Well, where to start after so long?
Unfortunately, my ACM ICPC (International collegiate programming contest) team missed out on a free trip to China by one place. The top 2 teams advanced and alas, we were third (a team from Cornell placed first and team from Columbia placed second). However, it is hard to really be angry at ourselves considering that we performed our best and were simply outbested, as opposed to our performance at the regional last year where we did not perform our best and could have taken second if we had. Contestants are ranked by number of questions correct and then by least accumalated time amongst teams that all have the same number correct. There were 9 questions this year and I believe that we were in first place after submitting our 7th question. But we stumbled on the last two questions and Cornell/Columbia kept going strong to take the win. We did as well as we could have hoped to do and only encountered minor problems with two questions, but that proved to be the determining factor. It is dissapointing that we won’t be heading to the International competition held in Harbin, China but we were certainly able to walk away with our heads held high. I still have one more chance to compete as a first year grad student (both teams that beat us had a grad student), but I am not sure that I will find a team that had such synergy as we had.
I am competing in the IEEE X-treme programming contest tonight, but I really have no idea what to expect for that contest. My teammates are both really strong coders and problem-solvers, so we should be able to do pretty well, but I dont know how fast we have to be to get a nice prize. At the very least, I am hoping to get a T-shirt out of this business. Plus I got an IEEE membership sponsored by the school.
Now that the ICPC is out of the way, I should really really buckle down and get my grad school stuff done. On my list right now is studying for the general GRE (which happens to be less than a week away), writing my personal statement (or at least a rough draft), applying for the NSF fellowship (or any other that might apply) and then finally mail out the apps (which I have a bit of time for).
I also got a cool new trackball mouse. It is very good for when you are lazy and want to be able to scroll with minimal movement from your body, but its a little imprecise when you have a lot of caffeine in you and your hands are shaking terribly. But clicking things has never been so interesting as it is now.
Arg, so much shit to do so little time. I dropped the “research” that I was doing this semester because I really should be devoting my spare time to grad school prep and the grad student I was working with was expecting too much from me (things that I would have had difficulty delivering on if I worked on the project full time; no less with a full course load and other stuff). Also, I dont find data mining to be particularly interesting, especially the stuff that we are doing.
Wow, I really have to stop writing now and do something. What a crappy, substance-less post. Hopefully I will have a clearer mind when I write next time (which will be circa 2012).
