Blogger upgrade and more

Season's greetings, everyone!

Blogger Beta has now gone official, so I just switched my blog over to it a few minutes ago. I've been messing a bit with layout and that sort of thing, and a lot of my old hacks don't work anymore, such as the comment expansion script.

Okay, actually I just can't be bothered to go through with figuring out how to integrate that into things here. I'm not sure how much the template has changed and I'm feeling kinda lazy at the moment. I'll probably look into it sometime soon. One of the things that has always annoyed me about Blogger is the way comments are handled - either a new window pops up, or it opens up in the same window - either way it breaks continuity in a way it shouldn't.

I was going to apologize for not posting for so long, but given that I seem to wind up doing that in every single post, I'm going to be shameless and simply refuse to ever apologize about this again. A man's blog is his castle, after all...

Here's a potted history of what went on between the last post and this one:

My team (UCF Kernel Panic) won the ACM ICPC Southeast Regionals, handily beating the second place team by a margin of nearly 600 penalty points. We'll be going to the World Finals in Tokyo in March.

Well, we were beaten by the pickup team formed by my coaches Ben and Raymond, but thankfully pickup teams don't count anyway. In any event, I'm pretty happy - my first ever ICPC, and I'm already going to the World Finals. Not that I had all that much to do with it - my teammates have been doing this sort of thing for a while now. I did help a fair bit, though.

Right after that, I was hit by midterms, followed by a rather heavy load of work for the courses I was taking. Now, for the first time ever, I wound up slightly concerned that my rather undisciplined approach to getting stuff done wouldn't cut it. It was too late by then for organization to be any help, so I just went with overwhelming force instead.

People who know my somewhat obsessive nature are aware of just how much overwhelming force I can generate. It paid off - I wound up with an A in all my courses but one, and that was only an A-, so I'm mostly satisfied.

Still, I was kept extremely busy all the way through, and that left me slightly annoyed. Having to work like that eats into your time in a somewhat negative way, and I think I'd be happier with a little more control as opposed to my current methods of reacting to things as they come.

Consequently, I've gotten into this self-improvement and discipline thing - presumably the catalyst was reading How to Think like Leonardo Da Vinci and then being strongly influenced by another of Steve Pavlina's posts: Passion Vs Self-Discipline.

Pavlina knows what he's talking about. He does occasionally post on stuff which I consider rather irrational - psychic stuff and what not - but his personal growth stuff is amazing, and well worth the read.

I'd like to point out that I've been inspired enough that I'm actually waking up early these days(so far, that just means before 11 AM, though) and I've been using his 30-day trial approach to train myself to drink 8 glasses of water a day. Works like a charm.

Be advised, drinking more than 8 glasses of water a day means that you'll be visiting the loo on a very regular basis. On the plus side, it does make you feel a lot healthier.

The day after my last exam, I flew off to Maryland to visit my uncle. Armed with my new digital camera - it's a Canon Powershot A630 - I ended up coming back with over 90 pictures. This was another overwhelming force thing - my dad had demanded at least 50, fearing that my lazy approach would result in only a few photos here and there.

Family and close friends - if you guys haven't seen the pics, let me know.

It was a great trip, though it was only a week long. The best part was all the home cooking - mmmm....*Sigh*

Seeing Washington DC was an interesting experience. I briefly contemplated running for President, but then realized that I haven't learned how to fake sincerity well enough to be an effective politician.

It was also nice to meet a lot of family, particularly cousins who I hadn't seen in years, and some who I had either never met, or had no memory of meeting owing to the vagaries of the infant mind...

So I'm finally back home, and rather predictably, I'm solving dozens of problems as practice for the World Finals.

USACO rearranged their training pages, so I suddenly found myself back in section 2.2, after having been in 3.3 a few months ago. In a fit of inspiration, I solved 10 problems in quick succession to get to 3.2. This was mostly done yesterday, and a couple of problems were done the day before that.

I'm aiming to go yellow on TopCoder soon. Hopefully these 2 weeks of vacation will give me the added boost I need. A trend I've noticed among most people who have a high degree of skill at programming contests, is that at some point, they sat back and solved a huge number of problems over a very short period of time, and ratings and skill suddenly jumped. So you can guess what I'm doing now...

I guess that's about it. I've been promising myself that I'd start blogging again, and it wasn't working, so I just did the overwhelming force thing again. It worked.

Cheerio, guys! Enjoy your Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Winter Solstice, Rohatsu - and have a happy New Year!