Chan's Personal Blog

The conclusion of my Master's degree has kicked off a delicious week of celebrating and feasting which means that I'm no longer a starving grad student, but a well-fed one. Last Saturday, my parents took me out to Yoshi Sushi. I ordered the weekend boat special which had Chicken Yakitori, California Roll, Dynamite Roll, Shrimp and Vegetable Tempura, and a Robata Oyster.

The next day, Adam, Bethany, and Sarah treated me to a second round of Yoshi Sushi. We ordered the following: Chicken Yakitori, California Roll, Dynamite Roll, Prawn Tempura Roll, Spicy Tuna Roll, BC Salmon Skin Roll, and a Yam Tempura Roll. We finished the evening with an ice cream cake from Dairy Cream. Drool.

On Monday, I was at a birthday dinner at the Keg, and I had a caesar salad, garlic mashed potatoes, and a medium rare prime rib with beef jus. One of my favourite things about the Keg is actually their horseradish sauce that they serve with their prime rib. It's very hot and creamy, and it tastes a lot like wasabi. The heat from the sauce hits you and then it disappears, it doesn't linger which is nice.

The week of feasting hasn't finished yet though. On Thursday, I'm going to Cafe Brio with Natalie. This restaurant is part of of the Dine Around town event that's going on where you can get a three course meal for $25-$35, so this is a great opportunity to try out new restaurants. On top of that, I have a pending dinner with Myron at Sen Zushi, a dinner with Patrick at Eugene's Greek Restaurant, and a lunch at Japanese Village with Carmen.

It's nice actually being able to attend social events because I actually have time these days. Stay tuned as restaurant reviews will surely follow.

Well, I have just finished renovating my personal blog. The previous blog's design was more than three years old, so it was time for a change. In addition, the blog software I was using was becoming really dated, and I was having spam problems and such. So, I've spent the last few days upgrading the software, and there's a lot of new features that will become available.

Besides the new look-and-feel of the site, we also have web polls available now on the left hand side (scroll down a little bit). In addition, you can now participate more by rating the blog articles that I put out. More importantly, I've got more spam defences built in now, so it should be less of a pain.

Anyway, comments, feedback, and suggestions are welcome. This should conclude the downtime that we were experiencing, and I will resume regular blog postings again.

P.S. Sorry Brenton, I lost your last comment during the database upgrade, but to answer your question, I moved my host to dreamhost.com.

This is a public service announcement. We will be moving to a new web server over the weekend, so this site will be down intermittently. Our new home should offer better speeds and uptime, so this should help us serve you better. Everything should be back to normal by Monday.

If you are reading this message, that means you've made it to our new server.

Special thanks to Brenton for graciously hosting Chan Productions for the last few years.

So, today I defended my master's project by presenting my work and answering questions from a panel of professors, and I have passed. This marks the end of the academic journey that has spanned 6 years and 5 months.

The first thing one of my co-workers said to me after the defence was how calm and collected I seemed while giving the presentation. Honestly, I was fairly calm because I had already done a practice run of my presentation on Friday, and I had to hardly tweek it. In addition, all grad students in my program have to go through a course on giving presentations, and I was the top presenter, so I wasn't too worried.

I remember talking to Mr. Teel who had finished his masters last year, and he said that he wasn't nervous at all when he had to defend his thesis. He said that the hard part is getting the document written and getting it successfully reviewed by professors. The defence itself is pretty straightforward because you're the expert of that subject. Looking back at it, I would agree with his statements.

The part that I was most worried about was the questions afterwards because the professors would have questions about my project, and three courses that I had taken during graduate studies. It's pretty hard to study for three courses especially if you have no idea what would be asked ahead of time. Thankfully, the questions were mostly about my project (which I'm an expert in), and there were just a handful of questions about my courses. Needless to say, I overstudied by a long shot this time.

One of the professors spent most of his time inquiring about how easy it would be to add certain features because he wanted to use my software for the university. So, this is a good sign because it means he was rather impressed by my implementation, and he could see other uses for it.

The one course that the professors did ask a lot of questions about was on open source software engineering, since my supervisor taught me that course. There was a lot of discussion around that because all of the professors thought that this was an interesting topic. At times, they were debating with each other which is good, because that runs the clock down, and it means less questions for me.

