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Alcohol Saved My Night

So I had planned with Kim to goto a halloween rave on Saturday night.  Every year in Edmonton, there’s a huge party thrown by a big production company that brings in some big name dj’s.

I attended the first two in previous years, and they are an absolute blast.  There’s nothing quite like seeing a bunch of strung out kids in crazy costumes dancing to pulsating “techno” music for hours on end.  Free candy is always a good incentive too!

At any rate, I thought it’d be a good treat for myself since I’ve been all studious and haven’t really gone out since I got back in Edmonton.  I haven’t gone to an actual “rave” in years, and I felt an urge to get my dance on.  Honestly, they’re so fun to goto sober or not, and I really miss it.

So Saturday rolls by, and after my drinkfest with Kim on Friday night I was hung all day long.  Laziness kicks in, and we both decide to skip it.  Tickets that night were selling for $100 at the door, and if I wasn’t in a mood to dance until 7 AM, then why waste my time and money.

Sunday I woke up to hear the awful news that someone at the party got stabbed, and that they died from their injuries.  The party got shut down by the cops.  So what happened afterwards?  You have 2000 kids, probably most of them hopped up on E or speed, wanting to let loose some energy.  An afterparty was held a downtown club, and unfortunately the violence didn’t end there.  Three people were shot to death there, and a few others wounded.

So I guess in some ways my hangover saved me a night of hassle.  It was terrible to hear all the violence that happens in this city.  I think that raises the homocide count to 50 in Edmonton, and I heard that makes it the highest homicide rate per capita in Canada.

Pretty strange for such a “quiet” town.

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End of Midterm Week/Lee Gets Hammed

Yes, I wish I had something fun to say in my blog.  But really, school has become my life.  Luckily drinking is also a part of school.

Yes, I survived midterm week!

It was nice to put down my pencil 35 minutes into my math exam, after double checking all my answers. I think I was the first to finish, and although most of the time an early finish means trouble… I think I did a lot better than I had anticipated for the course. I left the exam room really elated, and relieved that yes… the course I’ve been been scared of isn’t really so bad afterall.

I once believed that your mark is inversely proportional to how you feel about an exam… I hope that I’m wrong.

So after all those sleepless nights, long days of sitting on my ass, and cramming as much as I can into my head I did what any good university student did and kept sane by going out to get drunk.

Luckily the girl next-door (literally) felt the urge to celebrate the end of her exam we too.  So the both of us went to the nearby moxies and drank…and drank… and drank until we stopped drinking.

Kim double fisting her big Coronas:

A gentleman always drinks with his pinky up:

After the lounge, we hung out at a big halloween party where I ran into Chantal and her friend, all dressed up as Emo Fairies!  What a wicked costume.  Notice the rouge that they have on, and no… I don’t wear rouge.  Damn you Asian alcohol syndrome!

That’s all folks!

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Ugh School

Yes, I will rant about how school sucks.  Didn’t take long before I’ve lost the steam for school.  Midterm week is this week, and I already feel so violated after writing my first one.

My prof slammed down a thick stack of sheets for our midterm, and casually said “oh, it’s not long they’re easy questions”.  Right, maybe they’re easy FOR YOU but not for us noobs.  Even with the 10 minute extension at the end, everyone seemed to be madly rushing to get it done.

At any rate, I pray to the gods of the curve that I survive that weathering.  I sorta freaked out due to the lack of time and made some simple calculation errors for some of my answers

An assignment and two more midterms this week to go and I should be stress free for a few days before my term projects roll in and I spend the next month in the coding labs.  Fun!

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To cheer you up from such a ranty post, here’re some cool youtube videos:

Photoshop and makeup can really distort our marketed version of beauty!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00nhKwv4M5Q

For all you street fighter fans, this is pretty slick:
http://www.hiroiro.com/entry/246.html

To help you gain a larger insight into the depth of William Shattner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN3MGN899yE 

Cause I’m a rocketman!!

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End of Online Poker?

So you may or may not have heard, but online poker has probably collapsed under the weight of conservative fundamentalists down south.  Tucked in a “port security” bill, all forms of online gambling in the US are now illegal.  Online gambling is now grouped up under the same felony group as distributing and storing child pornography… OUCH!

