End of School/Picture Dump :O

Today was indeedly the last day of trimester, and school, to an extent. It's also the end to Classical French Cuisine, which I'm going to miss dearly. Anyway, to preserve those moments of pure win and epic fail, I took pictures! (seems so OOC for me XD) Without further ado, here they are:

Left 4 Dead in Data Structures

What's wrong?

Our Sun Fire! with dual 750GB goodness!

Sun Fire internals. It's a single proc AMD with 4x512MB RAM

Looking at our motherboard for a science fair in Data Structures. o_O

ZOMG our circuit board etcher that no one knows how to use (except for George Hotz, ofc) XDD

Assembly-lining the BCA Math Competition 5th Grade grading room. It went fast, but they didn’t catch the boo-boo in the answer key. =[

My awesomely awesome answer key that sped everything up by a factor of 2 :D

The crapload of butter left over from the math competition. Anyone want one? =]

Unnecessarily short ethernet cable amid our ghetto LAN setup for Hadoop XD

Julia's vomiting pumpkin

The Fall Play, in which Mark-sempai performed!

Unnecessary celebration of Duke victory that covered our lockers.

LED sign fail (part 1). The people put it up after we won Duke. Well not me, but Mu A. Apparently the people felt like spoiling our victory, so they inserted a boo-boo…

LED sign fail (part 2)

Watching Pokémon during internship lunch break :D

Internship setup. Note the unnecessarily large object on the table. Some dumbass sat on my colleague's laptop, which cracked the screen, so he has to use an external screen XD

They give me a screen, I use it! XD It's a Dell Ultrasharp 2009WFP, btw. (the one that uses the sucky TN panel D:)

Same thing in the engineering room. This time I'm using a dual screen setup connected to a Dell Ultrasharp 2209WFP (another sucky TN panel monitor D:)

The computers in the engineering room. Each has a 2GHz QC Xeon, 4GB RAM, and 160GB HDD

Cupcake man in the school parking lot? WTF?! o_O

Typical day in physics. Yes, Kamran is riding on top of Fahmid.

Today, I was more or less done with the assignment at internship, so I downloaded and dd'd (UNIX clone tool) Chrome OS onto my 4GB flash drive. The dd took so long that I was able to walk across the school with my laptop open and sit down for another 15 min. Then, when my friend let me boot it, we discovered that we needed a working internet connection to log in. And we couldn't get that unless we got a web browser. School internet FTL D:

While I was in the parking lot searching for my bus, I saw a car with a weird sticker on the lower right  of the windshield. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the stick was a ``failed inspection'' sticker. And this was my first time seeing one XD

And this concludes first trimester. I'll upload the pictures of the food later. Stay tuned =]

PUMaC 2009

For the past week, I did not sleep well. Why? I was responsible for LaTeXing the power round, which meant staying after school every day and waiting for people to push changes to the Google Doc at 2345 (that's 11:45PM non-nerds). Even though I wasn't directly involved with the math, I still had to read through all the proofs, lemmas, claims, w/e to check for unLaTeXed items. From that, I pretty much memorized the following lemma (and its proof :O):

If is a set that generates and is a linear bijection from to , then will generate an isomorphic lattice .

We finished with everything around 20:20 (yay 2020! and yay for 20/20 vision XDD), after incorporating Alex's rewrites for three of the problems. Then I got home, reread the latest Naruto chapter, looked at the solution to 2007 AIME I Problem 15 (a geo problem XD) and went to bed.

Then the next morning, I woke up at 0715 and drove with parents to Princeton. There was relatively little traffic, so we got there at 0815, hopefully at the same time as the rest math team. While were finding McCosh Hall, I spotted TJ heading toward registration, so I got off the car and went to talk to Jenny. I detached from the group a while later to call Dr. Mayers to see where the rest of my team was. He said that they would arrive in roughly 15m, so I stayed out in the cold. I also saw Austin sometime around then, and we talked for a bit.

