Stephen's corner of the Web

So on friday I went to Ottawa to look for an apartment for myself. I had looked online at a number of apartments and set up 3 appointments to view three places. I left Cambridge at 4AM and got into Ottawa at 9AM after dodging the sunrise by eating breakfast at McDonalds at the Trenton service center. Eventually, I saw three places and decided to rent the second place, which was my preference based on the online searching. So if I get approved I will be living in a 1 bedroom apartment on the ground floor at the corner of Greenbank and Baseline. So now I am pricing out various items I need to get. End result is, I will be living with Dennis's parents for 2 weeks and then moving into my apartment June 1. Finally Friday evening, I drove back home to Cambridge and arrived home around 10:30PM. Long day. However, I am excited and am looking forward to starting my own place ad job! And that is all I have to say for now.

I'll post some pictures when I get a reasonable internet connection.

Update

I heard today that I am approved to live at the apartment I applied for. So here are the images of the unit I saw. It is not the unit I will be living in though.

So I got a job offer from Xandros today! So far I have looked it over and am awaiting the paper copy they should be sending out tomorrow. It looks good so far. I am still waiting to hear back from a couple other companies where I have applied, but if I don;t hear anything from them in the next couple days, I will likely accept the offer from Xandros. This relieves a lot of stress and worry I have had over the last couple months.

Hooray!

So another update seems in order.

This is my last term of school! Soon I will be finished course work and then exams. This term, I took one of the big 3 courses at UW. Last school term (Summer 04) I took Real-Time which is one of the other Big-3 courses, but there is nothing I can actually show as a result of that course. Unless you want to wade through a crappily designed and implemented operating system, and train tracking application. With graphics though, since I did a ray tracer for my final project, there is a lot I can show as a result. I have a collection of images I've generated while testing and debugging the individual features. As well there is my final project Demo page, showing each of the individual features.

Now having recently submitted the graphics project, I have only a couple things left to do, a Phil 145 paper which is late, and a Music 100 concert review which is due by the exam. Thankfully school is almost over. Now I just need to find a job...

So reading shawn's page recently, I am completely lost. Could you fucking speak english!

Thanks, that is all I have to say

So it seems I was hasty to say that I would base my KNetspeed on the Gnome Netspeed applet. It seems they use some glibtop library which I don't want to use. I did a little more searching and eventually came across another KDE program that does a similar job, except it isn;t an applet, but rather a program that sits inthe system tray area. It seems to have a decent interface to getting network device stats though, and is portable to Linux 2.6, 2.4 and BSD4 as well as Solaris. So I will probably use that instead, for network device stats. Yay for free software!

I have been a long time user of the Gnome desktop environment on my computer. In fact I have been using it since I installed Linux on my system. This term however, I have been working at Xandros and have gotten used to the KDE desktop environment. Recently I decided to switch to KDE on my desktop machine at home as well. While considering the switch, I realized that I only really use a console, web browser, email, music player, and IRC. Since I preferred konsole over gnome-terminal for a couple of reasons, and have really preferred Juk over rhythmbox at work, I realized that at the application level, KDE was better for me. After spending a while going through preferences, to customize my desktop a little, I am now happily running a KDE desktop.

One of the other benefits of using KDE is that for myself, I find it easier to understand the code since it is C++ Object Oriented rather than stange C object oriented with casting and weird Macros. Admittedly, I have done very little Gnome development and a fair bit of random KDE development now at Xandros, so that isn't entirely a fair comparison. However, as a result, I have been working ona little project recently (this afternoon) to create an applet similar to the netspeed applet for Gnome. In fact, I am using the netspeed applet device code. Hopefully, I will have some reportable progress and screenshots soon, for now, I have a working keyes applet with a KNetspeed name :).

I went and looked at JobMine tonight. More PeopleSoft shit...

I had an appointment in Ottawa thos morning to see the doctor. Now I am cast free and am allowed to put weight on my leg. Too bad the muscles in my leg have disappeared and are useless. Time to go do physio I guess.

One side effect of having a cast, is that a lot of the hair on my leg came out where it was in the cast and didn;t get any air and stuff. Also my foot and leg are mostly covered in a layer of dead skin now. Yay for pealing layers of skin. It really is fun

So I decided to kill off the planet.woot.net I had started some time ago. After looking at the logs and noticing that the only visitors was google and other search bots, I decided to remove it. Sorry to all the earch engines for removing another page from your databases. If you are interested however, the software to run it is available from PlanetPlanet and is easy to set up and use. I however, have no interest in maintaining the page and doing any of the design work I planned on. For now, it is easier to read everyone's pages directly.

