I Am Tracking Every Piece Of My Mailing And Would Like For: Fill & Download for Free

Something similar happened to my son. He was issued a collection notice by a bill collector who had bought Dallas county’s unpaid court fines. Apparently someone committed petty theft, was apprehended, use my sons name, was fined in court, released on his own recognizance, but never paid the fineMy son lived in New Hampshire at the time and had not been to Dallas anytime near when the crime allegedly took place.He hired an attorney in Dallas. The attorney sent a cease and desist letter to the collection agency who told him it had to be cleared by the court, otherwise they would continue collection. It was critical to get this resolved because my son could lose his security clearance (and job) if this showed up on his record. The attorney presented to the prosecutor two pieces of evidence:(1) my son has a google phone that tracks his location constantly. The attorney presented google screen shots showing That my son was in Connecticut at the time of the crime. Why was my son in Connecticut?(2) my son worked at a top secret facility in Connecticut. Each day he had to present a thumbprint AND a retinal scan to enter the lab. His boss provided a notarized letter stating that he had reviewed the time stamps on the fingerprint log and the retinal scan log. He also inspected my son to confirm that he still had all fingers and both eyes. On this basis, he vouched that my son, and every part of my son was NOT in Dallas at the day and time of the crime!Actually. I made that up, but it could have happened. My son had just moved from Houston Texas to New Hampshire, has a google phone and worked in a top secret facility in Connecticut.What really happened is that the prosecutor had a surveillance photograph of the perpetrator as well as the police mug shots. The attorney presented to the prosecutor a copy of my son’s TEXAS drivers license. It was clear to all that the man in the photo was not my son.The case against my son was dropped - mistaken identity. The collection agency was notified and the collection letters stopped. We will never know why the prosecutor didn’t look at the DMV files on his own.By the way, my son still had to pay the lawyer. Life’s a bitch.[EDIT] I have received numerous comments that he should have sued the collection agency for the cost of clearing his name, and, as some suggested, punitive damages. That’s not how it works for the working classes. My son is just out of the Navy. While he has a steady pay check, it’s barely a living. He has no spare money to retain an attorney on a case that may or may not be successful and a case that would likely take a very long time to conclude. Likewise the value of such a case is likely too low for any decent attorney to take up on commission. In my son’s case it was best for him to cough up the $200 bucks to get the case dismissed and walk away from it. His most pressing concern in all of this was that the case not affect his top secret security clearance and his job tied to that clearance.p

Attitude towards having a strong work ethic. Learning technology comes later.I too had a similar profile: private university, non-existent programming culture. But overcoming all said challenges, I got selected for GSoC at the end of my second year.What I recommend through my personal experiences is :Getting used to working as a programmer: I knew programming before joining college, although the kind of programming I am doing right now is way different from what I had learnt in school. Due credits given to my school for making my fundamentals strong in OOPS as well as getting me used to working as a programmer. Not very hardcore stuff, I just felt that I had an upper hand over the students who weren’t familiar with programming because I had spent 2 years on learning basics vs the latter had only one semester of introduction towards programming in general.To the people who aren’t familiar with programming, don’t get scared reading the first point. I repeat, the kind of programming that got me through GSoC is way different from what I had learnt in school.It’s imperative to getting used to coding. Read about the 10,000 rule for mastering any skill.In a nutshell, be comfortable in using a computer more than the amount your average family member uses.A short list of what you can do:For basics/catching up:Attend all the lectures related to programming in your college. Don’t miss out on lab sessions where you get hands-on knowledge.Or else if you belong to the self-motivated bunch, try taking Harvard’s CS50 course.Once you get the hang of basics:If you come from a Windows background/have a Windows Laptop:Install any flavor of Linux having a LTS (Long Term Support) tag. It’s not compulsory but in my experience it’s far easier and more productive to work on a Linux machine. Most open source communities that get selected for GSoC primarily use Linux themselves. Remember, work with the right tool.I use Gnome (Ubuntu) 14.04 LTS dual booted with Windows 10.Start building a strong foundation:I have read countless failure stories, that people spent months preparing for GSoC and still couldn’t clear it. I am not trivializing their effort but you can’t just walk out of the room, even if you exert a lot of force on one of it’s wall. Try working smart, or in that analogy use the door.In my case, I actively started preparation 2 weeks before the organizations were announced and I still got in. It was easy for me as I was involved in a lot of projects by the time I started preparing for GSoC. I had already interned twice and had developed the right mix of technical and communication skills.Quantify time with motivation:Currently you have a lot of time on your hand. But not enough motivation, so start quantifying time with motivation.For eg: don’t spend hours setting up things on Windows, whereas it will take you 10 minutes to do the same thing on Linux.Don’t lose motivation early. You will run into countless error codes, you will lose patience even though you followed all the steps written in the documentation and still can’t reach the end goal.Find your interest: It’s imperative that you enjoy coding, but it’s not crucial to have hardcore programming skills for GSoC. For eg: I am a passionate designer by nature, but I enjoy coding