THE END TO THE WEEKEND

So we’re upon the start of a new week. I had a really boring weekend. On Friday, I totally did nothing. I got home around 4pm. Felt kinda tired, so I just sat in my room. I taped a few shows during the week, so I started watching those. I had an episode of Ed, The West Wing, and ER on tape.

Three hours later, I felt like I had sampled most of the NBC’s season premiere week. A few of my fellow residents were supposed to go to KFC for dinner, but none of them were around, so I went to the Village McDonald’s instead.

I came back, and then watched TV and played video games I think. I know I didn’t do any drinking.

On Saturday, I did work basically during the entire day. For dinner, I went to the One More Sushi place at the village. It was nice. If you’re as old as me, you’d never think they could put a nice sushi place like that on campus. After dinner, I worked until 12am or so. Here’s where it got bad. Around 2am I decided to play Team Fortress Classic. I didn’t stop until nearly 5am. That was stupid.

On Sunday, I got up at 12pm!!! Stupid, stupid, stupid. I got dressed, showered, ate breakfast, and got my ass downtown to get some pants hemmed. I also bought a pair of jeans I didn’t need, but oh well. To top if off, I bought the Monsters, Inc. DVD, but really, who can fault me for that? It’s a good disc. My only disappointment was not finding a good picture or poster of Yoda from Clones. I want to put it on my door. I looked everywhere. Every book store, toy department, and even Golden Age Collectibles on Granville. When Clones came out, everyone had all sorts of promo material. Where is that stuff now?

Tonight, I just studied. At 10pm, I stopped for Band of Brothers, which is such an excellent mini-series. A fantastic combo of history and entertainment.

Well, tomorrow I’m getting my haircut before class. It’s going to feel weird, because I usually don’t do errands before class. Back in the day, I was usually in class from 8:30am to 5:30pm (with maybe a one hour break), so it’s odd to have this time on my hands.

I have an hour before I go to bed, so I’m gonna relax, take care kids.

INTERESTING STATS

Well, I’ve done nothing all morning, and I should be working right now, but I decided to post a few interesting stats about my website. I downloaded a program last night that distills all my site stats into a readable, coherent report. I’ll going to release the stats in little chunks, so it’s not so overwhelming. Here are the overall stats for my site since March 5, 2002:

Web Server Statistics for erwintang.com

General Summary

(Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending 28-Sep-2002 01:47).

Successful requests: 95,026 (4,763)

Average successful requests per day: 460 (680)

Successful requests for pages: 28,345 (1,179)

Average successful requests for pages per day: 137 (168)

Failed requests: 472 (0)

Redirected requests: 1,238 (30)

Distinct files requested: 1,163 (616)

Distinct hosts served: 3,143 (223)

Data transferred: 43.622 gigabytes (2.410 gigabytes)

Average data transferred per day: 216.509 megabytes (352.642 megabytes)

I’M SICK, OR NOT…

I woke up this morning feel fine, except for a slight tickle in my throat, I later found out I had swallowed a sock during the night…. but seriously, it’s the slightest of sore throats. If you’ve ever seen Osmosis Jones, I can just imagine my body’s defense forces are now attempting to fight what alien invaders are in my body.

I think it could go either way now. I could either get better and the sore throat will go away or, this could turn really nasty and my throat will hurt more, I’ll get the chills, my nose will start to run, and my head will hurt like a mofo.

Being sick in school sucks major wang, so let’s hope it’s nothing.

TIRED

I went to bed around 2:30am to get up at 9am, well at least that was the plan. I couldn’t fall asleep unfortunately. It must have been past 3am, probably closer to 4am until I did actually fall asleep. To make matters worse, I woke up at 8am for some stupid reason. I fell back to sleep until my alarm woke me up at 9am.

It didn’t feel that great, but I’ve had worse mornings. I managed to get to my lecture on time, even ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. Good old Kyle Lepage. He told me he’s gonna go do his Ph.D after his M.Sc. Wow, that took me by surprise. He said he’s really enjoying his work though, and you know what, that’s really the only thing we should be striving for. Good for Kyle.

I usually fall asleep at the first lecture on Fridays, but I was awake for the whole two hours. I even made two comments in class. They didn’t make much sense, and the whole class thinks I’m a tool now, but at least I participated.

After class, I’m usually lazy, and I like to go straight back to my room, eat lunch, and nap, but I had some things to do today. Firstly, I went to the clinic to get my stitches removed. They told me to come back at 2:15pm. I then went to the Old General Services Administration building to pick up my keys to the CEME building. I had not been in that building for about ten years. That’s where people used to pick up their scholarship cheques. After first year, the new Brock Hall opened up, and student services were moved there. Anyways, I picked up my keys and now I have access to the Civil/Mechanical building and the Industrial Automation Lab.

After that I came back to my room, made a few calls, checked my mail, and then went off to the clinic. It took less than five minutes to remove my stitches, and the doctor told me I couldn’t ride a bike or play hockey for about two weeks. My thumb has been under wraps basically for about a week, so I was fascinated at what it looked like now. The whole area had healed nicely, but the skin was really dry. The old skin which had been sliced open had become dead and dry. The whole thing looked like it was geological fault on a map.

Next, I rushed off to class. Now, I know I shouldn’t have done this, but the skin was so dry and it looked dead, I kinda picked it off. Yeah, it sounds gross, but I did. I’m glad I did because the new skin underneath was flawless. You couldn’t even tell I had suffered at a cut. I was so sure I was gonna get a scar outta this, but this thing healed so well, nary a spot will remain.

