wednesday november 13, 2002
picture with jerry
looks like i am finally posting the picture we took with jerry before he left vancouver
sounds to me like jerry is settling down quite nicely, which is great. sorry it took so long to post the picture, but here it is.
for the first time in a long while, i found myself sitting in front of the computer with time to kill. most of my time has been spent at work, or on the phone, or at the ymca, or catching up with my distance ed assignments/notes and of course, counter-strike (and sometimes xcom). i guess i could be playing counter-strike right now, but i already did for about half an hour. i'm done for the night. typically, i get home around 6pm, and kill a bit of time with general web surfing and ICQing until dinner time at 7. afterwards, it's usually some counter-strike (half hour worth) until 8 or so, when i call alison. when i'm done it can be anywhere between 9:30 and 10:30 pm. well damn. that's nearly the whole day gone. throw in some snacking, showering, a little reading for dist ed, and a little more ICQing, and it's time for bed. on a gym day, the phone call is cut short, and 9 pm to 10:45 is spent at the Y. even less time. so this is my excuse.
so how did i find time tonight? i guess everything sort of fell together. alison wanted to sleep early, i just finished a dist ed assignment earlier today, and no gym. so i finished my daily activities a little earlier than usual.
i dont like my distance ed course. the prof is terrible at lecturing. the tapes are mainly him reading the notes while skipping over some of the more detailed material because that stuff is unintelligible without looking at a graph in front of you. plus at the end of the lectures they have references to articles that were supposed to be included with the course material for me to read, but they're missing. so unorganized. it certainly doesn't help that the material is dry as ever: cost-benefit analysis. can you imagine?
things i learned from cost-benefit analysis that's actually interesting: the value of a human life is probably somewhere between 2 and 4 million dollars. the value of travelling time is about 50% of your wage. your leisure time is worth about 20% to 30% of your wage. and this is all determined by looking at how people make decisions involving risk and spending time so these numbers are not just pulled out of the air.
monday may 20, 2002
update!
it's the end of the long weekend, and i find myself with some time to kill, so it's probably a good time to write something.
where to start. i haven't done this in such a long time that i'm out of practice. i saw star wars on friday. it's a movie that's not as bad as andrew makes it out to be. there are parts of the movie that make you groan, and then there are other parts of the movie that just wow you. the real groaners were all the love scenes between anakin and amidala. very cheesy and with bad dialogue. the action scenes on the other hand were all pretty nice. the large jedi vs droids battle was awesome (featured prominently on pretty much every preview). you know the one. it's quite a sight to see about 30 to 40 jedi charge forward wielding their multi-colored light sabers. there are other very nice visuals and battles too. although jar-jar doesn't die, there's only about 2 minutes of footage with him in it, so it's forgivable.
also went clubbing on friday night. alison's cousin came into waterloo to visit her boyfriend, so we went to the revolution. drinks were surprisingly cheap there. at least domestic beers were cheap, at only $3.30 each. unfortunately, we had to pay for cover because we got there late (after 11).
the rest of the weekend was spent a little more productively. i got caught up with all of my course reading. now i understand all that went on in database class that previously was all a blur due to the professor's horrendous accent and his ludicrously fast talking speed. i also got caught up with econ371, which, by all intents and purposes, is a distance ed course.
also just played in a scrim today: draino vs MiB.
saturday april 27, 2002
insaniquarium
tank 3: 23485
it's all about the pirahnas, jerry. just get to pirahnas as fast as you can and you can get crazy scores. pirahnas drop 200 dollar diamonds. it's a pretty fun game. i hated the 2nd tank though. those starcatchers are dumb and slow.
friday april 26, 2002
it's that time again
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
| 10:30 | amath250 mc4045 |
amath250 mc4045 |
amath250 mc4045 |
||
| 11:00 | |||||
| 11:30 | cs454 mc4020 |
cs454 mc4020 |
|||
| 12:00 | |||||
| 12:30 | cs448 mc4061 |
cs448 mc4061 |
cs448 mc4061 |
||
| 1:00 | |||||
| 1:30 | |||||
| 2:00 | |||||
| 2:30 | |||||
| 3:00 | |||||
| 3:30 | |||||
| 4:00 | |||||
| 4:30 | |||||
| 5:00 | |||||
| 5:30 | |||||
| 6:00 | |||||
| 6:30 | |||||
| 7:00 |
econ220 |
econ371 mc4061 |
|||
| 7:30 | |||||
| 8:00 | |||||
| 8:30 | |||||
| 9:00 | |||||
| 9:30 |
ooh, a decent looking time table for once. 10:30am 3 days a week and 11:30am for the other 2. all afternoons off. at first i thought i had tuesdays and thursday off but they rescheduled a class. but i think i'd rather have it this way anyway.
