Pi Day Weekend

It’s Sunday night, the end of a crazy weekend. Two whole days of fun, productivity, and far too little sleep. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It’s Sunday night, the end of a crazy weekend. Two whole days of fun, productivity, and far too little sleep. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Spring Bling was so much fun! And so exhausting! My team was up against mostly competitive players, but we held our own pretty well and came this close to winning the bronze. Seriously, we lost 22 to 25, which is pretty damn good considering we hadn’t played together as a team in ages. Then, after a quick shower, it was time for all-you-can-eat sushi.

Some of us had serious discussions over dinner, besides complimenting each on games well played. The issue was, how do we get more recreational players involved in the tournament? Looking back at the tournament’s history, we’ve only had a separate C division half the time—and maybe I shouldn’t even count last year, where all of two C teams were registered. The consensus was that we should advertise it much further ahead of time, and also sell it as a fun challenge to meet people, test your skills, and see how the big boys* play play.

(* And a few token girls. But mostly boys)

For some reason, it took me a long time to get to sleep. Maybe I was still wound up, I don’t know. But sleep I did, eventually, and I needed it because today was the second and last session of my all-day AJAX workshop at BCIT. It was short periods of lecturing, interspersed with quizzes and practical labs. Last week we went over Javascript, which I’m already familiar with though I did learn a few useful tips. Today we dived into the AJAX API itself. It looks like a lot more students had trouble keeping up, even with the instructor being very generous and giving us a lot of time for labs and even allowing us to pair up.

Which is not a bad thing, really. He said that you learn more by collaborating, and it’s true. Besides, BCIT is supposed to prepare you for the real world and in the real world you’d rarely be all on your own; there’d usually be coworkers to pick the brains of or, failing that, online forums and user groups.

It’s late Sunday night now, almost midnight, and I’m finishing my job search homework for tomorrow. I’ve got homework and a take-home exam for the AJAX workshop, but that’s not due for a week. And I’m not worried. I was already familiar with the basic ideas and, if I do say so myself, I picked up the finer points very quickly. The server-side scripting aspect holds no terrors for me.

Happy Pi Day!