So, Samir came up with a cool way of kicking people out of his friend list on Facebook:

1. Change your birthday to some other day like tomorrow.
2. See who wishes you.
3. Be nice. Say thanks.
4. Block/Remove.

In yesterday’s post about Matrix-Ecomm 2010, I linked to a blog post written by Delhi Public School Vasant Kunj’s Pulkit Kaushik:

Mount St. Mary’s School’s annual symposium Matrix Ecomm was held on 20th-21st August 2010. See the invite here, though if you color blind you may pass it. (if you interested in reading the whole post then you must have a look at the Matrix Ecomm’s invite, it would help you empathize with me and my fellow students who were (un)fortunate enough to attend the symposium. Note: If you are susceptible to epileptic seizures please refrain from seeing the invite. It’s not that their invite was bad, it was just an invite which you don’t feel like opening. So many colors, so many images..oh! God! To open the invite you need to have a motive and a friend to support you while you are at it. Though no typos except one was found, the one which I found compensated for 50 typos. It was the third word of the invite and it was written in bold and apparently was in a size three times larger than the rest of the written material in the invite.

Yes, their diagnosis would have indicated insufficient use of Jokerman even otherwise. Because Jokerman is the most awesome font there is. Seriously, you’ve got to love this font.

Then this. Before being fragged 49 times by the losing team:

See people, we know you know what dpi is. You don’t need to show off your knowledge by writing anything. 3500? Seriously? My friend bought a mamba for gaming purposes (d’uh!) and you don’t want him to use it? I wonder why…

The guy with the Razer was probably just waiting for everyone shooting at him to explode. The only other thing he was doing was re-spawning every few seconds. Oh wait, I must have been having epileptic seizures.

Apparently these guys have never used the Macs with Windows XP at their school:

We sat in front of a PC with Pentium 4, a 13 inch Samsung LCD (the smaller version of the TV LCD’s) and the user log-in screen with a password protected account on Windows. With nothing to do we started entering random passwords. Apparently every time we tried consecutively for the 6th time the PC used to hang and thus forcing us to restart it.

More awesomeness. This time about not knowing how to use command prompt:

The trick in fact is pretty long. Requires CMD and is very long. In short not doable in surprise event. On the other hand the trick does not work without 3rd part software (WinRAR, 7Zip et al have to be used). See the trick here.

Please notify the Oxford Press that ‘long’ has been redefined to mean a few characters. You don’t need WinRAR to hide stuff inside JPEGs. But even if you want to use that method, support for compressed zip folders is built right into Windows XP. But their method of hiding stuff was uber-cool. They were trying to coax MSM to accept that adding some metadata to the file using the file’s property pane is hiding text in the file. Why not just rename the file?

Do computers now have no keyboards? That’s the only thing I could make out:

I said “Can we use explorer?” “No” came the answer. These guys are obssesed with CMD! Command Prompt everywhere!

I’ll tell you who isn’t obsessed with the command line: Everyone who uses Windows to check their email in Internet Explorer. Then there are those who call up Microsoft’s technical support to find out how to hide their porn from grandma.

A lot of the other text quoted in his original post is poorly paraphrased. Deliberately. I can understand why. If they had won this year’s Matrix Challenge like they have in the past, the tone of their post would have been different.

I went back to MSM today. The school hasn’t changed. A lot of facilities upgraded but in essence it’s the same. Oodles of awesome. The rain made the green really shine; unfortunately it reduced participation and fewer schools showed up.

I went to judge an event that mashed Image Editing (Movie Poster) + Video Editing (The Movie). Judging these events is a painful task, something you don’t realize when you’re participating. New Era Public School and Delhi Public School RK Puram shined among the others. Given the time constraints, it was interesting to see what they came up with. Given the number of attributes we had to judge them by, we deducted points for details that could have been less glaring and a few more for being vague. The general idea was to judge them looking at all that they had presented in front of us - the website, the pitch, the actual movie and how they reacted to simple questions. We did that, sitting on the PCs each of the teams worked on and declared what we had already pictured in the auditorium.

The event was very well organised. Wish it hadn’t rained so much though.

—

1. The invite was probably the only part of the symposium which could have been a lot better. I felt troubled seeing the usage of fonts + random images. When you’re going green, you could put the event signup module on Drupal to better use.
2. DPS Vasant Kunj would have been awesome if we had organised what they came prepared for. Sarcasm. We didn’t really have a prize to give them. Here’s a lolcat award. By the way VK, send me links all you want but ‘prepone’ still doesn’t replace ‘advance’ if the Queen’s English is what you are looking for.

I don’t know about the new Sharpie Liquid Pencil that’s been getting so much press lately, but I love my regular mechanical pencils. They always work. Drop them a hundred times, they’ll still work like they’re supposed to. Writing with lead gives you a smooth continuous flow that doesn’t smudge or spread. The detail you add to the picture is the only detail it depicts. What you write is waterproof, but can be erased. Permanent for as long as you want. I killed my handwriting when I started writing with a pen in 6th grade. But when I write with a pencil, I see it coming back.

When I use a writing instrument, I twist my left hand around in a weird angle to hold it. Almost everyone notices when they see me do this. This also affects the way I grip pencils. And not all of them work for me. The ones that do are:

1. Staedtler Graphite 777
2. Uni Shalaku DX
3. Camlin Nouvel Klick Pencil

Now that I’m done talking about pencils, I need to find a notepad with better paper.

NOSUG(Noida NCR Open Source Users Group) meeting number 3 at OSSCube. These office spaces are very cool. The responsibilities I fulfilled:  Broke two glasses full of water, a MacBook and the event!

(Photos: Facebook/OSSCube)