VM510 (LG Rumor Touch) also does

Blog XX of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

PROLOGUE: Continuing with the theme of making choices that one believes in, for sometime now I was planning to buy my first non-basic phone. Some of the must-haves were

• Camera (2MP atleast)
  
• GPS/navigation tool (preferably Google Maps)
  
• Media player (atleast audio)
  
• A regular Internet browser (atleast Opera)
  
• 3G access for anywhere internet access
  
• Bluetooth and PC connectivity
  
• Nationwide coverage
  
• Optional: keypad, large (touch) screen
  
• Allergic to contracts but will do if coverage is good
  
• Cheap (a default requirement)
  

***

One of the first thoughts that I had was to ape everybody else and purchase the then latest Android phone HTC Droid Incredible. Verizon was an attractive option coverage-wise. However I had been allergic to contract plans all along. If the mandatory smartphone data plans and bloated prices of monthly plans and so-called subsidized phones was not enough, the fact that I was stuck with a carrier for two years with a penalty for breaking contract seemed so wrong to me (remember how you feel on hearing employment bond).

Then I decided to compare Virgin mobile plans despite the fact that I live in partial coverage area of Sprint (Virgin carrier) and was I shocked to see that Virgin was offering data+voice plans in the price that Verizon was offering voice (that too at corporate discount). And the most expensive phones on Virgin (no contract) were cheaper than similarly featured phones on other major carriers. Notably, Sprint was offering the same phone for double the price. How this is possible is beyond my comprehension except that carriers intentionally bloat the no-contract pricing for their handsets so that customers are forced to buy contracts.

As you can understand, by this time I had tipped towards purchasing LG Rumor Touch from Virgin. I had to face numerous questions about why I took a phone that was so unconventional but I am happy with it. Thank God that I did not read the faulty review here.

***

EPILOGUE: The title of this post is a spin on the Google-Verizon marketing campaign of Droid Does aimed at things that Droid can do that iPhone (who else but its main competitor) does not. Here is a list of things that I have been able to achieve with a 130 $ VM510 LG Rumor Touch phone with 30$ monthly plan with no contract (in addition to must-haves above):

• watch videos on YouTube.
  
• upload photos/videos to a host of services: Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube & more.
  
• casual internet browsing, the physical keypad comes in handy in typing, a feature which would be sorely missed by most of the other smartphone users
  
• dedicated app for email/IM on Yahoo, Google, AOL & Microsoft with option for custom IMAP
  
• not that I am very active, but a social networking app for Facebook, Twitter & MySpace
  
• a paid app for voice based navigation, Google Maps is free.
  
• makes calls without dropping in partial coverage area.
  
• does not need to be held in a particular way.
  
• setup custom ringtones, wallpapers although third party apps are blocked.
  
• apps multitask (except media player, which engineer came up with this dumb idea !).
  
• access to notepad, voice memo, document viewer.
  
• unlike what is said in many reviews, has an easy touch screen (takes a little getting used to after touch calibration)
  

Agreed it is an exaggeration to compare it with Droid, but my point is can Droid do all that for 130$ ?

Making the choices you believe in

Blog XIX of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

This post is about two different ways in which choices manifest themselves. Both manifestations are rooted in the fact that humans by nature are social and tend to seek acceptance of society.

Often in my mentoring sessions (Mentorpolis, NSIT, ISMA, GSC), I come across students who know what they want to do & have a stellar profile to help them in that but yet when it comes to final execution moment they decide to take a backup ”just in case”. Now, backup is a good thing in general, but if I start working out of my USB drive instead of HD, then it is no longer my backup but working copy. There is a thin line between taking backups and losing focus. When a HW engineer thinks about learning a bit of software so that he can apply for SW positions, that in my view crosses this thin line. When a  GRE aspirant talks about preparing for CAT, that also in my view crosses this line. Now what was that proverb about trying to stand on two boats..or was it the other proverb about a pigeon in hand being worth two in bush..