I’m not sure how American politics works exactly, but from what I’ve heard the bill was passed quite undemocratically. The main bill itself is to improve security against terrorist attacks, the bill was ammended after it was vote on but before it was to be made law (before it was signed by George dubbya) to include a passage banning online gambling.  The official reason being that online gambling sites were tools for terrorists to transport and funnel money in and out of the US.

This bill was signed a few weeks ago, and all the major poker withdrew their service to US citizens.  Essentially, 85% of online poker users have vanished from the virtual tables.

Even though I’m Canadian, this news does affect me.  Poker is sort of like an ecosystem of its own, especially in the online world.  All the poor players get gobbled up by bigger fish, and in turn the bigger fish get eaten up by other fish or sharks.  As long as the stream of fresh minnows continues to flow, then the whole ecosystem is happy.  Now that the source has been cut off, the level of skilled players will start to dominate the lesser players.

Basically, it means that there’re less juicy games out there.  There goes my part-time student job :-p

I sleep happy knowing that terrorists will be having a harder time moving small amounts of money through US borders…

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Liberating Documentaries

So inbetween assignments and studying I’ve gotten a chance to watch two really good documentaries that I wish everyone will have a chance of seeing. Who Killed the Electric Car? and Control Room.
Yes, I realize that documentaries are never free from bias, but you’ve got to ask what media source is free from any bias at all? The best that we can do is to take in as many opinions we can, and somehow find the truth inbetween all the grey areas.

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I’ve just finished watching Control Room, a documentary about the Al Jazeera news network. Al Jazeera is an Arab run news network, probably the first of its kind ever in the Arab world, to report the news as an independent observer. It has shaken up the Arab world with its openness and frankness and has criticized all sorts of Arab regimes and nations. As a result, many Arab governments publicly denounce Al Jazeera as a credible source of news.

Personally, I haven’t see Al Jazeera before as I don’t have satellite television. But the network seems to be very progressive and candid, displaying images of those wounded and injured and even dead. It’s something that we haven’t really seen in Western media and television from self-enforced censorship and to make things “kosher” to us.

Though, there is too an element of propaganda in not showing such images. The Iraq war after all is just that, a war. Wars do not exist without innocent people dying and getting maimed. The lack of reporting such images is in itself a form of propaganda. What I found interesting throughout the documentary were the clips from press conferences where Donald Rumsfeld would denounce the network for displaying graphic images, and citing it as war propaganda. It just seems all so hypocritical, how a government body that abuses the media (”Today George Bush has raised the terror threat level from orange to pastel green. OMG THE IRISH ARE ATTACKING!!!”) would call images from the aftermath of their bomb strikes propaganda.

At any rate, if you don’t buy into the documentary’s portrayal of Al Jazeera, it is a good documentary to view the world of journalism as the Iraq war went on.

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Who Killed the Electric Car? is a great documentary about the promise and delivery of the electric that happened around 5 or 6 years ago.

The state of California, a state with the worst air quality in the US, had passed a law requiring all automakers to sell a certain number of zero emission vehicals.  GM, in response to this law, had developed an electric car, the EV1.  It was the first of its kind for decades.

It ran purely on batteries and electricy and produced no emission.  Though it only had a maximum range of between 60-100 miles per charge, it would fit usage by most consumers (really, who drives more than 100 miles in a day to commute anyways?  Not more than 10% of the population I gather).  It was not only a really green car, it was a really FAST car.  Accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds… faster than most sports cars.  The EV1 even looked really cool.  I’d drive one if I could, it’d be pimpin’ rad.

Anyways, due to pressure from the oil companies, government, and car manufacturers the state of California got rid of it’s zero emission laws.  What ended up happening was that automakers, such as GM, who built these wonderful electric cars took all the electric cars produced and crushed them all (they only leased these cars to consumers).  No automaker wanted anyone driving any electric vehicle on the roads, because they didn’t want to hurt their own business.  They didn’t want consumers to be reminded that there was and is a solution to all the car smog out there.
The solution to our oil addiction was here, and it got totally crushed.  I’ve never felt so sad for a car before.  It’s strange, but watching the documentary made me feel so empathy for those activists trying to keep the dream of the electric car alive.

What’s also really interesting to note from this movie is the last segment on the hydrogen fuel cell, and how it’s a big smoke screen for the auto-industry.  The hydrogen fuel cell right now is a “promise” of things to come in 20 years, when in fact producing such a car would be completely infeasible.

