First Day of Exams!

Like many other students in similar situations, I stayed up half the night last night to prepare for my first exam - physical chemistry lab, as it happens.

As I went out the door this morning, the sky was patchy with blue and grey, snowflakes fell softly with overenthusiastic gusts of wind, and...there was more snow on the ground than the door can clear. Lacking a shovel, this is not good.

I'd take a picture but I had no camera with me then, and the snow is partially cleared off by now. Fortunately, it wasn't a snow day today...

The exam itself went fairly well, I think, not that I'd know for certain until the final is marked. But my spectroscopy midterm score (which I checked online today) was remarkably low for some reason - I must see the exam to see why...

Anyway, Putnam was Saturday! As for why was I writing a 6-hour-long, brain-drainig math contest right before finals...I don't know. Being too stubborn to admit that I will get zeros every time I write the Putnam, I guess. Alternatively, there was free pizza. Free pizza is good.

To people who wrote it: how'd it go? I couldn't bash parts of A1 properly (so I didn't have all the solutions), but I think B1 was surprisingly straightforward to do. Of course I probably missed some major point and end up with a 0 anyway.

If I recall correctly, B1 states that:

Given any polynomial f with strictly positive coefficients, show that f(n) | f(f(n) + 1) iff n = 1, where n is a positive integer.

Aside: I just received an email that, verbatim, contained the following:
"i need to bug you again...there are two questions about cemistry that maybe you can help me with. they are listed below...if possible can you plz show me how to do the questions...and like thts the answer and stuff....thanks in advance"

I won't bother putting all the [sic]'s that should go in there. *Sigh*. And the problems are not difficult, either. Why am I stuck with spoonfeeding fellow students? Why? The sad thing is...I'll actually do it. Spoonfeeding and all. Nicely typed up, too. Altruism, or just being too soft?

[Edited]
I thought I'd never say this, but ... I need to take applied/engineering Calculus III. Someone asked me for help today, and I realize that I have not a single clue how to do those applied problems. I'd like to say that the problems are not "important"...but that's not true. Cursed applied problems...what's wrong with theory? Theory is good.