Overall, I think there were two or three questions that I didn't know the answer to, but that was okay. One of the questions that the professor gave didn't make a lot of sense to me, and when he gave the answer, I realized that the answer he gave was wrong. However, the master's defence survival guide says not to argue with a professor even if they're wrong; choose your battles to fight.

After the professors finished with their questioning, everyone was asked to leave the room while the professors discussed whether my work was significant enough to be awarded a Master's degree. They took about 15 minutes to talk it through. Then, the door opened, and the three professors came out bearing congratulations and handshakes. They also informed me that I didn't need to make any revisions to my technical project report, so I am completely done.

All in all, the professors were rather impressed by my technical project. As mentioned before, one of them is interested in adopting the software for other uses at the university, so there's some potential there.

Anyway, I'm very glad that it's over. It still hasn't quite sunk in yet, but I'm sure I'll be more excited later. All that I'm thinking about right now is getting some decent sleep because I have been staying up pretty late studying for the last few nights. But just think.... tomorrow, no more studying! And the day after..... no more studying! This is going to take some getting used to

So, that's another set of acronyms that I can tack onto my name.

Mr. Chan, MSc. BSc.

Looks pretty snazzy.

Well, it's 12 hours before my Master's Defence. Honestly, I thought I'd be much more nervous on the night before the big op, but I'm fairly calm. Really, I just want to get this thing over with because I've been studying for the last 5 days straight.

The checklist for tomorrow morning is to go over my notes and presentation one more time, read over the thesis once more, get dressed up, get psyched up, and into battle we go.

Here's a speech by Adama that will set the tone for tomorrow as I prepare for end.

This one goes out to all of my friends, family, and the Lord for supporting me through this long and arduous journey. Special shout out goes to Myron as he couldn't make it to the defence because of a turn of events.

It's on.

After this weekend, I have to say that it's good to be a ravenous carnivore. I cooked a total of three roasts on the weekend. It all started on Saturday when my mom asked me to prepare a leg of lamb for dinner. So, I seasoned the hunk of meat, injected it with a crapload of garlic, and 100 minutes later, we had a lovely oven roast lamb.

The next day at church, I was telling Sarah about the roast lamb that I made, and she immediately suggested that we have roast venison for dinner that night, because she had one sitting in the freezer. This is when things snowballed. We were expecting six people for dinner, so the venison wasn't big enough to feed everyone, so I was asked to go pickup a roast from the grocery store.

So, I hit up the grocery store, and when I got to the meat section, I was unsure what cut of beef to get. We asked the butcher for a recommendation for a really good cut of meat, and she suggested the top sirloin cut. I picked a 1.3kg piece, and we were on our way. The roast didn't look too big until I opened it up, and removed the butcher string. This thing expanded into a massive piece of meat; it could easily feed 6-8 people.

Anyway, that afternoon I prepared both pieces of meat and got them seasoned. My goodness was the top sirloin tender though! I was poking holes in the meat with a knife, and the knife cut through it like butter. Later that evening, I discovered that instead of six guests for dinner, we were going to have eleven guests. Good thing I picked up extra groceries and a big hunk o' beef. When the extra dinner guests arrived, I introduced myself as the executive chef of the establishment.

It was interesting cooking roasts without a meat thermometer though. It's like cooking blind. But it worked out fairly well. I pulled the top sirloin out of the oven and checked it, and it was medium rare which was perfect. Unfortunately, other parts of our dinner wasn't finished yet, so we had to keep the meat warm. By the time we served dinner, the meat was medium to medium well. It was still super tender though. The venison surprised me too because it was quite tender, and it wasn't tough or gamey at all.

So, this was the menu for the evening:


I cooked from 3:30pm to 8:00pm that night, but I enjoy cooking so it's all good. So, I ended up making three roasts on the weekend. That's probably a new record.

Meat.... good. Grunt.

Near the end of 2006, I discovered that the Blue Man Group puts out some awesome music CDs. My first exposure to them was through those Intel Pentium commercials. I always thought that they just did funny comedies and such, but no, they're very musically talented as well. My favourite album for 2006 was Blue Man Group - The Complex. Anyway, I have found some other video clips of Blue Man Group doing some live performances, and they're great. I just love how they marry humour, rock and roll, and multimedia in their performances. Enjoy.