WINDOWS FAIL

IT'S SATURDAY AND YOU SHOULD NOT GO TO ARML BECAUSE IT IS MALICIOUS ACCORDING TO GOOGLE

So apparently it is dangerous…oh well XD Get a Mac.

2009 BCA Math Competition: Success!!

The short:

6.5 x 10² contestants
1.0 x 10² student volunteers
5.0 x 10¹ parent volunteers
1.5 x 10² t-shirts sold
1.5 x 10⁴ dollars in revenue

shall write more later :D

Blogger Fail

1. wut i can't post a comment?! ;_;

2. iframe fail

Jeebus this is kinda turning into failblog…will post more useful entries soon! In the meantime, read about even more fail :D

Moar Fail

Enjoy :)

1. Wolfram Alpha fail

2. MIT Email fail

LOLFAIL

Didn't know large software corporations were this careless…

And this is what happens when you have a bunch of telecommies (and me) who jack the teacher's computer's ethernet to set up our own ghetto LAN

WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER

Wow. After fiddling with apache conf (webserver settings) files and the stupid router configuration for half an hour, I FINALLY got my router to do dynamic dns correctly, without any funky port forwarding stuff.

In other words,

http://y0u.dontexist.com/ works!

no 203 required =D

F***ING FINALLY.


oh, and my webserver has a 500GB hard drive. and linux. no more 160GB hard disk with windows XD

Math Team (Rant?)

A/N: This is the result of my boredom and thinking a little about math team…

I have been a lucky math team member to have gone on all trips since frosh year (this can't be said for many people on math teams of other schools :P).  Even though I am one of the better people at math in my grade, the bigger reason is that Mr. Holbrook tries to bring everyone on trips. I remember going on my first trip, Harvard-MIT Math Tournament. I spent the evening with Hannah torrenting and watching a Naruto episode :) ahh good times…

Recently, the topic of bringing waaaaaay too many people to trips came up again as we were preparing for Duke registration. Mr. Holbrook had asked the Duke people if he could bring more teams. We all thought they were going to stick with the team limit, but it turns out that they're lifting the team limit! :O ZOEMGEE WTF ASDLKFJIOEU;ASDFJK;LSWEFIOA!@#$!@ Yeah. We were all shocked by their responses, though only Holbrook was ecstatic about it. He shared the great news with me the other day:

Holbrook: Sherry!!!! Did you know that Duke is letting us bring an UNLIMITED number of teams??? This is gonna become one of our signature trips!! You know that we're gonna bring the whole lot right?!

Me: (fml expression on face)

people near the area (Alex Zhu and his friends): lmao @ my expression

Then it occurred to me when I was talking to Alex about Duke and bringing a boatload of people to competitions. Part of the conversation went like this:

Alex: yeah
what do you think

about the team thing

  i mean like holbrook

  just does it to make math look fun

  except

  the kids go

  omg math TRIPS are fun

 me: and fail

 Alex: but

  the TRIPS

  is the key part

 me: yeah

 Alex: which is the reason

  they're useless

 me: and they're willing to pay too

 Alex: yes

  because parents go

 omg MATH TRIPS

 me: which is sad

 Alex: must be MATH

  when they see the wrong word

  and it's not like

  bringing so many teams is inherently wrong

  it's just

  irritating

 me: still people will go if they're unofficial

I really want to do something about limiting the number of people that go on trips. Contest staff and other teams won't hate us for not bringing so many people and managing the trip would be quite a bit easier. Like any other attempt to change, there are drawbacks. Because Holbrook insists that going on trips is a good experience for math team members, we should be *happy* that a lot of people are going. Yeah right >_>. Like half of the people that go don't produce much and are there just because it's a trip and trips are fun. It's OK to be on math team and be bad at math, but if you aren't willing to work to become better (which the open trips encourage), then you should not deserve to go on trips.

Well then, why are there so many lazy bums at math team? Two things: parents (1) and donuts (2).
1. Parents think that having on their kid is something special, something to be proud of. It is, if you actually work and are on the winning team. Cheering on the sidelines for the Mu A does not make you speshul (but getting an award does =]).
2. I think that math team is so large is due to the donuts. Yes donuts. Every weekend, a math team parent goes to Dunkin' Donuts to buy about twelve (maybe more) boxes of donuts. They're gone in an hour, at most. I know that some people have more than one donut, but that's still a good number of people who eat donuts. I'm sure that if the parents stop buying donuts, chips, candy, and soda, then roughly half the people from math team will drop out and we won't have to bring eight teams to ARML!

I even have proof (um, wha??!?!?!?!?) of my second point. From the Unofficial BCA wiki:

…The method of training is interesting. It varies from going to Boston Market to playing Starcraft. In order to fulfill their laziness, Mr. Holbrook, the teacher who leads the AAST Math Team, provides kids with free soda and snacks. However, it is rather used as a big trap to lure the kids into the team. Nonetheless, most kids do not recognize this fact.

[Un]surprisingly, there are quite a few people against bringing so many people on trips, including one of the math teachers. Admittedly, these people are on the flagship team. (who wants to deny themselves an overnight trip or two?!)

So. Apparently talking Holbrook doesn't do anything because he insisted that anyone who does not want AAST taking so many people simply should not go on the trips. There is no way in hell any of us would risk our trip privileges to prove our point (unless we're supersuicidal). And if we did get fired, we wouldn't have a backup team to compete with.

Meh. Whatever. I won't be there for much longer, so long live AAST Math Team!

I am so tired =_=

Today, I spent almost fourteen hours at school. FML

WTF.

I got booted from French Cuisine Q_Q This means I'll have 4 hours free on Mondays…

ZOMG New Internship

So I got an internship in August for some compsci/math research at the City College of NY, but several things just didn't work out. In short, both my mentors decided to leave, causing their math/compsci department do dissolve. wtf. One of them was leaving for Google and the other just "suddenly retired for personal reasons," according to Mr. Jaye, the BCA principal and close friend with my mentors. He said that there was an opportunity available for programming for Columbia Law School. So I thought, this is kinda random…law and computers?! wtf?! w/e, sounds interesting; i'll do it. I sent emails to the person in charge of this and blah happened and I'm in!

Conveniently, I'm working in the school under the supervision of Dr. Nevard (my math/cs teacher) in his room. There are four telecom(mies) working with me and Mark sometimes chills out with us too, since Holbrook often leaves early on Wednesdays. Anyway, each of us is working on a different segment of the AltLaw search engine (src). I'm doing stuff with Hadoop, a framework for distributed computing. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it since I just got involved with this thing, but hopefully it will be interesting and beneficial for later experiences.

Anyway I have a meeting with everyone and the guy from Columbia tomorrow. Hopefully that'll be interesting/productive.