The placement and training officer of our college, Mr. Raja Singh, called me up to his office last week. I was not sure what it was about, the last time we had a discussion was at Empower.IT, more than a month back. And when I went to his office, there were quite a few familiar faces waiting already. It was the team that won second place in web designing at Empower.IT!

It was about this Web design contest from Microsoft, for college students, in which, you get to keep the free hosting and domain name, even if you don’t win (We have to send them a draft for Rs.1000 as registration fee, to cover the cost of hosting indirectly anyway)

I knew I was expected to participate, and I could protest neither on grounds of principles or on lack of time. God has made me that way, I’m really bad at saying ‘no’.

After reading all of Richard Stallman’s articles on how Microsoft is capturing the markets by giving subsidies to schools and college, I’m here participating in one of Microsoft’s contests, intended to get colleges to use Microsoft technologies. Can you believe it? Why didn’t my placement officer know FOSS enthusiasts don’t like to work on Microsoft technologies? Not that I’m anything like bad on Microsoft stuff. Infact, I’m much better at programming on Windows, than on Linux. Still, I’d like not to do this if I had a choice. But I’ve ventured too far, and if I try to get back now, it might just be enough for them to screw me up totally. And now that I’m in it, I’ll have to give it a good shot :P. The prizes are too tempting too.

It is called the GoAlive Challenge, where the task to design a website for our college, with Windows Live mail integration, and integrate other Live technologies like calendar and stuff too. Each college can have one team of 3 to 5 members.

Our college has its own domain, and fortunately, its hosted on a Windows server, so that’s one problem solved. So, the first thing we are supposed to do is create individual email ids for the students and staff (you know why), using Microsoft’s equivalent of Google Apps (Sorry, I don’t know what it is called yet :D).  The higher the number of email ids, the higher the points we score. Once that is done, we can get on with the development. We’ve got around 3 months to get it done.

I hope we get innovative enough to win something in this contest. And people, please don’t let anyone else know