Chan's Personal Blog

3:30am, that is exactly how late I was up last night finishing a crazy big assignment for my Artificial Intelligence class. Conversely, that is also how much sleep I got, three hours and thirty minutes. I had to be up at 7:00am for an early class.

My report for that class ended up being forty-four pages long. The first eight pages was documentation, and the final thirty-six pages was source code. If you ever need a good way to kill off trees, then printing off source code from a computer program is a good way to do it.

What made last night even more amusing was, after I finished writing my report, I started printing the whole thing off. Surely enough, my printer ran out of ink. Good times. The day got better as I headed for the bus this morning and missed it because it came a few minutes earlier than usual.

In either case, I managed to get through the day fairly well despite my sleep deprivation. I actually got a lot of programming done today at work too. I thought I was going to be a roaming zombie.

It has definitely been a while since my last all-nighter. I made an effort to never pull all-nighters any more ever since I finished my undergraduate degree as productivity exponentially drops off as the night moves on. You also start making some pretty stupid mistakes in your programming if you're not careful. If you're really out of it, then you end up creating more work. In either case, I'm getting too old for this .

Anyway, back to more assignment work.

It's about time that I wrote an article that wasn't related to politics, so here we go. I found a interesting site called wheresgeorge.com (American site) and its sister site whereswilly.com (Canadian site). These websites allow you to literally track where your money is.

How this works is, you go to the site, and enter in serial numbers of the paper money bills they have in their wallet. Then, you enter in your location by using a zip code or postal code. Finally, you write down a story about how you got the bill, what condition it's in, etc. Then you submit that information, and it becomes part of the database. This works because given enough people, the site can accumulate a vast database of information about where money is going.

When you punch in a serial number of a dollar bill, you can lookup some pretty interesting information about it (if the information exists). You can find out how far it has travelled since it left your pocket, where was its last known location, the average speed in which it is travelling, how long did it take to travel to a place, and much more.

What's even more interesting is that scientists have been able to use the information collected from wheresgeorge.com, and model how humans move, and how disease can spread.

To end this election, here's a few parody attack ads for the 2006 Canadian election from Canada's own, Rick Mercer:

Communist Attack Ad
Liberal Attack Ad on Stephen Harper (THE BEST)
Conservative Stand Up For Canada Ad1 and Ad2
(Movies in Windows Media Player format or Quicktime)

Absolute awesome. That's the best part about elections.... the humour.

This evening, we have witnessed the demise of the Liberal Party of Canada, thus ending more than a decade of their rule. The CBC has an article summarizing tonight's election developments. In either case, the Conservatives have won a minority government. Right now, the seats are as follows: 124 Conservatives, 103 Liberals, 51 Bloc, 29 NDP, and 1 Independent.

Biggest plays tonight in my opinion:

• Paul Martin resigns as Liberal party leader.
• Conservatives breakthrough in Quebec.
• Liberals completely annihilated in Alberta.
• Bloc loses support and seats in Quebec.
• Belinda Stronach (Liberal, former Conservative) survives and gets re-elected.
• Dr. Keith Martin (Liberal MP - Esquimalt, Juan De Fuca) survives and gets re-elected.
• Svend Robinson (NDP) defeated in comeback.

I don't have time to give the analysis of each of the points above as I'm too sleepy right now, but more will follow tomorrow.

While I was watching the CBC coverage tonight, they had Don Cherry (7th Greatest Canadian) make a few comments about the election. Interesting that Don Cherry flirted with the idea of going in politics, and he made a few interesting points about what he would do as a leader.

I think one of the most amusing things tonight was the notion that the election will be determined by British Columbia, because the pundits kept saying that over and over again. At 7pm tonight when the election result blackout lifted, I turned on the TV, and the first thing that flashes on the screen is, "Harper wins minority government." The polls just closed here for crying out loud!

Oh well, whatever. I'm happy that Canada is sending a Western Canadian to Ottawa as Prime Minister. Hopefully that will shift some of the power westward.

Savour your victory Mr. Harper, and don't let power get to your head, remember your roots and where you came from.

The big winners tonight, the Conservatives and the NDP. The big losers tonight were the Liberals and the Bloc. Although, I think maybe the NDP might be in a weaker spot now because they don't hold the balance of power, so they will wield less power and clout despite having more seats. Ironic no?

Well, we're at the end of the election campaign, and on January 23, 2006, the leaders are playing for all the marbles. There's really not much more to say as each leader has more or less finished releasing their ads, platforms, etc. This is a time to sit back, review, and finalize your vote.

So, to conclude this election, here's an excellent article from the CBC that highlights the 20 key developments that happened in this campaign.

See you at the polls on Monday. God keep our land.

Just got this e-mail from the grad mailing list:


Graeme sent me a link to the transcript for the Soup Nazi Seinfeld episode. Study it well if you dare order soup from the Soup Nazi, he has a procedure.

The people at my work will probably organize a soup raid that day!

Well, we're on our final week of election coverage. This week has been relatively quiet so far, but it is supposed to heat up in the last half of the week as the parties make their last stands. In either case, there appears to be a large number of undecided voters. To aid in that group's decision, I have found this Canadian election quiz from Politics Watch.

The quiz asks 18 questions about policies and values, and in the end, it'll tell you which party fits closest to what you believe in. Quick, easy, fun.

The quiz does carry the following disclaimer:


The party that I intend to vote for appears to be a 100% match with what I entered. A match made in heaven . The second place runner up in the match was quite shocking for me.

I'll end with a friendly reminder that the vote is on January 23, 2006. By law, employers have to give you time to go vote, so you can't make an excuse that you're too busy to work because of work.

It'll be interesting what the voter turnout will be this time around. I'm predicting that it'll be higher than last election as this election has been quite exciting.