Its almost 3 months into my term as the Sun Campus Ambassador of my college. Though i have great plans, i could not put much into implementation due to a lot of issues I had to face. After I returned to my college after Induction training at Bangalore, about 10 working days were lost as we had an unexpected holiday during the last week of August. This caused a cramped and tight schedule for the remaining time and everyone was very busy. With the last working day scheduled at the end of third week of September, I virtually had about a month’s time to do some useful activities. I was unable to arrange sessions as the college closed after the last working day. In the available time, I couldn’t schedule much of events as I couldn’t catch even a few of the busy people in my college. 🙁
Still I was able to do some useful things. I had an informal meet with the Sun club members and had a long discussion on what kind of activities we can have in the year. I also conducted a small-scale intro session with not much people on September 3,2008 – the day of Ganesh Chathurthi. During that session, I talked about the CA program, SAI, proposed activities of the Sun club and how students could benefit. I also introduced various Sun technologies. Jayalakshmi, my friend and classmate, gave a short talk on “Free Open Source Software” and Anugraha handled a NetBeans intro/demo session. Then myself and G.R. Karthik introduced the audience to OpenSolaris.
To keep the audience involved and cheered up, we screened the legendary “Big Buck Bunny” movie and had them in splits. We also had a demo of Compiz fusion on OpenSolaris and had a few dropping jaws 🙂
In another session, I planned for a small install-fest of Free Open Source Software OSes – OpenSolaris 2008.05, Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Fedora 9 and Debian etch. We had a reasonable turnout and I happily demoed the installation on bare metal and also on Virtual Box. I enrolled a lot of people on the Sun club mailing list during this meet. The audience were clearly impressed and wanted to have more such sessions.
My biggest achievement till now is conducting the Software Freedom Day celebrations for the fifth consecutive year at my college. More about it on another post on this blog http://blogs.sun.com/guruprasad/entry/software_freedom_day_tce_for.
With the Code for Freedom contest for this year announced, I am all geared uo to participate in it and do a good contribution. Of course, my role as a campus ambassador would be to introduce a lot of people to this great contest and motivate, help them participate.
So, as soon as my college reopens on November 17, 2008 (My birthday :-)) for the next semester, I intend to go full throttle with my activities and do a great job as a CA. I have planned to hold full-day sessions that will be enlightening to the audience and give OSUM a big kick to get it up and running. I want people to know about SAI and make use of it to get certified. There are great dreams and I want to make them a reality. Looking ahead for the great time ahead! 🙂
My Picasa Web Album is at http://picasaweb.google.com/lgp171188