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.

I'm really bad at this aren't I...

So here I am, finally posting an update. Been long enough hasn't it? Not a day has gone by since my last update where I haven't wanted to post something. It just seems like every day comes and goes without me actually getting around to doing it.

Lets see here, what has happened? Well about two weeks ago I went to the Games Workshop annual convention "Games Day" and had a blast. Took a bunch of pictures for our website, but have still yet to upload them. Why? Well let me get to that...

My power supply, the same one that I've had for about 6 years, finally died. Prior to that it was making some funny sounds, so I knew that the end was near. I got home from work one day, and it just didn't turn on. Upon openning the case, I could smell that magical smoke that is released from electronics...that don't work anymore. After taking appart my power supply (what, I'm cheap and wanted to see if I could fix it) I discovered that it wasn't something simple like a resistor; it was one of the main induction coils, making the thing junk.

Since I wouldn't be able to use my desktop till the weekend (which would be the only time that I would be able to get a new power supply) I borrowed one from work for the time being. Thinking that I might as well take one that looks like it doesn't suck, I do (after asking of course) and that night get it installed.

A few days later a new problem crops up. Since the list of symptoms is far too long and detailed, I'll give the shortened version. The motherboard was getting power, but the computer refused to turn on. Sometimes it would turn on, but then turn off randomly, to then either a) repeat that or b) not turn on. Whatever I did that seemed to fix it each time would be different every time. Eventually I managed to get a new power supply, hoping that my motherboard wasn't causing the above issues and it was just the power supply from work.

Thankfully, I was right, and it works completely fine again. I picked up the OCZ StealthXStream 500w PSU from canada computers for $30 after rebates and junk. It apparently has nearly the same internals has a much higher end PSU, just missing modular cables and some feature. It's working very well so far, and I'm happy.


On the World of Warcraft front, I started raiding again after a 3 week break. We had a little (and by little I mean big) explosion on the forums where a bunch of people's built up thoughts errupted. The entire conversation was based around the fact that many members of our guild were tired of having to carry people constantly through the raids. As I did in my last post, it got to the point where we just couldn't get anything new done. Not because it was too difficult, just because there were a few people holding the raid back every single time.

Because of all the talking that we all did, we had a guild vent meeting just a few days later to talk all this over. In the end, lots more people started signing up for raids, and the administration used that to help buff up the groups for the more difficult content. Because of that we managed to get Hodir down again in our 10 man group, and we finally managed to get him down in 25 man! And before you ask, I didn't get the token :P . I did get my T8.5 gloves off of Emalon in a guild ad-hoc VoA run last week. Just need chest and legs off Hodir (25&10) then hope that my 10man group can do Thorim 10 for my shoulders. Then I'll finally have my 4pT8 bonus!!!! EEEEEEE!!!!

Lorentz has had only a little bit of focus on him. He's level 76.

Other than that I've been doing some physical labour around the house....shovelling mulch and moving rocks. Lots of both. LOTS. OVER 9000!

Choo Choo Northrend Express

My enhancement shaman alt, Lorentz, just hit 75 the other night. Which makes him about half way done Northrend. The funny thing is though, he's not even done Dragonblight (and he didn't do the Fjord!). By done I mean finished the quests.

Once I hit 75 I ran on over to Zul Drak for a few moments just to knock out the ampitheater and that wanted elite giant fish guy. Got myself 2 new weapons to replace my matching fist weapons (the ones from UK and Nexus) from those quests, and headed back to Dragonblight to finish the Wrathgate quest. Just gotta head back to SW now with his shield then (a few conversations later) I'll be able to do the Undercity attack again.

Northred really is flying by though, and I'm happy for that. Those BoA shoulders + rest experience really do make a huge difference.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind the leveling process. I just prefer to get it over with. Unless that is, I'm leveling with someone. In that case I enjoy doing the quests and having fun with them. Its just that doing it alone is so...lonely? I'm not sure what to say about that really. Well I guess that kinda makes sense. At max level (assuming you don't completely suck at the game) you can attend raids with other people. You can do heroics. Even PvP (ok, you can 70-79, but lets be honest here...it sucks). A lot of the time when leveling you see a few people only in passing. Finding a group for anything can take forever....assuming you can get a group at all. Its just a strangeness about it that turns me off lingering around the leveling train.

In order to level with somebody you would have needed to have made that decision a long time ago in that toon's life. Its practically impossible to find a random person in northrend (or anywhere in WoW) that is on the same parts of the same chains as you are. And even if you do find someone to quest with that day, what happens the next? What if the other person logged on earlier and played without you? Now you have to find someone else.

