Sense and Sensibility

Just at the time when I realized that I would surely lose in a competition with prize $150, my desktop crashed with my paper draft in it. Luckily, that’s a very simple draft and I have the backup in my laptop. But it took me about 1 hour to restore the system and applications. 

My original planwas to finish at least two sections of my paper, now I have to make it one and try to catch up tomorrow - I hate to leave things to tomorrow, always.

What a bad day! But whatever, I have somebody to chat with and she is good at comforting.

And, I have a good song to listen : 

Lyrics(part):

Sometimes the system goes on the blink
And the whole thing turns out wrong
You might not make it back and you know
That you could be well oh that strong
And I’m not wrong (ahhh…)

So where is the passion when you need it the most
Oh, you and I
You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost

‘Cause you had a bad day
You’re taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don’t know
You tell me don’t lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day
You’ve seen what you like
And how does it feel for one more time
You had a bad day

TopCoder members are hungry now, especially the active developers and designers. They want more competitions, they want more projects and ofcoz, they want higher prize(for now, the prize is low like we came back to the iceage - same as when it was 2000). Financial crisis makes companies keep their money in the safe box. No one wants to risk doing innovation, maybe except Google. No projects, no business, no competitions, no money. This simply is the chain of effection.

Yesterday I saw an interesting post on the TopCoder forum. It talked about the future direction of TopCoder - Cheap Coder. That’s a different point of view. When the other members were simply talking about whether or not the prize of competitions could be raised back when the crisis passed(when?), he throw away the affect of the global financial crisis and tried to prove TopCoder is actually using the crisis to change its business style.

This is typical Conspiracism - the member who posted that topic even used a MaJia(second id).

So what’s the situation here? And is this the worst time? I do have some opinions to share, however, it’s too busy for me these days (personal and researching). I’d like to talk about this later, when I have some more time and that thing passes(Hopefully next Monday).