So in order to get around in Deep River with a broken leg, and next term when I will need to get to a variety of places, my parents had suggested that we get a small car for myself. So this week we found a small 95 Geo Metro for me. IT is a small green 4 door car with a 1.3 litre engine. My parents paid for the car and we bought it used on Tuesday. Wednesday was spent running around getting insurance, an e-test, and plates for the car. So now I have my own car since it is in my name. I don't have any pictures of it though. I tried to go back to the autotrader site to get the picture off there, but it was already removed from the site.

The fun part on Wednesday though, was when we picked up the car. We found that there was a bag of sausages left in the car. The guy we bought the car from makes sausages in his house as a small home business, and he left some for us. So now there is a bag with 6 sausages that are rather powerful smelling. I have had some of them and they taste good, but you can keep tasting them all day after!

So I discovered that my enrollment appointment was today and not this weekend. I blame Thai for me thingking it was on the weekend, since I mentioned it on IRC and he said his was on the 13th. So I naturally assumed mine was as well. So when I got around to registering at 3:30, a mere 2.5 hours into the appointment, I could register forr all but hte CS courses I wanted. I eventually got it to accept an 8:30 Mon, Wed, Fri Databases instead of the prefered 10:30, but instead of Networks, which was full, I had to try for something else. At first I had Distributed at 8:30 Tue, Thurs, but I didn't want 8:30's every day. So I swapped it for RealTime at 2:30 Tuesday and Thursday. RealTime is of course the course I originally wanted but decided not to take because of concerns of time requirements. However, it appears that I will take it anyways. Although I would still like to take Networks, possibly inplace of Databases.

So my new schedule as I am currently enrolled is here

So I think I have finished picking courses for next term. My proposed schedule is at the usual place. I was considering taking Real-Time for a while, but then decided that with 5 classes and probably having to go to Physio 2 or 3 times a week for a while at least, I won't be able to commit the time necessary for it. So I will be taking Databases instead. This leaves me with a fairly nice schedule for the term and lots of good working time blocks.

So my plan now is to take a course next work term, wither on campus if I am in Waterloo, or through Distance Ed, and then take Real-Time and 3 other courses in 4B. We'll see which ones, there are several courses I am interested in.

So I am now back home in Cambridge for a while. I have had a rather interesting few days.

On Saturday I got a ride to the Civic Hospital in Ottawa and when I went to a desk there, they had no idea that I was supposed to be coming, even though I was told to be there by 10AM. Eventualy we got over to the Emergency Department where they did their thing, more X-Rays and some other work. Then I was told that it is a break of one bone and a torn ligament on the other side of my ankle. So I would definately need surgery to fix it properly. The next step was to get sent up to my room, after getting an IV put in and told that I get no food or drinks till I am done surgery. Eventually, after dinner was sever and the night staff came on, I was asked if I had eaten dinner. It turns out that I was supposed to get dinner since I had been removed from the list of people getting surgery that day. I hadn't been told this before though, so then the nurse went and got me a bag lunch type of dinner, sandwhich, apple, a couple of drinks, and ice cream.

On Sunday I was told that I was back on the list for Sunday so I would get no meals then either. As the day went by, I got to sit and read and nap while aaiting. Finally at 5:30ish, I was told that there were 2 people left on the list for Sunday and I was one of them. In fact other people had already been cancelled. About 1.5 hours later the nurse came back in to tell me that once again I had been cancelled for then, but that I would be first in the morning. And another brown paper bag dinner was eaten.

After a night of sleep disrupted by nurses repeatedly turning the room mate over, I was picked up by my aunt to await tehe arrival of my parents. So I stayed at my aunt's place for a couple hours and after my parents arrived and talked for a bit, we had dinner and then left. 6 hours later, I arrived home im Cambridge and pretty quickly went to bed.

And now you know all about it. Or at least some of the story. I think I will be in Cambridge for a week or 2 and then will return to Deep River to go back to work. We'll see how that works out though. My parent mentioned something about getting a second car for me to use, and my brother also depending on where we end up working/needing travel capabilties, so that is a possibility. Otherwise we'll see.

So I am getting a ride tothe hospital with one of the guys I live with. I guess I'll see you people online in a while.

So I am getting a ride tothe hospital with one of the guys I live with. I guess I'll see you people online in a while.

