From what I can tell, Google Wave is like a cross between email and chat with editing capabilities.

Anyone want an invite?

[leave email as public/private comment]

Level 1 of Project Euler achieved!

Apparently, ~80% of all registered users don't make it (or bother getting) there.

Numbers are a great invention - they can put real life events and ideas into a different context.

For instance, it's recommended that you write down your numbers when working out: how many push-ups or pull-ups you've done, what weights you used in various weighty activities, and so forth. The point of tracking is to know how far you can go (whether it be repetitions or the weight of your weights) for next time. After awhile, if you graph the data, it'll hopefully be a nice line going upwards and it'll be super motivating.

Similar to levelling up in a game (as xkcd already noted).

But what if we want to track mental rather than physical strength? It's just as - if not more - important, considering studies have shown that self-control is correlated to success and happiness.

Can it be measured? Call it self-control, self-discipline or willpower, that stuff seems to be abstract and untrackable. On the other hand, research has shown that willpower is like a muscle: it gets strengthened with exercise, and it gets depleted with over-usage.

So why not have a go at it?



[Has gained 1 experience point from writing this entry]

Interview with Facebook was an interesting experience. It was the first time an interviewer brought a laptop and asked me to code 2 programming questions on the spot. Messed up a bit on the first one and answered too slow in general. Complete lack of sleep and sickness didn't help, but I really need to practice programming more -  started working on project euler problems for that purpose.

( interview questions for interested programmers )

In other news, I have 4 midterms next week! And my usual weekly microbio lab. Luckily, after that I only have 2 assignments every week, so the second half of the school year should be slightly more relaxing than the first half.

And speaking of exams, the final exam schedule has been released: 9, 9, 15, 17, 21. 2 exams on the first day. I wanted a bit more time for advanced algorithms, but at least the second midterm is microeconomics.

It'd be nice to be on a boat right now /random

Don't you just hate it when sickness robs you of a full day? It's been awhile since I hooked up with fever and nausea, and I can't say I miss them. Especially since I'm in my most brutal term evar, with effectively 6 courses (@#$ lab course should be worth more than half-credit) and job-hunting.

Speaking of job-hunting, I went to my first ever career fair. It was very much like ye olde university fair where people mill about, ask questions, and grab freebies. Since it wasn't aimed at CS students, there were some interesting booths - like police services from 5 or so municipalities, and 3 different korean ESL stations.

---

It's been raining a lot. The park rivers have some violent currents running through them. If there's positive thing about the long walk to school, it's the scenic-ness of the route.

---

Hopefully Tylenol will get me some sweet sweet sleep

According to Google Scholar, the paper I contributed to has 2 citations!

In other news, Career Fair is today. Spent quite a few hours completely overhauling my resume - looking at it makes me wonder how I managed to get *any* interviews at all. Terrible format and incomplete information for the lose.

Google's planning on funding 5 major help-the-world projects out of 16 potential candidates. Their decision is based on voting, so if this interests you at all, vote here!

For those too lazy to click the link, the ideas are:

01 - free online education
02 - public transport innovations (lol airships)
03 - landmine removal (IRL minesweeper)
04 - user-driven news reports (doesn't wikiNews already exist?)
05 - urban data analysis
06 - better banking tools
07 - positive depiction of engineers/scientists (PR for nerds, yay)
08 - revamp tax system
09 - better education for africa
10 - government transparency
11 - nature crisis tracking system
12 - fund social entrepreneurs (neverending recursive funding formula?)
13 - real world issue reporting (IRL bug tracker)
14 - upgrade science/engineering education
15 - genocide alert system
16 - health data monitoring/analysis

My friend and I had talked about 01 and 10 as potential side projects, but it'd be awesome to see the ideas transformed into realities by anyone else.

====
LIFE
====
* housing *

Downside: 20 minute walk through a park to get to class; amenities not as nice as rez (or home); subletting in Winter may be difficult
Upside: rent is relatively cheap (475 for fall term); nice roommates and landlord- especially the landlord. He fixed the washrooms as soon as he bought the place and put up some new blinds for my room.

* computer *

My laptop is now dual-boot Ubuntu and Vista (unfortunately). School offers Windows 7 upgrade for free, but their Professional version is incompatible with my Home Basic version. Curse you Microsoft for your segmentation strategies! My other two options aren't very appetizing: partitioning my harddrive for triple-boot or wiping Vista away. I'll eventually get rid of Vista, but I'll wait until the end of term. Installing and configuring all my programs would take up way too much time.

