It's a good start.

Finally I have an acceptance of our paper, after two rejections.

After coming to Rutgers, I started working on this as my GA project. I was working on it alone, and was totally new to the area of trusted computing. Had to go through the stages of familiarizing myself with the area, installing new software, including libraries, operating system and playing with them, collaborating with other people, writing code and testing it as part of an existing system. I was not totally satisfied with what I did since I didn't propose a new solution. What we did was implement an existing algorithm, and take measurements to identify the bottlenecks of the protocol. But this process itself consumed one year. Then, we had to give some more time to incorporate it in an existing framework.
Then came the first submission where I remember how all of us, the authors, were working till the last minute and submitted the final version with anxiety and nervousness. I got a sense of small achievement. Then came rejection, followed by another submission and subsequent rejection. And finally, here we are. This acceptance, too, has a darker side. Our paper was sitting on the fence of acceptance line, and got accepted weakly. Also, TrustED is a low-ranked workshop.

I don't feel so excited as to announce this news to the world. I don't want to take compliments for work that I am not so proud of. I will just let my family know about this.

Having said that, I am happy :-) Now, I have something to write on my resume under the section of publications. I no more feel that my first year at Rutgers was wasted. I now know what it takes to publish at more reputed venues and will definitely aim higher. It's a good start.

We, the Cruel Humans

Can you imagine that a lady is being forcefully impregnated, then she is separated from her newly born child, and then somebody forcibly takes away her breast milk? And this is done for years, until the lady can no more produce milk. At this point, the useless lady is killed and her meat is fed to others. Wow, the lady was "used" 100% of the time she was alive and also after her death. Just replace the lady with a cow. How can we be so cruel to cows? Why do we need to drink milk which is nothing but breast milk for the calves, and was not meant for humans? Who were those smart people who made humans drink milk from the childhood, feeding into our brains the idea that milk is good and nutritious for us? Why as adults, we never educate ourselves about the truth? Why am I just blogging about this, and committing myself to becoming neither a vegetarian nor a vegan? I don't have answers.