Chan's Personal Blog

Well, I just finished demoing my final programming project to the teaching assistants about an hour ago, and this concludes this week's work. I scored a perfect on the demonstration, so huzzah! I also had a midterm this morning that went really well. I'm feeling a little exhausted, but all in all, the battle goes well, thank God.

My wonderful weekend is filled with more assignments and what not, but hopefully after that, it will conclude this major phase of combat.

I got this Bible verse via e-mail, and it seems very appropriate right now:

"Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long." -Psalm 6:2-3

In either case, I'm going to Sabbath tonight and do no work. For a brief instance, I am free. That sounds pretty good right now.

Well, I'm in week three of my fight to the death against midterms, quizzes, assignments, and projects. It has been a relentless wave after wave of stuff on every front. On Friday I have a term project due and a midterm. However, there is hope as things should start winding down after this Friday. I'm looking forward to a sense of normalacy and sleep. I'll also be able to get that long overdue haircut. I don't like my hair long ... it's like having a perpetual bad hair day.

Anyways, I'm done whining. If you don't see many blog postings this week, you'll know why. Hail to those who have fallen in academic battle.

On a positive note, I am glad that I did get my grad schol application in early. It's one less thing to worry about at the end of the month.

Off to bed for me.

Well, tonight I went to Dave's farewell party as he's off to depot for 6 months of RCMP training. There was a pretty good G2K turn out. Eton, Dave, Jon, Paul, Elaine, Luke, Tyler, Tim, and a bunch of Dave's supposed friends showed up. We all spent a lot of time catching up with each other. I haven't seen a lot of these friends in a while. It's encouraging seeing everyone finished/finishing their degrees.

I was suprised that Eton made a greek salad for the party. It was pretty dang good. What was even more suprising was that it contained tomatoes.... and I'm pretty sure Eton hates tomatoes. Every time I go to lunch with him, he discards the tomatoes from his burger with extreme prejudice.

Anyways, Paul presented Dave with a 'walking tall' stick which was inspired by that movie by The Rock. It was a very suitable present for someone that will be enforcing the law. Lets just say some people (cough Eton cough) practiced enforcing the law with that stick at the party. Everyone signed the stick, so anytime Dave savagely beats down criminals with the stick, he'll think of us .

All in all, very fun night. I'm glad I went out to it. Kudos to the organizers.

Well, yesterday my boss delivered the good news to me that she received the green light on my funding for grad school. The deal is, I will be developing software for UVic Co-op which will be used as my master's technical project. Co-op will pay for the development, while my grad supervisor and my boss will supervise it.

Technical Project

The project involves building an e-portfolio system for Co-op students to use. It allows students to put examples of their work online, write about it, and show it to potential employers. The catch is, not everyone knows how to put up their own web page, so this e-portfolio system has to be easy to use for noobies and elite hackers.

In either case, I think it's a good idea that Co-op is developing an e-portfolio system. I think it complements a resume as employers can see examples of students' work. For example, showing an employer a website you built is better than just saying you know how to build websites on a resume.

From my own experience, an e-portfolio has definitely helped me find work. For my first few co-op jobs, the employer went through my website and liked what they saw. They especially loved ejordansolutions.com (which is down right now ), which is a site I built for a legitimate engineering consultant here in town.

Summary

So, I got me a technical project for my masters degree which means I won't have to write a thesis, but I'll have to take a few more courses. I'm fine with more courses though, a lot of the 3rd/4th year computer science courses I have chosen to take have been very enjoyable.

Now I have to finish writing up my grad school application form which is due at the end of the month. Stay tuned for the exciting season finale.