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Posts Tagged ‘school’

  1. Liked on SoundCloud: Mann – Buzzin (Geekmix ft Dr. Awkward)

    April 27, 2015 by Sunit Nandi

    I favourited this track:
    Mann – Buzzin (Geekmix ft Dr. Awkward) by Dr. Awkward
    on SoundCloud as I found it amazing.

    Hope you liked listening to it. 🙂
    I’ll be posting again soon.


  2. Dastan-é-blogging

    August 17, 2013 by Sunit Nandi

    If you guys have seen my posts already, you may have noticed I have been blogging here for over 5 years by now. In this post, I’ll be telling you about my blogging journey and how I finally reached to where I am right now.

    Back in 2002, I was studying in Chatsworth International School, Singapore. I’d give the credit to one of my classmates there named Hugh Bullen for introducing me to the world of web design by showing me how to write in HTML. He was pretty pesky, annoying and awkward to most people, including our class teacher. But to me and a couple of other guys, he was quite friendly. It’d be right to say he was moody. One fine day, he wrote a basic “Hello world” page on a piece of paper and after that, I gazed at the paper for a few minutes, trying to understand the whole meaning as he explained the tags. Later that day at home, I was looking up guides on HTML and practicing.

    I didn’t know where to host the files and I was pretty much confused at that point. Then an ex-student of dad named Parlapalli Madhusudhana Rao “Madhu”, set me up to use Yahoo! GeoCities for the webpages and Yahoo! photos for the photo gallery. After that I spent a lot of time learning HTML and made a simple website for the family.

    Back in India in 2003, I finally got bored with the 15 MB storage limit on GeoCities. Then another friend suggested me to try Tripod by Lycos with 20 MB hosting. It was on that host I first started blogging. Now comes the ‘how’ part. I was once going through their CGI scripts section. I saw a ‘web log wrapper’. Curiously, I applied it, and bingo, I had a nice blog with a WYSIWYG editor. I was never serious about blogging then and hardly felt with maintaining it. But the idea was damn fascinating.

    During the time 2004 to 2005, Google began to expand, launching GMail, Talk, Google Pages and then buying out Blogger. Someone suggested me to move to Google Pages for hosting the site. There was a storage limit of 100 MB and the WYSIWYG editor with nice templates was very superb. However, I wasn’t really comfy with Blogger in the beginning, so I used Windows Live Spaces to blog instead. I liked their nicely done ‘notes’ feature and used it for almost 2 years. 

    While all this was going on, I’d share URLs of my sites with classmates enquiring about their opinion. But, I was often always laughed at and often called nerdy. Some even said I was doing a pointless job.

    In the meanwhile I switched to a good reputed free web host (I don’t remember the name now) which then recently began offering 5 GB of space plus PHP and MySQL databases. I was new to the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) method of hosting websites, so initially I tried to make a basic webpage for family with MS Frontpage and embedded PHP scripts in the syntax.

    In 2006-2007, our school started off a Ecological and Environmental club and then they appointed to make their website. While I was in the process of doing so, I came across the WordPress blogging platform for the first time. WordPress had just reached its v2 state. After some initial discussion, we decided to go forward with it. The school, however, refused to grant us hosting on their own server. So we had to buy our own hosting to get it working. I learnt a lot working with WordPress in the process.

    As this was going on, the free host I was on started leaning towards bankruptcy. They began asking for donations to run. Soon afterwards, they had to shut down. Then after that, we had Live Spaces deprecating their notes feature, so I moved over to TypePad. I loved TypePad for its simplicity, and back in those days, it beat both Blogger and WordPress with their design. I wasn’t still a serious blogger. I just blogged about life events, few ‘yay’ posts and random stuff.

    After days and days of searching on the internet, I finally found x10Hosting. Their free plan gave away a whole LAMP stack with 2.5 GB of space. I thought it was too good to be true, but still signed up anyway. My account took a whole week to get approved. I was at the verge of giving up, but when I tried it, I was impressed. It turned out to be better than the paid host our club was using. TypePad then decided to go paid, making me leave their service. Then I got a .co.cc free domain name and with my hosting account I rebuilt the family website and also installed WordPress 2.2 to serve my blog. And since then, history was made as I never changed this set up ever again.

