Imagine Cup

Lets try this again

Mike Flasko — Tue, 10 May 2005 00:49:00 GMT

Had some issues when I posted this the first time - user error probably :). Anyways, looks like my buddy Mack is having a rough go of it with Imagine Cup this year as he explains. He is encouraging your feedback.

Picture time

Mike Flasko — Sat, 17 Jul 2004 03:46:00 GMT

I have started to post my pictures from Brazil at www.flasko.com/ngallery. Not all the pictures have been labelled yet. There are still more pictures to come so check back in a week or so.

All I can say is WOW!

Mike Flasko — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 19:12:00 GMT

So I am back in Victoria now and will be heading to Seattle tomorrow morning to start work again. It is nice to be back but I could have definately stayed longer in Brazil. The Imagine Cup was a great event. The following is my top ten reasons why someone should try to make it to the worldwide finals next year:

10. A free trip to Japan would rock

9. The event is very well organized and every detail was taken care of for you. Well, almost every detail - but that is what feedback forms are for :)

8. You meet a ton of people from all over the world with common interests

7. Great parties

6. Sight seeing rocks: we went on a safari, saw the falls in foz de igacu, went to a bird park, resort hotels (simply amazing hotels), got to attend PDC/tech ed, sight seeing in sau paulo and more

5. The food is really good and free: Brazilian BBQs are the best and I'm sure Janpense food would be equally interesting

4. You get a chance to learn from very talented students from around the world

3. You get to meet and network with many bright minds from industry and academia

2. Have I meantioned the trip is free :)

1. It inspires you to get your ass in gear and make cool software, business plans (next year), etc.

In addition to the imagine cup and all the cool stuff we got to do (resort hotels, safari, city tours, parties, etc) with them, my team stayed an extra few days and went to Rio. Rio has some of the best beaches and scenary I have ever seen. The national park, copacabana beach, outdoor markets and hang gliding has amazing. Yes, thats right, we went hang gliding in Rio. We jumped from about 650ft and soared over the downtown and landed on the beach below:). I hope to post pictures for the entire trip to brazil on my photo gallery very soon. Some need to be developed and scanned so that may take some time.

Its all done....almost

Mike Flasko — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 10:10:00 GMT

Today is the last day our team has to present our application. We have completed all the competition portions of the contest and todays presentations are just for interest sake @ PDC. Unfortunately, our team did not make the top 12 , however, we had fun and thought we did the best job we could. There was many great applications and we have learned a lot about the style of applications judges rank well at this competition. Hopefully, we will make it back next year so we can compete in Japan (next years worldwide finals site) .

I have to say I was surprised by the winning applications and short films. Many of the most innovative applications did not make it into the top 3 (check out Belgiums entry - it rocks). Its lunch time and my stomach is cutting this short. I will be blogging more on the competition once I can find internet access again.

Brazil rocks!

Mike Flasko — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 14:22:00 GMT

I cannot begin to describe how awesome our trip has been so far. We have been to 2 hotels so far - one in sau paulo and another in foz de iguaca. The first one had outdoor basketball, tennis courts, table tennis and pools in addition to 2 weight rooms and an awesome hospitality room. The service there was amazing. I can't even describe how much pampering they do to you at that place.

As I meantioned above, we are now in Foz De Igauca and this morning we went on a tour of their 250+ water falls - very amazing! Our hotel is a huge resort ... it has some of the following amenities:

- basketball, climbing wall, tennis, jogging trails, pools, weight room, amazing food, little zoo with exotic birds, water park, internet, sauna, and cheap massages.

Yesterday I had a 45min massage for about 15$CDN. Wow was it awesome!!!

I have to go and prepare for my “lightening round” presentation in one hour so this blog must be cut short :(.

My bags aren't packed but it's time to go

Mike Flasko — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 02:19:00 GMT

As usual I am packing and getting all my stuff together at the last minute :). It is 12:13AM and I leave for Brazil this afternoon, however, I have yet to finish packing, do laundry and get all my appropriate paper work together. Why I am blogging and not getting ready do you ask? Well, the answer to that is I got sidetracked building a tablet pc application and I figured while I'm on here I may as well post one more time before we leave. I'm sure I will be quite tired tomorrow, however, that is nothing starbucks can't fix. So keep your fingers crossed for our team to place well and maybe we will come home with some deeper pockets.