After 15m, they still didn't come. Austin's friend reported that they're in New Brunswick and would be here in 15m. (Hmm, see a pattern?) So I foolishly trusted their estimated and hung out in the cold. According to the schedule, registration was supposed to close. I held up the A division registration and Austin held up the B division registration. After yet another 15m, Dr. Mayers and Dr. Abramson finally arrived, followed by a pack of 90 people.  Learn to ESTIMATING, people.

Anyway. Once the A teams got settled in McCosh 50, the opening ceremony started. Arthur gave us our room assignments and we promptly dispersed.  Our proctor took us to our room, read us the rules, and distributed our tests. I took Geometry first. There were some fun problems, but 1hr flew by. I'm not quite sure why trig ceva didn't work for the last problem. =/ (lol wtf am i using such a useless theorem)  Next up was Algebra, which I bombed due to lack of practice and exhaustion from the previous test.

The team round was really cool and refreshing. The answer sheet was a crossword puzzle, meaning that you can check if you got a fail answer based on your other answers. I worked on a geo problem for most of the time. I probably could have finished it a lot faster had I not been exhausted and hungry. D: After that I looked at the recursive problem, which was pretty cool. We managed to get all the answers, with the last answer solved at 1m left. Phew.

As we were cleaning up after the team round, our proctor announced the individual finalists :O To my surprise, we had not one or two or three but FOUR individual finalists. And probably to everyone's surprise, I QUALIFIED. At first, I thought he was kidding, but then Pavel told me and the others to get our lunch tickets and run, since we only had 15m to eat. (hmm, another instance of ``15m''. hmm.)

After it occurred to me that I had indeedly qualified, I thought:
There is most definitely something wrong if I make INDIVIDUAL FINALS and then get 7th in Geometry. In other words, the Chinese people failed to do their job (assassinate US mathletes being competent) correctly.

The four AAST finalists ran to the lunch line, grabbed some food, and started munching. Then our proctor called us to head to the testing room. When I entered the room, I saw Brian, who congratulated me for making it (and at the same time, forced me to eat my words -.-) The proctor distributed tests and started the timer. Not long after, I heard the iPhone Tri-Tone sound from my bag. I thought, "oh gawd, why is she texting me at a time like this -___-''." I immediately set my phone to vibrate. However, that was the beginning. Jenny proceeded to text me again and call me twice. Since I didn't train for proofs at all, I barely got a question. Oh well…

So then Brian and I were pretty hungry, having barely eaten before the finals. We headed over to the Panera bread located on Washington St. Afraid of getting lost, I pulled out the map I had printed out the previous night, but proceeded to cut myself. My finger was oozing blood and I failed to pack napkins in my purse, so I applied pressure on the region of the cut and held it in my jacket until the platelets stopped the blood flow. We then got to Panera bread, at which Brian got a Turkey panini (I think: it's almost been a year and I'm back to revise this <_<) and I had a cream of broccoli soup. Anyway we sat down and took our time to eat. Surprisingly, a group of unofficial AAST freshmen/sophomores walked in to eat (while quietly ignoring us ^_^;;) In any case, after we ate, we slowly wandered back to McCosh, during which we sort of got lost.

Then was the awards ceremony. Oh wait, PUMaC was behind schedule, so we watched the quizbowl finals, which AAST won, as always :D Although Pavel just had to screw up the PPPL question, which stands for Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, not Princeton Physics Plasma Lab. The good part was that I disciplined him in Data Structures today for his fail =] What the hell is Physics Plasma anyway…
Then was the real awards ceremony. I got 7th in Geo :D, Sam got 8th and Alex Radek (a Mu Ber) got 3rd in Algebra O_O, John Chiarelli got 7th and Ian Osborn got 5th in Combo. We got an astounding 85/86 on the power round :D and perfect on the team round :D Both Mark and Mr. Holbrook were very happy =] and I was happy that they were happy. Unfortunately, TJ A didn't get announced, which surprised me since I knew they Brian put an enormous amount of effort into it. Therefore, it could be trivially deduced that there was an internal difficulty.

After we regrouped outside with the B division people (including unofficial ones), Aviv and a lost TJ C asked me where TJ A and B were. XD So then I said, "Well you should call them. I'll call Jenny." to which they responded, "lol good idea"

And then I drove home with my parents.

