On a completely unrelated note, I see that lots of lots of people from the NITI days are working / going to be working in London, Ontario.  Ahhh, home.  I’ll actually be visiting London in a few weeks.  We should all have a NITI reunion.

Anyways, I always say that I’ll update this blog more often, but maybe this time I actually will since now I have my life back.  I’ll try with once a week and go from there.  Peace.

First off, I hate snow. I really have no tolerance for snow or cold. For everyone who thinks it’s pretty, or it’s fun, shut up, no it’s not. One of the things that attracted me to Vancouver was this wonderful idea of “Winter is a place, not a time”. If you like snow, great, go to Whistler or Grouse. If you don’t like it, stay downtown and enjoy the balmy 10^o weather.

Needless to say, this week has been something else weather wise. The biggest issue though isn’t the snow, but rather the city’s entire inability to deal with it. The city has a handful of sand trucks which are barely able to cope with keeping just the arterial roads clean. Of course, this means that that roads are terrible to drive on. Busses experience huge delays and often get stuck when they pull over to let people on/off. Today I waited 30 minutes for a 99 bus (a major route which is supposed to arrive every 4 minutes). Throw in some SUV drivers who think that because they have all wheel drive that snow is not a problem, and problems start happening.

Today, most of UBC was sent home early amidst warnings of another snow fall and bad road conditions. How do Vancouverites deal with the snow? They run home before it comes and avoid it. Granted, if the city was equipped to appropriately clean the roads, this would not happen.

Rain is scheduled for tomorrow, which when combined with snow and cold temperatures should yield some nice patches of black ice. Wonderful to know that there are no salt trucks to handle that. Maybe I’ll work from home tomorrow and avoid the drudgery.

Anyways, besides that, life continues. The SIGGRAPH submission deadline is on January 23. Until then, I’m coding like a maniac!

With respect to how the race went, I wasn’t first, but I wasn’t last. Official times will be posted on Saturday, so I can see then how I faired against everyone else, but I feel I was in the upper quartile. I had this great strategy before I started the race which was to just set my pace to what I normally do and keep it for the duration of the run. Psh, that went out the window almost immediately. In the first kilometer, people were passing me by the bucketload, so I kicked it up a notch to keep up. Of course, into the second kilometer, I started passing a lot of these people because they’d just sort of sprinted out of the starting line and didn’t quite realize that you can’t sprint for 5 km. Of course, since I was dumb and sprinted a little also to keep up with them, I was starting to get that fuzzy and warm burning leg feeling by the third kilometer or so. Hills didn’t help. Anyways, considering it was my first race in a long time, I think I did not do so badly (though Saturday will be judgement day). At the very least, it was a learning experience.

On a completely unrelated subject, I’m thinking of canning my catch-all e-mail address for kenrose.org. Right now, there’s a catch-all which allows me to be cool and snazzy and tell people things like:

“Just e-mail anything you want @kenrose.org and I’ll get it.”

Another benefit is being able to never have to give a real e-mail address to various businesses. Rogers wants to know my e-mail address? Sure, just e-mail rogers@kenrose.org. Amazon wants my e-mail address? Try amazon@kenrose.org. If I start getting spam to any one of those addresses, I know exactly who it’s coming from (well, except for rogers and amazon since I just posted those two, but whatever).

Unfortunately, spammers can also send me stuff to the catch-all. This poses two problems. Problem one is that I get lots of spam to addresses like xzqadsf@kenrose.org. Problem two is that spammers use addresses like the previous in the From field, so I also get a bajillion bounce messages from mail servers around the world when the spam is unsuccesfully delivered.

So what should I do? Nuke the catch-all and manually create new addresses when I reference them in the real world (e.g., fido@kenrose.org will probably be created soon if I get a Fido phone)? Or should I keep the catch-all and just try to deal with the incredible amount of spam that’s coming in (I get about 50 pieces per day).

Finally, on the topic of work, it’s 02h43 and I got home not that long ago. Right after the race, I went back to the lab and got back to coding. The current project that I’m working on is awesome, but in true research fashion, is really hard (though it’s unknown if it’s NP-hard, which is a huge bother because then I can’t even prove it’s hard!). In 6 hours, I have to be up again and get back and keep on coding. Deadlines are looming.

Yep, that’s a calculator on it. I first got the watch for my 13th birthday while I was in Grade 8. The year was 1994. After 12 faithful years of service, she finally had enough. I remember reading the manual when I first got the watch so long ago and seeing that the battery was scheduled to last 5 years. 5 years came and went, then 10 years, and finally, as we closed in on 12, she gave in.

She was a good companion. I remember using the calculator a lot during high school and even for an exam or two during my undergrad. Nothing really says “Geeky math major” like a calculator watch.

I am saying that she died, but really, I think that if I replace the battery, she’d come back to life. Still though, I think it is time for a new watch. My Casio has served me very well and I cherish my time with it, but I must move on. The buttons are a little shoddy, the division key is in this half mode of always pressed and the button to change the time works when it feels like it. So now the question is should I be a big geek and just go out and buy the same watch again or should I go for something fancier? I’ve had my heart set on a Rolex for some time, but that’s not going to happen on the stipend of a grad student.

I’ve thought a bit about whether I should get another digital watch. If I do, then there’s the question of whether I want a databank watch. I used to really crave these, but the provided functions are more adequately provided by my cell phone. If anyone has any suggestions on a good watch to buy and whether I should buy another digital watch or step up the class level a bit and buy an analog, I’d love to hear about it.

What I do not like is the Go button on the location bar. In my opinion, this is a blatant waste of screen real estate. The “normal” preferences don’t provide a way to remove the Go button either. So, after a bit of Googling, here’s the solution, which I’m gratuitously reposting to make it easier for people to find.

1. Type about:config in the location bar.
2. Find the key browser.urlbar.hideGoButton and set it to true.
3. Ta da!

Hi, I’m . I’m a hot girl wanting some Internet fun. Please add me so we can chat and do other stuff.

Ummm, OK! I’ll get right on that. Nothing like talking to some random bot that’s probably a phishing scheme. Today though, I got a message of a different tone:

Hello, i have a problem with landlord, i owe him the rent payment for few months and i cant fix it, so im looking for a person who understand my problem and agree to donate me money, maybe you can help?

This was from 360882871. Nice to see that spammers are taking a different approach. Instead of pushing sexual innuendo, they’re appealing to the empathetic hearts of individuals once caught in the forray of coming up short on their rent payments. Good show ol’ chaps.

Especially interesting is the following comment from the article:

“The attendant actually recognized out loud that he wasn’t a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to ask him to leave,” Faguy said.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this statement. What if he were a Muslim? Would they not have been sorry then? Islamophobia has already reached such epic proportions that being visibly Muslim on a plane arouses suspicions of terrorist activity. G-d forbid you actually pray and are then kicked off without so much as an apology.

There was some confusion in the situation since the man didn’t speak English or French (given his Chasidic nature, I would guess that the man spoke Hebrew and/or Yiddish). Nevertheless, I am hard pressed to believe that on a flight destined for New York, the crew had never before encountered a Chasidic man praying (or perhaps they had just never noticed). Prayer is a very personal time for an individual and it should not be interrupted due to the ignorance of cabin crew. One more reason not to fly Air Canada.

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