So I was leaving to go to a friends place before going to the bar tonight, when I slipped and fell on some ice, after trying to feel my ankle for a bit, I stood up and tried to put a bit of pressure on my ankle. Needless to say, I soon stopped that. A little later, just as I was about to start throwing snowballs at a nearby house to get help, a cop was going by, so I got a ride to the hospital. It turns out I managed to break both bones near my ankle. So now I have a temporary cast and need to get to Ottawa Civic Hospital tomorrow by 10 AM to get it fixed properly. Right now I am trying to arrange a ride there before I go to bed.

Damn it

So I was leaving to go to a friends place before going to the bar tonight, when I slipped and fell on some ice, after trying to feel my ankle for a bit, I stood up and tried to put a bit of pressure on my ankle. Needless to say, I soon stopped that. A little later, just as I was about to start throwing snowballs at a nearby house to get help, a cop was going by, so I got a ride to the hospital. It turns out I managed to break both bones near my ankle. So now I have a temporary cast and need to get to Ottawa Civic Hospital tomorrow by 10 AM to get it fixed properly. Right now I am trying to arrange a ride there before I go to bed.

Damn it

So today I realized why my computer's CPU usage has been so high for the last while. Since I upgraded to X 4.3 in Debian unstable, and discovered that DRI is broken, my screen saver is being entirely rendered in software instead of using the video card. Good to see how much work the video card actually does.

So searching Google for "Thai Long Tran" gets Planet 511 as the first link. Not bad!

So I have lived here in Deep River for almost 2 months, through the worst of the winter, and as expected, there has been a fair bit of snow and cold days. In fact it is even snowing now. Interestingly though, this is the first time I have seen any packing snow here. Usually it is cold dry snow which is great for shovelling or skiing, but today it is about 1 degree Celsius and packing snow. This is unfortunate because it is so muchmore work to shovel and harder to ski on, since it is heavier and stickier.

Oh well, what is one to do, I guess there will be more packing snow now as the winter weather starts to break and spring will start to arrive in about another month or so. Here's to more snow and good skiing!

HEHE Donnie Darko...

So living in Deep River, I have spent some of my time cross country skiing. The skiing here is really nice. There is a trail system at the edge of the town that is maintained by the local cross country ski club. The trails are groomed as needed, by volunteers from the club. There is an abundance of nice dry snow, so the conditions are very nice.

The difference between skiing here and skiing at any of the other trail systems I have been on, is the style of skiing. This is partly affected by the quality of grooming. Other than the half-assed attempt by the Grand River Conservation Authority, everywhere else I have skiied has used large Cat equipment, similar to the equipment to groom the hills at downhill skiing resorts, to groom their trails and in the process made the trails very smooth. This eliminates all the little bumps and gullies along the trail. This is arguably a good result. Any place that has world class skiing and World Cup races has to meet standards for the condition of the trail and quality of the grooming. However, since resources are much less, (this is all volunteers after all), the grooming is done by a couple of snowmobiles or small cat like pieces of equipment (I haven't actually seen it) and a tracksetter. The result is that there tends to be a number of little dips and bumps in the trails.

In the commercial, heavily groomed ski systems, a lot of the skiing is merely keeping your skis in the tracks and propelling yourself forward and except for some hills where you actually have to work hard, there is only a moderate challenge for the technically proficient skiier. Here on the other hend, with significantly rougher tracks, but still well trackset, the trails are quite technical in nature. I find that the skiing here is the most technically challenging skiing I have done anywhere, and is very enjoyable. I even manage to fall occasionally because I let myself get off balance, or out of position. The most technically challenging skiing of all is skiing home from work. There the trail is not packed or trackset by anything other than other skiiers and where they fall :) It is a most enjoyable experience and work out.

I really like A Perfect Circle's newest album Thirteenth Step. I have been listening to it a fair bit lately, at work and at home. It is the kind of album that really grows on you the more you listen to it. One of my favorite songs on the album is The Noose. It has some very nice rhythms and catchy lyrics. I find myself humming the song after listening to it and I go somewhere else for a while. But, all the songs have the same type of catchiness to them after listening to them for a while and paying attention to the lyrics.

So I ordered some more CDs from CDBaby today!

----------------------------------------
ORDER # 353137 - Monday, February 9th 2004, 15:43 - (PLEASE READ!)
1 of: SHAPES OF RACE CARS: apocalypse hurts ep  ($9.97 each)
1 of: PAWN SHOP PORNO: window shopping  ($11.95 each)
1 of: DJEZI: this is a test  ($7.99 each)
1 of: NOBLE: encyclopedic  ($11.00 each)
SHIPPING: $4.50
GRAND TOTAL: $45.41 - US Dollars.

Hmm, that is going to be alot after customs, and USD->CAD conversion. Hmm xe.com is reporting that it is only $60 CAD. Not bad for 4 CDs being shipped from California. Anyways... hooray! Now I just have to wait.

