Geek on Two Wheels

It is now 2:30, and I am about a fifth of the way into a slideshow presentation that I must present tomorrow.

Damn you procrastination!

Laziness v.s. responsibility, academic success, and dignity.

One-on-three doesn’t seem entirely fair, but laziness can be a formidable beast.

Results at August.

Well, not quite gone just yet.

On Friday evening, I’m off to spend a weekend slightly closer to the North Pole for the now-annual Computing Science Student Society Executive Retreat. It will prove to be undoubtedly entertaining and productive, although I am slightly dissapointed that I’m going to be in Whistler for the first weekend that the bike park will be open, yet with no time to do any riding.

Amazingly enough, I’ve decided not to bringing my laptop to the trip, instead focusing on reading for my courses to occupy time on the bus. And, failing that, I will simply spend some more quality time on my borrowed Nintendo DS before it is sold off.

Yes, that’s right: this geek is going to be both computerless and wheelless for the weekend.

Tomorrow, it’s Monday, and that means it’s time to go back to school. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to it.

The decisions for my course picks were mostly made of desperation, and I’ve not heard many positive things about the specific offerings. Although I seem to have avoided any disastrous combinations of curriculum and instructor, the situation is still much less than ideal as I’ve not had a single course over the last two years, coops excluded, where I was happy about the final outcome. Satisfied, yes, but never joyful. As it stands now, the outlook for next semester remains similar.

All of this would not be too much of an issue if my schedule were not so absurd: five-days-a-week for one class a day, except Mondays, where my morning class is followed by a six-hour break and a three-hour evening class. My plans of weekday biking trips is about to be thrown out the window, and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to keep myself motivated through all this.

Here’s to hoping that everything will work out…

And here I was, a month ago, thinking my schedule was a piece of cake to put together.

I’m seriously wanting to swap CMPT 310 out for something else, but am having an incredibly hard time finding something to replace it with. Although I was initially not worried about the instructor offering the course at the beginning, what advice I’ve heard regarding this particular professor so far has ranged from Be cautious to Drop the course, right now—not entirely encouraging. And, on top of that, one of the students’ favourite professors for that class seems to be offering the same course in the fall, and I’m also really wanting to not do coop on the fall and spring semesters.

Naturally, I would like to keep my full-time student status for the summer, and need to replace CMPT310 with something else. Here’s where it gets depressing: all my choices suck.

Out of the very few courses offered that I’m willing to take, every single one of them are either on the days that I had planned not to have classes on, being offered by a reputabily horrible professor, or will be taught by an unknown sessional.

For now, it appears that my desire to not end up in a sucky 310 class has miraculously won over my desire for free Tuesdays and Fridays, and I will be taking LING 222 instead. Who knows: maybe Introduction to Syntax is so trivial that I won’t end up feeling gulity for skipping them, despite my strong desire to push my CGPA above the 3.0 mark again.

My phonetics class is so stupid, so utterly uncomprehensibly silly that I must now rant about it instead of studying for a midterm for the same class, happening tomorrow.

First, I was shafted on assignment 1 because, being away, I did not have the chance to form a group, and no one replied to my request for a group on the class discussion list. I also got shafted on assignment 2 because instead of working with the very capable group that I had found, I was forced into working with another group since the nature of the project required that there be 9 groups in the class, and not 8. My group mates, unfortuantely, consisted of a guy who was willing to put in only slightly more effor than I (read: next to none), and another guy who was pretty much useless.

So, now, assignment 3 is due in a week. Fortunately for me, I got back together with the above mentioned capable group. Unfortunately for me, the assignment is beyond idiotic.

Even though it is supposed to be a group project, the report to be submitted has to be done individually. Now, this isn’t so unusual until you consider the fact that the other parts of the project consists of gathering data, and giving a presentation on the analysis of said data. This analysis is also what the report is supposed to contain. So, we need to work as a group to do the project, except the report we hand in must be done individually, except that the report is identical in content to what we need to work as a group on, and…

DOES NOT FUCKING COMPUTE!

Frankly, this is the worst instructor/course offering I’ve ever had, and that includes CMPT 101. If it wasn’t for the fact that I actually find the subject area interesting, and that there weren’t other courses I could take, I would have dropped this class after the first week. I mean, for God’s sake, I actually enjoy learning about the subject area.

