Pug’s Place

First, I must berate my readers. My last post was a gambit to cause a flurry of comments on my blog. I remarked to Odette as I was posting it, “I’m going to have 10 comments on this post by the time I wake up tomorrow.” I can’t believe you people - where were the mass posts of “BURN HER!?” Gosh, I even quoted the scene number as the title - it should have at least been obvious to Carmen if no one else. You’ve disappointed me. What have I done to earn your indifference?

Anyway…

This weekend was the culmination of several hundred hours of coding practice this semester: the southeast regional semifinal of the ACM international collegiate programming contest (see last year or the year before). Preparing UF’s teams for this contest has been a massive time drain for me since the semester started and has been a primary reason for not updating this blog much. So, results… While standings aren’t available on the contest website yet, UF’s top teams scored 5th and 9th. Our 5th place team was UF 127.0.0.1 solving 7 of the 10 problems in the 5 hour time period. My team, UF: A Series of Tubes, scored 9th overall solving 5 problems in the time allotted. UF Slinky+Escalator=InfiniteFun also did well, solving two problems officially while having nearly-complete solutions for several more as the time expired.

I’m very happy with the way things turned out and I’m proud of UF. We’ve made huge headway in the last two years. Heck, for the first 3 and a half hours of the contest my team was #2 or #3 on the leader-board - I heard some mentions from the #1 team (who was seated adjacent to us) about their surprise at this. Muwahaha. I know that I did the best I could have done; in particular, I solved the top-tier problems. See, in each problem-set there tend to be a few problems which only the absolute best teams solve. I solved those three and solved two of them first… But that was my role, solve the subjectively hard-looking problems which would take a while.
Despite not winning a trip to Japan for any of our teams, I’m labeling this a success! Even better, we have a great core group of committed coders sticking around this year, and of course they are only going to get better. At the end of the day I just hope my legacy persists in a better light than that of Kevin (who previously ‘led’ the group)… but I like to think it will.
Finally, for some random craziness look at the Uncyclopedia entry for Chess, especially if you’re Tempest or easily amused. Definitely look at the “Pieces” section.

Other random updates: I’ve interviewed with Harris Corporation in Melbourne, FL. Monday evening I have a phone interview with Google in Phoenix and then the end of this week I’m interviewing with General Dynamics C4 Systems Group in Phoenix. In the mean time I have a midterm and some projects going on. But I’m just a little busy this time, not crazy busy like before.

She’s a witch!

In addition to passing my classes, managing the UF programming team, working and even sleeping upon occasion I’m also in high-gear on my job search. True, I’m in high gear about a month later than I really should have been, but the turtle doesn’t always win the race. Anyway, I’m presently applying to some positions at Google. While brainstorming ideas for this cover letter, I had the idea for a sure-fire approach which I won’t use:

Dear Google,
    I’m MacGyver.
Sincerely,
    Michael Knight

The idea is that (statistically speaking) even if the reader isn’t a MacGyver fan, he must be Knight Rider fan.

Comments?

Pug’s Place is seeing a lack of posts of late. The regularity of posts to this blog is basically inversely proportional to the amount of stress I am under at the time. Unfortunately, right now my backlog is reminiscent of a Faustian nightmare. Movies to edit, projects to do, homework to do, make-up homework to do, programming team contest in a couple weeks, find someone to sub-lease my apartment… and then the extremely broad line of “find my job.”

As is apparently necessary, everything must happen at once. In addition to school and the midterm exams which happen this month, this is also the month of the programming contest and of most January-openings’ interviews. Every company to which I’ve spoken wants me to interview with them this month, and unfortunately that implies that they’ll be wanting answers regarding the inevitable job offers within about two weeks of having spoken to me. This presents a nasty time dilemma: I have no interviews in my desired area of the country, I don’t have the time to apply to enough jobs to gain these interviews because of all of the aforementioned activities, yet if I do not get these interviews in the very near future I won’t have time to evaluate their offers against the pending ones.

In the mean time, I have built a new computer and haven’t been able to enjoy it yet. I’ve been letting Resmiranda (2.0 or whatever designation you like) update her entire system slowly over the past few days: when I get a spare minute between classes I’ve been shelling in and fixing compilation problems and the like and setting her back on her way. Yes, Gentoo has upgrade problems… however, it should be pointed out that most of this system hasn’t been upgraded/updated since March 2004, so many of my problems have been that packages I formerly used now no longer exist, have been renamed or the like. (In Gentoo-speak, I had 53 packages being blocked when I first tried to emerge world, so I had to research and fix all of those first). The new Resmiranda is a beast, like the old one was in 2002 when I first built her.

• 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (soon to be overclocked)
• 2 GB G.Skill DDR2 800 SDRAM
• Silent (Heat-piped) Gigabyte-branded GeForce 7600GT
• 2×80 GB PATA primary drives in a RAID-1 (same drives from Resmiranda)
• 160 GB SATA-3 secondary drive containing random stuff (and a legal WinXP install for games )
• Antec NeoHE 550 W near-silent power supply
• Antec P180B noise-reduction high-performance black case

So, she is nearly silent (without the case lights you can’t tell she’s on or not) and is crazy powerful. Let me tell you, having two CPUs makes compiling things much more fun. Of course, that’s basically all I’ve done with her so far, homework and letting Resmiranda compile software upgrades to herself. Ah well, one of these days I’m going to do some game playing again.