A brief realization…and news

First I’ll get the usual boring academic crap out of the way:

Nothing has really changed in any of my classes. As predicted, I destroyed the JAPAN 202 Quiz 1 (1st midterm, whatever). I beat the class average by about 10 marks (about 20%). I made a stupid mistake though; I forgot a grammar point from 102 and used the wrong verb tense in one place and lost a mark…it was kind of silly…otherwise, though, I did well.

I figured out I need to start working harder in CS240. I’m really upset at myself now. For Assignment 5, I only got about 50% on it, not because I didn’t know how to do it, but because I didn’t have enough time to debug. After the due “date”, I e-mailed Prof. Cormack and told him what my solution was *supposed* to be (obviously not what my solution *was* because as-is my solution didn’t work), and he e-mailed me back telling me I had the right solution, meaning if I’d spent more time debugging it, I would have got full marks. On one hand it means I know my stuff, but on the other it means I need to start working harder in that class to get my assignments done on time.

I have a bit of a problem with CS251 this week. It appears Prof. Morton (apparently he does have a PhD) posted the next assignment 2 days before Reading Week (yes, Reading Week, basically the University equivalent of March Break), and made it due at noon the day after Reading Week finishes, meaning it’s going to be nigh-impossible to get any help on it. He also decided to put a bashit-insane problem on it that I have no clue how to even begin, which makes the problem a bit worse. I tried asking about it on the newsgroup; they won’t give us extensions, but hopefully I can get some help. Other than this, I’m going to try to take it easy during Reading Week.

The EASIA250 problem has been resolved. MUO sent me to talk to the Associate Dean of Co-Operative Education for Math (don’t ask me why I had to talk to the Associate Dean of anything; it was supposed to be a simple problem, but whatever), and he was a really nice guy about it. He let me override into the class with no issues. The only problem he said would be that I couldn’t do JobMine this term (i.e. I can’t get a co-op job through UW, meaning I have to either find one on my own or I can’t get a co-op credit for the term). I knew this was going to happen though, so I’m not upset about it; I’d planned for this when I decided to do EASIA250 in the first place. I still don’t know why MUO were such bureaucrats about it though when it was such an easy problem.

LunarFest was a blast. I went to it on Wednesday night. Every year, the Alliance of Asian Clubs puts on this event. There’s generally a daytime and nighttime part to it, the nighttime being a fashion show and a party at a local club. Only one other person from KonJa was there (although one of the models was in KonJa, so technically 2). The fashion show was great; after working on a similar project in high school, I was thoroughly impressed with the amount of work that went into this. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. It wasn’t quite as elaborate as the stuff I did in high school, but I could still see how much work there was.

After the fashion show, me and the girl from KonJa went to East Campus Hall, a building way on the outskirts of campus where the Fine Arts classes are, where she and her friend changed for the nightclub party. I’d never been to East Campus Hall before, but it was quite a nice building. I couldn’t imagine spending 6 hours a day twice a week in there though like the Fine Arts people do though. Heck, I can’t even play video games for 6 hours straight!

The nightclub party was…well, a nightclub party. For those unlike myself who like that kind of thing, it was great. I, unfortunately, am one of those people who get uncomfortable in clubs, hence it wasn’t my cup of tea. I stayed there until about 1 am when I went home and slept for my midterm the following day (CS245).

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that. I had a CS245 midterm on Thursday that I wrote on about 6 hours of sleep and about 1 hour of studying. The test has yet to be returned, so I can’t say for sure yet, but all I know is that I answered every question, overanswered at least half of them, triple-checked my answers, and walked out an hour early. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but I’m confident to say that I did well. I think it’s reasonable to expect so though, since I saw at least 5 or 6 people walk out before me.

Basically the midterm consisted of “prove De Morgan’s Law 3 times in 3 different ways, draw 2 truth tables, and answer some true/false questions”. Since I had already proven De Morgan’s Law on Assignment 1, it was pretty much a breeze for me.

So that’s basically the story with academics for now. But I came to a realization while I was watching the fashion show at LunarFest that I’d like to share, which is really my reason for making a post at 1:30 am (aside from having nothing better to do):

University life is really different from highschool life, especially if you’re away from home like I am. In high school, you (or at least I) find that you do much of your socializing at the behest of some combination of parents, other relatives, and the local transit system. In university (or at least at UW), I find this is not quite true anymore. For example, I went to the LunarFest fashion show, something I wouldn’t normally do, by myself, mostly because I could. I mean to say that you don’t really get that kind of an opportunity in high school, where most people’s socializing consists mainly of alcohol, clubs, video games, malls, or some combination of the 4 (movie theatres are lumped in with malls). Unless you actively look for such things, there’s no way to really find out about weird and interesting things that go on outside of those 4 standbys. In University, you get exposed to a lot of different things because they’re widely advertised on campus. Things like LunarFest or CTRL-A shows.

