One month in Dutch-land!!!

Its been exactly one month having left home (needless to say, missing home a lot!), and also implies successful survival for an entire month in this awesome, yet difficult environment (I can confidently say now that I can adapt anywhere in the world! (well, anywhere excluding Alaska!))

This week didn't really bring about much excitement! [:P] Classes(sometimes boring), assignments(always hard), my first written exam here(Piece of cake! MCQs -PU people will love it here :D) and a lot of running around(getting habitual now) consumed the entire week. The reconfigurable computing Lab which I am so crazy about, also didn't bring any respite. Contrary to my expectation, not many groups turned up with the solution for the component we had to design(yes, we did have our solution!! Me and my dutch-partner (Ath), spent the entire Sunday morning in the Library(the most amazing place to study) to wrap up the design and coding in flat 4 hrs!! Talk about efficiency! :)) The TAs spent most of the time checking our codes (so very pointless). At the end of the Lab, I walked out disappointed, again with the burden of homework to be 'expected complete' next Wednesday!

Since today is a special day (1 month completion, remember?), I thought I would pen down *my* view of Holland, University and life in general here.. So, heres 13 points which I felt were unique about this place! (why 13??, well my b'day is on the 13th!) 

1) You can forget your laptop in class, lab, anywhere and still expect it to be there! If you forget to lock your bicycle, even God can't help you. 

2) The cars wait for the bicycles to pass by. The bicycles wait for the pedestrians!

3) Everyone is honest and hardworking. They wont lie and would never mislead you. Whatever is the fact, they tell you on your face!  

4) The air is clean, the winds are strong and the weather changes every moment. Luckily it hasn't rained heavily yet! :)

5) In our apartments, we have taps with two knobs. One for hot water and the other for cold water, available 24 x 7. But the moment you step out of your house, forget the concept of *free* water. You actually have to go to the bathroom to refill your water bottle. (Even dutch students do that! and its potable water) 

6) Mobile-landline calling is way way cheaper than mobile-mobile calling!! 

7) Internet bandwidth is damn awesome!! However, breakdowns are common! Esp. DNS server breakdowns. (happened twice till today :( )

8) Fruits, dairy products and food in general, is of the highest quality, though a little costly.. Potatoes are really cheap and available in plenty.

9) Even the birds here (pigeons and crows) are healthier :P. The crows don't crow! (atleast I haven't heard them crow!) and pigeons are not at all scared of people.. 

10) You can talk with your professor like you talk with your friends.

11) Dutch girls are quite tall and physically well built (could beat the hell out of anyone :P), but everyone here is very friendly. More number of women smoke cigarettes, than men. 

12) They said, "You will fall in love with bikes when you come to the Netherlands!". I didn't.

13) EWI (23 stored, my department building), has 4 awesome lifts, which accelerate at > 10m/s squared. So, you can actually feel the G-force when the lift starts/stops. :) 

A complete month has gone by! My food habits have drastically changed (No more tea, snacks or chapati (we did find rotis here) - bhaji) Its been bread and rice all the way (thanks to my roomie - Surya), with only God knowing what all ingredients we add!! :) The next week will be a long one, with me expecting the assignments to get tougher and deadlines approaching faster than expected.. So pray for me! (I am serious!) 

My best regards to all!

Enjoy Life!!

Anand Khot

15 hours of Yale Patt

As promised, I come back with the blog for this week!!!

The week went smoothly with not much surprises.. Things have started to settle in and now, I do have a routine. For the rather unfortunate people living in Van Hasseltlaan, the day usually starts early at 6:30 am, when the alarm goes off all of a sudden. But, being the lazy engineers that we all are, we hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. Its not until its 7:30 am, that I regain consciousness, just to discover my roomie, starting to make his breakfast and lunch. Hurriedly, I enter the bathroom and have a quick shower (Btw, there is something interesting and annoying, about the bathrooms and toilets in the Netherlands, but I'll leave it for some post later). After having some breakfast and packing my bag, its time to unlock my bike and head out on the windy road to college.