IC worlds are coming soon

Mike Flasko — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 20:40:00 GMT

wow it has been a long time since I last blogged. I blame that on working stupidly long days and weekends for the past while. I am currently doing a research project which seems to eat time like a fat man at the sizzler. Anyways, the world competition is quickly approaching and our team is doing their best to add the last bells and wistles to our application. I recently finished adding some weather monitoring services and mappoint features to the application and now its testing time. We have a solid week or so before we leave so that will give us enough time to tie up all the loose ends.

I have now turned my focus to marketing our application to the judges at the world competition. I am told the judges will have a very technical background. Based on the metrics outlined for scoring, I think our application should stand up well. However, we only have about 15 minutes in front of each judge so we have to decide what slant we want to put on our presentation. Any ideas what we should emphasize? the broad range of technologies we use, the technical design, how the application meets a real world problem and solves it well, ????? We will obviously work to hit on as many points as we can in our presentation to the judges, however, everyone usually has one or two things that sticks out the most about a memory. What do we want the judges to parallel with game.set.match. in their minds - technology, practicality, usability, SOA architecture ??? Basically, I think we need to determine what will help us get our application to stand out. Will other groups blow us away with implementation or will their general idaes be better or more marketable? We need to pick the battles we have a good shot at being the best at and do an excellent job of selling ourselves in those areas. Noone ever remembers the second best of anything, right?

Planning ahead ... if only

Mike Flasko — Mon, 31 May 2004 01:18:00 GMT

My big plan to add some cool features to our Imagine Cup entry using MapPoint was foiled tonight. Unfortunately, you cannot get a test account from Mappoint immediatly. Instead, you have to wait up to 2 business days for your account information. So I guess I will have to find some time down the road to add those features. For now a couple custom controls for the win forms app will have to do.

Today I discovered there is a free hotspot (wireless internet access) at the starbucks in the mall near my house. This discovery is both good and bad. On the good side, it gives me a place to sit and enjoy a frappacino while playing on the internet, however, starbucks drinks are addicting and expensive - my wallet my suffer as a result. Well I guess I should stop bloggin and get to coding some features for our Imagine Cup entry....

Sink or Swim

Mike Flasko — Sat, 29 May 2004 01:11:00 GMT

My MS experience so far has been very positive. No other internship/coop position has forced me to use some much of the skills I have learned in school and then some. I can't really detail my project however, I have had to learn everything from low level miniport drivers to APIs and everything in between. So far I have had my head in a book at every space moment and I still have a ton to learn. Some of the stuff I'm doing is at a lower level than I like, but it is still valuable to know so all in all it is not a bad experience. The benefit to being on a project that has such a broad scope is that I get to meet everyone from a lot of different teams and make many great contacts and friends. For example, today I met Anthony Jones because I had a 1-1 meeting with him to get some data about WinSock 2. Anthony is the author of the flagship winsock book titled “Network Programming for Microsoft Windows” version 2. I forgot to get him to sign my book today though :(. Needless to say work and reading has taken up a lot of my time lately, however, this is a long weekend in the states so I have decided to devote one day to implementing some Imange Cup features for the world competition. I think if we get all our planned changes done for the worlds we will have a good shot because our app utilizes a broad range of technologies and solves a real problem. We made sure we didn't just build something cool and then go look for a problem for it to solve. The world is populated with too much of that type of software already ;).

New toy

Mike Flasko — Fri, 21 May 2004 02:27:00 GMT

As a perk from my last job with MS Canada I received a pocket pc yesterday. To be specific it is a Ipaq hp pocket pc h1935. I have yet to have time to really play with it but I'm sure I will enjoy it. Now all I have to do is jazz up the mobile part of my imagine cup entry to take advatage of the richer UI supported by the pocket pc!

This next bit really has nothing to do with technology, but I thought I would share it anyways. Since I am going to Brazil for Imagine cup I have been reading up on it. It turns out there are still pirates in the waters around Brazil. You can monitor all the Pirate sightings at this website: www.iccwbo.org/ccs/imb_piracy/weekly_piracy_report.asp

Enjoy !