Month: April 2005

Holy crap am I tired. I had four hours of sleep last night with only a small twenty minute nap today. I worked until 6am getting this prototype done for a class project I’m working on. I had to meet my other two group members at 10:30am this morning to discuss our progress. One of my teammates was quite appreciative of my efforts. The other teammate? Not so much. Well, what can you do? Some people go through life with elegance and class, and those are the people we should associate with, not the others.

The meeting took way longer than I thought it would. By the time it ended, I have a few more little touchups to do here and there on my work. There was a break in the schedule that afforded me my short nap, otherwise, I’ve been working all day. I managed to be lively enough at dinner over at SJC but I’ve been slowly winding down since about 8pm.

The only reason I’m up now is that I’m waiting for some chicken to come out of the oven. It was vegetarian night over at the College and I was hungry almost immediately upon my return home.

Hey, did you know David Duchovny has a blog? Sure, it partly a promotional tool for his movie, but a blog is a blog. I still have a soft spot for old Mulder.

Today was technically the last day of classes for the school year. Practically, it didn’t mean anything to me since my actual last day of class was on Wednesday night. Also, since I don’t have any final exams, this day didn’t mean the start of exam season. On a historical note, this will most likely be my “last day of class” ever. I don’t have any plans on coming back to school after this, so I guess this is a bit of a milestone.

At UBC, the last day of class also means Arts County Fair. I didn’t go this year. I’ve learned that if you’re not going to ACF, you’d be smart to avoid the people that are going. Since ACF turned into an all-ages show, the campus usually gets inundated with teenage punk types. It wasn’t bad during the day, but the campus got messy after the concert ended. Most people were leaving just as Adam, Woba, and myself were departing from the Village where we had dinner.

Everyone else was going one way and the three of us were going the other way. We came to the conclusion there was a lot of riff-raff amongst the concert-goers. I sound like an old man.

Anyways, yeah… last day of class.

On Wednesday evening, I handed in a 5000+ word report and gave a presentation. With that I was done with my software testing course. Three more credits accumulated and only one more course to go. I suppose the prof still has to mark the report, which is worth 45% of the class. I’ve done the calculations though and I can get as little as 65% on the report and still get an “A-” in the class. I’m not worried.

I had a project partner to help me write the report but I did the bulk of the work. My partner is some crazy dude that has no understanding of balance. He works full-time at an engineering job and somehow still takes three graduate courses. Most full-time grad students take three courses and that occupies nearly all of their time. Dave is one stressed out guy. I’m pretty sure he didn’t really have any clue what the hell was going on with our project.

We had a joint presentation that delivered our findings to the class. I let Dave write his own slides. I took the first half of the presentation and he took the last half. Giving presentations doesn’t phase me. As long as I’m prepared, I could talk all day in front of people. So when it was my turn to speak on Wednesday night, it was a piece of the proverbial cake.

Then it was Dave’s turn. Now when he gave me his slides the night before, I looked it over and had a few comments for him. For one, he had these tables with really tiny text. Some of his slides were really crammed with text. I offered to enlarge the text in his tables, but he said it didn’t matter. I said ok, but I enlarged some of the text anyways, before I got distracted and started watching TV.

When he gave his half of the presentation, he started flying through the slides, skipping several slides entirely. I later asked him why he did that. He replied that I had taken so much of the 15 minutes allocated to us, he had to rush. I think Dave might have been on some sorta chemical stimulant because I had timed my slides at home and consistently finished them in 5 minutes. I had budgeted 7 minutes for me and 8 minutes for Dave. I was well within 7 minutes.

Regardless of how long I took, we got instant feedback from the rest of the class. The prof made everyone fill out an evaluation form for each presentation, which was to be handed to the presenters immediately after. As I rifled through the forms, I had the following terms attached to my name, “engaging speaker”, laid-back”, “good eye contact”, and “interesting presentation”. Toot! Toot! Whoa, I think that was the sound of me blowing my own horn.

I will not say exactly what comments David received though I will offer his evalutions were peppered with adjectives in direct opposition of mine.

Afterwards, I patted Dave on the back and told him to keep his chin up. You know, crap that no one wants to hear. In a way, I feel sorry for him. It’s a full-time job for me just to take two grad classes and be a TA. I can’t imagine what it’s like to work full-time and take three grad classes. No wonder he smokes a lot.

I think we can learn several things from this experience. First, if you’re going to put text in your slides for a presentation, make sure the text is large enough to read. If you don’t want the audience to read some text, just delete it, don’t make it small. Second, if you’re going to work full-time, don’t be a full-time grad student at the same time.

Ok, now I’m going back to my TV and marvel at how 49 out of 52 channels are carrying the Pope’s funeral live. That’s a lot channels.

Here’s a strange story coming out of Princeton University. A mathematics graduate student has been arrested in connection with over 60 lewd incidents involving Asian females on the university campus. The grad student in question, a Michael Lohman, has now been banned from campus. The Daily Princentonian AP Wire report was quite liberal in explaining his activities:

“Lohman, 28, cut and took locks of hair from about nine Asian female University students without their knowledge or consent and poured his own bodily fluids into the drinks of Asian female students more than 50 times, according to police reports.”

“Lohman lives in the Butler apartments with his wife of four years, who is Asian, a graduate student who knows him told The Daily Princetonian Tuesday.”

