NOW AND THEN

Geez, this school thing sure does get in the way of writing for this web site. Anyways, the important thing is that I’m here now.

So, do you ever wonder about what some of your former classmates are doing now? Do you ever think about the guy that used to eat paste in your 2nd grade class? What about the girl that had all the New Kids On The Block pictures in her locker?

I had a few of those questions answered at my ten year high school reunion. However, some things, you just find out by blind luck. This, is one such story.

I have this friend and former classmate, let’s call him R for now. Well, R was at a strip joint one day in downtown Vancouver. This was about two years ago. To his utter surprise, who did he see on stage? A former junior high classmate. Her name was M. M went to my elementary school and junior high. She was blonde and very pretty. By the time we reached junior high, some people noticed she might have been worried about material wealth more than she should have. However, on the occasions when I did talk to her, she seemed nice enough.

My friend R, came home that night and was bursting at the seams to tell me and another friend about his find. He was so excited. One of our classmates had become a stripper and he got to see M naked. Two birds with one stone in a way.

When he told me, I too was excited, but perhaps not as much as he was. I briefly entertained the notion of seeing her myself, but shortly after it just didn’t seem interesting enough.

My buddy R saw her once more and they actually had a brief conversation after her act. That must have been surreal.

So why am I writing about this now? Well, it’s because I’ve been looking for the last piece of the puzzle. Sure, I have old year book photos of her, but what could I offer in the present tense? How the hell could I show you what she does now? Where do you get pictures of strippers? Real ones? In your own city? Only then could I make a worthy post.

My friends, that piece of the puzzle fell into place two evenings ago. It’s not important how I got the piece or who sent it to me, but that I got it.

Below and to the left is the year book entry for her grade ten year, circa 1989. To the right is a picture of M in “work form”. The picture is cropped for your pleasure, but if you click on it, you’ll get to see the real deal. WARNING: clicking on the pic will lead to some tasteful nudity, so if you’re surfing from a place that would frown upon that, wait until you get home.

It’s interesting how few people in grade ten include stripping as a future activity. Had she done so, I would have given her marks for being insightful. Notice that her stage name is Jade Jordan. It rhymes with Morgan I guess.

I would like to point out that I haven’t passed judgement on M for her career choice. Some strippers make a ton of money and you sure as hell don’t have to go through years of ass-kicking school to get the job. If she likes her job, then why the hell wouldn’t she keep on doing it?

The reason I made this post is because she picked one hell of an interesting career choice and this is something you don’t see everyday.

Oh, and one other thing. Now that I found that picture, she’s the only person from junior high that I’ve seen naked. Ha ha ha…

CHINESE NEW YEAR’S DINNER

I have just come back from SJC’s annual Chinese New Year’s dinner. It started off with a lovely reception that featured wine and finger foods.

Before the actual dinner there was even a lion dance. Dinner was great. I had lots of food.

I took many photos, which hopefully I’ll post in a few days. Look for them then!

FILLED WITH RAGE

Perhaps I am not exactly filled with rage, but I am certainly pissed. I just got back a quiz and I got 82%. Yeah, sure that’s an A-… yada yada yada… but he marked liked a sonuvabitch and took off 18% for really, really small mistakes. I went from almost getting perfect to 82%.

It may look like I’m overreacting, but every mark counts and this little indiscretion could cost me down the road.

Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhh!!!!

A HUNCH

We’re months away from final exams, but I already have a hunch on how one of them is going wind up.

I’ve spent the last three hours working on a discrete math assignment. I finished one question and tried two others. I couldn’t even setup the other two.

The course is about mathematical proofs. I hate proofs. It’s the academic equivalent of my Achilles’ heel. When it comes to proving things, I am very, very bad at it. If someone told me to prove poop comes out of my ass, I’d have a hard time even figuring out where to start.

So, why the hell I am taking this course? Well, it’s a pre-req for an artificial intelligence course. Geez, if AI is all about crazy proofs, maybe that’s one area I shouldn’t be looking in to then.

By now, I know the academic side of me quite well. I can recognize slight stumbles and know that I’ll be alright. I can also spot when I’ve come upon concepts that confound my brain, and will always be a struggle for me to understand. Discrete math is one such subject.

While April is still a long time away, I know that I will have to battle this course every step of the way.

And on that note, let’s end with a picture from a Super Bowl party.

the erwintang.com interviews

This new addition to erwintang.com has been in development for weeks. Well, actually it wasn’t weeks of development… more like a few days of development and the rest lethargy. Anyways, I digress.

