Nostalgia

"Friday, November 19, 2004

The night is over and I'm really really weary

After dinner I came back to my room discussed some implemention issues and approaches of the Mousatron with Hashim till 3:00 am. After that it was a couple of 8051 e-Books and Data Sheets for me. It didnt take me long to get bored though and I ended up watching Legends of the Fall again ..."

What you see up there in an excerpt from a blog entry that my good friend I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti) made in his blog "I-T's Blog Central" three years ago. This is one of the first few entries. I-T started blogging in Novemeber 2004, back then blogger was pretty new, and all of us were home from GIKI for mid-semester break. I-T didn't stop just there but infact i'm sure he was the single influencing factor in getting many people to blog, including me. Though I never was as faithful to it as I-T, as is evident from his long list of archive as opposed to my very short one. I even killed my blog and reincarnated it after a year. Please do pay I-T's blog a visit, the link is in my right pane under 'More Blabbers'. Anyway, since I am celebrating sad-yet-sweet nostalgia, I will continue to explain the background to the entry I-T made above ...

It was our 5th semester, and me, I-T, Hashim and moody (Ali Osman Hameed) formed a group for our Microprocessor Interfacing course project. We were all hoping to become fully qualified Computer Systems Engineers in another year and a half. We, rather ambitiously, decided to make a mouse-in-a-maze robot and after careful and lengthy deliberation, christened it 'mous-A-tron' (i think I-T and I came up with that one). A huge undertaking as it was, I-T and Hashim took the job of working on the code for the microprocessor itself, with I-T doing bulk of the actual coding, I was entrusted with making a circuit to accept the signal from the processor and send it up to the 15volt stepper motors (stepping it up from 5 volts to 15 volts on the way), which would in ideal conditions turn to make the mouseatron run, and I also designed the robot body in this rather cool engineering design software that we learnt in our 2nd Semester. I can't remember the name right now, but incidentally, it was I-T's elder brother, Kashif Bhatti, who was a mechanical engineer and had graduated in the spring of the same year we had joined, taught us the software back in our 2nd semester as he was our Engineering Design teacher.

Anyway, Moody and Hashim took the responsibility of actually constructing the robot body using the services of the workshop in the mechanical engineering faculty of the university. I-T also single handedly constructed the infra red obstacle detection circuit which was supposed to be the 'eyes' mousatron would use to get out of the maze. We spent some four weeks labouring over the project, during which I-T went crazy learning about the 8051 microprocessor while I could claim a half PhD in stepper motor theory. We finally got done with the four seperate parts of the robot but found out that they wouldn't work when put together and there was no time and hope to debug as the semester was nearly over, not to mention the final presentation was in the next few days, so in the end we showed all 4 components working seperately and incidentally got away with one of the highest scores in the class. Apparently we had done more with a non-working project than many people with fully functional ones :)

Fast Forward a year-and-a-half

All four of us graduated in the class of 2006. Our final exams ended mid-May 2006 with our convocation on 7th of June. Among our various accomplishments was an A in our two-semester, final year project, for which I-T, Hashim and I were again in a group. I think after mouseatron the three of us almost always ended up making project groups together.

Fast Forward three years

I-T: After graduation, I-T spent some time at his home in Lahore with his family. He had earlier applied to Microsoft, made it all the way and got hired. And I believe that he thoroughly and truly deserves it. But even before that, he worked at GIKI for sometime as a teaching assistant (TA), which I'm sure he was really good at. He moved to Microsoft which is situated in Redmond, outside Seattle, in April 2007 and been there since. Other than working, he spends his time experimental cooking, photographing, kayaking, canoe-ing, extreme sporting, biking, travelling and has nearly drowned at one occasion and multiple-fractured his arm at another. He's in Pakistan (Lahore) these days, his first trip home since Microsoft and is due to leave for America in a few weeks time. He blogs very regularly at his blog central. Link in the right pane. He is also found to cheer sad or sick friends up (meaning me) by sending them Chocolates and KFC through gift services.

Hashim: After graduating with the rest of us, Hashim, originally from Rawalpindi, worked in a local software house for a while, then went to GIKI as a TA around the same time as I-T, and left a few months after him. He is currently pursuing his masters degree at Chalmers in Goteborg, Sweden.

Moody: Moody also from Lahore party-ed after graduation and then moved to London, being a British national, as he was born there. There he switched jobs (and apartments) with quite regularity, yet never letting the party die out as many of our batchmates from GIKI went to UK for studies and proved to be his constant companions. He is currently working in the I-T department at Harrod's and can be heard from (online ofcourse) complaining about his 11 hour shifts.

I: Having gotten a job offer from P&G while I was in my 8th semester (I had interned for them in the summers after my 6th), I moved to Karachi just 2 days after graduating from GIKI. I started with the company on 12th June 2006. Coming from Islamabad, which is as diametrically opposite to Karachi as any two cities can get, I have had a rough time living alone here, with very few friends, a few personal set backs, and limited mobility due to the rather unsafe nature of the city. I have been here for nearly 1.5 years now, and I spend my time away from work in my room, staring at my laptop screen, enjoying the delights of unlimited internet. I was reading through I-T's blog archives when i stumbled upon the post above. My mother is still in Islamabad, where she has lived for 27 years and where I was born and raised. My sister now lives in Dubai with her husband, having gotten married some 2 months after I came to Karachi.

Here's the link to I-T's blog entry that triggered the cascade: The night is over and I'm really really weary


Here's a google map with GIKI, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi tagged along with my impressions of them. For Redmond, London and Gotenborg refer to your nearest google map.



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P.S: I'll try to dig up some old mouseatron stuff from my old PC which is lying like a relic in my room now and post them here. Next time I'll try to post about Egypt. A few people were interested in that.