All Things Yummy

I took the G2 Exit exam today - I thought it was today (August 26, 11:30) but apparently it was yesterday… but there was cancellation at the exact same time today, so I was able to reschedule it yesterday and take the exam today (confused yet?)

Anyway, exam wasn’t that bad. I passed - that’s the only really important part. Interesting factoid - to insure 1998 Corolla, under 20 w/ G2 license = $1700 / 6 months. over 21 w/ G license = $900 / 6 months.

After hectic three days that saw us going from one end of highway 401 to the other end, my family got the permanent residency status in USA! I guess I’d be Korean Canadian American… or something.

The interview was held in Montreal at the US Consulate there, so we drove all the way up there where people aren’t afraid of cars and cars aren’t afraid of people… felt sort of like busy marketplace in Korea.

On a totally unrelated note… I was in the bathroom at one of the rest areas when I first thought of this. What would be the distribution of the urinal usage? It probably won’t be normal Gaussian as I’m assuming the end ones will see the most use… which means that every odd one from the end will probably be used more often as well. So would it be staggered, with bias toward the edges?

The only thing that would have to be measured is how often each of them is flushed within a given time period… would call for an interesting study, methinks. Irreverent, but interesting.

Bah, I need to start coding now. :p

Margaret Atwood certainly knows how to write. Her pacing is impeccable, characters deep and believable, and prose fluid and rich. This is first book of hers that I’ve had the pleasure of reading, and it certainly did not disappoint. It’s refreshing to read something like this from more contemporary author, away from Tom Clancy’s and Robert Ludlam’s.

The story is about one woman, Zenia, told through ideas of three of her victims, Tony, Charis, and Roz. Tony, Charis, and Roz met each other back in University, living in the same dorm. However, if is Zenia’s meddling in their lives that brought the three together. Zenia waltzes through life ripping apart relationships, blackmailing those who open up to her, and taking advantage of everything and everyone around her. Zenia uses weaknesses and vanities of each of the women for maximum advantange, to suck as much out of them as possible.

We see three women’s history with Zenia as well as their own history, providing background information unveiling insights into their thoughts and actions. Their secret fears and longings are revealed through the interaction with Zenia.

We never really truly learn about who or what Zenia really is, but I guess that’s exactly the point. Zenia is there for the three women to overcome, nothing more, nothing less.

There are certain threads in which Atwood seemed little rushed in tying up - what’s up with Boyce, anyway? - but overall, it was very enjoyable read, full of wit, insight, and wry humour.

Serial Reading List

I think this is the first time that I’ve ever sat down and read through a collection of short stories - it seems to require a totally different mindset. In the notes, Philip K. Dick defines the difference between a novel and short story as follows: a short story may deal with murder; a novel deals with the murderer, and his actions stem from a psyche which, if the writer knows his craft, he has previously presented.

One of the things that quickly comes at you is the time period in which these short stories were written - talks of the devastating war between Soviet Union and the United States, the nuclear holocaust, martians and plutonians running amok. However, unlike many other science fiction, Dick focuses on the minds of the people, not at how the latest gizmo saves the day. He seems to believe in inner goodness of people - most of the stories has an happy ending, or at least an interesting ending. The life always goes on.

Besides his fascination with the time mirrors and time scoops, he uses variety of objects and ideas in his stories, some plausible and others wildly impossible. However, through it all, he always comes with realistic characters interacting in understandable ways. I love stories with (mostly) happy endings, interesting twists, and unpredictable take on the world. This was a pretty good book to wind down the hectic 4 months of school - a collection of short, interesting stories to get the brain moving again.

Serial Reading List

And oh yeah, we had a blackout here.

Wrote my final exam, so 3A is officially over now.

I think I did pretty well overall, the only course that I’m somewhat worried about is ece342, but from what I’m hearing, everyone did poorly on it… or something.

