Tag Archives: Arnold Rosenbloom

Chillin’ and Dreamin’

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Elation!!! I finished work for yet another course, Business of Computing, and an assignment for the Foundations of Research course. So all the work for my Computer Science courses out the way, I can concentrate on the assignments for my two other courses. Staying up all night, sure wore me out but nothing a make-up nap did not help.

Right now, I am sit chilling and relaxing. I can finally concentrate on my “other” projects. Well after I finish my assignments and write my exams, but you get the point.

Taking about my side projects, I am pleased to say the justCheckers project is moving along well. I am impressed the amount of attention project received lately. A lot of this attention comes from the increased ranking on SourceForge.net. The ranking seems to increased, thanks to migration to Subversion and the recent updates to the site. I set up a wiki that should speed up development of specifications. Maybe we will see a new release soon too.

In other news, Arnold Rosenbloom – my professor for many past course including this semester’s brand new Informational Security (CSC347) – will post my article on RSA cryptography and its demise thanks to quantum computation. I plan on resurrecting the SiteChunks project. Also as promised last Friday, I will post an update to the Self-Experiment: Fast Personal Context Switching, later on today.

Here’s Some Snow For You to Eat, Mister Groundhog

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It decided to snow yesterday night. Which meant the first thing I did this morning was shovel the driveway and sidewalks. Apparently something got messed up, since on Groundhog’s Day the prediction was that spring was to occur the next day. The winter had been ridiculously light this year, so everyone expected a soon spring. Even mother’s snowdrops burst out of the light snow cover around the old pine tree’s stump on the front yard. They are probably still there. Under around a metre of snow. I have yet to see metre high snowdrops.

As is the custom of Saturday mornings, the rest of the day has started off slow. No real surprise there. My folks have come up (dreamed up for the sarcastic alter ego in me) with a number of tasks that I have to complete today. I reiterate; no real surprise there. However, I plan to finish my journal entry as I promised yesterday.

University is the life for me, yahoo! Right… Third year course in Computer Science are starting to become interesting fortunately. (Side note: mom bugged me about undoing the 2 metre high snowbank on top the snowdrops. I guess we will get to see the snowdrops this year. That and seeing a grown man using his hands to move a 2 metre high snowbank, 3 metres to the right of its current position.) This semester will be probably be my last in the actual CS major program. Which means I will have the opportunity of maybe TAing next year, and be in class whose girl-to-boy ratio is not worse than 1:20.

This semester I am taking Web Programming (to satisfy the hacker in me), Programming Languages (adventures in Scheme and Prolog) and Operating Systems. All of these I find interesting, and I have yet to actually fall asleep (from boredom that is) in one of the lectures. Web Programming being taught be Arnold Rosenbloom, means that are assignments will mirror the real world applications. That translates into massive code-monkey projects, which we can’t open source or subcontract to others. Lazy me. As for Operating System Fundamentals are being taught by G. Scott Graham. This results in a lot of technical details, derailing of lectures by introducing tangent topics, and assignments that may or may not be explained in the course content.

Programming Languages is being taught by an amiable younger (younger than most of the older faculty, if that means anything to you) professor by the name of Richard Kruger. This course I call my Adventures in Scheme. Now there is a language thats different. I really feel like I am learning programming all over again. Which is a nice feeling, I guess. I keep on having to ignore the itty-bitty nonsense of thinking in imperative languages, and dealing with memory issues. In fact, I found that thinking in “Scheme” alone helps alot with the assignments. Programming in this LISP derivative, sometimes feels intiutive and sometimes counter-logical. So I get this love-hate type emotion when dealing with this language. The best way of describing this emotion is with a mind-image:

Imagine being placed in an abstract world. One of those checkerboarded, cubicist, and colour-uncoordinated worlds of dreams and freaky puzzle games. Experiencing such a world in the first person, would be at time totally familiar. At others totally alien in the most mentally alarming manner. That is how I feel about this course. Since I would enjoy such a trip (prefer the land of the Sentinel over Hawaii); I find the entire course as a novel, refreshing adventure.

