I had been putting off watching Troy for a long time because of a natural suspicion towards hype. With such lowered expectations, it turned out to be not bad at all. Overlooking the occasional bodybuilder posing and terrible acting by Brad Pitt (as in the delivery of “Play your tricks on me, but not on my cousin” – not very easy to mess up, huh?) and the severely single dimensional characters, it is surprisingly passable. The latter is harder to ignore but then, the movie does not claim to be anything out of the ordinary. On the plus side are the prettily choreographed sword fights, the actress who plays Hector’s wife and Eric Bana, who scores with his gentle, brave, careworn, crown prince. Sean Bean’s Odysseus and Orlando Bloom’s Paris deserve mention too. Odysseus’s sad eyes and friendly laughter make Achilles look like a make-believe human being, and his closing lines add a splendor that the movie otherwise lacks. Bloom, whose dialogue delivery is severely limited to a single intonation, expression and gesture, has played the despicable role of Paris without forcing the audience to loathe him, thanks to the smart scripting of the weak-spirited, dumb, young Paris as a plain, spoilt prince.
The only time when the dialogue took an abrupt turn and became memorable was when Achilles says “The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.”.
On the whole, I wrote a review because of this – the only aspect of the movie that impressed me – the hints that seem to suggest, “This is what haunted these men; these men who lived, loved and died for glory. This is how and why the myths were born. Paris was “spirited away” by Aphrodite because he ran from the battlefield. Achilles’ is physically invulnerable everywhere except at his heel because, he was so damned skilled and marvelous as a warrior, threw spears and wielded swords like a god, and died when a poisoned arrow pierced his heel, when he was not engaged in battle. Achilles’ mother was a nymph because, she was rumored to be a goddess when he was alive.” And so on.

I kept away from my blog for so long that I forgot the password. :|

I thought of writing reviews after the topcoder matches, whenever I felt like it. The reviews would be personal and may not be of use to you at all. I promise to warn you with the title of such posts.
The 250 was simple but KawigiEdit slowed me down. The return type was double and the answers that my program was producing in KawigiEdit were nowhere close to the actual answers. I do not mean the precision. They were as different as “0.6666″ and “0.3333″. Weird. Luckily, before attempting to debug, I tested the program in the arena and it turned out to be right. It wasn’t a terribly slow submission.
The 500 is why I wanted to write the post. I actually GOT the solution DURING the match. That I horribly messed up the implementation like an imbecile is another story that sadly doesn’t bother me at all. The problem statement is here.
My approach:
Make a graph with the buyers as the vertices. An edge exists between two vertices if they have at least one stamp in common. Since the maximum number of buyers that can want a stamp is two, the maximum degree of every vertex is also two. Hence, the graph is made of components such that every component is either just a path or just a cycle. The maximum total price of a set of vertices in a component such that no two of those vertices are adjacent, say T(i) for component i, can be calculated by dynamic programming, for every component. The answer is the sum of T(i) of all the components.
How I wish I had coded this right! It is not everyday that you get sparks like this one during a contest.
Sigh.

How does one deal with one’s peculiarities?
For instance, suppose that you are talking to someone who has just hijacked the conversation and has been explaining for the past hour about how his wife, his colleagues, the shopkeeper and the rest of the world are conspiring against him. Even as he is inculpating half a dozen of your common acquaintances, you see him take shape as one of the non-entities in the book that you might write. You strive to listen to him and make the appropriate sounds but all you see is his first scene, with him telling his friends in a passionate voice that his brother, who is an overbearing ass and who stole his girl (and who is incidentally your hero), had just fired him because he couldn’t type fast enough. You see how his shifty eyes never waver when he feels righteous or when he talks about his brother. You debate between the choices of adjectives and sentences spring to your head. You craft him carefully, highlighting his essential weakness but without creating in him an antithesis of your hero, giving them both straight noses, stubborn chins…

Unfortunately, the number of non-entities in my books seems to be inordinately high. How DO you deal with this?

No matter with what ingenious ways I try to reform myself, it always comes back to the same thing. Always. Books. Never mind, the post is not a rant.
I don’t relate to movies. I watch them fully only when the alternative is worse; impossible for such a scenario to recur often. Also, the number of movies I’ve watched for half an hour is many so you can’t say I don’t try.
Since I keep up with the dullest books to the end and seldom commit the offence of giving it up unless out of disgust, I do not believe it is boredom that drives me away from movies. I suppose it is that the movie usually ends before I get to know the people in it. I prefer the slowest of books to any movie I’ve seen, as long as I remember a guy from the book after a year.
So what’s this bookish movie I saw?
It just had two people talking throughout, literally, and I’m sure I’ll remember the girl after a year. It felt just like I’d read another lovely book. :)
I must be missing some key aspect in movies. Don’t tell me in the comments – I don’t care to learn. I have enough on my plate already, for whatever time I have.

30 days to GRE:
“A month to GRE! Ah, only fifty word lists. I can do much more than two per day! Gonna finish them all and spend the last week only in revising. The last weekend alone ought to do for Quants.”

15 days to GRE:
“I DON’T wanna work! I MUST start preparing soon. The most-frequent-words list alone might be good enough.”

10 days to GRE:
“Alright, suppose I do five word lists a day and spend the last day on Quants… She says nobody can get below 1200. Hmmm…”

7 days to GRE:
“Goddamn these cycle tests. Forty more to go. Okay, I’ll mug till 9, study for CT till 12, get up at 5.15… Never mind. I’ll play AOE and postpone GRE. By an year.”

There’s something very funny about paying a clueless twenty year old so much money. At least, my father says so.

I’m back in the land of dusty keyboards and tiny monitor screens. Two months is a big stretch of time. I entered the lab I’ve entered a thousand times before and realized with a stab that I find it more of a make-believe than anything else. It is already hard to imagine the blazing momentum of the place I left two days ago.

Manas: “Trying to make the car run on water :P”
Suren: “My laptop laughs at me “intel inside , mental outside :D”"
Hari: “sunday sanda potta monday mandaya podanum”
Lavanya: “koyembedu market la meenu vaaanginaa scene”
Veena: “Snow on Mars”
Me: “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”

All at a time!