is Delhi Universoty, this is CP, this is where I live (Pitampura :)) and this is blah blah blah

PS: Yeah yeah, the main reason behind writing the complete post is the poster :)

Pie

Poor sun does not get its share of pie.. any guesses why??? (No PrIzE for guessing though)

APOGEE 2008 - Inside

A few names which come to my mind when I think of APOGEE 2008: (in psuedo-random order)
Gautam, Jyoti, Sumanth, Reeshav, Dhiraj, Ravindra, Divya, Vinay Soni, Pradeep, Ritesh, Raja, Sagnik, Ali, Rajat, Jeffery, Mohit, Gurukaran, Puri, Ankit Mittal, Shubham, Tarun.
Favourite moment: 11th March 2008 1400 hrs:
Lunch at Sky. Thinking about inaug... almost all the projects were working :). In all it should be 20+.
Scariest moment: 11th March 2008 0600 hrs:
I woke up. F*ck! Oh I am in chota wala lab (2138). Oh fish! Why was I sleeping.. Oh fish! what's the time? Oh fish! just 6 hours left for assoc room inaugration. Oh fish! We need to move all the stuff to the assoc rooms. Oh fish! Where are all the people? Gautam... uth saale... kuch kar... just 6 hours... kya kare.. oh fish! Tu kuch kar yaha... main hostel jaake logo ko utha ke lata hun. (Dub: Gautam... wake up... do something.. just 6 hours.. what to do..oh fish!... You do something here.. I'll go to hostel and get people from there.) Ring Ring... Hello Jyoti!.. tu kaha hai.. MB...abhi tak so rahi hai.. just 6 hours left. Jaldi aa... main hostel jaake logo ko utha ke lata hun (Dub: Ring Ring... Hello Jyoti!.. where are you.. Meera Bhawan...sleeping till now.. just 6 hours left. Come soon..I'll go to hostel and get people from there. )
Funniest moment: 13th March 2008 0930 hrs:
Explaining the projcet to the judge; and I was wearing cargo ( it should be called pyjama actually) and T-shirt which read "I am Kind of a Big Deal" :D. Actually I was supposed to change before the judging seesion, was on the way to hostel to do the same at around 0845 hrs. But then got to know that judges have already arrived, so aborted the plan and went back. (I am not too sure of the date for this one :D)
Five things which make me happy as Co-ord, Instrumentation Forum, APOGEE 2008:
- Assocs collaborated to conduct events
- Over two-thirds of the projects on the display in our assoc were working. ( Generally percentage is pretty low)
- Good participation from all three batches in our assoc (don't expect anything from psenti-semites)
- Our assoc had two rooms full of projects and workshops
- Our Group leader called me after Val-D to congratulate us
Five things which don't make me happy as Co-ord, Instrumentation Forum, APOGEE 2008:
- The events were not handled so well by Instru assoc.
- Wireless Quest (new event, required particiapants to design radio receiver) failed even after the (not-so :P) hard work
- Abstract submission was vague. Only projects which were being done seriously should had been submitted. Inspite of my efforts to do so, finally it dint happen properly.
- Guest lectures were not given due attention
- Publicity was not so effective.

APOGEE 2008

Well, its time for APOGEE 2010, but alas, I am lagging by two years. Lets not wait further, lets do it this time. APOGEE 2008. Truly, one of the most memorable events of my life and I am sure that it will remain so even at the time of APOGEE 2050. APOGEE i.e. A Professions Oriented Gathering over Educational Experience is the national (rather, its international now) level inter-college technical festival hosted by BITS Pilani.

At the time of APOGEE 2008, it was in my third year, and I was the co-ordinator for Instrumentation Forum ( association of students of Electronics and Instrumentation ). So I was responsible for all the activities of Instru assoc for APOGEE 2008. We were some 70+ students. Together we organized guest lectures; technical events (Parishod, Open hardware, Virtuosity, Garovista, Siddhi, Wireless Quest, Breadstroming, Quintronics) in collaboration with some other assocs; workshops; and we prepared some prize winnig projects :).