Now to crashland into Reality’s lap, I want to discuss my impressions on the people around me. I have been getting along much better with my family generally. My brother is becoming as a irritiating and obnoxious like I was at his age, only much less rude and in a much more lovable manner. This week being Reading Week, I decided to go out on Wednesday to meet some of the leaders of my brother’s Polish scout troop. So I went with my brother to the scout meeting, just to find out almost none of the leaders were there. For some reason, I volunteered to deal with the “Zuchy” (read as a Cubs/Brownies). Damn little brats. I had the honour of working with a girl from the older Girl Guides, Gosha as the leader of “Zuchy” decided not to show up. So I had the experience of being a teacher-substitute of Kindergarten/Grade One class. Yummy. Which basically meant extracting troublemakers out of trouble, yelling my voice off, and dealing with silly conversations with smart-ass mini-punks. One of the best conversations/rumors was that I was either the boyfriend, fiancée or husband of Gosha. Righto… like I would be married to a 15 (maybe 16) year old girl. Not that she was bad looking. But WAAAYY too young for an old fart like me. Too much of an age difference anyhow. Damn kids. In a funny way I did enjoy myself. But I made sure I never showed it.

The next day, Rudy invited me to go go-karting. So he picked me up around 9:30, and along the way there we find out that his “so-called” ex-girlfriend Shelly was not feeling too hot. So we ended up going to her house. I never really liked Shelly, but since Albert and Rudy were there I obliged. I probably shouldn’t of gone, since my opinion of Rudy and Shelly went down a few notches that night. So we talked a bit, over wine and beer (hated the wine, and I never tried Corona). After deciding to hit a bar later on, Rudy and Shelly decided to get stoned. Since I was there, and I hate the smell of weed, they decided to go outside to smoke. I am totally against getting intoxicated in any manner, I found their actions very childish. Since they didn’t want to take their precious bong outside, and Shelly couldn’t roll to save her life; they made an improvised bong out of a small plastic water bottle. Sigh… since I never liked Shelly, her smoking up just added to my abysmal impression of her. And Rudy… he is simply immature. I don’t know who was more immature Rudy or those “Zuchy” that I had put up with yesterday. I vote Rudy. That is just sad.

When they finally finished, we hit the road to get to a bar. Poor Albert had to get directions from those two crack-heads. After a near hour of rather pointless circling, we arrived at a sports bar ran by the father of one of Albert’s old acquaintances. We played a few rounds of pool, in which Shelly even in her state beat us down badly. Since it was late, I found it a little difficult to concentrate on the game. I think it was more of the late hour than the single bottle of Stella Artois beer I had there. Around half-past midnight, we left the place, and had to stop by a Tim Hortons to satisfy some folks’ munchies. Again another long sigh… I ended up getting a ride home with Albert at one in the morning. Overall it was a waste of a decent evening.

To end this entry in a positive note, I am still working in my work-study job on Datasphere. I was supposed to have a nasty meeting Wednesday morning, but that by the grace of God was cancelled. So I have recently buckled down and done some serious work in that region. I am hoping to work off an fair number of the hours I owe them in the next couple of weeks.

Well I better be off, since I have a number of tasks I want to complete today. Till this evening’s post, farewell fellow blogspherenaut.

Staring into the Endless Void

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The void stretched endlessly outward. Far past the insignificant planet, that he called his homeworld. Far past the distant gas giants. Far past even his own wild, mechanistic imagination. He stood there, the cold air condensing his warm breathe. Beside the glow of the fire, snuggled amongst the still river, and the dark forest, he stood. He stood there. A feeling of absolute insignificance in face of the grand scheme of things. He asked quietly, neither to himself nor to the silent, distant stars, “Are you there?”

First day of university, and already I feel about squished under the immense pressure. So much to do, so much to learn, so much to set into motion. And so many to greet again. I was in a stupid rambling mood… but still… I guess I was nervous too. Please forgive me. Anyways, this entry is going to be a longer one since it deals with the last three days… so here goes.

Saturday. I crawled into the tent when the sky became gray, and the stars had dissipated into the morning gloom. That was at 6:30. I got up around 9:30, and needed a few coffees to revive myself. After breakfast we packed up, as we had decided to head back home in the evening. Of all places, we found the outer covering of the tent, underneath the tent. We had been sleeping on it all the while. While the packing took some time, we managed to start kayaking around 2:00. This time we kayaked the lower part of the Masquash, below the Big Eddy generating station. There we encountered a long stretch of beautiful grassy banks, a half constructed bridge, and a not so amazing C1 rapid which handled like a swift. And I was hoping to have some fun on that one too. Anyways we paddled all the way down the river, and the adjacent Grey Lake all the way up to the falls.

