Sat, 15 Nov 2008
Muddling through.
It's halfway through November now. I've been stupid busy. Mostly it's been work and school.
I'm taking CO330 this term, Combinatorial Enumeration. Basically the math of counting things. LOTS of things. You wouldn't think counting things would be hard, but it's a struggle to wrap my brain around this course. I'm eking out a C, and it's making me feel pretty dumb. Oh well. It's almost over. I just need to buckle down and do the work I suppose.
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Fri, 12 Sep 2008
And you thought some of my other puns were contrived.
Occasionally I come up with a pun that requires not just waiting for the right moment in which to use it, but requires that the right moment must be manufactured:
- Find a branch of Mathematics, Science, Philosophy, etc., where someone with the (family) name of Benji has made some significant contribution.
- Devote at least five years of my life to studying and extending the worldly knowledge based on Dr. Benji's work.
- Get my PhD.
- Get a position teaching and/or doing research in my new field of expertise. Though not required, it would help if this was a thankless task.
- Wait until someone asks me directly why I would devote my life to this field of study.
- Draw myself to my full height, look down my nose at the asker, and reply it's all about the Benjians, baby.
The sad thing is this sort of thing goes on in my head all the time.
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Tue, 02 Sep 2008
Beyond this place, there be vampires
It's 1:30 in the morning, before the first work day of the new school year, and I can't sleep. It's my own fault really. I get too used to staying up late on weekends, and then the last night of the weekend my body doesn't want to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. So, here I am, writing a blog entry.
I had to go turn on my network to get online. I saw a video that was posted to the information aesthetics blog about the price of vampire power and I thought I'd try an experiment. My hydro bill is pretty constant throughout the year as my place is heated by gas, and I don't use the air conditioner much. I have quite a few devices that go into standby mode when they're "off", or simply never got turned off, but except for the fridge and micro wave are pretty much all plugged into a couple of power bars that I'm now turning off overnight, and when I'm at work. This, naturally, includes my computer network.
I don't expect I'll see a significant difference in power consumption. After all, the bulk of my energy consumption occurs when I'm actively using them, and that's not changing. But still, it'll be interesting to see if there's any noticeable difference.
That's it for now. Back to bed I guess.
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Sun, 17 Aug 2008
A month of Mondays
Thanks for everyone who e-mailed me or sent a message via facebook or came out for drinks on my birthday. I had a good day, mostly just taking it easy, sometimes in my own company, sometimes with friends.
The rest of August has been busy busy busy so far. At work, we're in the "Let's get all our system updates done before the new term starts" mode, and there is a LOT to get done. Combined with the humidity at night leading to some restless sleep, I've been getting a bit run down and tired.
This Friday was a particularly nasty day at work. Edit: I probably shouldn't be blogging to much about stuff that really is an internal work thing. Let's just leave it at the fact that it was a tense afternoon.
I haven't climbed in a couple weeks now. I was starting to feel it at the beginning of the week, and I mentioned it to D&R, and the suggested that I come to one of the boxing training sessions that was part of their boxing gym's open house yesterday. So I got talked into going to a one hour technical boxing class, yesterday afternoon. I was in pain by the end of the class. And I possibly over exerted myself punching. My left shoulder is still a bit sore. And I've got that day-later muscle ache that invariably sets in if I work out muscles that aren't used to it. I've been talked into signing up for a four-week session, two evening classes a week. We'll see how that goes.
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Thu, 24 Jul 2008
Summer aftermath
The weather here has been up and down a bit. Tuesday was absolutely fantastic. We got inundated with Summer. I noticed it most in the evening, starting with my walk home from work. It was hot and humid and sunny. The undergrowth or whatever its called between the UW parking lots, and Waterloo Park was lush and green and tall, and filled with the buzzing of cicadas, big fat bumblebees and more than a few Monarch (or possibly Viceroy) butterflies. Then after I got home, we got a bad ass summer storm. Tremendous thunder, hail, lots of rain. All sorts of Summer in one day. It was a significant amount of rain too. Two other units in my building had some flooding. I seemed to escape unscathed though.
The painting is pretty much done. I still have some very minor touch ups to do, but it seemed more important to regain some living space at the time, and so I'm slowly getting things back into place.
The beach was fabulous, as one might expect. I had a whole bunch of days just doing nothing important, which is pretty much the perfect vacation. Then I immediately trundled off to Toronto for an evening to watch Jonathan Coulton at the Lula Lounge. The opening act, Paul and Storm was also really good, and I think all the performers were having as much fun as the audience was. Plus, JoCo signed my Softies, which is a bit of a story in and of itself.
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Fri, 04 Jul 2008
Makin' some changes
Ugh. Yes. It's been two months. Two and a half months. Sumimasen.
The weather has been quite variable. Hot, cold, sunny, wet, off, on. But we've had a couple of really nice days this week, and the weekend looks equally awesome. I'm off to visit friends at the beach that I hardly ever get to see, and I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm just getting my gear ready now to head out.
In the meantime, I've finally got around to doing something about making the place I live in a little brighter. The person I'd bought it from had chosen some really nice warm colours for all the rooms, so I hadn't ever bothered to really worry about it, but the main room's main wall is this deep red which, especially in the winter, makes everything seem that much darker. Plus, a recent shopping trip to Ikea netted me some rather nice shelving, all in a dark mahogany colour. It's a bit much. So it's time to paint!
What you're seeing is a reasonable facsimile of my colour selections (unless you've overridden the CSS, in which case I have no idea what you're seeing). The furniture I have is the orange and dark brown, and I can't do much about that. The deep red wall is going to be painted the same light beige as the rest of the walls in the main area, and I have a much smaller wall that's going to be painted that "Soaring Eagle" blue.
I'll post some before and after photos when I get farther along in the process! For now though, I'm off to the beach!
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Mon, 21 Apr 2008
Rez plz
My goodness, but the weather has been nice all week. It's reached at least 20 every day since Thursday, and it's been Sunny all weekend. Too bad I managed to come down with something at the end of the weekend, but it could be worse. At least I have some opportunity to catch up on sleep, and more importantly, studying for my exam tomorrow morning.
Once the exam's done, I'm going to have over four whole months without all that book learnin'. I'm not sure what to do with my time. I've actually considered picking up WoW again, for kicks. I'm told there's a referral program where active players can get a free month if they bring back an inactive player to the fold. Aptly titled the Scroll of Resurrection
So I'm going to assume that someone out there who reads this (though I really don't know how big my audience is, to be honest) is a WoW player. If you want a free month, send me an e-mail, and I'll give you my WoW account name or the e-mail address I used to sign up, or whatever it is that's needed to make this thing work.
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Thu, 10 Apr 2008
There is that
The past week has been largely sunny and quite mild, with highs around 15 or so each day, which has been fantastic. Spring is clearly here, though it's odd so still see huge snowbanks remaining all over the place, with so much green everywhere.
Classes are done for the term now, and I handed in my last assignment for the term on Monday. Now there are no obligations remaining until my final exam on the 22nd.
Oh, there's that work thing, I suppose...
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