Today I had my last university lecture ever at the University of Waterloo. It's been a long haul, but I've had fun and met a lot of cool people along the way.
To celebrate, I've been coding pantsless in the graphics lab. While this has alarmed some people, I feel it's perfectly appropriate.
Much to my disappointment, however, the monkeys down in the real-time lab are all wearing pants. A disgrace I tell you, a disgrace!
This happened a while ago, actually, but I'll mention it here for the record. I officially accepted an offer to work at Google in New York when I graduate. Planning to live with dreamage and andukar, which should be pretty fun. And I'm totally looking forward to New York; I hear it's pretty damn awesome.
I appear to have developed a white board fetish. At Google I had a bunch in my office and I would fill them up with designs and steps for implementing them. And as I went along I would add little notes about how specific problems would be solved, how the changes would influence other areas of the code, etc.
Before the white boards, I didn't really make many notes at all when coding. Sometimes I'd write a little diagram in a notebook or sometimes I'd put some things in a text file, but it was pretty rare.
I think the biggest appeal of the whiteboards (besides the psychotropic smell of the markers, of course) to me is the "look and feel." Smoother than a blackboard, not as dirty, and easier to read. And they're way better than a (paper) notebook or text file, because they're staring you in the face all the time. No need to shuffle things around on your desk to find your notes, or open the text file, or figure out which window it's in.
In any case, this fetish has led me to conduct much of my recent work in compilers in the graphics lab, despite me not actually taking graphics this term. BTW, if anyone wants free Google pizza the graphics lab is a good place to be over the next week or so, as I have a bunch of Google pizza money to burn before the end of term...
It all started with a request from a_chatterbox to reunite Pooh with his long-lost buddy quikchange. And so it began.
Pooh's excited about the trip!
Aren't flights fun?
Thankfully, I had Pooh's good, kind company for this ordeal. I also read Orson Scott's Ender's Game, which was pretty damn awesome. Though it killed my Treo's batteries.
Drinky
After interviews, I met up with Saul and Jimbo for some drinky drinky. Somehow, these blokes have managed to find a hick Irish dance pub in Mountain View. It was somewhat alarming to me to discover that such a place exists.
Needless to say, much beer was had by all, and Jimbo even joined me for some prairie fire (though a proper prairie fire, like you'll get in Calgary, will have a full shot of Tabasco).
San Francisco
After a long sleep and some french toast at the creamery, I hit SF (with my trusty Peet's Coffee of course; they still remembered my order!)
Just basically did some sights (Fisherman's Wharf, Golden Gate Park, Union Square) and then met up with a friend for dinner in little Italy. A nice, restful day before another day of planes and airports.
The city from Fisherman's Wharf
All in all, it was a good trip. I got to quite like the bay area, and it seems I may not be back there for quite some time, so it was sort of a chance see the old haunts and say "good bye".
So it turns out my previous ipw2200 card was a dud. drheld put the sucker in his laptop and it was just as crappy there.
I got a new one today, and it's working fine. So no more ndiswrapper for me! Although I understand the bcm43xx people are making good progress; jdeboer seems to have it working on is iBook. It's a heroic effort, and I'm sure many, many people will thank them for it. I still don't want to use crappy hardware made by a crappy company that won't release specs, though...
(Says he who currently runs an nVidia desktop machine; at least in their case the hardware is generally good, just no specs... *sigh* In related news, I'm interviewing with them tomorrow, for the Linux driver team, so maybe I'll get a chance to bug them first-hand!)
I think I'm done with Via. My train back from Montréal last night was over 2 hours late. It arrived after the last busses and trains to Kitchener. They did at least put us in cabs, but we still ended up arriving back home over 2 hours late.
This kind of thing happens with any form of transportation, of course. But I think I've been on a grand total of 3 Via trains that were even remotely on time. So they're batting around 15% It's a shame, because I really want to like the train, but no amount of irrational emotional attachment can overcome this level of suckage.
So I finally broke down and got a cell phone. It's a treo 650, per drheld's suggestion. I was thinking crackberry for a while, but all the wacky Palm software you can get for the treo finally won me over, and the email apparently works just as well as the crackberry email. Of course, here data costs 3c/KiB, so I won't be using it. (Seriously, 3c/KiB?!? How the hell can phone companies get away with this crap?)
Anyway, if you want the number just email me.. not too sure how brilliant it would be to stick my phone number in such an easily Googlable place.
Montréal
mrwise and I are coming to lovely Montréal this weekend. I'd be down with seeing some Nitiots if anybody's interested...
Today's a snow day at Waterloo. So if you were planning to go classes, don't. They're cancelled.
mrwise was nice enough to alert me via Google Talk before I left the house. He came home and we went out for breakfast, and I'm now lying in bed with my laptop watching the snow blow outside. I also get to miss my super boring Thursday afternoon English tutorial. Yay! There's something so satisfying about eating a lazy breakfast and then spending the day in bed on a weekday...
The University of Waterloo is screwing me as usual; I have an exam on the very last day. At least this is the last time they'll be able to do it (assuming, of course, that I do ok on my exams). That doesn't mean I'm not bitter though; it seems every term I'm the only person in my group of friends who has an exam on the last day.
Discrimination
Since I'm also one of the few people I know around here who's left-handed, I suspect this may be a case of discrimination against left-handed folk. drheld and I also suspect there may be discrimination at a certain popular employer of Waterloo students, as we're the only ones around here who haven't received our offers yet.
So Google Talk is finally available within Gmail. If it hasn't been activated on your account already, it will be within the next few weeks.
I really love this. I used it at Google and it was super useful. It's the best chat interface (better even than Meebo IMO) I've seen in a long time, very well integrated with email, and most importantly for me, no stinkin' pop-ups when stuff disconnects! The best thing, though, is that your chats can now be indexed if you want. Then when you search in Gmail you'll get chat results as well. This is incredibly useful for me, because I often have people's phone numbers or other important information in chat history that is only searchable on the machine where I actually had the chat. So I have to look on my laptop, then my desktop, and I don't always find it.
For people who are freaked out by having their chats indexed, this is a completely optional feature. But for me, it's totally worth it. It works no matter what client you use for Google Talk (the Google Windows client, Gaim, Gmail, whatever).
And anyone who has no clue what I'm talking about but would like to find out, feel free to hit me up for Gmail invites at pcolijn gmail com.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
