Outsourced

TCEA Area 2004 was a blast. We attended the area 4 competition at Waller High School this morning. Before the contest started, Terry, myself, Ryan, and Tommy began to play ultimate frisbee outside, and eventually 7 out of the other 8 participants from our school joined in for a 6 on 5 match. It was some pretty intense action, but it ended in a 3-3 tie; we had to go back in because the dry run was starting. It really got the adrenaline pumping for the contest.

This was the first time Ryan has programmed with us, and he did pretty well. He got all the two pointers done, which was exactly what I wanted him to do. Terry did mostly fives, but he helped me out with a few of the nines. I practiced a lot, and got most of the nine pointers, though they claimed one of my solutions was flawed. I was pretty confident it worked correctly, but the appeal got shot down. As far as I could tell, people who used C++ got it correct, but the people using Java received errors. We ended up placing 2nd. Tommy's team, on the other hand, didn't do so well. Normally he programs with Chris Johnson and Zhi, with Zhi doing the nines. However, Zhi was gone for Academic Decathalon, and Shuo was his replacement. They had a bad day. They blame it on not having Gandalf watching over them, a poster they accidently left at the last contest which they had taped to the wall at previous contest locations. Of course, the TCEA packet was geared towards Java programmers this year as it's the main focus in high schools (at least for the AP Computer Science tests).

Okay, So Why Is This Contest Special?
Most importantly, we didn't lose to our super freshman team of novices led by David N. At the last contest we went to (Cy-Creek), they outscred all the teams in the advanced division and took home first place. They still placed in the lower half of the top ten at TCEA today, though. Our 2nd place victory is important for a couple of reasons. Most of the good schools (namely Cy-Falls, and to a lesser extent, Cy-Creek and Cinco Ranch) are in our area, so beating the majority of them is important to keep up our school's reputation. Also, apparently Taylor has never placed higher than 3rd at TCEA area, so we're the first to do so. I have my pride back now. We'll be going to state in Allen, Texas on May 15th.

On a side note, Foxtrot still cracks me up. This comic feels fitting, as the Waller High School computer science teacher still teaches Pascal to his CS1 students I hear.

Today Terry's car battery died at school. Apparently he left the headlights on the whole day and it drained away the battery. Mr. Woods was nice enough to lend us his pair of jumper cables, and I drove Terry to the west lot where he parks. Naturally we weren't totally sure what we were doing, and our conversation went something like...

Me: "Wait, isn't there some order we're supposed to connect the cables in?"
Terry: "I think you're supposed to put the red on first."
Me: "Are you sure? Is it going to blow up and kill us?"
Terry made his crazy noises.
Terry: "Der-der-der-der. I dunno. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we connect the red ends first."
Me: "Okay... I hope we don't die."
Terry: "Okay, I'll let you do it. Have a nice life, Jeff."
Me: "What?! No, you do it!"
Terry: "So which side is the red end?"
Me: "The side with the red cap."

Eventually we started to hook it up, and luckily some guy came out from the freshmen center and confirmed that we were doing it correctly. So anyway, Terry got his car going and went home. Yeah, so that was pretty much the highlight of my day. After a strenuous day of practicing for contest, I should be ready for tomorrow's big event.

I found out that Chris Corbett lives three houses away from me and has lived there for several months now. I went over and checked out his sweet computer with a Radeon 9800 XT along with his iBook of course. So yeah, I can't believe I just discovered that he lives close by today.

It seems that tomorrow will be a day of tests, as I have Calculus test, Physics reading quiz (which counts as a test grade), and a three chapter Government tomorrow. The only thing I really have trouble with is government, as it's an insane amount of reading and I am a slow reader. I'm also horrible at skimming. However, Friday will be fun. I'll be participating at the TCEA area programming contest at Waller High School with Terry Ma and Ryan McQuistion this Saturday. This is one of the few contests that actually count for something, and with all the problems I've practiced, we should do well. The weekend after this I'll be competing at HP / Compaq Code Wars, which Terry and I placed in 2nd last year with Chris Lang, losing only by one point. Stephen Castles will be teaming up with us this year. It's supposed to be bigger and badder than last year, so it'll be interesting to see what problems they come up with.

"Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords." -Microsoft Knowledge Base Article

This morning I only got one hour of sleep, and then the only rest I got during school was 40 minutes during homeroom. This morning I pumped up the volume in my car to keep me alert, cause you know that Brain Stew really gets you going. I am just a really big procrastinator. I basically worked on an English essay half of the night, writing the rough draft after the final copy, of course. And then I realized I had other homework to do as well, including calculus, government reading, and a huge linked list review packet of 20 pages (which ended up taking only 20 minutes, but makes me wonder how long other kids took to complete it). So here I am now, working off a little less than two hours of sleep. I really don't know how I'm still awake. Boy am I tired.

Anyway, the New York Times ran this cool article about a bunch of people combining computer resources to form a super computer, kinda of like Voltron, or that unstoppable Transformer that all the construction robots form together to make. I mean, come on. The thing has a bulldozer for its right foot. There's just no stopping that thing. You know what I'm talking about.

License agreements are so stupid these days. You know what I'm talking about. Practically everyone blindly clicks "I agree" to EULA's (End User License Agreements) when installing software without reading a single word. Even if you did read one, the sentences are purposely so complex that most people can't even understand everything it says. Some of the rights forfeited when agreeing to such licenses (like Kazaa's) are just absurd. Apparently it's impossible to read some licenses without agreeing to them before reading them.