The falls themselves were quite pretty, and dangerous but we didn’t go anywhere near them on kayak. We portaged ourselves (not our craft) to a lookout at the base of these falls. Quite a view. But the best was still to come. On our return trip, along the stretch of grass bank, we met up with a beaver chewing on fresh greens on the bank. Naturally my brother had to scare him, as my little brother is usually up to doing silly things. The beaver jumped into the water, but later emerged and swam along with us! Then we noticed another, and yet another swimming a bit further up. The creatures swam with us mostly, but occasionally waded unto the bank and after spying us jumping back into the water. I must say, that I felt privileged to kayak alongside such beautiful creatures. Of course, the beavers were sly enough not reveal their lodgings. But still… wow!

Due to the beaver incident, we got back to our car by dusk. We barely secured our kayaks to the rooftop rack before it got dark. After a short meal, we started on our long trip home.

Sunday. Fortunately not such a fast day, as I had expected. Still a worthwhile mention. I started off with mass as I have with every Sunday. This time the mass was held on the field nearby the construction site of the new church. Not a very interesting mass at that, since the pastor ranted the entire time about the “miracles” of preparations for building the new church. I will not state my opinion about the pastor, but it unfortunately leans to the negative side. Even more unfortunate, that most of the more “involved” parishioners have stronger, negative opinions. Sigh… Anyhow, leaving matters of religion and politics aside, my brother Martin’s dance performance happened later on in the day. Martin is in a Polish traditional dance group, and today he performed a number of dances. I am impressed with his progress, since he is one of the best dancers in the entire group. Go bro go!

The day ended in a disastrous walk to Heart Lake which ended up in me having some 12 crazy mosquitoes landing on my legs simultaneously. The walk cut short because of that, my parents decided to go to Professor’s Lake instead. I greatly enjoyed the latter park. When we got back home, I got started on preparing for school: getting rides, and fixing my wireless card. I gave up on the wireless card around 1:00 AM. I really don’t think its fixable.

Monday. First day of school, and I am ready for action. My lecture of the day was PHL245: Modern Symbolic Language. It seems incredibly easy thanks to all the previous intensive logic training I received. Rudy also found it simple too, and so instead of listening to the professor, Rudy attempted hacking my wireless card. Naturally after about half an hour, he gave up on the venture. When I talked to the head of computer services, Joe Lim about the problem with the card, he also remarked there was no way I could fix the problem… maybe the manufacturer could… or maybe not. After class Rudy and I drove to Chapters in hopes of purchasing of the textbook for our Information Systems Analysis course. We did buy them but only after searching for the store, then the book, and then paying for the books was fun too. The store price was too high, and they chewed up my gift card in the process. Fortunately they lowered the price and reset my gift card (hehehe funny little story about that too but I am not going to tell). On the way back to school, I grabbed a fairly inexpensive Netgear PCMCIA wireless card. It cost me less than the old one, and the new one can do the faster 802.11g protocol while being able to switch back to the older 802.11b one. Nice.

I arrived just in time for my next lecture: CSC320 Visual Computing. Yay! My graphics course. Well yay sort of… I mean the material is interesting, the professor is pretty cool as he seems to be one of those hacker-types, and a number of my school friends are in the class. The only problem is that the assignments are huge and technically difficult. Yes, I know its a third year level course… but still. The professor, Arnold Rosenbloom actually went through two lectures today. A song and dance about visual computing, the quality of the assignments, and a bit about image processing. Then on to the matting problem… which bewildered most of the class. When he asked for a show of hands who knew what was going on, about a third of the class raised there hands. Most of them were lying, including me. No, seriously I did understand it, but I had a bit of difficulty visualizing the solution, and its been ages since I touched linear algebra. Anyhow, no slouching in this class. No sir.

That was my last class, and it was time to go home. On the way out, I saw a posting for a student position in working on programming in the Psychology department. Very interesting, and I met the guy hiring. Apparently there is one more position, and I should bring in my resumée. I will try it out. I should be up for the job. I took the bus home since I have not gotten a concrete answer for a ride. Sigh… the rest of the day was spent resting, and preparing for tomorrow’s kayak trip. Looks like another busy, and interesting school year.