Also, since so many people (at least of the people I know) live on or around campus, unlike in high school where your friends, like you, are at the behest of parents and/or local transit, you can kind of make your own social schedule in university. If you feel like staying up in the V1 caf playing cards till 1am like I did on Monday night, you can do it. You have a lot more freedom here, and that’s really cool.

Anyway, a brief YAY READING WEEK!!!! to all, and until next time,

Lyle Waldman

So much news, so little time…

So it’s been about a week since my last post, but so much has happened already…I have half an hour before bedtime (2:30 am for me these days since I have only afternoon class on Wednesdays), so here we go:

Boring academic stuff:

Classes are basically same-old same-old. I completely died on the first Stat 230 test, which I pretty much figured. The marking TA made no comments though so I asked Diana to get me a remark, or at least some idea of what I did wrong. She hasn’t returned it yet, but we’ll see what happens. We’re covering distributions right now which I vaguely remember from Data Management, although it looks like I might actually have to start studying for this course soon.

CS245 continues to be boring as all hell. We’ve spent about a week talking about proof by induction (the 3rd time I’ve learned it! I think UW has a mandate to teach it once a year or something…) and then talking about predicate logic (basically the equivalent of function calls in logical statements). It’s like doing Math 145 all over again except SLOWWWWWWWWWW. The midterm for CS245 is tomorrow (technically, since it’s Wednesday now), but I’m not sure what to do. The first assignment was kinda tough, but then I got it and did it and got 96% on it (I made one mistake in about 5 different places, but now I know not to do it again), so I’m not sure what to do. Maybe after class tomorrow (today) I’ll have a better idea.

CS251 continues to be boring. I’m not sure what to study for this course, quite frankly, since the prof (lecturer? instructor? Not sure…) keeps going on and on about these ridiculously complicated diagrams we can’t possibly be expected to memorize (and in fact he said we’re not expected to memorize), yet that’s really all he keeps going on about, so I’m not sure what to study. I’m doing decently on the assignments I guess, and he said the tests are based mostly off the assignments, so I’m not too worried.

CS240 is getting really really hard. Apparently, enough people screwed up the end of assignment 3 (the stupid Calculus crap mentioned in my last post) to warrant a special tutorial session on the usage and meaning of the various analyses. I was planning to go, but unfortunately it happened to be on the (as of yet) coldest day of the winter (more on that later), so I didn’t. Assignment 4 was even harder. The first 2 questions were ridiculously easy (one was a brute-force search, the other was a simple math formula using application of stuff from class), but the third part was ridiculous. After spending 4-5 hours on it and getting absolutely nowhere, I took a 66% on the assignment and forgot about it. Even some of the better people in the class who I’m friends with couldn’t get it. It was really really hard.

My first Japan 202 midterm was last week. I’m going to be getting it back tomorrow. That’s really all there is to say about that class for now.

On to club developments:

First and foremost, I’m now an official member of the CTRL-A exec. The External Relations Officer decided he couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore, so he resigned and we had a re-election, which put me in his place. This is really not that much of a big change for me since I’m already organizing joint KonJa-CTRL-A events. Now I just do it in a formal capacity and also have to contact the “anime industry” to get permissions for series CTRL-A shows. It can’t be too hard…I think…looks good on a resume though…

This week, KonJa is part of an Asian Club Alliance event (the Asian Alliance is basically the unification of all East Asian-related clubs on campus). It’s called LunarFest, and it’s supposed to celebrate the Chinese New Year, which was apparently last weekend or something (I dunno; I can only keep track of 2 New Years…I’ve already got one in January and one in September…). Today they sold food in the SLC, and tomorrow there’s a fashion show followed by an after-party. Our former Science blogger was in the fashion show last year, and it looked kind of interesting, so I figured I’d check it out. I probably won’t stay late at the after-party though, what with a midterm the next day and all. But I dunno; we’ll see.

And now the miscellaneous stuff:

So I’ve achieved my goal this term. After trying twice so far, I got Misato-sensei into ProfQuotes. The quote (with reference to the kanji 道) was:

“This part means “neck” and the kanji means “road”, like finding a head on the road”

She found out. It wasn’t quite as amusing as when I got her in 102. She was thankful I didn’t use another quote I could have used (that one might get her into real trouble; it was hilarious but somewhat off-colour for a classroom, so I won’t post it here).

