September 3, 2001

13:15

Once, my cousin introduced me to a game. The sims. Pretty fun game.

For those of you who haven't played, well, you simulate the life of the virtual representation of yourself. You eat, you sleep, you work, you socialize, and you better use the washroom before you make puddles on the floor.

You could play the game, and you could literally 'waste' an entire day. You would wake up, read a book, clean up the house (stagnant pools of water aren't good), maybe talk to a neighbour, and then it'd be late. I remember thinking to myself, "Hey, this day is too short. Those people in the white labcoats who designed this game -- they've got no idea what -real- life is like. They've obviously been sitting behind their computers a bit too long." Especially 'the networking' part of it. You could send your sim to go talk to another sim, and they would say about 10 things and 2 hours would pass. I thought to myself: "This networking thing is taking WAAAAY too long, I mean, it's taken 5 hours to get the friend counter up 1! I mean, if I need to get more friends, I'm going to have to skip work to make time for it!".

My summer's winding down. My workterm is now over. I'm filled with mixed thoughts. I'll be going back to where I was working before. I'll miss it. It was great. I'll be going back to school for 4 months. I'm looking forward to it, the last term was great. I'll be moving in either tomorrow or the day after.

I look back on the last 4 months and I realize I haven't done much. I'd go to work, come home, and flop down on the couch. Or the computer chair. Ok, so I played a little bit of basketball, and I wrote my work report, and maybe wrote a little stuff for my talker. Alright. There's not much else besides that.

I discovered it's really hard to do what you want to do, on top of a job, on top of family, on top of trying to keep your friends. It just becomes impossible with your non-existant time resource. There's just too much to be done in this world, and not enough time.

I didn't really get, when I was little kid, why some people ran around and did things very quickly. I asked why they didn't just take their time, and relax more. My mom told me something along the lines of "Time is very important -- we don't have much of it." I didn't quite understand. To me, time was endless, eternal, and I had more than enough of it. I was waiting to grow up, waiting for things to do.

And now I understand, with a little bit of help from the simulation experts who made the Sims.

September 6, 2001

00:20

Well, the summer's finally winding down. Signified by the fact that I lugged my life possessions and belongings into my parent's car and got driven out to my university, Waterloo.

Yeah, so I moved into a nice little 4 bedroom apartment, suite style. I'm enjoying it. Except for the 'little' bit, it's small, yes, but I'll get used to it. And I'll post pictures when Roger shows up with his digital camera.

There's a point to this post.

No, and it's not to flame Rogers cable, neither is it to bug Roger about his digital camera. And it's not to compare my life to computer games.

For the benefit of those of you who are starting university this week with the ever-quintessential frosh week, both friends from high school and Shad alike, I offer a bit of advice; tried, tested, and true. Rather, murphy's laws for university life.

So, without further ado:

• Sleep is for the weak.
• On weekdays, when you ask someone to call and wake you up, they call 15 minutes after lecture starts.
• On weekends, when you ask someone not to call and wake you up, they call 2 hours before you want to wake up.
• The later you go to sleep, the higher the probability of your parents showing up the next morning.
• The best parties are on the nights before midterms.
• Cafteria food degrades over the course of the term. Except on open day, when the food is actually decent (I wonder why).
• The probability of you getting all the courses you want is slightly less than the probably of the registrar's office calculating your invoice correctly. Only slightly.
• If both of the above happen, buy lottery tickets.
• On days where you have no classes, a magical class will be created for you shortly before the beginning of the term.
• Try to get more sleep.

Good luck!

September 10, 2001

00:21

I'm here. Sitting in my room. It's a little after midnight, and thus this is the first of what may be many post-midnight-gotta-go-to-class-in-x-hours blogs.

I've just finished eating my first round of instant noodles for the year. Yes Mom, I did eat a real dinner -- I just got a bit hungry. And it wasn't the 'boil water and pour it into a paper cup' instant noodles, it was the real ones that you had to cook.

Anyway, life is getting all revved up for classes tomorrow. Starting at 10:30! No more deadly-early-in-the-morning classes! How great is that! :)

I better go get ready for bed. Wow, that's quite early for me. It's a start.

September 12, 2001

20:25

I'm not dead yet. I've survived 3 days of eating my own food. My roommates aren't dead yet either.

My parents would be proud.

No guarantees, but Ardant.net seems to work now. Woohoo! :) :) :)

We're back in business.

September 17, 2001

01:09

Well, I guess it's time to classify this as an all-nighter. Well, it's not even close yet, being only slightly after 1 AM. It's the darned Work Report. Still working on it. 27 pages and counting.

I stayed up almost all night working on it last Friday (4:30 AM!!) but I didn't have class on Saturday so it doesn't count as an all-nighter ;)

We'll see how long I have to toil on this one. It's due on Tuesday btw.

03:34

Well, 3:20 is the official ending time of the all-nighter. I'm now done my workterm report (yay!) except for the appendices and 'extras'. But I'll worry about those tomorrow night.

