Dynamix 2007 : Winning Seems To’ve Become A Habit

Dynamix 2007 was held at Ramjas School, R K Puram on 26-27 December 2007. It’s a miracle it got held, especially considering the number of times it got postponed, or shifted to some other date, or ‘finalised’. Might say that a lot of credit goes to my pal Jimi Hendrix (alias Prashanth) for ensuring the event got held.

Day 1 :: Mommy, I Need MapMyIndia.com
Started off the day with a bit of confusion about the gaming team. Bombardo’s down with measles, downing chicken soup by the bucketful while ‘resting’ by playing Half-Life 2. Finally got a new guy, who’s pretty much a pro at the FPS genre.

The school is in Sector 4, RKP. Way close to my home. It’s in the residential colonies though, and well, it’s a confusing area. I got to the place, got the school, but not its entrance – ended up at some DJB engineer’s office or something. Finally, we did reach there. I might add here that I’m no more melancholy when going to competitions because our drivers don’t waste time drinking fucking tea any more. Weird. I guess they stopped mixing cocaine with their cuppa.

Jimi had told me that about SIXTY schools had been invited – THAT was pretty ambititious. On ground, teams numbered around 20 only. Sitting around in their hall, with then most pathetic speaker system EVER, they made all the teams SUFFER by insisting on playing songs, despite people begging them not to. Anyway, it started after their principle muttered some inaudible words.

First up, quiz and crossword prelims. Quiz prelims were…pretty tough. Also, it seems certain parties had bribed / threatened (probably the latter) Jimi to rip off some rules from Code Wars. Sucked. Anyway, we got through. Crossword prelims, again, pretty amazing. Got almost everything in it.

Ran off for group discussions after that. My batch, the competitive participants apart from me were a bunch o’ fucktards who didn’t know one THING about tech. Was the only guy from my batch to qualify. Topics were good though – impact of Internet on piracy; and censorship in games. Which reminds me, that DPS RKP’s replacement guy for Radhika has a long way to go next year if he wants to start winning GDs.

Finals were held soon after – the topic was on whether a governing body for the Internet was required. Frankly, I didn’t expect such a redundant topic to come in especially from Jimi, because THAT already exists in the form of ICANN. Sigh, there was nothing else to do than plod on. The GD turned out to be very lively, thankfully. Everyone seemed to go off on a tangent, because they kept on talking about content, i.e., like Pornab Mukherjee (pun intended) foaming at his mouth about ‘indecent material’. My foot. Anyway, it was fun to see the judge make tick-marks on his sheet as I dropped one RELEVANT example after another. Won the GD. 😀

Gaming. Won that. Oh, I heard it was fun, with our guys knocking out DPS RKP pretty early. Maybe it was luck, but at the end of the day, our team kicked ass.

Creative event – well, didn’t get too much done in that. Arjun is zis guy who really wants good design, and we were supposed to make a Google hoax. I come in to see a site with a purple background, Flash stuff, colorful menus and whatnot. That went outa the window(s). I wanted our hoax to mimic Google as closely as possible, so the team took a decision to start from scratch on Day 2. It also meant an evening spent in online conference with our team to chalk out strategy for that event.

Day 2 :: They’re Vegetarian!
Morn saw me and Vivek going for the Codex event. Basically, it was like N-Crypton Lite. We both sat gawking at clue which had Pamela Anderson in it most of the time. Not that we hadn’t seen it earlier, but it was the most ‘interesting’ clue of all…

…and we could have given the answer they wanted, except that I thought they’ll shoo us away and call us a bunch o’ perverts. Turns out, they actually WANTED us to answer ‘Silicon Valley’ for that! Abhimanyu (of DPS MR) came up with something equally hilarious though – MySpace.

Anyway, I was ultra-pissed at their answer for another one – where they showed a picture booth and said the answer was ‘Adobe’ because they were talking of ‘metaphorical construction materials’. Well dearies, ‘adobe’ doesn’t happen to be just ‘any other construction material’, but happens to be the name of the sorta bricks / stones used in making the Egyptian pyramids. There were quite a few other valid answers, like ‘Photoshop’ (Montfort) and ‘pixel’ (ours; because it was literally a ‘picture cell’, and the image was made of pixels); but it seems they hadn’t thought of alternate answers. Then again, MIS came up with a ‘Lite-On’ for an image for ‘Flickr’, only to meet with resistance. Anyway, I guess they DID finally give marks to everyone for all that. Screw them if they didn’t and we got third position because of that.

Our creative event Google hoax idea was pretty much chalked out. Lemme elaborate no further an introduce you to Google 53x – view at your own risk. Got VERY little time in the morning to do a bit of stuff, rest was over to Vivek. And then me and Arjun had to move on to the quiz.

Bright kid from RKP, Aditya, thinks too much of himself (apart from violating the code of conduct we’d hammered out with Exun, but I let that pass); but sat clueless most of the quiz. Our team also went around sledging Team BlahBloohBlah (damn, it doesn’t have the same feel to it when I type it out) from MIS (we / I hate them ever since MINET, for making that rule against us…), who also seemed clueless. Needless to say, despite ‘strong’ competition, the DPS VK team has raised its standards beyond the reach of anyone this year, and won the quiz. Allow meself to be a bit arrogant in this regard, but the team of me, Arjun, Vivek, and Karthick are WAY ahead of others. 😀 The quiz itself was pretty good, thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the connect questions, which were simply brilliant.

Next up – crosswords, something our team was better than others last year, and comprehensively made others eat dust in this year. I’d say the prelims were much more fun. I mean, giving ‘Magna Vox Odyssey’ as a word in the grid is too much, no matter how logical the clue is. Still, it was a pretty fun crossword, one which foxed me at Forty Two too! And oh yeah, we won this too; swung it in decisively towards the end with a double-or-nothing answer. 😀

Programming, didn’t turn out that well. Surprise event, was Windoze power user tasks. I saw the paper, and I’d no clue where to even start with it. Guess I’m not a Windoze user after all!

Coming to the creative event. I saved it for the last, because, ahem, there’s quite a lot to talk about
it. Turns out, Vivek is a pervert extraordinaire (gawd, he’s only in class NINTH!), and wrote content for Google 53x which even I might not have thought of! We raced against time to get the site completed, especially since we practically only used Day 2 for our work.

The disappointment was, their HoD saw our site…and had us disqualified. Sucks. AND showed it to our teacher. Sucks even more. Guess what? Teams which won basically hadn’t even MADE a hoax. Ours was a Google HOAX – there’s were feebly recycled fucking Flash PRESENTATIONS for existing products. Ever seen Google using Flash? I haven’t, beyond their web messenger. Bunch of losers thus walked away with a prize. Oh, did I mention that the idea for the creative event seemed ripped off from Code Wars 07’s surprise event (we’d given that too).

Everyone in our team was in way bad state after that incident, fearing the wrath of OUR HoD. Oh well, it turned out that she wasn’t mad at us at all (phew, what a relief!); and was happy at us winning the overall at Dynamix – second year in a row.

And how can I forget the uber-cool prizes. All podium finishers got a free issue of Skoar (boy, I MUST write about that too), a free voucher to get the December 07 anniversary edition of Digit; and a one year subscription to PC Quest / Living Digital, based on the event. Oh boy, it’s simply amazing. Prizes was one of the reason I came there, apart from the fact that I knew Jimi’s (and Uma’s) quiz and crossword were gonna be fun.

Fifth overall trophy of the year for the Code Warriors, again, of overall winners, rolls in… 😀