Anyways, enough of my incoherent ranting and raving of these two really good documentaries.  Go pick them up!  They’re a lot more entertaining and interesting to watch than you think.

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Return of Poker & Dual LCD Goodness

So back in May when I started my summer job at Stats Can, I thought I’d treat myself and buy a nice LCD monitor. For one thing, LCD monitor’s are a lot more ergonomic on the eyes. Whereas a CRT monitor scans and refreshes the image on the screen (basically blasting lights at your eyeballs) every x milliseconds, LCD monitors emit a constant amount of light. This removes a lot of strain on the eyes, and being the comp sci geek that I am I think my eyeballs are the first to go. Also, using an LCD means GeekFactor++;

Anyways, my brother’s computer has been on the fritz lately and it won’t boot up. So I stole his LCD and put it in my room. Now I’ve got twice the amount of monitor goodness thanks to the dual monitor support on my PC. It feels soo good… and it makes my geek self cream my pants when I use them both. Productivity shoots up as I can have a bunch of documentation on one monitor while I code on the other. So handy.

Plus, this also means that I can play a ton of poker tables all simultaneously.  That’s right folks, it’s the return of my poker playing!  Well, it’s not back as strong as it used to be back when I played everyday.  But now I’m finding myself playing a little more often, utilizing the benefits of having 2 monitors.  Party poker now lets you play up to 10 tables of poker simultaneously.  For me, that’s a bit too crazy so I’ve been playing 6 tables instead to maximize the number of hands I can play in a single hour.

PartyPoker also gave me a $100 bonus, as long as I played 1000 raked hands they’d give me the $100.  Normally online poker play goes at the rate of 40 raked hands/hour.  But if you multiply that by 6 tables, then you get roughly 250 hands an hour.  I six-tabled the past week for about 4 hours and made off with my nice $100 and a little extra.

Although playing that many games simultaneously removes almost all fun from the game (other than winning money, which is always fun), I don’t mind playing like a zombie for 4 hours to make off with a small chunk of tax-free cash.  This starving student needs to pay the rent anyway he can!

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Other than that, life has been pretty school-oriented.  Yes, I’ve become a hermit in a lot of ways.  Right now I’m supposed to be out clubbing with my friend and instead I’ve opted to stay home and get some sleep because I wanna get my assignments done.  I know, it’s sad.  But anyways, clubbing sort of has lost its purpose now that I’m no longer single.

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Facing My Fears

So this school term is really about facing my fears.  Actually, this applies for the entire school year too.

As mentioned before, my biggest academic fear is math.  Simply because there’s way too much voodoo going on in calculus and I hate rote memorization.  What I’m talking about is that theorems are based on other theorems in which most of the students won’t ever understand fully.  Not only that, but there’re so many magical formulas out there that need memorization that it’s hard to keep up with it all unless you study math constantly for a period of time.  I guess “mathematical conditioning” would be the term here, a conditioning that I haven’t paid attention to over the years (among other things :-p).
When was the last time you could recall at any of the inverse trigonometric functions off of the top of your head?  I thought so!

My second biggest academic fear, which is a strange one, is formal logic proofs.  This is sorta strange in that I’m a computing science major.  You’d think after studying the computability of things I could write things out logically.  But no, formal logic has a language of its own.  It’s not quite math, and it’s not quite English.  It has its own syntax and method of thinking, and like math, it demands its own form of mental conditioning.

This term and the next is chock full of math and logic goodness.  Calculus and database systems this term, and CMPUT 340: Numerical Methods the next term.  Calculus is total math, and in database systems we study in a very theory/logic heavy approach.  Numerical methods is basically the marriage of the two.

I knew this year would be a killer for me, but I’m happy to say that after some initial struggle the math and logic is coming to me, albeit slower than I’d like it too.  But I am facing my fears, and I’m improving on it!

Tonight I finished assignments for both classes, and for once I didn’t just half-ass my work hoping to get enough part marks for a pass.  My marks throughout university have been really lopsided.  With formal math and logic classes pulling my GPA down and my more “applied” classes pulling my marks way up. Hopefully by the end of the year my last year will consist of only up!

So here’s to facing my fears, and hopefully continuing on like this I’ll be able to conquer them.

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