* job * 

Can you believe that full-time job positions are open? And that I should be applying right now? Barely started school, do not want to think about the next 10-20-30-40 years of my life just yet. Gotta finish updating resume tonight.

=========
COURSES
=========
* microbiology lab, molecular biology, biological sequence analysis *

2.5 biology courses that I'll try to enjoy. Should've switched out of bioinfo earlier but at least it forced me to learn a bunch of bio and chem. It's been awhile since I did any lab work, hopefully I don't accidentally unleash a new strain of disease (o wait that only happens in movies)

* advanced algorithms, database *

"Interesting and difficult" vs "boring and easy". Both are useful courses and have good profs.

* microeconomics *

Larry Smith. For those that don't yet know, he is arguably the best lecturer we have at Waterloo. Very quotatious.

A flickering pen-light does not make a good guide for a solitary walk through a darkened park

Legs still shot after yesterday - basketball, walked all over campus to find classrooms, ran on treadmill at CIF. Basketball was super fun though, just need to get into shape so I can do more.

Not enjoying the ~20 minute walk to school. Just another reason to look forward to the winter term when I move back to Wilmot North.

There is one cool thing about this room though: when I went to bed, I found myself staring at bunch of glowing stars. Someone put a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling. Almost does look like the night sky.

TRAVELOGUE RETRIEVAL SYSTEM LOADED
Start date: 08/27/09
End date: 09/09/09
Flag: random "medium-high" importance events

Retrieving...

08/27/09 - BBQ at supervisor's place. Everyone got destroyed by Jason in Gears of War including me. I shouldn't be losing to adults in video games! Also found I have eerily many similar interests to the new coop (she likes xkcd OMG)

08/31/09 - Centre Island with friends. Playing frisbee reminds me of how our precious green-space is lost to the new nanotech building (damn you nanotechies!). My friends are less in shape than I am: I won 1-v-2 in beach volleyball. Got to try out the 2-seater bike-carts. Wouldn't ride again: they're difficult to move. Might try out the tandem bikes next time though.

09/03/09 - Godsister randomly visited for around a week. We spent most of that time doing her favourite (and my least favourite) activity: shopping. Very interesting person living a very different lifestyle, so definitely worth spending time with her. She gave me a dice-shaped car air freshener. In less than a week, two people commented on the new car smell and another two asked what that weird dice was. Sadly no one seemed to be able to connect those two observations.

09/04/09 - Dinner and board games with friends. Would not recommend Wasabi - it's half a regular buffet and half an AYCE sushi place, and executes neither particularly well. Maison du Japon is superior for AYCE sushi, and my friends recently recommended Akina. Cranium and Settlers were fun.

09/06/09 - Dad's birthday. Went to dinner with family friends, drove back myself because I rather not be the only kid at an adult's party.

09/07/09 - Dinner and board games once again. You know you need Cranium expansion packs when I'm forced to act out "headbanger" for the second outing in a row. Went to a korean restaurant in the yonge-finch area and there was a bell for signalling the waiter! Bibimbap is delicious and worth trying at least once - rice cooked in a stone bowl tastes more crispy and delicious.

09/08/09 - Movie and dinner with friends. Inglourious Basterds was a good movie (plot, acting, cinematography) but was really hard to watch. The bad guys were terrible people but the good guys were even worse. Every time you think something good might happen, you get a cynical slap to the face. Golbi (?)  was a great sushi restaurant in the middle of a very sketchy area.

... end of retrieval.

===========

Didn't get to go on a big trip with friends like originally planned, but my summer was still fun and eventful.

Here's to a new school year for those that are still in school! 

Wrapped up my last work term this week. Coop is an awesome program - I'd recommend it for anyone going into university. The stuff you learn and the people you meet is well worth the sacrificed summer vacations. This term was no exception: I had a chance to work on an agile team, learn a new programming language/framework, and meet some of the friendliest coworkers ever.

On another note, now I suddenly have 10 hours* to spend.

Parts of that will be used to reinforce stuff I already do (e.g. work out less infrequently, read more and faster), but now I'll have the chance to indulge in other things, like practicing my neglected, dust-covered instruments. I gave them a little bit of attention today; hopefully practicing will turn out to be more than a whim.

