Month: March 2005

In regards to my last post, yep, Daddy is in fact sick. I know that some of my female readers find it creepy when I refer to myself as “Daddy”. In my defense, my head hurts and every muscle in my body seems to ache. You know it’s bad when just moving the hairs on my head causes sharp pain.

Anyways, if you’re like me, you’re always in search of cheap entertainment… and what better place than on Internet to look for it!?!?! If you live in Vancouver, you no doubt have seen or read The Georgia Strait, a venerable free newspaper for the arts and entertainment scene in the city. They’ve recently put online their “I Saw You” section of the classifieds. If you’re not familar with this, it’s a free ad where people usually try to reconnect with someone they briefly encountered. Did you catch a girl smiling at you on the bus? Were too shy to say anything? This is the place for you to get a potential second chance.

Here are just small selection of ads from this week’s paper:

DKE BOY WITH BLACK EYE

I saw you walking into the DKE frathouse on Wesbrooke. You: thin, blond, black eye, skateboard, trucker hat. Me: blond, tall, eyebrow, hiding behind bushes. We exchanged a glance which I found meaningful. I will be standing by the Dance Dance Revolution at the SUB Arcade on Saturday Night at 11 pm. I would love to start talking to you rather than just seeing you from a distance.
reallywannab-yfriend@hotmail.com

This young “lady” clearly has a case of the “bad boy” syndrome. Not only is she after a frat boy, he’s a frat boy with a black eye. A black eye no doubt gained while living the “bad boy” lifestyle. I wasn’t even sure frat boys were capable of meaningful glances. I’m almost tempted to be at the SUB arcade tonight just to see what happens.

Here’s another one:

I CAFE, VANCOUVER,
Wed. March 02,05.

You- hot asian lady with asian friend sitting in the booth in front of us. Me- tall guy sitting with asian ladyfriend. We exchanged several glances & smiles. Being the shy type I missed the opportunity to meet you. Wishing to meet you some day soon.
nitroballr-om@shaw.ca

Asian, asian, asian! Let me guess, the tall guy is in Asian Studies at UBC right? I know, I know… low blow, but hey, I call ’em the way I see ’em.

Last one:

Feb 24th Outside UBC Hospital.

Me; making strange sounds, unable to breathe, and tears streaming down my face. You; tall Asian guy who carried my bag and blond girl who carried my weight. Thank you both. I was really struggling/afraid and you guys really helped. With gratitude, Louise

Finally, it’s not all about random hookups. Sometimes people just want to give thanks when they couldn’t the first time around.

If you want to see the rest, click here.

Either I have allergies now or I’m about to get sick. Last evening, I came home and spontaneously just had a problem with my throat. It felt like a small piece of food had gone down the wrong pipe, you know when you cough uncontrollably when your pork rind tries to go down your lung. Except with me, it was an extremely mild form of this. It only felt like there was something there and the reflex wasn’t strong enough to make me automatically cough. My body was kind like, “You might wanna cough a bit, we’re not too sure what’s happening there… hey is that The Daily Show?”

When I woke up this morning, I felt fine again. This evening though, I felt a distinct tickle in the back of my throat, you know, the usual cursor before a cold comes on. I’ve had this feeling before though, and sometimes nothing happens. Perhaps it’s just allergies as well, my eyes itch like a mofo right now.

Wow, what a post. Here are some more random pictures from the last room crawl.

So here’s the story, I tossed and turned last night until well after 6am. It was probably the worst case of insomnia I’ve had in a long time. I had a little bit of Coke to drink at 9pm, but I’ve had way more before at even later times and had no problems. I wonder why that was. In any case, I managed to squeeze in a little under 6 hours of sleep. The odd thing is, I don’t feel all that tired right now. That actually concerns me. I should be tired.

Anyways, when I was out and about campus today, I did some thinking. I realized that the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum. What might be right for you, may not be right for some. Everybody’s got a special kind of story, everybody finds a way to shine. It don’t matter that you got not alot, so what? They’ll have theirs, and you’ll have yours, and I’ll have mine. And together we’ll be fine. Because it takes, more than six hours of sleep to move the world. Yes it does.

It will only cost you $2.76 for four apple pies at McDonald‘s.

So I think things are slowly returning to normal here at the offices of erwintang.com. We’ve removed all the water out of the lunch room and sweeping up the last of the glass out by reception. Gosh darn it, good old Jimmy spent all night just putting the mailroom back in shape. I knew I made the right decision when I hired that kid right off the street.