    Then came the blogging buzz in India in 2008-2009. Bollywood stars like Aamir Khan and Amitabh Bachchan began to blog. It was heavily publicised in the media, with articles on how to start a blog being printed on every other newspaper. Blogging was on everyone’s lips. The people who once dissed me for ‘pointless efforts’ began creating their own blogs like there was no tomorrow. I had one of the greatest LOL moments of my life then. It just seemed that the public memory is just like a beach. You make a mark on the sand, very soon its washed away. However, when the tide comes up, it stays there a while before leaving, making the beach appear like it isn’t there. Here the beach is the public, and the sea tide is the media. People only accept what the media says, not what you as an individual say.

    Soon enough Twitter took the world by storm. In India, it was more of a hurricane. Again the media went maniac over it. Then our nation’s honourable ladies and gentlemen joined Twitter. The common man made his account to follow them all. I watched the whole drama unfold itself like a poor joke. News and music channels began to display those ‘elite’ tweets on their scrolling tickers. I laughed at the whole stupidity of making a mountain of a molehill. I wasn’t inclined to join Twitter because I did not have a proper reason to actually use it. It’d have just been another unused account, like most old Twitter accounts that were created by humans of our nation.

    I finally got the message that the people around me were just trying to be hippie kewl dudes and babes by keeping up to the trends, and they weren’t the right guys to ask for any sort of opinion. I realised I needed to find the right people to discuss with.

    Its year 2011. My friend Farhan Hussain, a senior at school, was very much into web design and web application projects. His activities were quite popular, and got immense support from numerous friends. His only problem was that he never did anything for long terms. He used to start a project, develop it, maintain it for a month or two and then move on. This attitude of his was rather irritating to me, and we often had ego clashes and exchanges of harsh words took place. To be really honest, we never looked like friends to everyone else. Even though we had differences, we still started Techno FAQ with couple of other friends, and it turned out to be quite successful. Then Farhan left school and within a year, joined a college in Bangalore for a course on Mass Communication. Finally, according to his nature, he wanted to shut down Techno FAQ saying, “Dude this is just a technology group, the fact that has progressed this far is something significant. Now I think its time we move on and deal with more important things in life.” I vehemently refused to let it shut down when it had already come this far, and that I had made a whole new circle of friends because of it. Plus, I had my own plans of extending Techno FAQ. We again had fights over it. He first made me quit the group and asked me to build my own. But a week later, he asked me to join it back and he himself left it for ever, for reasons I don’t even know till now.

    This is year 2012. Now that Techno FAQ was in the care of the remaining members, we added a whole lot of new members in the management to take the group forward. As it was expanding, we decided that a website was necessary. To fulfil the requirements, I upgraded my hosting plan to premium paid hosting. The web host promptly moved to my account to their premium servers. technofaq.org was bought and started our site and began some serious tech blogging. We also joined Google+ and Twitter to make a presence.

    A few months later, I decided it was time to resume building my personal websites too. So I bought nandifamily.in and moved all my sites from the old domain to the new one. Then I imported all old posts from the older blogs I once had and imported them here. Finally I shut down all other other blogging accounts. After a little bit of touch-ups, this blog was ready, and I was finally ready for some serious blogging. Also a point worth mentioning is that I finally have people around who love blogs and are willing to read what I write. I hope to maintain this blog for as long as possible, and make it close to a personal diary as far as possible. Hope you guys continue reading it.

    I also joined Twitter as I had enough friends to tweet to and enough topics to tweet about.

    In case you want to read my old posts, you are free to do so. This blog has posts dating back to 2007.

    With this I end my post. A few words I wish to tell everyone is: No matter what anyone says or if anyone stops you, do what you love to do. Any good activity that is going to benefit you or people around you is worth doing if you love doing it. Don’t listen to negatives. Remember that all people will not be able to appreciate your work. Just carry on and find people who will actually love doing things with you. The world will seem much better and happier.


  3. Well I’m back!

    April 19, 2012 by Sunit Nandi

    So finally, I’m back. All this while I was away giving my Class 12 board exams. Then I sat for several JEE exams.

    So, now that I’m finally back, stay tuned for the coming updates.


  4. School starts again

    August 15, 2011 by Sunit Nandi

    Now our school starts again. Back to activities and studies again. Boards are coming up in March, so studies are on in full swing.

