A night of fun and games
05.04.06 9:35 PM


By omgrace
TopCoder Member

After watching the wildcard round, I’ve decided that next year, they need to have a play-by-play announcer on the TopCoder site during the Challenge phase. Luckily for me, I had Kawigi sitting next to me during most of the challenges keeping me up to date on who was reading whose code. After watching three semifinals and one wildcard competition, I’ve decided that the challenge phase and the system testing are my two favorite parts of the competition. The spectators get really into challenges and whenever someone gets a challenge correct and you see 50 points added to their score, you can hear little golf claps (nothing too loud - we wouldn’t want to disturb those competing!) The wildcard round is also more fun (in my opinion) because it’s the competitor’s second chance to get things right. Congrats to natori and andrewzta for advancing to tomorrow’s finals!

This afternoon while everyone was enjoying the presentations, I had to change hotel rooms :-(. My electricity wasn’t working correctly AND my bathroom flooded last night (what horrible luck - I think it’s a sign that should definitely NOT gamble). While I waited for the room to be ready, I walked to Caesar’s Palace to visit during the day. While walking to Caesars, I noticed that a lot of people were just standing around...after a little investigating; I found out that someone is going to do an extreme jump for ESPN! They have motor cross bikes that will be doing it later this weekend! Here’s the set-up:



So the real reason I went to Caesar’s again was to find Celine Dion. I probably won’t get to see her show because there isn’t enough time, but at least I have a picture of me with a Celine Dion poster!!(it’s almost the same):



I walked through the casino to get to the Forum shops (maybe I sabotaged my hotel room fiasco... think about it... hmmm...) and saw a huge Trojan horse!



This is the entrance for a toy store! The eyes of the horse also turn green and red and his head moves (I have a 10 second movie if anyone is REALLY interested). There is a lot of shopping to do around the forum shops (and it’s mostly upscale for those high rollers) so I walked around a bit and window-shopped. Here’s a fountain in the middle of the forum shops (they have shows every afternoon):



So if anyone reads my blog, you’ll know that I like taking random pictures. Here’s my random picture for the day:



It actually took five tries (I kept making funny faces and ruining it) but I approve of the final product.

Finally, here’s a picture of the four pick me bloggers:



Who looks the most like their profile pic?

I’ll be back later with an update about tonight’s event...and maybe another contest!