Ladies and Gentlemen! As the title suggests, I’m baaaaaaaaaaaack again! Well, the first thing you’ll notice about my return is that the entire site’s look and feel (L&F) is totally revamped! Give me comments on how you like it You can always mail in to me at tejas@padekar.info or through the feedback page.

So, if you’ve been through the Archive of the blogs, you’ll notice that my last post was sometime in August (to be precise, 28th August). Where have I been for so long…? What’ve I been up to…? Hmm… well I’ll do my best to try and tell everything that I’ve been up to… just have the patience to go through the contents… and yes, I received a lot of comments from prospective USC students that my blogs were helpful to them in some way or the other… well, for them, I can only say that I was more than glad that my scribbling on the net has been helpful to someone.. even if these blogs are helpful to 1-2 people in this whole world, it’ll have served it’s purpose!

Hmm… so I believe I last reported my visit to Venice Beach. So what happened after that…? Well, I got involved in my routine work, and then assignments and classes kept me pretty busy! A few days after my blog, I had to drop the EE475 Wireless Communications course, because the Computer Science Department decided that to take that course you have to take some higher level courses! So I decided to drop that course and took up CS571, Web Technologies. Now, I’ve had a good time with WebTech (as it is affectionately abbreviated as…), with me scoring 9.8/10 average in all the assignments. The assignments themselves were pretty nice… Here’s a list:

• HTML reproduction based on an image given to us
• Using Javascript to parse XML using DOM to create a representation of the XML as a table
• Using Perl to extract live NASDAQ data from Yahoo Finance
• AJAX assignment: In this assignment we had to use Ajax to get data from Google and simulate Google Suggest.

The Final Assignment was to create a Meta-search using results from Yahoo and Google. We were to extract results from Yahoo using the XML provided by Yahoo, and for Google, we had the option of using either Google’s XML interface or to use GoogleAPI. We used WSDL stubs for this assignment. *Whew* As you can read from this list itself, other than studying Webserver technology (Apache, Jakarta Tomcat) and many more technologies, it was also a lot of fun to practically do assignments that felt like they were… real-world!

The other subject I had was CS585, Database Systems. This course was, as is obvious, all about Databases. The final assignment was the real deal. We had to use Java to create an interface for a kind-of GIS(Geographical Information Systems)-like application. For the uninitiated, it means extracting spatial data from a database and representing the data on a map- like interface. This program was to run remotely from a remote server and would display an interface on your system using X-win. Other than learning about Database technologies, what I also learnt in this course was how to use Java properly… I can safely say that I am now quite comfortable with Java… and believe it or not… I literally learnt Java in 3 days for the assignment…!

Other than that, I visited Las Vegas once more when Akshay’s (my roommate) parents were visiting us. We visited Las Vegas for one evening and we came back the next day. I made some good friends during this time. I already had good friends in Akshay, Viral and Deepak, but I made some more good friends in Aakruti, Charmy, Manali, Nirav, Jaydev, Mohnish, and some other people I met on my East Coast trip… Patience… I’m getting around to that trip!

During the last two weeks of the semester, I was talking to dad about planning a trip back to India in May. Well, after some time, my dad asked me what I was doing in December. And he insisted that I come down to India for a few days. I was, obviously, quite happy to take up that suggestion! I do miss home and family a bit, and it’s always nice to be visiting and staying in touch with everyone.

So after I finished my exam on the 1st of December, I flew back to India on the 2nd. I had a wonderful time back home… spent time with family, met some friends, completed a lot of incomplete tasks, and generally just had a great time!

I returned back to Los Angeles on the 20th of December, and I had to start getting things in order for my East Coast trip which I had already planned up long before I had any plans for going to India. On the trip, I visited Philadelphia (for one night actually), Atlantic City, Newark (for close to 8-9 hours), Washington DC, New York. Oh, and while we were in New York, we were staying at a hotel in Parsippany, New Jersey. Initially it was around 6 people for the trip, Jaydev, Nirav, Charmy, Sumita, Mohnish and myself. We were joined by Sumita’s friend, Viraj and his roommate, Anand in Newark. And in New York, we were joined by Charmy’s friend, Shreyas, his roommate, Samit, and their friend, Ruchi. All in all I had a great time on the east coast. Oh yeah, I mentioned that I made some more friends on the east coast, they are Shreyas, Samit, Ruchi, Viraj and Anand.

I had planned to meet some very old friends of mine that I haven’t met in ages, like Anand Parekh, who’s staying in New Jersey. Anand and I were in school together and he later moved to the US, and I have not met him school! Unfortunately we couldn’t co-ordintate to meet. Sorry, Anand! But hey, we’ll meet up sooner or later!

So, from tomorrow morning I get back into a routine! I start working, studying and chasing after assignment deadlines! This semester I’m taking three courses:

• CSCI570: Analysis of Algorithms
• CSCI576: Multimedia Systems Design
• CSCI477: Design and Construction of Large Scale Software Systems

I hope that this semester goes as well for me as the last one… in fact, I’d pray that it’d be better!

OK… I’ve written quite a bit now… but then it was long overdue! Have fun, and have a great time!