Access 2006 was held at Modern School, Barakhamba Road on 21-23 December 2006 by their computer club Bits N’ Bytes. It’s known for being the testing ground of new teams since it’s always an open event, and that makes it fun, plus the cool prizes they always have! 😀
Anshul, the CW president, had given up CW for his soon-approaching preboards – in fact none of the 12thies would be going, which made our team weak from the start. I was handed over the charge for taking care of the Code Warriors team (whoopie!!!). Didn’t begin on a happy note though, with our computer HoD creating a hullabaloo about the large gaming team we were sending. Got quite a few scoldings because of that, and was even ticked off by saying Code Wars 2007 will not have a gaming event. Sheesh! Eventually she did allow the team, after much haggling. There was a fun dialog I made on a very unfortunate event (Illusion losing hid iPod Shuffle), “Yeh iPod mujhe de de Thakur…”, which had everyone including HoD ROFL but it’s a long story, and there’s more to it than just the words… 😉
We reached two hours early on day 1, because the school needed the bus back before a particular time, which made us pretty bored. We were first at the registration desk when it opened, but we had so many people that our list went into supplementary sheets.
Day 1 saw no gaming – the schedule had changed and the morons hadn’t updated it on their site, so the gamers were left to while away their time. The Senior Quiz prelims were held, conducted courtesy two smug-looking thug-like alumni with slicked back hair (who didn’t allow Illusion to leave for JQ). The papers was…odd…and we tried to make it funny by writing lots of answers as 42 (or variants of it) but that (unfortunately) didn’t fetch us marks. Qualified with ease.
Junior Quiz prelims were also held, for which Illusion and Spector were supposed to go (Illusion couldn’t, thanks to Mafia Inc), and I was really disappointed with Spector because he missed such sitters and didn’t qualify. I was really angry at that…
Two teams in Senior Programming, and one in Junior Programming qualified too. The last event of the day was Story Writing, for which almost everyone went. It was something on brain copying, Palika Bazar and their annual Bhaskar Kishore shit, which I tried to make insane by including a reference to 42 in each and every sentence (no kidding!). I DID confirm from the judge whether he knew about 42 beforehand, and whether he enjoyed crazy stuff, to which he replied in affirmative, but the bozo finally gave prizes to (compared to mine) serious stuff. Hypocrite. 😛
Day 2 saw actual gaming, where I too dropped in for Quake 3 and Need For Speed. Of course, didn’t qualify, maybe because I’m not a gamer, but mostly I guess due to the fact that my eyes constantly strayed to the huge Ruby posters that the sponsors ATI / AMD had put up. After all, how can you not resist looking at someone who’s been voted the ‘hottest virtual woman in the world’ (er, make that cyberspace…) 😉
The real cool thing was unlimited gaming, that too on brand new Intex PCs. THAT’s what I call SPONSORSHIP.
Scored our first victory, with first position in Sub Junior Quiz (expected…); rest were disappointing though. Nothing in junior programming. In senior programming, wouldn’t blame the Himanshu-Chirkut team – they’ve been out of practice for quite a while; but next year’s prospective programmers Court Jester and Eeshu really disappointed me by not being able to solve childish problems they got. Makes me feel concerned about programming next year.
I also ended up going for Ad Mad, because I’d no other event left the whole day. Unlike normal, this one had making video clips as part of it. Shocking thing was I turned out to know more about Windows Movie Maker than my partner who generally goes for such thing, despite the fact that it was only the second time I’d be using it (the first was at CW06, where I took time out to explore the crap). Topic was Mowgli, on a PC that kept on hanging. With much difficulty, we were able to get something done in Movie Maker. Wanted to do something in Adobe Premiere (6.5! Ugh!) or Pinnacle Studio, but the ‘supercomputers’ they gave us couldn’t handle them.
End of day 2, out of the humongous gaming team that we took nobody qualified, except one already in the core CW team – Illusion (in NFS).
