Contest diaries 1

It's not the first time that I've been to a contest though but this is the first time that I'm feeling like writing about one. Today, me and my team participated at the Daffodil IUPC 2010, a national level contest in Bangladesh. Teams from almost all renowned varsities came for the title of the championship. Before this, when I participated at the BUBT IUPC 2010, the arena wasn't looking like a contest arena. But this time the arena was awesome. The PCs were stylish and the food was less :[.

Likes:
1 - Nice looking workstations
2 - All the contestants in one room
3 - Setup of the systems.
4 - Nice view with lots of solver balloons in the room

Dislikes:
1 - Very unorganized while the contestants taking seats
2 - A wire beside us was burning because of overload
3 - Too much login issues
4 - Some PCs were so f'd up that the contestants had to submit using USB
5 - The AC was awful
6 - The sound system was a pain to the ear
7 - Too much light hitting the eyes

Top solvers:
As usual, our country's proud, BUETians solved 7 problems. It was a nice start when a team solved a problem at the very first minute with the single submission that was also the first in the contest. I'll give them this, the five balloons idea was great, creating more jealousy and competitiveness among the contestants. At first the Aeternitas team was starting to take the lead but the rat race ended with the slow but clever jumps of the Chimpanzees. As usual first 10 positions were taken by SUST, BUET and DU. Noticeable among the Private Varsities were SUB Epsilons.
The venue was all centered around the arena. I think they should have paid more attention to the capacity of the AC, I was sweating literally. The BUBT Runtime Error team had a plug all burned up beside them and their team mate had to repeatedly call the volunteers about that. Some of the seats were not distributed properly. We had to share one with the BUBTans. The cameras were putting lights on contestants faces at some places.

Solving experience:
We solved 2 problems. One a regular statistics median problem and the other was an ad-hoc XML parser problem.
What I think we should do:
- Find a better way to read the problems faster so that we can detect the easiest problem
- I left freopen intact while submitting which generated errors, I think I should work more carefully on better codes
- It's high time we've been serious about algorithms
- Need to be more mathematically analytic.

That's all I can think of right now.