Category: Events

We had lunch with Loudon Wainwright

Here Come the Choppers
Well, sort of… :-)

The day started with WeatherGirl and I having a very productive strategy meeting with Arne and Athena to work on the design of a MARQS pamphlet in support of November’s school levy vote. While we were deep in planning, who should come into Common Cup but Loudon Wainwright! He apparently came in last night, and spent the day wandering around town and campus on his own, including lunch at our little coffee shop.

Many (most?) artists and speakers that come to UMM tend to hole up in their hotel rooms and spend almost no time in town among us plebs, so it was particularly cool that Loudon was so comfortable cruising around town. We talked about going over and saying “Hi”, but I’m frankly a total wimp about talking to famous people like that. In the end he left before we did, saving me the trouble of having to think about it.

Across the rim
After that exciting time WeatherGirl and I went over to the PRCA Gallery to take photos of art. As a fund raiser for the Center, we’re working on a calendar of photographs of the work of PRCA artists. I already had quite a few relevant shots from outside the Center, but needed to spend some time in the Center of some of the cool stuff on display (and sale) there. We stayed a couple of hours and I took some 150 shots. I think we’ve got a pretty good set of shots to work with, and will hopefully have the calendar design and permissions sorted out in a few weeks.

Beads and bowlsThis fine day was then capped off by an excellent concert by our lunch guest. Loudon played a fine 90 minute set as the opening act of this year’s Performing Arts Series, mixing crazy fun stuff with his great family songs and political commentary. Edson Auditorium wasn’t full, but it was close (400 people?) and the audience was very enthusiastic and supportive, and he got a nice standing ovation at the end.

We bought a copy of Here come the choppers, and Sub-Evil Boy got in line to have it signed. Sub-Evil really enjoyed chatting with Loudon, and I think that Loudon got a kick out of having a really cool young fan. Sub-Evil told him that he’d wanted to request “Unhappy anniversary” (a pretty unusual request from an 11 year old), but he was pretty pumped that Loudon finished up his encore with “Hard day on the planet”.

All in all, an excellent Saturday!

Tags: Photography

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Laid low by a single equals sign

Way out, man!
Tonight was Round 3 of the TopCoder Open, and I came this close to making the top 100 to go on to Round 4, in fact missing it by a single equals sign… As it is, I placed 138th, so I’m on my way out of this year’s Open, having gotten a round farther than I ever had before, which is very cool.

The first problem wasn’t too bad, but the second problem was a complete bloodbath. It wasn’t terribly hard (some fairly straightforward algebra), but there were quite a few tricky cases. I submitted it in fairly reasonable time, but then went back to check it over because I was nervous about a problem with that many cases to sort out. A good thing, too, because I did find a pair of cases that I’d overlooked. I repaired those and resubmitted, and was pretty confident about my solution at that point.

My confidence was misplaced, however, and I (and about half the known universe) was successfully challenged on that problem, which was a definite bummer. So many people lost their second problem in the challenge and system test phases (less than a third survived), though, that I actually moved up from 155th to finally place 138th out of 191. The stinker is that it turns out that the only mistake in my solution was a single equals sign. Removing that, changing a less than or equal to a less than, fixed it. If I had gotten that problem correct then I would have placed in the low 60’s, qualifying for Round 4 and earning a few more bucks. Or if I’d been faster with a challenge and gotten 50 points for that I would have been in the 90’s and still qualifying.

Sigh.

All that said, there are no doubt dozens of people kicking themselves right now for little things, and in the end what counts is what you do, not what you could have done.

Tonight was a great example of how incredibly careful and precise one has to be about the details in programming. Programs tend to not fail gracefully – they either work or they don’t. My program returned 100 on the test case in question when it should have return -1, and I can construct a (literally) infinite set of cases it will fail on, with the differences from the expected value being as large as you’d like. It may have only been a single character, but it was still absolutely wrong and I (rightly) got no points for it. And that’s big part of what I love about computing – it’s a kind of problem solving that requires both creativity and precision, and which has real consequences.

I’d told WeatherGirl before I went off to compete that, on the assumption that I wasn’t going to make the top 100 and qualify for Round 4, I was hopingfor something like 150th; not too close to 200 to feel totally incompetent, but not so close to 100 that I’d kick myself for every little thing that might have been. 138 is pretty good, then, and I’ll just have to put that equals sign behind me :-).

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