England vs SA: Classic Front Page!

The rugby world cup final is history now, but I found a copy of the front page of The Independent from the morning of that match. It's just classic! Makes you wonder why we put so much pressure to apply racial quotas to our sports.


Yes, England has it's fair share of many of the things we, and more importantly the rest of the world, make such a fuss about. I find this article so great coming from the English themselves! I don't think there's much more I can add -- it's all in that article.

Sweet Victory

If the good old saying "sweet victory" were anything to go by, this weekend has been an exceptionally sweet one. Any victory is well-taken, but none more so than a championship victory. I have experienced, in different ways, three of these so-called victories this weekend alone.

It all started early yesterday morning with the South African ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest regional contest. Out of 66 teams nation-wide, UCT claimed the top spot for the sixth year running. And this is destined to continue for the years to come, as even though this will be this year's winning team's last contest, we have many more teams coming through eagerly vying for that taste of glory.

To put it briefly for you, UCT swiped all four top places from the rest of the country! And if that weren't bad enough, due in part to our excellent record in the past we managed to gather a record 22 teams from UCT to participate. This formed a third of the national teams! The full results are available here, with the top four teams being:

1. teh_solverers
• Timothy Stranex
• Migael Strydom
  
• Tamara von Glehn
  
2. Bacon & Eggs
• Bertus Labuschagne
• Ian Tunbridge
• Ingrid von Glehn
  
3. ʇ|nɐɟƃ3s
• Charles Bradshaw
  
• Max Rabkin
• Keegan Carruthers-Smith
4. Bit Chow Down
• Christian Geist
  
• Dave Jacka
  
• Ashley Reid

I'm in the process of writing up a lengthy post on the contest, but with the latest victory that just cropped up I couldn't resist combining all three.

The sight of victory:


The second victory happened over in Paris, where we repeated what we last did on that memorable day back in 1995. While this victory will never be just as glorious as the first, it will always be remembered as a huge success. I tend to put a lot of the success on the shoulders of Jake White, which is why I feel it is a huge upset that he is leaving and mostly due to the poor management in this country's sport.

If you don't watch rugby at all you will be a bit lost. The South African rugby team took the William Webb Ellis trophy along with the rugby world cup champions role away from defending champions in the final, beating them 15-6 in fairly convincing style. The streets were wild apparently, although I was sane enough to remain indoors.

The sight of victory:


These two above were fairly expected results. UCT has dominated the ACM ICPC for the past six years and South Africa had already creamed The Pommies 36-0 in a group match just five weeks ago. This last one, however, required half a miracle to achieve. The odds were so low that I personally had written it off.

Before the final race of the Formula 1 season this evening, Kimi Raikonnen was seven points behind championship leader Lewis Hamilton, with a maximum ten points up for grabs. Hamilton's teammate, Fernando Alonso, was even closer with just a four point margin. The odds against Kimi winning the championship in the final race were awfully low.

However, a combination of mechanical faults, driver error and poor choice of strategy pushed Hamilton all the way back into 7th giving him only two points. With him out the way, Kimi and Massa ran away with an awesome 1-2 Ferrari victory leaving Alonso trailing 57 seconds behind in 3rd. So it couldn't have ended any tighter. Kimi ends the season on 110 points, with Hamilton and Alonso tying on 109 points each! Simply amazing!

The sight of victory:

Blog Silence

Ok, I've been a bit silent for the past week here. And a couple people have asked why. Well, that mostly has to do with the last push in my honours project. There's still a lot of work that needs to go into it, but that's what happens when you choose an ambitious project (and certain things don't quite go the way you expected, but that's a touchy subject).

It was also a bit unfortunate that the ICFP Conference had to fall right in the middle of things. I really need to cut down on my travelling. I've been on five international trips this year and I have another long one in the form of Nvidia just around the corner. Just have a look here and, while there will be those that will say how they've traveled more, 74 flights I believe is plenty. Unfortunately it's looking like next years trips will mostly be to the American continent - I far prefer the rich cultural history of Europe.

Next Saturday the 20th is a big one for me. For one it's the day after our project reports are due, so it will be a moment for rest and relaxation. More importantly though, it's the South African ACM ICPC Regional Contest. If that website looks a bit bland, then try the international site. This is our first year being sponsored by Google. It was a nice catch as we have an amazing record 22 teams from UCT alone! Compare this to last years 10. We even had to close registration early due to space constraints! While there are other factors that affect the large growth, I'm confident a fair share is due to Google's involvement.

We're hoping for major UCT domination this year, although we'd really love to see some competition coming from the rest of the country. It's the competition that makes it fun and when all the competition is concentrated at one source it takes away some of the fun. My team can't compete (as was the case last year) since I've already attended two world finals, so we'll be watching the scoreboard, being the hopeless onlookers unable to help the falling, cheering on the rising.

After the contest we're planning on heading off to Da Vinci's on Kloof Street for some good pizza. It looks like we'll be taking up the whole place, so it should be interesting to see how that turns out.

Then there's the moment I hope we all get to enjoy as a country. There's no reason why we should lose to Argentina. If we do we get the chokers label along with the other Tri Nations teams for losing to the lessers. If you're lost already, it's the Rugby World Cup I'm talking about. The final is in the evening at 21:00, on this very same day as the ICPC. If things pan out as they should South Africa should be there. This is going to be one almighty match. Assuming we do make it, we play either France or England. This is our best opportunity to regain our '95 success. They've been playing so well and the main competitors have foolishly knocked themselves out. However, I rather not jinx the boys so I will stop right there.

It's going to be a fabulous day and let's hope we're not let down in any regard. Go UCT! Go Bokke!