With the slight guilt of having troubled the seniors with their projects by blowing up the UPS, I went to college today. We had to submit the soft copy of our mini project report today (at least we thought so) and JHspice was on it. Rambo Jinu, the chairman, editing and formatting the whole report from top to bottom from morning to evening, got really tired of it by the end.

After finishing it by 3.30 in the evening, we decided to submit it in front of our guide. But it was Anuraj sir!! The man who knew about the power of mordor. A bit hesitating, I finally decided to go and meet him.

There he was standing in front of the lab holding his head. I took a few deep breaths and got ready for receiving whatever was going to come.

Getting closer to him, I was greeted by a warm smile. Something told me that not everything was wrong. Even though Ponnappan had mentioned it, I hadn’t quite digested it.

He said with a smile, “It was not the UPS of your lab that got damaged. It was the other lab’s. You could’ve resumed your work if you had came today morning to the lab.”

The sense of relief and at the same time the sense of guilt for not having had more faith in myself, in what I was doing and in God who sees and knows all, I stood there with him. It was pouring cats and dogs. He was enjoying the rain. Or maybe he was wondering how to get home. His slight headache prevented him from checking our soft copies today and he was standing there, hands folded on the bars of the grill, leaning forward. It was one of those mesmerized moments where you just stare at something and see that you can’t take your eyes away. I accompanied him. After all, neither of us could get out of the building (since the birthday girl, Afaf, had borrowed my Umbrella and I was waiting for her to return it).

We talked.

For the first time in college, I could talk to one of my teachers with an open mind. We joked a while about how a guy riding a bike almost fell down risking a turn in the mud in front of our block. We talked about the rain and how heavy it was. We talked about the department and the sorry state that it was in. I told him about the one thing I wished for the most in college. A few motivating words from the side of a teacher.

He listened to me. He said his part and I said mine. We were entertained by how one of the teachers was trying to get her car out of a messy situation from right under our nose.

It was nice and heart warming.

I guess I’ve never been so literal in my life.

Mission lab – Day 3 (D – Day)

With much more enthusiasm to finally see the fruits of our labour, we were in full swing today. Although I was bit late in waking up due to the uninterrupted series of sneezes that I had last night, I managed to get to the lab half an hour late. The team was given instruction to start without me and start, they had!

I was a bit thrown back (with each sneeze that I made) and I just couldn’t do hardware today. But when Chellan is there, who needs to do hardware? He was already taking things apart when I entered. “Let’s begin installation!”

I was pretty adamant about installing 10.04 as it was an LTS release. But I knew not my fate on the path I had chosen! We forged a way, a psycho path, hoping to find light at the end but alas! The fate that awaited us was grim indeed. Even by the sword of elendil, light was not shone (But our mobile phones helped a lot. 😛 ).

I could say Ponnappan was the hard disk specialist. He had some spell that made hard disks work. We burnt two new installation disks of Ubuntu 10.04 and started installation. Well, just as Hobbes puts it, “You can take the tiger out of a jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of a tiger.” And like that, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to name the computers that I installed something weird. But why make it weird? Lord Of The Rings shall it be!

Shire, started I, Rohan, Lorien and things were going pretty smooth. Except for a few systems simply not accepting the 10.04 disk. They were more adamant than me and I had to go for Debian distros. On our way we found out that we had reinstall certain Windows XP OSs too. We couldn’t risk them having viruses after our job was done.

Our compiler, Bose, was on the job. He was installing systems just like children playing with their toys. And I was sitting on one too. When I reached the partitioning part, I found out that it was a 160 GB hard disk! 50 GB was already given as NTFS for windows. And I was about to give the rest for Ubuntu when I simply asked Ponnnan for his opinion. “Make 50 GB more as D-drive and then give the rest for Ubuntu.”, said he.

“Why can’t it be the other way around?”, I asked.

“Because you install stuff in windows. You don’t do that in Linux”, he said.

I was completely clueless. But I did do as he asked.

However, we sill were forging a path. Unfortunately, none of us cared to notice the faint smell of burnt ash. We were nearing somewhere dark and dreary.

Ponnappan was installing a system with Debian. He asked me where our journey had reached. Although I said “Isengrad”, we both had a fall out on whether it was “Isengrad” or “Isengard”.

“MORDOR!”, thundered a sound from behind! It was Chellan.

Both of us decided on Mordor and named it thus.

Slowly Mordor started coming to life but Frodo had already made it!

“KABLOOOOIEEE!!!”

We heard a blast and all was dark. Here was where the sword of Elendil was of no use. We shone our mobile phones instead. But the damage was done! Something had gone really wrong.

