King  Gary 

Today was BarCampWaterloo. It’s the first one, ever, in Waterloo, and so I was excited to go, especially since I’ve gone to a few TorCamps in Toronto, and had a blast. This event was no different, and it was at least a great first meeting to get to know all these new people, and to finally meet people that I’ve only talked to online, such as Shawn Allison, Chris Erbach, Michael Fagan , Mitch Hargreaves, and Jesse Rodgers.

Later on in the night, I watched the movie Hard Candy with some guys in my residence building, and yes, I was scarred for life. Thanks Shawn!

And then late, late at night, we went through two whole apartment buildings, room by room, to find some friends of mine (there are name tags on the doors so you know who lives there.) It took a while, but we eventually found them. We then came back home, and now I’m typing this at 5 am. G’nite!

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Our kitchen counter, before dishwashing:

And the counter, after dishwashing:

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It’s that time of year! 4 stream co-op students at the University of Waterloo are applying for jobs and preparing for interviews that will take place in October. I’ve applied to some of the ‘typical’ jobs found in the JobMine database, of course, but I want to look outside of the jobs provided by companies through the university in order to find a job that is better suited for me.

So, if anyone knows of a company that is looking to fill the position of some sort of junior web developer, then please let me know and we can talk!

Thanks!

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JPMorgan has announced the launch of ‘AlgoAlert’, which is ‘an instant messaging service that provides unique charts as well as real-time updates of algorithmic trading performance and trading conditions’. It’s interesting because it uses different IM platforms such as BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL® service’s messaging system, AOL’s AIM service, and the Google Talk ™ instant messaging service, which, as Google notes, was not a use that they had imagined for their Google Talk software, but that it’s nice to see it being used for things outside of their scope of imagination.

What’s most interesting to me is that, the head of product development in ECS, the team behind the AlgoAlert, is Carl Carrie, the person who I met while I was in Europe this past summer. Cool stuff!

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I’ve been a bit sick the last few days, so I’ve been sleeping a lot during the day (although I suppose that’s not that different from my usual routine.) So that has sucked a lot of fun out of the past few days.

On the flip side, I managed to pass the ELPE, which is an exam to test who can write proper English and who can’t. I was surprised to find out that about 30-40% of students in the Faculty of Mathematics had failed this - something which I was not that much expecting, but now I suppose I’m more happy that I passed it.

I also bumped into two high school friends today, Jiasen (living off-campus) and Joanne (living at UWP). We talked for a few minutes, and then we went to visit Simon, another high school friend, who lived at Conrad Grebel. We stayed for a bit, and watched him play Heroes of Might & Magic and his roommate play Starcraft, and then we went to visit Jackson, yet another high school friend, who lived at Renison. So in the end, I saw four high school friends that I hadn’t seen yet during my stay here at Waterloo, and the five of us all live in separate residences, as well!

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Day 9

• We went shopping for groceries today.
• It wasn’t really an eventful day, but it was tiring, so I won’t post much else here.

Day 10

• I timed myself to see how long it takes me to walk from my residence to my main building on campus (the math building). It takes 6 minutes, at a fairly quicker-than-average speed. It takes David 15 minutes, at a fast speed. 6 minutes seems like very little when I compare it, but it still feels like a long time when I walk it. I’d have to burn through 2 songs on my iPod before I reached one end!
• My 512 MB stick of RAM just arrived today. This is the first time I’ve ever had at least 1 GB of RAM in a computer before; yeah, I lag behind the world a bit.
• The Bomber finally opened again today! (a club)

Day 11

• Graal (a game that I DON’T play but some of my friends did before) is a fairly small community, especially compared to other games like, say, CS:S, WoW, etc. and so it gets weird and funny when you meet someone else that plays Graal too. My roommate plays Graal, I just found out a few minutes ago (he showed me a screenshot from Graal and I’m like ‘WTF’). And he had heard of Maloria, too, which was funny, because then I go ‘I’m the webmaster of Maloria!’. Fun stuff.

Our floor messing with our floor don’s door:

And finally, a video showing how this was done.

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I just found out right now, from my mom, that my grandfather had passed away yesterday. I’ll be going back home to Toronto from Waterloo for the funeral service, which will be on Friday…

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Here’s my class schedule, for those who keep on asking (and for those wondering why I’m not picking up my phone when you call me ).

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Today’s a slow day because it’s the first day of school, and yet most people have few classes (especially compared to high school.) So I’ll post some of the pictures that we took (and click on the pictures to see the entire album - they are in reverse chronological order).

I also missed my first class today, even with 3 alarm clocks, and even when the class started at 9:30 am! Thank God it was only English, AND we had a substitute teacher today, too, so I just picked up the handout that I missed when class ended. Afterwards, I had 3 math classes scattered throughout the day. It is definitely NOT fun… and so, I slept a bit in class. When I awake, though, not much was missed, so I think I’m still able to pass, with enough studying…!

Later on, at 7 pm, all of us Mathies wrote our ‘Math Readiness Test’, which is a test for ourselves to see just how well we stack up against other students and against what we should know by now. I doubt I remember much from high school, and so I’m not looking forward to seeing my mark - at least you can’t fail it, because if you DO get below 50%, then they simply give you an ‘invitation’ to math tutoring lessons.

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Today was the day where I slept in, in order to regain the energy that I lost from sleeping less and less during this past week. I slept in until 2 pm, and I woke up with a pretty sore headache from, well, sleeping in.

All that I can remember from today (that is related to school, anyways) is that there was a floor meeting at 9 pm on my floor, but from what I understand (since I wasn’t there myself; I was basically in my room talking with a few other friends for a few hours, just keeping up to date on some things…), a lot of people did not show up because they were at an EngSoc meeting (’EngSoc’ is ‘Engineering Society’.) I missed my MathSoc meeting, which was at ~11 am; my roommate went, though, and said that there weren’t too many people there. Although, after looking at the photos taken from there, I’m thinking that I should’ve gone; I blame all the late night partying for stopping me from going, though!

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