The Ultimate Showdown

So this is it - the final make-or-break stretch of my most demanding term at the University of Waterloo. Over the next 28 days, I will either successfully complete Real-Time and Graphics concurrently or consign myself to a pseudorandom location within the Bermuda Triangle of exhaustion, insanity, and despair trying. In typical fashion, I've done some preliminary number crunching: assuming roughly 8 hours of productive time per day - including weekends! - I have 224 hours in which to complete four Theory of Computation assignments, an essay about Church's approach to the Entscheidungsproblem, a raytracer, two more Real-Time train control milestones, one last midterm...and both my Real-Time and Graphics projects. I believe that this feat is tractable, albeit barely so - but time will be the judge of how well my wetware handles NP-complete scheduling problems!

The clock is ticking.

Waterloo Sunset

Work Term Reports - why?
The utter pointlessness is
Rather annoying.

(Decided I'd, er, borrow a motif from vasavage.) Spring is here in Waterloo - the sound of construction in the air, the cranes in full bloom! At least the ensuing fracas has contributed the above sign, redolent of the kind of neon-coloured cartoon-character Engrish prevalent in Japan, to our collective student consciousness. I've snapped a couple of pics of my room, as well as a few around campus; they're up in my nascent Waterloo album. As for me, I'm scrambling to get this work term report done so I can get on with life - for high-course-workload values of life, that is.

Panic! At the 401

After an epic journey down the 401 involving 5-6 coffee cups worth of caffeine, 2 hospitals, 12 hours (7 or so of which were spent either in said hospitals or in an ambulance headed thereto), and 3 carpopedal spasms (these resulting from panic attacks, which in turn were most likely induced by the aforementioned dose of caffeine), I finally made it back up to Waterloo in one piece. I'm most definitely avoiding caffeinated beverages from now on...

On a more positive note, I'll be living here for the next four months. (That said, my decision to take the infamous Real-Time and Graphics project courses concurrently may very well minimize the time I get to spend in my new digs!) I've got a decent room setup which will only get better with a few key investments in hardware - pics to follow.

I'll post some kind of winter term retrospective in the near future; for now, however, I'm off to tackle some nagging errands.

Meta-Work

The birds are singing, the sun is bright, the days are getting ever-longer - and I have to write another work term report. Ugh. Fortunately, a quick Google search brought up this. It's not the cleanest bit of LaTeX code, but it gets the job done! (Yes, I know I could use Word. I'll consider it next time I want to spend 90% of my time format-tweaking to obtain a layout that I can't easily reuse and share.)\

Also: the same search unearthed this (unfortunately nascent) effort to create a public repository of work report templates! Hooray for open source.

The Twitter Olympics

The Waterloo Regional Police Service has recently joined the ranks in using Twitter to broadcast updates, incident reports, and other information - 37 followers and counting. Now if only the rest of our public services could follow suit...

@~

I'm at home for the weekend, basking in the almost imperceptibly warmer Oakville-Toronto weather before booking it up to Waterloo. Pleasant drive down here, if uneventful - absolutely magnificent sunset, French-edition CBC Radio discussions on the caisse populaire and our troubled economic times, slices of Bowie, and some much-needed mid-term reflections.

Also: it's Pi Day! Unfortunately, the Math Department decided to give the requisite pie out yesterday, so it looks like I'll miss out on that.

Food, Water, Air, ...

Okay, so I haven't posted in a week - five days of parkour/conditioning/rock-climbing does that to you. So sue me. (Then watch as I nimbly elude your litigious minions.)

It's mid-March. There's nothing special about mid-March per se; it's just close enough to the Spring 2009 term to finally kick off the housing search. If anyone cares, I'm looking for something: close to Uptown Waterloo, at most $350/month, non-smoking, decent kitchen, with broadband and at least passably sociable roommates. I'd prefer laundry and relatively secure bike storage, but I'll take what I can get. Now to set up a properly-weighted LP and crunch the available housing data...

I've tried a number of approaches in the student housing market. Cluster-bombing Craigslist, Kijiji, and Facebook Marketplace allowed me to sublet out my previous digs with relative ease. On the other side, I've always had decent success sifting through Off-Campus Housing. I tried finditoffcampus; the interface is zippy, the idea is good, but there's still a couple of missing pieces. The selection is somewhat limited (only 220 listings!) You can search for housing near the universities/colleges, but you can't search by proximity to, say, Uptown or Waterloo Park. The Advanced Search form fails to fill in sensible defaults - try filling in just the upper limit for rent, and you get this. These are mostly minor annoyances, though, and it could easily cure me of my board-sifting ways with just a touch more work.