THE END

Er, wait. There's probably stuff that I missed, which you can read about here

The Good:

• I SUCCESSFULLY REPRESENTED AAST IN GEOMETRY :D
• We rock at teamwork :D

The Bad:

• I'm only good in Geometry.
• AAST sucks at individuals.

The Ugly:

• A 25 makes individual finals.
• Our 5551 test distribution worked. rofl.
• A one-man army got 3rd place overall.
• Reading the latest Naruto chapter the night before is an effective studying method.

THE END

Other Thoughts

TJ math team needs to LEARN TO TEAMWORK. They're going to fail a nontrivial amount once the owner of this blog leaves.

Blah. now i can't upload the power round cuz i fucked up apache on my web ssh server. oops.

In other news, you should go buy a racist microwave

In other other news, I managed to use both ``fail'' and ``trivial'' in a blog post ^_^

Math Prize

For now, I just have the questions uploaded. Maybe I'll actually blog about it when I'm not busy.

Some stats:

HM I: 9 points

HM II: 10 points

8th - 12th ($600): 11 points

5th - 7th ($1000): 12 points <-- me

2nd - 4th ($6000): 13 points

1st ($20000 -- 10 MacBook Airs!!!! [see end of post]): 14 points

EDIT 1: yay trophy ^_^ daamn the text on the bottom is not clear at all =[ it weigh more than my computer O_O (aka more than 5.25lbs)

EDIT 2: giant check that i can't use

Problems:

Tiebreak problems:

Problem 1:


Problem 2:



10 MacBook Airs: Because I knew that there would be massive death at the competition (especially since the china girls math olympians are going), as a joke I said that if I got first, I would buy TEN MacBook Airs (at the newly-opened Broadway Apple store :D) with the money. Of course it didn't happen, but I was indeedly surprised that I got 6th.

Anyway, here is what 10 MacBook Airs looks like:

Youth Bridge Championship

Enjoy~

(my apologies for the crookedness)

Play Minesweeper

while riding on a lawnmower in real life! (almost)

FTA:

From Me to ***************@gmail.com:

Hey,

My yard is 5 acres and I would like to work out some kind of regular mowing schedule. How much will you charge for five acres? Do you come weekly? Please let me know.

Thanks,

Mike

From Rob ***** to Me:

Hey Mike. Where do you live? Yes, I come weekly. I charge by the hour, but a rough estimate would be around $45 depending on if you want me to do trimming as well.

From Me to Rob *****:

Sounds good Rob. I'm located off of Naaman's road, near the 202 intersection. I would like you to trim around my sidewalk and patio, so I guess you should factor that into the price. I just need you to sign a waiver before you mow my lawn for the first time. Let me know when you would be able to do this.

Thanks,

Mike

From Rob ***** to Me:

Why do you need me to sign a waiver?

From Me to Rob *****:

The last couple of dumbass landscapers I had working for me sued me for injuries that were their own fault. I am just covering my ass so I don't have to deal with these damn settlements anymore. As long as you use common sense, the waiver won't even have to come into play.

From Rob ***** to Me:

Forgive me for asking but how were they injured? I find it peculiar that you have been sued by landscapers.

From Me to Rob *****:

Well, let me just say that I inherited this property from my grandfather when he passed away. He was a war veteran and a little bit eccentric when it came to guns. Long story short, he buried a bunch of land mines in his backyard. I had no idea until the first idiot mowing my lawn ran over one and it exploded. He lost his right leg and then sued me like a little whining baby, claiming it was my fault.

The waiver pretty much says you won't sue me if you hurt yourself by detonating a mine.

READ.

or on the computer (requires java): LINKY

Epic Post

[A/N: this is what happens when you're bored on a 10hr bus ride]

Table of Contents
Preface
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Preface

I was very excited for this trip, not only because I could see my TJ associates, but also because the week in general was awesome. I did a lot better on my October SAT, but my reading score still sucks. D: Who cares about SATs. The more important thing was that I MADE USACO GOLD!! Wheeee~~ Also, I submitted my MIT app on Friday, 00:30! Yes! Though 5.5hr of sleep kinda killed me. Anyway, onto the real thing...

