Rants

Disappointment. The word is apt to describe my frame of mind.

Quizzing at Rendezvous 2k8 was a disaster. No, this isn’t a post about how good I felt about the quizzing culture here at BITS, Pilani (which I did), but rather how sorry I felt for the state of things at IITD.

The fest boasts of huge sponsors and mega events and a cracking rock show, then why oh why is the organization of the quizzes so bad? I’m sure the teams that came were pretty good. Teams from Stephen’s, NSIT with whom I had quizzed earlier were there and they simply sighed, saying that it’s nothing new.

Of the many inferences that I made after returning from the fest with regards to quizzing, one of them was that the eliminations and finals had to be made by different people.

A lot of questions in the finals were “lifted” from Wikipedia. How do I know this? I spotted a [2] after a sentence on numerous occasions. Also, someone should get these gentlemen acquainted to the concept of using a PowerPoint presentation to host their quizzes rather presenting us with a compilation of notepad files, each containing one question. It’s never too late to shift, you know. Another suggestion from my end would be to rename the audio clip that you are playing rather than put the clip in a folder named "question 12-do not open", it just tests the audience's patience. And please for Christ's sake dont put in some 85 x 123 size pics and then try to zoom in, instead use larger pics, and if you can't find larger pictures then don't put the question in an AVQ.

We made it past the elims for both the quizzes; one whose name I don’t quite remember and Kombat, the open quiz. In the finals, we were leading for a major portion of the time in the first quiz but ultimately messed ourselves up when we didn’t go for the theme and that resulted in us coming fourth. In the second quiz, we just didn’t hit the right opportunities but oh well, congrats to Vivek, Aravind and King for winning that one.

And then came the blow. Zoom in. The Audio Visual Quiz. Which was about 95% VQ, since there was one audio clip in the whole quiz. Now for the questions, they show us a picture of the Google Chrome comic and didn’t ask us to identify the comic, but instead to identify the creator. WTF?

On another topic: I like the new improved zemanta.