Events... lets not discuss it. I accept that we could had done better in organization of the events. But projects and workshops.. they were the highlights.. that is what made the APOGEE 2008 memorable, atleast for me.

Workshops - we conducted two workshops - One on MEMS and another one on Industrial Automation. These were not professional workshops. It was like students (primarily first year, guided by third year students) study and present some (not necessarily :P) new technical topic to the junta during APOGEE. So one group prepared on Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems and the other group prepared on Industrial Automation. Both the groups had some 8-10 furst year students guided by 1-2 third year student(s). The MEMS group studied the various concepts/processes involved in MEMS and explained it with one example (I think it was Cantilever). They were planning to use some software tool called Sugar, but I don't remember if they finally did it or not. The other Industrial Automation Group prepared a working model of Tile Industry. They integrated it with LabVIEW also. The model showed the various staged involved in manufacturing a tile. In reality, manufacturing of tiles invlove very high temperatures for baking and stuff. So this was just a model, and it prepared models of tiles :D. It was working in the sense that there was a conveyor belt, controlled by motor, some other moving parts like a 'heavy' weight which can be moved up and down, and is used to flaten the stuff to form tiles and so on. Both of them got reasonably good response.

Projects - This was the thing. Our show in Project competition was lot better than previous times :). We won first prize in Automation for 'Digital Display'; first in Industrial Processes and Automation for 'Automation of Tile Industry'; first in Signal Processing for 'Speech Controlled Wheel Chair'; and second in Signal Processing for 'Automated Linesman'. Apart from project competition, some projects won prizes in events too - first in Siddhi ( in the module which required a robot to imitate some biological organ/organism ) for 'Octapod'; and first in Open Hardware for 'Speech Controlled Wheel Chair'. Apart from the winners, some other projects were - Surface Colour Plotter, Robotic Arm, Free Space Optics (this was inspired from my and gautam's first APOGEE's project), GRID - Automated Path Tracking Robot, Writing robo, Automated Machine Error Detection System, PoleClimber, Table Ice Hockey, Breaks Unleashed, etc. Most of these project plus may other whose name I dont remember (sorry) were working :). I was really happy and satisfied as we had more than 20 projects in working condition.

I'll upload the photos on some online album and update the link in this post soon.

This all was just data. And obviously I remember something more than just data from this memorable event. If I post it here, it will be too long post, so lets split it. I'll 'blog' and not report in my next post on APOGEE 2008.

DSP yes DSP no

Actually I would had preferred starting with APOGEE 2008 or Speech Controlled Wheel Chair, thoose two are my favoutrite. But they'll need some visual effects, and right now I am in my office and I don't have them.
So lets move on to this one...
DSP yes was till third year, rather till my placements started in the seventh semester. I was really interested in DSP, Communication Systems and related stuff. Actually I still am. But at that point of time, I wanted to make my career in DSP. I feel really bad to admit, but the main reason for DSP yes was that I felt microelectronics is out of my reach. So, at that time, I decided not to step in microelectronics. The second best option was DSP and Communication. Moreover, my profile also suits pretty well for this field. It includes my APOGEE projects - Free Space Optics ,Specch Controlled Wheel Chair; my formal projects - Advanced Experiments in Telecom Networks, Reconfigurable Architecture for Turbo Encoders for Software Defined Radio; and my electives - Mobile Telecommunication Networks, Telecom Switching Systems and Networks, Digital Signal Processing, Digital Communication. With all this, it seems I am deeply interested in DSP and Communications, which is obviously true.
But I still thought of VLSI, particularly Analog. It feels more electrical than DSP/Communication which has signals, statistics, algorithms.
Then came Placements. The best thing they did to me was helped me believe that I can, I can get into VLSI. The first big relief came with nVidia :), no I was not hired, but I was among the six shortlisted for interview. That time I realised that Digital VLSI is definitely not that difficult. The end was even better, Cosmic Circuits Pvt. Ltd. selected me :) It works in Analog VLSI, we'll talk about in detail some other time.
But this was really the turning point, and boy, I am enjoying this DSP no world :)
Rishi Mathur
Design Engineer
Cosmic Circuits Pvt. Ltd.