Friday

I get to school at 07:15 and head straight to Holbrook's room to read Naruto. However, Holbrook was being annoying and made me do some secretarial tasks, like laying our spare t-shirts on the tables for people to pick up if they didn't bring t-shirts. He was telling me how everyone should wear an AAST shirt on the day of the competition to show our spirit. Not long after, some of our core members walked in w/o AAST shirts. Holbrook got quite pissed off and threatened to ban them from competing because of lack of spirit. Anyway, the people who didn't bring shirts picked up shirts and I got to read my Naruto.

We boarded the bus at 09:00, but didn't leave until 10:00 because Dr. Mayers was LATE. Ugh. The us ride was really long. It was too long. Towards the end, I decided to do some programming :O Watching me fix my fail USACO qualification programs, the froshies sitting in front of me begged me for some programming problems. I was delighted to see my disciples interested in and wanting to improve at programming. ^_^

For dinner, we drove to Golden Corral, an American buffet. THERE WAS NO SUSHI. RAWRRR. Luckily, there were a lot of cheese-based foods, so I spammed mac & cheese and lasagna. [A/N: I'm so unasian...]

We got to the hotel, unpacked our stuff, and tested the free internets. My roommate showed me the epic short film at the Halloween Assembly, which took 15 minutes to buffer due to lack of bandwidth on the network. WTF. Then we slept at 23:30.

Saturday

ZOMG It's competition day! I was indeedly excited for [obvious] reasons :D We arrived on campus at 09:30. There was only one team present when we got there, but more teams slowly trickled in. I was waiting anxiously for another team, inconspicuously glancing at the crowd near the breakfast table. After a while, I noticed that they came, so I took extra precaution to ensure that I wouldn't be found. However, the football/frisbee game was fail enough to make me yell "GG," which was followed by "Sheeerrryy!!" from my TJ friend. Sadly, It took Brian a while to come to my vicinity because he was being stupidly shy, and when he did, Dr. Abramson assembled us for a captain meeting. :(

After breakfast was the opening ceremony. One of my teammates insisted that we sit in the first row because there were power plugs so I could charge my laptop while we played Peggle (coincidentally, TJ A was sitting in the 2nd row. HMMM.)

When the ceremony ended, Duke staff led us to our test building. While the guides led us to our team test rooms, I had to opportunity to chuck a small paper ball into Brian's hair >:D I quietly thanked my AP Chem and AP Physics classes for giving me opportunities to practice this valuable art. I don't think I got away with it; not long after, someone from TJ A asked "Is Sherry here?" I thought "NO" and quickly scurried away to my test room. We did fairly well on the tests, but got #1 WRONG on the team round. D: Oh well...

Lunch was quite interesting. Jenny greeted me at the bottom of the court after I got my sandwich and begged me to eat lunch with the TJ people. As meta-captain, I had to stay with my team, so I politely declined. When I went to get a drink, Brian approached me (finally ~_~) to discuss the bridge tournament. We went down to where AAST was eating lunch and set up the deals. Unfortunately, we were only able to fit in two boards. One of them was a cold 6NT, which my EW associates missed (but Brian and Lenny found it with their crazy precision system) =/ so we lost 13 IMPs on that. The other one was 4S, and I was able to get 1IMP for my side ^_^ Then the Duke staff herded us into our morning auditoriums for the afternoon tests.

The individual round was harder than expected, but Mu B did ok. We each got six! (Yay for consistency!) Oh, and I managed to crack my jaw during problems 1 & 2 :D I thought that was good sign of things to come. hehehe, who knew lol. The relays were average. I think we had only one zero, which is acceptable. We all thought Mu B had no chance of placing, so I quickly made a "Holy FAIL" poster XD

We were finally relieved of math that matters when the Devil Round came around. I was more or less shocked when I saw the numerous math brainiacs in my group, namelyBrian, Sam, and some short kid from NC or somewhere. We easily pwned the Devil Round, missing only one questions (time ran out when we got #13). The Duke people said that we would get a box of chocolates, but I never got mine =[

