BABES ON THE KEYBOARD

So, I’m sitting in one of my com sci labs today. It for an undergrad CS course. I’m taking a few of those out of personal interest. Anyways, that’s not the point.

So there I am in front of my machine and I notice someone else has logged in on the machine next to me, but is gone for the moment. I start the lab and a few minutes later, the person next to me comes back.

It turns out she’s one of the hot girls in the class. Yeah, you read that right… one of… anyways, she doesn’t go to all the lectures, and she always has her labs done before the lab session. I mention her hotness not to be sexist or to objectify women, but this is an observation that needs to made. This girl is extremely pretty and either she works out a lot or is blessed with some great genes. She also wears her clothes in a way that you could easily see this. She’s just not pretty for a girl in computer science… she’s a pretty girl compared to any girl, in any department.

Imagine that, a genuine hot chick in computer science. I thought that day would never arrive, but here we are. And we’re only three years (or is it two?) into the new millenium. You’re probably saying, “Big deal Erwin.” Oh yeah, it’s a big deal alright. I’ve done all my academics in engineering and science, and I can tell you there’s a severe under-representation of females in this area. I could count on one hand how many girls were in my undergrad class in mechanical.

To be seeing babes taking computer science, that’s saying something about how far we’ve come as a civilzation.

Now lest you think this girl is an idiot, she actually helped me with my lab. Part of my code didn’t work and a small suggestion from her fixed everything.

Then, this weird thing happened. She called the TA over to check over her work. He did and then she started asking some advanced questions about something else. They talked for a while at her terminal, but then they went up to the board to write out some code. They kinda disagreed on a point and started to get into a bit. I swear I felt some sexual tension emanating from them.

Later on, she asked another question, and he came over again. He playfully mocked her a bit about an e-mail application, and again I thought I felt something there between them. I’m going to have to keep an eye on this… very interesting.

So, she not the only hot girl in the class. There’s this blonde girl too. She has a beautiful face and a trim figure. Sometimes she goes to my tutorial.

The younger students these days have it so easy. In my day, we would sit in class and pass along rumours of the existence hot females outside of class.

Well, due to the fact my blood sugar is low and I had five hours of sleep last night, this has rambled on too long.

Until next time!

P.S. No, I am not going to start mackin’ on these fine ladies. I doubt I’d have any chance with these women who are probably eight years younger than I am.

PASSING THROUGH

It’s late and I still have tons to do, so I’ll make this quick.

THE GOOD

I forgot to mention that I saw actress Carly Pope on the weekend. I was at one of the Starbucks in Yaletown and she went inside. She’s a lot prettier in person. We’re going out for dinner on Saturday…. ha ha ha ha ha…. heh heh… heh… ahem….

The Canucks signed both Ed Jovanovski and Trevor Linden to multi-year contract extensions. I won’t hide the fact, I’m a big Linden fan, so these are two excellent moves on Burkie’s part.

Stay tuned for a new section to be added to erwintang.com this week!

THE BAD

I am knee-deep in school work and it’s only getting worse!

TOO MUCH WORK, SO LITTLE TIME

Logically, I shouldn’t even be taking the time to post, but I do so to clear my mind and to put down some thoughts.

I spent too much time not working this weekend. I had a social commitment to keep on both days. I had fun going out, but when I returned home, I tried to work like a dog for the rest of the evening. I partially succeeded tonight. Had I worked this hard all through the weekend, I would have steam-rolled through my course work.

Nonetheless, I am a bit frazzled as I have lots to do this week school-wise.

Well, what else happened? Oh, I did manage to order my very first delivery meal at St. John’s College. I ordered from Johnny’s on Saturday evening. I had the lasagna and some chicken wings. The wings were alright, not the biggest wings I’ve seen though. They were kinda over-cooked too. The lasagna was definitely sub-standard. The sauce was decidedly bland, and in what must have been a first, I thought that this particular piece of delivery food needed to be more salty. Will I order from Johnny’s again? Probably not during “regular” hours, but if it’s 2am in the morning and you want food, who else are you going to call?

Hey, do you remember the blogs I wrote about? These were the two blogs I personally read regularly. Anyways, after I linked to them here, both authors have decided or are thinking about not blogging any more. Geez, I must be the kiss of death. Anyways, Alyssa actually took her blog private and now Dev0n is threatening to take her whole site down. I think Alyssa might be going public again, but I’m not sure.

Well, regardless of what happens to those two, you know who I always count on for an entertaining blog? Paul Katcher. I’ve linked to him before, and this won’t be the last time. His stuff is that good.