So, I’ve decided to interview people via e-mail for my site. My readership was grown considerably in the last few months and I wanted to gain an insight on those who visit. By publishing the interview, the rest of you can see who else reads this site. I think it’ll be fun.

I conducted my first interview with fellow SJC resident Marcia George. She was kind enough to agree to it and answer all my questions.

If you want to participate, please send me an e-mail and I’ll see if we can work something out.

Well, without further ado, click here for the very first erwintang.com interview!

WEEKEND UPDATE

So, the much anticipated weekend is almost over. My, how time flies when you’re doing homework.

Well, I actually did a few things other than work over the weekend. On Saturday, I woke up at 11am and per my usual routine, one of the first things I do is to dial-up CNN to see if Iraq and North Korea still exist. I think I may still have been half-asleep because for about a second, I was wondering why the main photo featured seven astronauts. Shuttle landings are never top stories any more I thought.

As I read some more, I became dismayed that another shuttle was gone. I was eleven when Challenger was lost and space accidents aren’t really something you see very often. I think that is part of the reason why people take space travel for granted now.

I have no doubt that the engineers at NASA will find out what happened, correct what needs attention, and move forward in space exploration.

I had planned on doing work on Saturday afternoon, but I was glued to CNN for a while. Before I knew it, I had to go prepare for my second ball hockey game.

This time we had another addition to our team, Matt Farish. He’s tall so that something we were looking for on our team. We were going to play a Dentistry team called the Drillers.

When we arrived for warm-up, we noticed they only had four players and a goalie. That meant that had no line changes. It was a bad break for them, but possibly a good for us.

Well, to make a long story short, we got ventilated for nine goals I think, while we managed to tally one. They only started playing tired with around three minutes left, when the outcome was hardly in danger.

On a personal note, I had my first shot on net! For reasons to complicated to get into, I was playing defense during the game. They dumped it in on a change, and I needed to get off to, so I sailed one in from my end all the way to their goalie. Of course he stopped it, but hey, a shot on net is a shot on net when you’re down eight.

Speaking of hockey, what a hell of an All-Star game today! I think it was the best one I’ve seen in a long time. For once the goalies were awesome. The only reason it went into overtime was the play of Patrick Lalime. He was a wall for the final five minutes in regulation. When it did go into OT, I was so hoping it was going to end in a shootout. It was nice to see Naslund and Kariya get their goals.

Well, I have to get back to work. Stay tuned later tonight for a new addition to erwintang.com!

THE CIRCLE OF THE FORCE

That was not a fun week. I had two labs and two assignments, a 10% exam, readings, and some other assorted junk to get to.

Unlike last term, everything goes like clockwork this term. I have two labs and two assignments every week to contend with. There’s no time to slack or else it’s reflected in your work. I’ve never really been an “up-to-the-minute” type student. I rather play the “slack-for-weeks-at-a-time-and-then-learn-the-course-in-a-week-right-before-the-final” type role. It’s worked before and I was hoping to do so again. Oh well.

As you can see, the workload has prevented me from posting as much as I am used to. I feel really bad, because I just recently installed some new page counters for my site. People are visiting in droves and when I write droves, I mean maybe five or six people a day… ha ha ha…

Well, because of the lack of postings, I’m probably going to ramble on more than usual here.

Let me see… what do I want to write about… oh yeah, actress Ali Larter was on late-night TV twice tonight. I wrote about her in an earlier post of mine. She has to be one of the most beautiful women on this planet. On Craiggers’ show, she actually clarified her “pot belly” comment. Ms. Larter said that in addition to the pot belly, she’s looking for intelligence as well. Something tells me she wouldn’t mind if the guy was fit and smart too.

On Saturday, I play my second ball hockey game. Some of my teammates are optimistic about our chances this time around. “It can’t be that bad again… ” is the popular refrain. Those poor, poor suckers. We are bad, and I’m wondering how many games it will take before everyone realizes it. You can’t make progress sometimes until you hit rock bottom.

Gee, what else… well I guess nothing… it’s really late and I kinda want to crawl into bed now.

However, I will leave you with a link for your enjoyment. Have you ever seen pictures of porn stars on the Internet? I know it sounds like a stupid question, but seriously, have you ever seen porn stars in a relatively normal and clothed (for the most part) environment? It’s interesting to see them when they’re not “working”. If you click here, you’ll see a set of photos from a porn convention where surprisingly, nearly everyone is in normal clothing (for the most part). There are maybe five out of two hundred photos where a breast makes an appearance, so you may wanna re-consider looking at this from work. Click here for a work-safe photo.

I am going to get some much deserved sleep now. Later.

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!