Outsourced

So this morning I remembered current event articles were due for Physics 2. At about 7:05 I went to my old computer and found one of my old ones from Daigle last year and redate it. Since my old computer is craptacularly slow, I try to transfer it to my new computer over our network. For some reason the connection between my computers was incredibly slow and took forever to browse through the directories. I tried opening it directly and M$ Word hung on me, without the paper loading at all. Then I tried copying it onto my new computer's hard drive, but the context menu refused to come up, and ctrl-c and ctrl-v had no effect (presumably due to the slowness of the network). Now if you're wondering why I just didn't save it on a floppy disk, I wasn't able to because when we built my new computer we "borrowed" the floppy drive from my old one. That is... borrowed permanently. But I digress.

Anyway, so I give up on transferring the file to my new computer and tried to print from my old one. However, it claims that my access to the computer with the network computer was denied and refused to let me connect. So I tried printing to the old color printer (that already has a history of problems, which is why I didn't try that first) that's attached to my old computer. Of course, it goes psycho on me and an error pops up on the screen whining about not having any paper. I look at the printer and there's at least 20 sheets of paper in the tray. By then it was 7:20 and I just decided "Screw it. I'll just take a zero. I don't want to be late to school." So I get to Kossculus right after the Pledge of Allegiance. Not only did I get a zero (technically two) in physics, but I also received a tardy for being late.

Well... the rest of the day wasn't so bad. I ended up getting a 74 on my calculus quiz, which is actually really good compared to a lot of the other grades. Most people seemed to be getting 50's, and I know of at least two people who got 5's. After school we had a picture taken of all the UIL winners. Nitin had like 8 different medals. It was a good time for all. Anyway, check out our awesome UIL scores for district.

I won first for Computer Science at UIL District today with a perfect score of 240. Unfortunately, the test was way too easy and the freshman Neville managed to tie my score and rank. I didn't stick around for the rest of the standings, but Nitin placed first and Terry placed fourth in Number Sense. I think Nitin also won first in one of the catergories for Science. I'm pretty sure Zhi also placed high if not first in one of the Science catergories. Overall, Taylor ranked first in Computer Science by over 100 points and won first in Number Sense and Science as well. Take that, Cinco.

Nelly put it best:
I am number one.
No matter if you like it,
just take it sit down and write it.
I am number one.
Eh, eh, eh, eh eh eh.
Now let me ask ya, man,
What does it take to be number one?
Two is not a winner and three nobody remembers.
What does it take to be number one?
Eh, eh, eh, eh eh...
Insert some random grunting in front of some of the lines, you know like, "Uh uh uh uh." Of course, it's not rap or hip-hop or whatever you want to call it without the grunting and words like "pimp" and random obscene words from the English language.

Anyway, I was pretty angry when I got home because I noticed a few dents and scrapes on my car's front bumper. My Maxima may not be new, but I still don't want it getting banged up. It's not even in the middle, there was one on the left side and one on the right side. Either two people hit me while I was parked, or one person is just a really horrible driver. It's so ugly. Argh!

I just finished my Congressional Profile on Gene Green a little bit ago. I'm going to be so tired tomorrow. I seriously don't know anything about the government. Apparently Texas has its own House of Representatives in addition to the one in Congress. It's just so crazy. Anyway, my guy turned out to be somewhat interesting. He's a democrat amidst a sea of republicans in Texas. His region surrounding the north, east, and southeast parts of downtown Houston was formed through Gerrymandering to put all the democratic Hispanics in a single district. Then it got declared unconstitutional and they redrew the district lines, but nothing really changed. Now it's a district filled with democratic Hispanics and democratic whites. I hate learning about the government. Every time someone says PAC, I'm not thinking Performing Arts Center anymore. That's right, I'm thinking political action committee.

So yeah... the rest of my spring break was pretty craptacular with the exception of the two parties I went to. Other than that, I basically played a lot of tennis and did other random stuff with my various friends. What made it crappy was that I got rejected from the Turing Scholars program, which is basically the honors CS program at UT. I was (and still am) pretty disappointed. On top of that, it would appear that I am not going to go to prom. I was going to ask one person, but that didn't work out. Then I was going to ask another person, but it would appear that it's not going to work out either. I guess I fit perfectly into the cliché of a computer club geek. Today I got a 75 on my government test. I'm a really slow reader; I can only read like 12 pages in the government book in 50 minutes. I was planning on reading yesterday, but I was really exhausted and slept from 4:30 to 5:30... pm to am. I'm probably going to fail my next physics test as well... electric potential doesn't make any sense and I never understand what Dr. B is talking about. So life is pretty sucky these days. The only bright side was that I got a 240 (perfect score) on a practice computer science UIL test, though it was an easier test. I guess that really is the only thing I'm good at, yet still not good enough for UT's honor program apparently. Oh, I also got kicked out of school today by a security guard person. It seems that we can't even stand around lockers and talk around 3 pm.

