Work work work...

Its been nearly two months since my last blog post. I didn't get anything done on my app during that time. Thankfully, it wasn't because I was lazy.

Shortly after my last post was my 21st birthday. Carolyn got me a record of ACDC Back in Black and a ring that say "one ring to pwn them all". ISN'T THAT AWEOMSE?!

I wanted to get some work done on my app, but I just didn't really have the time. Sure I could have spent my weekends, but I also wanted to get *some* video gaming in. Exams hit shortly after my birthday. After exams, I went to my parents house for a lovely time.

When I got back, I was working on finishing my research project. Experiments to run, presentations to prepare for, reports to write. No time for app development.

The presentation for my research project was last Monday. It went extremely well, and my supervisor seems to be pleased with it. Today, I handed in my written report, so I hope that it also goes well.

With reports and all that jazz out of the way, I can return to my app. My course load for this term is lighter than last, so I'll have more time to spend in the lab and more time for my app.

I made some development progress tonight. I removed the "main menu" screen and made the app boot straight to the root browsing directory. I decided to do this based on feedback, and because you can access search from anywhere in the app. In its place I added a png "loading" image. This image is displayed for the few seconds (~2 sec) it takes to load the app on my iPhone 3G.

Since I removed the main menu, I moved all the additional buttons that where there (rate this app, tell a friend) into an "about" screen. This is currently accessed by clicking "About" on the root directory of the browser. I'll include a screenshot of this later because I'm sure that was not clear.

On the academic front, I'm taking the following courses this term:

• Introduction to Quantum Information Processing
• Electricity and Magnetism: Part 2
• Analog Electronics & Lab (yes, this is the second analog class
  
• Research Project

This isn't enough for me to graduate. I'll be taking one additional term to finish off my undergraduate degree. This is in an attempt to lower my work load so I don't go (more) crazy. During the summer I plan on taking Digital Signal Processing from the Electrical Engineering department, and one other course that I haven't decided on.

Anyways, enough talking. Going to get some more work done!

Well....it was kinda soon.

What a crazy last few months its been. And naturally, I've failed to keep track of it.

Where to begin? Well, let me first go over what has happened in WoW. I ended up leaving my previous guild and joining Tabula Rasa on Dragonblight. Amazing people, really fun to hang around and play with. A few months after I joined, the officer responsible for handing out healing assignments had to take a break from the game to focus on his family (I think him and his wife just had a baby at the time....not sure on that though). I stepped up, and filled the roll of assigning healers. A few weeks later I had a discussion with the administration and was made an officer.

Fast forward to May. I'm starting to get really tired of raiding. I was so busy with other stuff that staying up late was killing me. But I stuck with it because I committed to it. At the end of May, I went to a physics conference (which I will talk about later), and ended up receiving an amazing job offer to start right after the conference finished. It was such a good opportunity, that I had to step down from officership to ensure that I got enough sleep, and still managed to get other things done in my life. With that decision I also decided to completely stop playing WoW.

On the academic front, I really put my butt into gear this year. I almost managed to get an 80% average this past term (I was juuuuuuust short). My goal for this upcoming fall term (which will be the start of my 4th year) is to hit that 80% average.

So this past year, I have taken a number of courses. Last fall term I took Quantum 2, Mathematical Physics 1, Intermediate Classical Mechanics, and a lab. In the winter term I took Condensed Matter, Mathematical Physics 2, Statistical Mechanics, Scientific Computation 2, and a lab.

So what's this conference I mentioned? Well, the stars aligned and I was chosen to attend the Institute for Quantum Computing's USEQIP conference. This stands for undergraduate student experimental quantum information processing. It was a 2 week conference consisting of about 14 students from all around the world. I was taught by some of the world leading experts in the field. It was such an amazing experience, and it has really helped push me in the right direction for getting into grad school.

During the conference, I was offered a job in one of the labs. Naturally, I took it. I am currently working for Dr David Cory, a very famous scientist who just received the CERC prize (google it for more info). As part of his prize, he's been given a huge amount of lab space; 10k square feet I am told. Its the entire first floor of this new building on campus. I spend a lot of my time helping set the labs up. One of the big projects I am working on right now is helping setup the low temperature lab. Its absolutely amazing getting to see just what goes into setting up the equipment. The postdoc that I'm working with is a great guy, and answers every question that I have.

I don't just do labour though. I work with a very simple nuclear quadrapole resonance (NQR) setup. Due to its (comparative to other setups) simplicity, its perfect for me to get hands on experience with the basics.

So some of you might have heard that Dr Stephen Hawking was in Waterloo last month. Well, I'll let the following picture speak for itself....

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Aww. Yeahh.


All of these events in the past year have been really exciting. None of them compare to me meeting my girlfriend. We started dating in Sept 09 and have been happy ever since. She's really nerdy like me (she's a math major, that's right up there with physics on the nerdy scale). She's a really awesome person. There have been times during my academic terms where the homework load was putting too much stress on me. To help me out, she would come visit the physics study lounge to keep me smiling while working away. Heck, she even brought me pizza when I was working all night on a take home final. I know she's going to read this at some point, so Carolyn: RAWRRRRRRR!!!!

Anyways, that's the key things that have happened. Maybe later I'll go into some more detail about how stupid my housemates are.

Back into the Swing of Things

Yes. I know. I fail at posting. Blah blah blah.

First off, how about a school update? I finished by second year of undergrad at UW. Woot! How about a summary of how the courses went?

