And the day was begun. We all crew members(me,omkar,tammay,virendra,akshay) gathered on a sanvordem bus stand at 7 ‘O Clock sharp. We took a sanvordem-margao shuttle and reached Margao. Since it was a working day there was so much rush at Margao bus stand. A huge queue for a shuttle ticket. If we would have joined that queue it would have required us to wait for half N hour and so, and ended up by reaching late at DIRECTORATE OF TECHNICAL SPORTS Miramar panjim. So we directly went to kadamba ticket counter from backside . One of our crew member(tanmay’s) fathers was the employee of that department , so we approached him.

And we managed to get tickets then we climbed bus. Since all people were waiting in the queue for a ticket……they astonished to see us people get into bus. Then we reached Panjim bus stand at 8.30am. Then we climbed overfulled Miramar bus and and reached DTS by 9 O’clock.

Since we did’nt knew the exact place, We entered almost all the buildings in DTS section. Did some mischief at swimming pool. By then, we had forgotten that we came there for playing an tournament. Suddenly someone from our crew shouted we’ll get late for competition. And we at last got that building.

All the teams were already present at that hall. After a while we started playing. This tournament was not so good experience we had though but we learned lot many things from this tournament. Since all the top level teams were competing we got a good exposure to all the skills . At the end we got 3rd place at this tournament .

 From our higher secondary more than 40 people had participated . With a fair game me n my friend omkar reached to the finals…. by beating all our opponents. And in the finals he won (gold medal) and I become the first runnerup (Silver medal) Since he was my good friend and also he was from science stream I didn’t had any regret since in chess ultimately science was winner.

 After that after a week or so our PE sir Ratnakar Raikar called 5 of us. We didn’t knew zonal competition is waiting ahead for us. But again my parents gave me permission for just that single competition…… so prepared again for little “MASKA”….and convinced them. So after a week and so we attended training from one of the goa’s famous chess master MR. Sanjay Kavlekar. In those training days he thought us all the chess basics ,opening moves. How to defend, Which part of chess board is the most important, Which move to play against any strong opposition and how to quickly fold game(rapid chess ).

The day of competition began. Our chess team along with other 9 higher secondary team gathered at Sanvordem Chess Academy.

 Our Team had 4 main and one substitute.

1)Omkar (caption)

2)Krishna(me)(vice Caption)

3)Tanmay 

4)Virendra

 5) Akshay(substitute)

 We played with each our opponent. Our team played at our potential but unfortunately omkar won only 1 match out of his 4. Me and tanmay won all 4 of 4. And virendra won 2 out of 4. At final tally our higher secondary and Gardian Angel higher secondary got 9 points each. Since only 1 team can participate at state level . Co-ordinater decided to play 1 man decider by 5 minute rapid fire. We decided that our caption omkar will play this decider.

Match was started 10 minutes later. Since this was just 5 minute decider. There was no roam to think. Our full team ‘s heart came to our mouth.All was just thinking of get out of it by winning . At the same time we were scared of loosing .But we had a faith on our caption that he won’t let us down.And only this had happened and he beat him in just 3 and half minute. We all Excited with one burst. We then cheered our higher secondary slogan.”East or west CTN is the best”.And noted faces of the loosing team.

Kyun naaa ho???? We were the winners at zone level and they were losers. We simply started teasing them since they were the biggest rivals of our higher secondary (like INDIA?PAKISTAN).

 Atlast the Academy co-ordinator came and told us to leave something to enjoy in higher secondary. We started laughing at one sight and came out of academy and all went to our respective home.

I participated in all goa rapid chess compition.
it was sunday and rainy day….somewhere in the middle of june.

Heavy shower were falling in quick successions.
we all, Me, my friends(Amey,omkar,gautam),my cuzn(rohan),
n his friends(gajanan and krupal) set to go kamakshi hall near tisk sanvordem.

We reache there at 8.30 am.

Apart from management we were the first once to enter the hall.
We entered inside and
directly went to trophy section
and clicked some of the pics with rulers trophy.

