Exun 2008 – Day #1

By the way, this post if from my Mum’s laptop, because my PC has taken leave of its senses again. By the time the display starts working, the hard drive unit on the motherboard stops. Anyway, to more important stuff…

To be brutally honest, my performance has been severely substandard in the past few events, and I reallyhad to intentions of repeating the same at Exun, partly because it’s really important for the defending champions to win again, and partly because I was sick and tired of getting to lift just the overall trophy. (I assume the rest of the Code Warriors excel at what they do…a not entirely incorrect assumption)

So, to make sure I performed well, I spent a good part of the previous week preparing…as you might have picked up from my previous posts. This is actually quite rare, because, generally, prep doesn’t begin till a day or two before an event. But, a little deviation from the plans every now and then isn’t all that bad an idea. In fact, today, I even got up at 5:30 in the morning, just to do some last minute prep. I find getting up early in the morning so much easier than staying up late at night…

Anyway, by around 8:15, I was showered, dressed and fed, and all set to go. Actually, I was so engrossed in prepping for the quiz that, yesterday, I totally forgot to put out the laundry I’d washed, which meant that I didn’t have a set of washed pants for Day 1. A pair of similar coloured cargoes substituted quite easily. In fact, no one actually noticed till I explicitly pointed them out, and even then, some tubelights failed to get it.

Since Dad was away, and Mum can’t drive, I had to take an auto. Thing is…it was a crisp, cold morning, and I forgot to take along a cap/muffler of any sorts. Feeling smug after haggling over the fare, I set down to a freezing 10 minute ride to DPS, RK Puram. After 5 minutes, I actually began pondering if I’d have to defrost my ears or something.

Reached there to find Karthick waiting. I was too preoccupied with my frozen ears to bother responding to his long-distance overly cheerful wave. We had to wait around for some time for the others to arrive, because we’d arrived pretty early. First came Ponnappa and Aditya, followed by Ravi and Abhishek, and last but not least, the Lord (I mean Arjun).

In fact, as we saw him approaching, with some amount of apprehension, the rest of us formed a line in the driveway, and as he came up, started giving him the usual salute. Don’t I love doing that, I could almost feel the heat from his face in the cold morning.

After we’d registered, we tramped off to the AVH, and settled down. There was the usual lighting of the lamp ceremony, shown over CCTV from the lounge, and after the chief guest had settled down, was shown the viddeo. I regret not having had the chance to make one for Code Wars, since it was just a one day event, and there just wasn’t enough time. Anyway, their video had the one odd reference to 42 that Arjun and I spotted.

After this, there was the speech by Kartikeya and a girl, whose name I don’t remember/know at all. In my humblest of opinions, Kartikeya made a complete fool of himself. I have not the slightest idea as to who wrote his speech (most likely he, himself) but he tried to make it informal, constantly interrupting the other speaker, and the worst part was that, he wasn’t even natural. I would have forgiven everything if he’d managed to be natural! The best part was when he tried to interrupt her the first time by saying something like Wowowo, but just sounded like a terrier with an attitude problem…:-P…there was also a mention of H2G2 in the speech. 

An interesting speech by the chief guest, making us speculate about whether we would end up with pencils and bags with IP addresses in the future. I must also make note of the sponsors, Mangalayam University. I think that Exun was so annoyed of the fun that was made of Pavna, that they decided to use Mangalayam University as a front, which is also, coincidentially or not, funded by Pavna Industries. Sheesh…

Then, there was the senior quiz. The first team consisted of Arjun, Karthick and me, and the second team was Feroze, Ponnappa and Anirudh. Seeing our competition, or lack of which, we were thinking of shuffling the teams so that both the teams had a chance to qualify for the final, but we decided against it because we decided one totally solid team, capable of getting a first, was better than two substandard ones, which might not get podium finishes.

At this crucial juncture, I would like to point out one thing about RKP classrooms. Apparently, on Saturdays, they’re cleaned. Cleaned so throroughly that they end up smelling of Phenoyl and God knows what else. Also, I badly needed to go to the loo. And I didn’t go. Because as a rule, whenever I’ve had an exceptionally full bladder before an event, it usually goes well. Anyway, the prelim seemed quite easy, compared to what I was expecting. We answered nearly all of the 20-25 questions, and were confident of about 12-14. Since there was a lot of time left, we spent the rest of the time laughing our heads off at nothing in particular.

Standard CW protocol.

Eventually when the answers were announced, we found that we had only got 8 right, which was a cause for worry. Then, we went to the AVH, and watched the GD for some time. I was there to witness Saurabh’s round. To be honest, he was being too dominating and a bit too shouty as well. That probably went against him, because not only was he a Code Warrior, he was also one who wasn’t too good at what he did. Not a good combo. In the prelim, thet topic was whether long-distance education was better than classes for real. During the GD, the SQ papers were being checked, and Karthick noticed that a lot of people had got 8 marks apparently. But when they were writing down the names of the people who had qualified, Karthick noticed our names there, and all was well.

Shortly after this, Karthick and I had to go for the junior quiz. Ponnappa, Anirudh and Aditya were team 2. This quiz was also pretty easy, but we missed out on a couple of sitters. I messed up which year the PC was named Man of the Year in Time magazine. It was 1982, and I thought it was 1986. Overall, we got around 16 right. We were a bit scared when Sopan from DPS Dwarka said that they’d got around 20 right, but a revised score was the same as ours.

After that, we went back to the AVH, where the final round of the GD was about to take place. In the the final round, they were debating on whether Indian IT workers were simply cyber coolies or the brains behind the whole industry, Again, he was shouty, and before the event began, one of the judges took him aside, and must’ve warned him to control himself, or risk losing.

Before we went out for lunch, we found a guy coming up the stairs with the JQ results, and found that we’d qualified there as well. We, as in both teams. This was remarkable because team 2 was pretty new to quizzing. Also, our crack programmers came back from Swat the Bug and informed us that they’d gopt second position. Then there was lunch…sigh…Dominoe’s seems like a memory from the distant past. It was hostel food again. Rice, chowmein, manchurian and ice-cream, which for some reason was served along with the plate. If this was summertime, it would’ve melted and we’d all be drinking it, instead of using our spoons. Nevertheless, it was passable, but the manchurian could’ve been better. Aditya and Saurabh, for some reason, decided to act pretyt juvenile, started chasing each other all around the place, spilling water over each other and basically acting like a couple of overgrown babies.

After this was the crossword and surprise event. This was a bit of a problem for me and Arjun, because we were participating in both! Eventually we decided that we’d both go for the crossword, and Arjun would leave after about 10-15 minutes. The crossword was really easy, with simple clues like ‘ballistic camera maker’ and other easy stuff. When Arjun left, we had 7 unsolved, which I reduced to 3 or 4 by the time th papers were collected. No time to check the answers, and I headed off for the labs for the surprise event.

It turns out that we had a lab to ourselves! They were one PC short in the other lab. This was both good and bad. Good because we would have no distractions and bad because we wouldn’t be able to see what the others were up to. We were supposed to design a tattoo. Appparently, Exun guys didn’t notice the fact that the exact same event was there at Warp 2008. They should’ve changed that, to be honest.

I was the lead designer, coming up with the designs, and Arjun simply put them in Photoshop. Simple really. There were 2 main designs we had. One being a silly one based on the skull and crossbones sign you see on elecrical boxes, and another tribal one,  which looked much better. Anyway, we didn’t win that event. Am looking forward to Day 2.