For the last four years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019 and 2020 competitions on this blog. This year, I wrote one of the problems and helped with some of the administrative backend. I also hosted a live broadcast during the competition with another CS@Mines alum, Sam Sartor which you can view on YouTube. In the broadcast, we provided commentary on the competition, hosted interviews with problem authors, and talked to former HSPC and ICPC contestants.

For the last three years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about last year’s competition in this post. This year, although I am no longer a student at Mines, I wrote two of the problems, and I volunteered during the competition.

Due to the current COVID-19 lockdown, the competition was held remotely, which meant that we were unable to enforce a no-internet rule as we are able to during on-site competitions. Luckily, the problems are all unique, and written by Mines students and Mines alum specifically for the competition which makes it very difficult to search the internet for answers.

You may have noticed that dark themes are becoming more and more common across the computing landscape. Everything from Windows 10, macOS Mojave and later, iOS 13+, and Android 10+ to many Linux desktop environments and many individual browsers are including dark/light theme toggle settings.

I use a program called mutt for managing my email. A lot of the time, I want to download all of my messages and use mutt offline (for example, when I’m on the train commuting to work). In these cases, I also want to be able to queue email messages to send once I get back online. Even when I am online, sometimes the process of sending the message can take a while (with a large attachment, for example), and I don’t want mutt to freeze while the email is being sent.

I posted last year about my switch from WordPress to a statically generated site generated by Pelican by GitHub Pages in a blog post. Since then, my hosting situation has changed a couple of times. I first migrated to deploy straight to a DigitalOcean Droplet from Travis CI. Then, I migrated to GitLab and used GitLab CI/CD to do the same thing. Now that GitLab Pages has support for automatically handling the Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate on custom domains, I’ve moved to GitLab Pages for hosting as well.

Today was my last day of vacation. I flew back to Denver in the afternoon, and I am starting my job at The Trade Desk on Monday which is just two days away! But, that means that I had most of the morning to be in London. So, I decided to go over to Buckingham Palace and then to the British Museum.

Today we docked in Southampton, England. I disembarked as early as possible so that I could get in to London for as much of the day as possible. I did the “self disembark” which basically just meant that I had to carry my bag off the ship rather than have them take it for me. Mom is staying on the boat to go back the other direction to NYC.

Instead of giving you a day-by-day on what we did on the crossing (I was told that it is not a cruise because only lowly peasants would go on a cruise), I’m going to just talk about some of the highlights and make some observations about my time on board the Queen Mary 2. We didn’t stop in any ports, so it was just what we did on board.

Today we left Washington D.C. Mom and I went by train to New York City, while Hannah and dad headed back to Denver so that dad can get back to work and Hannah can do a summer class for her nursing training.

The ride to New York City was uneventful and easy. We got in a quiet car, which was nice and I was able to sleep for most of the trip. Once we got to New York, we had a bit of trouble getting out of the station. It was a subway and train station combined into one, and there were a ton of different exits. We ended up going out of one which we (really it was me) had to carry our bags up a few flights of stairs. When we got out to street level, we looked across and saw that the other side was a larger exit, and had an elevator. Oh well. At least we didn’t end up on the other side of Manhattan, which could have happened if we’d really screwed up and gone to the wrong exit.