Holy crap. This is terrible. Just read the article at MSNBC website about another possible earthquake with a magnitude 7-7.5 and more Tsunamis.

It is cruel but atleast we now have a forecast to take measures to prevent the damage and hopefully we won’t end up losing as many people as the previous time.

My life still moves without any incidents. Adios !

I am back after a rush of intense work for the past 3 weeks. Everything is settled down and i don’t have much to do for the coming one week during the spring break. Just a couple of assignments but hopefully no time crunching tasks to take care of !

For today, all classes are over. My meeting with the prof went on well and got a couple of things to take care in my code to get it working the way it is supposed to work. But that is a good thing ! The code really works !

But what am i going to do otherwise ? Well, as it turns out, the plans to go to Columbus, Ohio and Savannah, Georgia to meet old buddies are cancelled and i am just going to lay back and relax here, with nothing much to do. Planned to go to Austin this weekend, but no confirmed plans as of yet and so totally tied to college station over the break.

It does feel weird when you had so much to do the last couple of days and when you suddenly have so much time, the reaction is the most unexpected. You start remembering all those people you’ve been with the last couple of years. Ugh, it is miserable. So, me going to get drunk and do the things i wanted to do for quite some time.

Start my own site. Well i have registered for the domain name quite some time back but nothing much is still in place. I should get it done by this weekend. And i designed a new template for this blog. It is coming out well too. Hopefully, before wednesday, this site will have a new look and i could move out the blog to my site also !

yeah its all the general boring stuff. But nothing much to write. Maybe i should catch up with all that sleep i missed but unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a cumulative effect. After working all through the wee hours in the last few days, i am still wide awake. Well i could babble on for some more time writing whatever i want, but am gonna stop now.

Probably should do more browsing or watch new movies or read the novels i picked up from the library. Can this become any more vegetative ? hmm .. Here comes the end of the ramble.

<p>
</p>

<div style="clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;">
</div>

<p>
</p>

I know it sounds really abstract but that’s a question I’ve been contemplating on for sometime now, after coming to Coimbatore from Bangalore. Life has not been the same and its become dull, boring, monotonous and sating. All the things I hate !

Apart from the dreaded monotony, the family makes so much of a fuss about every miniscule issue and i am really getting tired of this game. Is actually going for higher studies in the US such a big deal after all ?? Why don’t they consider my passion in nuclear as opposed to considering that I’m using higher studies as an opportunity to go to US. Why can’t they get it ?

I’ve been growing fat all these days. Lots of food at the right time adding weight at the wrong places. I know I’m gonna regret this later and seems like my legs are already troubled. Gotta do a checkup on that too. As of now, i need something interesting to keep my mind occupied. Reading books, browsing and roaming around to keep myself busy but am sure running out of options.

Well until next time, I’m going to vegetate even more…

<p>
  There is one more&#8230; About ideas. A daily journal of thoughts that i pour out. Aha !
</p>

<p>
  Oh Thee, my Blog Manager, thou art the soul listener ! Here it comes &#8230;</span></div> 
  
  <p>
  </p>

‘DevDays’ – my first MS event in my short software career till now. I definitely was excited about it and after reading through the agenda covering Whidbey and Yukon, I had expectated quite a bit of mental workout. I got a pass for Devdays Bangalore after a lot of nail-biting suspenses and finally on May 5, i hoped all that was expected was about to happen.

The opening keynote was very normal, not something i had expected after reading through some of the opening notes that have been delivered recently in many conferences. hmm.. Well after that, another developer who spoke, promised us to show the nitty-gritties of programming because this is ‘DevDays’ ! Ha, there’s something assuring, i thought.

Then we moved on to the technical sessions … the interesting bits eh !!

The first one was about ASP.NET 2.0. They spoke about Master pages, personalisation, Role based authentication as all inbuilt features in the upcoming ASP.NET versions. Thats cool. But haven’t i already read all that online. Show me something else interesting, something thought provoking, some complex application where it could be used, saving valuable developer time. But ahem, to my dissapointment, the session ended very soon without any surprises. Even the question and answer session at the end of it was very short 🙁

Then was the session on Winforms and CLR 2.0. The speaker detailed about Generics, partial types and Iterators. Wow cool ! Again, can’t anyone read the online entries from innumerable people talking about these basics. This is not what i want or expected. What happened to the anonymous delegates, and details on all that was mentioned and all the other really neat stuff that the MS devs have spent hours to include in the upcoming release ?! Not a word. Very dissapointing really … About Winforms, there was something new, some new controls but not anything other than that they have shown in the Winforms site.

Ok. Now comes the hands on session. How cool ! Am gonna do some cool code in Whidbey finally. I do not have to toil anymore with collections that are loosely typed with Objects. We can create strongly typed Generic classes over which we could apply constraints and manage to create a robust collection !!! With all that hope we entered the hall, only to find that there weren’t enough seats left. Ugh. Share the computer with a fellow programmer. Ok. Not bad. We could do something like XP here, aha. Or so i thought. The instructor got onto the podium and started dictating exactly what to do. Hello ! These are not kids here for God’s sake. Do give us the requirements, and we will code it out. If we need help, we will look into Google, MSDN or ask help from someone who knows this stuff. Don’t and Never dictate. After 10 mins, i lost all the vigor with which i entered into the place. So much for hands-on sessions …

After the lunch there was the Yukon session. There were quite a bit of surprisingly new things. But probably IMHO there was quite a bit of focus of the Reporting services, which could have been dealt with in later sessions. But anyway this one was good ! Ah at last. Then came the hands-on for Yukon. Oh God will these people never change their ways … More dictation again …

It was in the back of my mind that we have the ‘Ask the experts’ session anyway to clear all our doubts. No problem. Since this was scheduled for more than an hour, we were expecting to see some interesting questions and some thought provoking answers here. But, it was dissapointing again ! Not on the part of the experts, but on the developer’s side.

Certain things dawned upon me then. Ofcourse I was not the only guy who was bugged by this contentless showcase but then we have all been following blogs and all the discussion that has been happening in the past year. May be that is the reason why these sessions weren’t interesting at all. As someone said in the Keynote, I was expecting to see some hardcore nitty-gritties of programming in Whidbey and Yukon but instead it just turned out to be an overview of the basics. There could have also been an indepth session on the CLR 2.0 which covers behind the scenes on the exact kind of things that the CLR does for each of the new constructs and how it is being handled. That would have been very interesting. Also, I would have certainly liked it a lot if the speakers didn’t treat the developers like kids and start popularising the absolute ‘drag-drop-build an application’ philosophy.

Well, at the end of the day, for all the money’s worth, we got a bunch of 4 CDs containing Whidbey, ASP.NET Resource Kit and an Infopath SDK ! Cool ! But wait, where’s my Yukon ??! Hey, please give me a copy … Why did you forget that ?!

There goes my perfect sessions. What a start 🙁

Scoble, is there any reason or background why the DevDays sessions were like this in India ?! I’m sure i am not the only one with this opinion. Mahesh, Babu shared my opinion about the event and so did many others who had come over. Any thoughts or comments anyone ?

Bliss of silence descend down to me.
But without peace, it wreaks havoc,
Words inadequate.