All Things Yummy

I’ll be working at Blue Coat Systems (formerly known as Cacheflow) this upcoming workterm. It’s even closer to home than OpenText was, hehe

Have you ever had so many ideas and thoughts floating around your brain that you have to sit down and write it out? My brain’s like that right now but I can’t afford the time to actually do it. It’s driving me crazy.

Funniest thing, though, is that this kind of thing always seems to happen during midterm/final period. Never during workterms when I have more than enough time to waste on stuff. I always end up starting something only to have it slowly die out (like the anime page). Maybe stress and creativity is somehow wired together in my brain.

I had an interview with Blue Coat Systems/Cacheflow people today - very small office (about 20 people) so I think I’ll really enjoy it there if I got the job. 3 people interviewed for it, so I guess I have 33% chance of getting it. I’ll know in just over 2 hours, I guess. If I don’t get any job for the term, I’d like to take the 4 months off and do…

• Ask Sanderson for the 5307 coldfire board and try to figure it out (gotta be done sometime anyway)
• Build some kind of robot - I want to build a balancing, two wheel robot
• Write a book - beginner’s PHP guide? PHP 5 has some very neat features including built-in SQLlite package - that may make things very interesting… I don’t know if I’d have the technical understanding to actually write something though
• Figure out a way to make ece324 lecture note graphs better
• Build wireless mp3/internet radio player

Bah, who knows, all this is probably my overactive brain spewing stuff out left and right.

PS. Synergy - one of the coolest little utilities I’ve found in a long while. I think this got the biggest Wow! out of me since the Internet Archive.

Glenda the Plan 9 Bunny! So cute!

In chronologically order:

Friday, I came fourth in the Mini Solar Car Racing. Lessons learned: Use better capacitors, use better wheels. I’ll know what to do if I have to do it again.

Saturday, Don’t want to study, watched some movies, including Good Will Hunting where I realized I understood some of the math they talk about (It mentions parseval’s theorem, fourier, and maclaurin series)

Sunday, still don’t want to study, it’s pouring outside. :p

Monday, interview for the University of Toronto job at the Princess Margaret hospital. Job looks interesting and I’ll get to touch a lot of neat stuff, but it’s in Toronto. :(… Still don’t want to study. :p

Our group did the demo for Real Time Operating System project today! It’s finally done, except for the Final Report which shouldn’t be that bad. Bah, that was quite a bit of work but I really did enjoy it and I learned a lot of things in the process.

Midnight Sun fell down to 5th place in the American Solar Challenge, about 40 minutes behind the leader. They’re still in the leading group, but it’s better to be in first place than fifth. :p Apparently they had to change the motor and do some steering and brake adjustments. Bah, hopefully they’ll be able to regain some of the lost ground.

University of Waterloo’s Midnight Sun is currently at number 1 position in the American Solar Challenge!.

Midnight Sun was one of the five teams out of 20 that covered Chicago to St. Louis (328.56 miles) and one with the fastest time at 8:12:12. Bah, with all this news coming in, I feel like I made a mistake by not going to the race with the team… but I also know that I would’ve had one hell of a time trying to catch up after missing last three weeks of class…

Still very happy about the results, though. Hopefully they’ll win so that I can go to the World Solar Challenge with them. Australia!

There was a tiny spider that was crawling along the wall couple of minutes before… but it seems to have disappeared somewhere.

I registered a domain name today -> pureevil.ca. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but I made a little stick figure guy out of paper clips and hung him in supremely evil fashion. I’ll figure something out. Maybe one of those “Email me with your question and I’ll make fun of you” websites or something. There’s gotta be something evil and interesting out there somewhere.

I really don’t know why I registered that domain, though. Maybe it’s because I got 60 dollar GST rebate cheque from the government. It’s good being a poor University student, though come to think about it, this doesn’t even come close to the taxes that I’ve paid over the years. :p

Our OS seems to be mostly working! That’s very good news. On the other hand, the assignments for ece342 are very, very, very long so I’m hoping to be able to go through it this weekend, along with getting some ece316 done.

Bah, I’m tired. Maybe I should go to sleep.

One of my harddrives stopped working couple of days ago. It was 60GB IBM drive that I got as replacement for one of two deathstars that I had. However, unlike the other ones, there was no click on death, or rattling noise, or anything like that.

So, I opened up my computer, plugged and unplugged some stuff, and voila! It started working again. However, while I was doing that I saw some disturbing sights - bunch of the capacitors on the motherboards have blown up and is leaking fluids. Well, computer does work so I guess that’s good enough for now but I’m thinking that the end might not be very far. There’s so much dust that I’m surprised the CPU hasn’t given up yet (currently running at 72 degrees celsius). Bah, if it dies, I’ll see if I can fix it by replacing the capacitors… or something.

Dell sells pretty nice computers for well under $1000 including monitor. Computer prices have dropped so much that at this point, it’s not an investment you make but something you buy to use for couple of years and throw away… I know there’s already 6 computers in my house, but the new computers look so… shiny. Bah, I’ll figure something out when it dies. That reminds me, I should do a backup soon…

I got a mail from Mission Foundation today, in which a letter from recipient of “Yum Science Scholarship” was enclosed. He is, as far as I am aware, the first recipient of the scholarship. I wonder how much he got… I’m guessing around $500, but I guess it really depends on how the funds are managed.

Anyway, it was interesting blast from the past… He actually knew me through his sister who graduated in the same year as I did. Seeing that mail (generated using mail template/wizard in Word - you know, that globe background and stuff?) brought lots of memories of my highschool days. Ahh, it seems such a long time ago that I find it hard to remember the details. I killed some time surfing around the highschool website. I still recognize some of the names of the teachers but there are more unrecognizable names than recognizable ones.

I somehow ended up on Star Wars Galaxy website, it seems like a fun game and I think I’d enjoy it (probably as a druid engineer or doctor or some kind of non-combatant character) but then the reality hit me - I probably won’t have enough time. Wait, strike the probably. I definitely won’t have enough time. This also got me back into nostalgic-for-highschool mood when I seemed to have all the time in the world… Ah well, c’est la vie. Maybe I’ll play that game once the workterm starts.

or so a study says. Well, I knew that, but I didn’t know that almost half skip studying to play video games.

Wait, skip ’studying’? Nevermind. I believe it.