For today, work consisted of going down to Semiahmoo Secondary in South Surrey/White Rock and talking to several Planning 10 classes. I went with Rich from Engineering, who talked about the Faculty of Applied Sciences at SFU, with me running the Computing Science demo, which was the Towers of Hanoi problem.

Before I continue further, some people may go “What the hell does the Towers of Hanoi have anything to do with Computing Science?” Well, it teaches students about recursion and is an example of a problem that you can solve, since CS is about solving problems.

But anyway, the visits went quite well. The kids enjoyed the Hanoi problem and it is truly interesting to see just how people in the audience think it is easy, then suddenly come up and think for a long while.

So this being quite possibly the first time I had to drive down south of the Fraser from Vancouver in various points in the day, here are some observations; these may be good things to note, because I surely did not realize some of this:

• Even when you would expect to be going in the opposite direction of where the traffic flows (since people in the suburbs would be heading towards Vancouver in the morning), you still run into traffic jams. While heading down in the morning, I hit traffic problems on the Knight Street bridge as well as Highway 99 at the George Massey Tunnel.
• Despite the fact that the speed limits were 100km/h, I still found myself and others barreling down the highway at a good 120-140km/h. (I had to anyway, the traffic problems made me late by a good 10 minutes)
• Counterflows suck (when you have only one lane and the other side has three).
• Avoid the merge lane(s) if you want to go through faster.
• People will do anything to avoid the huge lines. When going back to Vancouver at the end of the day, some cars were trying to go down an already closed lane (for the counterflow) and merging in somewhere up front. So here’s a message to pretty much all drivers: if a car is going down a closed lane just to cut in line, DON’T LET THEM IN. Letting them in encourages them to do it again because they got rewarded for it. In psychology (operant conditioning specifically), they call this positive reinforcement. If you don’t let them in, they will probably not do it anymore, because they get screwed.

All in all, an interesting day. I nearly fell asleep while driving too. Kinda scary, when you’re on the highway going at 110 km/h and you find yourself drifting off the lane. Thank God there were no cars nearby and I ended up not getting into any crashes or accidents.

Well, better get to sleep. We have more classes to talk to tomorrow, this time with the usual presentation.

To summarize: I lack a work/life balance.

Maybe it’s the fact that I have kind of over-committed myself to things as of late. Let’s examine just how many hours per week of my life goes into various things… this is in an ideal world, of course.

• Work at SFU: 40 hours (8 hours a day for 5 days a week)
• Transit to and from work: 10 hours (1 hour each way for 5 days a week)
• Scouts: 10 hours (2 hours for the meeting, 1 hour for the pre/post meeting stuff, 1 hour a day for logistical planning)
• Sleep: 56 hours (8 hours a day for 7 days a week – an ideal figure)
• Church: 1.5 hours
• Work at Appnovation: 21 hours (3 hours a day)

Hours in a week: 168.

Hours I spend doing stuff: 138.5

Hours I have free: 29.5

Note that the above figure of 29.5 hours does not include time spent on doing things that are necessary, like making food, washing dishes, doing laundry, taking a shower/bath, and so on so forth, since these are variable. Since parents are out of town as of this writing, I will need to fend for myself with these things. So let’s say it takes..

• 1 hour for the morning routine, done daily (includes brushing my teeth, washing my face, shower, breakfast, washing the dishes; optional of course)
• 1.5 hours for dinner, done daily (making, eating, and cleaning up)
• 3 hours for laundry (includes putting the clothes in the washer, after doing some cleanup on messes, hanging, ironing, placement of clothes after they are clean)
• 2 hours for grocery shopping

Should we add these up, then there goes another 22.5 hours, which leaves…… 7 hours and as a result, cutting into various different things in the routine to make up for the lost time, like sleep, skipping breakfast, and so on. Obviously, this will hurt me in the long run, so I need to make changes before it’s too late.

Technically, I can do the Appnovation work on the commute, but that means:

1. I need to bring my dad’s laptop with me on a daily basis until I get mine shipped (it’s still waiting for parts as of this writing.. wow)
2. I really only merge around 5 hours, since around 30 minutes of each trip is on an actual transit vehicle; the rest of it is walking. It really depends on which routes I use to go home though.

So given all this, I will need to make some changes or else if I do actually manage to follow through on this schedule, I would go insane due to not being able to pursue my own interests and be a bit free for a bit. And to think that I will be taking one class (JAPN 200) next semester, which by an ideal schedule means 12 hours gone (2 hour tutorials, 2 times a week, followed by 8 hours for studying, if you follow the class time to study time formula where for every hour of instructional time, you study for at least 2 hours).

While at work today, Benton pointed out that this could be a potentially good time for me to upgrade my box at home, particularly the CPU. At the moment, I am running an AMD Athlon64 3200+, which makes use of a Socket 939. Since AMD has moved onto the AM2, it would be a nice time for me to upgrade this good old machine to an Athlon64 x2.

Here lies my problem: despite these suckers being sold down in the States for stupidly cheap (ie. less than $100), it’s hard to find Socket 939 processors up here. Even if I do find them, they’re not even dual-core or stupidly expensive!

Honestly Canada. What the hell. Get with it!

The CSSS in-house phrase, which found its origins from the 2006 CSSS Exec Retreat, returns. In this exceptional case, it happened to me and the Scout Group during our camp just this past weekend.

We had our camp in a Scout camp site in Maple Ridge over the weekend. It was somewhat cold for obvious reasons and we were tenting in the forest. Eventually, on Saturday as we were practicing foot drill in the field, it happened.

Brian: Dom! Bear!

Me: What? (pretty random thing for someone to say, especially during foot drill)

Brian points at the bear.

Me: Oh.

Since that point on, it threw us off balance schedule-wise. Any plans for outdoor activities that the Beavers and Cubs had were pretty much scrapped due to the unknown danger. Movement of our campsite areas became a priority as the bear had managed to steal some of the kids’ food (cookies, salad, Wonder Bread), which meant it would be coming back for more. We moved them into one of the Cub hulls (think of a cabin with a tarp for the roof, no windows, and no door) and constantly reminded them to not have food in their sleeping areas, lest they want to have a face-to-face meeting with a bear in the middle of the night.

Luckily, the kids did not have any more sightings with the bear anymore and the camp finished without incident, save the bus not starting up.