C-TIDES stands for?

Just thought of checking the poll feature, clubbing it with marketing lessons for tomorrow’s exam on Marketing Management.  🙂

Revamp

I didn’t like the way my wordpress theme (MistyLook) displayed the images that would post. There was this white stroke and a mild shadow, which I didn’t like.

The sad part was that the theme didn’t allow changing the HTML, so border=”none” failed to work. The obvious workaround was to change the theme. But there are few things I look in a theme: customizable header, one sidebar and some little things like the way sidebar items are bulleted, the way it displays categories/tags beneath each post and so on. All this combined made MistyLook the best theme for me. Except this image problem. Sometimes I feel Blogger was better!

I tried other themes which didn’t display images or which allowed HTML changes, but each one seemed in some way short on looks, some way of formatting and layout which was not acceptable. This was frustrating.

Till I came upon Ocean Mist. This one allows border removal and has the least number of unacceptables. So I can have a square white image with some illustration in the centre of the image, without an irritating border to reveal that it is actually a square image! The conclave logo looked much neat now.

Still this theme has some problems, but I think it will stay for some time. Let me get used to it.  🙂

I made a new header (picture taken on the Arunachal trip). I was even able to add blog title and tagline, which I coundn’t in the previous header for fear of spoiling the look of it. But here in this theme, the title/tagline are placed too far from the big header to influence the looks of it. One more positive point!

Redesigning your blog makes you very excited, but all the fun vanishes when you are have to convince a friend that accompanying you to somewhere won’t be a waste of his time.

Releif on Monday!

Spending a weekend without internet is bad, really bad.

Over the mess table…

…Hemanth (Lavigne) disclosed that Obama-Biden sounds to him like Osama bin Laden.

After over 3 years of engineering education

After every quiz went bad, you thought you would study for the next one. And you didn’t. How long was this to continue? Eventually, one fine day, you realize you have had enough of self-humiliation (if such a thing exists in the first place), and you begin showing some interest in the class. Begin. That means writing your own notes.

You stare at your notebook filled with doodlings, sketches, random words here and there. You say to yourself, “Enough of all this. Let’s get serious in life.” You leave two pages blank as a partition between the old life and the new (yet to start) life, and begin writing on the 3rd page.

You keep on writing, till you face with the symbol. It’s a harmless looking symbol on the board. The professor’s writing is not that bad that you can’t read it. You know its ‘K’. But is it in capital or small? After years of seeing big heavy books with your room neighbours that have 5 pages devoted to ‘List of Symbols’ immediately after the preface, you are sure of one thing at least: Capital K and small k may, and be all scientists cursed for it, represent two very different things. So different that when you write one instead of the other in exam, the professor will happily tell it to the entire class and the entire class will understand the grave folly and laugh seeing your face. Before the mystery of capital/small shows any signs of being resolved, the symbol next to K astounds you. Is it a subscript ‘E’ or a normal ‘E’? You begin making possible combinations. If it is a normal E, and if the K is capital, it made sense: KE stands for Kinetic Energy. But soon enough this dreadful feeling begins to haunt you: This in engineering education, here Kinetic Energy is no more represented by KE, you have some weird symbol for it. It used to be sigma in one of the previous courses.

After few more trials and guesses, you give up. The next resort is to ask someone what the symbols on the board meant. You look around. People are busy writing. Everyone knows what the symbols meant, you are sure of this. You suddenly realize that may be the professor was using the symbol since long, may be he would have explicitly mentioned about it in some previous class. After this, you pack the idea of asking someone.

Suddenly, you hear the professor shouting and asking if could erase the board. You look up, to realize that while you were dealing with the wretched symbol,  the entire board was full, and the he was waiting to erase the symbol part of it. You forget everything, copy the symbol as it is, drawing a vertical line for K and drawing those two protusions of the alphabet from exactly the same place where the professor had drawn them. You place your E, relative to the K, in exactly the same place as the professor has placed his. And then the board is erased.

You make a mental note to remember that this symbol was a problem when you would mug for exam. When the exam arrives, you look at your notes, forget everything that had happened in that class. You see the symbol, the first impression tells your brain that the symbol is so and so. You accept it, unaware of anything that passed, be it k or K. And you write the same in exam. And it turns out to be the opposite. And the professor tells it to entire class. And they laugh seeing your face.