Pug’s Place

Yesterday, Saturday, UCF drove up here for that Programming Contest I effectively organized. It went … fine, though it started late due to a series of printer problems. This was problematic since printer access during a competition is an absolute must: when you have three people using one computer, it’s highly useful to be able to print your buggy code and fix it on paper while another teammate is coding their solution to a different problem.

After moving everything into place and setting up the whole contest my brain was already mostly fried. This wasn’t helped any by my team’s handicap: My team, the most elite UF team, joined the most elite UCF team in attacking a different problem-set than the other 7 teams. In particular, we had to handle the 2004 ACM Collegiate World Finals problem set [PDF]. The other, less experienced teams luckily were given a problem-set containing some much easier problems (to keep them from being discouraged… like my team was! ). Unfortunately the world finals problems were very, very tough and we, the UF elite team, were very out of practice in comparison to UCF’s elite team (since they’re going to world finals in a month). So… we got stomped. But hell, that happens sometimes and I’m sure it was good for us anyway.

We had 28 UF students, 6 UCF students and 5 UCF faculty/staff there. I, as the organizer, had the fun of worrying about everything, setting up most of the technical stuff and then eventually giving the speech at the end, awarding prizes and shaking peoples’ hands. Yay.

The big thing for me is that it is OVER. Now all I have to do is get the school to reimburse me for all of the things I purchased with my own credit card (like all of the food)… Note to self: I’m never organizing another one of these.

Oh, and the other big thing is that in addition to being OVER, it seems to have served its purpose - most of the UF competitors were new to the sport and are now very interested in joining the team. That was the reason we did all of this, to inspire more people to join up. Here’s hoping that worked.

The rest of the weekend has been spent reading and then performing an aborted trip to the Osceola Gun Range which was, no joke, full. We couldn’t park. Ah well, we’re going to beat the crowd next weekend.

Tau - 11 days until Spring Break.