So it looks like I'll have a decently full schedule in the spring.

Courses:
MATH237 (Calc 3), MATH235 (Lin Alg 2), CO342 (Intro. to Graph Theory), CO350 (Linear Optimization), and CS341 (Algorithms). I'm pondering whether or not it's worth it to skip lectures for one of CO350/CS341 in order to attend Wolczuk lectures for both MATH235 and MATH237. It's tempting, but with my schedule the way it is currently, I can only make it to his calc lecture.

Extra-curricular:
Apparently I'm going to be MathSoc VPA in the spring, which should be interesting. It means I get to be involved with more committees, which I'm hoping will be somewhat engaging. I was UAPC rep in the fall (CS undergrad curriculum committee) and quite enjoyed that, even if the only reason was that I got to listen to sometimes grumpy old profs arguing with interjections from the young'uns like Vasiga and Goldberg. One item related to that is that I'm also part of a committee this semester that is allegedly going to set the policies for appointing folks to sit on the various academic committees. It should provide some interesting discussion, as Edgar and Chris Neal are on it. I'm sure Edgar and myself will manage to get some kind of argument going.

I think I also may end up running for CSC exec (prez?) in addition to the other stuff, since spring is generally a quiet semester where nothing happens (or bad things happen due to sketchy exec, see S07).

So yeah, should be a nice light term. :D

Tags: s09
Current Location: Work (aka my living room)
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Dream Theater - The Glass Prison

So, one exam down, four to go. My thoughts on my courses this semester follow:

STAT 231: The material is dry, and the lectures are boring. However, the content is not difficult, and some of the stuff I can see being useful in the future. I studied for many a day for the final, and I'm pretty happy with how I did. I couldn't solve the last question which was to derive an estimator for beta in a regression model, and I messed up and used the wrong distribution when doing hypothesis testing on a log-likelihood function, but other than that, I think my fuck-ups were pretty minimal. I'll be happy with anything over a 60 in that course, though.

PHYS 121: I was really worried about this course, as I don't go to lectures for the most part, for no apparent reason, and I tend to be spotty about doing assignments. However, after this evening's review lecture, I'm much less worried. It looks like I just need to review some of the laws and figure out rotational shit and I'll be okay. This makes me a happy and less-stressed panda. Shooting for anything over a 60 here as well.

CS 350: Lowest mark so far is a 90% on A1, got 99% on A2 (missed a code question >.<) and A3 is being hand-marked by Salem becausemath_foo and myself implemented page allocation/deallocation, as well as doing both kmalloc and page-level memory leak detection. Even though the final for OS comes only 1hr after I finish my phys final on Thursday, I'm not too worried. I think it should be possible to pull off a 90-something in this course.

GER 102: I think I'm doing well in the course, but it's hard to say. I seem to have a thing for languages, which I must've forgotten after I started hating French during public school. Then again, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised given that my mom used to teach English and French. I'm guessing an 80 for this course.

CS 245: DiMarco gives us a big list of questions and informs us that the final will be a subset of this list. This makes me happy. Aiming for an 80 in this. The course is a bit slow-paced, but useful in the long run for students who aren't that comfortable with logic.

Current Location: outside phys145
Current Mood: content
Current Music: Rush - Red Barchetta

So yesterday I decided to go along with the MathSoc team to Scunt, particularly to the full-contact calculus event. I should've figured out that it was going to be a bad evening when a wasp stung me on the arm before the game even started. Luckily, I'm not allergic to many things (if any), so I was able to go on with the game.

For those who don't know how it works, there were teams of 5 folks. Each team was given a sheet of paper with some calculus problems on it and a writing utensil. One person on the team was chosen to solve the problems, another was the table (basically a writing surface/blocker for the solver), and the other three were free to either defend their solver, or try to harass the other teams solvers (including stealing their paper).

