tala @ so-phobic

• Finish A Feast for Crows
• Finally read Anansi Boys
• Practice AJAX
• Finish and publish all my blog drafts. Yes, _ALL_.

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I subbed for Miss Tanya for this year’s ACM, so I was walking around the Ateneo Grade School quad wearing the ID Tanya Torres. Miss Tanya picked Small, so at least this year’s yellow Coach shirt will fit me.

Ateneo de Manila is hosting for the first time. Today’s highlights include a keynote session with Stanley Tan, and a 5-minute system shutdown during the practice session.

Stanley Tan gave a sales pitch for Visual Studio 2005, to be released this November. It’s a software production suite, integrating the needs of the Project Manager, System Architecture, Developers, and Testers. It features the drag-and-drop school of programming. He demonstrated the creation of a Notepad-like application in 5 minutes using drag-and-drop. The people applauded. They probably didn’t realize that for every Visual Studio 2005 bought, one of them was going to lose a possible job. Software development for dummies was what it was. Sometimes, I just hate technology. We are supposed to be inventing it, improving on it, not let it rule us. Tools are meant to aid, not to do our thinking for us.

This year all the contestants were packed into the grade school auditorium, simulating the World Finals setup. Each team occupied a one-person desk that had the monitor and the CPU on tob, barely giving them space to move around. The contest Regional director started a roll call to establish attendace and give each team their login credentials. This took up most of the first hour that was supposed to be allotted for the practice run. Funny moments were when he mistakenly pronounced the team Suisui as sulsul - a Filipino word that means to bribe (?). Patty (who subbed as Coach Bennett Tanyag) and I had a few laughs when Team I Love Cherry Pie was called.

Apparently, much to the dismay of those who preferred the language, they weren’t providing any C++ docs this year, only Javadocs. IMHO, this is unfair. If you provide help for one, you should provide help for all. A couple of minutes into the actual test, monitors flickered and went black as the system went down. They had to do a 5-minutes shut-down. The _actual_ practice lasted only about half an hour. Food was to be served at 4:30pm. We wouldn’t want to starve the future of Philippine IT. Keehee.

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Congratulations Magnum Bax for graduating, and thank you for the fun, fun night! I really love the people in this guild, most especially the Hagibis boys. And I’m never sitting in front of Jackson in a restaurant again.

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