Holy crap, I’m rambling on right now. Anyways, I’ll wrap this up with this last item. I sneezed tonight. I shouldn’t have done that. Right after I did that, I started feeling really tired and not so well. This might signal an onset of a cold. I’ve experienced this before. It could go either way. I could wake up tomorrow and be totally fine, or, I could wake up and know immediately bad times are ahead.

Being sick sucks.

RANDOM THOUGHTS BEFORE BED

Hmmm… I just thought of a great new idea for a post. It’ll take some time to get it ready, but I’m looking forward to it.

Anyways, tonight I decided I really need a new lamp for my room. Kristina and I went over to Lindsay’s room to watch the season premiere for Friends. I’ve lived here for three weeks, but I’ve never been in a girl’s room before. It was breathtaking. Firstly, the place was brightly lit. Stupidly, I was in there for 30 minutes but for the life of me, I cannot remember what was giving off so much light. Second, the place smelled much nicer than mine. Lindsay had scented candles arranged around the room. Not that my room stinks, I even have an air freshener, but her’s smelled better than mine. Though, she’s a girl, and by default any girl smells better than a guy. Thirdly, the place was much neater than mine. My place is a sty compared to hers. I have like empty beverage containers on my desk, my bed is unmade, and papers are everywhere. It’s a good thing no one comes into my room.

Another thing I noticed is that I’m not making efficient use of my time. I stopped working tonight at 11:30pm basically. It’s now about 1:30am. If I were totally efficient, I’d woulda crawled into bed around 12am, slept until 8am and then got up and continued to work. Instead, I watched Letterman, ate some left over pasta, took a shower, and made this post. However, a chap here by the name of Nicholas Clarke, told me an interesting thing. Nic is here studying history. He told me one day, one of his history profs said this to the class, “It’s all fine and dandy to be studying history, but remember we’re living in the present”. So yes, there’s more to life than just studying. Though how much more is something everyone needs to discover.

Tomorrow, a few of us are going to KFC for dinner. I’m excited. It’s been weeks since I’ve had fried chicken. Also, if I have time, I’m going to get my stiches removed. I’m going to try to resist the temptation of taking Friday night off. There’s a party scheduled for Saturday, so I don’t want to waste the whole weekend.

Ok, well I should be off to bed. This doesn’t mean that I’m actually going to bed right after I post this, but it’s an indication of what I should be doing, but probably won’t for at least half an hour. Bye.

WHOA, I DID SOME WORK

I’m posting mainly just to see if this thing works anymore. Anyways, I felt like I actually got some work done tonight. Probably for the first time since I started school. Sure, I didn’t get as much work done as I wanted to, but it was better than wasting the entire night.

The good news is that I get to do more work tomorrow!

LABS, AN OLD MAN, AND WIDESCREEN MOVIES

Due to a karate class, my lab group didn’t meet until 10pm tonight. We expected to be in the lab for an hour. It turned out to be 4 hours. We got our damn code to work though. Finally.

It was an interesting evening. Stupidly, I asked my three group members how old they were. Two of them were 21, and the other was 20. Then I told them I was 28. I asked them if I could call them my “kids”. They said only if they could call me “pops”. We all had a good laugh at that.

About an hour before we left the lab, Curtis and I went in search for a pop machine. We had to leave the building. We saw a few people being carried home from what we assumed to the Pit. Why is that when people are having fun, I have to be in a lab?

Anyways, we left around 2am. I’m lucky my first class isn’t until 3:30pm tomorrow. Though lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping past 9am. It’s really a hassle since I have no trouble staying awake past 3am sometimes. Why can’t I sleep in?

This is a long post, but I’ll squeeze in one more thing. Many of you know I am a big proponent of widescreen format for movies. The starwars.com web site has posted a new feature on the widescreen vs. full screen debate. It tries to be neutral on the subject, but in the end, you clearly can tell they favour the widescreen format. Here’s a quote from the feature:



Full screen was the standard for years for videocassette editions and television broadcasts of feature films. As a result, most of the Star Wars generation that grew up with the saga on video in the early ’80s were very used to the cropped editions of the film. So much so that when the films were re-issued theatrically in 1997, many presumed new elements were added to the film that were in fact always there.

There are many comparisons between the fullscreen and widescreen presentations from Attack of the Clones. It’s visually quite compelling. Click here to take a look.

WHAT A LONG NIGHT

Hmmm… this thing still isn’t working right. Anyways, I had a long evening at the lab tonight. I met up with my three com sci buddies to hack out a group assignment we had.

We met at the lab at 7pm. We had a quick discussion of the code and then started to work. It’s amazing how much smoother things go when you talk about the code first.

About three hours later, we assembled our little pieces together and gathered around one machine. Ok, it didn’t compile at first, but five minutes later, we had an executable that ran.

This is when the problems started. While the code ran, it didn’t spit out the right output. Problems with logic are so much harder to solve than problems with syntax.

Two hours of debugging later, it was still screwed up. At midnight, we left the lab and agreed to work on it again the next day.

That’s when I went to the Village Country Style for a sandwich. Ever since I found out the Country Style was open 24/7, I’ve been looking forward to getting a late night snack from them. This was the first night.

I took home a tasty clubhouse sandwich. Their toaster was broken so I had to have untoasted bread. Bummer. Oh well, I was starving, so I didn’t care.

Man, that was like five hours tonight of just doing one assignment. Stuff that like that isn’t fun.

DAMN THIS THING WORKS AGAIN

Well, I had to turn the post archiving off, but I can sucessfully post again. What an adventure it’s been to get all these backed up posts to publish. This is a sucky workaround, I hope Blogger gets their crap together.