Busy, Busy

This has been a really busy weekend. Saturday was my convocation. (I'm now a graduate with a Bachelor of Mathematics - Honours Double Combinatorics and Optimization & Computer Science Cooperative Program With Distinction - Dean's Honours List...or something like that). I had a lot of fun seeing my various friends although the ceremony was a little long.

Saturday as dinner with various relatives and Sunday was lunch with various other relatives. e.g. My cousin (who is back from a year of teaching in Iraq) came down from Ottawa with his girlfriend. Sunday night I went out with friends who were in town for Convocation and Friday I went out with other friends who were also in town for Convocation.

On Friday, we saw the movie Supersize Me. I thought it was really good. It is a documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDonald's for a month. However, it is much more sophisticated than that. Rather than bashing McDonald's, it examines the state of people's health (wrt exercise and diet) in the US. He travels around interviewing various people, e.g. a law professor involved with law suits against McDonald's, a lobbyist for the food industry, a very obese guy who was getting his stomach stapled, the 3 doctors and 1 nutritionist who supervised him, etc. I'd recommend seeing it.

Tomorrow I'm planning on going to a talk at the Fields Institute in Toronto.

I also posted some photos from Liechtenstein and Austria on my digital photo page. Eventually I'll finish adding photos from my trip to Europe and then I'll add some from Convocation.

Graduated

I just checked Quest. I'm now officially graduated:

                       - - - - -   Degrees Awarded   - - - - -

Degree        :  Bachelor of Mathematics

Confer Date   :  2004-06-19

Degree Honours:  With Distinction

Degree Honours:  Dean's Honours List

Plan          :  Combinatorics & Optimization, Honours, Co-operative Program

Plan          :  Computer Science, Honours, Co-operative Program

(It's Good) To Be Free

My last exam was this morning. So I'm FREE! Forever. Well not quite. But I'm done my undergraduate degree aside from showing up for convocation. (Assuming that I pass, but I think that's a given).

I haven't really done anything cool yet. Mostly just sleeping. (Between cramming, not being able to sleep, and having a 9 am exam, I only got a few hours of sleep last night). I started reading Daniel In Japan. It's an interesting write up about how his trip is going. But it is longer than my attention span right now. (That whole lack of sleep thing). I think I'll go watch the Leafs win. :-) Go Leafs go!

Stuff

I have less than a week of school left now! The Psychology final is on Saturday and the Distributed Computing final is on Tuesday. Then I'm free. My plans are to go on a European for 3 weeks in May.

Rogers (my ISP) finally stopped blocking their customers from access the nasa.gov domain after working "as quickly as possible" over 3 weeks. [sarcasm]. So I can finally access the Astronomy Picture Of The Day again.

I've also heard that Amazon's search engine, A9 has launched. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting.

2 Down 3 To Go

Cryptography and Nuclear Science are over with. I think both finals went okay. The next one is Network Flow on Monday, which seems a long way off. I think I'll slack off tomorrow instead of studying. I sacrificed too much sleep to cram for Nuclear Science, so I'll sleep in nice and late I think.

Four Movies

On average, I'm 3 weeks behind in reading for my classes and there are less than 2 weeks left in term. However, instead of catching up on all that work, I watched a bunch of movies this weekend:

Bourne Identity is really great action movie. It is fast paced and a little suspenseful since you don't really know what is going on (Jason Bourne has amnesia, but seems to be some kind of spy/assassin and people that he can't remember are chasing him across Europe). One of the better movies I've seen in a long time.

Runaway Jury is a decent movie. Perhaps a little slow at times and I felt it didn't live up to its potential. Nevertheless, I liked the ending and John Cussack's acting was good.

Rush Hour 2 would be complemented if I called it a "B-movie". There was no plot. None. The fight scenes were few and far between. Chris Tucker is annoying. The out-takes they showed during the credits are the best part of the movie.

The Corporation is a really compelling documentary about how corporations (which are legal "persons") would be diagnosed as psychopaths if they were real persons. Definitely a left-wing documentary [but isn't that the best kind? ;-)]. It featured people such as Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winning economist), the CEO of Shell (I can't remember his name), the CEO of Interface (some carpet company that is trying to become environmentally sustainable; again I forget his name), and various other notable people.

Tired

I'm glad this week is (basically) over. It has seemed really long. Perhaps because I've been so busy. Four days of class, two days of night class, a BBQ at Daniel & Andrew's, going to Moose Winooski's with Arun and Martin, plus homework = a lot of stuff and a lot of driving around...Oh I forgot the Brian Kernighan lecture that was this afternoon (What Should an Educated Person Know about Computers?). I found it interesting and he is a pretty good speaker. Perhaps it wasn't totally educational though as it was just a summary of a class he teaches at Princeton to inform arts students about what computers are, how they work, how pervasive they are, what contemporary issues involve computers, etc. (Being a Computer Science major I know all that stuff). Nevertheless, it was entertaining. I think more people came today than for the Aho talk back in January too.

Just one more class tomorrow before the weekend. (I want to go see The Corporation at Princess Cinema...)

No More RPC

I just submitted the CS 454 assignment. 3788 lines of code plus a couple of documents about how wonderful it is. [Well hopefully the TA thinks its wonderful :-)]. That is the end of my computer programming assignments as an undergrad student...Wow...That is a very nice realization (as I'm tired of being sleep deprived while chasing down segmentation faults..). :-) Time to make plans for going out tonight.

