Done with exams!

Back after a long hiatus. The grueling final exams of the Fall '07 had kept me off blogging. The semester wasn't bad, and I'm satisfied with it, though, there are things I would be improving on the upcoming semester, which is what I'll use the whole of winter vacation for. This vacation we (as in me and my roomie, Vish, aka Jay) intend to slog harder than we did through the semesters to achieve the mammoth goals we have set for 3-4 weeks!

It has started snowing here, a couple of weeks back, actually. And I find it very exciting because this is the first time I'm seeing snowfall!!! It looks beautiful around, everything is just white, PURE WHITE! No adulteration! But it's not easy to survive in snow, once outdoors, you gotta be careful to be well equipped: thermals, weather-proof jacket, good shoes (if not snow shoes), nice head-cap, muffler, etc. The wind chills are the worst part, sub-zero winds blowing at tens of kms/hr are not easy to bear. And just 2 days back I had been to Robinson Mall's Walmart, and the wind actually strayed us away from our paths while we were walking on the highway!!!

Here are some photos, see end of the post for complete albums.

This is CMU's legendary ECE department, aka Hammerschlag Hall.

CMU's School of Architecture

Lying down for a short nap...

Naah... it's pretty cool down and you bet don't you stay any longer than a few moments, lest it freezes your nice little butt into a hard rock.

Once lush green lawns of CMU are now all snow-clad, no trace of green colour anywhere!!!

Cute snowman that some beautiful girls made (wish they too were in the photo :-P )

Thanks to thermals, Vish's attempts to freeze his a$$ is foiled!

Snow everywhere!

This is how parkway looks like after snowfall through whole night. Taken from Namrata's house.

Brave boy!

Only the braves dare tread in such heavy snow and lethal wind chills...
On our way back home, after we went grocery shopping at Walmart the previous day, that's what's in that HUGE ruck-sack.

Raju ki maa (scolding): Badmash Raju, drinking wine?? Aaa???

Apart from these, writing my own shell, exploiting buffers to open an interactive shell on remote system, developing small yet completely functional proxy server, and a zillion other projects kept me busy through the post-midterm part of the semester.

What I promise my readers this winter break are:
0. vim: a beginer's guide
Only because, I believe true programmers use ONLY vi[m]
1. Why vim?
Why I believe 0 is so true
2. New and revamped homepage
3. Why simplicity rocks: in light of Unix design

As I promised, and as usual if you have read so far, then you deserve to get bored a bit more... here are some albums that Vish has put up:
0. Snow in Pittsburgh
1. More Snow in Pittsburgh

Photo credits: Vish