Some interesting numbers to note:
1:24 - the time I got bored and made a cool 'Now Working on:' and 'Which is due in:' indicator for my webpage.
2:35 - when I ran out of cereal to eat. 6 bowls of rice krispies were eaten (an estimated 1500 grains of rice)
1.2 times my playlist looped. It was only the 4 hour one though.
29 pages of crap.
4,891 words.
12 minutes for my printer to print it.

And, 18492 seconds of sleep before I have to wake up for lecture. Which sounds a lot until you realize you have lecture in 6 hours.

Eeek.

Good night!

11:39

I'm alive. I've survived through 2 lectures, and I'm sitting in the lab, trying to get my submit-blogs-via-my-cellphone to work.

You might see some weird blog posts because of this.

11:52

Now testing remote blog posting capabilities. Woohoo! :)

If you see this, that is good.

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12:11

This is a second test of my blog posting capabilities. I'm limited to 150 characters so I'll keep it short. Later!

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13:04

I'm obviously bored in class, and the prof is droning on about boolean algebra -- blah!

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17:17

A befuddled suppi-chan asks: "woah... blogs via cellphone?!"

That's right. I wrote some quick scripts to blog SMS messages sent from my cell phone to my server. Fun.

I've still got considerable work to do on it -- 150 character limits per message aren't nice, so I'm going to have to write some sort of system to defragment posts in to one nice big blog. Yummy.

Anyway, I should be working on this work term report instead. ;)

September 18, 2001

01:18

I'm wary to classify this as an all-nighter, because I don't have class until 1:30 PM tomorrow. So I can safely work until 3 or 4 AM. In fact, I plan to work until 3 or 4 AM, and then maybe do my binding at Kinkos as there won't be a line up. Well, there might be, if other deranged co-op students similarily think that 3 - 4 AM is a good time to bind work term reports.

Regardless, my behemoth is almost done, all 36 pages of it. I'm putting the finishing touches on it now. And boy am I tired.

04:21

I'm done. Yippee kayo. My LaserJet 4P is now dumping out 39 pages of absolute garbage. Yippee kayo.

Phew, atleast it's over and done with, done, done, done.

I'm going to sleep now. Well, as soon as this thing finishes printing.

15:08

It's done. I've handed it in to the Engineering office. Rejoice. Now we're just resting for an instant -- lecture soon. That's life.

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16:00

Only about half the class is here, and the ones who are have their faces down in their books. Yep, work term reports must be due.

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September 20, 2001

02:24

Another day in the life of me concludes. Yes, today wasn't filled with the exciting story of a work term report, or anything like that. Just your ordinary, regular, day.

Except that I did some calculus and it's 2:30 AM and I have a lab in 6 hours.

Good night... yumm... calculus...

[Ed Note: That last line was -not- me. Those of you who read that and thought it was actually me deserve to be shot. ]

September 21, 2001

14:45

This is the second time this week a TA has forgotten about our tutorial -- and we paid for this -- absurd.

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September 24, 2001

00:23

Ardant.net is working again, which is good. So I might as well tell you about my weekend which I haven't had the chance to write about due to Rogers Cable's wonderful service. :P

Friday night was the first ^A show of the year. It was fun, anime is great. :)

Saturday was the first of two ACM tryouts. And then more anime. Whee.

I just came back from the PAC -- the physical activities complex. I went for a jog and then did some weight trainings. I feel unusually good, perhaps I need to get more physical activity on a regular basis.

Anyway, to Calculus, and then to sleep. Good night!

September 25, 2001

18:36

... as a result of my inepitude to do work.

My last post lies. I didn't go off to do my Calculus assignment. I fell asleep with my head in my Calculus book. I woke up a few hours later, groggy and stiff; too bad knowledge osmosis doesn't work, or I might have been done my assignment.

So I went to sleep somewhat 'normally'.

My dreams were weird. Something about wanting to save the world and us failing miserably. All I remember is being in some sort of spaceship, with aliens *thumpthumping* on the door trying to get in.

The aliens went something like this: "*thumpthump* Gordon! Wake up!", which I thought was pretty odd for aliens. Then I realized it was Roger thumping on my door as we had a seminar in 15 minutes.

So that was the beginning of day. I wonder what's going to happen now?

September 26, 2001

01:04

I just came back from the gym about an hour ago. Another late night work-out with Roger and Pam. Fun.

I'm awfully tired now... Getting my protein fix, consisting of two sausages and two eggs. Then a glass of milk, and I'll sleep. Yes, I need to sleep.

I'm exhausted. This post has no purpose.

September 27, 2001

02:09

I spent the night doing Calculus. Just a little more of that, and a little work on ECE 209 (materials) and ECE 250 (algorithms) and I'll be caught up (yay!).

Anyway, to sleep now, hopefully for 8 hours, and tomorrow, 6 hours of class to slog through.

02:13

I spent the night doing Calculus. Just a little more of that, and a little work on ECE 209 (materials) and ECE 250 (algorithms) and I'll be caught up (yay!).

Anyway, to sleep now, hopefully for 8 hours, and tomorrow, 6 hours of class to slog through.

September 30, 2001

04:51

I'm at Mel's -- yes, I know it's 4 am. Eating with friends and my cousin, having a good time. Cheers!

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