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Monthly Archives: October 2006

So it’s all over!!!

So – that week is over! w00t!!!

The weekend was pretty good too. Katherine came out on friday night and we went out for all-you-can-eat Sushi. I had lots of sashimi… god I love the stuff. And when you’re paying for all-you-can-eat, you might as well take advantage of it. ;)

Yesterday, we went and saw a play that Kath’s roommate was starring in. It’s called “Desperate Fishwives”, and was about a group of 6 women who were trying to find a way of preserving the heritage in their town – Pityme, BC. (yes – Pityme) They end up doing a “nude” photo shoot for a calendar that then goes on to be Oprah Winfrey’s calendar of the year… so they get $500K. I wish I could make $500K from Oprah that easily. :P

Anyways – at the end of the show, as a final “present” to the town the women do their own rendition of “The Full Monty”. Sadly, there was no real nudity, but there were some nice black underwear… hehe. *avoids whack from gf*

This morning, I played ultimate frisbee with my classmates. Our team is called “Fizzbees”, since I’m in Fizz – short for Engineering Physics. It was really really really windy out (AND COLD!!!), but we still managed to make two points upwind. Go team! You can check out pictures of our team last weekend here.

So… on another note. I got a pleasant surprise today on MSFN. I’m now an SMod! I totally wasn’t expecting that one, but it’s a nice thing to come to. Hopefully I’ll do a good job of it. :)

Part way through…

Ok… so I’ve made it though the first bit of the hell…

I got a midterm back in my Computer Graphics course that I wrote last week – 22/27. Not too bad considering I lost most of my marks on stupid math errors rather than the harder questions later on in the test.

As for the midterm I had today… let’s just say that I’ll be happy with a pass… It totally destroyed everyone I talked to afterwards. Stupidly convoluted and long questions – the kind of stuff that you’d probably need more than 90 minutes to slog through properly.

On a good note – both my assignments are due Friday, meaning I can take a bit more time to do them properly. I started on math today, but I’ll have to take a longer look at it to figure out what’s going on.

Anyways – I gotta get to bed. Tomorrow I get to work with Mike Chin on a power supply… w00t!!!

2 days…

Ok, so the next couple of days are going to be hell. I’ve got a lab to finish up my 1PM today (in between classes), a lab to do at 1PM, a midterm tomorrow evening which I know absolutely nothing about, and then two assignments due on Wednesday. I’ve asked my Optics prof if I can have one of the assignments due on Wednesday extended to Friday… I’m hoping he’ll say yes.

After all that though! On Wednesday afternoon, I’m meeting with Mike Chin from www.silentpcreview.com regarding a hardware reviewer position he has available. For everyone who deals with computers a lot, this is the kind of job where manufacturers send you stuff, you test it, and then tell the rest of the world how good (or bad) it really is. If you haven’t seen the SPCR site yet, I suggest you do so now. The site has LOTS of great information on quiet computing – something that I think is getting more and more important as computers get more integrated into our daily lives. I spend a good deal of money and time making my desktop system as quiet as possible. The result? You can sit right next to it and barely hear the thing. The loudest parts of it are the hard drives, and that’s mostly because I haven’t got a chance to build my own drive enclosures for them (commercial ones are $25 or more a piece… and with 4 drives – eep). In any case, it’s definately not the loud whirring tower that you might have sitting next to you or under your desk.

Then I get to go out to PoCo (Port Coquitlam) to watch Lost with Katherine… I wonder what they’re gonna do to Saywer this week… :-|

Geeky Site mod

So – I made a little bit of a mod to my site a couple of days ago. You may or may not have noticed it, but at the top of the sidebar, there’s now a section that says “Zxian’s Computers”. It checks my hamachi online status for my laptop and server, and then displays the appropriate status there.

Now you can see if I’m actually on the web or not. ;)

Good Things

A little update on things since my post last week. I’ve got back together with my girlfriend, Katherine. We’ve got a lot of things to work on, but we know where we’re going now. To sum it up, I was getting frustrated with trying to work things out, but trying to do so without a plan. Such things just don’t work out.

Before I go further – I’m gonna show you all what she looks like. Here’s us together last year.