Now all set to dream of holding the trophy with
the press reporters
trying to click us to publish us on next days newspaper.

We enrolled our names and were Ready to play.
compition was about to start by 9 ‘oclock but because
of rain stuff it get bit late.

about 9.30 am management put up fixtures.
Guess what… my first match was with
well known International chess player “BHAKTI KULKARNI”

At my first thought i got little Nervous.
my all friends stood up n told me
” Do whatever you can but dont give up to her”.
“I want results”
“Play to your basics”
“Give her a tough fight”
with this hearings i made my mind “I will give
her a tough fight…whatever will be the outcome”.

I went to her.
As usuall Typical sportmen spirit
we both greet each other,shooke hands and started playing a match.

she took first move.

First thing i noticed about her is she is “E4″ player(usual chess opening move)

I tried to block all her move.

In the middle of it she tried to capture my knight with her bishop.
I lost my knight to her Bishop.

Next move she played was the horrible blunder instead of blocking my queen
with that bishop.
She blocked my queen with her queen.

GOD KNOWS WHAT HAS CAME TO HER MIND THAT TIME.

huhhhh…i got little sense of JOY.
i killed her queen with my queen and she killed my queen.

(15 minutes had passed)
Then here on suddenly i dont know what had happened to her.
She started playing a rough game n sacrificed all her assets
to my equally powered assets.

Match reached to the last 5 minutes.

My only king and 5 pawns had left and
her 1 rook ,king n 4 pawns.

so she blocked my king with rook and advanced her pawns to destination
to give rise to her queen again.

Final 1 minute
she gave me check with her new born queen and
all the all my hard work went for null.

Only satisfaction i had is i played a match with her.

It was June 2007, packed up with all competitive and board results and just enjoying the vacations as if life would be the same in the coming months and years. Hardly, aware where we would get finally landed up and which engineering college had the destiny decided for us. Cautious about the career but not that much really, thinking that life would be more easier and free , as it was the college time , free from all stringent school rules and daily punishments.
Neither homework, nor a bulky bags just a thin notebook and pen. Fewer lectures and more bunks, and having fun all the day with the fellow peers. June passed with the same thoughts and enthusiasm. It was the admission to allot us the engineering colleges in Goa according to our state ranks.
I was lucky to get discipline of my choice that is information technology and that too in the college I had opted for. GEC at farmagudi popularly known as the educational hub of goa.

The place was new. Got up early in the morning as it was
my first day in the college,. Thinking while brushing the teeth-
Will I reach the college on time today?( because I had to find the way first. Was totally new to that place)
What about ragging? How will be the new classmates and new teachers? Muddled up with all these thoughts, I dressed up in very simple clothes.(Full-sleeve t-shirt and formal pant, as I thought was the criteria put up by the seniors for the fresher students.).I started my journey to the college and in the way asking passersby from where I could get the bus for college. As it was the first day I was little reluctant to go by GEC bus so I decided to go by walking. Anyhow, I maintained my grit and reached college’s gate(Thanked God, found it). It was a walk of 15-20 minutes from farmagudi to actual campus With my head down, I was walking and I found 2 new friends there while walking(actually I met them during my admissions at DTE) I got some confidence as i will be not alone now to face any consequences if any senior follow us. Next task was to find the classroom. we met security guard n he guided us to a classroom, then we managed to enter a big hall like classroom(we were the first FE’s to be in the classrooms), I took a backseat. At 9am our class filled up completely First lecture went off only with class arrangements and introductions. The whole day went in the same confusion, searching departments and escaping from getting ragged every now and then. Finally the first day came to an end and I was among the few day scholars who had to go far and leave the college campus. After a week in college, ragging was in vogue. It was hard to cope up with the studies and above which the fear of ragging. I was totally in a situation of dilemma where life has left me.
Every morning we had to get up at six, then cook for breakfast, and climb the bus, as the college was 29 kms away. Struggling in college buses sometimes inside and many times the door. By hook or crook we used to reach college and often late for first lectures. It was 5 pm when the college used to get over and at 7pm we used to reach back home. Totally soporific schedule used to make us asleep for 2 hrs after reaching home. Then getting up, having dinner and again go to sleep. That was the daily schedule and hardly any time to study. Only Weekend holidays were meant for enjoying little bit and completing the written work. Life continued in the same manner and slowly and gradually time passed and we also became seniors. Situations were little better now but we were totally exhausted.