The time just flies between 9 and 6, when I am doing something or the other at the campus. After 6, time again flies by, with me doing some assignments(ofcourse, along with usual lukkhegiri on facebook) or making dinner.. When your eyes start hurting, its the perfect time to retire to bed. The reason I simplify and wrap it up in 3 lines, is because a hell lot happens in between 9 am and 12pm, so much so, that it will take me hours to narrate it.

Okay then, coming to the main point - This week's highlight.. 

Last Sunday, I enrolled for the 'Yale Patt: Advances in Computer Architecture' guest lecture series, which ran from Monday to Friday (for 3-4 hrs everyday). Unfortunately, I couldn't attend all of the lectures, since I had a few compulsory classes clashing with this event. The lectures I attended were quite insightful and great fun. It was an honour to listen to Yale Patt, a micro-architecture guru, talk about the complexities and opportunities in future (multi)processor designs. Of all his witty remarks, sarcastic comments and amusing analogies on a wide spectrum of technical issues, I particularly liked two instances. First one will require explaining some technical background and jargon, so I'll skip it. Heres the second one - On the last day, when Yale Patt was gifted with a TU Delft sweatshirt, he brought up the topic of 'Whats the difference between guys and girls !??' (this was off-record, meaning that it was not being video recorded). He says, and I quote, "For we guys, when we see a girl and like her, we say- 'Yes, *this* is the girl I want!!'. But when a girl likes a guy, she thinks -' If I can change the way he does this, and change the way he does that, then I think I'll like to be with him!!' .. Lol, pretty insightful there, esp. coming from a computer architecture veteran whose inventions have gone into the cutting-edge Intel and AMD processors 

So, apart from attending this cool lecture series, I also, managed to get started with my assignments (I had to!! .. Trust me, all the assignments just fall into your inbox on one day! Its like the saying goes- 'When it rains, it doesn't rain, it pours!'. Not to mention, these assignments are nowhere close to the 'Mickey Mouse' assignments we did in Bachelors!!)

And btw, that assignment for Reconfigurable computing design class I talked about in the last post, is still in Design phase (:P :( ) and its due on Wednesday.. Hoping for the best!

Till then, Adios!

Cheers,

Anand Khot

My Life in the Netherlands

First and foremost, a few disclaimers

I have decided to update my blog every weekend, updating my status and recording interesting/amusing events over the week. If you know me well, you must have realized that a lot of future posts would give insights of my academic life (I am here for that, ain't I?) and would have ocassional mention of trips and parties etc.

I had an amazing introductory week at TU Delft, but unfortunately, I hadn't bought my laptop then, and now, I am just too lazy to write about it. But to summarize, I had the perfect start to my academic life at Delft, and the credit surely goes to the Introduction Week team and the Indian seniors here.

Also, to everyone, I got so super-excited about the courses here, that I decided to take up 6-7 courses in the First quarter itself. There are a lot of reasons for this, which is useless to discuss here, but I know what I am doing. The bottom-line is, I am trying to pull off a super-feat in a completely new education system along with a lot of other 'First time' activities like cooking food, washing my clothes (No washing machine in my apartment :( ), ironing them, fixing my bicycle etc etc.. So, as you all must have guessed, i am super screwed up.. The good news is that I am learning to do all that, and will eventually succeed. The only problem is that its very difficult to start my laptop and hit on the Skype button to have a nice chat with friends and family.. So, please bear with me for atleast 3 months from now. My second quarter is a lot relaxed with max 4 subjects and hopefully, I can spend a lot of time catching up with you all.

Intresting activity last week :

I enrolled into the Reconfigurable Computing Design Course last week, and some of the world's famous professors teach us that course/ associated with it. Had awesome fun attending the lectures, but even more amazing was the Lab work. The TAs for that Lab are really helpful and quite knowledgeble and the best part was that we were working with some amazing infrastructure on some real life challenging problem. Quite something!! My partner for that lab is a 7 feet Dutch guy named Ath (pronounced Aaa -Th). We have to design a reconfigurable-component, which integrates into the system, over the next week and i am really running short of time, since the offer is that the team which designs the module better than what the TAs could manage, gets an extra point!!

So, Adios till then, have a good week ahead, while I fight for that extra point :)

Cheers,

Anand Khot

M.Sc (Computer Engineering),

TU Delft,
The Netherlands.

(P.S. Feeling proud of the signature :) )