Author: Erwin

In the same grand tradition of my reporting of wang flies, comes another similar and equally disturbing story.

For those of you who haven’t done your taxes, here’s a little tip I learned from Eddy. If you made less than $20 000 last year (I’m talking to grad students mainly), you can use QuickTaxWeb for free. That’s a pretty good deal. I love finding these little perks for poor people.

For those keeping score, the mocha frap I had on Friday night did not do any damage to me (other than keeping me up until 5am). I’m actually thinking about having another one this sunny afternoon.

As some of you know, Frank has made it safely over to Japan and is now settled into his quarters in Science City. Not wasting any time, he’s started a blog. Go have a read and leave a comment.

I’ve been reviewing old notes for most of the late afternoon and evening. Why? I think I’ll leave that for a separate post this weekend. After being cooped up in my room for so long, I decided to get some fresh air and take a short walk over to my neighbourhood Starbucks. It was time to get my first mocha frap of the season.

Now, if you’re a long time reader of erwintang.com, you’ll remember that I’ve had an interesting history with mocha fraps. I enjoy the treat, but not the ocassional gastrointestinal disagreement that occurs afterwards.

It’s been about half an hour since I’ve finished my calorific treat and so far, I’m doing ok. Let’s see how I do in the next little while.

I did indeed take the day off today. I woke up earlier that I had anticipated and could not fall back asleep. I hate when that happens.

Upon rising, I saw that it was another beautiful day on the west coast. After “breakfast” I headed downtown. I needed to buy a video game for research purposes (I swear that’s the real reason). I hadn’t been downtown in a while. The nice weather made shopping quite a pleasant experience. Thumbs up! I also had lunch downtown. For those keeping score, it was a Teen Burger.

After returning home, I took a most quick nap. It needed to be a short nap because I was going to toss the ball around with Adam at SJC. When I arrived at the courtyard, Carolyn was there. We all played a fine game of catch. Carolyn has a much improved arm now. Yay! She had to leave soon after I arrived to meet some friends at the pub. Adam and I were left to continue on our own.

One time after throwing the ball to Adam, I got distracted by some girls walking by SJC sidewalk. Adam, not knowing I was under a hypnotic spell, threw the ball at me. It hit me square in the left shoulder. Luckily, he had not thrown it hard and it surprisingly hit me in a place that didn’t hurt too much. Nevertheless, I went down like a ton of bricks. Adam rushed over and apologized profusely. Little did I know I would inadvertently give him some pain later.

After dusting myself off, we went to dinner which consisted of pasta. I had organic pasta for the first time. It was… interesting. After dinner, we went to Koerner’s to see Carolyn. It was a short-lived visit since it was time for hockey.

At hockey, I totally by accident slammed my stick into Adam’s shin. The ball was loose around us, we were both twirling around, I found the ball, and decided to whip it towards the net. Bam! Man, that must have hurt like sumabitch. Like way more than getting hit in the shoulder by a softball.

Ok, I need to drink some water now.

So, I did it. I’m done. Perhaps not the finest four minutes of my life, but I’ve seen worse. I tried napping in the afternoon. I couldn’t get any rest despite being quite fatigued. My body just didn’t want to fall asleep.

I’m very tired now though. I’m waiting for some pizza to come out of the oven. When that’s done, I’m going to seriously consider crawling into bed. I think I may take the day off tomorrow. Day off from what you might be asking. Hey, I still got stuff to do, maybe not school-related, but it’s still stuff.

Frank, if you’re reading this, I hope your flight was enjoyable. Please let us know how Science City is.

It kinda snuck up on me, but tomorrow I have to jump through my last hoop and then I’ll be done all that is required of me for my Master’s degree. As part of a group presentation, all I have to do is speak for just under four minutes. I am four minutes away from an M.Eng.

As fate would have it, she ain’t going down easy though. I gotta be up around 8am to help setup my team’s demo of our work. We actually don’t have to present until 10:30am. I’ve been lucky all year in that I haven’t had to wake up early at all. I just wish I could have gotten away with one more late start. By the time the presentations end at noon, I’m going to be one relieved and tired dude.

I don’t think anyone can accurately visualize the end when they start a graduate degree. They just start jumping through hoops: meetings with supervisors, assignments, readings, labs, projects, papers… one after another. I remember the first assignment I had for this degree, it was a lab exercise for a software engineering course. I was filled with both dread and excitement at doing schoolwork again. After 2+ years and traversing one long road, I am nearly done with this journey.

I just wish I didn’t have to wake up so early!

On a completely unrelated note, I made it into Greg’s blog again.

Only one image comes up when you type “erwin tang” into Google Image Search. I have no idea how that one image refers to me. What does that say about me?

I just finished writing a moderately long post about how my desk chair is wobbly right now. As I went over it, I thought, what a bunch of crap, no one wants to read that. It took me five paragraphs to write my chair is broken. That can’t be the most interesting thing to happen during my weekend. As it turns out, it wasn’t.

I’m not sure if this was the most interesting thing, but on Saturday night, I was sitting in car in a 7-11 parking lot with two other guys. It was then that I found out other guys share my theory that girls outside my own immediate family don’t poop or fart. The tertiary function of all men is to make gas and in large volumes. The tertiary function of women is to smell nice.

One guy I know, he had a lady friend over at his place once. While they were hanging out, he felt the call of nature. Rather than stink up his bathroom and risk her noticing, he actually left his own home and went to a public washroom to do his business. See what extremes you non-pooping and non-farting girls have driven us to?

For lunch today, I had a slice of pizza with Montreal smoked meat (it’s a pro topping) and pineapples from Pie ‘R Squared. Though I pioneered the “what I had for lunch” post, Greg seems to do it a lot better now.