CAS Blog - December

December was only half a month of activities, it ended abruptly when winter break began. It was getting cold, too cold to do any physical outdoor activity and borderline freezing indoors during badminton club. Furthermore, the Gyms are air conditioned which lead to participants to wear thick clothing or shivering in the chilling breeze. This was what caused Badminton Club to become less effective as an excercise method. Those that were not as sensitive to the temperature also suffered as the game requires at least two players. if your opponent doesn't play as well as usual, it becomes easier to beat them and so you put less effort into it, less effort means less training. I attempted to fix this by wearing several extra layers but this made is harder to move as the sport requires high levels of agility, soon i began to sweat and began shedding the layers. Then it was too cold. It was hard to find the right balance between performance and health (the immune system weakens and the body becomes susceptible to disease if it's operating below optimal temperatures). The joy that I usually get from badminton is also disappearing into the weather and with it, all it's stress relieving properties. I relied on the action to vent my pressure that accumilated over the week from the strenuous IB program, the need for a vacation grew rapidly. Bandminton was also my method for staying fit, as it became less effective, i didn't really notice it (but the scales did!). I hope to return to playing badminton at the club after the winter break has ended, hopefully it isn't as cold then.

CAS Blog - November

Two interesting forth-comings in Habitat for Humanity (aka Habitat) and Computer Club (aka C-squared) have kept me pretty busy. The first of the two, Habitat, organized builds for its members to go on. During the second weekend of November, I volunteered to go to a remote village to the north of Dhaka to help build one of two houses that were at the site. It was actually more a a refurbishing than a from scratch build. This was the case because the owner previously lived in a corrugated tin shack, dangerous and poorly protected against the monsoon. The Habitat for Humanity organization aims to change that, giving this family man a sturdy dwelling by the beginning of the next rainy season. Our build was only a small part of the whole house and arguably the most important one, the floor. Straining our backs to shovel, shift and mix over 200 baskets of brick, sand, cement, and water to obtain concrete, we laboriously (but still carefully) created a floor. According to our trip leader at that time, Mr. Steffens, this stuff would last almost a century (if not, at least 50 years).
Secondly, our C-squared team advance in our goal to create a functional website for our club. With the absence of Mr. Read during some of our meetings, we collectively decided that the best course of action would be to have each member specialize in a sector of the website. With the building underway, the website has big potential thanks to the efforts of Erfan for scouting for useful tools and a newcomer, Tanveer, who will be responsible for image editing. In a way I see myself as a group leader, although not officially appointed as one by our project coordinator. I constantly get decision making questions asked and am the "go to" person for anyone with troubles. On that note, I hope to be of some help to my peers as I am the only one with prior experience with Dreamweaver, the application with which we will be constructing our website with (although the decision is not final - the proposition has not been run through to Mr. Read.) The learning phases are slowly coming to an end, we aim to pick up pace on production during the next meeting!

CAS Blog - October

This month, in C-squared (aka computer club), our small team consisting of me, Prakash, Tanveer, Erfan, and Akbar separated from the rest and began working on the group's website. When we began brainstorming and creating our first drafts, we realized we were in way above our heads. Luckily a new adviser (Mr Read) stepped in and gave a basic 101 on how the internet acctually works. With this foundation in place, we had to reassess our strengths and weaknesses to maximize on what each team member did best. It took two whole sessions of designing and redesigning to get a basic outline of the website we were going to build (without setting our goals too high). The error we encountered first was that we were still learning the basics but envisioned the final product to be on par with those made professionally. I really hope i can put to use the skills i obtained during a six month web designing course i took with Mr Ratliff in 7th grade, its been a long time and standards have changed but i believe the main principals stay the same. I think I was limited back then to my knowledge of a software known as Dreamweaver (by Adobe), this time i'm expanding my insight with basic HTML and CSS (the guts of a website) thanks to Mr Read. Although we get to work with vast possibilities, this approach is a lot more technical and time consuming (I still really want to work with Dreamweaver).

CAS Blog - September

For the past two Tuesdays i have been spending two hours in Gym C with a badminton racket in my hand. Between 6 and 8 pm, me and a gymful of sweaty high schoolers bounce around on each side of the net, some just to have fun or because their friends asked them to come. For me it's a bit different, badminton is my main source of movement in the week. Being stuck behind a desk isn't very healthy and those two hours are a relief for me, not to mention the much needed exercise. Coming home with a sore arm or a cramp in the leg isn't always pleasant but its calming to know that its good for my fitness. An aspect that makes Badminton Club much more thrilling is that my friends are always the competitive type, like me, there isn't a match we play that is without energy. Even at the end of the two hours, one can still find a thrilling doubles match in play. To me, its not about winning or loosing (put it still plays a role), the club is a place where i can vent out all the physical energy that i've been storing in me over the week.
In general most other members are not as serious as others are so there is difficulty finding good partners to play with during the high attendance hours (when there are too many people and not enough courts, Mr. Jones makes us rotate around). This problem hasn't yet been solved as its early on in the year, but we've tried to get permission to use Gym B, last Tuesday we had permission but the gym was locked without any nets set up. This was frustrating but we also realized that we couldn't just offload the responsibility on someone, we're going to try to take a larger initiative the coming week.

P.S. due to technical issues all my posts from my old blog have been moved here