Another note on the doomed blog :)

Hi all.....
Yes, Mithra ..just to add to your blog update, I too couldn't resist writing after Hari's comment. :)(no offense meant). And just a wish, hope the rest of the girls pipe in real soon too, if not for anything else but to show that cs girls always have had higher enthu than the cs guys.:p

My life in the past 1.5 years.... well its not taken a multitude of turns but each of the decisions which had to be taken were pretty hard. But I hope that each decision in its small way is taking me where I want to be.

The worst thing after the college farewell, and a great but extremely short time at home, was leaving for Hyderabad to join Oracle. (Just to add, it seemed like the worst thing then... but I have really cried for those days later.) As always with all my new adventures, I was pretty sure I would be there for only a few months if not less, and would escape at the first opportunity that I got. With such a mentality, Oracle was a difficult place to make friends, except those I already had from NITT. And the first few training months were great....with the NITT (majority CS) gang always hanging out together. Once training got over, I actually came into the so-called software engineer life. And I can assert that the email forwards do not exaggerate a bit when they talk about the countless times that we check our emails. Thats the only thing which seemed interesting in the whole day. As the months went by, I grew more frustrated by the ample time but no work at hand. Hence decided that I could utilise the free time to try my luck at applying.
The problem arose when the design stage (so-called idle stage) of the project ended and the coding stage started right when I had all the deadlines. That was some experience....and there are many auto-drivers who, I am sure will remember me not very fondly, for having made them wait while I took print-outs and then made them wait again outside the DHL shop while I couriered, all in one trip :).
Somehow, and I am cutting this part short... I meanwhile made a lot of friends in Oracle and old friends got transferred to Hyderabad .....and we started having a great time hanging out together. And just when we got into this mode of meeting on weekends, watching movies and hogging at IMAX and having some freaky times together and paying random visits to and from Bangalore to Hyderabad, I decided to go for my Masters.
:) May 27th I had stepped into Oracle. June 7th I think (but forget) was the day I left Oracle. It was heart-breaking to hand over my ID card and bid goodbye to a building which I had hated as much before, as I had grown to love later.

Then I spent a whole month and a half at home, having a great time just spending time with my family. And then I had to fly....alone, across the Pacific to some other country. :) I wonder why I didn't freak out then.
I would have enjoyed the flight more and probably have been jet-lagged more if I had stayed awake the whole journey. I had thought train journeys in sleeper classes from Trichy to Calcutta were the most seemingly unending journeys before I undertook this one.

(Cutting short again...) Tucson, the place where I landed was not quite liek rest of USA. It still does not seem like it. Its this laid back city with very few people, and people who love the sun. I should say the sun never sets on Tucson....(summers are one of the worst you can imagine). The first few months were terrible. I was dreadfuly home-sick though I called it something else. The only comforts were memories of home, Hyderabad and Trichy.... and teh thought that I would surely leave the place by the end of the semester. :)

Well since I am sitting here in an apartment in Tucson, beginning a new semester, blogging on cs100s proves that idea wrong. No, I still haven't fallen in love with this place. But I do like it here. This is where I actually started learning and starting to love Computer Science, I used to wonder before what makes people love something so much that they can do a night out for it.....I guess I got the answer.......here, knowing and understanding made a difference. Learning was fun and slowly but surely, you got addicted.

Thanks to all the ftps in NITT, I really really had to slog it out. I did mess up my grades but what of it.... I went ahead and signed up for tougher courses this semester only because I knew the professor was great. (That too theory of computation ...).

Well all in all , its given me what working in Oracle didn't. But at the same time, its been tough to progress from getting hefty salaries to going back to being a student and searching for jobs.

But in the last month, I have been to these places I never thought I would ever go to. Universal Studios, and Sea World and Hollywood ... and well...its not so bad here after all. And maybe thats what changed things.

But having said all that, I am waiting to go back home....still! :)