Winter School of Programming, Day 7

The last day of our stay began differently from the others: this time, after waking up, my teeth weren't chattering — it had grown warmer outside after all, and the heating hadn't been turned down yet. First thing in the morning we packed up and headed to the train station, where we left our things in the luggage storage. After that we set off for the book market.

Heading there, I already had a goal I was aiming for, thanks to a tip given to me by Dimonas. In short, after arriving at the market, I began my hunt for TLK blanks.

My judgment had let me down a little back then, and as a result of nearly an hour-long hunt, I managed to "bag" 50 CD-Rs, 20 DVD-Rs, and one disc with characters from the cartoon that knocked the Lion King off the top of the highest-grossing animated films in the US, not adjusted for inflation. I had to take that one disc because in one place there were only 9 of the blanks I was after. Of course, that wasn't the limit, but I still had some restraint left, and besides, the disc count came out to a round number if you counted the 30 DVDs I had at home. Still, I ended up lugging a sizeable number of discs around the city for the rest of the day.

There I also bought four interesting notebooks with a leopard and tigers, whose spots and stripes are made from fabric and have a three-dimensional feel. The covers are very original and beautiful: I'd never seen anything like them before, and now I'm wondering what to do with them — it feels a shame to actually write in them.

After the market we walked toward KhNURE, where the closing ceremony was to take place. On the way we stopped by the zoo and learned that it was open until 16:00, which meant there was a fair chance of not making it in.

The closing ceremony in the assembly hall began almost on time; the vice-rector spoke, and then a representative of one of the sponsors gave a nearly hour-long lecture, during which some interesting figures and data about the work of programmers were mentioned. But the main goal of the lecture was to get the audience to remember a certain percentage and a date when they should visit the sponsor's website. An interesting thought was voiced: that you shouldn't work for outsourcing companies, because there they greatly enlarge your hands and correspondingly shrink your brain; instead you should work for companies that make their own products. In short, the point was also stressed that you should strive for first place in the world, not in the country, and try to leave something important behind.

The speaker also remarked that the license agreement of a program holding a leading position states that all disputes are to be settled in the district court of Kherson. He had told this story before, but back then there were no representatives from the city in the halls. This time we informed him that the city's population is over 300 thousand and that there aren't 1 but about 10 trolleybus routes.

After the sponsor's talk, the awards ceremony began. For the largest number of problems solved afterward, the award went to the second team, KNU DDRAGONS, which had taken second place in the main round. First and third place went to the teams Pointless and Scorpions respectively, which had led throughout all the days of the competition. For solving the sponsor's problem, the award went to the team that took first place. All participants of the competition received a book whose translator was the sponsor who had spoken, as well as a collection of the competition's problems with the authors' solutions, a certificate of participation, and discs with the problems, solutions, programs, tests, and video recordings of all the lectures and the opening.

It's worth noting that there was a mix-up with our team's award. Since the trainers were also on the list, when reading from it they only read out the names of the universities and didn't pay attention to what came next in the line. So we were called up for our award twice, but the second time they took back the books that had been handed over the first time — though they left the discs. After the trainer came up at the end of the ceremony, we ended up with a third set of discs as well.

After all that we quickly headed toward the zoo, and even though it was a quarter past three, I went into the zoo on my own. The carnivore house turned out to be closed, and it was only possible to watch the animals that were outside. All in all, in forty minutes I managed to take about four hundred photos of three leopards, a tigress, and a lioness that were outdoors at the time. I think a few percent of the shots I took will turn out well. Once I'm back, I'll post the successful pictures in the corresponding section of my photo gallery. A shame I couldn't see the rest of the lions inside, and the tigress was nervous and growled accordingly.

Then the whole team sat for a while in a café, and afterward we set off on a walk through the evening city, stopping along the way into interesting shops to look at the goods and warm up. High in the sky was a full moon, slightly veiled by thin clouds, and we ended our wanderings with a pizza dinner at a buffet in the park near Freedom Square, just like during our last visit to Kharkiv.

And then we headed via the metro to the railway station, which for us can be considered the end of the first Winter School of Programming held in Ukraine.

Edited 22.02.2008