Surprised when I see the news of "Microsoft to Buy Google?". That is just wrong, and I hope Google won't take the offer, since it's profitting and excellent performance (and possibly the largest IPO in history later when it releases it, with the possibility of IPO Online, so everybody can get a chance at Google stock rather than going through usual big IPO distributor companies)

Obtained PMATH midterm, 370 midterm, and 341 A3 back today. Not too bad (pretty good actually) on both midterms (10/16 on FLOPs question, I'm happy).
But very bitter about 341 A3 -> they deducted marks for marking something I crossed out as garbage (and wrong indeed)? But that's after midterm for sure.

Honestly speaking, I think I can say my birthday (TODAY) will probably be the last break until first week of December. From now on, it's hell on deeper leve,
no break, filled with assignments from every course (yes, PACS will have a 15% assignment too). How exciting will this be? WE HAD ENOUGH~

Happy Birthday to myself, Happy Halloween to everybody else!

Seems like everyone's busy blogging daily, I can only say I'll try since honestly it's not that top priority (apologize to my "audience"). Today is good, nothing immediate to worry about though our group did stay up to 5 a.m. to work on A2 of OS (not too productive though).
By the way, I watched Friends and ER and they're both great. I got humor out of Friends, and a full-of-surprise ER episode, so all is good.

Now, since it's officially 10/31, it's Halloween AND my 23 birthday. Want to say thank you to those who wished me happy b-day's, I'll try. It's just annoying that there's nothing to celebrate about, but all the awful study and assignments coming up. Right now, I only wish school term is done so I can start my work term in Toronto.
Shall I look forward to pick-up 3 midterms tomorrow? I so not want to know..........

One day after 370 midterm still bitter about it (do not mention FLOPs ever!!!). Discussed with prof a bit, and he's in disbelief that I didn't try the practice questions and find the FLOP question easy, stupid me @@
First basketball game I get to watch tonight, so far Raptors is winning a bit. Also catched Enterprise (storyline is more interesting now, finding the Xindi) and Jake 2.0 (stupid funny). Then hopefully I'll start either studying or OS, because the need is there.
Stayed up till 3 am to do one PMATH assignment, it's annoying that it was very very long and woth about 1% of final. Hint to whomever's relevant: Finding CNF and use DPP resolution is a SLOW process

Smallnote: Anybody noticed the ad disappearing on the top? Yeah, because I've successfully transfered my blog from BLOGGER to my own domain

Finally, the day of ranking form, and the final ranking is out -- I still got the offer, and I'm gonna take it. Good news to lead off the day of midterm

Surprise surprise, the day ended on a bad note, stupid 370 midterm, brutal. In addition, there's PMATH assignment due tomorrow, it was long and torture.
What is wrong with Professors, do they enjoy other people's pain and suffering?

Job Job Job

This is to my surprise, but I've got an offer from Unisen Inc. for programmer/analyst. Probably will working primarily on Oracle and some PowerBuilder.
I'm happy since I haven't seen an offer in a long time, but worrying at the same time about living and commuting. This division of Unisen is located on 29th floor of First Canadian Place, very cool (Maggie worked there for BMO)
This weekend was a total waste (even though we get one extra hour of sleep by daylight saving time change), all I did was watching entertainment shows from Taiwan (catched up on last Saturday, Sunday and this Saturday's shows ~ 10 hours in total). Guess I should start studying 370 and worry about PMATH assignment.

By the way, I'm happy that I got all my hard drives sorted out (it's not easy to manage 700GB of HDs), so things are where they should be. And I'm still downloading more ...

Wow, pretty Linux

I've typing from the newly installed SuSE Linux 9 on my dual-cpu server (5 CDs)
The desktop is pretty, to my surprise (all the icons are cute, somewhat XP like, big floating colorful icons),
and I can see all my windows shares by default. (Trying to figure out how to share IN Linux now)
Sigh, 3 midterms finished (2 within last 24 hours), 341 turned out to be short of time, but can't care anymore, period.
Tonight I definitely need a LONG sleep to make up for previous days.
Then it's back to study for 370, but the good news is that it isn't too bad, so I can catch up with tv episodes, and world series, yeah!

sidenote: I walked from Columbia Ice Field to Maggie's place ><

Haven't done any blogging since Thanksgiving, I guess working on assignments and studying for midterms are my excuses (it's not like anybody reads my blog anyway; if you do, give me a poke so I know). (I got poked by Rachelle, surprise surprise!!)
Finished PACS midterm tonight (Peace & Conflict Resolution), 2 more midterms left though this week. Sigh....... ><
370 wasn't hard, but it certainly takes LONG time to finish.

It's funny that I came across a quote when I studied PACS, I think it's funny and "deep"
When we think we are using language, language is using us. ............................
language is like a loaded gun: It can be fired intentionally, but it can wound or kill just as surely when fired accidentally.
I guess that's somewhat true, where in movies people get killed if they say the wrong thing :)

After the midterm, I'll try to move my BLOGs to my own domain (www.jerryhung.com) and see how that works out.
By the way, Kill Bill is quite ... disturbing after all. Images of the movie still show up from time to time and costs me time to ignore that
Be aware, those who do not have strong heart or have better things to do, do not watch it unless you really know why and want to!!

