THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

Well, exams ended on Tuesday and the mass exodus of undergrads have begun. On Wednesday, I saw plenty of cars, vans, and trucks filled with belongings as students headed off to wherever they live during the summer.

The campus will become a lot quieter and less crowded now. Summer at UBC is my favourite time to be on campus. The weather is nice and you don’t have to fight your way through throngs of people.

Unfortunately, the arrival of summer also means the end of the U-Pass for the year. U-Pass was our cheap bus pass for the year. It allowed UBC students go anywhere for a fraction of a regular bus pass. No worrying about transfers and no worrying about zones. Stupidly, the AMS and Translink could only agree to make the U-Pass go from September to the end of April. This despite the existence of summer classes, not to the mention that grad students are in school 12 months of the year. A broadcast e-mail was just sent out tonight about the earliest a summer U-Pass could be instituted… summer of 2005. I’ll be done by then. Guess who does have a summer U-Pass though? SFU students

In other news, unlike last summer, I actually have some guarded optimism about getting a summer job this year. Last year, I fretted for about a month before I pulled a horseshoe out of my butt and landed a great job on campus. Things are much better this time around. I don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll keep quiet for now.

Alright, I gotta go do some stuff. Later.

PROJECTIONIST BOOTH

I was going through some files on the old hard drive tonight. I found a picture I took when I had the LCD projector for my lecture here at SJC. They give you the projector the day of the talk and you get to keep it almost twenty-four hours.

I got the thing in the afternoon and even though I was supposed to study, I couldn’t help but set it up with my computer. I placed it on my desk and had it face the wall next to my bed. It was awesome seeing my Windows desktop that big on the wall. E-mail was larger than life! It was like surfing the Internet on a huge billboard sized screen. Later, some guy told me porn must have looked great too at that size, but I wouldn’t know anything about that.

Of course, I had to try out some DVDs, and it did not disappoint. In a perfect world, every room here at SJC would have an LCD projector mounted in the ceiling.

Take a gander at how movies look at my wall. A prize goes to the first person to correctly identify the movie I was watching (it’s a gimme).

FREE TIME IS TIRING

Do you know that relaxing can be tiring? Even doing nothing can take a toil on you. Well, not that I’ve doing been exactly nothing. I played a lot of sports on the weekend (for me). Two hours of hockey on Saturday and then tennis for the first time on Sunday. I was a bit sore today.

I also went to a housewarming on Saturday night. This was attended by people from my junior and senior high days. Some of these people I haven’t seen for years. You know what? People do get better with age. Suprisingly, a few of my old classmates mentioned they read this site. I think a few of them just saw my site once, but just in case I do have some regulars, I’ll say hi to Fraser, Col, and Jenn.

I bought a game on Friday, it’s called Contract J.A.C.K., the official prequel to No One Lives Forever 2. I finished it last night. Wow. I paid $30 for it, I expected it’d be longer. I played it on normal difficultly and I felt challenged. It was a good game, just not long enough. I was in Future Shop again today, and I did feel the urge to buy another title. That’s just not smart though, $30 every two days for games.

Tomorrow, I gotta focus on getting some errands done. I gotta leave the fun behind for a day. I have to pay some library fines, get a free copy of WinXP Pro from the CS department, put in my TA assignments requests for September, and clean my bathroom.

Though I’m kinda tired right now, I feel like chatting with someone right now. The problem is it’s 1:30am and most people are in bed right now. There are not enough night owls in this world. I’m looking at my MSN list and most people are either offline or away (probably in bed). There’s one guy who might be awake here at SJC that I’d like to talk to, but he’s doing thesis work tonight. I need a late-night chat buddy to just shoot the breeze.

Here’s a totally off-topic fact, the smaller window in my room won’t close. A sliding mechanism in the window has seized up. Luckily it’s been warm out and I’m a lazy ass, so it hasn’t been a problem.

I can tell exams wil done tomorrow, I can hear the undergrads from Vanier yelling their heads off outside. If I cared more, I’d shake my ornery, gnarled fist at them. Back in my day, exams last three months and you didn’t drink beer afterwards, all you had was Ovaltine… and you liked it!

Well, let’s end the ramblings here. I’m getting hungry and Family Guy Vol. 2 is on my desk.

THIRTY, FLIRTY, AND THRIVING

Several months ago, I wrote that I really enjoyed the trailer for 13 Going On 30. I was predicting that I would unlikely get anyone to go with me, especially any of my guys friends.

Well, tonight, my good friends Rhonda, Sarah, Kristina, and Bryan came along to see 13 Going On 30 with me. What good buddies they are.

The theatre population was skewed towards the female persuasion. Rhonda pointed out the only other guys there were on dates. It would have been really weird to see a group of guys there by themselves.

Anyways, the film was very good. Going in, you might think it would borrow heavily from Big, but it finds it’s own unique path and storyline. The whole movie rests squarely on the shoulders of Jennifer Garner. Her energy is what makes the movie work and it is an admirable first-time performance as a leading lady.

Yeah, some of the reviews aren’t so good, but who are you going to believe? Some “know-it-all” film critic or me, your good buddy Erwin? Trust me.

TO DO LIST

At 6pm on Thursday, I will have written my last exam for the term. My immediate “to do” list is as follows:

1. eat dinner – done!

2. shave – done!

3. wash my dishes – done!

