Last Saturday was my chance to don the QM cap once again at K-Circle. I guess folks enjoyed the quiz. Thanks for the generous review, whoever has written it.
Quoting Verbatim:
Riyaz Usman sporting an Infosys “Hyderabad Quiz Forum” t-shirt, exuded the air of an experienced quiz master as he unveiled his June Arre Bhai quiz. His “waiting-for-the-room-to-fill-up” slide was an interesting visual – the word “June” half obscured by a hillside (like a sunrise), and a plug for the June 21st Summer Solstice. This was a “tell”, since questions from that realm of knowledge also made an appearance.
25 Lone Wolves arrayed around Riyaz who held in his clicker two sets of 30Q that were going to be answered in the old fashioned analog way – by putting pen to paper. The first set of 30 seemed to have been designed as an engine primer; they were enjoyable and guessable but remarkable in that they enabled higher scores in the second set.
The QM showed his predilection for First Generation video games with two questions about very early games – one game that a software icon created, and the other game an icon in its own right.
Physics/physicist questions were eagerly lapped up by the science-types; A visual with a 60s style “shaggin wagon” with tell-tale markings and a really leading license plate made us all eagerly mentally tabulate physicist names and strike off the ones that did not gel with the visual clues.
There were some interesting visual connects for us to sprain our eyes on – one collage included a set of animals, a world leader, a lofty peak and a farm implement; another showed us an interesting type of doodle whose style we had to identify, and yet another that showed a selection of movie posters of the patriot/war genre.
Riyaz’ quiz was also an ode to the obviously central position that Wikipedia has in the lives of quizzers, and indeed in the lives of all curious people. “Wikipedia” featured as the answer to two questions – one in each set. That frequency is, if anything, an underestimate of the importance of that online resource to us all.
As the Solstice reference had intimated, there were a few Astronomy related questions that had us seeing stars…(not really, but it was a pun waiting to happen!). One question connected astronomy to a physical manifestation of modern commerce, which I thought was terrific.
Showbiz was a major player in the quiz with cameos by a famous movie making duo, a very successful sci-fi movie of the 80s, an Indian flick from the dawn of the film era, a legendary creator of enchanted stories, and a famous spoof of sc-fi films. If there was an also-ran, it was sports; but what was represented from the world of sports, were probably the most iconic, long-lasting sports images and ideas so they were really enjoyable to work out from the given clues.
All in all, a varied and wonderful quiz. Riyaz: your flair for the dramatic, the visual and the entertaining, all came together to make this a memorable session. Thanks, and come back soon!
For those who missed it, the quiz is available at Google Docs, and a low-res PDF as direct download. For those who were there already, attempt the bonus connect round at the end of quiz.
In other news, Infosys team including the humble me has won the ICICI inter-corporate Quiz contest, the same morning. This came almost within a month after winning the Debate contest by ICICI. My shelf got richer by two more trophies! Meantime my bank account got poorer by a significant amount, thanks to the new digital toy – Canon EOS 550D.
The next production by MANCH theatre at Infosys Hyd DC. Staging this on 31st March 2011. Planning to stage this outside Infy too. Contact me if you can help.
It makes you feel good when you hear good things about your good friends. And when you keep on hearing good news, nothing like it. Santhosh Thottingal, is one such good friend, who always makes his friends happy with continuous feed of good news. He pings almost every day with some news or the other. It can be about his workshop on Wikimania 2010 in Poland, or about one of his apprentice winning Google SoC scholarship, or one of his project making big news.
Recently, he has been selected to the Language committee of Wikimedia foundation in its recent expansion. Santhosh is the first and only Indian in the 16-member committee. Not a small achievement at all.
Wikimedia Foundation is the organization which operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation language committee is in charge of developing a clear policy and documentation for new language projects and their proposal, processing those requests, and supporting and coordinating new projects to optimize their success.
Santhosh is a major Wiki-contributor from India, and a volunteer in several Indian language projects. He is known for his contributions to Free and Open source projects particularly in Indic language computing. He is a lead developer of Swathanthra Malayalam computing, a developer collective working for Malayalam language computing. He is also the author of Dhvani Text to speech system for Indic languages which won FOSS India award 2008. He is upstream author for more than 10 packages related to language computing in various GNU/Linux distributions. He is the author of hyphenation algorithms for Indic languages in TeX and Openoffice.org. He designed and developed the biggest Indic language computing initiative named SILPA and authored many Indic language processing algorithms such as Indic soundex, cross language fuzzy string match etc. He wrote the wiki2cd tool used for creating the offline version of Malayalam Wikipedia. He was invited to conduct a workshop on offline Wikipedia projects in Wikimania 2010, the annual Wikipedia conference at Poland.
His admission to the Wikimedia Language committee has happened taking his years of contribution to the Indian language computing into consideration, along with his numerous contributions to Wiki projects. This sure is a proud moment for all of the FLOSS community in India.
Visit Santhosh’s blog to know more about him and his projects.
One of the Posters for the Quiz Show
Jan 2011 was (is) a busy month. Hosted two quizzes at work – one for the Junta, and one for the Senior Management at work. Both turned out to be well received ones.
Couple more quizzes lined up, busy preparing them. One for an inter-collegiate technical festival organised by University of Calicut, Kerala, and another for a similar event organised by an Engineering college in Hyderabad, both in Feb. (If you’re a student either from Kerala or Hyderabad, and want to participate, do contact me.)
One of the Posters for Shaam-e-Rang
Also happened was a theatre event called Shaam-e-Rang, staging couple of short plays and monologues. These plays titled Family v2.0 and The Trap was first staged at ITsAP inter-corporate event in December 2010, and won the first prize there. Again, warmly received.
Upcoming are two new productions, for Mar 2011. Auditions for the same will happen this week.
A short story shared by Dad, during a discussion over media’s power.
Once two shop owners in the town had a fight between them over some issue. When the verbal fight got physical, someone informed the police. A police constable was sent to settle the fight, and he did. One of the parties presented him with some bananas as a gift for settling the fight amicably.
Local reporter of a news paper who was present among the spectators, found some news value in there. He duly reported the news in next days paper, with the title.
“Police receives Banana as bribe for settling fight”
Some of the higher authorities in the police has read the news, and they felt it very disturbing. They ordered the police constable to return back the bananas, and he did. The next days news title read as,
“Police returns back bribed bananas”
The otherwise low-visible constable, who already was the hero of two news reports decides to use his power. He called local news reporter and warned him. Little did he expected the next days news,
“Police threatens reporter for reporting bribe”
Again higher authorities, who had enough of this issue, and wanted to settle this down already, ordered the police constable to apologize, to avoid further damage. He did. Well, that went news again,
“Police apologizes for threatening reporter over bribe news”
PS: The discussion was initiated after us watching us a news bulletin on Indiavision, where in the closure comments went like – “Good Night. If C. K. Chandrappan doesn’t shut Indiavision down by then, we’ll meet next week again“.
