Current mood:

satisfied

OpenTalk @ PESIT
OpenTalk at PES has been a huge success this time.

The Event Looked like it may not happen, due to last minute hiccups, but everything was solved by the end.


===Pre Event===

This is when the fun began. We went to Hall so that I could charge my laptop a bit, and then the news hit us:

SOMEONE HAD OVERBOOKED THE HALL.

ie, we no longer had permission to use the hall! Luckily, Anush was able to convince the management to allow us to use the Seminar Hall of the MCA department.

So we had to visit each class and tell them the change of venue.

And we had to beg for a Projector from the CS and MCA dept

We also had a few problems getting my Acer Laptop to run with the projector. Luckily I figured out the trick:

If you turn on the machine with the projector plugged in, it works. Otherwise, simply reboot your machine.

Many thanks to Arun AR (Nalli) for getting the brilliant ID of pressing the 'on' button on the projector


=== Event ===

Before I realised, it was time for me to speak, and suddenly became nervous. I tried delaying by waiting for speakers to show up. I even went to the gate to wait for Praveen. The guard saw me using a cell phone on campus, so I used my last option --- RUN!

I ran back to the hall, and decided to just start speaking, after seeing that about 60 people were waiting.

My talk went off without much problems. It wasn't as terrible as I had expected it to be. Anyway, think I spoke for about 15 mins. I noticed that many of my batchmates had come just to watch me.

Anush Spoke next, about FOSS tools. I missed most of this talk, as I realised that speakers will want water on stage, so I went and bought Aquafina from the campus.

When I came back, I noticed that Dinesh from Servelots decided to come, so I sat down next to him in the second row. I also noticed that some of my classmates had decided to stay.

Swaroop CH spoke next. He spoke about python. He managed to fascinate the audience. They were incredibly impressed when swaroop ran this simple one-liner:

>>> a,b = b,a

and swapped two variables, even thought they were different types. This was simply brilliant, and people actually started clapping. His demo has generated a lot of pythonic interest, and we are trying to start some kind of PES py project. Details later.

Next up was Shreyas. As there was no internet in the room, and his laptop wasn't playing nice with the projector, he gave a small talk on how he got into FOSS, and what he learnt from it. His speech was truly motivating.

Praveen followed with his FOSS in edu talk. He talked about the mailing list and the projects that FOSS in edu is doing, such as making a distro for schools and stuff. He gave me as a contact of PESIT for this project.

By the time Praveen finished, it was getting really late. Sadly, much of the audience walked off. Their loss, as the next Talk was brilliant. I saw the last of my classmates vanish

Atul spoke on "Innovation" and how people only have college to innovate, and how they should be innovating NOW! He compared FOSS to an electric socket.... actually, I am not going to continue describing this talk. It was simply TOO inspiring to blog about. If you haven't already, invite this guy to talk at your college, and hear for yourself.

Not much 'after the event'. We cleaned up, and went home.

=== Selected Chuckles ===

Here are a few funny things that happened:

1) I kept seeing this one girl all over campus. I was wondering why I saw her so frequently. At the talk, I suddenly saw 2 of her. Thats when Anush told me that they were twins.

2) When Atul was speaking, the power kept going everytime he mentioned Kalyan, or exams. Luckily generators kicked in within 5 seconds from each failure.

3) The screensaver kept coming on during Atul's talk. Once, a picture of a vacuum cleaner came on screen, with a message 'KDE: clean and bug-free'. /me could see shreyas trying to not break out laughing.

4) When shreyas was looking for a laptop with internet connection, we found a laptop with Reliance wire-less net. But it had one problem... It had windows... and only Korean Language Support... and it was out of batteries... and we didn't have the charger. We just used my laptop in the end