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Today, as part of the National Science Day, Open Day was celebrated at IISc. The whole institute was open to the general public. Anybody can come and interact with the students and the Professors and get a feel about the various researches occurring there. I too attended some of the sessions. Joe accompanied me in the afternoon. I am not sure whether such an event is organized at IISc every year. But it gives an opportunity for the general public to see what actually happens in India’s top Research Institute. Being from Computer Science background, I attended the sessions organized in the Computer Science and Automation department. I interacted with some of the PhD scholars and one of the faculty of the department. Lot of interesting work is going on in the field of Parallel Programming, Storage and security level apart from the other researches in Theoretical computer science.

In addition to this, I also met a Professor from the Signal Processing Lab along with Joe. It was great to interact with the Professor. We spent a lot of time discussing about the research work occurring in the field of Computer Music both in IISc and abroad. In short, the discussion with him was very much encouraging.

Lot of students from various colleges were present during the event. I wanted to spend some more time in the department, but because I had to come back, we left the place early.

I am definitely happy with such a novel idea from IISc. Hope other research institutes follow the same in the future.

It’s a long time since I have been trying to write my first post here. But I was procrastinating it for a long time for various reasons. I will discuss some of the reasons here in the first post.

Firstly, should I call this my first post? I have been blogging for quite a long time, ever since I heard about the word ‘blogging’, introduced during a Tech Talk on blogging by Kiruba Shankar back in the year 2007. I was pursuing my Masters at that time. It may seem quite a shame that I was not aware of the term back then. But let’s not discuss it here, because I knew a lot of people from my batch who didn’t know about it. Probably blogging was not a buzz word in India at that period of time. No more justifications. Anyway I found the world of blogging quite interesting. I always had the desire of writing and Blogging introduced me to the world of words. My initial writings were more about my personal life, the day to day occurrences. To put it better, it was more of an internet diary. Then slowly I started writing about some technical stuff. This had put me on the wrong track, because the moment I saw a surge in the visitor count, I started writing more technical articles. I felt that technical writing is my passion.

My initial blog was on blogpost, then I migrated to wordpress. Slowly I purchased a domain, which is the one I am posting this article on (johnsamuel.in). I created some subdomains, each meant to serve different purpose, some reflecting my personal thoughts, some to write programming experiments, and some for book reviews (books I have read and liked). There was a dedicated blog for writing technical articles. I still remember the large number of visitors I used to get for the simple post “How to change offline/online mode of Firefox?” In short, I had around 4 subdomains. But I was able to concentrate only on the technical blog.

Then I got the CALL. There is always a moment in your life, when you turn back to your life to check “Is this really what you intend to do?” And my inner voice replied “NO”. So one day, I decided to revamp my site. And now I am here with my first post after the revamping.

What next? I have learned a lot about blogging during this long period of blogging on various topics. And now I want to experiment with my learning. I want to turn this blog as a medium to express my feelings on topics which really interests me. But one thing is sure, I don’t want to turn this blog into one more site for tutorials, HOWTOs.

I want to explore the writer in me. I want to experiment with my writing. The reason for procrastination for writing this post was that I was trying to find the real reason for the revamping (one fine day), the cause which influenced me to take the step. I was not aware of the cause to a full extent. And now that I am fully aware, here goes my first post.