Victor

Suddenly I have this idea of blogging about the people around me. I don't know yet who I will write about, what I will write about them. However, I've got in my mind a handful of people, and most of the stuff will just be my random thoughts. This time it will be about Victor, one of the teammates in my ACM team.

Victor is a Singaporean. 2 years older than me. He is a math student. His favorite sentence is "It's crap only". Whenever I ask him what he is doing, he'd say, "nothing, it's crap only". "What is this module XXXX?" "Nothing. It's very boring. Crap only." He hates Java so much that every time we need Java (for BigInteger), he would murmurs "I hate Java" the start to the very end.

There is nothing special to say about his looking: a small guy, looking OK handsome. Not that kind of handsome that all girls will fall in love in the first sight, but I wouldn't say he looks bad in any way. He's the kind and trustworthy guy, would follow rules, instructions, etc. very carefully and dutifully. He's the kind of guy who can listen to people. In my team, while I can go crazy & childlike playful sometimes, Adhiraj might go detached and stubborn, he's clearly the one that do things the most careful and reliable.

That bring me to the next point. Though he is the math major, in a team of 2 IOI medalists, he is actually the main coder of the team. Many times I will find solutions for problems, explain to him, then he will handle the  coding part. It works quite well for us because, while I'm generally better at solving (hard) problems, he produces more reliable code. The funny part is that though he's a math major, I'm the one that usually solve math problems. I usually joke him, "man, you sucks at math."

I actually asked him several times why he doesn't major in CS. It makes sense when he always take few CS modules every semester, has scored well, tutored several CS modules. He has joined ACM the third year and he is very passionate about it. In fact, he is the most passionate about ACM in our team. He has given up his SEP to Canada to take the chance of joining ACM with us this year. His answer was that he didn't want to do the boring software engineering stuff a whole life.

Still, he has done quite a lot of programming. He has solved over 1000 problems in UVA live archive, a website that allows users to submit solutions to its huge problem banks. I must say he's very diligent. For now he is trying to solve past ACM regional contests to prepare for our competition.

This semester, I randomly met with some of his other friends -- friends outside the ACM circle. And I realized that despite what I thought, I knew very little about him (outside ACM). For example, I didn't know that he went jogging everyday (i guess it might be inspired by a book I sent him =P), has joined RUNNUS for 1 event at least (Well, I didn't expect him to join any CCA). I also didn't know much about his friends, and other stuff. I guess I still have some time to learn more about him.

I've ran out of thoughts already. Anyway, I'd say so far I've quite enjoyed being his companion.