Our team consisted of Rob as the table, Aaron as the solver, and Ian, Matt and myself as the blockers/harassers. After the initial charge by 6 EDCOM, we got to go have fun by teaming up against other groups. I quite enjoyed using my size to my advantage, as nobody ever managed to pull me off of someone else or tackle me, even though they tried. Unfortunately, close to the end, I managed to tackle one of the quicker paper-runners and hold him on the ground. The suck started when someone tripped over him and landed on my face, crushing my glasses into my face. Luckily the bleeding stopped quickly, so I put the glasses aside and got back to the game.

Afterwards, I managed to steal a ride from Aaron over to the vision place in University Plaza. The optician took one look at my frames and told me that they weren't gonna be fixable. So, I got to drop $250 on some new frames, under the impression that they were just gonna move the lenses over from my old frames. This would apparently be a very sketchy thing to do because of my strong prescription.

I headed back to MC to hang out, since without being able to see a damn thing, there wasn't much to do at home. I ended up playing frisbee in the hall outside of C&D with Milk and James, and got a nice solid elbow in the nose from Milk to make my day all that much better. :D However, the fact that she agreed to go to KO with Saunders and myself made up for the fact.

KO was classy, we got ID'd by Bill, who apologized afterwards when we told him who we were. We got to listen to him rant about different things, such as his time in the army, the stupid things he's said in the past, and rants about the US economy. I had a couple of pints of Konings Hoeven Trappist, which was fairly good (I still prefer my Hacker-Pschorr Hefe Weisse, but this is up there), and tried some of the Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest Lager, which I'm really not a fan of. I also discovered that my ADD meds significantly delay me feeling the effects of alcohol. All three of us were pretty toasted by the time we went home.

This morning when I got to the vision centre to get my glasses, I discovered that they'd put new lenses in the new frames, instead of transferring the old ones over. This makes me significantly more happy, as that's a damn good deal for $250. And now I'm here in CSC, being classy and listening to Dream Theater.

Current Location: CSC
Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Dream Theater - Constant Motion

Tonight was good times, playing Set and Munchkin in MathSoc with a bunch of fogies and two of the first-years from my team. Also talked like Sean Connery for a good chunk of the time, as we agreed that it made even bad jokes funny. Listened to Richard Cheese and Dr. Horrible soundtrack. The Dexedrine seems to be working better than the Ritalin, though it's hard to say at this point.

Crunch week at work continues. I presently have a total of 14 tickets assigned to me. 9 of them have a fair amount of work remaining. The majority of them also involve a component of our software that I haven't dealt with before, and I need to learn and re-factor the code for it by Friday, as well as fixing a number of bugs. I also haven't been sleeping well recently, I fell asleep for three hours after work today. I still don't know if my company wants me back for another work term. Fuck.

Current Mood: tired

So I saw the new Death Race movie this evening. It was exactly what I needed - a series of car races and big explosions, with a weak story full of holes thrown in to tie everything together. It was good in that it allowed me to easily lose myself in it without having to think to understand the story. One really doesn't even need to pay attention to the story to be able to enjoy a movie like that, though I'm now interested in seeing the original, Death Race 2000. I also discovered that the 35 takes a really fucking roundabout route from Conestoga to my place, but meh, it was still faster than waiting for the next 12 to come by.

Frosh week is soon, but for now I get to worry about work. Things are a-changin' at the office, I'm now ancient there - I started September 6, 2008 and there are a total of 6 current employees (including the president) who have been there longer than me. I don't know if I'm going back. I'd like to, but my boss is incredibly hard to read, at least for me. I think that some positions may get shuffled around a bit, but who knows, 'tis office politics.

Current Mood: blank

Recently I got sick of running Gentoo - I found that while it was nice to have the amount of control that it allows, I found that I just didn't want to invest the effort into getting some things to work, such as the special media control keys on my laptop, and even things such as hardware video acceleration. I switched back to Ubuntu, and everything but my wireless Just Worked (TM). I was expecting the wireless issue, as I have to use NDISWrapper 'cuz my Dell is using a Broadcom card. But yeah, out of the box I had a nice working X session with hardware acceleration, the media buttons just worked, and everything was shiny without me having to put effort in. I think I'll still continue to use Gentoo for things such as servers, but Ubuntu is definitely superior on the desktop in my eyes.