Finally, Thanksgiving

It's 2:30 am on Sunday. Long weekend is half-done, but I enjoyed it. It's something that we Mathie haven't experienced in a long time (and after this, midterms are coming up).
Friday and this week was basically hell. Had to do OS, Algorithms which are hard, and may still end up probably bad. Our group discovered that OS assignment was due at noon instead of 5:00pm as we originally thought. OOPS...Algorithm turned out to be alright, though divide-and-conqur certainly takes long to solve (i.e. I'm not intelligent? :) Anyway, planning to play basketball on Sunday. Took tours of Future Shop, Best Buy, Joggers (shoe outlet), and that's about it for my back-to-Mississauga tour. Finally able to sleep and wake up without any urgency or pressure, missed that a lot! By the way, more NOs from ACCESS. However, interestingly enough, 1 YES from YAM Technology, from Taiwan. WOW~ 3 candidates, guess I have 33% chance. Wish me luck!

Baseball Playoffs

Soon before I realize it. It's Wednesday night already (i.e. Enterprise + 2 more days left for 341/350 due date).
I visited TAs today (and basically that's all I did today), waited long and discussed long and realized couple things
1. Most TAs know nothing about Nachos (same as us), and some aren't really helpful
2. However, some TAs do know their stuff even though not knowing Nachos. And speaking Mandarin helps, ^^

Anyway, watched the NLCS (Florida Marlins vs. Chicago Cubs), it was very intense and heart-catching. Marlins beated Cubs 9-8 in 11th inning.
More baseball games tonight (both NLCS Game 2 and ALCS Game 1). It's only in the Playoff series that I find baseball interesting and worth watching!

OS Night

It's 3 am on Tuesday morning and we were doing OS and stopped. Sigh >< cannot get the testing program to work (it won't even print out debugging lines). So much for learn-Nachos-by-ourselves OS course!!
Visited the Tzu-Chi sale today, it was surprised to see that the sale isn't as popular as I thought it'd be, I guess those foods (pineapple cakes, etc.) aren't too appealing to non-Asians? At least the $2 bubble tea is a good deal.
Trying to modify the Blogger template so I can squeeze some links on the right side. And no class today, yeah! So I can sleep to whenever I want (except that I have to drive my brother to 8:30 classes). No, wait, I can ask him to drive to school himself, though doubtful~ he's lazy, same with almost everybody (except some people who like 8:30)

Tzu-Chi Youth Event

Participated in the UW Tzu-Chi help-baking activity this afterrnoon for the charity sales for the BC Fire.
It was interesting and fun, with a warm send of group feeling. part of belonging to something
About 10 of us (all Chinese) showed up and had fun (since most of us never baked before), but we're proud of our "products"
If you feel like, you can come to SLC to buy them (donation as well) and enjoy a taste of our skills (also bubble tea are for sale too)

Funny thing is though, among the group, we have majority of them from B.C. and more engineers > science&pre-op > mathies
This is not a very good representatino of the school populatino for sure (in stat. terms) -> Toronto rocks & Mathie are everywhere!!!

Stressful Weekend

It's 3:16am Sunday morning -> what are we doing? CS350 -> where are we? nowhere near even Q1. This does not look good, and clearly we're more focused on other stuff than OS (such as CS370, PMATH330, and CS341).
Turns out I can use "struct" inside a file instead of "class" outside the file, now I have to re-do my "brute-force" algorithm. Although by the definition of "brute force", I guess any lengthy-running algorithm is brute force (including mine).
Still in the process of trying to wake up my sleepy brother, he's a pig that don't get awaken by anything like phone, doorbell, and alarm. Sigh......

Interesting Readings

Picked up Imprint & MathNews to read today, found some useful information and interesting articles. Apparently I should be glad that I use CIBC, because all other bank ABMs are replaced by no-brand $$ ABMs (TD, Royal Bank)

Regarding graduate school (which I'm really interested recently), Imprint indicated that The Schulich School of Business at York University was the highest ranked Canadian business school by Forbes magazine. (6th among top 10 business schools outside U.S.)And there's an International Graduate School Fair at Toronto Sheraton Hotel on Oct 18, 2003, which I'm tempted to visit now.

Bought a web hosting on eBay ($9.99 U.S.) for my domain "jerryhung.com", anxious to see how that works out.
Finally, I discovered that Gov't of Canada is willing to pay for your Master of Social Work (MSW) if you're BSW --> they're desperate?

Real pain of 3B Term

Let's count: CS370, CS341, CS350, PMATH330 --> 4 Assignments due next week.

Now I begin to feel the pain of 3B term (toughest term of all). And I'll be joining Tzu-Chi activies during the weekend as well. Time seems so precious now that I started the assignments already (and gladly, almost finished CS370 & PMATH330).

But the leftovers (341&350) are the real killers.......According to Zima, we're killing ourselves if we don't start CS341 this week (I think that worked quite effectively because suddenly there are news posts in the newsgroup, compared to none before)