Yup, ThinkQuest is now over, so it becomes ThunkQuest. At long last, the ThinkQuest site we were working on is OVER! ThinkQuest (TQ) is this global web designing competition sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation. Our site was on free / open source software, technologies, and ideology. Boy, did it take a lot of work. I did a bit of content editing mostly, before the math exam; and then jumped in with full enthusiasm before the computer exam. Although the Code Warriors (ahem, I) had thought up the idea quite early last year, work didn’t really start until the last month. Later on however, it no longer remained a ‘CW TQ team’ – as two brilliant guys, Prashanth and Varun (and later, also a guy from Denmark), joined our team. And quite frankly, this was one team effort where you really just can’t say who did more work, because everybody worked their arse off to get all the research, content, design and everything else into their goddamn place.
One thing that really made us free / open source fans happy is that Bruce Perens, one of the leading founders of the Open Source Initiative; and Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation – BOTH agreed to be featured on our site. Perens gave us a short interview, while Stallman agreed to give us permission to excerpts from some articles of his – and even went ahead, and gave suggestions on the article I wrote! And it is sad, that we had also contacted the young guns like Matt Muellenberg (or WordPress), and Blake Ross (the Firefox guy), but neither of them bothered to reply. We even wrote to less important people (compared to Perens and Stallman), like the editors of PC World and Digit magazines, and some tech journos. Guess what? None of those assholes replied either. Perens and Stallman, who could quite probably be getting hundreds of emails a day, had time to reply and help out students who approached them; but sucky Indian airhead tech magazine editors? Nope.
The TQ team literally spent whole nights awake to put the content together. ‘Nuff said about that. We uploaded everything to their servers yesterday, minutes before the deadline. The last day was fun too, as me, Vivek, and Prashanth were at Varun’s place, working on integrating everything. After the submission was over, we quite futilely tried to order pizza at 1am; and then resigned ourselves to watching South Park, movies, and goofy videos the until the morning. Man, we practically spent the whole night laughing non-stop, with a lot of PJs going around too. Cartman rocks!
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