TopCoder is the world's largest Online Programming Contest organizer. I've been competing there for almost a year and I can only say that it is very very very interisting for anyone trying to gain some algorithmic knowledge or simply for people trying to challenge themselves.

There are non-paid competitions on a weekly basis and multiple competitions a year (Open, Colleiate challange, etc.) with really large amounts of money involved. In each round of a competition each contestant has 75 minutes to solve 3 problems - a easy (250 pts), a medium (500 pts) and a hard (1000 pts). As time goes by the points of each problem decreases.
After this phase, there is a short intermission followed by a challenge phase where each player may see the code other players in the same room wrote a challenge it against the reference implementation. After all this, a series of system tests is ran.

It really is easier to just drop by the geekiest site on the web without slashes or dots :)

After being totally wasted with work in the last couple of weeks I took a week off with some friends to rest and have some fun.
I'm back now and will try to keel the blog updated.