Knowing how the Microsoft interviewing process works is sometimes more nerve-racking than simply being ignorant. If you have a bad interview at the beginning, you start to wonder whether you'll make it to the end, and what are those interviewers are going to type up in those post-interview emails. If you have a big break, you beging to think, is the next person going to show up? Or is this just some ploy to get rid of me.

In the end, all you know is that you're really tired, and would like to go to bed. Unfortunately, I had a redeye waiting for me, and that's nothing to look forward to.

Jump to me driving down Edinborough St. in Guelph between Kortright and Gordon, and wondering why there are no less than 40 manhole covers in a minute and a half stretch of road.

Give me curiosity.
Flash.

Jump to my first day of elementary school in Canada. I remember the crunch of frech October snow under my shoes as I stepped into Sir. John A. MacDonald elementary school. I had an ESL teacher who came in and taught me some English for two hours every day. I didn't even know the alphabet. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out that the kids at the playground were trying to tell me the school system for playground use. Grade 1's on Mondays, 2's on Tuesdays, ... 5's on Fridays. I guess Grades 6-8 were out of luck.

Give me plagiarism.
Flash.

I remember when I first set foot on Canadian soil. It was at Pearson International, late into the night, and everything just seemed so new. People were speaking a language that I couldn't understand, and I saw my father for the first time in six years. In all honesty, I had no memory of what he looked like, everything I knew about his face was through pictures that him and my mom sent to my grandparents.

I felt anxious to meet him, and it was quite natural. We sat and talked in the airport waiting area for hours as we waited for our plane to Thunder Bay. I'd grab his lighter and light his cigarettes for him every half an hour. I have no recollection of what we talked about, only that we talked and talked. I was very excited, and I wasn't tired at all.

Jump to me seeing nobody walking on the way home. Just cars, buzzing back and forth, no one walks here. That, and the fact that there in fact was no one. I've never seen a city so empty before. I've never seen so many individual, detached-house-with-a-single-car-garage before.

Jump to my mother picking us up from the little brick building known as an airport terminal in Thunder Bay. We stepped off the plane in one of those staircase trucks, and walked into the brown bricked building to get our giant suitcases bundled and wrapped in rainbow coloured straps.

Jump to the drive home, where we seemed to be going super fast on the highway; where we were sitting in the Ford Taurus that my parents OWNED. I've never been in a car that was OWNED by the driver before.

Jump to me sitting in the plane, on the way to Toronto, asking my grandmother if it's okay to eat the shrimp because it's cold, and if it's okay to eat the salad because the vegetables haven't been cooked. I don't remember, but I think they had good airplane food back then. We were just too afraid to eat it.

Jump to me sitting in front of the computer, reminiscing.

A big life decision has been made. I guess I'll send out the letter soon.

Trying out a cgi commenting system. Maybe eventually I'll add IP traces.

Congratulations Jon, you lasted longer than I did. But everyone caves. Everyone.

I saw on Slashdot today where some person from England said it's actually cheaper to fly over to the US and buy a laptop rather than buying one in England because of the "weak US dollar".

I don't know much about the economy, but the US dollar has been doing shit lately. I remember at the end of summer 02, the USD was at a high of 1.6 against the Canadian loonie. Now it's hovering at a pithy 1.3. This means that I would have lost $3000 CDN if I exchanged $10 000 USD now as compared to less than two years ago. That's almost a term's tuition.

At least the US tourism industry will benefit from this.

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

-- Invisible Monsters (61)

Give me patience.
Flash.
Give me strength.
Flash.
Give me understanding.
Flash.

Chuck Palahniuk looks like Jeff Probst.

I find that I simply can't concentrate in my distributed class. I'm not sure why. It could be the ppt presentations, but I've had classes where the prof used ppt before, and I've never been as disinterested. Sometimes I find myself not even listening, and just daydreaming away about nothing. This is not happening in any of my other classes, and I think it's affecting my grades.

We won in soccer today, which brings us to the semi-finals. It came down to shoot outs, and the other team totally tanked. They missed the net THREE times! It must be the Pat intimidation factor.

Back when I was taking flying lessons, there were some instrument training involved where the instructor would put this "visor" on my head so I couldn't see above the dash-board equivalent instrument panel of the plane. This way, I could only rely on the instruments to tell me where I'm going rather than looking outside. There would also be exercises where the intructor would tell me to close my eyes, and he would put the plane in a compromising maneuver (like a spin or spiral dive - those are always the favourites), and then I'd open my eyes, and try to recover by looking only at the instruments and deciphering what was happening. For example, if the airspeed is rapidly increasing, the bank indicator shows a steep bank, the altimeter is showing rapid decrease, and the vertical speed indicator is high in the negatives, then it's probably a spiral dive, and one should level wings, pull back power, ease out of the dive (careful not to stall), and increase power as needed.

I feel like I'm in an undecipherable maneuver right now. I can see what the instruments are showing, but I don't know what they're trying to say.