—————————————-

Thus ended the third day with a blast! Anuraj sir consoled me that it was a natural thing to happen and not to worry. But it seems we will have to wait long to see the fruits of our labour.

I was all set to be sitting and installing ubuntu on all the systems when going to the lab today morning. But life just isn’t that easy. We had forgotten about a few CPUs sitting in the cabin. Anuraj sir had told us to check them out. Two of them were brand new and three of them were quite old. Even though we only had three damaged systems while leaving the lab yesterday, now we had 8. But five of them were yet to be diagnosed.

We started away in full throttle. We had two screw drivers today which meant that we could cause double the damage we had caused yesterday. But the great evil struck us! Distraction.

It was the last date to submit the application forms for our sixth semester exams. And we were interrupted constantly by people coming and going giving their forms and talking about this and that. No one was to blame. Sharat had his hands full as he was the rep. I admire his responsibility. He called up all of those who didn’t even bother about the matter and asked them to somehow submit their forms. Ranjith helped him in filling the forms and setting the money matters right. But all in all, our main objective didn’t make much of a progress.

The two new systems that we took today didn’t have hard disks. But it supported DDR2 RAMs. So we had to set them up. Anuraj sir came after a while and blessed us with 6 new SMPSs, 4 DDR2 – 512MB RAMs, one disk drive, one hard disk and a lot of encouraging words. Since we got the RAMs, we decided to set up the new CPUs.

To do that we dissected the already working old CPUs and pulled out their hard disks. We put them in the new ones, placed the brand new RAMs in them and got them working.

Somewhere in between all this, something went wrong. I still can’t get it. We slowed down considerably. I don’t know if it was because we tried installing distros in between this or because we took each and every component apart testing them individually or just because of just plain bad luck, but we were slow.

All things considered, we identified that three motherboards were corrupt and one’s power button wasn’t functioning. Two among the three CPUs whose motherboard was corrupt and the one that had its power button bad were the three among the first five ones that we took!! Putting it that way really makes me crazy.

So all in all, it was a hard software day. and there are still a few hard disks, a couple of drives, two RAMs, and some six or seven SMPSs lying around over there.

Its going to be one heck of a satisfaction once we’ve cleaned the whole thing up. And some emotional attachment to this lab is going to last always even after leaving my campus.

Dear Lord! What a department ours is. One whole computer lab called the “Debian networks lab” lying there completely unattended to! No one even cares whether it lies like that or not. I believe Anuraj sir and Viji ma’am do care, but they just don’t have the time to do anything about it them being the only two staffs in our department (another one of our department’s mention-worthy features).

Anyway, at last I went and asked Anuraj sir if I could help him out. I just couldn’t sit quietly when so much resources were just lying there underutilized. I wonder why no one ever cared to do anything about it.

He agreed and I decided to stay at the hostel itself this week even though almost all the others are happily at their homes. I wanted to learn and moreover, I didn’t want anyone else to feel what I felt on seeing the condition of the lab. So I was determined to do it.

Since all the hostelers had planned to go home, I called three of the day scholars to help me out. Sharat, Ranjith and Sudheesh (Ponnan, Chellan and Bose respectively). We did quite a good job in the lab today.

It was hardware day. Dissecting all the systems and identifying where lay the faults in the systems that didn’t work. RAMs, SMPSs, CMOSs, Motherboards, what not! We dissected everything to the core and have drawn a fine line between those systems having a hardware complaint and those systems that don’t have it.

DDR, DDR2, 128 to 256 to 512 to 1024 MB RAMs were there. All working, surprisingly. We got two spare RAMs and those are still lying somewhere in the lab! Hope no one decides to play flute with it.

A very constructive day and I can see more interesting stuff ahead. Can’t wait for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the software day where we install all the systems with OSs and get them up and running.

To the future!

Sunk in the marsh, I see what lies beneath. Nothing has life anymore. I’m dead and so are the things I perceive. I see people talk, I see people laugh. But everything is just a lie to me. I walk around. I see things around me. The green grass and trees are not green to me anymore. In no words I find respite. In nothing do I feel the reality. Everything floats. The aim, the goal, the meaning, the path… I blaze a trail no more. I follow the path that has already been laid. I find no power, no work, no force heals those wounds events inflict upon you. Once you feel the pain, you’re afraid to even be near such an event again. You isolate yourself. No matter how fast you heal a scar you have on your hand, a smell, a scenery, a few words… They always bring back what you never want to remember…

I always thought I was a fool in seeing meaning in those Wolverine comics that I used to read when I was a kid. But now I see not everything was a fluke to make money. I can now relate to something.

Oh Lord… Forgive us for humans we are.

Responsibilities lie ahead…

Thoughts and emotions, I find them a luxury.