Posting after long intervals seems to have become a habit with me - it's been over 10 days since I last posted here. Here's the lowdown on what happened in the meantime, in no particular order...
Finally finished off Shaping Regions at USACO - I posted about it a while ago, if I remember correctly...What was the problem? Dumbness and no knowledge of the Java Collection classes...All I did was rewrite the code to split rectangles and switch to Vectors(All I really needed to know about java.util.* I learnt at TC...) and it worked after just 2 tries. Of course, I had made 41(!!!!) tries before this, so I was treated to the standard USACO message saying "Congratulations, your solution passed all tests. This is your submission #43 for this problem." Like I said on MSN, there's a thin line between dumbness and perseverance... On the other hand, there's that old Edison saying about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration...Sagar and Hrishikesh - if you guys wonder how I do div 2 probs so fast(er, usually) - now you know...
Anyway, after that I was on a roll, and destroyed about 6 more problems in about 2 days and moved on to section 2.3(Shaping Regions was in 2.1). Haven't started anything yet...
Forgot to mention - USACO still uses JDK 1.3! WTF!!! I'm sick of casting things when I use collections, and being unable to use the nice little foreach construct...
Missed SRM 262 this Friday - the rains came down in force and sundered my connection to the Internet, leaving me floundering for almost 2 days. Sad...
I've been feeling a little strange since Friday - rather lethargic from a coding perspective. For some reason, I can't summon up the concentration needed to code effectively. It's not that I can't code, but I can' t seem to think properly about the stuff I'm doing. Kinda bugged - maybe I should play a game or something - but there's nothing around...
So maybe it's good that I didn't do the SRM - probably would have lost rating points if I competed in this frame of mind. As it is, someone else lost rating points and I'm now ranked 47th in the country, up one place. Cool...Hopefully I should be back to normal soon.
Got a bit of happy news yesterday - apparently Google isn't gonna be evil - those of us who qualified but missed the Online Round of the GCJ still get t-shirts! Google, you guys rock! If you guys are planning on holding another GICJ here, you can count me in...hopefully by then I'll be yellow or something - maybe I can make it onsite...I'm feeling lucky! (Pun intended...)
Finally, my aunt is arriving from England today, so there's gonna be another one of those nice family get-togethers! (Hmmm, really odd that I enjoy these things - I'm usually rather anti-social...On the other hand, if you can't relax with your family, who can you relax with?) Maybe I can play a bit of King Arthur at my cousin's place to help me get my groove back...
For now, I think I'll go kill some Covenant - Halo, here I come!
My rantings on Life, the Universe and Everything(and a few other things besides).
Links
- A Load of Bright
- Dhaval's Blog - The Blog
- Ebon Musings
- Essays by Paul Graham
- Good Math, Bad Math
- Google News
- In the Name of Towelie!
- Joel on Software
- Scaryduck
- The Bastard Operator From Hell
- The Daily WTF
- The Joy of Curmudgeonry
- The Panda's Thumb
- TopCoder
- Waiter Rant
- Webcomic - Piled Higher and Deeper
- Webcomic - Schlock Mercenary
- Webcomic - Wulffmorgenthaler
- Webcomic - xkcd
About Me
- Nadeem Mohsin
- Orlando, Florida, United States
- I can probably be classified as a somewhat non-standard geek(though it's debatable whether there's any such thing as a standard geek). Like most computer geeks worth their salt, I read voluminously(on and off the net) and code incessantly. Pet peeves: Stupidity(especially the kind that acts like it knows what it's doing), solecisms(look it up), Luddites, and the ludicrous religious cant about how proven scientific understanding is wrong, or has yet to 'catch up'. Annoying stuff I'm always doing: Crucifying my unfortunate friends for speaking crappy English, producing interesting(to me, at least) theories about 'big ideas', and turning small talk into its opposite.
Nerd Score
1 comment:
Actually, the reason I seem to have so many aunts is because of the way my family defines relatives...My large collection of aunts includes not only the sisters of my parents, but also their first cousins, second cousins...er, you get the idea.
In the US you'll mostly find people from my dad's side of the family - this aunt is coming from England - one of my mom's sisters(my favourite aunt, actually - and I believe I qualify as her fave nephew...). My mom has 3 sisters and 4 brothers, so you can see where the several million cousins come from...And those are just first cousins - you can imagine how many more are around when you use our definition...
Even more interesting is this: my mom's the youngest, so my oldest cousin is only a couple of years younger than she is. In fact, one of my cousins is now an aunt to several kids older than she is - my sister too, as a matter of fact...
Maybe I should explain my rather convoluted extended family some other time...maybe on chat or something...
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