Life

So, I have an announcement that most will probably find pretty suprising. As avid readers of this blog know, I went to Vegas last weekend with my roommates mag and drheld.

While there, drheld and I decided we didn't want to keep living in secrecy. He and I have been involved for a while now, and we decided to formalise our relationship: we're married! Unfortunately it was a spur-of-the-moment decision; had it been better planned, we surely would have invited our many close friends and relatives.

April 05, 2005 (link)

Correction

drheld and I are not married. The post was made on April Fool's day, admittedly a little late in the day (so possibly April 2nd in some time zones).

It was a joke, but was not intended to insult anyone or belittle anything. Indeed I am very supportive of same-sex marriages, and am of the opinion that the recent advances in Canada making same-sex marriages possible in most of the country are great.

So sorry Ankh, we fooled you!

April 11, 2005 (link)

Work

Still busy. But my project has become really popular inside Google, which is always a nice problem. I think I will be able to finish up what I need to before leaving, but it'll be tight.

And yes, I am thinking about coming back for another term; it's fun, and there's so much interesting stuff going on at Google, you can learn so much so quickly.

Life

My friend Thap was in town last weekend, and we hung out in San Francisco. By complete coincidence, we ran into my 3 other roommates:

I live and travel with a bunch of monkeys

The week before, my roommates and I were in Vegas. It was interesting. I don't think I'd want to go back any time soon; I got my fill. But it was interesting to see a city in which complete and utter debauchery is encouraged so heavily. People seemed, for the most part, very happy. They were eating all they wanted, drinking all they wanted, smoking all they wanted, etc. It was kind of liberating and kind of disturbing all at once (I mean, is that what people really are like when they let go?)

Entrance to the Vegas monorail

I came out with a net profit of $30, won at black jack; not quite as good as drheld, but better than mag, who lost some money.

Pictures

I finally got off my lazy ass and posted all my pictures for this term on my gallery. Enjoy!

April 15, 2005 (link)

Friday

April 17, 2005 (link)

Regularly Scheduled Maintenance

Would somebody please tell me WTF is up with this? More and more sites seem to be going down every day for a few hours for "regularly scheduled maintenance." Washington Mutual does this, QUEST does it, and so does the Canadian Government.

Did somebody forget to mention to these people that the whole point of having a web service is that you can use it whenever you want? I don't need a web app to get crappy service and annoying hours from my bank; they've been doing that offline for centuries, and the whole point of web access is to get around it. Sigh.

April 26, 2005 (link)

Geeks

Ah, geeks. There's a bit of background required to fully appreciate this story:

Mag and drheld left today to head back to Waterloo, and a new roommate arrived, from Switzerland. This in itself was a little funny, because I didn't even know this new guy was showing up, and I stepped out of the bathroom this morning and there he was. (un)Fortunately, I wasn't naked.

In any case, mag and drheld, being the bastards they are, took all the wireless routers (they have no less than three between them!) so iMac and I were in a bit of a bind for connectivity for the rest of the week.

Lo and behold, Patrick, the new roommate, bought a wireless router today. Yay! Except by the time I got home everybody was asleep (as usual). So first I try DHCP. Nothing. Hmm, crappy, maybe he turned on WEP and I'll need to ask for the key. Well, just in case, I'll try a random 192.168.0.x IP and a default gateway of 192.168.0.1. Bingo! Ah, geeks.

Work

Too much stuff to do, not enough time, same old, same old. I'm gonna miss the free food. Sigh.

Life

Craptacular Waterloo, here I come! Living with mrwise again next term, which should be fun. I enjoy living with him, in a flatulent sort of way. I managed to remote-rent us some rooms near the Brick Brewery, which is of course a good place to be. I've never actually seen these rooms, except in some ghetto photos the current tenants emailed me, but hey, what can you do when you're on the other side of the continent, your roommate is on the other side of the earth, and you need to rent you soom rooms?

Toys

To celebrate my taking grazaphics, I got me a nice, sweet, GeForce 6800GT video card with 256MB. It came in the most rediculously over-marketed 'X'-shaped box (and it's not even an X-box! what the hell?) It should be pretty damn fast though. I still haven't played Half-Life 2, so I'll need to do that.

I also bought a new laptop. The battery in my poor old iBook got to the point where it wouldn't even last an hour, and I didn't feel like spending $300 for a new battery for a laptop I wouldn't be using much longer. So yay, toys! Now watch as I never listen to profs again, instead reading Slashdot, PlaNit and checking email.

April 29, 2005 (link)

JIT delivery

So tuition is due today. Boo. I was anticipating some difficulty paying on time, since all my money is currently of the American variety, and I left my Canadian bank accounts a little ahem tapped, after paying for my visa, some rent down here, and blowing a bunch on Christmas.

But, I submitted my tax return about 2 weeks ago online. And today it was deposited into my Canadian account. Yay! Now I can blow it all on tuition. Boo! Although I do enjoy the irony in using the tax refund that is due largely to my tuition deductions to pay for tuition. In some places where the government isn't braindead, they just pay for your education and cut out the middle man. I guess we're too stupid for that in Canada.

Now if Quest would stop sucking and actually be up for once, I could figure out how much I need to pay...

April 30, 2005 (link)

Last day

So today was my last day at Google. It involved remarkably little work. First there was a team meeting where two folks who were on vacation last week gave out goodies from their trips. Then I had a massage, ate a nice free Google lunch, and we went to see Hitchhiker's Guide in the afternoon. Sure worked hard today :)

Moving

Ah, the 4-month tradition of any Waterloo co-op. And here I am procrastinating packing up all my crap by posting to my blog. I guess I'd better get to it.. sigh.

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