Busy Day

I just got back from Daniel's/Geoff's/Andrew's where they were deep frying stuff. Lots of people were there; most of them I haven't seen in a while too as I'm not in any Pure Math classes these days. It was good times. [I missed the Leafs game though - they got revenge against Ottawa, winning 5-1. :-)]...I spent the afternoon at school working on Waterloo's January local programming contest. It was hard problem set. The standings are here - I was 15th out of 44 (or so). I only got one problem (E). I couldn't figure out how to properly solve the next-easiest (C), so I spent the rest of my time on the only problem no one solved (A).

Math Awards

The Math Awards Banquet was tonight. A lot of people won awards or scholarships - more than last time I was there. (I won the Combinatorics and Optimization book prize). It was mostly people from 1st and 2nd year (winning entrance scholarships), but I saw a few people I know that I haven't seen in a while - Ian, Martha, Jon, Brendan. I also think they served the same meal as last time - chicken, vegetables, and potato. It was okay though and their coffee was decent. (Although I haven't had too much coffee since I left Seattle).

Snow Day

Snow days are cool. :-) Class was cancelled, so after breakfast I went back to bed for another couple of hours of sleep. And Tuesday is my busiest day too, with 6 hours of lectures (3 in the morning and 3 in the evening). The afternoon and evening haven't been very productive, but I finished the Network Flow assignment that is due Thursday, started the Distributed Computing assignment, and did a little reading.

It's not very cold outside anymore (maybe only -10 below), but there is a fair bit more snow. When I went on a walk with Clancy (my dog), the bottom 6 - 8 inches of my pants ended up covered in snow by the time we got home. If I can make off of my street (which never gets plowed), I think (hope) the driving won't be too bad tomorrow.

The Teeth of the Tiger

I finished reading The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy a couple days ago. It's the first novel that I've read in a long time. (Too many textbooks and assorted non-fiction). I thought it was pretty good. It was shorter than most of his books and, consequently, the plot and characters were not as rich as some of his other books. (Jack Ryan is no longer the main character - he's retired and his son, aptly named Jack Ryan Jr., is now the protagonist). The only thing I didn't like is that it was set up a little much for a sequel - a few obvious, but unspecific, foreshadowings to characters and events that don't occur. All in all though, it was good read.

Template

I started playing around with the template a bit...Blogger doesn't seem to want to republish the blog though. So I'm making a post to nudge it along (hopefully)...

Slacking

It is nice having only one hour of class on Mondays and Fridays. Not quite as nice as it would be to have zero hours of class, but still it makes the week seem a lot shorter. I spent too much of that free time slacking off though. I added some thumbnails to the index page for my digital photos and stylized it up a bit. I like it a lot better now. I better going and start my CO 351 assignment...

Randomness and the Netscape Browser

The Leafs are losing to Philadelphia yet again, :-( so I am working on my Cryptography homework again. The article Randomness and the Netscape Browser is kind of interesting, but perhaps not very profound.

I figure out how to add titles to my blog posts, so that can be my improvement for today. Ram sent me a copy of his blog template to use as a reference, so soon I'll make something better than the default template.

Prof. Aho

CS started a "Distinguished Lecture Series". Prof. Aho from Columbia (the university, not the country) gave a talk about programming languages and compilers. It was mostly about the reliability of software, quantum computing, and how to craft compilers to address these two areas. It was kind of interesting. There were tonnes of people there - standing room only in one of the larger lecture halls on campus. A much higher turnout than one would expect for a Friday afternoon extracurricular event.

The Leafs are losing to Philadelphia again. :-( I think I'll work on my Cryptography assignment...

Photos!

I've copied over photos and other stuff to my new website. I've reorganized my digital photos a bit, and hopefully improved the overall quality. I've also added some new photos from Christmas and the fall (while that first one is actually from the spring). Most of the "older" photos were on my old site, but some are new additions - I'm too lazy to make a complete list, but here are a few.

I have night class for the next two days, but sometime in the near future I'll try to improve the "look-and-feel" as well as the navigation. I also want to play around with the blogger template to make the blog better too.

Webspace

The nice folks at 1-and-1 have a promotion for 500 MB of free webspace for 3 years. Ram signed up a while ago and even bought a domain name. I think I'll be a little bit less ambitious...For now I'll just copy over some of my photos and reorganize them a bit. 500 MB is a lot more space than the 10 MB my ISP Rogers gives out!

A Blog

I have too much time on my hands, so I'm starting a blog. If all goes well, I'll have a new website too with more webspace for all my photos...