Speaking of mail, all the e-mail that’s been accumulating is still trickling into my inbox. I got several e-mails from Saturday just today. If you still don’t know what happened, here’s the short story: the guy who fixes my server left town to get married and didn’t leave a contingency plan. I scrambled for days to get it fixed. It actually took longer because the server went down on Friday night and I couldn’t get anyone at the network operations office until Monday. If there’s one person I have to thank, it’s Roland, who answered my desperate plea for help and got my message to the right people. Thanks once again Roland. And thanks also to Sarah, who let me have a little of her own blog space.

Not having my web site, my blog, and my primary e-mail for three straight days was not a pleasant experience. You can probably guess why the e-mail was so important, but I really missed my blog too. I thought at first it might be nice to take a little blog vacation. Writing one entry a day can be more taxing than you think, especially with the demands of school. I genuinely missed writing stuff. Whether it was an update to the guy that got his testicles ripped off by chimps or the fact I had dinner at Stepho’s for the first time on Saturday, I wanted to write about it.

What I did learn from this little episode is to always have a back up plan. In this case, it’s in the form of http://erwintang.blogspot.com. It’s easy to remember (I hope) and it’s hosted a completely different server. If this site ever goes down, that’s where you should go.

Alright, here’s to some dependability in the near future.

My server was rebooted about three and a half hours ago. The plan worked! I’m sorry for all the inconvenience. If you were wondering if you missed anything, http://erwintang.blogspot.com is a good place to start. I’ll be back with more later.

Some of you might have already read about this but just in case you haven’t, have a gander. According to reports, several chimpanzees escaped from an animal sanctuary on Thursday. Two male chimps began attacking two visitors to the sanctuary. The most seriously injured, a 62 year-old male, apparently had most of his face chewed or ripped off. Here’s a quote from a news report:

“St. James Davis had severe facial injuries and would require extensive surgery in an attempt to reattach his nose, Dr. Maureen Martin of Kern Medical Center told KGET-TV of Bakersfield. His testicles and a foot also were severed, Kern County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Hal Chealander told The Bakersfield Californian.”

That’s not a pretty description. Read the whole story here.

Remember that academic plan I was writing about a few weeks ago? Well, I present that to my supervisory committee tomorrow (er, today). I have no idea if I’ve prepared too much material or prepared too little. I asked the departmental graduate advisor if any guidelines existed on this stuff. He said none did. He seemed real casual about it. I get the feeling if I got up there and just talked about chicken wings I’d be ok.

I’m hoping that I’ll just present my slides, tell my committee why I took the courses I did, they’ll give me a standing ovation, sign off on my plan and insert it into my file. Of course, I’m scared that they’ll start to question me on my choices. Why did you take that course? That doesn’t seem helpful at all to your work goals. Did you ever think about taking this course? Did you know you’re not wearing pants right now?

I don’t even know how long this will take. I booked a room for two hours from noon on. I hope we won’t need all that time.

My intuition tells me that this will go over quite well. My supervisor wants me to get the hell of here, so there’s no reason for her to want me to stay behind any longer. The other faculty member on my committee is a super cool ™ guy. He’s a relatively young prof which is unlike my entire department. I picked him because we got along real well when we taught a semester of tutorials together. My slides are complete in my opinion and I even have some videos to show them. By 2pm Friday, I’ll be one step closer to graduation.

In hindsight, it would have been easier to mark these assignments before going out with the boys for beer, wings, and nachos. Geez, I feel tired. Every answer looks pretty good to me now.

While I take a quick break, I’ll make this short post. Writing posts that feature links are the most painless ways to blog. In light of this, I point you towards Frank’s web site. He’s got pictures from last week’s LAN party and room crawl. Some of the pics you’ll see are eating challenges, man-on-man action, and other feats of debauchery… the pics of the room crawl are good to look at as well.

I’m afraid I don’t have much time to blog tonight. I’ve spent most of the evening working on a project and for the first time, writing a Windows application. I made three buttons and a little text window, all by myself. Actually, I got a lot of help from one of my group members which made this much easier.

As a result of all this coding, my left shoulder feels like I’ve thrown the baseball around a thousand times today. The whole area feels like it’s on fire. I’ve never had that happen before.

What I had for lunch today: an Oh Henry chocolate bar.