Happy 2007!

(This entry tracks back to a far superior blogger's post. The following statement is harakiri*, but here goes nothing: Y'all should watch her space. Harakiri, because I've just directed y'all to some place from where you'll never turn back. So much so, that I might as well stop blogging.)

Last year's been such a roller-coaster ride.. and no.. not "roller-coaster" in its cliched form. More like an actual roller-coaster depicting a sine wave. Yeah, I've been working with a lot of sine waves in the recent past but that doesn't mean it can't make an interesting analogy (or a pathetic attempt at one.)

Started off with a crest..

Got nominated as prefect, to my utter surprise. I mean, for Pete's sake, what leadership qualities do I possess? I can't even handle a one-on-one conversation.. where am I going to handle the likes of 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th graders? Not to mention the tots.. I'm not exactly fatherly material, you know!? As modest as this might seem, it's the truth. Then again, what the hell, might as well live with the honor some kind soul(s) bestowed upon me.

Trough..

9th grade final exams.. "Managed to heave myself into the 10th" is all I want to say, however dramatic that might sound.

Crest..

Summer! Caught up on a lot of web development stuff.. CSS, JavaScript (to an extent), XHTML, AJAX, JSON. Continued dabbling with C++, too. This summer, like every other, was very productive.

Trough..

10th grade. The academic year begins. Transitions away from the holiday mood are normally hard. But this one was especially hard since I was entering the "10th" grade!!11!~~!1! Oldies using every opportunity to instill into this 15 year old's thick head that this year was "critical" since I'd be "appearing for" my "board exams".

Crest..

Experience is something that I've previously underestimated and continue to underestimate. I wrote an Offense Recording & Aggregating System in C# for the school. It's basically an app that allows a select group of students, prefects, to enter the defaulters he's caught that day. Full, with a complete authentication and authorization subsystem and all, it could do stuff like pick out the class with the least number of defaulters if my school captain asked for it.

I'm especially proud of this one because it's one of the few applications I've coded that's actually being used in the real world and.. works! An application whose design, development and testing time was more-or-less 5 days actually worked!

Thanks Faizan, Maneesh and Nishok for getting me to building it. It was certainly an experience!

Trough..

The TCS IT Quiz. I qualified out of 700 teams and secured 5th on stage... last year. Didn't even qualify this time. And it was my fault all the way. I, as usual, fatuously didn't prepare enough. Luck isn't going to sway my way every time. I know.

The trough didn't turn into a crest this time, it just neutralized into a series of ripples.. unit test, got to making this personal website, first term exam and then got to more-or-less understand how DNS worked even though I got through the theory a year back.

Crest..

Got to make our school website. Again, I build stuff like this all the time in bits-and-pieces but what was special about this one was that it was going to be a live, production site.. the pinnacle of web presence for a whole organization. Originally planned to take a couple of weeks, it dragged on to take the better of one-and-a-half months, firstly, since I wasn't too ace at web programming and secondly, since there was a lot of red tape to cut as to who would be hosting it, the price, the domain and so on. You can find a (somewhat) finished product here.

Trough..

Second term exam happened and it sucked. I actually planned to study this winter but the distractions proved to be way too much. It has been the season consisting of an occurrence that I'm not ready to share it with the world as yet. Cryptically said, this occurrence involves the use of a part of my brain that I've never used before while more importantly involving another organ that I've never used before other than to carry out its biological purpose... my heart.

Here I am on the 1st of January, 2007 still in the trough that I've managed to carry over to this year.

Two-knot-knot-six has been the best and worst year of my life. As good as it has been, it has ended leaving me a mess. A mess that I hope 2007 will help sort out.. unless its desire is to be referred to as a black year in my life.

This is one of the last blog entries you'll see until the 26th of March, 2006, the end of my board exams. I'll be back with a better vocabulary, less depressing posts and renewed creativity, hopefully.

Until then.. auf wiedersehen, bon voyage, sayonara.. so long.. ciao!

* - Guns & Roses Lead Vocalist Axl Rose uses it in his 'lil speech before singing Estranged, so.. I used it.. *cheesy smile*..