Another trend is to go along with what everybody else does or what is fashionable. I am also guilty of this at times. People want to do MBA or engineering, purchase smartphones, cars, SLRs, switch jobs, because that is what everybody else is doing. It is cool and happening. Often in doing this, they do not care about what they themselves want or if the cool thing fits their case or not. That explains why people run after 3G phones in places without a 3G coverage or look at DSLRs when what they want really is a P&S.

This post is neither a lament nor a criticism. It is just an observation. C&C (comments and criticism) are most welcome.

International Students Funding 101

Blog XII of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

I receive emails which start off like “Can you tell me about the research/group/academics at ..?” but end up with “Also can you tell me how is the funding scenario for ..?”. It is hard to miss the true intent of these emails. My replies start with “Texas A&M has …” and ends with “Btw, if funding is a big concern for you, then RELAX because..”. I imagine that last paragraph sends a smile across most people because their next few emails are solely about funding ! I figured from a past article, that a blog on the basics of securing funding for international students might have some utility value. (Who is interested in what I could have ended up as ??) Ok so first of all, 101 code refers to a basic primer course in any subject, often used in academic lingo.

First things first, this article is aimed towards international students who are going to be studying abroad and (often) are in need of financial aid to sustain themselves. Please note that notwithstanding the aid options available, you would often need to show enough financial resources to visa officers to convince them that you can financially support yourself through the whole course duration, unless you have received some aid ALONGWITH your admit offer. In reality, the living cost estimates made by colleges are often conservative and one ends up spending only 50 to 80% (depending upon location). This is possible due to sharing apartments, cooking at home, living frugally, sharing / lending / downloading books, relying on free food opportunities (religiously !!), etc. In addition, following aid options are available to ALL students :

• Scholarships: Often there are plethora of one-time financial aid options available in the form of scholarships (link) through university. Often these are merit based and in some cases almost always offered once student accepts an offer and reaches university. These may also be available through various departments/research groups or communities. Loan based scholarships (link1, link2) are also available in one’s home country which are marginally better than taking a loan.
• Graduate Assistantships (GA): As the name suggests, GA are assistantship options available for graduate students. Usually GAs imply that students COMPLETE tuition is waived in addition to receiving a monthly stipend/pay. Senior UG students MAY qualify depending upon local policies.
  • Research (GAR/RA): If you have got a PhD or MS admit AND been conversing with some professor for your research topic, chances are high that you could get an RA. Sometimes, professors may insist on seeing you perform for a semester before funding. RA is the best option available as you get paid to perform your research. However, it implies a commitment which may scare those unsure about their future plans.
  • Teaching (GAT/TA): If you are a graduate student, your department may need you to assist a faculty in conducting undergrad classes as a TA. Opportunities may be availed by applying to department OR talking to concerned professor in advance. Often prior working relation with professor may be required. While RA options are limited by research funding, TA options are limited only by courses and department funding. The flip side is you might have to attend UG classes, evaluate loads of marksheets and help UG students understand their course.
  • Non-teaching (GANT): If you are REALLY good in office skills like IT, programming, web development, helpdesk, customer handling then you could seek part-time employment in various campus offices as GANT. While this implies working 20 hours a week on non-academic work, but can be a great value addition to your resume (apart from offering the much needed aid). These positions are fiercely competed for and requires due diligence during application.
• Fellowships: Many government / research organisations and companies institute a fellowship to promote work in a field of their interest. While fellowships accepting international students are far & few in between and fiercely competed for, landing one ensures worry free education and a bright future. Some fellowships may require participation in campus activities or exhibiting exemplary performance in campus. Many fellowships require endorsement from faculty or multiple references.
• Part time (SW): If nothing else works, one can be a student worker by working on-campus part time UPTO 20 hours a week during session and 40 hours a week during holidays. Some universities may also allow international students to seek off campus employment (please check your college’s international students organisation link). Usually universities have some system for searching and applying for such jobs (link). Tasks may be as varied as cafeteria, sports centre, librarian, support. Some senior SWs are incentivised by offering them GANT.
• Full time (CPT/OPT): During the complete education term, based on local policies, usually students are eligible to work full time provided their work is related to their academic field. Often students achieve ‘breakeven’ by working in companies during summer (internship) or regular semesters (co-op) thus avoiding the need for any financial aid (although it would require you to pay tuition cost initially and recover it later). It also entails a chance of being extended a full time offer once academic course has been successfully completed. The flip side is one’s academic plans may get delayed due to being absent from university.
• Others: Depending upon locality, other options such as participating in a research experiment, contests, etc could offer additional sources of income although these are not strictly considered as aid. In USA, FAFSA is a good resource to claim federal aid but involves a long drawn process.