The return of f0(int, int) is: 15

Just under 32 hours to go...the middleware layer actually works now! Well it works for a procedure that adds 5 to 10 and gets 15. My to do list is down to 4 things plus testing (and fixing bugs...well hopefully not) and writing all the documentation. Not too bad. I think I'll take a break...

Blood-Shot Eyes

Man, my distributed computing assignment is driving me crazy. It is due in about 46 hours and I still am not done coding (so I can't even test)...too many crazy errors and too many pieces...I'm almost done...have to write 3 more things before I can get the client and server talking, plus my to do list has 4 other things that I should...plus I need to write server-side skeletons and write a real client and server that I can use for testing...(and I haven't even thought about the write up that need to go with the RPC layer)...Procrastination is a bad thing.

Studying Sucks

The psychology midterm is tomorrow night and the cryptography midterm is Wednesday, so I'm coped up in my room cramming...It's not very fun. There are only so many multiple choice questions that one can do from the psychology study guide before going insane. I'm getting most of them right though, so I think I'll be okay. Plus, I just got an e-mail saying that the Network Flow assignment due date was extended to Friday (as the server that it was on has issues so people were having trouble downloading it). That's means I'll be able to get a reasonable amount of sleep Wednesday night. (My previous plan was to start it after my Wednesday night class...but every other week I've done that I've ended up sleep deprived).

Time Flies

I can't believe reading week(end) is over already. :-( I did too much homework to relax enough and too much slacking to get enough homework done.

Probably the most interesting thing I did was going Friday night with a bunch of my friends to an African-cuisine restaurant downtown. I don't think any of us were impressed. The service was really slow. I had a beef dish with beef chunks, sauce, and according to the menu, there were a few vegetables in there too, but there were so few, they were hard to find. It wasn't warm enough either. (Cold food isn't usually good food). The salad consisted exclusively of lettuce and tomatos - nothing else. And I don't like tomatos. The bread was interesting. The plates were pizza dishes and the bread covered the entire plate. It was kind of like a pancake, but cold and rubbery. For the portion-size and the quality of service, the prices were too high too. To be nice though, it was better than the last time we went to Jack Astors...

Other than that I've been working on Distributed Computing a lot. Aside from the midterm on Wednesday, there is a big programming assignment, where we have to implement a RPC middleware with a binder process and a bunch of other bells and whistles. It's not too terrible, except I couldn't find a partner, so I'm doing it all myself. (Hopefully the TAs will be cool with that). I figure I'm about 40% done. Most of the socket stuff is out of the way (I forgot how crazy some of socket stuff can be!). I have the server talking to the binder and vice versa, but I need to write the part where what they say is meaningful. (I think I'm into the outside-in programming methodology - kind of a blend of top-down and bottom-up!). For the client, I can rip-off (i.e. reuse) most of what I've already written as (I think) I've made it all nice and generic.

Nuclear Science

I survived the nuclear science midterm. 24/25. :-) That's not too bad, considering I was making educated guesses for about a quarter of the questions. Multiple choice is so nice. :-) Hopefully the rest of my midterms will go just as well.

Reading Week(end)

Thanks to reading week(end), I'm done for the week! No more class! :-) [Alas, most other faculties have the entire week off...but 2 days off is still nice]. I think I'll slack off for the rest of the day and be lazy...watch lots of TV or something like that.

The registrar's office posted the final exam schedule. Once again I have a mediocre schedule - the 6th, 7th, 12th, 17th, and 20th of April. Nice and spread out so I have time to study, but they cover almost the entire exam period (which is the 5th to 22nd), so no chance of escaping early. :-(

Midterm

Argh! The Nuclear Science midterm was tonight. It was a lot harder than I was anticipating...but it was multiple choice, so as long as there are a lot of E's in the answer key then making educated guesses is sufficient. ;-)

Time to start the CO 351 assignment which is due in 11 hours and 19 minutes. Ram says it is very hard. I hope not...

Procrastination

I reorganized my digital photos a bit. There are a few new photos. Most were on my old site, but I think the ones of the Westlake Centre fountain and traffic on Battery Street are "new".

I haven't taken too many photos this year, but later in the week, I'll put up some real new ones [unless all my assignments/quizzes/midterms take up all my time - I have 1 quiz, 3 assignments, and 1 midterm to worry about this week. :-(]

Night Class

Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have night class. Night class can be a bit of a drag because I have to travel back to school for a second time on those days. Plus the lectures are about 3 hours long, which is way longer than my attention span.

Last night was Psychology. It seems every unit has some kind of unethical experiment. Last night the lecture was about dreams and learning. Apparently Pavlov locked dogs in cages, starved them, and cut up their digestive tracts before teaching them to salivate when he rang a bell. Watson taught a little kid to be afraid of white fluffy things such as rabbits and Santa Claus beards by giving them a rabbit to play with then sneaking up from behind scaring the kid. The experiment ended when the kids mother stopped taking him to day care...

Here's a interesting article by Bruce Schneier that I saw. It is about identification cards and security. He makes a few good arguments against over stating the value of IDs. [Nevertheless, IDs have their (limited) uses].

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.