All I wish is “A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down”…

Ahh.. what a wish, I really wish I could do that for a couple of days more, like I’ve been doing for the past 12 days of my vacation.

I just hit upon this site (nicecupofteaandasitdown.com). I really like their mission statement, really can relate spiritually to them:

Our Mission Statement:

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely.

What a beautiful concept! This is the reason why the Internet still remains sane today…

Take a look at the site: OPEN SESAME!

Shashank

PS: This might make you hungry.

I love keyboards… I hate people

God bless keyboards, especially at times when the mice decide to go on a hunger strike. I’m sick and tired of wireless mice, and am half inclined to walk right tomorrow and purchase an ordinary optical mouse. The problem is that its far and I’m too lazy to do that as such. :-/

Its been exactly just a week since I replaced the old mouse batteries with brand new ones, and bam! they’re already dead! My mouse has stopped working right in the middle of the night at 12:29 am, when there is no chance that I can go around the house and humbly beg someone to lend me a battery, nor run out of the house and purchase some. And I was just beginning to get cosy with my work.

Damn! Today’s been a miserable day, loads of work planned, and almost none achieved. Overslept as usual.. had planned to wake up at atleast 10am for a change, woke up at 12:30pm. So then I thought, “Such is life”, and started up my system and began designing the new website of my college’s IEEE chapter (I’m its Secretary BTW), and Bang! at 1pm the power fails. With no signs of it returning anytime soon, I grumbled at the interruption of my once-in-a-lifetime, finally-sat-down-to-do-it, just-when-I-was-getting-warmed-into-the-subject initiative of my website, and decided to sit down and paint something instead! Yeah, as in real paint and paintbrush etc, which is something I managed to do atleast for a while, before I dropped off to sleep right there holding the paintbrush.

When I woke up a few hours later, I discovered that the power had returned, and therefore sat down to work again (after removing those wierd paint daubs on my clothes from that paintbrush I took to sleep with), when that stupid UPS repair fellow came. Another 2 hours wasted on that. Clock struck 8pm, and I desperately sat down to do some work atleast, when my sis called up and asked me to help her fix her system via phone and Yahoo chat. Grrr.. it was 9.30 before both of us ran out of patience and went off our own respective ways. Next, dinner and the usual running around the house insanely, before I finally managed to sit peacefully at 11pm (while that UPS fellow, and my sister, and the rest of humanity slept cosily in their respective homes) and worked for an hour or so, before my MOUSE IN A SUPREME BURST OF IRRITATING GAS……. DIED! Bah!

I’m going off to sleep like the rest of the the irritating world.
Good night.

Looking back…

DynamiX Clan (Dec 2006)

There was one time when I was at school you know.. and I met two interesting guys called Roshan Shariff & Rahul Seth (in different ways.. Roshan because of an Intel project we did together, and Rahul ‘coz of one SchoolNet Website competition.. then me and Rahul jointly started and ran an online media portal called Big-Anda.com for a while). And before long we all met up and one thing led to the other and we setup up a Computer & IT Club/Klan called “DynamiX”! We were basically fed up with the lack of anything being done at school for identifying and encouraging talented students in the field of computers. The teachers had this attitude that our school wasn’t any good in computers, and that we didn’t have students here good at computers. We thought differently. My reasoning was that it physically wasn’t possible for them to know each and every student in the school and also know whether they’re any good at computers, or any particular field. So we decided to go deep among the students, of almost all classes and spot people with talent, and people with an aptitude for computers and a desire to grow and do things differently!

We had immense support from our Principal, Mrs. Meera Balachandran, and basically were permitted to do whatever it takes to get it running. We started off with Mr. Umakant Pandey as our chief mentor, who was the faculty in-charge of the Intel Lab, soon re-christened “The DynamiX Labs”. The rest was quite a rush, recruiting students, getting them to work, getting ourselves to work, competiting at the tech fests of many other schools (and winning several of them! ) and holding our own events & fests.

My point is that even though our fests never really played up to our expectations and planning, personally I have grown a lot as an organizer, manager as well as team-player, and the experience I gained due to DynamiX has been invaluable in my college life, ‘coz when we read about managing events, managing people, working in teams, division of labor.. for most of the folks here its just theory, whereas I can actually relate to it from my personal experiences and be better at organizing and working in teams.

Anyway, this post was just a bit of remiscence of my time at school and my “DynamiX Days”, and was sparked by the recently concluded (and very successful) “DynamiX 2007″, one that was almost entirely organized by the young talents (that the school believed didn’t exist before DynamiX started) with help from Rahul & Anshu. Kudos to the new DynamiX team!

Shashank