Good News and Bad News

Bad News: I installed and ran MSN Messenger for the first time in 3 years.

Good News: I promised a beer to a friend stationed in Iraq via MSN Messenger.

Unmoving Computation

Apparently, I don't move much when I use the computer. It sounds strange, but it should be expected: I focus on what I'm doing on the computer and don't move otherwise. This became very noticable when the new, motion-sensor lights in the study room kept turning off with me in the room.

Thunderouslessness

My bedroom now has huge windows. It is very exciting to me, because the window faces East, so I can wake up in the morning, and I don't have blinds built into the window pane so I can actually see out of it. Tonight, there apparaently is some lightning, even though I don't think there is any precipitation and I don't hear thunder.

Apparently, the rain decided to come down and the thunder decided to be audible immediately after I posted...

I'm Outta Here!

For some reason I am much more anxious about leaving Kauffman than I expected. I want to be living full time in the apartment now. I guess I really want the semester to be over, to change locations, and change focus. I want to relax, work out, do research. I can't do any of those things.

The semester has wound down, and today was the last class of Design Studio for the year. Now I just need to get grading done and take some finals.

What a Waste

I've never had my time wasted quite as much as I have in Numerical Analysis. I think I've gotten dumber in this class. Also, I've never been more upset about the grading policies, because I got reamed in a homework where Tracy got an A, but we worked together and had equivalent answers. Also, others were talking about getting good grades without even finishing the assignment. I'm very angry and am afraid I'll tell Costello how worthless he is to his face.

I'm in class right now, and he's on one of his philosophical soap boxes that have nothing to do with the class and should be ignored. I'd walk out, but I need him to fix my grade.

Figures

It figures that five minutes after I throw away a lock to which I've given up all hope of finding the key, I find the key under a business card.

Return to World of Warcraft

Now that I don't have any pressing deadlines or teamtime to worry about, I reactivated my World of Warcraft account. I missed this game. I hope I can continue to play a moderate amount this summer.

I've decided to change the way I play, as well. Before, I was trying to catch up to all my friends with level 60 characters. Playing a priest, the slowest leveling class, was not a good idea for that goal. However, I like being able to join parties at will, so being a healer helps with that.

In my first few days of playing, I have a couple interesting stories:

Yesterday, I did a stockades run with 3 priests, a paladin and a hunter. That is quite the interesting group. Since I spec'd shadow, I acted like a mage. We wiped a few times near the end because of the inability for the hunter to manage aggro.

Today, I found the Servant of Allistarj in Stormwind Keep. Apparently, it was placed there by a GM. It was a horde warrior that did minimal damage, but didn't die, either. I was able to disarm myself, attack, eat lunch, and come back to a full unarmed skill (that was 0 before).

Computer Science Isn't Interesting

...apparently. This article talks about America's losing battle in keeping CS majors compared to the rest of the world. It interviewed Duke's ACM team, who also only solved one problem.

The Napkin Speaks the Truth

Yesterday, as I sat in Selleck trying to sustain my life through solid matter consumption, I saw someone write on a napkin and put it in the middle of the napkin pile. Curious, I took the napkin and read it. Interestingly enough, this is the most important napkin ever.

Moving Time

Now that it is as good as final that I move in with Jesse in the Haymarket, I've started to move things over there. Most of it is stuff I won't use (or shouldn't) like DVDs, video games, and books. Also, I put casters on my futon so Tom and I could just roll it over there instead of enlisting the help of someone with a large enough vehicle.

We got quite a few odd looks from the people dining on the sidewalk.

A Grand Visit

Yesterday, after some confusion about arrival times and directions, Grandpa Stolee and Boots came to Lincoln. I am very happy to report that they really liked Lazlos, my favorite restaurant in Lincoln. Everything from the location, the atmosphere, to the food seemed to inspire their interest.

It was good to see them in Lincoln and show them my favorite part of town.

Exercise is for Crazies

I got my fully-assembled bike back from the professionals today. I got the chance to let loose some steam on a good bike ride to Holmes Lake and back. As I went out eastward, I thought I was going pretty slow and taking far too much effort. I must be really out of shape. However, upon turning around, I realized that I had a pretty strong wind in my face the whole way that would push me back to campust. I've never gone so fast on a bike as I did when I went down the hill with the wind on my back at full gear.

Afterwards, I noticed that I was actually worn out but in the good, exercise way. That is a feeling I've missed.