• Classical Mechanics & Special Relativity: WOW this course ended up being pretty intense. It started off ez-mode (summary of basic calculus and mechanics) but then turned to WTF mode. Assignments took us upwards of 14+ hours to complete...in groups. Yeah. Was a fun course though. Prof was awesome; he tried his best to connect with the class. Not sure if that worked for everyone, but it worked for me. I did end up getting killed on the final though :(.
• Optics: That was one boring class. Not sure what else to say. The content was easy, but just SO BORING. Actually, it was more the professor's ability to make it interesting that was lacking. Useful course? Yes. Good prof? No.
• Thermal: Nice course, fairly easy throughout most of it, much more difficult at the end. That's about it.
• Stats: Wow what a joke. I would not have taken that course if it wasn't a prereq for a 4th year course that I would like to take (applied crypto). Take it if you have to, other wise skip it.
• Intro to Combinatorics: Hands down, best math course I have taken to date. I now understand power series stuff (unlike my inability to grasp the concepts during DE in 2A), and graph theory was a lot of fun. I'm take the 3rd year Graph Theory course this fall (3A term). Most people complain about this course for its difficulty, and they are right, it isn't easy, but once again, best math course I have taken to date.

Now about a social life update? Lets see here....hmmm....yeah. lol

In the fall I'm moving off campus (finally) to live just north of campus with my 2 good friends. We're living in a small 3 person townhouse, so that should be fun. I've been working my ass off this summer so far trying to figure everything out that I need for the networking side of things for our house. Which reminds me....

I HATE ROGERS. That is all.

Started my summer work since I'm back at home now. Working at the same place as last summer, doing more or the less the same stuff. Today I managed to get version 2 of the intranet website rolled out, which was much fun. I'll type more about work another time.

I've also completely moved to Ubuntu 9.04 on my personal computers for everything that I do other than video games. Its just so much better than XP. There is no doubt in my mind about it. While I was typing this I was working on installing 9.04 on my laptop. It did have 8.10 on it, but I wanted to do a "minimal" install, and of course, use ext4 as my filesystem. Seems to be working much better now.

But what about video games Steven? Yes yes, I have been playing a bit. And by a bit I mean a decent amount. And yes the game is WoW. I'm back!

So during my 2B I got WoW up and running again with a new account for 3x experience goodness. With that bonus experience I managed to get myself a lvl 58 druid, rogue, shaman, and paladin. Since then my druid has gone resto and hit 80, my shaman 72, and the other characters are awaiting me to play them :).

My resto druid is clearly my main. And for the first time ever in my WoW, I am very VERY well geared. Although I didn't have full BiS pre3.1, I was still full epics with my lovely Torch. These days when I heal Ulduar I'm either the top healer or what feels like the only healer (aka completely blowing the other healers out of the water) in both 10 and 25 man. Although I don't like the LB changes from 3.1, it has made me an even better healer. I just can't wait until I get 4pT8... /drool.

In case you were wondering my main's name is Fermi on Dragonblight. My shaman's name is Lorentz on the same server.


I'm going to spend some more time posting this summer. I enjoy being able to share my thoughts with anyone interested. I have a feeling that there will be a good amount of WoW healing information coming this summer so you all you trees out there can be awesome-sauce healers in your raids like myself.

Until next time!

And now for the 2B term....

Yes, I failed at posting, I know. Basically I went home after my exams, and didn't feel like typing anything long there with the small screen and stuff. Blah. I'm going to do my best now to recount what has happened in the past month and do a better job at not failing at keeping up so I can recount details better.

After my CS exam, I went home the following day. Home was meh. Actually, it was slightly better than I was expecting thanks to my dad's ability to keep me at least slightly entertained throughout the week. And of course, no one pressured me about school. Which believe me, helps a lot.

During the break one of things that I did was indoor Go-Karting, and it was AMAZING. My father and I had the entire tract to our selves for our run, and I had a blast. It was clear though that I am far too light for those machines because around every corner, regardless as to if I was on the accelerator at the time or not, could feel the back end sliding. Of course, being on the accelerator made the sliding more profound, but still.

Over the course of the Christmas break I aquired the following (that I can remember at the time of writting this of course :P ). Some sweaters, a dress shirt, scarf, gloves, a Canon 'PnS' camera (which I still have to install the CHDK on :/ ), bunch of money in cash and gift cards, the new Sonicare toothbrush, new watch, 640GB WD HDD, Vantec Nexstar 3 HDD enclosure, and my Introduction to Quantum Computing book. I ended up spending my $50 Futureshop card on another gig of (the now dead format) DDR1 RAM and the WoW Battle Chest for 3x experience goodness.


I'm trying to find a job for this summer that doesn't completely suck. Well, by that I mean a job that is actually even mildly related to what I'm studying here at UW. Andrew is asking a few PhD physics students that he knows if they have any need for me, and I have a few professors in mind that I would like to ask. I only just a few minutes ago find out where they're actual offices are (due to UW having inconsistent and old information scattered across everywhere).

Classes I'm taking this term are the following:

• Phys 256(L) Intro to Optics and the lab component
  
• Phys 263 Classical Mechanics and Special Relativity
• Phys 258 Thermal Physics
• Math 239 Introduction to Combinatorics
• Stat 230 Probability

OH! I just remembered! Andrew was kind enough to buy me TF2 for Christmas when it was on sale for only $10. I good number of hours of that this week; its quite a fun game. I enjoying playing as Medic, but I'm getting better at Sniper to.

There were some other things that I was going to type about, but now its getting late and because of that I have forgotten what I was going to type about. Well, there's a few things that I can think of, but I don't feel like getting into that at the moment.

Anyways, here's to me not failing as much at posting. Now that I'm back at UW I should fail less.