Chan's Personal Blog

Every Saturday, I get my weekly dose of Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately, last week was the American Thanksgiving holiday, and the Space Channel decided to pause the season for a week. So, that meant no new episode of Battlestar Galactica for me.

Holiday or no holiday, I was going to get my weekly fix. I rewatched one of the best battle scenes in Battlestar Galactica so far, the Battle of Exodus. The following is the video of that battle.

Major spoiler warning, if you intend to watch Season 3, do not watch the following video clip. Now, here we have it, the Battle of Exodus. Enjoy.


Mmmm... so good.

This morning I was awaken by a phone call from Mr. Winter (yes, that is his last name), the manager of our department, and he informed me that the University was closed, and that even if I could get into work, don't bother, there was far too much snow. Sweet action! First order of business.... sleep in.

All of the schools were shut down today, so 39,500 students stayed home to enjoy the snow. Mail deliveries have been delayed. Bus service didn't start running until 9:00am.

I was planning on spending the rest of the day at home, but Adam calls me up to go sledding down a hill. Who could resist? Usually snow comes and goes in a day here, but yesterday, we got 30cm of snow, or a year's worth of snow in one day. So, I spent about an hour clearing snow out of my driveway, and exhuming my car out of its snowy grave. It was fun trying to get into the car as all of its doors were frozen shut.

Thankfully by the time I got onto the roads, they were all plowed, so driving wasn't bad at all. I was expecting the worse. I'm also very thankful that my car has front wheel drive, which resulted in no problems going up hills and such.

Anyway, spent the afternoon sledding down a hill with Adam, Sarah, and Doug on lunch trays. Yes, lunch trays, the poor man's sled. The neighbourhood kids had also built some snow ramps at the bottom of the hill, and they were jumping them. Adam got some serious air off a giant ramp near the end.

Then, we spent the rest of the evening in Adam & Sarah's warm living room, next to the fireplace watching TV, and playing video games.

Very productive snow day overall. Couldn't have been better

Sorry for the lack of timely updates as of late. I've been busy rushing to get my thesis finished. Last Saturday, I fired off the first draft of my thesis for review, and it weighed in at 70 pages. I got the draft back from my professor, and luckily, no major revisions were required. I probably had about 20 revisions to do. At 2:00am today, I submitted my second draft, and it weighs in at 78 pages. So tired..... zzzz.

Now, this is 78 pages of content and diagrams. This isn't even including all the fluff like table of contents, acknowledgements, list of figures, etc. With all that stuff, it's probably about 98 pages long.

Interestingly enough, last Wednesday, I bumped into Mr. Teel on the bus (my highschool math teacher). He had gone back to university to pursue his Masters in Philosophy. I was asking him questions about his thesis, and about his experience writing it. He said that his supervisor wanted the thesis to be under 100 pages, but Mr. Teel's thesis was longer than that. So, he took a bunch of pages, moved them to the appendix, changed the line spacing and font size, and voila, 99 pages long. He defended his thesis in August of this year, and he said it wasn't that bad. He said that the hardest work is writing the thesis, everything after that is fairly trivial. It was uplifting and reassuring to talk to someone who had recently finished their thesis.

Anyway, I do think the hardest part is writing the actual thesis (crosses fingers). It's tough trying to stay focused and motivated to keep on writing. The key is to keep your eye on the prize at the end. It's really easy to procrastinate or feel unmotivated because after spending hours writing, you realize that there is a still a million miles to go, it's like you've barely done any work. I've probably been at this for about two months straight now.

It's time to end this once and for all. It's on!

Today, Google's stock (GOOG) hit a new 52-week high, and it has finally passed the $500/share waypoint. Looks like I'm getting an early Christmas present . Anyway, feeling pretty good about this because I convinced a few friends to buy some GOOG, and it looks like they're being handsomely rewarded. The original price target that Jim Cramer set for the stock $560/share. Looks like that price target has been revised to $750/share.

Anyway, glad this stock is working out. A lot of people said that I was crazy for buying a $400+/share stock, and that the stock was too expensive. However, upon closer inspection, it turned out Google was a cheap stock, and it had a lot of upside potential. Take that Google bears!

Last Thursday morning, I was walking into work, and as I was going up a flight of stairs, I noticed security personnel interviewing some of the computer consultants. Something must be up. After I get into my office, I head to the main kitchen to wash out my cup, and I see a bunch of security people roping off a section of lockers with caution tape.

Half an hour later, I walk past the lockers again, and there's security personnel monitoring the lockers while tradesmen are cutting and sawing off locks. Something in those lockers weren't good.

By lunch time, I pass by this area again, but the lockers are all gone. They cut a section of them off, ripped up the carpet, and hauled it all away.

This week people from maintenance were having a serious talk with one of the managers of our department about what had happened last week. It turned out that there was a chemical spill in the lockers. Someone had put something in the top locker, and the substance ate its way through three levels of lockers, and ate a big chunk of carpet. Strangely enough though, they never bothered trying to identify what the substance was.