I am impressed. So the Mozilla Foundation announced on Feb 9, that they had released FireFox 0.8, which is the next version of FireBird. Today checking the CDBaby About page, I saw that they had already updated the page to reflect the change. Talk about being on the ball!

MyRealBox seems to have turned into a spam haven. At least, the only email I get from that address is spam. As a result I am cancelling the account. From now on you will only be able to reach me through my other addresses. Enjoy!

So everyone has heard of left wing / right wing politics before. However, recall that there are people who consider themselves social left/right wing and others consider themselves fiscal left/right wing. In order to determine just where you lie, use The Political Compass to map your position.

I appear to be fairly central (as expected) and I guess I expect that everyone I know is fairly central as well. However, we'll see.

The Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -2.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.23

So at AECL we use MKS Source Integrity for source control of our projects. At least in the branch I am in we do. It is a system that uses the RCS format as a backend data store, similar to CVS and Perforce among others. I just started to use it today and as of yet do not have write access to the repository. However, I already know I will not like it. MKS has a concept where you can check out a sandbox of the project. Ther are several types of sandboxes, a Normal Sandbox which is a copy of the Head of the repository. Then there is a Variant Sandbox which is a copy that creates a branch. Finally there is a final kind of sandbox which is used to generate a build environment, but only from a tagged project revision. So, after you create this sandbox to work in, you have a copy of the files, but you have not actually checked them out yet. Instead, you have to check out individual files to actually work on, which places a repository lock on that file. So while you have a file checked out, no one else can work on it. What a pile of crap source control system...

I walked the the Beer Store friday evening. I had checked online and discovered that they were open till 9 at night. See here for the operating hours. That is the way life is around here though. I have to plan my life around the hours of the stores I need to go to. Another example of this was last weekend I wanted to go get a haircut, so I went to the barbershop on Saturday and discovered that they were closed. I went back again yesterday and found that they were open, but they were only open till 3PM on saturdays. Like who has ever heard of a barber shop closing at 3PM on a Saturday, and they are the only one in town as well. Other ackward hours are Valu Mart. They are only open till 6PM Monday through Wednesday. At least they are open later on Thursday and Friday. If I hurry, I can get to Valu Mart after I get home from work if I need to pick up something, but I certainly don't have time to do groceries. Well it makes for an interesting life. I certainly appreciate longer store hours in larger cities now though.

So I was playing with Excel at work today, experimenting with copying sheets from one workbook to another, and the following dialog box popped up.
How crappy is that?

Hmm, it appears that the gpg plugin I have for Outlook at work corrupted the image. I'll have to get it again and fix it tomorrow.

So today was the first day of work at AECL for me. It was interesting for the most part. After I got throught the first checkin and sign on procedures at least. I managed to go through 3 ID cards today. The first was a generic visitor card which lasted at most one hour. Then it was replaced with a photo card which allowed me on site, but not to the section of the complex I needed to be in, at least without an escort. So then after I did a little training course on a computer, I went back and got another new photo card which allowed me to enter the section I need.

Security is pretty tight at the Chalk River Labs. I have a photo ID card to get in. And every day I have to pick up a docimeter badge, which measures radiation exposure I accumulate. In a little while, that badge will be replaced with another that also has my photo on it. In order to get into the section of the complex I am in, I have to pass though a building which has a bunch of equipment I have to go through. The first one is something that sprays air and does some beeping. I think it checks for radiation contamination and cleans off other stuff. Then I have to pass a ID check by the security guard and pass through a metal detector. Finally, I have to flash my pass at some detector, and have a HAND PRINT SCANNER verify my identity before the doors will let me go through!! I think that is very cool. Of course this is all after I get to the site.

In order to get into the complex, I have to drive (get a ride) to the site, and go through a gatehouse where the security guards check everyone's access pass. Then I have to drive about 6KM along a windy road before I can see the next building. Actually in that section there are several other side roads that go to other storage buildings and some other facilities.

COOKIES AREN'T FILLING! They might be tasty though.

So today I have spent a fair bit of time working on the new design. I think the main page design is almost done now. I need to let it sit for a couple days and see how it looks in a bit. Give me any feedback you want. I still need to figure out what I want to do with the comment pages yet. I haven't forgot them yet.

So here is the beginning work on my redesigned website. I still need to finish some of the CSS for the main page and clean up some of the templates yet. But this is the basic look I am going to have. Less ugliness and more goodness. As you will have noticed, I have added a comment system. I need to do all the CSS layout for that yet and make it look good. But I don't have time just now. If you have any comments, leave them there.