and just like that, my work term is over. i had to stay in late on my last day today to finish things off. i left work around 7:15. pivotal is a great company to work for. everybody is very friendly, and they know how to treat their co-ops well. right now they have a strong push to improve the co-op experience even more and build a strong reputation as a good employer among the schools. they made us attend a focus group to figure out what they can do better and improve upon, while i was already thinking they were one of the best. i'll tell you why.
pivotal flew me to vancouver and back to toronto, and they paid me a 350 dollar bonus for food expenses 'while looking for accomodations', and would have given me a week's accomodation at a hotel while i was hosue hunting, but of course i already have a home here. The entire first day was orientation with a free lunch, and during the first week there were 3 other information sessions about their main product (how to set it up, how to use it, and so on). very impressive.
they have free coffee and pop, at cost chocolate bars and chips and other snacks, dart board, foosball table, weekly basketball sessions, and i think they have a volleyball team, soccer team, and a dragonboat team in the summer. last week there was a rock climbing event on pivotal and right afterwards, a pub event where we watched the canucks beat the red wings 5-2 while enjoying free drinks and appetizers. very nice right? and they want to improve on it? excellent.
monday april 23, 2002
push downstairs
push... tina... tina lives in berlin, her voice so seldom on my machine, is here tonight and i'm on the market but, when i'm on the market words move faster wire, and clouds move thin between us like a skin, like a salty skin for a seed, of fat circles, smiling smilng her voice so, intentionally smiling, in the clouds between us, these are my intentions... pushin... push. pushin... it's me i see you i've seen you before, i know about you i been told about you, you were waiting and the wind was waiting for me to call, you were waiting in the air where it's thin. comin through the tiny holes, your number. comin through the tiny holes, your vapor. comin through the tiny holes, in the edges of the night, and the tips of your wings are comin through the tiny holes, pushin... push. these are my intentions... through the club a blonde is carryin something, is carryin me, i'm someone i used to be, grey plastic someone, blue plastic girl, your cream is pushin pushin and pushin... pushed away your body is-a pushin... pushed away come before the unbelieve, carrying some, lipstick for the, boyfriend blonde, between the rolls of sheets, is professionally poised, the faces are watching her, she's watchin the faces, watchin her... these are my intentions... push... tina... push... tina...
-underworld
sunday april 22, 2002
eyes
have you ever noticed that almost everybody has eyes that are differently sized? even shoo pictured below has differently sized eyes. her left eye is smaller than her right. same with mine. i have a smaller left eye. i think it's because there's so many possible eye sizes for a person that the chances of getting 2 eyes of the exact same size, even with genetic disposition for a general relative size of eye, is very small. check your own eyes. are they exactly the same size? if they are, check them again to make sure. and then if you're still thinking that they are. then consider yourself one of the privileged few. now check the other parts of your body. if you find yourself perfectly symmetrical, then congratulations. you have a good chance of making it as a model.
now, to see if you can make it as a supermodel that everybody of the opposite sex will ogle over, you can take a morphing program, morph a hundred faces of a variety of people around your age. if you look somewhat like the resulting photo, then you have a great chance. Since the perfect look is the average look. beady eyes are no good, and super huge eyes are bad as well. the average is the most beautiful.
now, to picture the perfect male or the perfect female at a specific age. choose an age and a gender. now find pictures of all the people in the world at that specific age and take that morphing program of yours and morph them all together. you now have yourself the most baeutiful human of that age and gender. this is all based on looks of course.
sunday march 24, 2002
thumbs
i figured out how to batch thumbnail pictures in photoshop now. so pictures may be coming really soon. i wonder if i can make it save at a specific quality level.
shoo
friday march 8, 2002
furniture
a new set of couches arrived on sunday. and we got rid of a couple of sets of older couches, and moved around some of the remaining couches, so now the basement and the third floor family room look different now. i took some before and after pictures and those are now added to the backlog of pictures to post. sigh. i'm so lazy. i have too many pictures to post. damn my new camera, giving me so much work.
war3 patch
i haven't been playing much warcraft 3 the past few days. a new patch is due out any day now, and will fundamentally change the game, so i don't see the point of playing right now. besides, the game is horribly unbalanced as it is right now. night elves rule over everything. there's no good way to stop a rush of archers and a keeper of the grove. the keeper summons too many treants to deal with.
the new patch will hopefully fix this. they made it so creeps dont level your heroes that quickly. to make up for that, you now get a free skill point at the start. to make up for that, they made level requirements for higher level spells (level 2 spells require a level 3 hero, and level 3 spells require a level 5 hero). so the end result is, you can't get triple cast treants until level 5. which is pretty late in the game. they also made heros take 75% damage from pierce damage, so they can't get shot from range that easily, which is good. orcs were beefed up a lot. grunts have double the hp, but cost more gold and food to make. taurens are now the strongest melee unit in the game. i can't remember what else right now, but there are tons of changes.
