Pug’s Place

I got a postcard from Jen today! She’s in Haren, Groningen at present, so this is extra special.

Thank you, Jen!

You know it’s bad when the elections office says, “It doesn’t show here that you requested an absentee ballot. What address should we mail it to?” (I give my address) “Ah, that’s the already your absentee ballot address.” (Already? This means they received my request for an absentee ballot… which I knew since they mailed me another card here.) “Somehow your absentee address was input, but the check-box saying you requested a ballot was not checked.” (So will I even get the ballot in time?) “Maybe. I’ll send it today but you’ll definitely have to overnight it back here.”

James suggested I tell the democrats I was being disenfranchised. Hehehe…

I’ve got my 5 referrals. Thanks to everyone who helped - your cash is on the way.

I don’t feel very good about the competition yesterday. I along with the other two guys on my team (and a lot of us who went down there) don’t feel that we did the best we could. My team placed 31 out of 77, the best UF team placed 14, and our worst was 41 (I think). Not a terribly bad showing of course, but nothing to brag about either. There were some difficulties:

1. Specific to me, I should have used C++. At our coach’s insistence I learned and used Java for all the practices throughout the semester and thus used Java yesterday. But I could have solved two more questions if I had only used C++ — I’m better with it, I’m faster with it, and the STL Vector would have saved me a lot of debug time with one particular problem (Java’s java.util.stack does not support random access or searches, so I had to create my own stack and had some problem with stack pointer corruption, ARGH!). Next year, I’m doing C++ no matter what. I’ve 11 more years experience with C++ than Java!
2. In general, we hammered algorithm design and mathematical solutions during practices over the past couple of months. Our four pounds of materials were all pre-written algorithms for complicated computing tasks. Every practice our coach gave us any sort of question he ran across except simulation questions, since they were ‘easy’ but just took a lot of time to design. Well, this competition all ten questions were simulation questions.

Sad, yeah, but such is life. I’ll know better next time, that’s for sure.

Didn’t win — Georgia Tech beat UCF this year (first time in a long time that UCF did not get first place). Scoreboard was here, but appears to be down right now.

Very tired. More at a later date.

Badnarik.org has an article and a link to a recent interview with Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik wherein he makes the case for a return to smaller government.

It’s really quite a good interview.

I have gone off with my programming team to Melbourne, FL and the Florida Institute of Technology to the International Collegiate Programming Competition to represent UF.

I’ll be back really late Saturday night — wish me luck! Winning means a trip to Shanghai! Woohoo!

From the Globe and Mail, via Sean Flynn:

Tehran — The head of Iran’s security council said Tuesday that the re-election of U.S. President Bush was in Tehran’s best interests, despite the administration’s axis of evil label, accusations that Iran harbours al-Qaeda terrorists and threats of sanctions over the country’s nuclear ambitions.

Historically, Democrats have harmed Iran more than Republicans, said Hasan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security decision-making body.

I’m speechless with amusement.

TV-B-Gone sells a key-chain fob that is a universal TV power-off dohicky. It works by cycling through all the known power-off IR codes for TV sets in the country really fast, so you point it at an annoying TV and hit the button and *zap*, it gone be.

I want one of these for bars, restaurants and other people’s houses. That
way I can piss people off and impose my views on others — then I’ll be a one-man Government! Gimme gimme!

I had some trouble last night, see, I saw this strange away message associated with Sean, and, well, just read about it and how I tried to decode it here. So he takes this one-sided conversation and posts it on his blog without decoding it! Even now, hours later, I have no clue what message is hidden there!

I thought I was gonna be up all night. Sean, you’re like the goddamn Riddler.