Aerostat Recovery Device (ARD)

Well, when I began writing this blog, I had promised to post some random stuff here. And it would be like throwing a biased dice if I don't include any technical GYAN.

So here it is- the fruits of my 2 months arduous efforts in IIT Bombay during summer 2009 The project title- "Design of an Aerostat Recovery Device (ARD) in case of accidental breakage of tether". Full pdf is available for download. Do check out this link, and refresh as many times as you like ;)
http://www.casde.org/index.php/casde/article/view/4

Well apart from that nothing much to share. Well yes, we said tata-bye-bye to BITS, our home for the last 3.5 years. It was a little sentimental moment, but considering that there is lots more in life ahead, I didn't feel that bad. Lots more includes Mercedes Benz PS in Bengaluru and job at John Deere. But yeah, I will miss DC++ badly :(

Anyways life has been great and will continue to be, Merry Christmas and a Happy New year!

Blitzkrieg '09

Well the story has grown old... So let me just upload the pics and avoid the bak-bak!!

Celebrations at domino's after winning Around 7k.
"Office Office", the event Girish and I won... :)

Thanks for the treat @Girish and Pratik, the megawinners!!

Prizes bagged by our group were Paper Presentation first and second place, Quiz second place, Office Office FIRST place, Sudoku second place... \m/ BPGC rocks!!

True Love

When you are in true love, all you can think is about your love. All you can see is your love, a lot of movies have used this concept. But I neither intend to discuss a script for a movie here nor am I going to write about my latest crush. [So do I have one? ;) ] Nevertheless this is a true incident that happened with me...

My cousin had been to Mysore and had uploaded a picture of a giraffe she had taken. Here it is:

It so happened that I had to answer my CAD exam the next day. I had been studying a chapter on FEM (Finite Element Method). I LOVE IT!! Actually I had also done a project in FEM using ANSYS in this semester. When I saw the picture of the giraffe I pictured a Finite Element Meshed Model of giraffe. For non-mechanical friends, presented below is FEM in two lines.

This is a model of a rectangular plate with holes. In FEM basically the whole plate is divided into a number of small elements and required analysis is done. (Now have a look at the giraffe!)

So I had to conclude that if Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, then the guy who invented FEM must have seen a giraffe when he got the idea!!

Cheers!! So Please Protect Wild Life, who knows which species will inspire the next technological reform? ;)

The day that was April 1st

I have had hundreds of ambitions in life but never dreamt about being a lawyer. May be because I thought I am not so good at lying/ fooling people. But my opinion changed on 1st April 2009 when this happened.

We have a students' blog in BITS started by the journalism department where all BITSians are welcome to post their ideas that they would like to share with other BITSians. Recently they decided to start a "Pic of the day" competition. BITSians can submit pics that they have clicked but it should be based on the theme of the day. At the end of the day, the best pic will be declared as the winner on the blog.

So I submitted this pic and did a lot of propaganda that BITS dome will now be seen on Indian Rupee. "Few specimen of the coin have been kept in Student welfare division for students to view and the details can be read on Hindu newspaper dated 01/04/2009." I had not expected anyone to believe it, because since morning a lot of guys/gals had already been fooled by other pranks and when pesticides are used over and over again even pests become immune to them.

But strangely enough a few guys did fall for it. Guess they were first yearites!! One of them asked me how long it would take for the coins to come in public circulation. I told him within a month we would find these coins all over India and even bus conductors might exchange them for change. At the end of the day, my pic did win the title of POTD (Pic of the day). Yoyo!!

Now if most guys guessed that the pic was photoshoped, where did I fool them? Everybody praised my editing skills and said I am pro in using photoshop. Someone called me the topper of Multimedia Course. They still think I used photoshop. Lol! I used a website that offers a variety of effects. I just had to upload the pic of the dome and it automatically put the pic on the coin and published the pic.

So did I fool you or not?

THE ACADEMY AWARDS

After a successful journey of almost one week in my life (since my last post), I present before you a few of the Oscar winning moments during the week.

The nominees for the most delightful moment are: Slumdog Millionaire winning 8 oscars, some really heated arguments and jokes exchanged with Pintoo, leap into the swimming pool after 1 long tiring week, driving our ALTO after almost one month.

And the winner is: “some really heated arguments and jokes with Pintoo”

Speech: Pintoo is one of my beloved dudes in campus. Arguments with him can last for hours together and almost always are ridiculous and idiotic, yet they have sometimes made me laugh more than I have ever in my lifetime. And the best part he appreciates some of the most pathetic PJs I have cracked. The other day I said the center of mass of his body will shift if he wears his new heavy wrist watch and he will lose balance when he jumps from one tree to another ;) err... he’s our Makadman!! And he liked the technical joke! Hehe! :P By the way, having posted all this in public, I guess I'll have to face one more heated argument (which might get physical :( ) when he reads this post!

In the category of moment of achievement, the nominees are: completing DMV assignment at 2am after some really painstaking efforts, writing my first ANSYS code successfully, topping CAD in Test1 convincingly, Winning the 16^th Trophy in RanchRush (that’s my favorite Yahoo game- see my orkut album for details). And the winner is “Topping CAD in Test1 convincingly”.
Speech: Getting a score of 57/60 was undoubtedly a dream come true when the average is just 25. Scoring more than double the average marks is a big achievement as far as academics are concerned.

The nominees for the most memorable moment are: Antony’s birthday treat at Royal Darbar, 8 guys in 1 Taxi NFS ride from Royal Darbar to BITS, Playing a pun on Antony by telling him he was OPRE topper, Watching “How can she slap me” videos. And the winner is: Watching ‘How can she slap me?’ videos

Speech: In the Dadagiri show on Bindaas channel, Esha the goddess slaps Ravi and he returns it with full force. (You can see the videos from youtube). There are some lolest videos on DC (a place to download all kinds of stuff from, in BITS) :P and the whole campus watches them and has intense discussion on mainchat. This time almost everyone agreed it was Esha’s mistake. She deserved a harder slap.

In the category of fiction, the nominees are: first kiss with my girlfriend (issshhh…!!!), driving our Alto at 100kmph, taking a 10m leap at the swimming pool and the award is bagged by “First kiss with my girlfriend.”

Speech: Fiction refers to some of the dreams that I might have

seen, either asleep or awake. : P

Almost all the times (including this one) awards in this category have been bagged by daydreaming. Well the kiss lastest for just about 20 seconds, but left memories worth 20 years. Err… and those 20 seconds will require at least 20 pages to describe, so I’ll post it some other time. :P Enough for now!