Speaking of whims, I felt like playing basketball this morning - a frequent urge - but most of my friends are not within walking distance and probably weren't awake yet. So I went to the park by myself and shot 101 free throws. Why 101? Well, I planned 100 free throws, but I wanted my last one to go in.





* 8 hours workday + 2 x (1 hour commute)

Writing this down to remind myself when I need it.

"The craft of programming... (provides) five kinds of joys:
* The joy of making things
* The joy of makings things that are useful to other people
* The fascination of fashioning puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts
* The joy of always learning, of a nonrepeating task
* The delight of working in a medium so tractable - pure thought-stuff - which nevertheless exists, moves, and works in a way that word-objects do not."

~The Mythical Man-Month

I swear, I know my university is not an *artsy* school, but is it too much to ask for a user interface that doesn't suck? 

Like someone already noted, our student account page looks like a gaming site, while our new school logo has generated a lot of negative feedback (almost OVER 9000!!1). Even CTV picked up on our artistic ineptitude. Sad times.

But the thing that irks me the most right now is our Quest system. For those that don't know, Quest is where school-admin stuff gets done, like getting into classes. They've redesigned Quest this term, and - I didn't think this was possible - the user interface is now *worse* than before. Less usable! More confusing! 

I mean, who was the genius that decided checking our class schedule or exam schedule would be buried under the Enroll tab. Or having two sets of identically ugly tabs at the top and bottom of the page. I also like how there isn't a way to print my class schedule, and as if they purposely designed the system to give us a hard time, a jumbled mess comes out after a copy/paste into Word.

I swear, coop students can do a better job than these so-called professionals.

Now, back to painstakingly recreating my class schedule on Excel.

EDIT: As I finished writing my entry, Quest went down for their nightly maintenance. ARG. Seriously, why isn't Quest up 24/7 like a normal website? Even the Toronto Public Library can manage this. It's not like Quest needs to sleep. 

Finally got a place to stay! Now I won't have to worry about camping at the MC or living on someone's floor.

StuffList
* 5th trip to Waterloo this term
* 5th deal - other 4 fell through
* Not too far (15-20min walk)
* Landlord is really nice - bought the place recently and started fixing things himself
* First landlord to not act like a jerkface just because supply/demand tips in their favour
* Coincidentally his last name is Emerson

Gonna have to worry about subletting later, but hopefully there'll be enough people looking around in Winter. If anyone wants a place in Waterloo from Jan to Apr, let me know! 

After closing this long and sordid housing chapter, I'm really glad I got residence for all my previous terms.

Lately, I've been digging up and trying out online networking and sharing tools. All of the following already have a sizable chunk of users - some have been around for ages - so it's not like I'm trying to be cutting edge. The list is sorted by how much experience I've had with it and each item links to my page. Maybe you might find some of these to be useful or fun to use!

# Livejournal

An online diary that's good for writing down day-to-day events, and keeping in touch with friends. LJ makes filtering posts simple, so it's easy to write whatever you want and share it with people you have an acceptable comfort level with. Very spiffy for letting off steam and putting it in a box. The community feature is a nice touch. I use the uwaterloo one and people there are helpful and responsive. Seriously, if I ask about  - say - a professor, I'd get replies within the hour.

Recommended Use: Journaling - especially for drama and angst. Keeping in touch with faraway friends or family (hi sis!) 

# Blogger

At first, I tried using this like LJ to keep in touch with friends. But honestly, it's a major pain: you'd need to bookmark or link to your friends' blogs, whereas other places (see Livejournal, Facebook, Twitter) keeps all friends update on one page. What most or all blogging tools *will* do for you is give you freedom to customize your page. It's good for publishing your own content - writings, thoughts or news.

Recommended Use: Decently long thought-provoking and-or humorous entries. Or pseudo-intellectual, pretentious writing. The latter sums up my blog perfectly! 

# Facebook

Facebook needs no introduction and everyone knows its many tricks. However, there are ways in which people are doing it wrong. In addition to what that dude said, I personally find LJ better for keeping track of friends: less cluttered and easier to read. Other than that, Facebook does many things well - which is why it's the market leader in social networking and killed off crappier attempts like Friendster.

