Wish I was at Shaastra 2009 HackFest

Was just reading my twitter timeline when my eyes dropped on this tweet by Atul Chitnis:

achitnis: Small report about my talk at the IITM on the 1st: http://tinyurl.com/yaa58xe

The link points to Shaastra 2009 Hackfest – Day 1. After reading this page, I realize I have missed a great chance.

It was this last Saturady, I was trying so hard to get a railway ticket to Chennai to visit Shaastra 2009 at IIT Madras. Except for the train ticket, everything was ready: I had received the selection letter for attending Hackfest (and that too for kernel hacking) and for attending the CUDA workshop that were conducted on this 1st and 2nd of October; I had almost arranged for my stay at IIT (thanks to Amarnath my senior in S5); I had decided to skip the Mechanical Workshop on Wednesday and whole classes on Thursday (i.e. Oct 1) to board the train and go to Chennai. I tried the whole day to get ticket, the only option feasible for my need was Chennai Mail at 17:30  on Wed Sept 30 and it had almost 200 waiting list passengers. After getting everything else right, at around 8 in the evening, I tried to contact Anil who runs a photostat shop at MC (and who had previously promised me to arrange for a ticket under Tatkal quota), but he had already left for home. The other guys there gave me his contact number (calling which always resulted in unreachable destination :(). They also informed me that Anil won’t be coming to the shop on Sunday either.

I was completely hopeless after this. I started thinking whether wasting a Mech. workshop, a thursday full of classes which included a Chem lab too, and 2 days of my holidays (my exams are starting on Wednesday and I haven’t yet finished a subject except for computer programming) would be worth attending a Hackfest at Shaastra? And yeah, today, we had a 3 and a 1/2 hour Chemistry special class too which I would have missed if I had visited Hackfest.

Alas! At about 8:30 PM on the same evening, I gave up the idea of visiting hackfest this year.

But, after reading the above mentioned report about Hackfest Day 1 I feel I have really missed something that could have been a life changing experience for me.

If you have reached this far in reading this, please post a comment and tell me what should have I done? I am really confused whether I took the right decision or missed a great opportunity?