Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, January 30th 2008 at 5:39pm
Placing 2nd in the Quebec Engineering Competition was completely unexpected. I was there to have fun and attempt to solve interesting problems. I really didn’t expect us to come in second! What’s even more, is that we found out that the first place team beat us by only 0.7%. Wow! That’s extremely close! Luckily both teams get to advance to the national Canadian Engineering Competition in Waterloo.
The same weekend of the CEC, however, is the annual CS Games competition which is being hosted in Sherbrooke. I have spent the past month struggling to put together a team, and was extremely proud of the strong responses I got from computer science and software engineering students here at Concordia. We managed to register a compliment of two full teams, many of whom are in their first and second years of school. I couldn’t be happier! We’re going to bring these greenhorns to Sherbrooke for fun, friendly, nerdy competition and lots of partying. I’ve been coordinating with the team from ETS for us to share a bus down to Sherbrooke. They’ll be teaching our team French drinking songs while we’ll be teaching them the English ones. Cultural exchange for the win!
This is my last semester of school, and I’ve been looking forward to CS Games 2008 since … well, since the last CS Games. It’s my chance to go out with a bang, to party one last time with friends from all the Québec schools, a number of Ontario schools, and from all over North America. More than anything, I want to be the one to lead my team of mostly-freshmen to the battlefields of Université de Sherbrooke and show them what it means to represent your school, your friends and flaunt your knowledge and nerdly status. Then I get to pass along the torch, and these froshies will be the ones organizing the trip to CS Games next year. Maybe they can even get it hosted at Concordia in 2010! I have such high hopes for this new batch of students and I want to teach them everything I’ve learned over my years of student involvement. I’ll be able to get my team to mingle with other schools, forge alliances and friendships that will lead them on to be supreme powers in inter-university events. CS Games is my chance to do that; and I feel like it’s my last chance.
Now I’ve got myself stuck in this pretty sticky situation. CS Games and the Canadian Engineering Competition are mutually exclusive. They overlap completely, and there’s no way I can go to both. I can’t let down the other three members of my Consulting Engineering team – they’re convinced they need me. Apparently, in the national competition you’re allowed access to the internet, so my Google Fu will come in handy. Considering this is the first time Concordia has ever sent teams to the CEC, I would love to be a part of the inaugural team, boldly going where no Concordian has gone before. I want to be there to represent my university, and more importantly to represent my province. I’m proud to be a Québecker, and I want to join with the other Québec teams in drink and song and competition, especially before I move away to Ontario. While I’ve attended previous CS Games competitions, I’ve never been to CEC before. The pressure to attend CEC is terrible.
I wish I could fork a new process1 so that I could attend both competitions, then merge together again. But alas, there’s only one of me. I can’t go to both. I have no idea what I’m going to do … but I feel like I’m being torn apart and it’s depressing me. I put off thinking about it for the weekend, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Tags: cec, competition, concordia, csgames, life, party, school | 5 comments
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, January 30th 2008 at 12:15am
I attended the Compétition Québecoise d’Ingénierie as an afterthought. I wasn’t originally planning on going, given that January is the busiest month of the year for me. But when Wally asked me to join the team for Consulting Engineering, I figured that since it’s my last year of school I may as well try to get as much out of it as possible and signed up. We won the preliminary/practice round at Concordia, and so we qualified to compete at CQI.
“Consulting Engineering” is this: You and your team are locked in a room for 6 hours with a case study problem statement which includes a ton of data. You have access to a computer, but no access to the internet. There is an intranet forum where teams can ask questions (and of course, other teams can see your questions and the subsequent answers from the judges). Your team’s goal is to put together a presentation (to be presented the next day) and an “Executive Summary” document outlining your solution to the problem given, along with its economic feasibility, rationale, calculations, and everything.
Our team of four (Wally, Kevin, Greg and myself) spent our six hours trying to determine whether a small fleet of oil tanker ships would benefit from traveling through new routes in Canada’s north as oppose to through the Panama canal. The new routes were shown to be shorter, but we would need to factor in the costs of reinforcing the ships hulls to withstand potential iceberg collisions, as well as a the risk involved should a collision occur and oil were to spill into the sea. Thus we also needed to design a collision detection system and a spill recovery system to deal with these scenarios.
We crunched numbers like there was no tomorrow. This is where I started to find myself being useful. I don’t know how to calculate shear strength of steel or the forces of heavy oil tankers as they act on gigantic icebergs, but I can use computers. I monopolized the computer, basically tabulating everything imaginable into an Excel spreadsheet using the numbers and equations my team were feeding me. I actually got to row AB. I’ve never gone anyway near row AB before. Our “Executive Summary” therefore consisted of some formulas (typeset in the new Office 2007 equation editor) and some tables copied and pasted with data from excel, but stylized with Word 2007’s autoformatting tools. And our powerpoint presentation? Well, the template was provided to us by the talented Nik Brovkin, but the content was thrown together in five minutes and prettied up with Smart Art.