Hmm… what other crap I can write about before I do more work that will cause me to be a sleep-deprived zombie tomorrow? Oh, this is kinda nerdy (it’s actually 100% geeky), but I’m using this new application called X-Win32. It allows you to run Linux and UNIX applications off a Windows machine. It’s so cool! I use it to connect to the CS UNIX machines at UBC. I can run any number of UNIX apps like emacs, Netscape, gdb, vi, and ddd, all from home. I don’t even have to go to the lab now, and I even live on campus.

I must go now and do the abeforementioned work. Have a great Monday morning.

YEAH FRIDAY! SOME FREE TIME TO DO WORK

Geez, this term is a lot more work than the last. Fridays actually mean something to me now. Oh blessed Fridays, the signal to a brief respite from the toils of school and work.

Hey, you know what I got in the mail today? A pirated copy of The Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers. It’s not important who sent it to me, but I’m very grateful to them. Anyways, this bootleg is pretty good in quality. It’s not one of those camcorder jobs off the movie screen. The source material was a “screener” DVD sent to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members for purposes of Oscar nominations (see image above). These screeners are not supposed to be not distributed beyond the members possession, but it happens all the time.

Well, one of these got out to someone who knew how to encode it into the .avi format. As I said, the quality is good, but no where close to a real DVD. The movie is split onto two CDs, three files on one disc, and the final one on the other. The audio volume is really low in parts even though I have the levels turned up. I’m not really sure what is going since the audio was encoded in stereo, which was a nice touch.

You know the movie industry is all worried about piracy and everything, but I still think there’s nothing to worry about. Honestly, even with the great source material, these discs can’t compare to the theatrical presentations nor the eventual legitimate DVD release.

Well, that’s all I have to say about that.

NO TIME, NO TIME

Sorry for the lack of quality postings, this week has been especially bad for school work. If I can just make it to Saturday I’ll be fine.

Hey, does it mean you’re gay if like listening this song all the time?

DEAN’S VACATION

University can be a crazy place and it can make people do some crazy things. You usually never hear about half the stuff, but with the advent of the Internet and the desire of UBC to cut down on such incidents, one can find out a lot.

UBC just recently published the Student Disciplne Report for the last calendar year. Some of it is pretty boring stuff, your typical cheating crap, but there are some interesting incidents to be read. Here are but a few:

3. A student was present and in an intoxicated state while in the company of 3 other students on top of a University parkade when a plastic road barricade was thrown from that location onto the roadway below.

DISCIPLINE: a letter or reprimand.

14. A student was involved in an altercation that led to a physical assault of another student.

DISCIPLINE: a letter of severe reprimand (Ed. – severe reprimand? what’s that?)

17. A student broke the terms of a restraining order.

DISCIPLINE: existing suspension from the University extended for an additional six months and student required to continue with professional counselling.

54. A student was responsible for a bomb threat that disrupted an examination being held in the Henry Angus Building. The same student denied being involved in a similar bomb threat that disrupted an examination in the Buchanan Building.

DISCIPLINE: a suspension from the University for 24 months.

100. A student allegedly authored a series of anonymous and harassing letters and telephone calls that were directed towards a Faculty member.

DISCIPLINE: the allegations could not be proven by the available evidence and was dismissed.

If you’re interested, the whole report and many others are located here.

14-2

Um, so yeah, that was the score in our ball hockey game today. I don’t have to tell you what end our team wound up on.

When you get shelled like that, you can’t really expect too many positives from the game, but surprisingly there were some. I’ll go into those later.

As for the game, I knew we were in serious trouble in the warm-up. I looked over to the other team and watched a guy shoot the ball. It was a fucking laser from nearly half court. I instantly knew they might be going into double-digits. The other team had clearly played ball hockey last term, while on our team, some guys hadn’t played hockey period.

Max volunteered to start in goal, but he took so long to get his equipment on that he couldn’t warm-up. He started the game cold. He was also wearing shitty gear that didn’t help.

Here’s where it got incredulous. About a minute into the game, we actually scored the first goal. Kent scored a beauty in close. I was on the bench and I thought it was a mistake.

Then reality set in. They notched the equalizer about a minute after our goal. Then they went up 2-1. I think they scored another one soon after to go up 3-1.

Kent then got in alone with the goalie and made a helluva forehand-backhand deke to bring us to 3-2. That would signal the end of our scoring.

After that they just came at us in waves. Guys were missing defensive assignments left and right. We left the other team alone out front and their pointmen were sending in bombs with impunity. It seemed like everything was going in.

Mercifully, the half ended and we talked about getting our defensive responsiblities together.

It didn’t really matter as they continued to score unabated for the second half, but we definitely cut down the amount of chances they had.

