T-something hours

Our wake-up was accompanied by a nice, loud nuclear alert siren at about 6:30 AM, much to Kenneth's annoyance (yes, I am going to continue bagging him out for no particular reason). Going down to the cafe to have breakfast, with the $25 breakfast vouchers held in hand, I was disappointed that no one was down there yet. Where's the enthusiasm for informatics training?! :(

Informatics has a variety of uses. Lots of people don't know what it is, or why is "typing on a computer" is considered hard enough to be an international competition, but I can say that it comes in useful when you want to order exactly $25 worth of breakfast ("Big Brekkie" with a large cappuccino and a croissant (which I did not get time to eat (maybe I should cut down on the brackets))).

Running down to the CSE labs for the first Trial Exam, we managed to lose Kenneth. He somehow managed to turn up there before us, meaning that someone was taking the longer (longest?) path down to UNSW.

The exam was fairly unbalanced, having 3 easyish problems and 1 nearly impossible one. I mean, come on, how are we supposed to code that up in an exam :(

We then ran off to lunch, with the students going to Ivan's Fernery, some "cheap Asian place" as Ken remarked. Eating laksa with chopsticks = hard. Much harder than splattering some of it on my white shirt.

Problem session was amusing. We couldn't arrive at a reasonable solution for Lego until I adapted my bruteforce to calculate the number of possible arrangements (6427, a prime number O_o). I desperately needed actual Lego blocks for the task because I couldn't work out the combinations of them used in the sample data :D

Another exam tomorrow at 0830, hopefully it will be more interesting :D