And now I understand what “Consulting Engineering” really is: professional bullshitting. We pulled numbers and equations out of our ass. We took the data we were given and manipulated it every way imaginable. It was no real surprise when, at the end of the 6 hours, we were showing a net profit of over $21 billion. And then we put the data tables into our presentation and handed them in, keeping a copy for ourselves. Back at the hotel, we were reflecting on our numbers and practicing our presentation when our wits started to come back to us …. $21 billion is way too much. So we recalculated our numbers. It turns out that I had put a minus sign in the denominator of an equation instead of a plus sign. This made our numbers astronomically large. Oops.
Now we were faced with a dilemma. Do we present the numbers in our presentation, since we can’t change it, and act confident about it? Or do we come clean and say that we made a mistake in our calculations, and give the judges the new numbers? We decided to go for honesty. When it came time to talk about the data, I said “Being responsible engineers, we made sure to double check our calculations again and again. And while we were going over every last detail of our data, we noticed that we had made an error in our presentation, and the numbers in one of these data tables are grossly exaggerated…”. Believe it or not, this seemed to earn us major points with the judges. When we mentioned that it was a little error of a minus instead of a plus in the denominator, they gave us a knowing smile as if to say “yup, that happens all the time …”
We walked out of that presentation with a good feeling.
Later that night at the banquet, we had our hopes up. We thought that might be in a position to actually win an award. But we were still shocked when we were called up as the winners of the special award for Technical Excellence. This is an award that could have gone to any team at CQI, from any category. And yet we got it. Wow. We went back to our tables pretty satisfied, and we had the slight feeling that our award was nothing more than a consolation prize. Which means we were really surprised when we called up because we finished in 2nd place overall for Consulting Engineering.
The first and second place teams from each competition get to advance to the national level: the Canadian Engineering Competition. This is huge. Not only did our team place second, but Concordia’s Senior Design team placed 1st. This is apparently the first time Concordia’s ever had teams to send to the CEC, and we’ve got two. I can’t even begin to describe how proud I was to be a part of all of this, and how proud I am of my team.
I will now share with you our two secrets to success.
- We all went to the RnD party at ETS the night before our presentation.
- We demolished a mickey of vodka immediately before our presentation. It took just the right amount of edge off.
However, the CEC takes place from March 6th to 9th … which will be the subject of my next post.
Tags: canada, cec, competition, concordia, cqi, eca, engineering, qec, quebec | 4 comments
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, August 29th 2007 at 5:11pm
This has been the summer to remember. I haven’t been blogging what I’ve been doing, since I’ve spent all my time actually doing it. Work was amazing. Big Blue couldn’t have been better. And I finally moved downtown, so I’ve been partying harder/longer than I ever have before.
Now I’m settling into my new role as VP Academic of the ECA. Today, this meant going throughout the faculty and department offices asking department heads and associate deans, professors and TAs to be the victims of a dunk tank next Thursday. You’d be surprised at how positively most people reacted. :D
Frosh starts next Tuesday. Make sure to be there.
Tags: concordia, eca, events, frosh, school | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, March 12th 2006 at 3:24pm
This year’s Molson Banquet was a huge amount of fun. I ate three servings of roast beef and drank plenty. Guillaume won the award for most outstanding contribution to student life for the CS/SOEN department, and Stuart won the award for most involved graduate student. Dr. Constantinos Constantinides won the faculty-member award, and explained aspect-oriented programming to me without using a logger as an example. I can’t wait to take his course in the fall (Mmmm programming paradigms…).
A huge thanks to Bridget for being my smokin’ hot arm candy for the evening, and to Leilani and Mel for helping shop for a suit, shirt and tie. (But I picked out the shirt all by myself!)
I can’t wait for the pictures to be posted. :)
Tags: ccss, concordia, events, school | 15 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 28th 2006 at 9:15am
I think the best reason to have fire drills is so that people know what the fire alarm sounds like. This is especially important if the fire alarm is not the “standard” obnoxious buzzing (a.k.a. “new school style”) or bell-ringing (a.k.a. “old-school style”) noise. For example, if the fire alarm is indistinguishable from a very loud doorbell accompanied by strobe lights – and all good doorbells have strobe lights, right? – then no one is going know what the hell that sound is, and will continue about their business as usual until a voice comes on a loudspeaker and says “Uhm … this is an emergy situation. Please remain calm and evacuate the building”.
Either way, it’s certainly an interesting way to spend the morning… sitting there, reading my e-mail, hearing this loud doorbell and staring at a strobe light (with the emitter clearly labeled “F I R E”) trying to figure out if I should, well, move. But then the ringing stopped. So I went back to work. And then finally we got the voice message on the loudspeaker.
It’s amazing how many people went straight for the escalators. That’s a pretty silly thing to do. The escalators are jam-packed when people are just getting of out of class let alone when they’re evacuating the whole freakin’ building. I took the sparsely populated stairwell and upon getting out noticed that de Maisonneuve was armed to the gills with fire trucks. Does that mean classes are cancelled for the day? I have a tutorial to give at 10:15. It’ll be weird if no one shows up.
Tags: concordia, news | 10 comments