On a related note, I was hanging out in MathSoc the other day talking about getting Misato-sensei into ProfQuotes (without using her name since nobody in MathSoc is taking any Japanese classes to my knowledge, and definitely not the people I was talking to) when a guy turned around and asked me “is that Misato you’re talking about?” Turns out he was her husband. I’d seen him once before at my Japan 201 exam, but it was kind of random meeting him in MathSoc. We chuckled about it a little bit.

Speaking of meeting people randomly, I saw Professor Willard today in the Davis Centre when I was passing by. He still remembers I write this blog and said he might look it up again sometime. So here’s a shout-out to him if he decides to read it!

(And because I know I’ll probably get e-mailed about it otherwise, I suppose I’ll shout out to PR as well while I’m shouting out to profs).

I forgot to mention a detail of my little Linux adventure in my last post. I had a couple tax forms I needed to print out for my marking job (FYI for those considering: marking sucks. Don’t do it. It’s not worth the money. I’m doing it mostly cause they wouldn’t let me do tutorial centre instead), so I was trying to print them out through Ubuntu. The Ubuntu PDF reader froze up when I tried to print, so a friend of mine in res printed it out for me. He asked for a shout-out, so here it is. Sorry, I don’t use real names here (except mine and my profs).

Other happenings…hm…ah, right, a good rant about MUO now and then never hurts anyone. So here we go:

So I went by MUO (the Math Undergrad Office) the other day to hand in my course override form for EASIA250. It turns out that normally people don’t take terms off to do educational stuff (I dunno) and MUO tells me I need a stream change to do the trip (i.e. I need to take 8 months off school and come back in stream 8 so I can work for 4 months). I had already spoken to the Math Co-Op Advisor about this towards the beginning of the term, and she approved everything already. Apparently MUO won’t believe me, so they have to double-check. Problem: Renison College is asking for $300 from me by tomorrow (Thursday) as a non-refundable deposit, but I don’t know if MUO is going to approve my trip. I e-mailed the co-op advisor again and she said if MUO contacts her, she’ll approve it, but I have to wait for the OK from MUO before doing anything. Stupid MUO. If they cost me this trip, I’m going to be SOOOOOOO pissed at them it’s not even funny. Normally I’m too lazy to act on my own for these types of things, but I’d seriously consider going to the Dean or Needles Hall if MUO screws with me on this one.

In other other MUO-screws-me-up news, I apparently failed my first work report. Don’t ask me. I got this job and my previous writing job, but apparently I can’t write an academic paper. I think my marker had some issues when she was marking my paper…she failed me on improper formatting and stupid grammar stuff. Improper formatting. Apparently MUO has this standard, and if you try anything else, it’s a fail. Don’t ask me; I didn’t make the rules. So I have to go and get the stupid thing revised again and then find some way to edit the stupid thing. I’m probably going to end up bootcamping my Mac and installing Office 07 on it since I have it lying around (legit, by the way) anyway. Damned MUO…

And finally, the saga of the computer continues. So far the Mac’s been good. It’s really loud (hardware-wise I mean), but otherwise not bad. I got an app that monitors my system resources which tells me that if I try to use a certain program, it uses 100% CPU power (i.e. if I didn’t have Core Duo, it would lock up my computer on me). I think it’s a minor thing of updating the file, but I don’t know for sure. It’s a known bug with Leopard though, apparently. Other than that, I think I’m pretty much fine. I need to reboot more often; my comp takes a while to power cycle (it’s still significantly shorter than Windows or Ubuntu, but still a bit slow compared to how it was when I bought it. I dunno though; everyone I ask says “don’t worry, it’s fine” and if my grandmother who quite literally got every virus known to man on her computer under Windows can use Mac without problems, I suppose I shouldn’t worry. Hopefully nothing will be wrong, and if something is, the Apple people are much more knowledgeable than anything I got for Windows or Ubuntu.

Anyway, this post took much longer than I hoped it would, so I should be going to sleep now. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

The other operating system…

Wow, it’s only been a week since my last post but a lot has happened. So since I’ve got about 40 minutes to kill, I may as well write some more. First, the boring academic stuff:

So I went to the CS 245 tutorial last week and asked about the assignment. Even the TA had no idea what the last question was supposed to say. It was quite silly really. As for the other questions I couldn’t get, one of them was supposed to be done exactly like I thought, but it was really counterintuitive. The other one was just ridiculous on the whole; the prof said it could be done in 18 lines or so, but my solution pushed 50, and I’m still pretty sure I did it wrong. It was kind of silly. In class, we’ve spent the last week learning proof by induction. It’s always good to revisit old skills, but this is now the 3rd time I’ve learned how to do this (high school, Math 145, CS 245). It’s kinda silly. At least hopefully this week’s assignment won’t be brutally stupid like last week’s was.