Now I just wish that everything I need to do tonight was done already and I could stop with the endless distractions (freshmen and blogging).

You Wouldn't Get It

A Stressful Dream

Last night, I had a dream that bothered me by how real and how depressing it was. All of the things I'm stressed out about over the next few weeks were there. The bike company that is fixing my bike emailed me to go pick it up. When I got there, they said it would be $100 more than they said. I ended up in the hallway in front of my Japanese class, talking to my sensei who decided to make the quiz and all homework for this next week due today. Then, I found myself in the math department, furiously trying to find Costello so he could tell me what the hell the test will be on. No one knows. He's having a mental breakdown or something. He was senile enough before...

Leenk

This article didn't take long to get to press. Too bad she didn't wait for responses from the rest of the team.

Social Networking Gone Horribly Wrong

I was just interviewed via Facebook for the Daily Nebraskan. The DN has sunk to new lows. I can see how they could have looked up my email or phone number on Facebook then used those channels to ask questions, but this is stupid. Why do you have to send messages through a website to communicate? Is there something wrong with you email client? Is your phone not working? Do you feel that posting more messages makes the Facebook popularity bot think you are a better person?

I found the experience kind of sad, but look for an article on the ICPC finals in the next few days.

Not Well Understood

I realized today, when updated video drivers, that I have no idea what happens when a program is loading the necessary utilities to install a driver. Even after so much of my computer science education, I still have no idea what goes into a hardware driver. I also know little about the installation process of any software. Do I care? Not really. I'm not going into application development. If I was, I would be spending my free time making useful software, not considering geometrical objects.

I guess it will continue to baffle me, unless all that is happening is a file transfer of a DLL or something. That would be kind of sad that something so simple evaded my knowledge for so long.

The Godfather: Part I

I can't believe that I like to call myself a movie buff when I haven't seen most of the classics. Tonight I was able to complete the first Godfather movie. I wish I had seen it sooner, for now I just want to watch it again so I can analyze the execution of the film after knowing the plot. The second watching of any film is always the most important. I wonder what classics I need to see next (other than parts II and III).

Grindor Wins ICPC World Finals!

Here we are receiving our awards:

Airline Travel

Cheap internet at the San Antonio airport is nice, but I don't know if it will be this cheap at Memphis where we have a 4-hour layover.

How To "Lose" a Programming Contest

Step 1: Choose the wrong problem to start.

Step 2: When you realize everyone is solving an easy one, copy-paste code from the other problem such that the combination of two bugs makes you think it's right. Hand in, get 20 minute penalty.

Step 3: Get scared by all of the special cases present in all the other problems and do nothing but bang your head against the brute force method for a couple of them.

An Intelligent Bug

Today was the IBM Java Challenge, where we got 3 hours to write an AI bot to play the equivalent of an RTS. Due to point balancing issues, the most reliable way to keep yourself in the finals was to drop all of your energy into your base immediately, leaving your ships dead in space. All of the teams placing 3-10 had strategies similar to this.

We had an interesting "bug" where we would use our not-so-good strategy until the round was almost over, and then dump all energy into the base. However, we forgot to reset this for the next round, so the following rounds would be very prosperous. There were some problems with the server, so when they ran it the first time, some teams were not the most recent versions of the bots. So, they ran it again, but with fewer rounds. This dropped us from 22nd place to 41st. The first time, we beat some major US teams including MIT, CMU, and Caltech. Even in the second round, we were just below the halfway point (only 78 teams participated in the Java challenge) and were still ranked first in our region (SD School of Mines was 44th and UW-Madison was in the 60's).

I'm looking forward to getting a copy of the SDK and tournament software for this in a few weeks.

All Too Familiar

There's nothing like a cramped elevator between sessions at the ICPC finals to help you become intimately familiar with the stench of nerd-sweat.

Contest Info

The contest will start around 8 AM CST on Wednesday morning. The results will be updated online by a link that will be available at this website hosted by Baylor University. I hope somebody will be tracking our progress... we'll see how much "progress" we actually get.

I Usually Don't Do This

I'm planning on reading again this summer. It has been too long since I've read any sort of fictional work, and my English vocabulary and grammar has decreased steadily since. I plan to start with the two books that I have been motivated to read: "In Cold Blood" and "A Scanner Darkly." I hope to read some of the classics of the last century as well as some of the more interesting recent works.

Let the flood of comments commence: any suggestions?

