Finals, finally done!!!

26th May, 2008 was my last final paper of Bachelors, my very last paper of Bachelors. :D
It was "Media and Advertising" paper.
As I have said before, I haven't studied a lot during these finals. The was I used to spend my gaps, it didn't feel like I had a paper next day, watching movies, tv series, everything except studying. Well, I was studying of course, but not like I used to. I was always like "Yaar akhri semester hai"
I even said they shouldn't take papers in the final semester, they should let us all graduate with a 4.0 GPA in every course. When I told this to my friend Ashba, she stopped studying too and now she blames me saying "Jab se is ne yeh kaha hai na ke akhri semester mein finals nahi honay chayein mera bhi jee nahi chahta parhnay ka".

And this was the case during the gap I had for Media.
It has always been my record that somehow the first two or three chapters are left. And I always go through them in the point.
But nowadays I don't even count how many of the chapters are left.
And in Media we had to study from two books, I don't think it has ever happened that I bought a book and simply didn't read it or even touched it the entire semester. But this time I have done it all.
Till the end I didn't read one line from the Advertising book and now I regret wasting more than 400 rupees on a book I didn't study from, I could have bought a Stephen King novel from that money and that would have been money put to a good use. At least I would have read the entire book.
Anyways, there we were all sitting together in E1, studying Media, or at least trying to study with a more than 10 minutes break after every 5 minutes of studying. :P
And we also got our photographs that were taken on the picture day, the individual photographs.
At first, everyone was saying "yaar achi pic aaye hai". And then after a while we looked closely and went on with the problems...... Another half an hour waste. After the paper when we had a lot of time to discuss our photographs, they never came up. :P

My friends used to play "Name place" before their mid terms in the first semester. When I got to know this I planned that we'll do the same in the last semester. But we never got a chance. Before we every paper we said "Yaar name place phir reh gaya..... chalo Media ke paper mein khel lein gain"
But didn't go ahead with it then either.

Now let's talk about what happened during the paper.
I was thinking "Yehhh this is the last paper :D"
I spent the paper sneezing.
Every now and then I just sat looking here and there, pretending to think what to write, when I didn't have a clue about the question.
My friend Ashba, I guess, was suffering from the same symptoms, as she too was looking here and there, and twice our looking here and there was synchronized and we got a chance to pass smiles at each other. Notice our condition, that we didn't even think of asking something from the other person and just settled on a simple smile. :) May be that was because I was in the middle of the room (which happened to be Seminar 1) and she was sitting besides a wall. So, it was like one at the middle one at the end. What good would have happened even if I asked her something. :)

Back in school, one my teachers Miss Shamim gave us a lecture before our first Board Examination. She gave her tips for the papers. Like don't worry, etc etc. She also said, sit through the 3 hours, even if you finish half an hour before the paper is supposed to end, still sit and read and reread your answers, ponder over what you can't remember, you might just remember it at the last moment, so don't give back your answer scripts until you are asked too. I practiced this during my bachelors too. Only once or twice, I guess I have given back the answer scripts before time. And this time too I kept the script with me till the end, mainly because as I wasn't feeling well, most of my time was wasted in sneezing rather than writing what little I did know.

But the point is, it has finally ended. All of it.
After the paper, none of us discussed the questions. I never do that, I leave the place if my friends discuss the paper, but this time I didn't have to leave because no one even talked about it. We were just exchanging "Mubarak ho, last paper ho gaya" and shaking hands with each other.

Haa,... finally it has all ended.
We have finally given our last final paper of bachelors.
All through out this semester I was counting like "Last First Mid Term of Bachelors" then "Last Second Mid Term of Bachelors" and now finally "Last Finals of Bachelors".
It would have felt much much better if we didn't have FYP to worry about.
And also if my group and I didn't think that we had to submit our complete FYPs on 28th. (By the way we are supposed to submit it on 4th june, so it isn't like we have eternity left to work on it).

But still it feels good. Pretty good! :D :D

Zindagi ke safar mein koi rasta nahi deta,
Zameen waqif nahi banti falak saya nahi deta.

Khushi aur dukh ke mausam sab ke apnay apnay hotay hain,
Kisi ko apnay hisay ka koi lamha nahi deta.

Uthana khud hee parta hai thaka toota badan apna,
Ke jab tak saans chalti hai koi kandha nahi deta.

Tips

I read the following tips in "Spider" in June 2007 edition, in the column "Tips and Tricks". It has been very helpful for me.

Nifty folder shortcuts

This tip is for setting up your folders for some really easy access without having to clutter your desktop with folder shortcuts. First step, make a folder in your C drive called “shortcuts”. Now you can place as many shortcuts as you want in there. To test it out, create a shortcut for internet explorer and place it in the “shortcuts” folder. Now rename it to “ie”.

Now for step two, right click the “My computer” icon on your desktop and select properties and click on the “advanced” tab. Now select “Environment variables”. In the new window you will have two sections, “system variables” and “user variables”. In the user variables section look for an item (also called a variable) called “PATH”, it it’s there, select it and hit edit. In the edit box type in “;C:\shortcuts” and hit enter. Do not change the value that the PATH variable already has, just add that to the end of it. If there is no variable called “PATH”, then hit the “new” button instead of the edit button and create it with the same value but without the semicolon at the beginning that is, just, “C:\shortcuts”.

Now hit OK on all the windows. To test this out, go back to your desktop and press “Winkey + R”, this will bring up the Run dialogue box. Now type in “ie” and hit enter. Internet explorer should open up now.


Winkey is the key with Windows icon on it.

Using notepad as a log file

Here is a way to use the Notepad as a log file that tracks the date and time of whenever you add something to it.