By the time it ended, the score was 14-2. I played poorly in my mind, though I was only a -3 which was pretty damn good. I didn’t register a shot on net, though I knew I was probably going to have to play defensively the entire game.

At the end of the game, there were two amusing anecdotes. When I was picking up my student card from the official scorers table, I overheard the stats guy and the ref in a middle of their conversation.

“Man, you only hear of games with a score like this…”

I looked at the scoresheet that the ref had handed in to the stats guy. It was a piece of paper divided in the middle into two columns. Each side showed what player on each team had accumulated how many points. The other team’s column was littered with numbers and check marks. I don’t think a single guy on their team was with out a point. Our column was clean as undriven snow. Out of our two goals, only two players registered a point on those plays. It was awful looking at that.

The second thing happened as we were shaking hands with the other team after the game. I overheard one of our opponents ask one of my guys, “So, what team are you guys?” He asked it in a way that you would ask your friend if someone was mentally-challenged. I figure he didn’t want to start bragging if we were some “special education” group that was being studied at UBC. I think what he meant to say was, “So you guys wear the helmets when you’re not playing hockey too?”

Well, here come the positives, how small in number they are. I think overall the team improved in the second half. For a bunch of guys who never played together before, it could have been worse… but not by much. Individually, Kent and Steve were our best players. They definitely should be linemates. With their skill, it only makes sense. Aseem had a wicked shift near the end where he broke up two scoring plays and kept the ball hemmed in at the other end.

Well, I’m not sure if it’s going to get any better. My biggest fear is that the team we played today was the 2nd worst team in our pool. Whoa, what if that was true?

THE PRACTICE

I alluded to this earlier, but the ball hockey team I’m on is called Les Boys. It’s not exactly a name that strikes fear into the hearts of our opponents.

Also, it doesn’t look like anyone wants to get custom made jerseys for the team. This is something that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing before. Usually everyone chips in $20 or so and we get a set of custom made set with our own logo. Each person has their own size, number, and name bar. However, this team doesn’t seem to be “serious” enough to warrant cool threads.

Instead, we’ve been stuck with these God-awful SJC t-shirts from the SJC admin office. In a stroke of genius, they ordered virtually every t-shirt in Large or Xtra-Large. I assume they wanted to prepare for the case that SJC would populated by fucking giants.

So, I got stuck with an Xtra-Large t-shirt as my jersey. The kicker is I have my custom made Whistler Brewing Company ball hockey jersey hanging in my closet. Anyways, this dress t-shirt hangs down to my knees and I look like a child in it. I’m not sure if these things fit anyone on my team.

So, some people got word of our team name and our dress-like t-shirts. Here were just a small sample of the comments:

“You should wear bicycle shorts and cinch the t-shirts with a big belt at the waist… like a big girl’s belt from 80s”

“Yeah, the bicycle shorts are good, but you should twist the loose end of the shirt into a ball at your side… that would look nice”

“Even better, you should take the front end of the t-shirt and loop it through the neck… you know, like how those slutty girls and gay men wear their t-shirts…

Excellent. We’ll be the most effeminate team in the entire league… including the women’s division.

With that in mind, five of us ventured out to the parkade next to SJC to practice our skills. It was myself, Francois, Aseem, Nic, and Maxime. Tellingly, none of us wore our SJC t-shirts/jersey/dress. I wore my old ball hockey jersey and Nic was in a Russian national team jersey. We didn’t have a net, nor a proper ball hockey ball. We barely found two tennis balls.

We took a few shots at the wall to warm up. I was the only one to have played Bodin Ball Hockey before, so I explained some specific rules (3 second rule, no offsides, no body contact) to everyone there. We then tried a 3 on 2 drill. This was the most fun. We set up a make shift goal for the offensive guys to shoot at. There was a lot of running involved and I think everyone found out how fit there were.

I was leaning on my stick at times, but I think I’ll be quite alright for our first game. Everyone at practice was ok too.

My biggest concern is the lack of involvement from my other “teammates”, the guys that didn’t show up for practice. We have about 10-11 guys on our roster and only five showed up for practice. Assuming we’re the dedicated types, it leaves us with two defensemen and two forwards and one goalie. That’s the minimum you need to field a team, however… that’s with no line changes.

I’ve had the misfortune of playing an entire game without going off, and it’s just about the most painful thing you could consciously decide to do. By the end, you’re just standing in one place, weakly waving at guys as they blow by you.

The rest of my team better be damn serious about showing up. I already think there are a few wankers who live here, I better not be adding to that list.

Our first game is on Sunday (tomorrow). We’re playing a team called Operation Infinite Justice.

Operation Infinite Justice vs. Les Boys

I ask you, who’s the one dropping the soap in this matchup?