Yet another non-technical post. Vinod studies in the same department under the same university as I do (but in another college). I was in splits when I read this account of his four years of engineering - they're SO true
..For example, let us consider the rather profound question 'Explain data transmission over Computer Networks?'
Here is how I'd go about answering it,
'The transmitting system sends the data over the data channel to the receiving system which receives the data. Thus, we can infer that the data is sent from the source all the way to the destination with the help of the systems in between the source and the destination. The working of the system is as follows: The transmitter first sends the data, then the receiver receives it. The sheer simplicity of the whole procedure is what has made data transmission over networks a vital feature of networks today. The process can be carried out in steps as follows:
Step 1: Transmitter transmits data
Step 2: Receiver receives data.'..
And this account on the textbooks that we study from before exams
..No article about Engineering College life in Chennai can be complete without a mention of the redoubtable Charulatha Publications or their remarkable series of publications known in the student community simply as '.....made easy'. Remarkable is definitely not the word. There was 'Operating Systems made easy', 'Digital Signal Processing made easy'. Name the subject and it was immediately made easy... just for you. And that is what made it the most astounding series of books to come out of the great publishing houses of Earth, Ursa Minor and Major all put together.
A million times at least, I've glanced at my watch and seen that there was an hour left for the semester exam to start. A friend would pass me a well thumbed copy of '....made easy' and it was as if, like The Guide, it had the words 'Don't Panic' in bright red friendly letters on the cover. And, also like The Guide, it's much cheaper than the extravagantly priced prescribed texts. One look at it and I'd feel my body beginning to relax. My mind would become clearer and all the knowledge I gathered from the book, I'd spit it out on my answer sheet and go on to successfully clear the exam. It helped me pass. Me. Pass. That's how magical the book was!..
One thing he neglected to mention about Charulatha Publications is their abundant usage of OCR scanning from other books - and the fact that they don't have a single proof-reader. So you'd find extremely creative usage of spelling and grammar. For e.g, you'd find '[' instead of 'T' in a lot of places.And oh yeah - no book would be over 150 pages. Andy Tannenbaum would forget about writing articles on who wrote Linux and commit suicide if he ever saw the kind of editing these people do to his books
Way to go, Vinod! For the rest of you, this is one of those you-have-to-be-there-to-find-it-funny posts.