Groogy Weather, Groggy Me

Greetings again, and sorry about missing two day of updates. Dealing with stress, putting up with administrative nonsense, writing assignments, attempting to dance around illness and living with the sudden wacky cold-wet weather, puts me in a mood where I rather not even poke my nose from under the blanket. On the bright side, everything is falling into place.

The instructors of two of my course, kindly set the hand-in date for my course work until December 20. That gives me some breathing room, and lets me concentrate on the three assignments due on Friday. Next week I get to study for exams and work on the later assignments.

Carmen Hung, the new leader of our CSC454 or Business of Computing, handled getting everyone to work on the last assignment wonderfully. The paper still in the works, weighs in currently at a hefty 41 pages, and 24% of our term work. The business plan is coming along, not as fast as I wanted it. Still no complaints, as yesterday I came home late and crashed. I spent this entire morning getting over my tiredness “hangover”. When I finish blogging this entry, I will stock up on caffeine again.

Katarina Halan, classroom friend and almost my girlfriend, let me work with her on the CSC347 or Information Security assignment. We spent about 16 hrs on Sunday working only on the assignment. After hours of hacking, half-working and actual coding we finished the assignment. Thanks Kat for yesterday’s coffee “date”. Sorry about the Tim Horton’s coffee, next time I will buy some good coffee from Second Cup instead.

My last assignment after the “Business” course, deals with the unfortunate CCT209 Foundations of Research course. I am so behind in that course, it stopped being funny months ago. My group started on Monday, but since my e-mail to them, I saw no work. I guess I have to juggle this assignment and writing the business plan. Bother. Guys, you better get on the ball soon.

As for my open source project and my other blog, One-Time Trash Pad both I place on hold until I meet Friday’s deadline. I have too much at stake to deal with any side projects. If I don’t update this blog anytime before December 20, please do not be surprised. I will try my best, but no promises.

Until then wish me luck. I need all the luck I to overcome the stress, the weather and my own sluggishness.

Back in the Void Again.

I feel so out of place nowadays. There is a bit of lull between assignments and exams, so I have taken advantage of this to do a few random things. These past few days I have returned to work on my pet project, justCheckers. I am quite pleased with the new look, and setting up the forums was a quick issue. This time I even included an avatar gallery. Only two things remain to do. One is to write a dynamic news page, and an image gallery. Thanks to my new found knowledge in databases, I can finally make this a reality. The only issue is that there is a bit of planning that needs to go into this.

I have sort of taken a hiatus from my Datasphere work too. I am sort of ashamed of this, but with schoolwork and all… My most recent task of coming up with requirements is not fun. Originally when I applied for this work, I was hoping to become a code monkey and not a designer. Oh well. I have a 10 page memo to go through, which I am not too excited about.

I have to do a financial check today. I have sorta neglected that for too long. Recently I have spent a lot outside of home on food, and entertainment. Not to mention the paychecks coming from Datasphere. Taking about entertainment, the topic of Rudy’s new girlfriend is starting to be a bit irritating. I am in fact slightly jealious of Rudy, and also the amount of attention he gives her. No I am not complaining… but I still am going to. I learnt a few things about Rudy, that I would have passed on knowing. Also my own failure of picking up any girl, or even getting the slightest hint of interest is most depressing. I do loathe this type of depression cause it leads to defeatism and more depression. The fact of having little social activities, the looming perpetual cold of winter, and the stress of the end of the semester, is bad enough. This little issue (I mean this is only an emotionally large problem) is compounding to the general depressing mood. HEY SOMEONE GIVE ME A LITTLE ATTENTION!

On a good note, I recently acquired a sexy little USB optical mouse. I am seriously looking into acquiring a Palm keyboard. The funds of getting my own system are still not present. Fortunately things are looking up in that department. I still feel a tinge of guilt… I really aught to buy a few presents for the family… I promise I will.

Farewell until later, fellow blogsphere traveler.

Drifting in a Netherworld

Fall. Well not officially but still… everyone can feel it. Summer’s warm embrace is loosening and slowly turning into the cool of autumn. And haven’t enjoyed it a bit… not much time off. And now the sickness. Apparently my latest illness which seemed to be fading, has struck my sinuses. Now I have had to deal with this quite painful secondary infection… So much for time off. To top it off my knee-jerk coughing spree kept me up till 4:00 AM yesterday night. The only thing enjoyable was a reading a VERY depressing Japanese (Yeah for English translation) animated novel. Well maybe not enjoyable but at least I least I felt better about my own situation after it.

Fortunately I have been feeling better with each passing day. Mostly thanks to intensive pill-popping. Of course, to make the experience more exciting, my condition always seems to worsen in the evening. Lovely. So I decided to get some work done. I have updated my Linux box recently, with a newer version of udev, a new kernel (which I soon found to be broken with a new implementation of the Alps touchpad driver…) and few other things. I cleaned out a few old things, like useless libraries, a few games including Quake 3 Demo (sorry it was just too bloody) and UT2004 Demo (love the fast action, but I don’t have time to play), and best of all Mozilla. That’s right! Now I have only Firefox and Thunderbird… without all the additional bloat. I also
threw out the Gentooized version of Eclipse, and got a newer copy for my own personal use off the Eclipse.org site. A few minutes later (and DSL reconnects), I had everything I needed. Sort of. My update kept on crashing with the configuration of wings (awesome 3D modelling program), but that bug report I sent in yesterday paid off. I am currently in the process of
reemerging a few kernel dependent programs, and my update.

I have given up on my old laptop. The not-so-hot release of FreeDOS now lives on it. What a change I might add… I really do prefer a Unix system… but at least I can play my old DOS games again. Weee… OLD SCHOOL!!!

As for back-to-school (university) preparations, I am debating on whether to take PEY or not… and whether to pursue a degree in bioinformatics (I suck at Bio and Chem labs and their reports :() or take that one icky statistics course and take the AI courses. I would really love to hack robots (especially space probes/drones/rovers) as a job^H^H^Hcareer.

Out of the Abyss and into the Clouds Again

Hello, hello again, dear reader and fellow blog-journeyer. Finally had the heart to write an entry again. The last few days since the last entry and this one, I had a bout of depression arising from an all time low self-esteem and self-worth. Today, when I got up to work today I thought today would be the same old low. But no. I got up late, but not tired and with a full reserve of energy. Didn’t really need my customary early morning French Vanilla coffee. But hey, it is customary.

Work itself was exasperating as always. My machine ran OK except for one place where the material would fold up… and everything would die in the messiest way. The lead hand, Malkait tried to fix it. But the machine had its day, and the lead hand got on my nerves. Again. He is a really nice guy, but an utter fool and has the perpetual illusion that his way is always right. I play along since I really don’t care about work, and am not in the mood to stir up problems. Beside I got to finish earlier since I ran out of material. Hey! Who’s your daddy now, T-3?

I have only three more days left of work. Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday and then… freedom 22!!! Now that in itself isn’t would seemed to end the vicious cycle of defeatism. I started to write up that novel I was talking about. I don’t have a title for it yet, but who cares when I actually have a plot, characters and everything else falling into place. This is really exciting, and maybe I will add a bit more content later on Today after I get ready for work tomorrow.

Another success was that my Dad fixed my Palm yesterday, so today I had my precious music. Yay! To top it all off, I actually can keep up my hackey-sack for more than four hits. In fact, I feel like I have been better today, than ever. Now only exhaustion is holding me back, as I got a hold on the technique and the rhythm of the game. I am exhilarated by all of this. I hope tomorrow will be just as good as today. (Maybe I should ask out Kat today, since today seems like my lucky day. Or am I just pushing things again?)