Southern Reading

Throughout our travels around the lone-star state, we found many sushi restaurants, but no bookstores. In the miles of stripmalls and shopping centers, we could not find a Barnes and Noble or a Borders anywhere. That is, until we found a small one in the corner of a huge mall in San Antonio. Apparently, they don't like to read much.

Your Assignment: Present to Nerds Who Know More Than You

The first "official" gathering of nerds around the world took place at the "IBM Cybercafe." This was a mixture of board games (only chess, backgammon, and checkers... nothing interesting), computers with internet access, and IBM presentations. The only presentation I was remotely interested was the one about the Just-In-Time compiler of the Java JVM (specifically, IBM's JVM). However, the person giving the talk was clearly some intern who knew nothing about the JIT. Between staring at the slides for 30 seconds before reading them to us, he failed to answer any question I asked in any useful form. It turned into a discussion between four contestants and coaches from three continents. We got more out of our hypothetical arguments than the presenter understood.

Everytown, USA

Today, we rented a car and drove up to Austin for lunch and things. Travis needed to check out apartments, so Yuliy and I hung out at a mall. The mall was pathetic, so I went walking around looking for a comic book shop (I need a tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron for geometrical purposes, not D&D). While sulking about the "horrible" location of this year's contest, I realized that every single midwest town is exactly the same.

Anywhere between the Rockies to the Appalachians, I might as well be in Minneapolis or Lincoln or Austin or Denver. Other than climate, they're all the same. Suburbia has rendered each town's identity into a cookie-cutter society. You need a drastic geographical/historical difference to find something interesting about a town. There are certain distinguishing parts of cities: KC has the Plaza, San Antonio has the Riverwalk, Austin has 6th street. But, each of these examples is not enough to claim that any are significantly different. In fact, they are all the same in that they have some attraction that is "unique" to make the place seem interesting.

Oh well. I've never really been one to travel for the sake of locations, but what you can do at a location. San Antonio has had little to offer until registration tonight. I'll get busy with the contest soon and will stop being bored. I'll hopefully stop being nervous that I'm not working on homework.

The Internet is SOOOooooo Slow

Now that the rest of the nerds are in town and using the internet, it has drastically slown down since last night. I'm trying to blog, but I may get frustrated and give up sooner than that.

Riverwalking

I must say, San Antonio is one of the worst places to have the World Finals of the ACM International Programming Contest. So far, its only merits are the overprices, touristy Riverwalk, which gets old after 5 minutes. If there were some actually nice places to eat and hang out without feeling like a section of Disneyland, I might enjoy it more.

I sure hope the international students who have practiced long and hard through their college careers for their one chance to come to America aren't so disappointed with the location. I'm just glad that I'm pretty self-entertained. I can work on my computer for hours without caring about anything else in my surroundings.

On a non-whiny note: It's so nice to be on vacation and not worrying about class and stuff... except that I needed to finish some things for a team project tonight. I slipped up, I guess.

Some Assembly Required

Yesterday, I got a new bike in the mail. I was in need of a commuter bike for transportation this summer. However, no directions were available for assembling said bike, and I did a horrible job trying.

I'll probably have to take it to a real bike shop to get pros to do it for me...

Storms Cause Electrical Headaches

I was a little worried when a thunderstorm blew through Lincoln so hard that some people lost power and the lights flickered in my room. I was working on an assignment that was procrastinated to the latest possible moment, so I could not stop working on it just because the power may kick out. So, I turned of my PCs and started working on my laptop downstairs, where the power is a little more guaranteed. Luckily, no issues arose. I heard that power went out in one section of the building during a brown-out (probably because of the increased electrical load of freshmen playing Oblivion).

Warm Forecast

I'm excited to go to San Antonio. More excited than I have ever been. I'm getting out of Lincoln, away from class and team obligations, and the weather forecast is looking pretty good (until the day we leave). I'm also pumped to see how well we will do.

April Foolishness

Just when I thought I got off scott-free with no April Fools pranks on me, I wake up uncomfortably to AOL CDs in my futon mattress and every compartment in the room (drawers, fridge, laundry basket, etc.). Apparently, I didn't notice them when I went to bed because I was so tired.

I owe Stack a couple pranks now.

A Little Sun

Today, it is bright and warm outside here in Lincoln. What do I do? Sit in my room and browse the internet, do my homework, and wait for Tom to stop by with his 360. It'll be a fun day of not enjoying the weather.