And so it begins…Matrix-Ecomm…heralding the ‘actual’ beginning of the open season. Silly sounding name, though, as I’ve always maintained. Here’s what happened.
Well, every story begins at the iLab. My bus was a bit late, so there was already a gaggle of people around the PPP (Pavna PowerPC). There was one event, we were slightly uncertain about. In order to participate, the presentations for the Symposium had to be submitted by the 22nd, which we totally forgot. Anyway, we were allowed to present it, which is a relief. Oh yeah, before I forget, the Code Wariors are the defending champions at MSM. (I will refrain from using the silly name, more than twice in any post)
I pity the cultural secretaries of my school. These guys have to miss classes in the morning, whenever there’s an event, even if they’re not directly involved, and have to get the lists ready, arrange for the buses and the teacher. This wasn’t how it used to be. Earlier, the Code Warriors arranged all of this ourselves, and tomorrow, I’m gonna tell them to take a day off.
Anyway, we were all bundled into the minibus (regisration number – 5742), along with a couple of noisy guys for the AdEnact event. Noisy in the sense, really mind-numbingly noisy. Some of the noises these guys could make, were simply astonishing. I MEAN IT! I wonder what kind of reactions such noises would cause, up on stage, assuming they ever decided to include it in their act.
Mount St. Mary’s is located in the Delhi Cantonment, which is approximately 30~45 minutes from our school, depending on the traffic. On the way, I showed Romil how normal iPod earphones could be turned into in-the-ear earphones . Having him around is fun, cause’ firstly, he’s a nice simple guy, and secondly, I don’t have to handle the iPod, but he does get stuck on Green Day, once in a while! And after a long time, we reached at an event on time!
> Actually, just in time…the chief judge followed us into the hall…almost…
Me and Karthick were participating in 3 events – Quiz, Crossword and the Matrix Challenge. The Quiz is on Day 2, along with Round 2 of the Matrix Challenge.
Round 1 was the first event of the day for us. It was basically a treasure hunt of sorts. Before I begin, let me explain the venue. I don’t remember the name of the lab, but I do remember the state of the lab.
> It was a little storage house for dubbe with ‘Turbo’ buttons.
The CD drives didn’t work. Neither did the floppy drives, and I think I heard something living inside one of the CPUs. And there were a couple of odd, egg-shaped speakers lying around. They were all running WIndows 95/98 (d’oh), and a guy started up the 3D Mazes screensaver in 16-bit color, and the effect was that of a drug junkie on a high. Psychedelic colors indeed.
We had a file called clue1.doc on the desktop. It had a question and a general idea of where the second clue was located. Not the exact location. There would generally be a lot of sub-folders to look through, and the answer to the question in the previous clue would give us access to the next clue, which was password protected. There were a total of around 19 or so clues.
Because we needed to go for the Crossword, we couldn’t complete all of them, and when the electricity went off, we went off as well. We had completed 6-7 clues.
The crossword wasn’t cryptic, which meant it was bad. A non-cryptic crossword can’t really be differentiated from a quiz. Anyway, wasn’t exactly the easiest crossword either. We got only 7 right, but that should be enough to grant us a podium finish.
The refreshments were utter rubbish. Two paneer rolls (semi-cooked) accompanied by banana milkshake. (barf…bigtime)
Anyway, this was also one of the first events where my events got over in time for me to go back to school to catch my regular bus home. We were waiting for the gamers and the programmers. There was good news. The gamers – Bombardo and another guy called Ishaan qualified for the second round tomorrow.
And…drumroll…the programmers…came first! Which is big news, because we hadn’t been winning in that department for some time now! Kudos to Deepit a.k.a D-Pit and Abhishek. Anyway, looking forward to Day 2.
