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.

Purplez, Breakz, and Technolust

Sorry everyone, its been a busy week. Much stress was had at work. On a positive work-related note, I got my ASP.NET calendar working how I wanted. I had to get it to highlight days that had events in the SQL server for. Then also show the details in a hoverover div.

On the WoW side a good amount happened too. Last friday I finally got my first piece of gear from Ulduar! I managed to grab the leather head piece from heroic Auriaya....and when I wear it I feel like my Druid is a character from Sailor Moon or something. I would link the item and some pictures, but I'm not at my personal desktop atm.

That night we ended up making some progress on Hodir, getting him to 25% on our last attempt (which happened to be the same attempt where we didn't die prior to enrage). Not that bad for my guild.

On the weekend it was another story. Well, most of the weekend I spent with my friend who came to visit me for saturday&sunday. She left prior to my sunday ulduar-10 raid, which I was excited for. On the saturday they downed everything up to Hodir, minus the IC. We went straight for Hodir....and spent the next 1.5 hours dying on him. Some players didn't understand the concept of moving to stay alive. On one attempt this mage died 3 times (brezed 2x obviously). That same mage also never broke 2k dps. In fact, the majority of the dps never broke 3k. I could do better than some of them in pvp boomkin spec with resto gear! /sigh

So once we FINALLY didn't all die on Hodir and hit his enrage timer, he still had 25% left. So we left him and went to Freya. We spent about 45 minutes on the trash and managed to get 2 elders down. I died so many times from random things its not even funny. DPS breaking CC, mob goes straight for me, spam heal myself, no one takes the mob off me, I die. Or how about the pulls where I would put 1 rejuv and 1 LB on the tank as he runs into the pack of mobs, and all of a sudden 3 of them run at me....with no intervention by anyone. When I played mage that would be a time I would frost nova to save the healer! In the end, we killed not a single boss.

Because of this frustration, I'm taking a break from raiding with my guild. I just can't stand it these days. The majority of them really are great people. Its an adult only guild too, so I don't have to deal with the problem that a lot of guilds have being immature children. I just can't stand raiding with them some times.

Oh well, it'll give me some more time to do some work around the house.


The big thing that I've been working on the technology side is the planning for a multitouch table. I've got some big plans, and I really hope that I can do this. Its going to be a lot of work. The main things I'm working on for it are finding out where I can find infrared (850nm specifically) light sources (I've found some good online retailers, but seeing if I can find local), how to program the UI, how I want to make the UI, securing a projector (I have access to one to test my designs with), and lastly a webcam with a ir bandpass filter. The rest is fairly trivial.

To learn more about this stuff, check out http://nuigroup.com

Since I had to spend all day at work today in a "diversity training" meeting thing (I don't know why...apparently everyone in this building has to including myself [IT] and maintenance) I was working on writting down my ideas for the UI and what I want to do with it. I was even working on the database design for how to store some of the information.

Now to learn OpenGL....