Chronicles of me MIA: Part 02

Continuing….

January 27th:

Well I have no recollection whatsoever as to what I did on this Sunday. I remember that I was supposed to go to Saarang. But then we dropped the plan. Also my college Alumni Meet was slated for this day. I conveniently missed that as well. I think I stayed home and slept a lot. I might have taken a walk in the evening.

January 28th:

Ah, had to go to college. But then there were no classes. We had a symposium coming up soon (In about two days time.) and were supposed to be working on it. I was not involved with any particular event. So had nothing to do. Then I got bored so went to the lab where a lot was going on. Games were being installed and they had some issues. So I decided to help my friends Jeyanth and Naveen with installation as we were men short. Mani from third year was also helping with installation. We finished Installing NFS Underground 2. After that we played it on LAN for some time. I won most of the games. (Not a big deal considering I drive a lot of NFS at home.) We had to do things like transfer RAMs from one machine to another as we have PC’s with 256MB RAM. So we made it 512 and the game ran alright. I think we started with installing Counter Strike:CZ as well. More than anything most computers had viruses and hence we were having trouble with that.

January 29th:

Another day in college where everyone seemed to be busy doing something or the other. 🙂 That’s how days before some important event works. Everyone wants to be seen as busy. Even I made myself look busy by making a few trips to the urinal. I tried my best to look active , but then slept for a while in my class. After a while, I again went to the lab where we once again set CS:CZ up and started playing against each other. I am not particularly good at CS, and hence was fragged quite a few times. Naveen was playing particularly well. We decided to pack up at around 15:30 and I left home.

January 30th:

The day our symposium was to be held. I skipped college since somewhere in the past two days, I had received an intimation from PSG stating that my paper had made it to the final round and I was expected to present it. So I booked the train for 30th night after consultation with Vibu. The plan was to go there on 31st, hang out with my friends for a day and attend my event on 1st. The whole day was spent with paper to an extent and packing for most of the other part. I finally had everything I needed and left home at around 20:30. The train was at 22:20 , but didn’t want to take any chances. Boarded a bus from the Thiruvanmiyur bus depot and reached the station about an hour from then. By 22:00 I was already in my seat on the train. Then I just let people in CBE know that I am coming and people here that I am leaving.

to be continued…

 

Chronicles of me MIA: Part 01

In the days after 22nd of January, I was doing a lot of things. There was Saarang coming up, Kurukshetra was also sometime soon, and Odyssey quiz was around the same time. Here’s a short account from my memory as to what all happened in the last two weeks or so*:

23rd January:

After having attended the IT Symposium at MSEC the previous day, I was down with a slight fever and cold. So the whole of the daym I remember resting and doing nothing more. I seem to have written a post on 23rd. Must have been late evening after I woke up. I also remember going to Odyssey and Cafe Coffee Day to ask for tickets for the Choreo Nite, which they told me had been sold out. Only the Rock Show tickets remained.

Also, on 23rd night, I received a mail form PSG guys that my paper abstract had been shortlisted for Kriya and I was expected to send in my paper latest by 25th. As pleasantly surprised as I was, this was going to throw my plans in disarray. The plan was to attend Saarang on almost all days as this would be the last year I would be able to attend it as a student. I didn’t actually want to go to IIT the next day, but I had already dragged other people into my plans and it wouldn’t have been very decent to cancel on it. So the plan was to go to IIT and come back late afternoon.

24th January:

I went to IIT for Saarang 08. A couple of days before this I remember sending my entry for the Saarang Online Quiz 02. The results of which was never announced (nor the answers for that matter. I shall be posting the answers soon on my blog for the benefit of the quizzing society. 😉 ). Ah, what a wonderful way to conduct online events.

The plan was to meet up Marc (who somehow never showed up or showed up and didn’t bother to call me, or as he claims stored my number wrong.) Shiva had also agreed to meet me in IIT. He was pretty pissed off when I told him that I had still not left home by 10:00. I finally went to IIT slightly after 10:00 and met up Shiva in the Creative Writing venue. I even gave an entry for Creative Writing. (Again something I shall be putting up on my blog along with the rules later.) Thing was we were permitted 4 entries and the score of each entry would be added. Since I gave in only one entry I was sure as hell that it wouldn’t make it. Plus I am not so sure that it was all that creative.

We missed the Buzzer Quiz because of the Creative Writing. I tried the daily Crossie and the daily Quiz as the Creative Writing was going on and wasn’t able to get those many. For someone who considers himself a crossword buff, I think I suck at it. Thankfully, I did get a few answers right. Next up was the actual Crossie. We went in an hour late and by the time we went in, people had already cracked the full Crossie. So we left in something like half an hour. By then we knew that we stood no chance in hell of making it to the Crossie finals. (Not even by fluke. 😀 )

We did give the Cluedo prelims a try and did pretty well too. We screwed up a question or two, but that’s ok. Thing is, other teams did much better and hence qualified. By onw I was weary and tired. Also, I had a paper to complete. So we decided to give the India Quiz a miss and leave home. 

I came back home and started typing in some crap on a MS Word document. I remember sitting with it till late night and finally giving up and going to sleep.

25th January:

All I remember is trying to work on my paper and sending it in on time. I must have worked on it all day I guess. Typing out crap first and then editing it to make it look much less like crap and more like a paper. I sent in the entry finally at around 23:30. Another half and hour and my entry would have been rejected. I wasn’t fully satisfied with the paper. but what was done was done and it would have to do for now.

26th January:

Don’t really remember what I did in the morning. Around afternoon I left for the Odyssey Quiz. Madhusudan (Another of my college seniors who is currently with TCS.) was supposed to meet me opposite Birla Planetarium. I did not know the route to Music Academy. From Birla, I followed him upto Music Academy. We met Shiva in a while and chatted up for a while. We were lucky to get seats, even if it was in the Balcony and the seats were quite cramped. Actually it was pretty empty compared to Landmark quiz.

We gave the prelims and as always I screwed up the answers to many a question even if my teammates knew the right answer 😛 . I am happy to be alive. I did this with about 5 questions I think. (Answered wrong when we knew the right answer.) So we ended up doing the prelims pretty badly.

We did see the finals and some pretty regular teams were on stage. Sundar and Vinod won the best team name prize which was cool. We left the finals even before it got over and left home.

more to follow…….

* – May not be very accurate. My memory is quite bad and I conveniently forget lot’s of things. If you notice any such thing you can bring it to my notice.