The Contest
January 25, 2009
Eight days ago, I was exhausted, . Here’s how it went:
Friday the 16th was supposed to be a half day, though some even got to skip it. I, however, needed to stay the longer – longer than even a normal school day to set up for the contest. I have a picture of the cafeteria, somewhere…but I ended up getting home at around 5:00.
Saturday the 17th. I got a pretty good amount of sleep the night before – at least 8 hours – so I was feeling relatively well. I even stopped by Kroger to buy some doughnuts for our helpers. I got to school at around 7:15AM to find the front doors locked. After waiting a few minutes, Sid arrived, and he called Halbert to tell him of our situation. Eventuall, we were let in and then ventured to get ice from the trainers’ room. By the time we finished with the ice at around 7:40, the first of the teams began showing up. Not ready (at all) for these teams, we began our journey of clearing the servers of our test data, turning on the other servers for our registration, preparing the judges for the two programming contests, and putting volunteers where they needed to go. Eventually, all of these things got done, and luckily, that was just before the rush. While teams were settling in, I was still getting our volunteers situated. I couldn’t do much with just anyone – a lot were rather random NHS people who couldn’t help with anything but the grading of the UIL test. At any rate, I was following Halbert, whose walk is practically a run for me. I was supposed to have two people following me to do my bidding…but they ALWAYS disappeared…eventually I settled to one person, who happened to stick with me. Eventually, after much ado with setting up the teams and getting the network to work, the UIL test started. It was a moment of rest for me…45 minutes with all the contestants in the auditorium…quiet while taking a test. After the test, the UIL people got to work…and “borrowed” some of my people. It didn’t really work, though. The UIL graders were rather lazy, and when there was an hour left to the contest (2 hours after the grading started…), even I had to join the grading. Anyway, throughout most of the programming contest, I was running between teams who had questions. The answer was always the same: “submit a query using PC^2.” Either way, I got a good earful of some complainers.
I don’t really want to finish…but I can say this: whatever I excluded really blurs together. I’d have to sort through the timeline in my head to figure it out, so ask me if you really want to know something.