Recommended Use: finding old friends, contacting people, organizing group events, sharing photos, stalking

# Twitter

Same as LJ except for people with ADD. Or likes constantly receiving updates on mobiles. Useful for tracking/talking to celebs. 140 char lim

# StumbleUpon [echoblaze]

As mentioned earlier in the facebook entry, StumbleUpon is good for discovery cool things on the web. If you have time to burn, you can continuously click that "Stumble!" button and be forever amused by the vast expanse that is the intertubez. Or if you have a lot of interesting content to share (i.e. whoring your own stuff), then you could attempt to push it here.

Recommended Use: killing time

# del.icio.us

Social bookmarking. You upload your bookmarks and share it with friends or others; you could check out cool stuff by looking at the most bookmark-ed items ever. To be honest, I didn't use StumbleUpon or this much because I don't have too much time to burn. Also, if you start having tons of bookmarks - it's honestly easier to search for what you want in Google.

Recommended Use: killing time

# LinkedIn [Emerson Cho]

I'd call this "professional networking" as opposed to social networking. On the recommendation of my coop advisor, I went and played around with this toy today. Functionality is similar to Friendster - the coworker recommendation system is similar to ye olde testimonials, but there's a lot of extra structure in place: job searches, sorting by companies or fields of work, finding coworkers. Not sure whether this will pay off - I find it more likely that people will add to their professional networks IRL. But if nothing else, it'll be good for keeping track of ex-employers and ex-coworkers.

Recommended Use: too early to tell. I suspect it will become an e-rolodex.

It's been up to 7 years since I've seen some of the guys last night.

After months of chit chat ("hey wouldn't it be cool if"), planning inexplicably fell to me so I had to mash together a dinner / movie thing and get everyone onboard.

Spring Rolls had terrible service - we had to wait to be seated despite it being not-so-busy, the waitress took *years* to take our drink orders and *eons* to take our food orders, and pretty much disappeared on us after that. It's surprising, because I had a pretty good experience there last time.

Transformers 2 was better than I expected - then again, the bar was set so low that "exceeding" it only required a small step. Action scenes were less confusing than the first one, but still a mishmash of silver on silver. The plot wasn't particularly impressive - but luckily I already knew that from reviews, so I was well-guarded.

The most interesting part of the night is the catching-up part. Everyone started at pretty much the same place, taking the same courses - then it's like an explosion: everyone goes their own way and it's amazing how diverse the fields are (accounting, sociology, cooking). Now I'm tempted to plan one for elementary school, some of which I haven't talked to for even longer.

So, I was standing at the intersection and waiting for the lights to turn green. And naturally, they did. So I started walking across the street when suddenly I hear a loud honk and a scream - and a car whizzed past, missing me by a few inches.

I was pretty much unhurt the first time I got hit by a car, but I really shouldn't test my luck like this.  

---

Recently I've had the urge to sketch, so I dug up my olde sketchbook and doodled a bit. My art is terrible, but I might put it up somewhere anyway. If anything, it'll be nice storage/back-up in case I lose my sketchbook. And for awhile, I was pretty sure I *did* lose my sketchbook. It's been so long since I've used it that I can't totally remember who drew what in that book. 

After getting locked out of the library twice, I finally got around to picking up my reserved books.

While I was there, I also found out why they were closed before. Apparently they installed new security scanners plus a self-checkout system. It's really neat - you could lay down your stack of books and the scanner will read them all at the same time.

Just another step towards eliminating humans and paving the way for our robotic overlords!

I've recently subscribed to The Simple Dollar; it's a finance-related blog in normalspeak. It's latest entry was about purchasing items to change your habits and how it doesn't work.

Fortunately, I'm not a very compulsive shopper so the only example of abandoned-habit-changing-item I have would possibly be the guitar that's collecting dust in my room. Which is a shame because it's a pretty nice acoustic guitar.

Rather than making an expensive purchase, the post tells you to follow these steps:

- use minimal equipment
- cut out a bad routine to make time for the new (hopefully 'good') one
- have reminders

Two new routines I set for myself this term were 'read' and 'workout' - and both have been proceeding decently. I'd have to say the post's advice works well, even though I didn't even know about it when I started.

Increase leisure reading:
- book, random scraps of paper for bookmark
- daydreaming on transit, psychic attacks on traffic lights to make them change faster
- book in school bag

Workout:
- chair/weights already in basement, bought a resistance band
- countless DotA games
- an excel spreadsheet on desktop telling me which day I'm on

So a large part of being more active is being less interested in gaming. Or perhaps I'm simply mixing the two together.

Geez xkcd, is there a situation which you have *not* thought of?