Sem 2 nuggets

* Two and a half weeks into semester 2. The good days when you can wander into all the courses (some of them very good) and make up your minds as to what you want to do this time (like the joke about Hell's publicity department, several courses seem very appealing, but it's only till much deeper into the course do the mundane parts bite you).

* Institute Elective time, so I picked "Applied Economics". "Introduction to Indian Astronomy" caught a lot of eyeballs because of its course title, More surprise was in form of the instructor who is unconventionally dressed in a "kudumi" and "veshTii" and is the archetypal "Tamil vaadhyaar". I'm impressed by his resolve to be a non-conformist and non-traditional (if traditional == current culture)

* The other two theory courses are going to be "Distributed Computing" and "Web Mining". I'm dreading the maths (as usual) in the latter, but the contents have been good so far

* What I'm not impressed by is having to do a compulsory Systems Lab course where the aim is to build a product and apply all the S/w Engg principles etc. Nice idea in theory, but I don't fancy the current structure where they propose to divide the class in two groups and get them to compete against each other in building the same product. All we need to do is to fly in Donald Trump and we can then begin shooting "The Apprentice" here. I'm loath to do all that kind of dev. work again and would have preferred to pick up a course on Functional Programming (which I hopefully can do next year). I'm always nervous about large project groups and prefer smaller & cohesive groups. Am hoping they will change things around a little.