I Hungary!

A few weeks back, there was an online programming contest, held as a qualification round for the 2006 Challenge 24. Teams of 3 with no restrictions compete for 5 hours, solving unusual problems. The first 30 of them are invited to Budapest for the 24-hour programming contest, that is, Challenge 24 (Actually, only 27 are invited. The first 3 teams from last year are invited too.) We only had half a mind to compete anyway. By we, I mean the usual team: bme, eam and me (yzt). bme and I were in our respective homes and eam was at his university, in Tehran. We decided to stay where we were and try our hands at a "distributed" contest and communicate using the fine technology that is AKVoIP (Any Kind of Voice over IP! It includes normal VoIP technologies and the multitude of voice-enabled chats.) To make a long story short, it was a disaster execution-wise. I have never used instant messaging software before (a fact that I'm proud of,) except for limited use of Google Talk. We had to try half a dozen of them (OpenWengo, Skype, Google Talk, Gaim, Yahoo! Messenger) before settling on the latter. eam just dropped in at the beginning of the contest, said hi, and went off so we were one person short! The communication overhead was too much. On the other hand, we (the remaining we) were competing from the comfort of our homes, and to me, programming on Mike (my box) is quite a pleasure. Everything works the way I want them to (at least I want to believe so!) and I like my chair and desk a lot. The Electronic Contest ended with us (our team name was "Balefire") in the 32nd or 33rd position. Then they processed the remaining submissions and we came to be 27th! I mean, how non-auspicious is that! Now the real challenge started. We had to get passports (eam and I) and that required a plethora of letters, forms, running from here to there, from Mashhad to Tehran, etc.) and to top it off, we have new year's holidays ahead of us. It was and is very time-consuming! Although I should probably mention that bme did the bulk of the work for me, and I only signed were it said signature, but still it was hard! We were also seeking financial support, first from my university (IAUM) and then from other sources. Up until this minute, those other sources have proved far more dependable! I also wanted to write a lot about the ridiculous inefficiency in operations of our governmental (and semi-governmental) offices, organizations, etc. but since you either already know or will never find out (lucky you!) I'll skip that. Basically, this is were we are: bme has everything worked out, except for her visa. eam has done all he had to for a passport, and it's a matter of days before his passport is ready. Now me. I have already finished all the work that had to be done with IAU, and now I'm waiting for Saturday to go stand in the lines at the Conscription Service Offices (all Iranian males above the age of 18 have to do 2 years of conscription service. Without it or their consent, you cannot do many things, leaving the country among them.) After that, I'm gonna apply for a passport.