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Archive for September, 2004

Our Olympians… and our OASIS

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A preview on OASIS first… we’ve been having a huge discussion on OASIS in our mailing list… it’s mostly been FashP but we seem to be moving on now… someone else can probably plug in the blog on it.

Anyways, I and Goyal had another discussion… mostly guided by a rediff article… (you can read that here)… and we both were of the opinion that the author’s been a little too harsh. We don’t have the world’s best sportsman, that’s a fact… so instead of blaming them, we perhaps need to delve into why the state is such. Personally, I think anyone who blames Anju Bobby George is out of his mind… as are all those people who called her this big Indian medal hope… realistically speaking, yes, she had a chance but everyone, from the officials to the media made it seem like she had a 99% chance or something… It’s one thing to encourage our players, it’s quite another to pressure them… which is what we do everytime. She went there and bettered her personal best, what more do we want from her? If her best wasn’t good enough, it’s not her fault, it’s our fault.

If she has to come up with excuses, it’s because we don’t congratulate her on doing so well, we ask her why she didn’t win… she hardly needs to be defensive of her performance… I for one, am proud of her… We really shouldn’t be asking her why she didn’t return with a medal when the figures show she actually did better than she has ever done.

And the best part is everything is now gonna be forgotten till Jan 2008… when everyone will wake up again… how many of us tracked our medal hopefuls during their progress in the past 4 years… how many of us had heard of Karnam Malleswari before she won a bronze in Sydney? I’m sure 80% of us didn’t know Rathore some 15 days before Olympics started… why should we just blame the authorities saying they ignore our sportsmen… do we remember them?

The aim here is not to win an Olympic medal, it’s to create world class athletes who will win everywhere. At other championships as well as the Olympics. And we have to start now… There will be some who like Lee-Hesh might not be able to make it but we already know they’re right up there with the best in the world, they hardly need to prove it.

Written by Rahul

September 7th, 2004 at 8:21 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Of Audi ragging and bug fixes…

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The same thing happens every year… First sem starts at BITS and the usual discussions start, how can OASIS be improved, how dumb the UC candidates are… Blab blah blah… And every year, it leads to no change… We’re just a bunch of people who can sit and type… Or speak! (Goyal hopes to change that… Amen!)
Cynical, eh?? Well, it’s the end of the day, the code I wrote has some runtime bug I can’t trace, what do you expect??!
Typing in crap always cheers me up, which is why I’m here…
Mostly, till now, it’s been confined to Goyal and me… We’ve been majorly blabbering about it on this mailing list we have and even had messenger sessions… Bansal, from the one mail he sent, seems hajaar pissed with the Audi ragging session… And particularly unimpressed by the way the EC panel went about it’s job… (Ha ha, Goyal was on the panel… I sense a coldwar!!) Everyone else… We haven’t had a comment in yet… Those Infy chaps seem busy with compres, majorly ghoting… Compres after college, sucks man! And Ankit as usual is dunno-where… A total repeat of BITS seems to be happening in Bang, and there is no Meghs around! Anyways, to be fair on him (he’ll edit this post otherwise!), he’s working pretty hard.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m working hard too… It’s just that my code doesn’t work!!
So, where were we… I think I digressed again… You’ll have to get used to that… Whenever Ankit is kind enough to let me in, I’ll make good use of mytime in the sun… Touch every topic I can… (Remind me to get to how the Karnataka govt has totally ruined our weekends!)
Anyways, to get back to the topic at hand… Good ol’ BITSian electoral reforms! Audi ragging… EC Panel… Well, it seems to have provided a lot of entertainment this time too… Seriously man, an Audi ragging session beats quite a few of those RAF movies at entertainment value… It’s a pity CCTV doesn’t tape it, I’m sure the Union could make profit out of it. I’d buy it, it’s so funny!! I heard this time around someone said the chief job of a campaign managerwas to change slides… I mean, isn’t that funny??? After you’re done being depressed of course!
Why do we have an audiragging session, Bansal raised that… I’d like to think it’s for the first yearites… If you’re not a fresher, you’ve already chosen who you’re gonna vote for… Candidate-A or Candidate-B or None-of-these… Or you’ve decided it’s not worth the trouble on a Sunday morning… You’d rather just sleep through the whole voting deal… There was a time when I, a fresher, sat in the Audi hanging on to every word (though the cheers and jeers sometimes made it impossible), trying to take my ‘right-to-vote’ seriously… I’d like to believe that most of the firstyearites are like I was, who haven’t been swayed by the crap of politics yet, who have the minds to try and decide… I’d like to believe those are the people the Audiragging targets…
But then, does it??
Maybe we need to ask ourselves that… There is this whole talk about how inertia drags everything in BITS… It’s done because it was done last year… Has the audiragging also become one of those institutions… Last year, it was a joke (seriously, CCTV should have taped it!) inspite of the best efforts of the panel… Seems to have been the same this time around too… Maybe we need to come up with something new… A better system… For the poor first yearites, if nothing else…
My advice to the freshers… Read the interviews that EPC does… They seem to give a better view of the candidates though I haven’t got my hands on the latest issue yet… After all, its easier to judge how smart or dumb the replies are when you don’t have people shouting from all sides… And if the Audiragging leaves you all frustrated, stop yourself before you go down the cynical road… Coz once you take your first step, there’s no coming back…
I’ll get back to my code now… (that was quite refreshing!!)
- Rahul

Written by Ankit

September 3rd, 2004 at 3:35 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Search for the name

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Rahul suggested that the first entry in the blog should be about how we went about searching for the name for my blog.

All credits to Rahul. He is the one who came up with the name.

Here is how it goes….. In the (sleepy) afternoon hours today, I came up with this (brilliant) idea to start my own blog. So I go to blogger.com (where else??) and create an account for myself. But the question was what shud the blog be called. I thought of “That’s me in the corner” for name and “mycorner” for the url. Was not sure so decided to ping Rahul. When i told him that I was thinking of calling it “That’s… corner”, his first reponse was that the url shud be “mycorner”. Alas, it was not what was meant to be coz the url was not available.

Next Rahul suggested “Swimming in a fish bowl” + “myfishbowl”. However, It was rejeced without much thought because of certain reasons. After we had discussed a few more, both of us agreed on “Waiting for the winter sun” + “wintersun” but that too was not meant to be (God! Why me??).

Now we knew that the task we had taken up was not as easy as we had thought it was. After this, we tried “Till you came knocking at my door” + “mydoor” but yet again we were unsuccessful.

At this point of time, I was forced to change my line of thought as I had to leave for an important meeting. But Rahul, he didn’t stop….. he kept on thinking and came up with some cool ideas… “just nod if you can hear me” & “justnod” and “smoke on the horizon” & “distantship”.

Then,…. it was then that the masterpiece came - “On the road again” & “eastofomaha“….. Seeing this I knew that the success was near. All that was required of me was execution.

And thus, this blog was created.

—This is just the Beginning—

Written by Ankit

September 2nd, 2004 at 1:15 pm

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Here I go….

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Just thought of creating a blogspot…..

No strings attached, its a nice way to put down your thoughts.

Hope I continue and its not a one time thing

Written by Ankit

September 2nd, 2004 at 1:00 pm

Posted in Uncategorized