too.The beauty of GSoC is that it enjoys considerable variety. It’s reach in terms of projects is huge. You have projects ranging from Biology, Chemistry, Hardware, Software, Web, Security, Applications, Mobile, Design, ML, AI, NLP etc with tons of different projects under one node. Go to the GSoC’s website for the past 2–3 years and spend time searching for the right project.A right project lies at the intersection of your interest + what you know + what you don’t know but you are still willing to learn on the go.Network: Since you don’t have the necessary exposure inside your college, start looking outside and find people relevant to your interest. This skill is very crucial in terms of career building too. This process can be broken down into 2 steps: Research properly → Network specifically.What I did was:I spent considerable time in researching about what GSoC is all about. What it stands for? What is the general profile of people getting selected? What skills are generally in demand? Quora has a plethora of knowledge on it. I went through all the answers that were on Quora’s GSoC thread.I focused on 2-3 repositories that I was interested in and I started reaching out to the people who were selected before:Stalk their profile out on the internet. Blogs, LinkedIn, Quora, Github etc. Do your research about the person in terms of how will he/she respond. You generally get a bird’s eye view of the personality by looking at their content.Don’t ask questions which you can readily find answers too on Google or Quora. Most of my questions were answered by reading either Quora or the blogs that the person had written.Ask very specific questions and good questions. Asking good questions is an art and it’s almost equivalent to googling effectively. Always keep a mental note that the other person is also a human, and he/she will be specifically taking time out of their own schedule to answer to your queries. Mostly when I pinged a fellow GSoC’er, our conversations generally revolved around their experience and some queries about some of my parallels drawn to their experience.Plan: By the time you have progressed with the above steps, you will know what to do. Good planning helps you map a timeline of when to do the things. Start looking at the GSoC’s timeline (it’s more or less same every year). Break the time available to you in short realistic mini goals.Communication: Though it does come under networking, IMO it’s the most important skill specifically for GSoC since the internship is remote based (and therefore this point will be the lengthiest also).You will be communicating with people belonging to different ideologies, background and time-zones. Everything, I repeat, everything hinges on how well you communicate with your mentors.Start hanging out on IRC’s, mail-clients, gitter or whatever communication the organization prefers. Some project mentors also have personal emails, but it’s generally not a good practice to communicate directly. Gain some confidence with the mentors, and you are good to. Emails in GSoC’s context are way too personal and if the mentors are replying to you, that means you are on the right track.Research well before making your first proper communication. Read and re-read the organization FAQ’s. Remember first impression counts.Know how to sell yourself. Play on your strengths and work on your weaknesses by the time GSoC arrives. Quoting my organization’s comments on the type of students that they were looking for:We trust you can fix the small bugs, but we're more interested in your approach to solving larger problems. The bigger things are more interesting to you and to us. Think about how you would spend your time this summer. What would you do to improve the project besides the small fixes? We are interested both in your technical skill, but also your holistic understanding of the project. Ultimately, we will judge your application by the thoughtfulness of your proposal.Keep reminding yourself that you are a student, and it’s okay to not know something. BTW the mentors also know that you are student and hence they are not looking for people having a lot of experience. You don’t necessarily have to know every piece of technology that your project uses. (I am currently into my third month of my GSoC project and I still know half the tech my project uses). It takes time, probably years to reach the level of your mentors.You just need to prove yourself that you are the best student for this job. Mostly (what I assume) mentors look for:You know some relevant tech related to the project. Saying I know Python will not hold much weight, but if you could demonstrate through examples say you made X project or gave a talk in Y conference, then they have validation.How much did you think about the project?How much effort did you put in to think about your proposal?Can you list down the benefits of your project?Would your project be some key feature of the project or a side project that could be implemented by somebody else?GSoC is more student oriented i.e. your persistence, previous hard work and your thoughts value much more than your current skill level.Indirectly gauge what type of the student your mentors are looking for in your communication.For eg: in my case the project required me to have a decent knowledge of AngularJs. I had spent some time learning Angular, but hadn’t had an in-depth knowledge about it.My mentor mentioned that he would like to look through code samples which involved the usage of Angular. I spent the next 2 days going through tutorials + a coding marathon till I was able to create a basic project in Angular. Tada, now me saying “I have a basic knowledge about Angular, but I will be able to learn it on the go” has some weight behind it.But that doesn’t mean, your previous hard work will not count. If I hadn’t had dabbled with projects and other technologies to the time leading to GSoC, it would have taken me an entire year just to get to the point where I could do the above.Do it right:Don’t prepare for GSoC for the sake of getting selected for it. Do it for the steep learning curve it brings towards you. The brand value, money, Google swag and goodies are just a plus not the real joy.Thank you for reading this long answer. In the end it always boil down to this:“How badly do you want it?”Cheers!