DISCLAIMER: Since I have only one MS to speak for, this blog may/may not stand true for situations in colleges other than Texas A&M but should come close. Please use discretion.

pursuit of naukri

Blog VI of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

This blog is about my efforts for securing a naukri (Hindi for job) as a graduate student in TAMU. Hopefully it would help those who are still searching for jobs/internships back in TAMU or elsewhere. I am dividing this blog in two sections, first describes my own experience and second describes a list of resources that I found useful. So if you are in a hurry, jump straight ahead to second section or else you may continue reading.

the pursuit

On a sultry afternoon in Aug 2008, I found myself sitting along with about 100 odd students listening to our Director of Graduate Studies trying to impress upon us that the industry was concerned only with the M in our degree and not the second letter that follows it (i.e. S for MS and E for ME). Fast forward eight months, while searching for an internship I was not sure if our DGS remembered to inform the industry about this fact. Summer of 2009 was the height (or rather the depth) of recession and it appeared as if all the job postings had been sucked dry by Texas sun. Not so bad for me because I still had experience from India to rely upon but the graduates 2008 and graduates of 2009 with no industry experience had it very difficult because of this. Some of them went on to delay their graduation or seek higher studies just to avoid being unemployed.

By Fall 2009, it was time to seriously think about where I wanted to go. While my love towards technology and inclination towards semiconductor industry in general was quite clear, I was equally interested in position in web technologies that required fair bit of understanding of how computers work. Over next few months I was interviewed for Microsoft and Intrinsity (now part of Apple) but nothing clicked. By this time, I was shooting for full time positions only. The rationale behind this being that the industry would recover (it already was showing signs) and applying straight for a fulltime might make things proceed faster considering my research was already near completion.

Spring 2010 was the final countdown, roughly one third of my semester was spent preparing for my defense and rest of it on preparing and applying for jobs. I interviewed left right and centre but in some cases the profile was not right (Intel), in other cases compensation (Garmin, Mathworks) and in some cases my preparation (Cirrus Logic). One good thing about these interviews was that they helped me in strengthening my weaknesses and further leveraging my strengths. The next round of interviews showed some great promises and although Texas Instruments had a hiring freeze, I received offers from Marvell Semiconductors and Cisco Systems. Ironically though, when I had almost decided, I was further interviewed by Freescale, AMD and Qualcomm although I had to end those discussions after I accepted Cisco’s offer. Phew ! Looking back, I never thought I would be interviewed in so many places, job yes but multiple interviews, no.

what helped

This may not be an exhaustive list but definitely covers most of the resources and tips that were instrumental in my preparation and search for naukri.

