Matrix 2006 - Random thoughts

For the new visitors, Matrix is Marian’s Association of Technological Research and Information in eXcellence. It is my school’s computer club(or clan for those who think “club” is archaic).

Our’s being a really conservative school, it was really difficult to make any monumental changes to the way anything gets done. At MSM, before doing anything you need to run around with your idea and get all the coordinators to agree with you. If they don’t, you go the next day and bring out the idea in a new way without really changing anything and they’ll tell you they love it.

Our school doesn’t have any admission fees or compulsory donation system, so funds are not as high as we wanted for a smooth run of our symposium. Our computers were fairly decent: Pentium D PCs each running with 128MB ATI radeon graphic cards. But we couldn’t harness their power with Windows 98 installed on them.

After a serious talk with Mr. Geo Mathew(our CompSc. HOD) we agreed to replace Windows 2000 with Windows 98. Since we thought that was a really good day, we thought of visiting the school office and having a chat with the principal too. An hour later, for the first time, our school was ready to have an event sponsored by an outsider.

Emails to Google got us replies which said we should visit their Grants page to request for money for development. Since there was a waiting list and time was less, that idea was dropped. Amkette and Luxor sponsored some additional prizes which were given out to winners of the 3 new events we started. That was all we got, but hey, it was a start!

The gaming event, thanks to Windows 2000, was spectacular.The Matrix challenge was awesome because of the Team work involved in ripping open old PCs in the store room. Digimaging was great because we never gave a difficult topic(The topic was “Designer Watches”). Our first GD, a great success. Symposium, good as always. WebPresent- Projected to the whole audience, a fair contest no one could complain about. Logo Challenge - An event where Microsoft Excel did all the work, amazing turn up.

In all, a great symposium - Bigger than Bergins and great organisation.

Unrelated, pending and necessary: Sorry MIS, for hurting your students’ and teachers’ feelings.