I'm not saying that I'm a lonely person. I'm just saying that since I don't level with anyone, I don't have a desire to hang around in the leveling stages. Maybe its that whenever I did level with someone, it was the fun in "hanging out" with them that made me want to wait for them to log on instead of leveling solo to rush up to max level.

Or of course, maybe I'm just thinking too hard about this :P

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....

Bored Druid is Bored

EXTENDED DOWNTIME ARG

Honestly, I wouldn't have a problem with the down time if they actually gave a realistic end time. If I was told originally that it was going to take this long, I would have started something else a long time ago. But the problem is I don't want to start something to do it for only a tad, then go back to WoW (seeing as I was waiting for it!).

ARG

:( I just wanted to relax after work :(

All this down time has made me miss horde though. Maybe I'll make a horde toon for me to play when I'm bored. I've got a druid (duh), a shaman at 73, a pally&rogue both at 58, DK at 60 (does that really count? :P ), and a mage at 71. I've played a warlock to low 20s before. I refuse to play a hunter because I hate pet management, especially to the level that hunters have to deal with. Any suggestions?

[edit] Extended again until at least 9:30 PDT (12:30 my time)....THATS IT TIME TO DO SOMETHING ELSE [/edit]

Meet the Druid!

Alright, so I may not have a cool intro video like Valve does for its classe updates, but still, this is a post about my main character in WoW...Fermi from Dragonblight, the resto druid!

Yes, I forgot to take a screenshot of my talents. Stats are completely unbuffed.

A few common questions people have for me after they find out that I play that character are, where is your character's name from? Why do you play a female character? Alliance...whaaaa? Well, here's some answers for you folks.

• My character is named after the physicist Enrico Fermi. He's famous for his work on the first nuclear reactor, and did a ton of work in various nuclear, quantum, and stat mech fields. For more information see here his wikipedia article.
• Why do I play a female character? Well, since I'm an alliance player now, and since I wanted to be a resto druid, it was either male or female night elf. Since the male night elves look...well...silly, I rolled female. Plus, I didn't want to spend days looking at what is suppose to represent the back side of a male...lol
• Yes...I'm playing alliance these days. Although I'll always be a horde at heart (my first characters were horde, and I miss my 70 tankadin), I decided that if I was going to come back to WoW, I was going to play with my friend that I live with (when I'm at university). Since he's always played alliance in pretty much the same guild since vanilla, I figured that I would join him. This isn't my first time playing alliance however....my first max level toon was my mage during BC....and that was a human!

Now that we've got that part out of the way, I'm going to talk about Fermi's history.

As soon as her level was high enough to enter deadmines, she stopped doing quests in favour of instance runs. My friend and I had everything worked out so that we would have multiple lvl (approx) 60s through instance runs. I demanded that Fermi was the first so that I could start my outland questing while we worked on getting our other alts through the instances.

Eventually, I hit 80 and started to gear up. Over the course of 1 weekend I pretty much got everything I needed for my guild's "raid level 1" clearance. I was still missing just a few things at that time however. That week was also the guild's first time battling Malygos. They needed another healer since someone didn't show up, so I said that I would help out.

And boy oh boy, that was fun.

It was the first time that I would be healing alongside my friend in a raid situation. Of course, he's an awesomesauce pally healer, so it was good times. So even though I had terrible gear, I came out in the top few of the healing done, beating the other better geared resto druids. How did I do that? I'm better than them, that's how :P.

We ended up downing him the second night we went in. A bunch of us (spearheaded by me) on the forums came up with a strat that would work for our guild's skills. I was then lucky enough to get the leather healy belt from Maly that night; my first raid epic. Woot!

Now when ever I do maly (which isn't that often these days because everyone is on ulduar), I decimate the charts. I use a combination of grid+clique and mouseover macros to heal. During vortex I'll mash my LB button and move my mouse over people's icons in grid to apply a single LB to them. In maly, LB can be upwards of 50% of my healing.

I *still* need the cape from KT, as it's looking to be the BiS still for resto druids even with ulduar out. Never did get the OH from maxxena either. If I can find some time to do the during-the-week ulduar runs (work keeps me from staying up too late during the week) then maybe I can get The Ironmender from heroic-kologarn.

I wants it naow!
(especially seeing as its going to be ages before I get 4pT8 q_q )

I've got some Life/Computer stuff I'll post about later, but this one was dedicated to ma drood.

Until next time!

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!