June 27, 2005

I am in a sort of strange mood today, I was feeling rather restless and unbalanced for most of the day and finally got rid of it by going for a jog after I got home. I wish I knew what makes me feel like that, but everything goes a little bit wrong, everything I say is a bit off, and I end up feeling all edgy and out of water. This happens to me every few months and I don't like it a whole lot. Though I supposed I could make a point about it keeping my life interesting.

There are only two days left till the demo and I really really hope we can get things done in time. I am the main talker during the demo, showing off the system and it's making me a bit nervous. I am not all that great at making presentations though at least I don't have any sort of fear of public speaking. I just hope nothing breaks down, so I don't have to come with some sort of cute comments about it. Those sort of things turn out terribly wrong when I try to say them. Well, I'll keep my fingers crossed I guess.

In the past few days, Greg brought us a photocopied book that consists of a bunch of articles on all sort of computer related topics. It ended up being quite interesting and I've gone through quite a few of them. It seems like a pretty good collection, ask me if you'd like to see it. An article that really stood out for me there, was the one talking about the copyright law on the Internet and how ISPs have to take down material that is challenged by anyone as breaking the copyright laws. Very very dumb indeed. I won't even start on the whole lawsuit that they were having to make ISPs disclose personal information about their customers. I've gotta say it ain't looking good. If they don't want people to have pirated media, make it affordable. Not everyone can afford to pay $20-30 for a DVD, so I don't see how they can expect people to stop sharing. I suppose it's a moot point.

I also had an interesting birthday on the past weekend. To make the story short there was poker, pool, booze, and a lot of computer science students. Both friday and saturday. Way to go 20th birthday. Now I am terribly old and must buy anti-wrinkle cream. Eek.

Well, I think it's time for me to go play Minesweeper Flags with Patrick. Also comment! I like comments! Lots of comments! :)

June 4, 2005

Wow, it looks like I can only get myself to update the blog once a month. I really wanted to do an update after I start working, but then I got all busy and didn't feel like it, so I couldn't bring myself to do it. Well, I guess I'll have to quickly go through what has happened this month.

Starting with the latest news, yesterday I went to Aurelia's concert at Lambton's house. It was interesting to hear her sing again and I thought the performance was really good, definitely better than the last one. Aurelia's mother gave me a ride from Jane, so we all came there a little early so that CJ could set up and for the sound check. CJ is Aurelia's piano accomanist. They did quite a few songs together at the beginning of the performance, I do think Hallelujah was the best of them. These sort of places always make me wish I had some musical talent. In the second part of the concert Aurelia sang with Sandie, her guitar accompanist and I really liked some of the songs there as well, though I did like the first part somewhat better. I am also surprised at that because I tend to like guitar more than piano music, but I wasn't really too impressed with Sandie... perhaps it's also the sort of songs they were performing that I didn't respond to that well. There was also a crazy talkative guy who kept talking and talking to me and I had a really hard time following all the stuff he said or answering his questions. Fortunately he went away pretty soon and spent the rest of his efforts talking to other people.

The big thing for the past month was of course my new job. I am really enjoying working there so far. There are five of us altogether working on a project code-named Argon that will be used by computer science instructors to manage student projects in their courses. The other people on my team are Bin, Keir, Lilian, and Sukhmeet. Both Lilian and Sukhmeet just finished third year at UTM, Bin finished the 3rd of his second degree at UofT and Keir just graduated from engineering. I'd say we have a pretty diverse group there, but we all get along and it's a lot of fun working together. Greg got computers for us and we all have nice LCD screens at work. I'd really like to have an LCD screen at home, they are just so nice. We work in BA5205 where we have a few desks set up for us. It's a fairly big room where some grad students have their spaces too, but we seem to have driven many of them out by talking to each other all day long. Now I have a CS Lab account and we all go to grad lounge to drink coffee which is only 25c there. I have really increased my coffee consumption since I started working there.

Quite a few interesting things happened in the past month. One of them is that I went camping with Daly. He bought me a tent as an early birthday present and it's a pretty nice tent. I like getting presents like that. Daly's friend recommended us a campsite, called Pinery, which is at Lake Huron. It was quite a bit of a drive to get there, but the place was quite nice. One thing I didn't like is that the campsites are so close to each other, so that everyone is in full view of everyone else. It would have been nice if there were more trees around each campsite. We arrived there on Friday evening and spent the rest of the evening setting up, buying firewood, making fire and cooking. There's definitely nothing better than food cooked on an open fire. We ate two packs of Mammoth burgers throughout the weekend... I never liked the burgers as much as there. We also went canoeing there as they had canoes for rent and Daly taught me how to navigate it. Next day my arms hurt quite a bit and I found that there are places on my arm I didn't even suspect to have muscle. I also got quite sunburned while we canoed and it's quite visible now that my skin decided to come off. We also went for walks on the beach and watched the end of the sunset there. To sum up, I want to go camping again and soon!

There was also quite a bit of poker and lunches and hanging out with various people. It was good month :).