• Network Network Network: you cannot be over-networked, it is surprising how subtly networks can help and how their importance is often underrated. Some great ways to build networks are using LinkedIn, attending career fairs, talking to professors, senior students, ex-colleagues & anybody anywhere who can hook you to the job. Ok, let me repeat, you can never be over-networked, and it helps much more than you think. Looking back at my calls, exactly half of them were initiated by my network than me for ex. I received a call from TI out of nowhere only to realise that I was recommended by a consultant who knew me on LinkedIn.
• Spread your DIRECTED resume: hold it before you spam your resume to hundreds of employers. Different companies have different ways of accepting resumes and unfortunately that means that you do need to painstakingly enter all your information into various company and resume portals. If you have a network (read above), you can spread your resume there also. However, it is VERY important to customize your resume for each company/post. An Intel manager once told me “…in our job description, we already have given the things we are looking for, make sure that you include those in your resume…”. Often this implies re-wording your resume to reflect different ways of saying the same thing while laying more emphasis on sections of your resume relevant to job requirement. For ex. I had three flavours of my resume and dozens (yes, dozens) of cover letters fitting different needs.
• UPDATE your resume: During my job search I read up so much on creating a good resume that now I wonder how did I ever decide on creating my first resume template. So much has been said about writing resumes that I would not attempt touching it here. Only two advices, your resume is a living document, update it frequently and do catch hold of some resources or get your resume reviewed to make sure it is your best foot forward in job search.
• Prepare: yes, if it was not obvious, you do need to prepare for interviews. If you have got an interview call, it is already too late to start preparing for it, ideally you should be preparing while applying so that when the call comes, you are ready for it. I would often alternate between ‘prep’ and ‘app’ which helped me in handling back-to-back interviews each of which had their own areas of interest.
• Brush up: another thing that people forget is that interview is not an exam, it is a conversation made out of an exam and you need to excel in it to be able to get a job. That includes preparing ‘about me’ sections, hooks that allow you to plug yourself and 'sketching out' things to talk about. Our counsellor from undergrad once said that “you need to sell yourself” to the employer. I could not agree more. I know people who are technically strong but miss out on chances because of their soft skills. TAMU Career Center was an excellent resource in this.
• Be enterprising: I was not proactive initially during my job search which I am sure had its repercussions. Job search can be months long at the least and you should be geared up to stay focussed over the whole duration. This means you need to periodically apply to new openings on various portals, follow up on various contacts and keep revising your preparation.
• Brute force: extreme situations require extreme measures. Yet there needs to be a method to your madness. Some of the things that I did as ‘last mile’ effort were :
  • contact employees/consultants of interesting companies directly through LinkedIn.
  • frequently discuss my job search with my professors.
  • include your recommendation letters (say) from LinkedIn in the list of attachments that you send to employers. If it applies to your field, include prior work samples.
  • focus more on recent openings as often month old openings are already taken.
  • find out hiring trends and shoot resume to recent hirers. Temporal locality is true in these cases.
  • corollary to above principle, relay your job search status to trusted people only till things get finalised to avoid creating competition. It is a sad but true part of job search that it is a race in which your fellow colleagues are also running. Collaborate but not at personal expense.

Ten cool tools you ought to know about..

Blog I of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

It is funny how less than ten years ago I did not know what a computer was and actually took a course to learn MS Office. Then sometime in 2002 when I got my first computer, I remember the first software that held my attention was Borland Turbo C++ compiler, not because of its enticing blue screen but because I could not figure out how to exit it !

Hopefully I have come a long way since then, considering I have taught basic computer course to little kids under STF. Over a period of time, I have come to like a bunch of software and time and again I am surprised to see when i come across people who have not even heard about them. These softwares are instantly liked by anybody who uses them (or at least by me !) and are like those cute kids that you bump into once in a while. You simply like them ! So here is a list of ten softwares that I have come to like over the years that I have used them. Below each software is the year since I have been using them and the source which initiated me into the software.

Disk Manager by Broken Cross

2003/Abhinav M

Every wondered which one of your removable medias had that favourite song or movie or game of yours that you were having trouble restoring. Disk Manager could just be the solution for that, it automatically indexes each and every file on any removable media of your computer. So even when the CD/DVD/removable HD may not be connected to your computer, you can find out in matter of seconds which disk has what stuff on it. I even use it to store contents of my fixed hard disks. During a recent hard disk crash, it helped me figure out which all data/SW I had not been able to recover.

Dropbox by Dropbox

2009/Online search

The magic of some softwares is that they make you wonder few months into their use how did you manage without them. Dropbox is one such software. It adorns multiple hats, data synchroniser, data backup, online storage, revision control and the list goes on. In the short span of 1.5 years that I have started to use it, it has helped me survive my HD crash, allowed me to collaborate on my publications and thesis with my professor, synchronised my workspace across multiple computers and provided me 5GB of free hosting space (out of which 3GB came from referrals that I made). No doubt there is a bunch of MITians behind this tool.