Open up notepad and type in “.LOG” (without the inverted commas) and then press enter. Now close your file and save it somewhere.

The next time you open that file it will have a date and time appended to it. Now type whatever you want to under the date and time and hit enter when you are done typing. Close the file and save. The next time you open the file it will again append the date and time and you can enter more data after it. This will happened every time you open that particular text file.

You and God

(I especially love the last few lines)

By Mother Teresa

People are often unreasonable,
irrational, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse
you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere
people may deceive you;
Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating
others could destroy overnight;
Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness,
some may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today,
will often be forgotten.
Do good anyway.
Give the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

Poems

Though I don't like poetry a lot, but this label is for the few poems and verses I do like. :)

Why do People blog????

This is something all non-bloggers wonder
"Why do people blog, don't they have anything better to do? or do they have so much time to waste?"

Well it's not that bloggers have nothing else to do, or they are wasting time. There are certain reasons to it:

Some people, like me, just love writing. For us, we write even if there are only a few people reading what we write, and not many who appreciate it either, but we just continue writing.

Others have some other motive. Like companies have blogs so they can help their customers.
Orkut has a blog, where they keep their users up to date with all the new features they are adding. Some company have a blog to give a solution to customers' problems there.
MSDN people have their blogs where they provide solutions to many problems. For e.g. I was having trouble with the dll thing, and when I searched for it, with many other things I found blogs on it too. Even when I posted the problem on a forum people gave me blog's link.
I read somewhere that Microsoft had a bad reputation that they don't care about their customers. And they started a blot where they can help their customers.

I'll keep on adding other reasons as soon as I understand them and have enough time.


Why do I blog?

From an assignment by our supervisor blogging has become an activity I enjoy. Something I take time out for.
Why I enjoy it? Firstly I like writing. And even when people don't read my stuff I still write.
Secondly, there are always so many things going on in my mind, one thought chasing the other one. This is just human nature. Everyone has so many things to think about, some times we can't even keep track of what we were thinking and how we started thinking about it.
And to sort out my feelings and thoughts I write about them. Not the actual things I think about, and of course not the reason I am thinking like that, I just try to hide my thoughts behind words. When I am feeling low or depressed, I might make a post on it. I heard somewhere that writing down the things that are making you depressed might help. Well they don't normally help me, but I still write, it might make me feel better some day. :)
And thirdly, which is I guess the most important reason behind most of my posts. My blog is more of an online diary to me than a mere blog. I am trying to keep my memories save somewhere, and so I write about my last year at uni and whatever is going on these days. So I can come back to it whenever I feel like it and read it.
I know it's a stupid reason. You may ask why don't I start writing a diary then, why share my memories with the entire world. Well to be honest, when I think like that I too feel a bit stupid writing about such things. But then ....... I don't know yaar. Let's just leave it here.

Post Back: The Picture Day

So finally, the day came. Our Picture Day. It's not actually our picture day. It's not just for the seniors, it's a day when the photographs of all committees are taken but still I'll call it Our Picture Day.

Every senior was getting ready, after all, each senior would be photographed separately for Graduate comments and Graduate Profile. Everyone wanted to look their best.

That brings me to graduate comments. Although I had been planning for a long time that I'll write this and that, but when we were actually asked to submit our comments I was totally blank. I didn't know exactly what to write, of course I wanted to write something very good, but what?
And I wrote the same thing that I don't know what to write, and then I put some random thoughts and in the end it exceeded the word limit and then I had to cut it short :P

Khair, we girls got ourselves photographed in the morning. Then it was all random photos time. :)
We had already planned that in this last year of ours we'll take pictures at every corner of the uni. And we tried to do that.

Of course, how can we forget our beloved "Schon". A lot of pictures have always been taken there and a lot of pictures were taken there on picture day too. Standing in a circle at schon, with our juniors taking pictures from the top, we also made a 0 and 4 to represent our batch of 2004 :)

We took pictures until it was time for Committee pics and we all went out for Digital Eyez then we stayed for PROCOM.net picture so my friends Ambreen, Farnaz (heads of HR dept) and Madiha (head of ICube) can be in the PROCOM.net pic. And as we were there, waiting, and we had nothing else to do we utilized that time too in taking pictures. :)

Then of course the Batch Picture. The fun was in settling for the pic. Adjusting the entire batch in one pic. :) The guys took this opportunity to sing out loud their favorite songs. Starting with the National Anthem and continuing with "Ae khudha mere abu salamat rahein" etc. A few girls joined in too. Then they all started shouting "le lo le lo", at least I think that's what they said. And then when the photographer finally put up the camera to his eyes, the batch said "Cheese" and when he put it down again without taking the picture there was a big "oohhhh" then again he put the camera on his eyes and again a loud "cheese" and then again a big "oohhh" when he put it down again without taking the pic.. and this continued for a while. Everyone joined in this one. It was so enjoyable and fun. :D

This was just the pic for CS batch and then it was the entire batch, all departments pic.

Though Sir Hilal Qureshi wasn't in the pic and it was not a good thing, he is our senior most teacher, who taught us the basics, who taught "Introduction to Computing". Don't know if he wasn't informed or what, but he just wasn't there :(

Any ways, with the batch picture done we were all free to photograph our selves at every corner.
We took pictures with all the teachers, at least the one we could find that day and who also agreed. Waisay, sab ne kitchwa hee lee photo, kisi ne mana nahi kiya shukar. :)

Khair the entire day was pretty good. Reading about it won't be any fun. But being there, enjoying the day was a whole lot of fun for me. We enjoyed each moment and would cherish it always. :)