saturday march 2, 2002
final fantasy X
my brother finally bought his ps2 less than 2 weeks ago. both gta 3 and ffx look amazing. especially final fantasy x. the in game models are pretty good approximations of the pre-rendered fmv models. and all the effects during the fights are flashy and spectacular with lighting effects, motion blurs, transparencies, you name it. at times it is difficult to tell when the cinematic sequences are real-time or pre-rendered. they changed the levelling up system yet again too. now they have this sphre grid thing and s-levels. it's quite odd, but once you get used to it, you can see that it allows for lots of flexibility in how to build your character. most weapons and armor are customizable too, you sacrifice items to give it new abilities (up to a certain limit depending on the piece of equipment). now, weapons and armor does not increase damage or decrease chance to get hit. the only reason to equip stuff is for the special customizations that give abilities and bonusses. seems quite different from all previous systems. and i like it.
but i'm not gonna play this game. too many games to play, and not enough time. warcraft 3, counter-strike, and now this? there's just no way.
2002
how embarrassing. i've been using 2001 as the year for my dates since january until now. i just went back and changed them all to 2002. i'm surprised no one noticed. or if you did, why didn't anybody tell me i was a whole year off? bah!
rrsp
yesterday was the last day for rrsp contributions to get tax credits for year 2001. i put in 2500 dollars on thursday.
friday march 1, 2002
basketball
every wednesday at lunch time, my company books out a gym at a community center close by and a bunch of people go to play basketball. of course, most of the people who actually go are coop students. there are usually about 9 or 10 coops who go, and between 1 and 5 full time employees. i have a pretty fun time playing every week, and it's timed perfectly on wednesday. on monday and tuesday i look forward to playing basketball on wednesday. and then on thursday and friday, i look forward to the weekend. it works out pretty well, and the weeks go by pretty quickly. and even though i'm not really much of a basketball player, i'm starting to get noticeably better at it. i dunno why i never really got into it in high school and such. maybe it was because i'm not as big as i am now. i'm usually in the post constantly pushing for position for rebounds or passes. i don't think i was able to play the tough inside before. that meant that despite my height i couldn't get rebounds because i always got pushed out of position. now it's better.
even still, it's kinda rough in there for me. i have to use power to maintain position where other people can just use their weight. it gets pretty tiring. i need to gain another 15 pounds or so. and another thing, it's pretty easy to get hurt in basketball. so far in the last 2 months i got: sprained left index, sprained right thumb, cut on my wrist, cut on my right middle finger, blisters in the arches of my feet, a few bruises. but it's still pretty fun.
especially when i get to stuff people. which i've become known to do at these pivotal basketball sessions. better watch out! anyone wanna schedule some regular sessions of basketball for the summer in waterloo? or even now in vancouver?
wednesday february 27, 2002
warcraft 3 beta
what a time sucker. it's really fun, but still has a number of bugs in it. and the balance seems a little off, but that's what having a beta test is for. i'm not really part of the selected beta testing team, but so aren't most of you who are playing this game right now. we found a sweet bnetd server that is host to over 2000 users at peak time. none of whom are supposed to be playing this game right now. i hear there are even bigger servers out there, but they are run and overrun by korean players. i'll stick with this one. it's big enough. probably even larger than the real bnet server itself.
of the 4 races right now, i'm most familiar with the night elves, followed by undead, orcs, and finally humans. i've been playing random all the time, and i hardly ever get humans. i think i've only played humans once, ever.
the seattle trip
the weekend after my trip to toronto, i took a day trip with andrew and pat, along with andrew's mom and his brother. why? andrew just felt like taking a road trip. and what better place than seattle, where we can get some krispy kreme doughnuts! and that's the main thing we have to show for the trip. 6 dozen krispy kreme doughnuts. we also took pictures everywhere it was appropriate, and even some places that didn't really need to be photographed, but since we both had digital cameras with us, it didn't matter.
we had 2 canon s110's fully charged and with empty cards totalling 80 megs is free space, and one day to use it up, so we snapped away at anything. andrew's already posted one up of the archaic parking coin boxes they seem to really like using down in seattle. i think they have them because they have no dollar coins, so making boxes that took bills is better than having everyone carry 5 bucks worth of quarters with them everywhere to pay for parking downtown.
i have a great backlog of pictures to post up here. if only i could find the time to do it. damn blizzard and their warcraft 3 beta!
wednesday february 20, 2002
the toronto trip
i enjoyed my short stay at toronto. everything except the flights though: my plane was late both ways. and considering the timing of the flights were just right, this threw off the timing and i lost a bunch of sleep. i took a lot of pictures from the car show and with alison, so i may post them later when i have time to make them all pretty with thumbnails and everything.