Day 3 saw Illusion losing in the semifinals of NFS, by 20 milliseconds. Ah, I know how it must feel. 🙁 And the cadet team returned empty-handed too.
I had my Group Discussion – well, I wasn’t supposed to got for it since I didn’t want to miss my CL class of chemistry; however, the desire for prizes finally clouded my greedy li’l heart and I went for it. The topic was open-source related, the recent Microsoft-Novell deal. As it turned out, I happened to know the most on stage among the participants (yeah, no prelims; only 10 people were there). Akshay from MIS came for it, for prizes, since he hadn’t qualified anywhere, but he had NO idea what the hell was going on (he was asking me on stage what ‘that shitty deal’ was), and after the first few minutes, stayed quiet so as not to make a fool of himself. At one point, he wrote ‘Linux = complicated shit’ on his rough paper, which almost had me bursting out giggling on stage.
The judges for the GD were people who KNEW what they were talking about, and at one stage, they pretty much screwed me up. Before that, they both already HAD screwed everyone else up. I came second though, as they said, I was ‘too enthusiastic in my support for Linux’. Pah, big deal! What a moronic reason. 😛 Radhika, as usual, thus got first and added to DPS RKP’s point tally. Gotta say, must learn from her though (and Raj too), for any future in GD…
Last up was the Senior Quiz final, which going according to the stupid DynamiX like concept had an integrated (and PATHETIC) crossword with no cryptic clues at all. Again, schools like Apeejay Sheik Sarai and Modern BK have seemingly never heard of Across Lite and try to conduct theirs in some shitty Java-based applet.
We were doing well in the senior quiz – after all, trivia, history, Internet, software et al are my core strengths. Got quite a few open source ones, real easy for me. What sank us in the end were tech and hardware rounds, which is definitely NOT what I’m good at, and SPV and DPS RKP team 1 went slightly ahead of us in these rounds – lost ground which we never quite recovered. Then there was Illusion, my partner, who wasn’t really paying attention to the proceedings as he wanted to piss. Poor chap, kept on rocking back and forth clutching his crotch during the event.
I was in one of my crazy moods on that day, and gave such funny (and incorrect) answers too that had everyone LTAO (laughing their ass off). I also had such amazing flukes hitting bulls-eye that I myself was shocked, and thought at at each one of those instances that the quizmaster was trying to be funny. All those crazy answers and guesses are too funny to blogged, if you wanna hear them ask me personally…ROFL…
Came third in senior quiz. The most AWESOME prize went to DPS RKP team 2, for scoring only two points in eight rounds – a fused tubelight! Man, what an insult! Had the whole audience and teams in splits.
I came Runner Up Senior Performer of the Year. Access always has cool prizes, and I walked away with Typhoon 2.0 speaker, a multimedia keyboard, game CDs, and scholarships. Not that I need the keyboard, dumb thing to give, but Illusion and Spector got a cordless keyboard-mouse set (alas, white series!); Spector got many more audience prizes. Oh, and good-looking silver plaques too.
The best prizes were in gaming (which unfortunately were all won by professional gaming clans) – ATI Radeon graphics cards. :O
Some miscellaneous talk now. I came to know there were hung
ry animals on CW team; people (not me!) who downed 9 sweets a day at the buffet lunches. Puppies, cute li’l ones they have many on campus; apparently its their form or ‘social service’ (or Hutch advertisement), but it was awkward to see pups freely roaming everywhere. And then, the Eternal Mystery – why do all Modern School branches always have such hot and exotic, er, birds roaming, er, flying in the campus? 😉 Don’t they EVER have class! Or maybe, it’s a sneaky tactic to unsettle the participants and make the home teams win…
In all, a bad outing, with the only success coming from the three core Code Warriors – Illusion, Spector and Open Sourcerer (that’s me!). I didn’t get a good team for next year, which I wanted. DPS RKP, again, won overall. Call that the ’23 section advantage’. 😛
Back to studying now though, I’ve loads of work left… 🙁
