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Episode II: Attack of the... oh, never mind
05.03.06 1:55 PM  By dplass TopCoder Member (OK, I know I won't be able to pull the Star Wars thing off, so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.) Tuesday night was the welcome reception, and boy did I meet a lot of people. At first it was really weird, still, that I was finally meeting some folks after "knowing" them in the arena. Ironically, as I mentioned to Kawigi, coders tend not to be the most social bunch, myself included. I find it hard to meet new people and especially to make new friends. But I was determined to "stick it out" and try to meet at least some of the people I had planned on meeting. On my "todo" list of people to meet included people who I've been in touch with:
For a while I was hanging out with just Kawigi and Rustyoldman when they started the introductory speeches. Rob Hughes thanked each sponsor (and in fact right now I'm typing on an AMD laptop, generously loaned to us bloggers by AMD), and TheFaxman went over some of the rules for the algorithms competitions tomorrow. The one line that solicited a response was that the Unused Code Rule was NOT going to be in effect, which everyone laughed at. ivern also went over the rules for the CDDC, which is a bit different this year, since the competitors will only be appealing, not writing code or making designs. One thing that will be very interesting will be that the reviewers will submit appeal responses "in real time", so there will be a leader board for the round, showing the status of each appeal, and whether it was accepted or rejected. (Side note: even if an appeal is accepted, it still might not translate into a higher score.) The competitors relative rankings will be adjusted in real-time, I believe. In one group of people chatting was kyky, John Dethridge and kalmakka, and we talked about our flights, and how looooong some of them were (especially John's). When Pops showed, after the announcements, he said it was the "longest flight of his life", even though it was probably about the same length as mine. (I feel your pain, Pops). We're both on "east coast time", both away from our families, both happy to be here, and both exhausted. BTW, in case you're wondering, his laugh really is "all that". (I wasn't able to get an mp3 of it, though -- maybe tomorrow ;) I ran into cucu towards the end, and he told me that he has already been to the Grand Canyon this trip. I've never been there (but I've flown over it a bunch of times.) Despite what I wrote before, there really were a lot of people who seemed interesting to talk to. I noticed a lot of other familiar faces who I didn't get a chance to talk to; hopefully the upcoming events will give me more opportunities to meet them as well. As the reception wound down, the four bloggers (Kawigi, davidyang and omgrace) synced up and compared notes. To our horror we saw that Kawigi had already written gobs of text, which was good motivation for the rest of us to come back to the hotel and capture our thoughts of the evening. Tomorrow morning is the first round of the algorithm competition, which I've been looking forward to -- I've always wanted to watch the really great coders code (in algorithms at least.) Specifically, I'm hoping to really study Petr and SnapDragon and maybe, just maybe, a little of their magic will rub off on me for my next SRM. Respectfully submitted, dplass P.S. Darn time change, it's now 4:41AM PDT... right about now I'd be getting on the train -- so, "to my peeps on the 743, greetings from Vegas!" |
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