Anyway, you might have noticed the name change to "Outsourced." Don't look too deep into the title, it just represents my general frustration with life at times, similar to how American programmers must feel when companies outsource all their programming needs to India. Anyway, I'm insanely tired. I studied physics from 3 am 'til 6 am and then some, but I (along with most others) still got owned by the test. Dr. B doesn't teach. He must think that everything we need to know can be learned from the book reading, reviews, and main idea handouts. Despite my sleepiness, I still need to read a ton for my three chapter government test tomorrow. I think I'm on page 10 out of 91.

Not Dance Dance Revolution. Yesterday I got around to buying some more RAM for my computer. I now have a superior 512 MB of PC 2700 333 MHz DDR RAM compared to the laughable 256 I had before. The awesome UT2004 (Unreal Tournament 2004) demo runs a lot better than before after the upgrade. The weapons are all pretty much the same, with a few new ones. However, the big change is in the new updates to the assault and onslaught modes, as well as the addition of vehicles. It's pretty cool, so be sure to check it out. Also Mozilla Firefox 0.8 has been released, which is a little more oriented toward end users than Mozilla is, so be sure to check that out if you're still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (which is quite possibly one of the suckiest web browsers ever in my opinion).

Emily Fortuna took me to Sadie yesterday. We went with a large group including Chris Johnson and Jim Washechek (and to clarify for those of you who didn't know, Jim is Jeff's little brother). I was supposed to meet everyone at some house on a street called Manitou Falls, but I got lost because apparently the MapQuest directions were wrong. Looking back at the MapQuest page, it now has a bar that says: "The Address you provided could not be found," but I swear that wasn't there yesterday. To make a long story short, I didn't have anyone's phone number and after driving around for 10-20 minutes I gave up and just went to the bowling alley where everyone was going after meeting at the house, and everything eventually worked out. Each couple was on a team and bowled one game (guys bowled even frames, girls bowled odd frames) and Emily and I ended up doing 3rd or 4th best out of 8. For dinner we went to Double Daves, and after the dance we went to a house and played the couch game. I didn't get home 'til like 2 am. It was pretty fun.

For more specifics on what I did, check out my conversation with Tyler.

Where G = Geometry. I took the second TXML (Texas Math League) test of my entire life today, and I only answered two of the six questions. Of course, I didn't use all 30 minutes to answer a measly two problems, but it seemed like most of the questions were geometry and I couldn't remember how to do them. I couldn't even understand what the non-geometry problems were asking for. Something about solving some problem in terms of a and b, but I didn't know what I was solving. Maybe I was just supposed to isolate x from a and b. Yeah, so I answered question one and two, though I'm pretty confident I did both correctly. It's not for a grade or anything, but I'll get +2 bonus points on a math test assuming I got both right.

Anyway, as I told a few people, I've felt generally crappy today. I really don't know why. This week I've been sleeping earlier than usual (before 12) and waking up later than usual (after 6:40). I've been getting to school late (7:15-7:20) and I've been doing pretty sucky on tests this week. Senioritis is really hitting me hard I think. I lacked the will to read all 92 pages for our last government test, and well... let's just say that I didn't do too well on it. I haven't felt like doing anything productive in study hall lately. Alvin dropped psychology and moved into it, and we've been playing Mario 3 on his Gameboy Advanced, which we plan to beat sometime eventually. Right now we're abusing some castle in World 7 to get lots of 1-ups. I helped tutor some junior high students after school to help them prepare for math competitions, though Terry wasn't there. I tried to explain to this one girl what square roots were, but I don't think she understood.

I also found out that I'm a moderate (as opposed to liberal or conservative) through some crazy tests we took in gov't today. The class is fun, though the tests really suck. I'm still pondering whether I was one of the people Mrs. Aguilar was referring to when she was talking about some people getting bad grades and needing to drop the class.

My friend, Chris, has been out of school for like a whole week now due to a deflated lung or something like that. Apparently skinny people are prone to it. I don't really know too much about it, but apparently he's had a few surgery operations done and he can no longer skydive or scuba dive. From what I've heard, he should be all right, but let's hope he gets better fast since make up work sucks.

We went to TCEA Robotics this week in Austin. It was a fun, though now I've decided that everything except Rockport is on my hate list (because that's the only place where my team has won 1st this year). The judges basically screwed us over in the double elimination tournament. In the second round, we tied in objective points with the other team, and the rules state that we should win through the time tiebreaker since we completed the objectives first, but the judge said that time did not matter and made us redo the round, which we ended up losing. After arguing the rules, the head honcho said something along the lines of, "Oh, we were wrong. Time does matter. Oh well, we're not going to reverse our decision. You still lose that round." After that, they start enforcing the time tiebreaker rule, which we ironically lose our second elimination to later on. What's even more lame is that the team that beat us originally ends up placing 2nd when they should have been eliminated long ago. Terry's team ended up doing better than us, and their robot wasn't even working when we arrived in Austin. Terry, Tommy, Shuo, and myself stayed up 'til about 3 am working on the program the night before the contest.

Well, the one bright side of the TCEA convention was that I got to restock my supply of pens. I picked up over 20 pens, pencils, and highlighters from various company booths such as Microsoft's, AOL, ASUS, and Scantron.