Till then it has been three long years now, struggling with life everyday but habituated now and become more tough and strong with the circumstances. The entire semester completes with the same struggle and the actual study is a day before the finals. Thus from my point of view, a B.E Degree is not a matter of 48 months(4 years) but a matter 48 nights(48 subjects in total degree , hence 48 nights before each exam.) A lesson it has taught is that life is not that easy always. Time is one of the best teachers.

At a time when cyber attacks are increasing worldwide, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was right to declare that an attack on one nation’s computer networks “can be an attack on all.” Indeed, the attacks are a reminder that, as a new part of the global commons, cyberspace already has come under threat.

Cyberspace must be treated, along with outer space, international waters, and international airspace, as property held in common for the good of all. And, like ocean piracy and airplane hijacking, cyber-crime cannot be allowed to go unpunished if we are to safeguard our common assets and collective interests.

Naming China among a handful of countries that have stepped up Internet censorship, Clinton warned that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.” Her statement, with its allusion to the Cold War-era Iron Curtain, amounted to an implicit admission that the central assumption guiding US policy on China since the 1990’s – that assisting China’s economic rise would usher in greater political openness there – has gone awry.

The strategy of using market forces and the Internet to open up a closed political system simply is not working. Indeed, the more economic power China has accumulated, the more adept it has become in extending censorship to cyberspace.

If anything, China has proven that a country can blend control, coercion, and patronage to stymie the Internet’s politically liberalizing elements. Through discreet but tough controls, Beijing pursues a policy of wai song, nei jin – relaxed on the outside, vigilant internally.

Google is now crying foul over “ a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China.” But, despite itscorporate motto – “Don’t be evil” – Google itself was instrumental in aiding online censorship in China, having custom-built a search engine that purges all references and Web sites that the Chinese government considers inappropriate. Now Google itself has become a victim of China’s growing cyber prowess, in the same way that appeasement of Hitler boomeranged onto France and Britain.

China deploys tens of thousands of “ cyber police” to block Web sites, patrol cyber-cafes, monitor the use of cellular telephones, and track down Internet activists. But the threat to the new global commons comes not from what China does domestically. Rather, it comes from the way in which the know-how that China has gained in fashioning domestic cyber oversight is proving invaluable to it in its efforts to engage in cyber intrusion across its frontiers.

Canadian researchers have discovered a vast Chinese surveillance system called “GhostNet,” which can compromise computers in organizations abroad through booby-trapped e-mail messages that automatically scan and transfer documents to a digital storage facility in China. This is what happened when computers of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, were attacked last year.

India’s national security adviser recently complained that his office was targeted yet again by hackers. “People seem to be fairly sure it was the Chinese,” he said. Officials in Germany, Britain, and the US have acknowledged that hackers believed to be from China also have broken into their government and military networks.

The state-sponsored transnational cyber threat is at two levels. The first is national, with the hackers largely interested in two objectives. One is to steal secrets and gain an asymmetrical advantage over another country. Cyber intrusion in peacetime allows the prowler to read the content and understand the relative importance of different computer networks so that it knows what to disable in a conflict situation. The other objective is commercial: to pilfer intellectual property.

The second level of cyber threat is against chosen individuals. The most common type of intrusion is an attempt to hack into e-mail accounts. The targets also can face Trojan-horse attacks by e-mail intended to breach their computers and allow the infiltrators to corrupt or transfer files remotely.

To be sure, if a cyber attack is camouflaged, it is not easy to identify the country from which it originated. Through the use of so-called “false-flag espionage” and other methods, attacks can be routed through the computers of a third country. Just as some Chinese pharmaceutical firms exported to Africa spurious medicines with “Made in India” labels – a fact admitted by the Chinese government – some Chinese hackers are known to have routed their cyber intrusion through computers in Russia, Iran, Cuba, and other countries.