4. iron some clothes – done (I even ironed a skirt, not mine)!

5. consume a cocktail or perhaps even a highball – done!

WEB SITE STATS

Every once in a while, someone asks me how popular this dog and pony show of a web site is. Usually, they ask me how many visitors I get a day. I don’t have an answer since I never process my log file to find out. Last night, I decided to process a 29 Mb traffic log file to see how things were going. The generated report was pretty interesting.

I’ll give you the general results here. The log tracked visits for nearly a year, about 330 days. Here’s an excerpt:

Analysed requests from Wed-28-May-2003 11:09 to Wed-21-Apr-2004 01:46 (328.61 days).

GENERAL SUMMARY

(Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending 21-Apr-2004 02:20).

Successful requests: 302,274 (5,758)

Average successful requests per day: 919 (822)

Successful requests for pages: 88,804 (1,922)

Average successful requests for pages per day: 270 (274)

Failed requests: 40 (0)

Redirected requests: 1,798 (26)

Distinct files requested: 2,401 (1,181)

Distinct hosts served: 12,364 (771)

Corrupt logfile lines: 3

Data transferred: 8.628 gigabytes (208.681 megabytes)

Average data transferred per day: 26.887 megabytes (29.811 megabytes)

There are several items to note. First, my site receives nearly a thousand requests a day for files. That’s pretty amazing considering no one knew this site three years ago. In terms of just plain HTML pages, I average about 270-275 requests a day for those. Again, pretty good in my books. Lastly, over the last seven days, 771 unique computers came looking at my site. That’s over 110 unique visitors per day in the last week. So, there’s your answer.

SHORT STORY

The following anecdote is neither interesting or funny, but it’s all I got right now.

So last Friday, I got the pleasure of invigilating a super long exam. I showed up twenty minutes before the exam started, like you’re supposed to. That made it around 11:40am. The profs arrive and we distribute the exams. The venue is the SRC which is a nice gym by the SUB. The exams are spaced out on these tables by every other row and every other column. The separation is incredible, I don’t even need to be here to make sure no one cheats.

At noon, the students are let in. They’re all mechs. I gotta say, compared to all the other engineering disciplines, mechs are one of least nerdy. There are certainly more women in mech compared to when I was in undergrad.

As the students get settled, the profs give out directions. It’s 12:15pm at this point. They’re going to give the students 15 minutes to just read over the exams and ask questions. I’ve never seen that before.

Exam questions are read and student questions are asked. I spend the 15 minutes scurrying around and pointing out to the profs which students have their hands up. With over 100 students and only two profs to answer questions, it takes some coordination.

The exam starts in earnest at 12:30pm. I’ll be there until 3pm. Yikes. Lucky I brought some reading material. I take a chair and sit down at the back of the gym. I read for a bit, get chilly, go take a leak, and do some more reading.

At 2:30pm some fresh-faced, cherubic student in sweats enters the room at the back of the gym. He looks around and walks towards me.

“Is this Poly Sci 101?”

“No, this is MECH 351. Where’s your exam supposed to be?”

“SRC C, but it’s empty.”

“When’s your exam?”

“2:30pm.”

“2:30pm? That’s a weird time. Exams are only supposed to be at 8:30am, 12pm, and 3:30pm.”

He looks at me with apprehension and leaves the gym. I look at him go with sympathy. I hope to hell he didn’t misread 12pm for 2:30pm. Missing a final exam is one of the worst fears any student has.

My exam ends shortly after. Papers are collected and I’m set free. When I get home, just out of curiousity I checked the exam time for POLI 101. It is indeed for 3:30pm. I just hope he didn’t go home.

THE CANUCKS ARE DONE… FOR REAL THIS TIME

Well, it’s the end of the second period and the Flames are up a goal. They have the game in the bag. It’s all over. Statistically speaking the Canucks don’t do too well when going into the third trailing. They’ve played poorly in this series when didn’t score the first goal. Hell, you might even say they played poorly even when they did have the lead.

They did a good job to win game six, but as I wrote before, it would be a shame if they came up short in game seven. It will be a long summer for the Canucks. If I can see one positive out of this is that I won’t have to spend every other night glued to the TV. Studying, here I come!

BILLIONAIRE BLOGGER

So how many blogs do you read that are written by people who are worth over a billion dollars? Probably not many.

For one, how many billionaires are there? In comparison to the rest of the population, not many. Of those who are billionaires, how many of them even know what a blog is? Again, even fewer. Most billionaires are probably older, having accumulated their fortune over time. Rich or not, old folks usually don’t take to computers too well. Of those billionaires who even know what a blog is, how many of them have time to blog? We dwindle that number down even further.

The only super rich dude I know that blogs is Mark Cuban. Self-made billionaire and outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban writes a pretty good blog. His Blog Maverick is quite popular, with posts receiving over 100 comments at times.

Now his blog would suck if he just wrote about the mansion he bought today or how he had to fire 5000 people so that he could still make a profit, but luckily he doesn’t do that. Actually, I’ve heard he only owns one mansion and he’d probably take a pay cut before firing 5000 people. Anyways.

One of his recent posts was a great read. He thought poorly of Donald Trump’s comments about him in a paper, so he offered a good rebuttal.

If anything, you should read his blog because he sometimes gives out stock tips. Remember, he’s worth a billion dollars.