Manish’s Scribble Board

To all my fellow blog readers and friends - “Happy Diwali. Enjoy this festival of light”.

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So finally have reached Hyderabad on Thursday itself, joining is on 2nd of June- Monday. Microsoft has arranged a guest house for our stay for the next 15 days. Am speechless at the facilities provided here- AC, Plasma TV, wi-fi, Fridge etc.

Our office is too far off from this place. Firstly we have to walk 2 kms from guest house to get to the nearest bus stand, from where Gachibowli is more than 10 kms. Bus service is too cheap at this place. Yesterday we went to central mall, where we watched Chronicals of Narnia- Prince Caspain at PVR. Did a lot of shopping and returned back late at night.

At present am relaxing at the guest house, (mis)using the wi-fi connection at the most. Only sleeping eating and TV is out routine. Who knows what is in store of us from Monday?

Check out some pics Here

When Luck Shines, there’s a heavy downpour of opportunities and success. This is what I felt after being being addressed “Congrats Manish! You have been selected for the internships, just tell us the time frame when you would like to pursue it?” It still echoing in my ears, what a pleasant surprise! I never ever thought of this day. My whole family is delighted, too much delighted, too too much!!

Want to know the whole story? Read patiently below, or test your patience.

We left Manipal for Shimoga at 5PM on Friday leaving behind the sessionals at a risk, well its a bit stupidity on my part to abandon the interview just for the exams. We were total of 7 people who headed on a Qualis. It takes three and a half hour to reach Shimoga by road, which crosses Augumbe Point (better known as Sunset Point). We stopped for five minutes just to have a look at the place and then headed on.

Reached Shimoga at 8 at night, had our dinner and went to station to catch our train, we had a third AC ticket which is supposed to be reimbursed by the Microsoft guys. The train left at 10 and reached Bangalore at 5 in the morning. We took a hotel room, 7 people in a room, got fresh, changed to formals, dumped our belongings and went to Exam Center without breakfast.

At the center we were told to sit in room no 11, after we had done our first question, the Microsoft dudes told us that my mistake they had put us in the wrong section, so now we will face a different pattern of exam. Our paper started at 11AM. First question was traversing a matrix in spiral order and secondly deleting n nodes out of every 2n nodes in a linklist.

Results came out in 5 minutes, 3 out of 8 people got selected. Now I had to face two rounds of interview. IN the first round, I was asked to implement memcpy and second to reverse adjacent nodes of a link list using address not values. The interviewer was very much impressed by my approach as I had prior idea of the both questions, thanks to PCS and DS papers which we had been taught we studied ourselves.

Second round was the most dangerous round. The problem statement is as follows

Given a whole C/C++ program in a program buffer, remove the single and multi line comments from this program. Draw a Finite Automata (or DFA) for it and write down the corresponding program as precise as possible.

After writing this program, he evaluated it thrice each time finding some or the other minute and minutest errors (guess that person was a genius and had an eagle eyes, catching even the smallest bug). He asked me questions on hashing, clash in hashing values, open hashing. Order of hashing etc etc etc. After it was done, he asked me to wait outside.

After 5-10 mins, a guy came out and said exactly the same words which I had mentioned at the top of the post. After that we were busy waiting for Adi’s results. God’s luck shined on them too and rest two of my friends were also selected. Who two? Drown yourself if you didnt come to know by this time. Its Sathvik!. Then had my dinner at 9PM after exactly 24 hrs. All this time I was alive on WATER!

We left Bangalore at 10PM night by a horrible but the only bus available was of come National Travels (or something of the sort). It had only 8 seats left at the last of which we booked 7. God! All the seats were defective . Mine was turned, Harry’s seat didnt slide to semi-sleeper and bulk loads of problems. There were mosquitoes all inside the bus. Reached Manipal at 9:30 in the morning. Am deadly tired, writing this post after sleeping for 3 hrs and missing my lunch!

Just returned today from Bangalore in the morning after a day long hectic trip. I had applied for the Internship at Microsoft for the year 2008 back on 5th of this month. The exam center was Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology, Yalahanka, Bangalore. This place is located outside the town, but luckily the exam was on Sunday. We didnt get caught up in any traffic chaos and all those problems general to Bangalore.

Reached the center at 8 in the morning, hopefully we were one of the earliest people to arrive at the campus. The regitsrations started at 9, PPT started at 9:20AM. They informed us about the general topics, exams pattern, exam schedule and their future prospects.

We were led to the exam rooms, after waiting for one and a half hour our exams started. The exam was total of 90 minutes with five sections- Aptitude, DS and Algo, C++,OS and RDBMS. The exams went fine, hoping for the best. The host college had arranged buses which were meant to ply over the main Bangalore bus stand. We visited some of the malls including “Forum” and caught our bus at 7PM itself. Reached Manipal at 7AM in the morning.

From the other side, I made an attempt at Zend PHP Framework for developing powerful PHP applications. Am not very much sure how much I may proceed but am hopeful that I may learn the needeful. More to come up, keep a close watch

Is there something so special on this day? Does on need a special day to show off his/her love? Are other 364 days of the year not suited for the same? These questions can be answered only by those love birds, not by people like me and other singles! Those who do have some valentine miss no chance to prove their might on this auspicious event.

So how I passed this day? Just like any other day! Why? Quite simple, I dont have a girlfriend. Proud to be Single!!!

I had some unavoidable experiences while going out for work today at campus. Not my fault, if you are out of room on this day, you cant walk with your eyes closed. And I dont believe in that preaching of Gandhiji “Bura mat Dekho”!

Update on 18th March(This section is edited) : Well, said a lot, leaving for Bangalore on Saturday afternoon for Microsoft Internship Exams. Expect something from this exam, am an optimistic person but dont fly too high.

So finally I returned from Bangalore after an exciting two days visit to my elder cousin. Left on 25th night and reached there at 10 in the morning, it took ages to travel from one end to the other where my sis lives. The first day,I couldn’t go out of the house as some of her relatives had come the her flat, so had no work other than enjoying the movies and talking to my cousin who had also came to meet her from his college.

Next day we left at around 2 in the afternoon, dropped my bro at bus stand then went to all major shopping malls which were possible(parking woes ). The visit to forum and some more malls at Cunningham road were excellent and really exciting. I have uploaded some pics. Have a look. Picasa Web Album