Chan's Personal Blog

Tomorrow's the last day of classes, and I've finally got everything finished. Feelings of nightmarish fear subsiding, feelings of cautious optimism returning. Hehe. I'm feeling pretty good about this end of term though. I got my research paper back, and scored an A+ on it which is sweet. The prof only had a few written comments in the paper, one of them says, "Oh." I'm not sure what that means exactly. Does it mean, "oh?" As in, wow, I did not know that before. Or does it mean "oh" as in, uhhhhh I think this is incorrect.

My presentation for the paper went fairly well also. It's difficult not to measure yourself against others, but the guy that went after me completely bombed. He didn't have his powerpoint slides done, so he loaded up Microsoft Word, and used that for his presentation. His word document was basically his research paper that he had written, and he was reading paragraphs directly from it. The text was too small so no one could read it. What made it worse was that there was a questions period after each presentation, and the guy cut off anyone that asked a question. The prof had to correct him on a few points that he made, and had to summarize the presentation for the guy because the presentation was somewhat incomplete.

In either case, I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I have a project demo to give, and it should be an easy 100%. They gave us two weeks to implement this project, and it took me about two days to code it up.

I also finished my flash presentation on Rwanda and Darfur, and I'll be presenting that at my church tomorrow night. I'm a tad nervous about this one; this is probably the first time I've spoken publicly at my church. I'm not preaching though, the talk is designed to raise awareness. As a presenter, I always worry if the material I'm speaking on is appropriate for the specific audience. Am I using too much jargon in my talk? Are my words too big and complex? Do I look awkward and uncomfortable standing up here? Is my audience going to eat me alive during question and answers? etc.

We'll see how that goes.

This weekend I had the lovely task of working on a programming project for a software engineering course. What's even more fun is that it had to be done on campus because the course requires proprietary software that's only installed in a certain computer lab. For the record, this is one of my pet peeves when a course requires students to use a tool that's only available on campus, and the tool can't be accessed remotely by computer. It means I can't work on an assignment from home.

In either case, working on campus on the weekend is extra bad because nothing is open on campus. There's no decent places to get food on campus, and if you don't have a car, it's a greater pain to actually get food as you have to travel off campus. Bus service on the weekend is intermittent at best as well.

So Sunday 8pm, I finally get a chunk of my software to talk to a neighbouring computer properly using CORBA (don't ask). I'm extremely hungry at this point, and I have a craving for Tim Horton's, so I go to the nearest Tim Horton's.

Normally when I think of Tim Horton's, I think of your stereotypical Canadian wearing plaid sitting around sipping coffee, reading a newspaper, and perhaps debating politics with some old guy. This should be the case as Tim Horton's is one of our country's greatest institutions.

When I arrived at Tim Horton's, I looked around and thought, "My God, it's all Asians!" It's 8pm which is NOT the peak time to be getting food, and the place is full of Asian students hanging out and doing their homework. It's wierd because I've never seen anything quite like it. While I was eating, I was able to brush up a little bit of my Mandarin as I listened in on a number of conversations being carried out in that language. I think the best sentence I heard was from the table next to me, "Wo jue de zhe assembly code bu hao," which translates to, "I think this assembly code isn't good." It was a bunch of guys studying assembly programming (programming language used for microchips and microcontrollers) for CSC 230 probably.

Anyways, I didn't know that Tim Horton's had become the hip place to be if you're Asian. Clearly, I haven't been notified by the powers above, and I have adjusted my meeting places as appropriate j/k. I've been looking for Asians in all the wrong places .