August 31, 2005

Well, work is now all over. Well, I guess except for the training session that we will do on September 10th for students who are coming to work on the project. I was actually crazy enough to spend an extra couple days working for hell of it. It was kind of fun because I got to mess with a bit of css and javascript and implement something new. Doing dev through ssh -X though was a pain in the ass. It took me almost 3 minutes to refresh a browser running on my machine at work. When you are doing css that's a major show stopper, considering how much tinkering it requires. So instead I did most of my dev straight on pyre and then moved it over to the new repository because the installation on pyre is way out of date.

On Tuesday, I got totally fed up with the slopokiness of working through css and I actually came downtown to wrap everything up. Yes, I do know that I am crazy. After work, Keir and I went to play pool at Annex and it was fun. It has certianly been awhile since the last time I came there, but it's a good place and so incredible cheap too. I managed to win one game out of 5 and majorly sucked the other four. I think I am gonna go there more often once the school starts. Gotta keep up the practice.

Friday was my last official day at work and Greg and Karen took us all out for lunch. We went to Pho Hung which was rather fitting since our first day at work we had lunch at Pho Hung as well. So we've come a full circle now. I really enjoyed the pho (pho tai is currently my fav) since I haven't gone for any in quite some time... Probably since the stupid allergy started. Then after lunch Greg and Karen did closing interviews with us, starting with me. They said some really nice things, though perhaps some of them were too nice. But it was a really nice ending for a really nice summer.

On Thursday of last week, I also sent out my database book review to the editor at Dr. Dobb's Journal. By the very next day he replied to me that the review has been accepted and will be published in a forthcoming edition. He said that it will probably appear either in December or January edition of the journal. It doesn't matter to me which edition it goes to, I am quite excited about my first publication nonetheless. It's gonna be really cool to see something I have written printed in an international computer science journal.

The plan for today is to go food shopping for the camping trip. We are all meeting up at costco in hopes that we will be able to either get a day pass or use Fox's father's membership. We have plenty of back ups though with a bunch of grocery stores in the area. Hopefully we'll get all the food we need today and no one will get lost of the way here. The trip is in two days!

August 22, 2005

I had a rather exhausting day today. I am not even quite sure why. It's not like I've had more work then usual, though there were quite enough jobs to do with all the new bugs that keep creeping up on us. What's difficult for me to believe is that this is going to be my last week at work. Even though there are fewer of us now with Lily gone, and the atmosphere doesn't feel quite the same as it was at the beginning of this summer with all this release mode stuff, I still feel like I am going to miss work a lot. I can't quite believe it's over so soon either.

Maybe part of my very grey mood today comes from the bleak weather outside or from 1984 that is far from a cheery summer romance. Perhaps it's just Monday blues, but I was definitely not feeling overjoyous today. In fact when I got home I was pretty tired and dead and just ... blah. I am on the last pages of 1984 and it's a little depressing. They finally broke Winston and though I hoped that somehow they wouldn't, I guess I knew from the time they has caught him, how it will all end. Though of course there are still 10-20 pages in which they may surprise me. I don't like it when everything loses hope, really really don't.

Well, my mood has gone up a bit now. I've had some dinner and a nice warm cup of tea. I even persuaded Andrey to take CSC321 with me in the second term. This way we've got at least one class in common both terms. It will be nice coming to school this year knowing that I will know people in my classes. I will even know some professors since I've already met my CSC324 professor as she was supervising someone's NSERC grant this summer and we were having a 'welcoming' lunch for all students and profs in the beginning of the summer. I want to seize the next few weeks and get all the rest I can. I don't quite feel I want back to school yet, but I have a feeling I will be missing good ol' St.George soon enough.

P.S. I wonder if they'll let me keep getting coffee from the grad lounge.

P.P.S. I know I'll get to keep the CS Lab account (or so I think), but will my card for the printer room still work in the fall? I have a damn nice printing quota on CS Lab.

August 19, 2005

Today was a really rainy day, in fact there was supposed to be a tornado in Toronto, but I didn't see it, even if it came by. It's really hard to keep track of the weather when you spend the whole day in a room without any windows. I sort of wish we would have some windows in the office. It would help a lot in trying to determine if the rain eased off enough to go outside.

Next week is going to be my last week at work. On one hand I am happy to be done, I really want to spend some time relaxing and reading before the school year starts again. On the other hand, it's been a lot of fun working this summer. I get to spend the whole day with people whose company I enjoy, learn interesting stuff, build something useful, joke around. We are almost done the program and now the last days are all about trying to sqash the remaining bugs, though there are a few things I wish we had time to fix.

I spent the last couple days at work trying to make Argon look decent on both Firefox and IE. It was an unimaginable pain to be honest. I fix the way something looks in one browser and it breaks the way the other one displays. We actually made some significant changes to css to get everything working. Well, maybe the changes were not THAT significant, but it sure required a lot of work to get this stuff right. On the plus side, I am a css guru now :P

I am reading 1984 at the moment and I am rather enjoying the book. The craziest thing is how realistic it is for a sci-fi novel. It totally describes USSR as it was during the communist regime and the book really hits home for me, pun not intended. I am about half way through, but it's going very fast. Also it's very reminiscent of Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It's something about the style, the character-centered narrative, the atmosphere. Though I wouldn't be able to say which book I like better. I am considering picking up some more sci-fi classics after this. I've been meaning to read up for a long while. Maybe I'll have time to do so next week. I have Chrysalids sitting on my bookshelf right now and I haven't read them either yet. Though I've read Midwitch Coockoes, so I think I have some idea on what to expect.

Our camping trip has grown in size. We have now 11 people for the two campsites we have booked. There's space for one more, though I am not sure there's going to be anyone else who wants to come. Andrey the Betrayer decided to stay back and avoid the hussle. I am totally looking forward to the trip though. I think it's going to be really fun. Now I just really really hope we are not going to have a rainy forecast for that weekend. Camping is not a whole lot of fun when it's pouring outside.

P.S. Isn't it amazing I actually blogged twice within a week's time? Maybe my new design has attracted me to blog ;).

August 14, 2005

I've got a new layout for my website! I am pretty happy with it too. I had a lot of fun making it. Well, Daly helped me with the graphics of course, otherwise the site would be green and purple ;).

This has been a fairly good month. I've been working quite a bit, but it's pretty fun. Now we are in release mode, so it's getting a bit hectic, but fun nonetheless. We've got Argon running on CDF last week finally. Unfortunately it's a little slow. But still, it's running!

The annoying thing is that it seems I have become alergic to something. Now I have red spots all over my arms and legs. I went to the walk-in clinic at UofT and they pretty much confirmed that it's an allergy, but no one knows what it might be an allergy to, so they just gave me some cream and now I have to make an appointment with a dermatologist to have a look at it. I just want it to go away!

Also after almost a month of reading, I have finally wrote my review for the data modeling book that I've been reading. I am hoping to publish it with Dr. Dobb's Journal. It would be really cool to have a publication, even if it's a small book review.

Right now I am also planning a camping trip to Sibbald Point park with a bunch of people. Hopefully that's gonna be fun. I really enjoyed camping at the beginning of the summer, and it should be even more fun with all the people who are coming. We have half-filled a second campsite already it seems. And at the beginning I thought we will end up with 3-4 people max. Well, it's better this way.. Unless we can't all fit into the vehicles and then it's gonna be a bit of a problem. I hope everything goes well though :). It would be a good end to the summer.