Paycheck

No, I'm not talking about the Ben Affleck movie (decent movie though, worth a watch if you haven't already). Here, I am talking about me getting my first ever paycheck. Well, not exactly a paycheck but rather a transfer of my first ever salary to my bank account. Anyhoo, paycheck sounds a good word and that's what I will use.

Feels damn good today, after a month (well not exactly a month, there was a full shutdown week), of toiling (:P), I finally get the dough.

What do I plan to do with it, well, I seriously dunno. Gotta get some gifts for my parents first. After that it will just lie in the bank for the time being. Will see later what to do. Maybe another computer upgrade :D.

A (computer) geek's life in numbers

There are a lot of numbers in a (computer)geek's life, and below is a collection of those that I could recall from the top of my head.

• 0 : Zero, NULL, NADA, nothing, yet half of everything in the world of computers.


• 1 : Zero's complement, and with it the basis of all there is.


• 7 : socket seven, the home of processors for long, and at a time when the PC was spreading like wildfire in households.


• 8 : bits in a byte.


• 168 : The number of contact pins on a SDRAM DIMM.


• 184 : The number of contact pins on a DDR SDRAM DIMM.


• 240 : The number of contact pins on a DDR2 SDRAM DIMM.


• 370 : The socket of the venerable Pentium 3 processor.


• 462 : The number of pins in the home of the Athlon and Duron processors for long.


• 478 : The socket of the good part of the life of the Pentium 4 Processor.


• 754 : The socket of the original Athlon64 processor and later for value class semprons.


• 775 : The socket of the bad part of the life of the Pentium 4 Processor. And that of the promising "Core 2" conroe processors.


• 939 : The socket of choice for enthusiast grade Athlon64 processors for about two years, now replaced by the socket AM2.


• 1024 : The one grand for geeks.


• 7900 : (nVidia GeForce, GTX)As of now, one of the most powerful graphics cards on the market, and one will soon be inside my machine :D.


• 9800 : (ATi Radeon, pro/XT)The card that was last the clearcut winner of the performance race. Not so clear competetive offerings since then.

This post is just an attempt to reaffirm my geekdom, as I have been doing some pretty ungeeky stuff for the last few days. :~|

(kick)Starting Maruti

While one does not usually kickstart a car (it is either cranked or self-started), I still would use the word "kickstart" here, not because I am actually going to kick a car, but because it is the kickstart of my professional career, with Maruti Udyog Limited.

Maruti Udyog Limited had a very early joining date for its Graduate Engineer Trainees, and this meant that I did not get much time to relax ("maarofy peace" as some would say). It was practically college to factory.

The joining process on Thursday, June 1st, 2006, was a mellow affair. A final medical checkup followed by filing of pre-filled forms, and filling and filing of some new one, and getting that green uniform. After that, it was just lounging around in a huge seminar room till 5:30 in the evening when we could finally go back.

The second day was worse still, with identity card formalities completed quickly in the morning, we were left to get bored to death in the same seminar hall again. Lucky that crosswords, sudokus, jumbles and stuff in various newspapers came to our rescue.

Things finally got into overdrive on the third day, with addresses to the GET's by the MD, the Joint MD's and the HR head. Thus began the week-long orientation program, comprised of interaction sessions with various senior executives of the company telling about the various divisions and departments of the company.

The plant visits were held on the two penultimate days of the orientation programme, and they were good. Seeing a car being made on a 66 stage assembly line is a bliss for a car geek. However, the last day of the orientation process was as bad as the second day on the job, maybe even worse. Just one interaction session was planned, and that too at 4 in the afternoon. This meant another day of lounging around, and to top it, the seminar hall was also not free for three hours after lunch.

Anyway, after the 4 PM session on Quality Assurance and Inspection, we were finally given our training rotation schedule, and come Monday, 12th June, I will be down on the production line, making(???) cars for real. Lets see how many I break...