Chan's Personal Blog

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!

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.