Whiz Kid Woes

This is a very special time for us NEDians. We’re taking a very special semester which does not require us to go to the college at all. We have to go to college about once a week and only for a few hours. We can sit home, relax and enjoy! By the way, this is a mandatory semester which every student must take in order to advance to the next year. However, there are some lucky people who don’t have to take this semester, just because their attendance in the previous months did not meet the required threshold. They’d still advance to the next year and they’ll take this very special semester during the run of the next year. What does that mean? That means that they don’t even have to attend the college once a week! Hurray for them!

Let me say a bit more about this special semester. The teachers don’t have to prepare lectures, the students don’t have to worry about getting up early, attendance or jotting down the long lectures. Moreover, because of the very special nature of this very special semester we get a lot of freedom at home, we can choose not to go to family weddings, we can opt not to visit cousins just like that! What more can we ask for? The duration of this very special semester is approximately 2 months.

At NED, we call it our exams semester.

Today I saw my cousins and a bunch of their friends communicating in sign language without any speech and I think it was the most beautiful mode of communication I’ve ever seen. Imagine, no distractions, no noise stress etc. They were actually communicating faster than a person can communicate through voice and it was with all the emotions. Given a chance, this is one language I need to learn. It was a Valima ceremony and since I am very bad at sign language I couldn’t join them; I sat far away and observed them for a while. It was spectacular!

Behind every great show, every quality service that you use, all quality fabric you wear, everything that you find up-to-mark and satisfactory, there are several stages of excessant amount of efforts involved. I’ve learnt this in time that things don’t happen just like that; at every level a dedication and spirit is involved and is clearly reflected in the end product. Our nation is not very fond of putting in the hardwork but they want excellent results all the time, hoping that some miraculous force will fill in the gaps for them. All this thinking reminds me of the The Architect. The immaculate nature of this universe clearly reflects His interest and devotion. The wonders of nature are in perfect harmony while anything that man has has invented is flawed and is prone to failure. The concept of money and society is to keep the humans under control, I wonder if there could have been a different arragement of those things from what we have right now (multiple realities, parallel existences, quite right). Nature is the ultimate inspiration for the humans and I think everything we do, for ourself, or someone else; no matter how small, we should do it with full devotion and devoutness.

I’m writing a research (re-research actually!) paper on AES: Using Rijndael. Cryptography has always been one of my passions and our teacher was kind enough to allow me to change my paper topic from DIP. I’ll post a link to the research paper when I’m done with it. I don’t believe I’ll be able to finish on time for SCONEST 2005.

Star Wars III is one the best movies I’ve seen this year. Like Star Trek, the best thing about the movie is the exquisite nature and the solidty of the characters. One of the best thing about the movie was the entire movie plot, it was just awesome! The movie has beaten LOTR 3: Return Of the King in terms of total business. Master Yoda, Windu, Obiwan were great throughout the movie but the most impressive performance was by the young Skywalker. He was young and was easily manipulated to join the Dark Side but the entire idea there was quite profound.

There is a very interesting phenomenon which most of us don’t know about. We see only one side of the moon all the time! Although both the planet and the moon are rotating and revolving, but we see only one side of the moon all the time. It was hoped that the other side of the moon will have more deeper craters but the satellite pictures reveal that the back side of the moon is actually flat (flatter than the side we see, with craters), it is like a huge dish-antenna of some extremely complex formation.

The point I wish to make here is that unless one studies all aspects of a subject, one cannot truly appreciate the better side (assuming neither is bad). As good/bad can only be a point of view; no matter much one studies, one’s judgements will always be subject to the life experiences and beliefs. I had a small chat with Joel today about this, although he did not share his point of view but he asked me if there were any absolutes and I had to disagree, given my limited wisdom. It seems ironic to me when they say wisdom comes with age and experience; it is correct to a certain extent, but that wisdom could be biased to so many things.

To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom. – Ashley Montagu

Faraz Naseem (Third year, Electronics Dept.) is the Chief Editor of the newsletter publication. I contributed some news pieces and did some final design touches.

This is the 6th time Fedora’s installation has failed on me! My nice friend Muhammad Yahya downloaded the FC4 DVD for me and I was really excited to get FC4 up and running on my spare laptop! After going through the the entire tedious setup procedure, it just terminates abnormally! Bye bye Fedora! I’m installing Slackware on my spare machine!

It was mighty fun today! We had to workout the tickets, so we missed the Intel keynote today. I attended the ‘Databases’ track today. I was able to answer some of the questions by the speakers which they said had not been answered in any other TechEd 2005 sessions in different cities! He was happy to know that I was from Pakistan and that I was an undergraduate student.

I drove on the roads of Delhi today as I hired a cycle-rickshaw back to the hotel from the mall and asked the driver to sit on the back while I drove it! Now I can claim that I have actually driven the streets of Delhi (that too, without a license)! The guy’s name was Phooldev and I caught him just outside the mall near Radisson.

Hey I’m finally in New Delhi! Flew on PK-272 from Karachi to New Delhi and landed on the Indira Gandhi airport. We visited the malls today and watched an indian movie! The malls are just radical and the sky scrapers are just amazing! Still trying to get hold of Gagan!

After a series of hurdles we are finally waiting at the airport lounge at Gate 25 for our flight to New Delhi. We are a delegate of four from Karachi and five people from Lahore would join us for the TechEd conference. I’ll post the entire story when I get over there. I won’t be having my laptop with me! Mr. Vaqar just offered us some coffee and we’re all set to leave. I still don’t have Gagan’s contact information. God save me!