Other than that, most of my classes are doing well. I had my first major Stat 230 test a little while ago. I don’t know who the proctors were; there was an Asian woman and a big guy with a red beard who gave the impression that he was the course coordinator. If he was, I don’t like him much. When he gave us the instructions (e.g. use a pencil, don’t cheat, the usual crap), it sounded like he was barking at us more than talking to us. Bad first impression. The test kind of sucked too…for someone who got 99% in Data Management without studying, I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped (I don’t know what I got yet, but it wasn’t 99%).

CS240 is also getting a bit annoying. Last week’s assignment had a full 5 questions requiring asymptotic analysis. That is, it required Calculus. I hate Calculus, especially after Math 138. I spent a good 3 or 4 hours on those 5 questions, and I’m not even sure if I got them right. I guess we’ll see.

In other news, I recently bought a Macbook. That’s right. A Macbook. I, who swore never to use Mac OS because I used Windows for so long and couldn’t possibly get used to Mac OS, bought a Macbook. Why? Ubuntu wasn’t working for me, and Windows leaks security like a sieve. Also, Mac is built on Unix, so its terminal shell looks and feels a lot like Linux, which I liked. But why didn’t Ubuntu work? A number of reasons, but the last straws were that after I formatted it (yes, I felt the need to format Ubuntu), the Ubuntu PDF reader froze when I tried to print from it (this is problematic when every assignment is required to be downloaded from the web in .pdf format) and the good text editor can’t read Unicode. Why can’t it read Unicode and why do I care? Well, on Tuesday night I spent about 1 1/2 hours on a Japanese assignment that was due for Thursday’s class. I finished it, saved it as “.doc” (because .doc is easier to share than .odt, the default type), opened it on Wednesday night to print, and all my Japanese characters had turned to question marks. Yeah. 1 1/2 hours wasted, and I had no time to redo it. Luckily, Misato-sensei gave me an extension, so I rewrote it and e-mailed it to her when I got my Mac (which doesn’t have the same problem when I use the basic text editor called TextEdit, basically an equivalent to Windows’ Wordpad). It would be easy enough to just not use .doc and do everything in odt, but this will cause a problem in about a month or so when I have to do the final term skit and have to be sending and recieving Japanese .doc files from my group members who probably will all use Mac or Windows. A couple friends of mine didn’t have these problems on Ubuntu, but after having a lot of problems already and then formatting and having more, NEW problems, I can’t be bothered to keep fixing it. All I know is that Misato-sensei uses a Mac, Prof. Trefler uses a Mac, Colin (my TA from CS241 who knows pretty much everything about operating systems) uses a Mac, and I could continue all day, and I’ve never once heard anybody have problems with Mac like I’ve had with Windows or Linux, ever. Not to mention all my programs (Starcraft, Warcraft 3, iTunes, etc.) work natively on Mac, unlike the hacks I need to get them working on Ubuntu.

So far my only complaints with Mac are that it only has 2 USB ports (I’m used to having 4, but I bought a hub to deal with that), it doesn’t have a serial video port (it has something stupid called mini-DVI and I need to buy a $25 adapter to use my Macbook with my monitor, which I’ll do if the Macbook proves to me to be to my liking), some of the moving parts (most notably my CD-ROM drive) is louder than it was on my Dell, and for some reason my “Y” key doesn’t like working properly unless I hit it extra hard from a certain angle. I’m going to go by CampusTech on Monday to try to get the latter 2 problems fixed.

Speaking of Japanese, EASIA250 looks like a pain in the butt. In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m going to be doing an international program to Japan in May through UW called EASIA250. It’s worth 1 credit towards the East Asian Studies diploma, which means I don’t have to take any Science courses (yay!). I go to Japan for 3 weeks. The first 2 weeks are intensive language classes 3 hours/day, 5 days/week, which will hopefully be helpful for my speaking ability, and the rest of the time is spent touring. Apparently Misato-sensei says we’ll be visiting Nintendo of Japan HQ in Kyoto while we’re there, which sounds awesome (of course, I’ll have to remember to save my 1-UP shirt for that day ). It’s a lot of work though; I have to write a presentation before we go and then a 10-15 page paper when I return. It’s a real Arts course. But honestly, I get 1 credit towards the EAS diploma, an opportunity to improve my Japanese, a visit to NoJ, and, hell, a trip to Japan (I’ve never been outside North America, not counting the Carribean), so I’m stoked anyway.

In about 1 hour I have a meeting in the Comfy Lounge where I’m going to be interviewed to be a Frosh Leader next fall. I spent a lot of time on campus during frosh week when I worked at RIM, plus I’ve been on the Frosh Forums as a contributor and I’ve been doing this job, so I think it’ll be pretty cool to be a frosh leader. Anyway, that means it’s time to get dressed. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman