Scintillations – Oasis 2K6

I have believed that over the years the quality of the Oasis website – a starting point for other colleges – has gone from bad to worse.

Though no expert at website design, I do have a few points to make about this year’s website. One important aspect of a good website is that it should be easy on the eyes of the viewer. Sadly, the website this year, falls very short on this standard. The colours used are garish and unpleasant. Black with pink. Yucks!! Seems like a webpage of those days when people experimented with geocities. Flashy and very odd. Light backgrounds and gentle colours are expected nowadays.

Second. I do not yet get the BITSian fascination for flash and shockwave objects. Any page designed at BITS has to have a dash of embedded flash objects. Could someone please tell me why??

Third and probably most importantly. Please do not copy and paste text from somewhere. “If you are going to BITS on an assignment, BITS will send you a complimentary car” (from the section on getting here.) I am sorry but I could not believe that this was written by an on-campus BITSian for Oasis website. As Google later revealed, the entire section has been lifted from the BITSAA website, without any attribution whatsoever. When did things become so bad? Could they not find a decent writer within the batches on campus? Come on you guys, before claiming the material as your own with that misused copyright symbol, did you check that BITSAA already has a copyright on it?

A simple website, probably based on some blogging platform like WordPress, would have been recommended by me. Very professional and neat. But then, I am not at BITS and can only do so much.

I have a wish to make here though. I wish that someone from EPC/HPC/Junta takes it on himself/herself or collaborates to get a blog going and provide real time posts from the scene as an when it happens.

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Quiz Actually!

Please do not blame me. This is the title the PR dept came up with for an intra-company quiz contest.

The elims were held yesterday. 30 questions (provided at the end), 30 minutes, 25 teams and 5 finalists to be chosen. The elims was fun and I hope a sign of things to come. Prepared by Rohan, a very interesting set of typical (though pretty easy ones) quiz questions. Anyways, the good news is that Ojas and me qualified (we were the last ones ;)). Yet another point ot note was that 5 out of the 10 finalists (5 teams) were BITSians. Sandeepan (’96, ELAS, BoB finalist), Ram (’98, HDC), Chaitanya (’98, PCr), Ojas (’01, Soundz), and yours truly.

The finals are slated for Monday Tuesday, and I hope to have loads of fun then.