When the manager heard about this, he was angry. He said that at least four staff members were complaining that they had a burning sensation in their eyes last Thursday. The theory right now is that the chemical agent must have gotten into the ventilation system, and that air is distributed our floor, thus spreading the chemical agent.

What's surprising is that the security people knew about the chemical spill but didn't bother evacuating the building or informing us what had happened. Now it seems like all of us could have been exposed to some unknown chemical agent. This got our manager fairly mad because he's ex-navy, and military training offers extensive training in an "ABC situation", that is, what to do if you're exposed to Atomic, Biological, or Chemical agents. So, the manager got a hold of security and had a nice long talk about how to handle the ABCs.

So, security is now trying to get the substance in the lockers identified. The troubling thing is that they don't know who put the chemicals in that locker, and whether there was malicious intent. I guess in a post 9-11 world, anything is possible.

Hopefully it turns out to be nothing. Kind of scary nevertheless how incompetently they handled the whole situation.

Well, tonight was the main event, the Worship & Praise Rally at North Douglas Church sponsored by Praise 106.5FM. The entire floor level of the church was packed with people, and a good part of the balcony as well. Two local bands came together to perform as one; they did a 20 song set together. It's amazing how quickly they could merge together and really gel with only two days rehersing together.

The time just before the show as the sound guy and stage manager is always the most stressful as there are a billion things to worry about. Are people going to show up? Will people complain the music is too loud? Is the stage equipment secure? Is the song list correct, or have the musicians modified the order.... again?

Another common pre-show ritual is the visitation by other sound guys. Sound guys from other churches will innevitably find the sound board, and scope out our sound and computer system. This evening, I had three different sound guys come through; so, I gave them a full tour of the system. They were pretty impressed.

I was also visited by a person that represents an important link to my past. A guy comes up to the sound board and starts asking me questions, and he looks really familiar. I ask him, is your last name Taal by any chance? Surely enough, it was Mr.Taal who was one of my substitute teachers in high school. This was quite surprising because last time I checked, he had moved to Ontario. Anyway, this is the man who helped my high school sound crew pull off major drama productions by giving us a hand in stage design, sound effects, sound setup, and lighting design. This was about 10 years ago, we're talking old school! So, it was really neat reconnecting with my past. Turns out he has moved back to Victoria, and he's the sound guy at Lambrick Park Church. We traded a few tips about sound and computer systems.

For those G2Kers, here's a tangent story about Mr. and Mrs. Taal. People who didn't go to high school with me can skip to the next paragraph. So one year, the sound crew was tasked to support a really complex play which involved a lot of actors, sound effects, and light cues. To deal with the sound effects, we had a midi keyboard programmed with a ton of different sound effects and such. This worked well because we could hit a key and the sound effect would play, this was way better than playing a bunch of tapes with sound effects. For this play, I was the manager who followed the script and gave orders to the lighting team, and the sound team. On opening night, we were a bit short handed, so Mrs. Taal volunteered to help out with the sound team. There was one scene where a doorbell is supposed to go off, and the actor is supposed to say, "Oh, someone's at the door." As we got to that scene, I cued my sound effects guy to ring the doorbell, but he missed the cue for some reason. I repeat the order and Mrs. Taal hears it, and realizes that they missed their cue, so she panics and hits the keyboard to do the doorbell sound effect. However, she hit the wrong one and we get a telephone ring instead. The confused actor says, "Oh, someone's at the door." Realizing that the wrong sound effect was played, Mrs. Taal panicks some more and hits the keyboard again, and a grandfather clock sound goes off. Laughter from the crowd ensues. Good times

Shortly afterwards, the worship service started. The whole venue felt really intimate and close, even though the church sanctuary is pretty big. We had the lights down really low so people wouldn't be distracted by looking around seeing who was there. People were able to just come in and focus on worshipping God a lot faster this way. Overall, the worship set had a good mix of traditional hymns and upbeat modern choruses.

My favourite song was Consuming Fire (by Hillsong United) as I really love the lyrics to that song:


Overall, it was a rocking evening of praise and worship. The band was great. Everyone loved the sound mix. In fact, this has never happened before, but someone actually gave me a tip for my sound services. Who tips a sound guy??? Mental note for future, keep a tip jar by the sound board.

Anyways, these sorts of services are my favourite as it's Christians from all over gathering, unified as one to worship God. It doesn't matter if you're Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, Alliance, Reform, etc. We put aside all our differences.

So, Chan Productions has been hired to do sound for the Praise 106.5FM Praise Rally that's happening this weekend at North Douglas Church. This could be the biggest gig for us yet for the year. Here's the information straight from their website:


It should be a packed venue. I've already received the song lists, and it looks pretty good. Hope to see some of you there. I'll either be at the sound booth, or frantically running around like a headless chicken.