想い出は遠くの日々

Now that I have a bit of time, I can write about what happened today and yesterday.

Yesterday: Victoria
Today: Whistler

Victoria
I started off the day waking up quite early at 8:00 in the morning and my family decided that we’re going to visit Victoria. So, off we went to the ferries across… there’s no bridge to the provincial capital of BC. We got to the ferries at about 9:30 but unfortunately, we misread the schedule and instead of 10:00 am for the ferry, it’s actually 11:00 am. So I burned my hour and a half at the nearby Starbucks near the ferry terminal (aside: there’s an absurd number of Starbucks in BC, it’s just as prolific as Tim Hortons to Ontario as to Starbucks to BC). The good that came out of this was the fact that we were way ahead of the ferry queue so there was no risk of not being able to board. 11:00 arrived and we got on the ferry. The ferry wasn’t too exciting… there were passenger decks were you could sit and relax while feeling the rhythmic motions of the waves. An hour and a half of boredom passed and we arrived at Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island. A short drive later, we arrived in Victoria. This place is absolutely beautiful. I’ll let the pictures below do the talking… but just a brief recap of some of the places where I went: BC Royal Museum, BC Legislature, Victoria Harbour. My family and I had lunch there and decided to start driving back to the ferry at about 5:30 to catch the 7:00 pm ferry back to the mainland. As we drove closer to Swartz Bay, we saw a sign that read ‘Ferry near full’, and all a sudden, cars that were beside, behind, and ahead of us sped up! So, it was a race to get a spot onto the ferry cause the next one would be at 9:00 pm and no one wants to wait 3 hours! So, we arrived at the loading dock, got our ticket (btw, the attendent says there’s no guarentee of getting on), and waited for boarding. I was relieved when the lane we were in started to move and we were hoping that there’s enough space for our car. Surprisingly (and luckily), our car was the LAST car to get on the ferry! As we drove in, we were right behind the loading doors and we barely squeezed in (pic below). Good thing that happened or I’d be talking about how I wasted 3 hours waiting for a ferry now. That’s my trip to Victoria in a nutshell.

Whistler
I’ll make this one shorter. Drove up today to Whislter. The roads were windy and at times, I felt that the car would go straight off the cliff and into the water below. Whistler is also amazing too with it’s snow covered mountains. Now I have to make plans to ski here when I get some vacation time. I got some shots of the mountains, so I hope you will enjoy them.

That’s it for now, tomorrow I will visit Stanley park in hopes of finding those towering Douglas Firs.

Today, I woke up at 5 am, marking the start of my 4-day vacation and 5 days of co-op orientation. The first 4 days I will spend with my family to visit Vancouver and my relatives here. The last 5 will be spent at UBC by myself.

I arrived at Pearson airport at around 6:30 and began the check in process. I won’t go through the fine details of this part but all in all, things went well and I got on my flight on time without issues.

I flew Harmony Airlines and the flight took a good 4 hours and 30 minutes. I would say the service is mediocre but from what my Dad said, it’s better than Air Canada (lot better). Guess I’ll find out when I fly to Japan. So, I got to Vancouver International at around 10:30 am PST (add 3 hours for EST) and stood around the baggage carousel. The bags for First Class came out first. Thinking that my bags would come shortly after, I eagerly waited at the chute for my bags. However, that wasn’t the case…

40 minutes later… I see the same first class bag the 20th time rotating on the carousel… bah! How long does it take to throw my bag onto a conveyor belt? After finally getting my bag on the 50th minute mark, things went smoothly (checking into hotel, getting a rental car, etc)

Spent the day wandering about Vancouver with my Dad driving and me navigating. I’ll skip more details because it’s 11:00 pm PST (2 am EST) and I want to sleep. I’ll leave you with some pictures I took and some captions.

Picture 1: This is the 20th time I saw the same bag on the conveyor belt…
Picture 2: Instead of ordering rice along with your 6-course Chinese meal, you get a bucket of rice.
Picture 3: This is the steam-powered clock in Gastown. Quite an interesting piece of machinery. Oh, and that’s me slouching and looking with awe.

I’ll probably post something more detailed and less crappily written tomorrow. Time for bed…

Today I went back to my high school for a visit before I head off to Japan. It has almost been three years since I left high school.

Walking in the hallways made me recall the carefree days of OAC and how it is unfortunate that the kids going through now don’t (and can’t) have the same enjoyment I had during my last year. I don’t think education is going in the right direction.

Okay, enough depressing stuff… I met quite a few of my teachers today. They’re getting old and I’m getting older. What’s surprising are the wide range of topics we talk about now, mainly, how to mix good drinks. I guess it’s not such a weird topic to bring up now than say while I was in OAC. I would probably get the weirdest look from my teachers if I started to talk about good booze.

Oh, one more thing, it appears that my work visa had a slight delay. It looks like I’ll be leaving one week later than planned. So, give me a shout on the week of the 8th if anyone wants to hang out.

Anyway, I’m off to Vancouver tomorrow morning. With luck, I will have internet and I can post pics into my blog. Wish me luck.

Once again, it’s time to look back on this term’s darkest moments and finest hours.

On a personal level, I really believe that my outlooks and ideals have changed somewhat to reflect the harsh reality of this term. It has been a great change from ‘oh, university is so interesting and rewarding’ in first year to ‘hmm, the university is trying to screw me over at every turn’ right now. I guess this is what I call scars of the veteran. However, at this point in time, I have no intentions of giving up. I have committed so much of my efforts to my degree that I will not and cannot surrender. I’m sure that my friends agree that I drank alcohol more this term than all my previous terms combined. I think this was a necessity…

waiting for arrival,
i have no regrets,
my whole life was Unlimited CS Works

About school… By now, I have gone passed the gauntlet for CS students. My big three mandatory CS courses, Operating Systems, Algorithms, and Theory of Computing are complete. This is where I would like to give my sincerest thanks (if I didn’t say in person already) to my dear friends who helped me through this hardest stage in university.

The biggest hoop was Operating Systems where my team and I committed an obscene amount of hours to get the Nachos operating system working. There were nights that I came home frustrated unable to debug a showstopping bug… those were dark moments indeed. And in contrast, there were ‘ahah’ moments where I fix the showstopping bug and breathe a sigh of relief that I won’t fail the assignment (much)… those were finest hours.

My other CS course, CS360, was a waste of time. Besides the concepts being impractical in industry (the prof attempts to justify the course by saying that people who invented GREP must have took 360), the course was not well taught. Not matter how hard I tried to get the proofs to the form the TAs want, the TAs seem to be unsatisfied with my answers. It’s like running into a brick wall repeatedly and don’t know why it’s not working. I have a good feeling that the marks for CS360 were not merit based but randomly assigned by a random number generator (RNG). The TA seeds the RNG at say 55%, puts in a variance of 5%, then randomly generate an assignment mark. All in all, the course was disappointing.

Calc3 and Stat231 were easy. No contest there.

And lastly, Human Resource Management 200 was a very useful course. I like the psychology of managing people and plus the fact the prof is an excellent speaker, I would say it’s the most rewarding course this term.

It’s not about graduation, but the journey to get there, and the people you meet and join along the way…

Should I ever stray from my path, I’ll be glad to know there will be people to guide me back.

From here on, it’s nothing but downhill… I don’t think I’ll ever take that much punishment again. I bid 3A farewell.

Welcome to the second version of my blog. Finally after 2 long years, I have upgraded my site!

There shouldn’t be much difference from my last site. Another cool thing is that this blog is RSS feed enabled. On the firefox browser, you should see the syndication icon and you should be able to subscribe to this blog.

Also! Please sign my guestbook!