I can’t wait until it’s finally over.

If found, please return to Common Sense along with a note reminding of soon-to-be-due assignments and projects.

Thanks.

I just realized today that I signed up to participate in a psychology experiment on the Monday for counting towards my mandatory research participation grade for PSYC 100. What I failed to realize when I made the appointment is that Monday is reading break. Since I must give at least 24 hours notice to cancel an appointment, I must now be on campus on Monday to take part in a short experiment.

God, I’m stupid…

Not that it actually matters, really, since I have midterms on the Wednesday and Thursday, on top of at last three assignments. I’ve so far managed to finish catching up on PSYC, only to realize that the upcoming midterm for the class is actually a day later than my LING 130 midterm, which I’ve yet to begin studying for. The material is easy, of course, but it’s still highly annoying.

It seems I’ve actually managed to recover fully from my seemingly-disasterous semester start. Things are looking up now that I am no longer behind on school work and the fact that this is very easy semester has finally sunk in, lifting a lot of stress off of my head. The bad news, however, is that I may be starting to fall into my slacker mentality once again. Time to work on that…

Chinese New Year celebrations has come and gone, and, despite being a rather small one (only two families) it was still nice to be celebrating with family and old aquaintances. My mom also invited Missy over for the festivities. I’m glad she handled the vegetarian thing so well, especially considering it was hot pot. It’s really hard to keep all forms of meat out of food in Chinese and Japanese cusine.

Finally, lets talk about the weather: it sucks. So far, since coming back from Toronto, it has been nothing but rain, except on the few days when I couldn’t go biking due to having just finished an overnighter or busy for the entire day. There had better be some good snow up on the local mountains.

So, I voted today. What an adventure that was. (Although not as adventurous going through an ice jam.)

Due to the way my neighbourhood is layed out, even though my nearest polling station is, oh, roughly a kilometer away, it is at least a 15 minute walk due to the lack of connecting streets and my lack of knowledge regarding the allyway network in that direction. My schedule for the day, as it turns out, does not allow me to be absent from campus for more than an hour at a time, and still be able to take care of everything I’m booked for with comfortable amount of time to actually transit to and from campus. And I sure didn’t want to wake up before eight in the morning to cast my ballot.

After much prodding from Dan and reassurance that I can, in fact, vote for my own riding from another, I planned out my Monday such to allow myself to be able to attend to every scheduled meeting and class while still giving me time to vote, eat, and still have time to sit around in the common room.

Despite a minor setback of missing my morning bus, my plan was executed perfectly — until it came time to vote.

As it turns out, the voting station they have set up at the SFU residence dining hall does not carry ballots for ridings outside of Burnaby-Douglas. Defeated, I headed to the MBC atrium to get on the wireless and come up with a backup plan. Failing to locate the nearest Burnaby-Douglas polling station outside of campus, and not wanting to risk being denied my vote yet again, I decided to do the responsible thing and head to my local polling station. This was at 16:20, only just an hour before my CMPT 320 class.

Luckily for me, all of my bus transfers head down the hill worked out perfectly, and without much wait. I arrived at my destination at roughly quarter-to-five. (I also managed to spot one of those new Nova Busses servicing the 97 line, and that Civic Si police car the VPD has, twice, on my way there.)

Having not received my voter registration card, and hence unsure of my voting eligibility, I was directed to the registration table where a nice lady found, upon my presentation of driver’s licence and bank statement that, according to the list, my address does not exist. Apparently, there is a gap in the street number listing where my place of residence should be. Clearly baffled, the nice lady then sent me to the booth I would be voting at, just in case, to see if I was on the list there. Well, I was, so I voted, thanked the poll station workers, then quickly hurried back to the bus stop, hoping that I would not miss the transfer and end up half an hour late for class.

Much to my delight, the transportation gods were still happy with me, and I had an uneventful ride back up to campus, arrving at my 320 class with ten minutes to spare.

Hooray for increased bus services.

On another note, during my search for an optimal path from campus to the polling station, I discovered that Google local has added two additional levels of detail for its satellite and hybrid views. Think what you will, but I’m almost ready to reach for my tin-foil hat…