I am an 8hr sleep person. If I sleep less than that I normally would end up being groggy the following day. I attribute this requirement to the high levels of mental activity :-). But I don't mind sitting night outs where i don't sleep at all for 24 hrs. Also I used to consider that 5hrs was the barest minimum single stretch of sleep that is worth putting effort into (yes sleeping does require effort). If the amount of sleep I could possibly get was going to be lower than that my normal decision would be to go all the way and sit a night out. I don't remember ever having slept fewer than 5 hrs before today.

Yesterday night, Zyxware hit a traffic spike and the hosting provider took the site down because it was overloading their servers. I sat up till 5:30AM trying to get the site back up but I couldn't. I gave up and went to sleep. But I had to be up to catch a car to Technopark at 8:30AM and I woke up at 7:30. Yes, just 2 hours of sleep. I could barely stand and dozed off after waking up. The next I opened my eyes it was 8:15. I jumped out and managed to brush my teeth and dress up within 15 minutes and was out by 8:30. I think I broke the physical barrier of my tolerance limits, (more likely mental barrier). A record, in any case.

At Technopark, I was to be a judge for a state level programming competition held by IT@School. I was invited to be a judge the last year also. My memories of the last competition was not very pleasant as I was generally not satisfied with the average quality of the students who participated in the competition. But this year it was totally different. Students were better able and better prepared to handle the challenge posed to them and valuation was more fun.

More than fun, it was the satisfaction in knowing that the IT@School program is slowly managing to take IT to the public school students of Kerala effectively. Looking back at last year, this marked difference must have also been caused because of the increased awareness and knowledgeability of the teachers. So the program is beginning to show its results. Still the students were far below what I would call as good programmers.

I feel that a little training on top of their regular curriculum should be able to do this trick. I am planning to see if I can organize some kind of programming workshop for the toppers during this upcoming summer vacation. I had discussed this idea with a few IT@School teachers and had received general positive feedback. Only thing I am not sure about is whether I would be able to get sufficient time to volunteer for this. Only time will tell.