On the MidnightSun front, we’ll be proceeding as if we’ll be going for World Solar Challenge in Australia. This means more work for me over next couple of months. :p

I’ve finally filled out my profile on JimWorld and wrote an article… I have to talk to Norman Young tomorrow about 4th year project website, whose scope seems to have ballooned over the couple of days O_o… Go sign my contract with Blue Coat systems on Friday… go to MidnightSun party thingie on Friday to say bye to Johanna… I put three books on hold, one by Philip K. Dick and two books about personality types (I’m INTJ!)…

Oh yeah, my new replacement motherboard finally came! So, I booted my computer up again, and all of sudden, the computer works! Bah, Phil says that the computer was threatened by the new motherboard and decided to work… Bah, hopefully it’ll fail soon so that I can have a valid reason to replace the motherboard.

First of all, my parents are back! Everything seems okay.

Anyway, just finished second hump of the exam period with ECE316 and ECE342 out of the way (making it 60th and 61th exam). Feels so long ago even though it was just this morning and yesterday morning… Bah! Studying for ECE316 seemed to have screwed up ECE342, we’ll see how the marks come out.

In the continuing line of computer problems, my computer finally went belly up with blue screen everywhere and refusing (for some reason) to run Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firebird. I ordered a new motherboard - ECS K75SA PRO - which was the cheapest motherboard that I could still use the old CPU and RAM in. I’ll be losing the RAID and the third memory bank, so I’ll have to figure out where to put the two extra harddrives and the extra 256MB memory stick. :p That reminds me, I need to send in the IBM DeathStar to get another DeathStar back. To add to this, during yesterday’s thunderstorm, lightning hit near here and the Linksys router finally went down, crashing every 3 to 4 hours requiring a cold reset. I’ve replaced it with the NetGear RP114 that I had around, so all-important Internet Access is not lost.

One interesting thing - I built my computer around November 2000. It means the computer is almost 3 years old but I really don’t feel any overwhelming need to upgrade since everything I do works more-or-less flawlessly. Granted, I don’t play mad 3D games but I was just looking around and 2GHz machines are selling for $500, $600! Of course, 3 years in Computer Engineering has taught me that the clock speed isn’t everything. Since the NetGear router (I believe) has SNMP support, I’m gonna see if I can put up a Linux machine and put MRTG on it… and maybe use it as a fileserver with the extra harddrives… or something. Bah, I get all these urges to do stuff especially when I’m busy.

Oh yeah, heh, I realized that my centralized mailing scheme hasn’t been working quite correctly - my server automatically checks different pop3 accounts and pools it into one server (and runs it through SpamAssassin!) but earlier today, I realized one of the accounts hadn’t been checked for about 10 days. I manually log in to find 1500+ email messages, of which about 5 were valid emails (From a mailing list), 1 from the online store where I bought the motherboard from, mixed in with 1500 SPAM! That’s less tha half a percent…. blah…

Just finished ECE354 exam - another pretty reasonable exam, I thought. That makes it 59th one taken since I started at UW.

Few other things that’s been running around my brain - This would be an interesting idea though I don’t think it’ll ever be implemented.

University of Waterloo sends out the tuition notices well before they are due - month? 2 months? - and my guess is a lot of people pay when the mail comes. Let’s assume that people pay one month before they are due. If tuition is $4000, then it means they are losing approximately 10 dollars in interest income. Now, to you personally, that may not be that large, but if we could gather 400 people, then that’s one person’s tuition paid for.

What I propose is this - create a non-profit institution, to which you pay your tuition one month before the actual UW due date. This non-profit institution will hold on to the money for a month, then pay University at the last possible moment on your behalf. During that month, interest income is approximately 10 dollars per each user, so this means that this non-profit institution can afford to pay out $4000 scholarships for every 400 people who use this. Hey, with the rate at which the tuition is going up, I could use that 0.25% chance of getting my tuition paid for.

Thoughts?

I wrote ece324 final today - that makes it my 58th exam since I’ve came to UW. (am I missing anything? anyone?)

Anyhoo… my pop3s ssl certificate was set to expire in about 5 weeks time so I generated a new one. This new certificate will last until 2013.