After the Devil Round, we headed out of our morning auditorium and into a much larger auditorium for the awards ceremony. I walked with most of my Devil Round team. Mike Tan was still asking Brian Hamrick about VMT and saying it's so much better than AAST, blah blah blah. Then Brian took out a Milkis out of his bag and gave it to me :O I was totally not expecting this. He also took one out for himself. Some people noticed that we had the same drink, so to dismiss encourage suspicion, I told them that I had brought it from home. Not long after some people began to doubt me, Brian told them that I was lying. anyway…

Then I found the rest of AAST and sat with Mu B. Again, the Duke people were still preparing, so I took out my laptop to play some more Peggle. (it's more like the surrounding people begged me to play Peggle). We got through a match, which I won ^_^ Then the tiebreaker round started, to which neither I nor most of AAST paid any attention. After that came the awards ceremony!!

DUN DUN DUN!1!!one

They began. "By the slimmest of margins, AAST Mu B!" Holy crap we was most definitely not expecting this. We all ran up to get our awards, got pictures taken, and sat back down. Some NC team got 4th and TJ B got 3rd. Second place was quite a surprise. We applauded loudly as TJ A went to claim their ribbons, while Mu A was thinking, "Holy balls we definitely lost to Mu B by a sliver D: D: D: Now Holbrook is gonna kill us T__T" Then the Duke people started to announce the champions.

"From the small, polluted state…"

We

FREAKINGLY

ROARED.

It was about time that AAST won a competition. We started sucking after ~2005, so this was definitely a change. I can say that the Mu A-ers were definitely not expecting this. They got their ribbons, posed for lots of pictures (alex zhu looked like he was falling asleep XDD), and got off the stage. Then we all ran out of the auditorium, bursting with joy. We went to the court to take some more pictures and boarded the bus to some retardedly crappy Asian buffet. With no sushi. D: (what kind of victory dinner is that?!)

When we got back to the hotel, we got ready for the School Bridge League Halloween bridge tournament. Of course, Sam and I destroyed the competition, since Pavel and Ian aren't an established partnership and the other four just...don't know bridge very well. At my table, every contract was a game contract. At the other table, only one contract was a game contract. On the last deal, I doubled Pavel and Sam since I had 5 trumps and some other side points, and it worked ^_^ 4Hx-2 (vul) = 500!!

Ahh, what a good Saturday...

Since my roommate and I were too overjoyed by our victory, we stayed up until 01:00. I was working out HMMT teams, doing physics webassign, and IMming while she was doing her AP chem stuff and IMming. Then I stayed up a bit more to wrap up stuff, since I thought that 01:30 EDT to 07:30 EST was 8 hours. FAIL! x_x

Sunday

I woke up at 08:00 to eat breakfast. It was the standard hotel continental breakfast, with the sausages, eggs, waffles, and all that crap. Then I packed my bags and boarded the bus and I started drafting this long post. It came out to be about two pages long (front and back of a blank sheet of paper, 12 pt font). O_O After about ten hours (sto0pid virginia for all the traffic), we arrived in front of the school. I went in to say hi to Mr. Holbrook! (No, he did not go to Duke with us :O) Then I went home to finish my AP Micro Presentation.

/END

Edit 1: Here are the bridge hands & results:

Best Week Ever.

This week was more or less full of win.
1. My SAT score is quite higher than that of my previous attempts.
2. I MAKE USACO GOLD.
3. I'm done with college apps! (at least for a while)
4. I get this wonderfully awesome 3-day vacation at the end of the week and get to see my TJ associates ^_^
5. Mu B gets 5th with little to no practice (at least I didn't prepare much) XD
6. Mu A finally wins something in 5 years!

I think people were a bit too overly excited by #6…

Now, I should start finishing my unnecessarily long blog post about Duke…

Stats Win

One of my causation/correlation homework problems was:

"A recent study conducted on elementary schoolers concluded that one's grades drop as one watches more TV."

other people gave normal reasons, such as lack of exercise and eating unhealthy food. [un]fortunately, the teacher picked on me next, so i gave him a creative reason, as usual:

"They're getting paid to watch TV and fail school."

Furious, Mr. D pointed at the door. Everyone else lmao'd.

/end