Elbie at Trig dot Net

A new frontier

Okay. 2010. So far all I've been is sick. That's okay. I have lots of Star Trek to watch (thanks T!). Oh, except my TV has suffered from some sort of hardware failure. Gibson Sound and Vision is coming to look at it. Hopefully it's nothing too costly. Though on the bright side, if it is too costly, it might be a good reason to trade my old busted plasma in for a shiny new LCD TV.

Christmas was both awesome and crazy. Lots of everything, not enough sleep, which is probably why I'm sick now. Net gain on Jammie-jams was zero, for those that are keeping score.

Slept in.

It's a pretty typical Sunday so far. Went to bed late last night. Slept in this morning.

Had the flu in the middle of November sometime. Don't know if it was The Flu, but I'm fairly certain it was some strain. Tangentially related, I've been playing a bit of Pandemic lately. I'm really liking its co-operative mechanic.

As per usual, Christmas is fast approaching, and I'm totally disorganized for it. I have yet to figure out what my family's schedule is going to be, and really should call my parents and get that straightened out. I pretty much have no idea what to get who for gifts. Haven't done cards.

The course is pretty much done. It was frustrating that I had to take it in order to get in to the 300 level CS courses. I'm a little tired of school for now, and probably won't take a course in the winter.

Hugging my kitty.

I have a very emotionally needy kitty. She's a rescue and there were some complications with her in particular out of her litter, but she's recovered beautifully, and I've had her for the last six years in which she has followed me everywhere, but skittish at almost anything. This tends to lead to things like her snuggling up to me on the couch, getting literally in my face, then bolting when I shift my weight. She's calmed down a lot in the last year in particular, and now she's actually much friendlier to strangers though she still rarely finds herself bold enough to venture outside the confines of my tiny condo.

The constant need for affection can be a bit much. Especially at, say, four in the morning, but every once in a while she's the sweetest little thing. I can pick her up and sling her over my shoulder, and she settles right in there, purring loudly, her rear paws resting in the crook of my elbow while I sit at the computer or putter about the condo. It's quite comforting.

Except she drools like you wouldn't believe.

Not much new to report.

Keeping busy. We're a bit short handed at work, and likely to be so for a while, so I've been getting home pretty tired. Plus the big coding assignment is underway in CS240. When I'm not doing work, I'm occasionally drumming, playing video games, watching complete seasons of TV shows on DVD or sleeping.

I'm pleased to report that my drumming doesn't appear to be abysmally bad. I picked up the Beatles Rock Band shortly before my XBox gave up the ghost with a red ring of death. Returning it to Microsoft for servicing was a surprisingly positive experience. They sent me a refurbished model for free even though mine was no longer under warranty, and it was relatively easy for me to drop off and pick up again sans car. Anyway, yes, I played some songs, drumming at expert level, and didn't completely suck, which was reassuring, and I also attempted drumming and singing at the same time (drumming only at medium difficulty though) and again was able to actually do okay.

The CS240 course is a little more basic than I really would have liked. I should have pressed harder to get an okay for CS341, but it's not the end of the world. I'll just get a really good mark this term, which won't hurt my ego at all. I still need to figure out jswat, to help debug my code for my assignment, but other than that, things are pretty straightforward.

Things are going to pretty much continue to be the same for the remainder of the calendar year. I haven't really given much thought to if I want to take another course in the Winter, or if I'd rather take a break.

Getting back on track.

It's been a busy summer. But most of it had gone by and I hadn't done anything terribly outdoorsy. I hadn't even done any bike tours in probably a couple of years. Oops. Towards the end of August, I got on my bike and biked out to Baden and back just to see if I could. It seems I can.

The first week of September, I took the week off and L and I went to Nova Scotia to go hiking in Cape Chignecto Provincial Park. We planned on doing the entirety of the coastal trail, 51km over four days, but we got there shortly after Tropical Storm Danny blew through, and we were told that we couldn't go hiking that day. After camping for the night, they'd repaired some of the trail, and we ended up hiking a rather aggressive 38km over two days, hiking along the very hilly coast to Little Bald Rock and back. My calves and thighs took a couple of days to recover.

Now that the new school term is getting started, I'm thinking more seriously about actually pursuing a master's degree. Mostly, I'm interested in the flow and visualization of information, so maybe something in the Human-Computer Interfaces program. I'll probably need to talk to somebody and figure out what my options are, given that I want to continue to work full time while doing the degree. I was going to take the Algorithms course this term, but because the CS program has changed so much since I was an undergrad, I was told that I should take CS240 first.

It burns! It burns!

No sooner did the summer solstice occur then the temperature and humidity reach height of summer levels. The week has been hot and humid. It's been a little difficult to sleep nights, so for most of the week I was relatively useless. But that said, it was really gratifying to see that big flaming ball in the sky so much this past week. I had an opportunity to get out and run around a bit a couple of times, throwing a frisbee around, which was nice.

June has been a decent month on most fronts. Drumming has been going a bit slowly, but not terribly. There's a final project for the History of Mathematics class, which I did a bit of research, finding books to draw material from. This week will be busier, as I madly try to throw together my first draft.

Not dead, just busy.

Yikes. It's the end of May already. Better throw together a blog entry so that I'm not completely negligent of my blogging duties.

Lots of stuff going on these days. I'm taking a History of Mathematics course, and the drumming lessons continue.

Went to the Empty Bowls event with Thingo, clvrmnky and L. It was the lunchtime seating, and I took the whole afternoon off. It was arguably the nicest day of the year so far.

There. On to June!

Quirky brand of hackneyed phrases.

I haven't updated much recently. I've been pretty tired lately, partly from fighting off a cold.

We got our (hopefully) last snow storm of the year, at the start of April. It was pretty tame, only 10cm or so. But it was right on cue, so with luck we're on to Spring. Actually yesterday was pretty damned gorgeous out, going above 20 degrees for the first time this year. Easter weekend wasn't too bad either, hung out in the Comfy Lounge on Friday for the annual games day with all sorts of UW alumni, and the rest of the sunny weekend was seeing all sorts of people I rarely see. In fact the only thing we've not had a lot of this Spring is rain. The grass is still pretty dead, though slowly coming back. A shower or two would help.

This past week's kw.pm meeting was quite successful. We'd been showing off various Arduino based hacking projects. All sorts of people came out of the woodwork. Some people from the local LUG, and the Make:KW group.

Apropos of random conversations I was having in the kw.pm IRC chat room, I did a Google search on "quirky brand of", quotes included, looking to see how overused that phrase has become. The first page of 2510 results are summarized as follows:

quirky brand of thoroughly English chintz and charm
quirky brand of fantasy
quirky brand of rhyming slang
quirky brand of beauty babes
quirky brand of electronic arrangements
quirky brand of the young outsider
quirky brand of travel documentary
quirky brand of sardonic pop harmonies
quirky brand of observational humour
quirky brand of comedy rock

These are of course ranked strictly by page rank. It would be nice to find an easy way to instead break that down by number of results for the words immediately following "quirky brand of". Anyone have any ideas?