Editpad by Jan Goyvaerts

2003/Online search

Yes, even in this age of productivity tools, you still need to type in plain text. Reasons could be as varied as grocery list to list of project ideas. And while Notepad is as basic as a text editor gets, it does not cut the mark when you want to handle multiple files or do some serious search and replace. Editpad is probably one of many contenders for a decent text editor but I have been loyal to this software.

jetAudio by COWON Media Center

2002/Self

“Umm where are your songs running from ?”, “Hey I like the way songs fade in and out in your computer” & “Wow that video looks so better on your screen” are some of the compliments that my main media software has received over the ages. I still remember the first time I saw jetAudio when it had a different tile for audio, video and disc player. But it had an amazing (far better than WMP) playback quality, had keyboard shortcuts (which means I can completely control the playback using key combos) and VLC-like ability to play any file based on codecs. These have been the main reasons why it still remains the default player for ANY media file on my computer. Over the years, jetAudio has got a major face uplift and with many new functions added (try tag edit & crossfade features) its free version can give many paid media players a run for their money.

RocketDock by Punk Software

2008/Kunal K

“Wh..what was that ? That thing that appeared out of nowhere !” No it is not Superman, but PC guy’s The Dock equivalent. I know Windows allows you to create toolbars but nothing is more intuitive and CHI zen-ish than having an app launcher pop out of hidden ends of your screen and leave as quietly as it appeared. RocketDock is perfect way to launch tools that you access frequently.

SequoiaView by Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

2003/Self

Hey you, yes you over there ! I know you probably have close to half a Tera Byte of storage on your computer and hence you feel justified in not deleting stuff ever from your computer. But remember that’s how everybody felt when they got hard disks with dozens of Giga Byte in them. How wrong they were !

Nope this next tool of ours is not an automatic file remover that removes files from your storage. But it gives you a visual snapshot of your disk usage, colour-coded by file extensions, filtered by various parameters so those hard disk guzzlers can no longer hide in obscure folders. Being an disciplinarian, SequoiaView has helped me to time and again remove locate and remove unnecessary files from my computer.

Snipping Tool by Microsoft

2008/Came with MS Vista Ultimate

As a webmaster, often I would need to take snapshots of specific regions of screen. Now probably there exist many tools to achieve this but this inbuilt tool from Microsoft in MS Windows Vista and above has kept me happy because of its minimalist interface and fabulous flow.

Streets & Trips by Microsoft

2008/Won in MS CPC 2008

Now I know ever since Google unleashed AJAX experience on Google Maps, Web and mapping softwares are no longer the same, but when I am aboard a bus from place A to place B with no internet access on my phone or laptop, it is Streets & Trips software by Microsoft which helps me figure out my way and whereabouts. This tool is the least used tool in this list but has been of immense value.

TClockEx by Dale Nurden

2002/Self

Early on into my PC usage, I was not satisfied with the default clock on Windows and needed some customisation. TClockEx has been adorning my start bar for eight years now displaying my clock in MS Comic Sans 9pt with a ‘$’ in between date and time. Apart from fulfilling my vanity requirements, it has a neat calendar view & also provides a view of memory/CPU usage.

TeamViewer by GmBH

2009/Online search

Remote desktop access is not a new topic, nor is the list of tools offering it short but TeamViewer struck me in what all it offered for free and the amazing UI. For an year, I used this software to access my personal laptop remotely from my college machine and boy was it exciting.

Hey, you said ten softwares, then why are we moving onto 11th one. Because it is free silly !

Free Studio by DVDVideoSoft

2010/Online search

The most recent entry in this list is a suite of a bunch of tools that come handy so often but surprisingly do not have a single tool that offers them all for free. Ranging from performing media file format conversion to downloading media in various formats from online sources, Free Studio is now a one-stop tool for my various media conversion requirements.

DISCLAIMER: All softwares are copyright of respective copyright holders and no infringement is intended. This entry captures my personal experience with these softwares and individual experiences may vary.