Still alive and kicking

I am still alive and kicking. Itz been almost 2 months since I blogged. tatz the longest break I have taken to blog since I started blogging.. I am on my final sem @ UIUC and working on a Advance DBMS course. This class is quite hectic with projects, assignments and study guide problems (SGP). SGP is a new concept that I am getting adapted to. we basically go through all the landmark papers in the database world. Right before every class we need to read the paper and frame a qn / ans and post it in our class SGP page. This would guide / help other class mates to learn broadly. I might be benefited by someone elsez SGP QA while someone could learn from my SGP QA. we also vote on these SGP QA and get graded on these ratings. Itz a great team work. I've been learning a lot in this class. For eg, I thot Map-Reduce was a ground breaking idea from Google but after reading about Gamma database, I was shattered to see a similar idea 20 years ago. I am constantly getting reminded about my ignorance as I keep learning.
Also our Prof. Kevin Chang has a search engine called iWisdm and we are working on to build a dirty version of search service. Me and my team mate are working on a "Who" search engine called "Hoo". You can ask a "Who" question like "Who is the father of computers" and it would answer "Charles Babbage" and provide an image of Mr. Charles Babbage. We still have a long way to go for refining the results etc but we are progressing well so far..