The past week has gone by without much of anything interesting happening. I have been keeping a close tab on the World Junior Curling championships in Jeonju Korea. Go Team Canada!! The official webpage for the championship hasn’t been that great and I seemed to have better luck with live results at another webpage. I sure hope they are having fun on the other side of the world.
In school news, I have a CS306 assignment due on Monday. That brings up another interesting fact; I raised the mark of my midterm by 10% by argueing with the prof about bits and bytes. . . He had given me 0 marks out of 10 on a question about the data rate of a T1 line. He told us about how there are 24 – 8 bit characters with 1 additional bit for framing. I did the calculation by using bytes not bits. I even made sure to point out that 8 bits = 1 byte. My final answer was 193KBps. So when I get it back with a zero I wasn’t sure what I did wrong. He even wrote a line “I don’t follow”. Needless to say, I argued this and explained it to him. In the end I got 8/10 , since he said my units were wrong. Don’t ask me how it was wrong since he didn’t specify he wanted it in bits. So since the test was out of 75, the arguement paid off.
The break was good while it lasted. Having returned to school, I have had to get back to studying. The midterms this week are CS340, and Econ202. Both of which require a great deal of memorization and understanding. Econ202 shouldn’t be too dificult but for some reason this semester I am finding it to be more difficult. I think this might have to do with the prof. Dar seems to write incredible amounts of notes and this seems to overcomplicate rather simple ideas. I prefer that simple ideas have simple explanations. Oh well what can I do.
In other news, Ben is back from college in Alberta now. Arthur is having a birthday upcoming, and I will attempt to make it to the Owl on Friday night. . although I work till 9 and then again the next morning at 8. This seems like plenty of time but I shall see.
So far, with only 4 days down on the break, I’ve been having a good time. It feels good not having to worry about finishing anything or having to do anything. That of course shouldn’t be the case but I’ve been lazy. I’ve actually been busy so far working on Friday, Sunday, and now Tuesday. This has kept me busy for the most part. I’ve also been enjoying watching some movies and generally just killing time. The Olympics have kept me interested.
A good movie for everyone to check out is Waiting. It is a comedy that is based in a restaraunt called Shenanigans. I think that this has to be a good representation of what working in a restaraunt must be like. I found myself laughing quite a bit throughout, especially scenes with Dane Cook. That guy is hilarious. You can get it from Amazon with the following link, Waiting DVD as well as check out the details on imdb
There is something about Arctic air that I just don’t like. . . if you can’t figure out what that could be then you have never lived through a Saskatchewan winter. I thought that this would be the year; a year without any frigid cold Arctic air coming down and freezing all of us. We got all the way into February and the worst we had seen was only -20. We had the warmest January on record! Now this. Today I think the high was around -30 or so, but then you have the wind. The wind chill was probably around -46 all day. Now the night, I can only imagine the horrors it will bring. The forecast now says -36 with a windchill of -50. There is an end in sight to all this mayhem. The long range forecast is calling for sunny days ahead with a high on Monday back up to -5. In the meantime, I better go back and make sure my car is plugged in.
Time has come for midterms. Up first is a midterm for CS290AF, the java class. I am not sure what to expect for the midterm. So far the quizes have been tricky which I believe to be a ploy to lower the class average to a respectable level. I sure hope the midterm isn’t quick so tricky but I’m going to make sure to keep a sharp eye out for any tricks. After this midterm on Friday, I have another Chinese 100 quiz. I did not bad on the first quiz but it wasn’t 100%. I am going to have to try harder this time to strive for perfection. I hope that this will be the class to really boost my average up. After this, I have a week off for school. Yay to Spring Break! Then I come back from the break and have a CS340 midterm and then an Econ202 midterm. I am not going to be happy for both of these at all. I guess I should probably do a little bit of studying during the break but I doubt I will get anything done. Since I never seem to actually study for these things beforehand.
I have finally finished all my job interviews for my coop job for the summer. I think I should be able to find a nice job that will allow me to have plenty of money. I’ll have to try to balance it out so that I am saving a portion of my earnings so that way when I go back to school I will still have a lot of money around.
Back to the job interviews. The interviews weren’t very stressful at all for me. I remained relaxed and confident throughout. I think that this has to do with my prior experience for past job interviews. Some of the jobs sounded really interesting and there were some other jobs that were only slightly interesting. I only applied for jobs that I would be interested in working at this semester. This helped me since I knew the jobs that I would be doing and the material in their fields. This game me a knowledge boost for the interviews and I was able to better express myself. I will find out next week how I am ranked at the jobs and then I will go from there. If I am ranked number 1 by more than one job I will get to decide where I work. If only 1 then thats where I will be, and if no rankings . . . I better be looking for more employment elsewhere.
I just got the newest issue of the official Xbox Magazine. Inside this issue is a full beta for Final Fantasy XI. It took me a couple hours to install, setup, and patch but it looks interesting so far. I’m sure I will play it a little bit for the 2 months that the beta is free. After that though, I doubt I will pay monthy for it. I have never played a MMORPG before so I still don’t really know what I am suppose to be doing or where to go. . I guess I’m just a big noob.
I don’t eat at McDonald’s very often but when I do I try to order the McDeal of the day. The trouble is. . I’m afraid I’ll go and it will be the Fillet-o-fish mcdeal. This scares me from going to McDonald’s any days between Thursday and Saturday. Since I know that is when the fish is out. I’ve decided to just list the McDeal’s that way everyone is able to see and make a smart decision before they head out.
Mon: Big Extra
Tues: Big Mac
Wed: Mcchicken
Thurs: 2 Cheeseburgers
Fri: Fillet o fish
Sat: Bacon Double Cheesburger
Sun: Quarter Pounder
Finally! I have been waiting for over a month now for my Xbox Training prize. I ordered Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark Zero. It seems like they have been on backorder or something so I had to wait, and wait. Well I just checked today again, and the status now saying In-Process. It looks like I will be getting these games sometime in January!! Good times are ahead indeed. In other shipping news, I finally received two of my textbooks in the mail today. It feels great to buy textbooks less than half of what the bookstore is charging. Talk about a rip off. My goal is to boycott them as much as possible since I don’t like their business practises of buying textbooks back off students for super cheap and then reselling them for over double. Especially when they probably sold the original textbooks to begin with. For them its a lot of profit IMO.
I am a big fan of Hexic for the Xbox360. Although my scores aren’t spectacular or anything I really like spending time playing trying to get a good score. While browsing the internet, I stumbled upon a picture posted by one of the people at the top of the leaderboard. Here . . for anyone who has played Hexic before you will know how difficult it is to make 1 black pearl but look at that! Very nice indeed.
as well as check out the details on