I guess Kevin beat me to it in the comments. But we came up with some t-shirt ideas in crypto class today. Listed in order of my preference:

4. I am a Psuedo Random Bit Generator (PRBG)
3. I am semantically secure
2. I am cryptographically strong
1. I am existentially unforgeable

Two weeks of intense coding are almost over. After this weekend, I feel like I might actually have some breathing room. I've been spending way too much time in the lab lately, it almost feels like I'm in realtime again.

Last night I was reacquainted with someone from my hometown. It was quite amusing actually, because I've seen her around campus, but didn't know if I recognized her because I'd known her, or if I've just seen her around campus a lot (I recognize a lot of people around campus without actually knowing their names - sometimes I give them nicknames like "creepy guy with long hair", "guy who wears the same clothes everyday", "hot girl from the gym", or just plain old "billy boy"). But last night, at the Bomber, she came up and told me my name, and where I was from, which was quite crazy, because I know my own name, and didn't need other people to tell me. Then I remembered her name, and where I'd known her from.

Last week was amazingly warm, and a lot of snow melted. There were miniature rapids along the roads leading to a waterfall down the storm sewer. The increase in melting snow also raised the water level in the creek that I cross everyday to get to school. So much so that there is now a tributary leading to the dark forest, going right across the path that we call scary, making it all but impossible to cross without the help of Charon. I have since stopped using the scary path.

Monday night, however, after a night of coding, Redman and I were walking home when we noticed that we have inadvertently gone past the entrance to the other trail, and were now in full force on the scary path. Redman had the bright idea that hell may have frozen over, and we can safely walk across the Styx and be merrily on our way home. This would turn out not to be the case. After much trudging through not so dense shrubs and dead branches poking me in the eye, we finally leapt across a narrow point in the river. Then we went home.

You weren't hoping for a dramatic ending, were you?

There are usually not many articles in the Imprint that deserve mention, but there is one this week that I feel need to be outed. It's probably up there as one of the worst articles ever, not for the subject it talks about, but the way the writer talks about it. Please note that I have not seen the movie, so I have no negative feelings toward it, this rant is purely on the article.

The article seemed biased right from the beginning, with the second sentence being "Jesus was reported to say that there is no greater expression of love than to lay down your life for a friend." I honestly think that the writer put in the words "was reported" simply to deceive the audience that the article has even the least shred of journalistic integrity.

The critic continues to say that "amid a mob of critics who have declared Gibson's film as anti-Semitic and bloodthirsty, I think it's important to take some time to critically evaluate the film." At this point, I thought that this might actually be a critique, with the strengths and weaknesses of the movie being pointed out, and what themes to watch out for in the movie.

But the rest of this article is an ill-hidden laud for the movie, essay style defence of Mel Gibson, and evangelistic preaching for Christianity.

The whole tone of the article was entirely in praise of the movie. If fact, there was no critique at all. All the points ended with the "critic" agreeing with the film's perspective. This is worse than the Academy giving a sweep to Return of the King.

But simple praise is not enough. The writer actually points out the critiques from other sources (like anti-semitism, graphic violence), and rebukes them, essay style. Each section begins with a negative critique, and ends with the reasons why it's not true. I think this article, given as a speech, would get high marks in the persuasive section of the public speaking class.

The author's religious beliefs clearly show through in this article, and the vague attempts to hide the evangelism is a mockery to my intelligence. Even in the last paragraph, where (s)he states "I hope that you won't accept my views and interpretations without going to check [the movie] out for yourself," is a half-hearted attempt to conceal the true intentions of the article. In fact, the article says to go to thelife.com for further opinions. Well, I went to the website. It's the official website for the movie, and on one of the forums, aptly titled Your Review on the Movie I saw only one review that could have been classified as "negative", where some mother addressed the violence. I guess it doesn't help when the forum is monitored and moderated.

Incidentally, I noticed something when I was at the discussion board, a post by "Leslie" mentioning the University of Waterloo (Leslie is also the first name of the writer of the article), and asking people to come to a discussion group about the movie. The email left was ccc_uw@hotmail.com. After a little investigative work, I found out that CCC stands for Campus Crusade for Christ. Take what you will from that.

Grad Ball Pictures.

Some goodies.

Also some misc. photos, and brick tour photos.

Big step forward in Networks today.

Our second assignment asks us to design a reliable data transfer protocol over a simulated link where congestion, corruption, and packet dropping can randomly happen. So we have to employ all the normal checks and balances of RDT's like flow control, congestion control, dynamic window sizes, timeouts, multiple ACKs, etc.

Our implementation has consistently been sending ~20kB at around 1 minute or so. We were unsure of how to improve the rate, but we knew that our bottleneck (other than the link simulation) was that we have to keep on resending packets because of corruption. Finally, we decided to use an error correction code (we had previously used xor packets, but that ended up being too much redundancy). So after a couple hours of surfing on the net, we found a Reed Solomon code implementation at sourceforge. This fit us perfectly, and after using it, we're now consistently sending at ~40 seconds. A 33% improvement.

Now it's almost time for bed.