This is how my parents deceived me for almost 7 years.When I was in my 3rd grade, I started playing cricket and developed so much love for the game. My idol was Sachin Tendulkar. I used to sit right in front of the TV and watch every game he played. One day, I came across a “BOOST” drink add that had Sachin in it and he was endorsing the product.BOOST had a contest and this was how it worked: We needed to collect 5 BOOST wrappers (equals 5 BOOST bottles) and then mail them to the company address printed at the back of the bottle. If we get selected in their drawing, then they will mail us an awesome MRF bat with Sachin’s autograph on it.Source: Google ImagesI jumped with excitement and asked my mom to buy BOOST. My parents used this as an opportunity to make me drink milk and so they started buying BOOST.The day when we got our first BOOST bottle, I was so excited to drink it. My parents were happy too. I requested my sister to team up with me to finish this bottle soon. She was a nice kid and so for the first time (eventually the last time), she agreed to team up with me to drink BOOST.After 4 months, we somehow finished the 5 BOOST bottles. My dad mailed the 5 wrappers to the company’s address and I was eagerly waiting to receive the bat.I didn’t hear anything in the mail for almost 2 months.Me: I am not going to drink BOOST again.Dad: Wait. I have a news to share. I got a phone call from BOOST today. They had selected us in the drawing but there was 1 missing wrapper out of the 5 and so they had to send the bat to someone else. He asked us to enter the contest again and send them 5 new wrappers. They promised that they would give us the MRF bat.Though I felt sad about that 1 missing wrapper, I wanted to give another shot. We went through the whole process again finishing 5 more bottles. We sent those wrappers to the company but dint hear back again.My parents came up with a master plan that worked out for 7 years.They were not in a position to buy a new MRF bat at that time and so they approached one of our carpenters to see if he could carve a bat from wooden planks. He agreed to give it a try. After 4-5 days, he showed the bat to my dad. My dad asked him if it was possible to design the MRF logo. He designed it and the final piece was ready. It was as close to the original. The best part was he did everything for FREE!!One fine day, I got back from school and went to the bedroom to take a nap. I found a cricket bat lying on the bed and YESSSSSSs it was a “MRF bat”. I was screaming with excitement. My mom hugged me and told that I won the contest and they sent us the bat.After few minutesMe: Dad, where is Sachin’s autograph on the bat?Dad: Oh. I don’t know. I will call up BOOST and ask them. Now you go and play.Me: ok :) *running out of the house with excitement*Next DayMe: Did you call them up?Dad: Yes I did. They said that the signature doesn’t come with the bat. It looks like you have to keep drinking BOOST and collect as many wrappers as you can. They will keep track of the person who is drinking it daily and collecting more wrappers. The surprise is that Sachin himself will come to their house and sign the bat it seems. I know you were drinking BOOST to just get the bat. Will you do it for Sachin now?Me: Yes daddy. I will do it for Sachin and will keep drinking this till Sachin visits our house.True Story - My sister had already switched to Horlicks but I never gave up and kept drinking BOOST for almost 6 years but Sachin never came :(Finally, when I was in my 10th grade (2003)I got selected to play for my school cricket team. My uncle gifted me a MRF English Willow cricket bat on my birthday and asked me to throw away the old MRF bat. I told him that I would never do such a thing and it was the first MRF bat that I ever owned. Everyone in the scene started laughing and I was like “what the heck is going on?”My mom finally told me the entire script on how they deceived me with the whole BOOST & MRF combo. Oh and not to forget “Sachin visiting my home by himself to autograph the bat”. Even though I was super angry, we had a good laugh on how I got tricked into drinking BOOST for almost 7 years.Here is a picture that I took recently of my precious possession (My MRF bat) when I visited India. It had reached its end of life. :(We couldn’t fix the handle at all and the MRF sticker was gone too. This BAT will always be the best one that I ever had :)I am 5’11 now and my parents made me believe that drinking BOOST was the only reason for my height :PBOOST was definitely the secret of my energy :DEdit: Here is the 90’s Boost ad that I was talking about. Watch it till the end if you are interested. I hope it will clear the doubts on why I had that last line in my post. It was just for humor purposes and not intended towards any “marketing strategies”.Source: Youtube