    Life isn’t that good now. One cellphone is sent for repair and the other confiscated. Waiting for both of them to return. 🙁

    I just pray everything turns out fine. Will write again soon. 😀


  5. Summer holidays are back, but for the last time

    July 7, 2011 by Sunit Nandi

    So finally July, and the summer/rainy season holidays are back again. This is gonna be my last one, because I will be leaving school next year. Makes me nostalgic to think of it. :O 🙂

    Not much of an activity is taking place, only studies for the upcoming board exams are going on.

    Btw, the fun part is that we had Aikyataan before the holidays. In case you don’t know what it is, it is the inter-house competitions held at our school. It has pretty good number of events like dances, songs, debates, extempore speeches, etc etc.

    I wish to share some pics of it. Here is the link to that album.

    Also here are some video of it, I have made a playlist out of it.

    Also, as I have earlied mentioned that I would post, here are videos of KK’s concert in Alcheringa 2011 at IIT Guwahati.

    So this much for today. Hope you have fun watching the pics and videos.

    Have a wonderful day!


  6. Class XII goes on as usual

    May 16, 2011 by Sunit Nandi

    So Class XII seems to go like usual. We are having tests every Monday on a different subject every week. Also, we are having practicals on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Coincidentally, I am having weekly tests on Mondays at Brilliant Tutorials too, which means Monday is a busy day.

    Hope these 6 months end soon. Its kind of sick schedule.

    Also getting time for the web is a tough job. Video encoding is also tough as encodes take a long time and I don’t get to keep my computer on all day.

    Lets see what happens.


  7. So how’s your Christmas gonna be?

    December 20, 2010 by Sunit Nandi

    Hello everyone. I am very happy today! Its Christmas holidays going on.

    On Saturday, our school organised its biennial cultural programme. Being an awardee, I was one of the guests there. Also, the performances were very nice, especially the dances and the drama on Indian Freedom struggle.

    I am trying my best to upload the videos to YouTube. It will take some time because my capture card isn’t working and my dad is going to buy a new one.

    Well, I dunno what my Christmas is gonna be cuz I am having exams at Brilliant Tutorials on 26th. 🙁 Hopefully, I might have a free new year. 🙂


  8. Remembering Chatsworth

    October 14, 2010 by Sunit Nandi

    So my exams are finally over.

    I set out to upload the only videos that I had of my time of Chatsworth International School. See them below.

    This is the play on Ancient Egypt performed by me and my friends, when we were in Year 4. (In the year 2003).

    This is the chorus that we sang after the play.

    It was a nice time remembering those childhood moments again. We spent a month preparing for this play and it turned out to be a success. Watch the videos and you will know about it yourself.

    Stay tuned as it is the season for Durga Puja. More nice stuff coming up!


  9. After a long pause

    August 1, 2010 by Sunit Nandi

    So guys, I was away for a very long time because I did not get time to do most of my activities on the web. My holidays started at the beginning of this month, but preparations for exams at Brilliant Tutorials took up half of the month. Then the rest half of the month was used up by catching up with Brilliant syllabus. The exams results were not good. So the entire holidays appear to be wasted up to nothing. No travelling, no shopping, blah blah blah…..

    Just a week is left for the school to start. Hopefully, something nice may come up. I have completed building the family website and also put a new and simple theme on my blog which looks great with my verbose typing.

    At this moment I am eagerly trying to get my HTC Tattoo to get access to the web, without any appreciated results. Just hope that it will be fine in a couple of days. I have tried transparent proxies but they are hard to set up and I am at it.

    I also wanted to set up a networking site for my school friends, but my partner in this venture is not responding to my requests and his phone isn’t working as well.

    All in all, everything is in a mess. Just hope that everything will be fine soon.

    Ok time to go. Will write again.


  10. Hey, I am gonna meet Michael Fincke!

    September 6, 2009 by Sunit Nandi

    Hello everyone! I have a great news to tell you all. I am going to meet Michael Fincke, a NASA astronaut who spent more than a year in space. News is that he had married an Assamese. So he was visiting his wife’s place, which is in Guwahati city. Incidentally, he was labelled to be the State Guest of Assam and he was welcomed warmly. Other than spending his time here, he will also be holding several interactive sessions with different institutions across the state. Our school is one of those and I am one of those students selected to meet him in order to represent my school.

    Well, I am already getting excited and am looking forward meeting him. I think I will have a nice time and one-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

    Seeya soon! Will be telling you all how I had enjoyed there.