Exun 2010 : Day 2

I’ll just pick up where I left off the first post. Basically, DPS VK was in a moderately good position at the end of Day 1 – qualifications in several events, along with a 2nd in GD.

I woke up late today (again), and went forward with the daily ablutions. Dad was around today, which meant that I would get a car ride to DPS RK Puram. First up for me was the Creative Event today. I wouldn’t be around for the whole day, because I needed to go to the AVH for the quiz and crossword as well. So, I had 4 hours to get the website in a somewhat good state before I could cast it away for Aseem, Nitin and Vaibhav to finish.

Things were complicated by Mrinal today. The guy was supposed to take an auto from home and turn up at DPS Vasant Kunj. However, he hadn’t turned up by 9 AM. He doesn’t own a mobile phone yet, and repeated phone calls to his Dad weren’t helpful either. But, after making sure that he had the money to catch an auto right up to RKP if necessary, the guys at VK left in the bus.

Shortly after, when I entered the AVH, I found that the idiot had already arrived at RKP and was simply waiting in the AVH. The only reason we didn’t murder him was because we needed him for the gaming finals. After that, he was expendable.

The creative event started soon, and Aseem and I decided to take first shift. I don’t want to get into the specifics, but I can say that we wasted a lot of time trying to get some basic stuff to work. But, since I had spent most of the car ride to RKP planning out the website, it wasn’t that big a deal. By the time I left, we had a template ready, and all the content in place. All that remained was to make the rest of the pages and place the content in. Kudos to Aseem for knowing CSS and HTML coding pretty well, but unfortunately, we couldn’t use as much of his talents today as we would’ve liked to.

After a quick semi-lunch of two slices of cold pizza, Karthick and I proceeded to the AVH. But, before going on stage, I had one last thing to do – I whipped out all the 7 Code Warrior badges that I have, and pinned them on the CW T-shirt, along with the 2 other insignificant badges (a picture will wind up on Facebook sooner or later).

With the entire front of my T-shirt coated in shining armour, we took our seats at the stage. The crossword was conducted by Sidharth G and Mridul Kapoor. It was a pretty tough one, with the winning score being just 40. We were tied with DPS Mathura Road for first, but there were several in-built tie-breakers in the crossword. By pure luck, all four of the questions we answered were tie-breakers, which meant that we had clearly won the first position.

After this, I quickly snuck back to the computer labs to check on the status of the creative event. I realised that some stuff wasn’t going as per plan, mainly due to the time constraint, so I replaced Vaibhav for a while and did some emergency repairs on the pages that Aseem had put together while I was gone. But less than 10 minutes later, Karthick called me for the senior quiz.

The SQ was a mixed bag, really, since there were 3 quizmaster – Anuj Bhardwaj, Siddharth G and Bharat Agarwal. Anuj’s questions were pretty long winded stories about identifying people, which meant that the first round was extremely frustrating. Bharat met with a rousing round of applause when he took over in the second round. His questions were usually just a sentence or two long, plus he gave all the teams a chocolate after the first round to compensate for some technical issues (Ubuntu was acting up while trying to output to a projector, which meant that the quiz had to be shifted to a Windows 7 laptop). Nevertheless, this too was a relatively low-scoring quiz for those on stage, which does say a lot about the level of quizzing that now exists in the circuit I guess that people, especially me, just aren’t that sharp anymore, which is kind of sad.

Anyway. after a consolation first (one of RKP’s teams consisting of Rohan, Aditya and Vidhur graciously conceded the first position to us as they weren’t competing), we realised that we were clearly the winners of Exun 2010. This felt a bit strange really – the Code Warriors are more accustomed to some last minute nail-biting before the results are announced because things usually run pretty close. However, this time, it was a pretty clear win.

It also felt good that in my last year at Exun, I got to get on the stage 5 times during the prize distribution ceremony – for senior quiz, crossword, creative event and group discussion, not to mention the overall. As of today, I can’t rightfully say that I have much to complain about the past 2 days. I’m truly relieved that my last Exun went this well – a win in every event that I participated for, and possible one of the best performances of the Code Warriors as a group:

• Senior Quiz – 1st – Karthick, Anirudh and me
• Crossword – 1st – Karthick and me
• Programming – 1st – Harman and Akash
• Group Discussion – 2nd – Me
• Gaming – 3rd – Aditya and Mrinal
• Creative Event – 3rd – Aseem, Nitin, Vaibhav and me

At the end of the day, all I can say is that I’m really going to miss the event. I hope I can be a part of it sometime in the future, just like Mridul was today.

In other news – the Code Warriors were RickRolled today as we received the overall trophy. I’m putting up the video for the benefit of those Code Warriors who didn’t get it i.e. all of them but me.