So another term comes to an end. Today is being spent in a packing and cleaning frenzy. So far we have brought our stack beer bottles back to the Beer Store and we got a 12 of Keiths in return. We needed to add about 15 cents to pay for it though. Not bad for 3 people in 4 months. So this means that some beer is being had while we pack our things. Anyways, right now most of the contents of my room are in the hall as I empty my room cleaning items so that I can clean the floor. It is starting to get hard to walk through. I need to do one or 2 loads of laundry yet, before I can pack clothes yet, but the hard part is all the odds and ends that are in my desk. My computer I will leave till tomorrow, but everything else I want to pack tonight yet. So here is the requisite goodbye to all from Waterloo for another term. Tomorrow I move back to Cambridge for about a week or 2 and then I move to Deep River. Now I just need to rent my room in Waterloo yet. sigh

So tonight I started to work on redesigning my website. I am going to trash my current style sheet, and start from scratch. In addition, I will add some other features. However, it is getting early and I should sleep yet. I need to study for the CS370 final which is on Wednesday so I may not get much more design stuff done before then. I expect that most of it will get done while I am at home over the christmas break or when I am in Deep River.

On the topic of web development. A cool mozilla extension is EditCSS. EditCSS allows you to edit the css file in the sidebar in your browser and it will immediately apply your changes to the page. It will also save the css file for you. However, this plugin really seemed to slow firebird down on me when I tried it. But if you want, give it a shot. Of course you will need to use mozilla or firebird or one of the other mozilla derivatives that support mozilla plugins.

anyways, off to bed for me now. I'll get up later and have breakfast... probably around 6 or 7 when I'll have dinner for breakfast. Kind of like today. I had hamburgers for breakfast at around 7:00 PM and I had cereal at around 4:00 AM. fun indeed.

One would think that by the time they are reaching the end of 3rd year of university, they might have figured out how to actually study well for final exams. Especially givent hat final exams tend to weigh in at around 40% - 50% of the final mark for CS courses and around 60% for math courses. However it appears that I have not yet managed to learn this skill. It seems that I never have the motivation to study for an exam untill just before the exam. For example, for most of my midterms this term, I spent no more than 4 hours studying for any of the courses. Regardless of the results of the exams, that is rather pathetic.

Now however, after having almost an entire week since my last classes, I have yet to do any serious studying even though I have 4 exams this week. I have read some of the course notes so far for my Wednesday CS 350 exam, even though I have spent the last 2 days telling myself that I need to study NOW for both CS 350, and PMATH 330 which is on Tuesday but I haven't had the motivation to start. In all this time though, I have managed to get myself to start playing Nascar Thunder on GameCube again, get myself addicted to Mario Sunshine on GameCube, at least for a while until I ge bored of finding shines (or swines as I like to call them), and entirely screw up my sleep schedule. Now, instead of keeping semi-normal hours, I am generally getting up at around 3PM and going to bed at around 5AM. As I will be doing shortly. I do have to be up relatively early tomorrow, so I will be getting only a few hours of sleep tonight I believe. So tomorrow I have a mission for myself, get up before noon, study lots of PMATH (since it is the last day before the exam and all), and manage to get to bed by some relatively normal hour. I shall have to report back with the results of this sometime. On second thought, don't actually count on another entry about it. Night all.

So Thai wanted a new journal entry from me. Since I have nothing so say, I guess I am done.

So it is ranking day today for the Winter 2004 work term and I have accepted the one offer I had this term. I will be working for Atomic Energy Canada Ltd in Chalk River.

I will be working on old Fortran code that is used to simulate the behaviour of Nuclear Fuel Bundles under different conditions. Specifically, I will be working on implementing changes that were recomended after a review of the code base last term. Since there is no housing available on site, I will have to live in one of the towns in the area. Probably Deep River, but perhaps Pembroke or Petawawa instead. At least from Deep River, there is a bus that runs to Chalk River everyday. I don't know whether that is the case for the other towns or not as well.

This means that I will also need to sublet my place here in Waterloo. Several options have been proposed already and we'll have to see what happens. However, somce of the options depend on where several other people end up with jobs and whether they are in Waterloo or not. Sigh, I am worried that if I wait for other people to sort out what they are doing next term, I will end up being stuck trying to rent out my room near the end of the term, which is not a stress I wish to have when exams are occuring. Oh well, we'll see. First I have to find a place to live myself so I will know whether I will need to provide furninture for myself next term. Oh well, we'll see what happens. Now back to studying for midterms.