“The fluids poured into the drinks were semen and urine, Lt. Dennis McManimon, the Borough police’s spokesman, said in an interview Tuesday.”

“A search of Lohman’s apartment revealed ‘a quantity of women’s panties and numerous mittens,’ according to a statement from Borough police.”

“The investigation, McManimon said, ‘has been leaning’ toward the conclusion that Lohman stuffed the mittens with the hair he had obtained from students and used them for personal sexual gratification.”

According to the article, Lohman is also a TA. I bet he broke some of those rules I was talking about in an earlier post. I will leave you with the best quote of the story:

“‘Princeton is the place he really wanted to come,’ the graduate student who knows him said.”

He’ll probably be kicked out of the math department, but the Princeton Department of Asian Studies has already stated they’ll reserve a place for him while he sorts out his legal troubles.

I’m feeling much better today. I’m not sure if it’s the combination of the antibiotics and inhaler, but it’s a world of difference. I did not know this until today, but the antibiotic I’m taking, erythromycin, is also used to treat syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. Sweet, I can hit for the cycle.

Well, I must make this a short post as tomorrow I have to hand in a report and make a presentation.

My road to recovery from whooping cough had been going fairly well until Monday morning. When I woke up, all I felt like doing was coughing. Luckily, I didn’t have class today, so I just spend the day dealing with it. I phoned the medical clinic to see if they had my test results back. Technically, I don’t have full confirmation that I have the whooping cough, though the doctor is going on that assumption. It turns out I won’t have my results for another week to three weeks. The testing isn’t being done at a private lab like MDS Metro, it’s being done at the provincial government’s lab.

I didn’t really do anything today otherwise. I did meet up with Jeff Newmark for dinner. Jeff flew in from Las Vegas to overnight here before leaving for Japan tomorrow afternoon. Also present at dinner was Eddy and Woba. I was really proud of myself, I only left the table twice to cough in the bathroom. The guys were nice enough to walk me back to my apartment after dinner. Eddy said, “Buddy, you need help”. He was probably right. With that, I said goodbye to Jeff and told the other guys I’d see them tomorrow at dinner.

Sometime after 1am, I started feeling much better. I’m coughing way less now. I’ve decided not to go back on the codeine because I’m not sure how that will interact with the antibiotics that I’m still on. The doctor did ok me to use corticosteroid inhaler though. So just minutes ago, I used an inhaler for the first time. I took two hits from the thing. It’s supposed to help open the passage ways in my lungs. I’m not sure if that’ll help with the coughing, but it can’t hurt.

The coughing makes it tough to talk, which sucks since I teach my last tutorial tomorrow. I hope I’m in a better condition by then. If there’s time I’m planning on visiting student health clinic tomorrow as well. I just want to make sure that my lungs are still clear. Whooping cough is known to lead to pneumonia in some cases and I’d like to avoid that if possible.

I kinda took the day off today. I wasn’t really planning on it, but that’s the way it turned out. I guess it all started last night when the time changed. One minute it was only moderately late and then the next, it was fairly late. I was watching Octopussy on TV. As far as Bond flicks go, this one was pretty good, minus the cheesy name.

By the time I went to bed, it was late enough that I was wondering if the first light of dawn could be visible. I awoke at noon because I knew I had to meet with my project partner for one of my classes. He had told me we’d be meeting today but not when. It took me an hour to track him down. He wanted to meet at 9pm. That was ok with me. After making some scrambled eggs, I settled in to watch an episode of Mythbusters. The highlight of the episode? Can you resell a car where a body had decomposed inside of it? To recreate the details, they sealed the carcasses of two dead pigs inside a Corvette and left it for two months. When the car was unsealed, it was a sight that most people present will probably not forget for the rest of their lives. The footage was heavily edited for TV unfortunately. After “cleaning” the car, they did manage to sell the car to some dude for parts.

Well, with that pleasant episode in my memory, I felt really tired and went down for a nap. I woke up to sunny skies and a clock that read 4:30pm. I took a shower and decided I needed to get some dinner and buy some food at Safeway. I stupidly forgot to book in at SJC on Friday, which meant I was going to miss dinner on Sunday and Monday.

After grabbing a bite to eat and buying some food, I returned to campus. As I was crossing the parking lot to my apartment, I just happened to see my project partner. He had just finished studying with another group of students. He was ready to meet now, an hour ahead of schedule. I dropped off my grocercies and we hammered out what we needed to do for the next week.

And now I’m going to watch another episode of Mythbusters. This time around, does toast always land butter side up? And, is yawning contagious?

This post will probably only make sense to gamers (ie. males) but oh well. I found this interesting video clip on the Internet. Pro gamer Jeremy gives us his thoughts on the game Warcraft.

“Warcraft is like teh gay and stuff. Don’t get me wrong, like orcs and stuff, like you know bows and arrows, dragons and some magic and stuff, it’s pretty much for like guys, like you know, never gonna have sex and stuff…”

warcraft.avi – 1.8 Mb

Please note, while I do know several people that play Warcraft, this isn’t specifically directed at any one of them. I just find Jeremy’s videos to be quite entertaining.

At lunch today, my sister sat next to former GnR guitarist Slash at the Fours Seasons hotel. By association, this automatically makes me cool.

I have just completed the draw for the erwintang.com-turns-five-years-old contest. And the winner is… go check it out yourself!