Jean-Sebastien is a really good friend of mine. Even though I’ve never met the guy, he’s been there for me when it comes to anything life throws my way. When it came to Katherine, he put it simply: Do you love her or do you love what it’s like to be with someone? For the days that we were apart, I felt completely empty. Not just alone, but empty. It was really, really horrible.

When Katherine and I started talking again, she wrote down some of her thoughts and some of her reading that she had done to try to make things easier for us. One of the readings that she had sent me included the following:

[There are] four rules for recovery: you’ve got to meet each other’s needs; you’ve got to protect each other from our own self-centeredness; you’ve got to give each other time for undivided attention; and you’ve got to be radically honest with each other.

I’ll admit – I’m guilty of not having followed those four rules while we were together before, but I’m trying my best to make them happen now. She’s going to be moving back home, which is about an hour away, and when she was there during the summer, I didn’t make much effort to go and see her. I’ve already told her that I’ll visit her this Wednesday, which made her very happy.

That’s all that I ever want to do for you Kath. I just want you to be happy – whatever that means.

I love you.

Wireless-N Devices

I’m gonna say this first – don’t buy them.

It just pisses me off to walk into a Future Shop and see them sell these things under false marketing. Why false marketing? Because the “n” standard isn’t finalized yet, and manufacturers have been making products that might not work with the final standard.

The 802.11g standard has been here for a number of years, and we know that it works. People have been using it left right and centre… cities have based their entire wireless off it. Google had implemented it in San Fransisco. The 802.11n standard is not final. What does that mean? It means that when you buy your D-Link 802.11n router, and Linksys 802.11n wireless card, they might not work at their full rated speeds. With g products, this usually isn’t the case (you might find some incompatibilities, but usually from smaller name brands).

Anyways – it’s not a finished product. Don’t expect them to work as advertised, and don’t expect them to work with true Wireless-N products. $200 for an unfinished router is a waste of money.

A bit of a mix…

Ok… so this post is gonna have both good and bad. It’s always hard to figure out which one to start with… I guess I’ll go with bad first, then good.

The bad: I broke up with my girlfriend yesterday. We had been together for 1 year and 4 months. It’s always hard when you realize that the spark that should be there just isn’t, and that you have to tell the person you’re with how you’re feeling. It’s even worse when they still love you, and want to be with you, but you have to walk away. It’s been a strange couple of days, but I guess I’m getting through them alright. I still think about her, and I hope that she’s doing ok.

I was listening to my iPod today, and some songs from Linkin Park came up. I’m guessing that the songs there come from the feelings of the band members, and if so, that they’ve experienced similar feelings to what I have. The lyrics from “Somewhere I belong” hit home today, and got me thinking quite a bit. I’m not really sure how to describe them, but you might be able to understand if you listen to the lyrics.

In the end – there were a lot of good points in the relationship. My ex (it seems wierd to think of her that way) was a nice person overall, and would never do anything malicious, but things just weren’t right in the end.

Onto the good: there are two bits of good.

First – I’ve been working on a database for my student society (Engineering Physics) for students to upload old exams, midterms, assignments, etc for other students to use in future years. The previous “database” was just a file structure, but it was completely unmanaged, and it was often very difficult to find what you were looking for. The new system is PHP/MySQL based, and provides a solid, managed system for storing the exams. I’ve still got a bit of work to do on the front end (search by course, year, etc), but the back end and the main page work as they should. Check it out. Please don’t try to upload something unless it’s an exam… I get a validation e-mail for each uploaded file, and I don’t want to have to remove files that aren’t needed. Thanks.
;-)

Second – OH MY GOD! What the hell is DreamHost doing now? They’ve increased the disk space and bandwidth of my hosting to 200GB and 2TB, respectively. I’ve wanted to upload my “My Documents” folder to my hosting to have a proper backup, but I’ve never got around to it. As I’m writing this, I’ve got 3089MB to go, and I’ve capped the upload here at home to 20KB/s, since otherwise my internet would slow to a crawl. It’ll go faster tomorrow when I go to school (no way it’ll be done by the time I wake up), since there I can get about 500KB/s upload speeds. Anyways… now I’ve got EVEN MORE disk space and bandwidth than I know what to do with. I’m gonna see if I can take my 1337 coding skills that I’ve developed from making the exam DB into a basic image hosting service. If I can make it good, then that’ll help get me some more money… Go Google Ads!