But, like their comrades in the pharmaceutical industry, such hackers tend to leave telltale signs. Then there are many cases in which the attacks have originated directly from China.

It seems unlikely that these hackers, especially those engaged in cyber espionage, pilferage, and intimidation, are private individuals with no links to the Chinese government. It is more likely that they are tied to the People’s Liberation Army. In war, this irregular contingent of hackers would become the vanguard behind which the PLA takes on the enemy. Systematic cyber attacks constitute a new frontier of asymmetrical warfare at a time when the world already confronts other unconventional threats, including transnational terrorism.

With national security and prosperity now dependent on the safekeeping of cyberspace, cybercrime must be effectively countered as an international priority. If not, cyberspace will become the new global-commons battlefield.

Law #2: Any error in any calculation will be in the direction of most harm.

Law #3: In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from engineering handbooks) are to be treated as variables.

Law #4: The best approximation of service conditions in the laboratory will not begin to meet those conditions encountered in actual service.

Law #5: The most vital dimension on any plan drawing stands the most chance of being omitted.

Law #6: If only one bid can be secured on any project, the price will be unreasonable.

Law #7: If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent production units will malfunction.

Law #8: All delivery promises must be multiplied by a factor of 2.0.

Law #9: Major changes in construction will always be requested after fabrication is nearly complete.

Law #10: Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.

Law #11: Interchangeable parts won’t.

Law #12: Manufacturer’s specifications of performance should be multiplied by a factor of 0.5.

Law #13: Salespeople’s claims for performance should be multiplied by a factor of 0.25.

Law #14: Installation and Operating Instructions shipped with the device will be promptly discarded by the Receiving Department.

Law #15: Any device requiring service or adjustment will be the least accessible.

Law #16: Service conditions as given on specifications will be exceeded.

Law #17: If more than one person is responsible for a miscalculation, no one will be at fault.

Law #18: Identical units which test in an identical fashion will not behave in an identical fashion in the field.

Law #19: If, in engineering practice, a safety factor is sent through the service experience at an ultimate value, an ingenious idiot will promptly calculate a method to exceed said safety factor.

Law #20: Warranty and guarantee clauses are voided by payment of the invoice.

Law #21: The rule for engineers: “Change the data to fit the curve.”

… choosing to buy flowers for your girlfriend or upgrading your RAM is a moral dilemma.

… you take a cruise so you can go on a personal tour of the engine room.

… in college you thought Spring Break was metal fatigue failure.

… the salespeople at the local computer store can’t answer any of your questions.

… at an air show you know how fast the skydivers are falling.

… you bought your wife a new CD-ROM drive for her birthday.

… you can quote scenes from any Monty Python movie.

… you can type 70 words per minute but can’t read your own handwriting.

… you comment to your wife that her straight hair is nice and parallel.

… you sit backwards on the Disneyland rides to see how they do the special effects.

… you have saved every power cord from all your broken appliances.

… you have more friends on the Internet than in real life.

… you know what http:// stands for.

… you look forward to Christmas so you can put the kids’ toys together.

… you see a good design and still have to change it.

… you spent more on your calculator than you did on your wedding ring.

… you still own a slide rule and know how to use it.

… you think that people yawning around you are sleep deprived.

… you window shop at Radio Shack.

… your laptop computer costs more than your car.

… your wife hasn’t the foggiest idea of what you do at work.

… you’ve already calculated how much you make per second.

… you’ve tried to repair a $5 radio.

9. Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it doesn’t work.

8. Not everything works according to the specs in the databook.

7. Anything practical you learn will be obsolete before you use it, except the complex math, which you will never use.

6. Always try to fix the hardware with the software.

5. Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab every day for the rest of your life.

4. Overtime pay? What overtime pay?

3. Engineers rule the world until the next revision.

2. If you like junk food, caffeine, and all-nighters, then you should go into architecture.

1. Dilbert is a documentary.