The blog of Michael Rice

My not so little brother Matt played football for Bonham this year. His team basicly kicked total ass. They went undefeated all season long. Last night they played for what I guess was to be distric champs against Goddard, an undefeated team from Midland. Most of the other games during the season were no challenge for Bonham. They would go in and dominate, some of the games they played had scores up in the 60’s with the other team at 0 or maybe 7. This game was not that way. If Bonham was going to win this one they were going to have to work their ass off for it. Both teams wanted to win this game, and it was obvious. Goddard would drive its way down to the goal line and then Bonham would hold them off and get a turn over. Bonham would drive down then Goddard would hold them for a turn over. This went on back and forth with both teams allowing only 2 touch downs each. The game stayed this way all the way to the end. The final score was Bonham 14 Goddard 14. I was completely impressed with the sportsman ship Goddard displayed after the game was over. Bonham was in the inzone having a meeting with the coaches, all the Goddard players and coaches went to the 50 yard line and took off their helmets and put them on the ground and then began to give Bonham a round of appluse and then rushed in to give them all a high 5. It was killer to see all those kids celebrating how hard they played. Each team went home a winner last night. Congratulations to both teams on the best game of 8th grade football I watched all season long!!

Well today was my 26th Birthday. I had a really good time. I didnt do what most people I know who are in their 20’s do on their birthday (which is go out and drink and party). Instead I was a judge at a UIL computer science regional meet. It was totally awesome. There was a total of 9 teams from all across parts of Texas. One team ended up having to quit before we got started because they had a sick team member and they didnt have the required 3 team members needed to compete. The contest had a total of 12 problems that each team could choose to do. Each problem they got correct was worth a max of 60 points. Some of the problems were so easy to do that if you didnt get them right you didnt need to be there in the first place, and others would have taken me more than the 2 hours of allowed time to write. All the teams got problems 11, and 12 right off the bat with the first submission taking under 8 mins. Which isnt much of a suprise considering this was all that was needed:

for(int i=0;i<23555;i++) System.out.println(”some message”);

Most of the other programs required you to parse some given data files and do something with them. The easy ones were problems 11,12,1 and 2. Only 1 team even tried any other programs than those 4. Team 6 (no idea who team 6 was) They tried problem 6 and found a bug in the given data and we were able to reproduce the bug, this team would have won first place if they would have had the correct datafile to parse. I have no idea what will happen now but they should be given the points for finding the bug like they did. I got a shirt in the mail from thinkgeek.com today from my mom. It was the “No, I will not fix your computer.” shirt. Personally I think I had the coolest shirt on tonight at the contest. It was really a great time getting to see all the upcoming computer scientists, some of those kids were really bright. Well I guess this is the end of my geeky day. I guess Ill wrap it up by writting some java code on one of my apps.

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Well school has started back and I am taking a few classes this semester and Im working at the school in the lab as the linux lab guy… One of the classes I am taking is the second semester of freshman english, 1302 as my school calls it. Its a very interesting class so far, lots and lots of reading in this class. So far we have read two short stories.

The first was by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a story called Youg Goodman Brown. This was a very cool story, I found it a bit hard to read (even after being modernized some) for me due to it having been written in the 1800s and me not being the best reader (thanks cartoon network :P). If you are bored and have 30-45 mins free go read that little story, its about a guy who questions his “Faith”, it has some pretty interesting characters in it, and I found it pretty enjoyable.

The second story we have had to read was written by Shirley Jackson and called The Lottery. It was first published: 1948, in the June 28 edition of the New Yorker Magazine. All I can say about this story was that it was great. When I first started reading it I though “Oh boy this one is gonna be lame” but it got really good really fast. At first I was wondering.. whats this gonna be about, are the winners gonna get money, a home imporvemnt.. what could it be.. I was really excited to find out. I found before the end that the winner wasnt really gonna be a winner..what a twist this story has… If you are looking to spend 20 mins or so reading a really good short story take a look at The Lottery. Its well worth the read.

Well on Monday its time to start back to school for Odessa College. I am looking forward to starting my second semester of Java programming. Dont mistake this for me liking to program in Java, rather I just like to learn about programming in general and well the school system seems to think I need to learn this in Java, which I dont agree with but what can I do… I feel like I am getting the short end of the stick on this deal by not being introduced to C and C++ but maybe when I get to UTPB I will get to do some non-Java stuff. The only good thing is that everything I learned in my Java class last semester I was able to use in my PERL and Python programming. Sure the syntax is not exactly the same but the idea is.

I have been doing a lot of nothing lately, well Ive been playing a lot of video games (which is a lot of nothing..). I managed to play so much UT2004 that the nice people in the AwK klan have asked me to join. They obviously dont ask you to join because youre good at playing.. I guess my good sportsmanship was all they were looking at, because I am certianly no good at the game. Thanks guy/gals for letting me be a member.