the air

I’ve kept a very quiet demeanor in terms of what Ashwin Khanna did on his blog a few months ago. I will NOT link to Ashwin’s blog as that would unfairly give him an undeserved linkback. This asshat hosted a contest that offered $2,500 to one lucky winner. For those of you who kept up, the winner was some blog that had only two posts and was newly created. It should be no surprise to you that it was Asshat Khanna’s own creation.

I happened to come across another post by Prince John that talked about the idiot Ashwin. So I decided to take a look at Ashwin’s blog and guess what. The kid changed his blog design, deleted his posts, and has offered an apology to the entire blogosphere. I think the fact is that the damage is done. Millions of bloggers around the world struggle to attract readers and move up in rankings across a multitude of search engines and blog indexing services. What Ashwin did was not only cruel but should also be considered cheating. If anything, I think his blog should just be banned completely.

However, I also think that forgiving one’s mistakes is a chance for harmony and gives the other person another opportunity to learn from their experiences. Am I going to read his blog regularly? The answer is no. Ever since I discovered his blog on Blogspot, none of his posts have been creative nor filled with quality content. All of his old posts were simply quick snippets of a variety of tech happenings.

Ashwin needs to learn and start writing original quality content. He shouldn’t simply be focused on monetizing his blog or running fake contests to get readers. Moreover, I hope he has learned from this experience and will regularly remind his readers that they too should not engage in deceptive practices.

So why am I writing this now? The answer is simple, Ashwin has redid his site and offered an apology. It’s only fair that I forgive him but also remind him that once you lose readers, you may lose them forever.

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As the fall semester begins to wind down, I figured this would be a great time for me to slowly start getting used to blogging on a regular basis. Since early this year, it has become frustratingly difficult to blog on a regular basis due to various activities. First it started out with my internship and followed by intense workloads at school once the fall semester commenced. However, now that finals are right around the corner and project deadlines are almost upon me, I’ll start to have a bit more time to blog regularly.

It has hardly been a month since the last overhaul of this blog and already there is a new redesign. There are still quite a few bugs in this design that I am manually fixing. You may notice that the archives are not working correctly and I hope to have that problem fixed soon.

Side Note

On a side note, I was admitted into the Graduate School at Northern Illinois University. Therefore, next semester, I officially start taking grad-level coursework for both undergrad and grad credit. Quite a wonderful event.

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Almost two years ago, I embarked on a new journey that would, I hoped, take me to new heights. Given the fact that I had struggled so much earlier, it was only natural that I felt desperate for things to turn around. Now that the year 2007 is almost over, I can confidently claim that this has been one of the best years of my life and I am eagerly looking forward to my final semester as an undergraduate student at Northern Illinois University.

Senior Design

Senior design is generally considered the last course a student has to take prior to graduation. Since I am a transfer student, I stepped away from the norm and took senior design a semester early. From what I know, you work on your senior design project with a group. This time around, my group and I have been working with Caterpillar in Aurora, IL. I’m pleased to finally say that I am almost done with the senior design project. We are in the final phases of writing our report and our data collection and analysis is complete. We still have some work ahead that will require some busy nights, but I am fairly confident that we can be done with everything prior to Thanksgiving.

Grad School

Since I love being in school so much, I applied to Graduate School for admission for the Spring 2008 semester on November 1, 2007. Although I will not graduate with a Bachelor’s until May 2007, I applied for early admission so that I can take some grad-level courses for both undergraduate and graduate credit. This is a special program known as the BS/MS sequence. It’s designed for undergraduate students who have a minimum of 3.0 cumulative GPA who have carefully designed a plan of study for both undergraduate and graduate levels. In a way, one journey will end and another will begin. The beauty of all this is that once I receive my undergraduate, I will be eligible to finally get a real job without having to finish my graduate studies if I decide not to do them.

As I make the last turn for my undergraduate career, I am very pleased with the way things have turned out and I am ready for the next chapter. On a side note, I aim to keep my original promise of posting regularly on this blog once this semester ends. Senior design literally takes up more time than I could imagine. Good spirits to everyone and Happy Holidays!

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Bear with as I am working on a new theme. I know I mentioned that I will buy a new theme, but I have this undying love to alter existing themes to suit my needs. Please check back often to see some of the changes. I will post another note here when I am content with the modifications.

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I think it is a challenge for me to even begin to discuss with you how busy I am this semester due to senior design. My senior design project is with Caterpillar and requires me to mainly evaluate their process flow after painting till the final product is handed over to shipping. Overall, the process is fairly intuitive to understand, but it does require lengthy data mining/analysis to come up with reliable numbers.

What is senior design?

Senior design is a semester long project driven course. In this course, there are no exams or assigned homework. Rather, you are given a project that requires you to work with a company to resolve any of the issues they have. Needless to say, any of the issues you will resolve will be related to your field of study; so they will not make you fetch coffee. Your final grade for this course rests with how well you deliver a mid-term presentation, a final presentation, and a final report. Moreover, your group members will evaluate each other as well as the company providing feedback on your group as a whole. Ultimately, upon the completion of senior design, you are pretty much ready to graduate as it is generally the final course in your field of engineering.

Are there plant visits required?

At NIU, all senior design projects for engineering are sponsored by a company and requires extensive plant visits. That means, you will spend anywhere from eight to twenty hours per week at a plant collecting data. However, this phase is only temporary as most groups will meet on campus once all the data has been collected.

What are the effects of senior design

Let me put this frankly, if you are taking senior design, the hell with all your other courses. You cannot think that senior design is not important because if your professor feels you did not make a worthwhile effort, he/she can simply fail you and prevent you from graduating. The word is that senior design takes first priority over every other academic course. Just last week, I had an exam that I really needed to study for, but I could not find time to study for it nor make time because I needed to finish my data analyzing for senior design. In fact, there may be days where you will not be able to sleep much because of your project. The end result is that you have very little time to do anything enjoyable. Hence, that is the reason why I have almost no time to update this blog. This process will be like this until mid-December when I am complete with this course.

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