Move along, nothing to read

Today was interesting. Firstly I woke up late, like 6.50am. Considering I have normally left by then, that was bad. I left by 7pm, after rushing myself ready. Took the usual transit, but there was a bit of snow coming down out there, so it was nasty cold outside.

Managed to make it to school in time still. Had my math class. One of the questions on the weekly test, number 2, was quite impossible to do. Everybody did all the rest, then came back to it, and we were all still working on it when the end of time came. We then requested the answer from the instructor, who spent 30 minutes trying to work it out on the board, failing dismally, then he finally admitted there must be a problem with it when the calculator cannot work out the answer.

After Math I went down to COMDEX. It was a fair disappointment this year. Even the Microsoft booth is getting a lot smaller now that it has been before. I bought a beef teriyaki for lunch from a store in Pacific Centre, and it was some of the worst teriyaki I've had.

Headed back to TechBC, since I had my NMI class this afternoon. A little while before the start of the class, James, who was in my schedule last semester, he came in to the classroom since I was there early, and asked if I had a little time to spare. I replied in the affirmative, and he said he wanted me to meet some people. Went outside the classroom, and talked with them. They are seeing about starting up a company together, and are looking for a programmer and system admin, so James offered them me, and I'll probably end up joining them towards summer when my TechBC job ends, if it does not end sooner.

After NMI, I snapped some pictures of my hand for the next NMI project, and then went to Research to get some work done, since I had left early on Tuesday, and hadn't got all my hours in this week yet. We had acquired an SGI Visual Workstation 320 in research, and it came totally disfunctional. I've got it mostly booting up Linux from a boot disk and CD now, but I can't get it to install yet. The hardware is incredibly custom on the system. Dual P3/550mhz chips. In the words on an SGI engineer: "The system's similarity to any x86 system ends at the pins on the CPUs.". He meant it too, the system runs a 64-bit PCI SCSI controller amongst other odds and ends. Total memory is 512Mb, but that is shared between the graphics systems and the core systems. No AT or PS2 connectors on it, only USB, Firewire, video in and out and a few other bits and pieces. The closest it has to conventional stuff is the standard pair of serial ports and a parallel port, but even those act somewhat differently.

While working on the system, I was talking to Patrick a lot, we moved between the research area and his office as we needed various items generally. Just before 9pm rolled around, we helped one of the terminated staff members to take her stuff out to her car with a pair of equipment dollies. Upon trying to go back in, we found we were somewhat stuck, so we had to go around a long way to get back in. Got back in, grabbed our stuff, and left. We went to Kieran's place go pick up a network card, hung out there for a bit, went back to TechBC with Kieran so he could borrow a laptop, then Kieran and Patrick raced some back to Burnaby, but we slowed down for a bit because we spotted a cop.

Patrick was saying, that for chilling out and escaping, there are two things he does. One is just go driving, fast to nowhere. Out to Cypress or Chilliwack or something, but it must be really fast. 150kph is standard for those long drives. I haven't been on one with him, but I think it might be neat sometime towards the end of the semester. The other thing he does is just "geek out", in his own words. Just spend time dabbling with computer hardware, getting things going, and totally ignoring people.

I should get some posting done for HTTC and PE now, so I'm going to do that.

Looking at my journal now, I even surprise myself. For several days now, I've said nothing.

So I shall now remedy that, and try to keep more up to date.

Wednesday, after my nap and working on my webpage, I was up until 4am working on my Business assignment, then I had only a little bit of sleep.

Got up groggily, went to my NMI class to present my videos. I'll put them up in a bit, if anybody wants them in a meantime, send me a message and I'll send them via ICQ. Had the math exam in the afternoon, manage to remember how to deal with expontional variables in calculus, then went home. Marissa phoned in the early evening, right after her class, because her vision was acting up again. I spent the evening starting to work on Mr. Sokugawa's linux server.

On Friday, I was going to wake up at 8am, but I slept till 10am instead. Had soup for lunch. Went out to Home Depot to buy Marissa's birthday gift then came home. The weather was really bucketing with rain. Later on, I got a ride up to Hastings to catch the 135 SFU bus, while my mother was heading to the airport to pick up my father.

I got up to SFU, where, in the middle of March, it was snowing. Freaky weather. Marissa and I boarded the new bus, and headed off to Surrey to set up for her party. Cellphones are handy in stopping you from having to get off the skytrain and use a payphone. Went via the video store on the way to her house, got the movie "AI".

Towards 5.30pm, Marissa and her father went back to King George skytrain station to pick up the other guests, and during that time I tried, unsucessfully, to get Laura's webcam working. It is a really crappy thing from IBM.

The others returned, guests: Angela, Vanessa, Tara. We talked about pizza which was interesting, because Tara used to work at a pizza shop, and Laura wanted huge piles of toppings on the pizza. While the pizza's were on order, we did Marissa's gifts. I'm sure she'll post about them in her LiveJournal, so I won't write about there here, except to say I gave her a big blacklight from Home Depot.

We had 3 large 14" pizzas between 6 people, then there was an argument between Tara and Laura, as Laura was taking a certain viewpoint that upset Tara. When Angela was leaving, Tara nearly left too, but didn't in the end. Angela was leaving as she had to be home earlier.

The rest of us watched the movie, which was really good, and touching. We then had nice ice-cream cake, and talked about all sorts of things more, punctuated by all of us except tara changing into night gear. Vanessa was tired, so she went to bed after a bit, and then the 3 of us sat in Marissa's room with the blacklight, talking about things.

On Saturday, went all went downtown with LiveJournal people and went round ScienceWorld. Visited Yvonne at work, then went via Metrotown home.

Today i've been working on more computer stuff.

WOW! This livejournal entry has taken me a long time to write. I started at 4.48pm, and now i'm done around 12.30am.

Ok, so I lied a bit. I decided to sort out something first. My webpage and LiveJournal now work properly with the latest version of Mozilla 0.9.9. Additionally, I am writing a colour system, so you can choose which colour scheme my homepage and LiveJournal will appear in. Have a look at http://www.orbis-terrarum.net/?l=prefs for a start. Colour scheme suggestions are welcome.

Just an update on the last two days as well. Yesterday I woke up absurbly early to take my father to the airport, then went home, only to go to school a bit after that for a job interview. I applied for the Java Peer Helper position at TechBC. After my interview, I went to visit Marissa for a bit, and had lunch with her and just relaxed for a while. Then came home and although I should have been working on my business assignment more, I didn't feel like it, so I just ended up delving into my webpage some. I got an email saying I didn't get the job. No big deal anyway.

This morning I had my HTTC presentation at 10am, Thomas was a bit late for it, but other than that it went well. Got 24/25 on it. Came home, had lunch. Fixed my webpage more.

Now I am going to take that nap. Bye!