Access 2007 (caution: their site has a trojan downloader; proceed at your own risk) was held at Modern School, Barakhamba Road on 18-19 December 2007. Sigh, just thinking about it makes me feel sad AND happy at the same time. It’s a…real weird mix of emotions. Quizzing / competitions, and the Code Warriors have meant a lot to me, and it’s all coming to end now. Sigh. Hell, the past two years were so MUCH fun! Since I’m supposed to be studying for my pre-Boards, I’ll leave you guys to read the whole story at Vivek’s blog. For some individual notes, plod on…
We left on day one, and our lucky mascot bus was right there to cheer us up. Look at the bus number.
Access always had loads of sponsors. I asked Akshit Mohan, their computer club’s president about this…
Me: Dude, how much money on EARTH do you guys get in sponsorship?!
Akshit (in a humble tone): Just suffices to say that we could run Access on one-fifth of the money we get.
Me: Whoa! What do you do with all that cash?
Akshit: Put it in a bank.
Me: Cut the wisecracks, come on…
Akshit: We get good prizes. This year’s third prize is what we gave for first prize last year.
Never stop boasting eh? All those sponsors mean they’ve adverts strung around everywhere. Sample this advert on a desk in the school. I was giving the senior programming prelims – yeah, yew go laugh about me in a programming event. Which reminds me, that school is really Modern, even their event prelims were on OMR sheets!
Continuing the MS VV ‘no boundaries’ tradition, even Modern School, Barakhamba Roads toilets have no partitions in between. Geez, I wonder how people go for a leak. Maybe it’s all to cut down on time students spend in toilets.
I also discovered that Vivek and Karthick are perverted beyond their age. But it’s fun to share THOSE sort of jokes with people who understand at least. Me and Karthick for example spent a huge part of Access rolling around laughing like madmen at joke after joke. I’m sure quite a few volunteers (not to mention the chicks) would have wanted to hand us over to some mental camp.
Vivek and Karthick won the Audio Editing event too. You can download the crazy Crawling to a Bhangra tune here. IMHO, it was oh-so-fun, given the limited time and software they got to work with.
Day one was much maligned for the fact that we had to push a bus around in Lutyens’ Delhi. I must say, it’s not as hard as it sounds, especially when you have six other people pushing with you. Our bus ‘broke down’ in a roundabout, and we were called on by the Delhi Traffic police (‘With You, For You, Always’) since the PM’s cavalcade was supposed to pass through that place. After ‘working hard’ for some time, we finally managed to get it back to right where we started from, much to the policemen’s satisfaction. I even have a (small) video of it…
[yahoo 5596362]
A replacement bus did arrive two hours later, and that bus’ driver came aboard ours. Turns out that our #$%^@^&#&^& of a driver FORGOT to turn the gas valve on!
Day 2, well uh, I ruled the group discussion. I generally like to be modest, but what the heck, this is my last school event. I fucking deserve it with the number of trophies I’ve won this year. 😛 As usual, same judges like last year. Despite me giving more and better points, they didn’t take my excessive support of open source too kindly, and Maneel of JKPS won. Not that I’m sore for this year, but this the SECOND year in row they’ve given me second just because of my support of open source. Apparently, I don’t ‘change my views’ (their feedback after the GD both years). Yeah right.
The same judge saved us from certain doom though, because some madcap school we don’t know wanted to get us and DPS Dwarka disqualified because we’d mixed up students from different categories for the events. He was kind enough to let us participate, but WTF, again, DPS VK won the points tally, but was given overall runners up position because DPS RKP had too many people to stick to categories too. And to think it wasn’t our fault because Access used to allow that earlier and never made it clear this year. Anyway, I’m still thankful to Goutam sir and Varun Verma (the quizmaster) for letting us continue in at least the quiz and get individual prizes.
Ah the quiz. Junior Quiz, bagged loads of audience prizes. Some fun moments though…
Quizmaster (to JQ participants): What’s Gutsy Gibbon? [it’s the codename for Ubuntu 7.10
Abhimanyu (in the audience): What’s the answer Ankur? I think I’ve heard this term in Gears of War.
Boy that was funny. Vivek and Karthick came second in the JQ…
…with DPS Dwarka as the winners. Note that Karthick looks like he wants to jump on their necks a la Betaal (of Vikram-Betaal fame)…
Our JQ team were the runners up with 42.5 points. A close miss.
Senior Quiz. We OWNED the other teams, with us finishing more than twice the points of the second position team (Jimi Hendrix). Our team is the one on extreme right (that’s Lord Vader looking at the audience).
They say Access 2007 was a star-studded event. It was. A photo of Jimi Hendrix with Bruce Willis.
With that, I come to the end of my school quizzing career. Oh boy, the whole ride still brings back so many happy and not-so-happy memories, but it thoroughly enjoyed it. One request I made to the new CW team – to call Arjun as ‘Lord Vader’ next year when and if he becomes the CW president. That’ll be so fun. Arjun meanwhile, was getting as embarrassed as an Indian bride while I was saying this, with rosy pink cheeks. LMAO!!! Yup, it’ll be fun if students call him Lord Vader, and Arjun DESERVES it, totally ruling over the web designing scene this year.
Best of luck to the Code Warriors’ team for next year. We’ve proved this year that we’re the best, winning the biggest events of them all, and what’s more, having a such a high success rate too. Do the same next year, guys…
And to all my friends in other schools too, in the competition circuit, best of luck to you guys too… 🙂
Some old Access papers (no time to type out this year’s):
8 replies on “Access 2007 : And Then, There Were None…”
You rocked in the quiz! Whereas I sucked–big time, any pointers?
@Anuj: Long reply, so forgive me if I type this out point wise…
1. Thanks! 😀
2. Just added your blog’s link to my blogroll, and subscribed to your feed. Way nice blog, good content. Not too many people have that these days. Do name it something better than ‘Thoughts’, it’s sorta too generic. Something unique will do.
3. You’re Anuj, the RoboKnights quizmaster (apart from Bharat I mean), right? Terribly sorry if I’m wrong on this count.
4. From the looks of it, it doesn’t seem to be your fault that you lost Access JQ. I guess everyone had an attack of nerves – your team, and Aditya not getting ‘full form of modem’. Happens. But you’ve many more years left dude! 🙂
5. Hmm, quizzing. Right. First thing, get hold old quiz archives. You’ll find quite a few on my blog. And Exun has one of the best archives, I know that. Questions at computer symposiums of this habit of repeating, mostly because some quizmasters in some of the schools I know have this habit of skipping research and recycling. If you need any particular papers though, do mail me. 🙂
6. The Wiki Way to Quizzing. Sounds dumb, and it’s probably something people do anyway. However, the main point lies in doing it in a SYSTEMATIC manner. Stuff like ‘Why did Bill Gates get arrested’ needs a method behind the ‘madness’.
7. Love quizzing more than anything. You’ll be 10th next year, right? THIS year, before the session starts, is when you get time to catch up on tech. Won’t find too much time to read Wikipedia in 10th.
8. Above all, remember that competitions are just, competitions. Not battles. 🙂 This is something I feel most people tend to forget. It’s the friends that you make along the way that make the whole thing worthwhile.
Thanks for adding me to your blog roll, I am afraid that I won’t be updating it in a while, my pre-boards are coming up and my mum and dad are getting tense (I am not). As far as naming goes I am open to suggestions
I do read up wikipedia a lot but the thing was that I never kinda read up hardware-I know how to assemble stuff but as far as naming goes I had no clue, I guess that’s the difference between a great quizzer and an average one. Further thanks for putting up archives on your blog it’s really helpful, I’ll read through them after my pre-boards
Yes I was the quizmaster in the roboknights quiz, I am more into robotics, I picked up IT this year as going to a competition, this year seems to be next to impossible(as you know it takes a lot of hard work to make a robot), by the way did you like the quiz?
Thanks for the advice!
One last thing gone are days of the “bond” quizzers of our school these days, the guys have a lot of attitude and pretty much nothing to support it, I mean I, a person who has NEVER been to a tech quiz before managed to rake up more points than the exun guys, seriously they suck. Sigh, I wish they realize, like you said, competitions are just competitions.
@Anuj:
1. Ah, so you’re in 10th. Best of luck for the pre-Boards. Same story here, need to prep for MY pre-Boards.
2. Thing with quizzing is, there’s no way you can do everything on your own. Get a fixed quiz partner, and then divide up areas. A good quizzer is always built by a strong team, and both people on the team need to be dedicated so that the other one can rest assured the other guy is covering the topics. Take my case – I never had to bother about new developments because my partner handled those. Naturally, it’s important both the people understand each other’s strength and weaknesses properly.
3. I guess you might have been drawn into IT quizzing after TCS IT Wiz, right? Too sad I couldn’t go there, just one day before Code Wars.
4. As for the RoboKnights quiz, I simply loved it. I was a bit apprehensive when I got the invite whether you guys will find enough content for a whole quiz. You proved me wrong. 🙂 The best thing about quizzing, IMHO, is that even when you don’t know an answer, you can learn a lot. I certainly learnt a lot about robotics thanks to your quiz. 🙂
5. Yeah, I feel that too that some of the newer Exun guys need to keep their attitude in check. No matter how much we competed, people like me, Akshay+Milind+Raag of MIS, Ramit of DPS MR, Manas+Bharat of your school…we all could have normal conversations with each other off stage. We all might be sworn ‘enemies’ on stage, but we knew where to draw the line. Some current members though…I can’t say too much about them. I went to congratulate some Exun members for example at Access, and they fucking refused to shake my hands. I’m talking about the guys who came third in SQ. Ok fine, I could’ve forgotten that if they’d won and were some hotshot quizzers, fact is, they weren’t. It’s normal etiquette, us in the old guard never had any qualms about complimenting each other no matter how hard fought the quiz was. Plus, I was a senior to those SQ guys at Access, class-wise, and experience-wise. It does irritate me.
6. Not all Exun members are like this though. 🙂 You for on have a lot of potential, and some other Exun 11thies I know too. Wish you all the best for the future. 🙂
2. Ah, I see.
3. Yes how did you guess?
4.Thank you
5.That’s precisely what made me quite Exun, they are so full of themselves….
@Anuj: Oh, TCS IT Wiz? That’s one event where all clubs send most of their members for experience and atmosphere – we did last year too. So I guessed, because in know most of the events in the quizzing calendar, and Access and TCS are the only ones open for all.
@ GQ– It’s just too tragic that some of the exun people have weird attitudes. Sorry about that but I don’t think those guys are ever gonna improve.
@Sakshi: That’s what makes me sad – that so many talented people get blinded by arrogance at times… 😐