Anyway, Terry somehow found a pretty twisted version of that Smack the Penguin game today, check out my score:

Being a Monday, I went to the bowling alley with Tyler, Travis, Jordan, and Dylan for some cheap games. However, I haven't bowled in a while, so I did pretty bad. I think I saw a few other familiar faces when I was there, too. The real fun was playing volleyball afterward, with Cody joining in. We played a few rounds and mixed the teams up a bit after every few games. I my teams won about 4 or 5 times and lost only twice. I may be short, but I'm pretty good at serving if I do say so myself. I had some pretty sweet diving saves too. And, of course, the evening would not have been complete without me running into the net and almost falling down while looking the other way.

As for the rest of my spring break so far, I haven't really done all that much. Tomorrow I think I'm going to a DDR party with Terry and then later I'm going to Chris' awesome LAN party he's going to be hosting. It should be fun.

In other news, this guy claims he can perform an operation on women and give them the ability to have orgasms on demand. Crazy stuff.

Today I had a few good things happen to me but also had a few bad things happen as well. This morning I got pulled out of Mrs. Koss' class to go to the principal's office with a purple slip that said "You are not in trouble." When I got there, I found out I was selected for one of those nifty Awards of Excellence (not to be confused with the 2nd Non-Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence). Apparently only twelve seniors from each school in the KISD gets one. Obviously, I figured out that I was getting it for Computer Science. However, I was listed as getting it "At-Large" since there was no computer science catergory.

It's a pretty cool award, but now I have to write a brief 200 word autobiography for the program that everyone gets at the banquet. I'm not particularly proud of my academic records for a certain period of my life (read: freshman year) so I don't really have much to write about besides my CS career. Apparently there was some kind of communication error which resulted myself and other recipients not being informed until yesterday, and on top of that they need it by 8 am, today. I haven't written it yet, as I was working from 6 pm to just about 20 minutes ago working on my government interest group project on the Natural Resources Defense Council that I procrastinated on forever. I know of at least two other people who haven't quite finished yet while I'm typing this.

Anyway, on top of the autobiography, I also need to write a short essay for a scholarship my dad wants me to apply for, and I need to do that by tomorrow as well. The other good news is that UT finally said I'm accepted into their college. Now I just need to wait for my acceptance letter for the Turing Scholars program.

Well... just a few more things to do and I'll practically be on spring break. I should probably start working on my HCC English research paper over the break so that I'm not screwed in the long run by my procrastination habits... We'll see. I'm going to be so tired today...

So today was the annual HP Code Wars programming competition. This year the contest was better in organization speed-wise, but worse off as far as the actual contest. Basically last year there were a lot less teams attending Code Wars and we had to wait in a line what felt like forever during registration, as well as to get food, free software, and other random goodies, but there was hardly any waiting this year. However, we had no idea when the contest actually started. The volunteers handed out sealed packets with the contest problems, and I looked around and some people had began going through the packet, while others were just kind of sitting there. After a few minutes, our team of Terry, Stephen, and myself decided to just start. The judging process sure did suck. We either had to wait a really long time to receive a program back incorrect, or the problem just never came back. In the end, we figured that if you didn't receive an incorrect slip, it meant that you got it right, though they're normally supposed to send back a sheet of paper saying you got the problem correct.

The problems were also littered with typos, one stating that a file was located in C:\codewares, as opposed to C:\codewars. Another problem's sample output did not match the sample input, and the sample input did not match the test input they gave to us on a disk to check our own problems with. There were several other differences that made the competition last year far superior to this year, although it was still fun. We're still not sure what place we received, though we think we got 4th, as they only announced 1st-3rd. We were told 3rd place got 40 points, and we (assumedly) had 36, and any other completed problem would have put us in 3rd. Tommy claimed that their team (including Zhi and Chris Johnson) would beat ours, but we proved them wrong (they only got 23 points). Our crazy novice team placed first in their division, as expected. Last year we got second place, losing only by a single point. Check out one of the photos from last year, though I look weird in it.

So while the competition part of Code Wars wasn't so great this year, we still got a free copy of Windows XP Pro and Visual Studio .NET, among other things. Free stuff is good.

I found this article on Script Kiddies to be pretty good reading, though you'd probably have to be a geek to really understand what they're talking about. I especially liked this part:

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Andy: DCOM, I think, was an example of that, though I was away when that started. It was discovered in February or perhaps earlier.
Roblimo: Doesn't this give the lie to a recent Microsoft statement that most exploits are done by reverse-engineering their security patches?
Andy: Absolutely. I quoted you May as when I found out about DCOM. Do you remember when they patched it?
Roblimo: No.
Andy: July.

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