My Childhood Dreams

I just saw 'the Last Lecture' by Randy Pausch. Those who havent watched it yet please do. Its amazing. So here is a list of my childhood dreams. Thanks to my friend Slinky who gave me the idea of making this.

1. Become a film critic. You get the attend film premieres and then trash them in the review.

2. Write a famous novel - I actually gave this one a good try. In 6th std, I wrote a novel called 'The Adventures of Mark Bill'. Then I also moved on to start writing an adventure fiction series called the 'The Terrific Three' . The resemblance with Enid Blyton's Famous Five is purely coincidental :p. None of these got published though :)

3. Find a way for transmitting smell like how we can transmit voice and video over wires

4. See the Iyers Rock in Australia

5. Be a show host for a Discovery Travel Show - Travel and stay in 5 star hotels for free and get paid too :)

My (mis)adventurous journey to San Diego..

I set out to San Diego on 8th May 2009 to join as a summer research intern at Qualcomm. I had to travel all across the world from Mumbai-Delhi-Chicago-San Diego. It turned out to be a quite a journey with unexpected twists and turns.

The first problem occured right at the Mumbai Domestic airport. While checking in I was told that I had just been given a travel itinery and no ticket number by the travel agent in San Diego who booked my ticket. They told me that they couldnt check me in. The perfect thing to happen on my first trip abroad alone.. I rushed to the reservations counter- then they contacted american airlines- and after 15 tensed minutes they printed out a ticket for me.. Phew!!..

My flight was scheduled to leave Mumbai at 7:30pm and reach Delhi at 9:30pm. Then the conencting flight from Delhi to Chicago was at 12:20am. So, after I got checked-in nicely with my baggage tagged for all the flights to San Diego, I find out that my flight to Delhi has been delayed by half an hour!!! And thats not all. Because of the heavy rush of flights at Mumbai, by the time it got off the runway it was already 8:30. My heart just sank.. I looked at my watch every 10secs on the entire flight..

Finally I reached Delhi at 10:45pm and found out that I had to collect all my baggage and recheck in it at the delhi international terminal. And whats more, the internal shuttle between the Delhi domestic and international airports. I managed to get a pre-paid taxi, stuffed all my lugguage in and finally reached the international airport at 11:30pm.

Thankfully the Jet airways folks had informed American airlines about the delay and they had already kept our boarding passes ready. After the immigration was done, I reached security checkin only to find a huge queue in front of it..

I panicked completely. I looked at it in despair with my passport and boarding pass clutched in my trembling hands. Left with no other choice I shouted at the top of my voice 'My flight is leaving!! Please let me go ahead..'. Thankfully the people let me go ahead. Then the security officer told me that I didnt have a tag on my backpack. I had dropped it somewhere while running from the immigration to security check. Seeing my panicstricken face, a lady in the queue (God bless her) took pity on me and gave me an extra cabin baggage tag she had.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I reached the boarding gate just on time when my flight had already started boarding.. The other Qualcomm interns were already in the line..I called my parents and told them the good news. My mom had got high BP then and my dad had already started checking for later flights for me to board.

I was through the ordeal finally ( atleast I thought I was). On reaching Chicago I found that all the other interns were booked on a flight to San Diego 2 hrs before mine and I had to make that journey alone. I couldnt even reschedule my ticket to the earlier flight because my bags were already tagged for the later one. And after reaching San Diego, my bags never showed up on the baggage belt!! After fruitlessly looking for them for about 15mins I went to the American airlines counter only to find out that they had sent my bags on the earlier flight (with the other interns) . Finally I found by bags safely tied away at the counter.

My Qualcomm teammate Vinay and his wife had come to pick me up at the airport. I safely reached my apartment in La Jolla, San Diego at 3:00pm, 30 hours after I had left Mumbai. It was the most adrenaline-packed journey I have ever had.. :)

My first day at Qualcomm

I had written this abt a year back but forgot to publish it.. Here it goes :P

I started my summer internship at Qualcomm on May 11th 2009. Qualcomm is a huge tech company which makes CDMA chipsets for many years. It is now venturing into many new businesses as all, but CDMA chipsets are still the main selling product. I had read text-books written my Qualcomm's founders Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi in IIT. So, I was really excited about working in their company.

Our first day was supposed to be devoted completely to a new employee orientation programme. First, there was a delicious breakfast in the main building N. Then they took us into the superb building N auditorium where we had an introductory speech and video about Qualcomm. I liked Qualcomm's 3 corporate values - Innovate, Execute, Partner. They are capture so succinctly what an ideal tech company like Qualcomm must aim at. This is the most striking thing I found about Qualcomm. Their aims are very direct and practical. It is surprising to see that people who work here - be it a new employee or a senior executive - all of them love their job. One does not find this in other companies.

After the introductory speech, we were taken on a bus tour to Qualcomm buildings. Since San Diego is Qualcomm HQ, they have some 20-30 buildings there. One very interesting building was the Media FLO centre. It is the place from where Qualcomm's new venture - FLO TV- (live TV on mobile) is broadcasted. There was a huuuuuge screen (must be 30m wide) which showed pictures of channels being broadcasted in every place in the US.

The next day we had a lecture session over breakfast in which some of Corporate R&D's top executives introduced us to the latest research developments. Later, we were assigned the specific projects we had to work on and we met our project mentors. The inital timepass got over and work began :).

Relativity

Einstein reminds me of this very interesting excerpt from Gamow's 'One Two Three...Infinity'. Check it out!


'The slowing down of the speed of time in a moving system has an interesting implication in respect to interstellar travel. Suppose you decided to visit one of the satellites of Sirius, which is at a distance of nine lightr years from the solar system, and use for your trip a rocket ship that can move practically with the speed of light.

It would be natural for you to think that the round trip to Sirius and back would take at least eighteen years, and you would be inclined to take with you a very large food supply. That precaution, however would be absolutely unnecessary if the mechanism of your rocket ship made it possible for you to travel nearly at the speed of light. In fact if you move, for example, at 99.99999999 percent of the speed of light, your wristwatch, your heart, your lungs, your digestion, and your mental processes will be slowed down by a factor of 70000, and the 18 years ( from the point of view of people left on Earth) necessary to cover the distance from Earth to Sirius and back to Earth again, would seem to you as only a few hours.

In fact, starting from the Earth right after breakfast, you will just feel ready for lunch when your ship lands on one of the Airius planets. If you are in hurry and start home right after lunch, you will, in all probability, be back on Earth in time for dinner. But, and here you will get a big surprise if you have forgotten the laws of relativity, you will find on arriving home that your friends and relatives have given you up as lost in interstellar spaces and have eaten 6570 dinners without you!

Because you are travelling at a speed close to that of light, 18 terrestrial years have appeared to you as just one day!'

Einstein's Brain Teaser

Albert Einstein once posed a brain teaser that he predicted only 2% of the worlds population would be able to solve.

FACTS:
1. There are 5 houses in 5 different colours.
2. In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
3. These 5 owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigarette and keep a certain pet.
4. No owners have the same pet, brand of cigaratte, or drink.

CLUES:
1. The Brit lives in a red house
2. The Swede keeps a dog
3. The Dane drinks tea
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
12. The owner who smokes Camel drinks beer
13. The German smokes Marlborough.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbour who drinks water.

The question is, who keeps the fish?

If anyone solves this puzzle, please do post your answer as a comment.