Today has been a very long day. I was up at 7:30 this morning in order to help with the regional ACM programming competition. Jess and I showed up and helped work registration, which involved passing out t-shirts, goody bags, and making sure everyone was registered with a name tag. We then proctored the practice competition, went to lunch with everybody, and came back to help proctor the real competition. We had teams from various colleges around the state as well as from Indiana; three computer labs were filled with the different teams. Jess got stuck in one lab and I was in another; for the most part, it was pretty boring, since all we had to do was wait for one of the contestants to have trouble that we could help them with. I left shortly after lunch, but Jess was going to stay till the end of the competition at 6:30 p.m., so my guess is that today has been even longer for her!

After leaving there, I got together with my project partner from my databases class. He was having trouble getting Ruby and MySQL to work together on his Mac, so I went to his place to see what I could do. It turned out that I couldn’t do much: after spending over three hours banging around at things, we still couldn’t get require 'mysql' to work in irb. There were some search results that turned up on Google that made me think the Ruby/MySQL connector doesn’t work yet in Leopard, which is what he’s running. He’s going to try and get PostgreSQL to work, but if that doesn’t work either, we’re just going to do our testing on 3till7.net. I tested irb earlier and things work fine here.