Captain's blog: 2002/02

Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2002 at 2/27/2002 11:37:52 PM

Experienced my first TIG workshop today (yay!), on the subject of how to conduct a workshop, at least the first 40 min of it. ( thanx jen, for ... convincing me to come at all :D ) "Learn by doing" was the idea for the first part of the workshop and we experienced the open tech workshop format first hand, i think i went to the "start your biz" and "tech & society" temp group. Food, friends, and amanda's nice mood-setting live guitar performance and met some new people (hi Irfan! Welcome to toronto!) , an overall well organized and professionally done workshop... but I had to leave early to go to the AGO to meet with a fine art history classmate, AGO had re-introduced free admission to the public as of Feb 23 for wednesday evenings so we planned to visit today.

We found the artworks we were looking for. Also visited the new Yes yoko ono exhibit. I think the maze with the transparent walls and the toilet seat in the centre was my favourite piece, I didnt read the description of this piece, just watched. i just watched a girl (another U of T student, also here for the assignment maybe?) bump , tap and eventually navigate to the toilet at the centre - I then applauded from where I stood outside of the maze. It reminded me of those experiences when youre in an unfamiliar large place like a new mall, and you need to go to the washroom and u dont know where it is, no maps but there are washroom signs, so you follow the signs but they seem to simply lead you to further washroom signs in an uncomfortably long series of more signs...just like the girl in the maze constantly seeing the toilet goal, reminded of the goal but not quite getting there... until the very end when either your bladder bursts or you actually found the washroom.

okay,now that im home i got to continue writing that reference letter essay for my thinkquest partner brian to help him get selected to go to the APEC youth science festival..

oh, and almost forgot,

attention: architecture students in any Toronto university!
hmm.. how many do we have here anyway?

There is a TIG workshop in slovakia for the slovakia university architecture students where there needs to be
a) very basic, short self-introductory video clips taken of architecture students here in toronto "hi, my name is___ , I am an architecture student in my __ year at ______ , what i like about my studies is ___ my graduation plans if any, my opinion of the architecture scene in toronto is ___, my favourite building... goodbye! " basic school and architecture related things like that for 5 or less minutes, really easy
b) then there is a live video conferencing aspect , planned for march 14 where you would actually be teleconferencing with the slovakian students, to help answer any questiosn they have and you could ask them any questions you have, etc

kindly contact:
Susheela, the liason/coordinator - person here in Toronto
susheela@takingitglobal.org

Haircut comic strip

Posted Sunday, February 10, 2002 at 2/10/2002 09:30:25 PM

1. I seriously needed a long overdue haircut.	2. So I asked my mom to cut my hair.	3. She had trouble remembering my haircut.
4. So I drew pictures..	5. . .. .	6. .. ..
7. She laughed at my pictures.	8. But she did start to try it...	9. .. so now I have a new haircut.

btw this is also for a computer science course i had to demonstrate i knew how to use tables and then i had these haircut scribbles so i decided to scan them in and make something to go towards marks..

Posted Saturday, February 09, 2002 at 2/9/2002 12:12:17 AM

random thought : It always helps to enlist the help of other brains, even if they dont consider themselves as "brains".
reason: I have to make a web page and comment EVERY line of the code. i could use html comments but then it would get messy, i wanted clean code on the right, my corresponding comments on the left, preferabbly in a nice 2 column grid. Word tables wud involve too much copy-paste .. there HAS to be a better way. Asked a few engineering friends on icq if there were programs they use for this, and i got such a simple but perfect solution - use excel ! (thanks safi). data > Import text file, which will interpret each line of text as a seperate row, so that now i could comment about every line neatly in its adjacent column.

Had a great lunch yesterday, thanx Deb. (helped Deb with her mandarin class) Also present were old classmates marg and meg, who recently transferred from carelton* and will be doing an authentic iroquois dance next week in her anthropology class - wow.

* also at Carleton now was Sydnia, the fearless leader / energetic **, long-time editor of my high school's newspaper the Bulldog , who had just recently last tuesday i think, wrote the feature article in Toronto Star's BOOM! section titled "young, proud and FOB"

** the 4 to 10 page bulldog came out every week plus 4 large newsprint editions through the year. One year there was the (teacher's) strike- but it didnt stop her or the paper, she went ahead and organized us into a new, "underground" paper that ran thru the strike until the strike ended, before returning things to normal.