Current Mood: tired

I think I've been playing too much Assassin's Creed. On the bus to campus today I amused myself by figuring out where various vantage points would be along the bus route, and how to scale them. On the topic of my 360, mine died a few days ago, unfortunately not with the red ring of death, and it was out of warranty. :( I ended up going and buying a new one, since I didn't really want to pay money to send it in and then just get a refurbished one back from MS. I ended up getting Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3 with it for free, so I guess it worked out okay. I haven't really been able to get into GoW, and I haven't tried UT3 yet. I am also pleased that I beat YYZ on expert in GH2 recently. :D

Work has been meh. I've been managing to get my monthly goals done in the nick of time every month, even though I tend to slack off a lot at the start of the month. My boss still seems happy with my performance though, so I guess things are okay. He's asked if I'd be interested in working from home again for my next workterm. I'm still thinking it over, 'cuz the CECS folks have been riding me a bit for spending so much time with the company. I started as a Junior Developer back in September '05 on my 2nd co-op term, and stayed on for another 16 months after that semester since I didn't want to come back to UW. Since I came back in Summer '07, I've done another two co-op terms with them, and I'm now a Senior Developer. I like what I do, and it's a good environment to work in, I'm just not sure if I want to try somewhere else to see how bigger companies are, or if I should stick with a company that I know treats me well... I think my brother would help me get my foot in the door at Fidelity Investments, since he's a manager in the IT Security division of the company (insert penetration testing joke here). Who knows, though. I've got time to figure it out, and I may have a peek at JobMine at the start of next semester. The main thing is that I wanna remain in Waterloo for a while, 'cuz I've got a lease at my current place until the end of April next year, and I'm sick and tired of moving.

Current Location: CSC
Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Juno Reactor - Solaris

Saw this neat flower when I was out for a walk earlier this afternoon. The flower's colour is still natural, I just desaturated the rest of the pic via Photoshop.

This time from my trip to Algonquin Park on the weekend.

Current Music: Dream Theater - Forsaken

So last weekend I went up to a family cottage in Kincardine, and came out with a few decent photos. I threw them up on my flickr here. I also got some neat close-ups of raindrops earlier on the same day, viewable here.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Nitrogen Part 1 - Juno Reactor

That makes the second semester in a row where the CSC's budget has gone through without any complaints. :D I think that next term I'm gonna try and get into a voting position on council so I don't have to just sit idle throughout the meetings.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Slipknot - Prosthetics

I'm sick of throwing up. Make the sickness stop. :(

Current Mood: sick

I just blew $700 on a camera.

So I made brownies from scratch today, and not only did they turn out awesome, I didn't even burn down my apartment building in the process! Though I did set the smoke alarm off once...

Current Location: 130 Lincoln
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Dream Theater - Lifting Shadows Off a Dream

http://personal.xsquared.ca/gallery/v/20080504-newdigs/

Current Location: Werk/Home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: The Small Print - Muse

CS240 - 82
CS246 - 81
GER101 - 80
MATH239 - 74 (sad)
STAT230 - 69

Holy shit, I passed everything! And I had 50% going into the 230 final! This is the best I've ever done at this damned university. :D

I'm also all moved in to my new sexy apartment, with a beautiful 7th-floor view looking north up Weber at trees and houses, and I've had my first day of work! Apparently one of my co-workers started telecommuting from Waterloo recently, and he lives just down the street from me, which should be good times. Wheeeeee!

Current Mood: bouncy

The two nasty exams are out of the way. MATH239 yesterday at 12:30 (estimated 70% on the final), STAT230 today at 12:30 (hoping for a 50% on the final). All I have left is CS246 tomorrow evening at 7:30pm, and I'm done the semester. Then I get to move into my new place and get ready for werk werk.

I think I've slept a total of ~8hrs since Monday morning.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Primus - Spegetti Western

Tylenol 3s make me bouncybouncy! Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

I got rear-ended on the way home from campus this evening. My neck is severely sore. I have a 240 exam in 12 hours. Bah.