Co-op finished last Friday. The week included a farewell lunch at Himalayan Peak, the Indian restaurant on campus, as well as four classroom visits in one day, which was quite exhausting to do. No matter how hard I tried, it was a struggle to get work done during that last week.

Outside of work during that week was Anto’s going away dinner because he’s going off to Waterloo to work at RIM for four months. After dinner, our group of people headed over to CHQ to play around in the arcade, which included playing some vertical shooter (never caught the name) with Anto, Initial D with Amy, Time Crisis 4, Taiko: Drum Master with Amy, some other rhythm game involving three buttons with several people, House of the Dead 4 with Anto, and Ghost Squad with Tadashi. Turns out I’m really bad with rhythm games. I also tried out that tank driving game based on World War II. I ended up calling an air strike on myself because I’m such a noob >_<, but it was fun nonetheless.

Once I got home on Friday, I found a Steam message from Dan telling me that Civilization IV was 33% off on Steam. And so, I bought the Civilization IV Complete Pack for USD $39.95.

However, I could not really get any rest for that weekend. That is because on Sunday, we had the 12th Annual General Meeting and Anniversary Dinner for the 99th Saint Francis Xavier Scout Group. Being the project coordinator for this meant that I was pretty much running all over the place on both Saturday (to rehearse and prepare) and Sunday (to oversee everything to ensure that the event ran smoothly and assist if something did explode in our faces). Surprisingly enough, the event ran quite smoothly, despite the last-minute nature of many things in the planning and preparation process. I did not really start the planning process until a month or so before the actual event, things got delayed and pushed back (mainly due to poor management from yours truly), and various other things.

Mom left for her pilgrimage on Monday, so I basically did the driving for the day. Woke up early, drove out to Richmond, had breakfast, saw her off at the airport, then dropped off dad for work and went home. Pretty much, the day was a maintenance day. Fixed up my bike so I could actually use it, then I started to try to fix that computer that was mentioned in the to-do list post. That in itself was a challenge because it’s got Chinese Windows XP installed, and I don’t really read Chinese all that well, even though I am Chinese. Basically, the problems with the computer mainly revolve around errors popping up when the system boots up (and from the looks of it, these are the application encountered an error and crashed type messages). Usage history from the users states that the errors started when they tried to install the TELUS eProtect software. I think I am going to toss it out and install AVG instead. Might as well go with what you know works for things like security. They are also using Spybot Search & Destroy for their anti-spyware needs, which I will keep around because it works. Haven’t done that yet because I wanted to actually spend the week enjoying life and taking a break from things.

Started getting lazy on Tuesday and lounged around for a quite a bit. Had a meeting at night though for more program planning for the next two months of Scouts. Not going to post details here because I know some of them read this blog. You’ll find out tomorrow what to expect!

There was a SFU Open House meeting on Wednesday that I went to because I am coordinating stuff there for Computing Science. Since my bike is ready to be used, I took the bike out for a spin. Good weather out too, but I just am not in good enough shape to bike much, which kind of sucks considering how I could actually do the distance from school to home (a 45 minute commute by bus/foot) back in high school by bike. As a result, I cheated quite a bit, and only biked the distance from home to Commercial Skytrain Station and from SFU to Sperling/Burnaby Lake Skytrain Station. Turns out it’s really beautiful at Burnaby Mountain Park. I should head over to that field more often – it doesn’t take long to get to from campus.

Went out to Havana for dinner with a few people from the co-op job on Thursday, which was pretty good. We then went all the way across town to Sweet Obsession for dessert. Very, very yummy cake (I had the White Chocolate Raspberry Mousse). They also have an interesting tea blend called the Sweet Obsession tea blend, which is basically an Earl Gray with jasmine.

After I got home, I finally started to play my recently purchased Civilization 4 with expansions. My God is that game addicting. I ended up playing from 9-10 PM until 4 in the morning because I did not look at the clock. >_>

Not really looking forward to going back to school so soon, but the time is coming. At least I’m only there for two days a week. I should get some golfing into the week at the nearby pitch & putt course at Kensington Park..

I just wish I had a longer break.

For work today, I had to go to SFU Surrey for the Surrey Open House. Of course, I went representing Computing Science as we spread the word about the pending-Senate-approval Software Systems program in Surrey, SoSy for short, and, of course, the good word about Computing Science.

I did something that Diana Cukierman, one of our professors at SFU who is currently teaching CMPT 120, did for one of her lectures. This is the “make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise.

For those not familiar with the exercise, which I first did in high school in English 8, here it is:

1. Ask your audience (in my case, the individual(s) who came in and checked it out) to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
2. Get the instructions from them.
3. Make sandwich based on their instructions

Of course, with computers, one needs to realize that they are not as smart as we would think they are. You need to be precise and detailed with your instructions, as the computer would not know how to do something that you would consider simple.

To illustrate what I mean, I will take my favourite example (which unfortunately was not said):

1. Take the bread
2. Place peanut butter on top of bread
3. Place jelly on top of peanut butter
4. Place bread on top
5. Enjoy!

That will result in something extremely silly, with a whole loaf of bread squished by a jar of peanut butter and a jar of a jam of your choice (strawberry for me) with another loaf of bread on top.

Some interesting things from running the exercise for around four hours:

• Talked to an elementary school teacher. This pretty much gave her inspiration to do something similar with her class. She also mentioned that doing computing science outreach with elementary school teachers, which would be quite interesting.
• Someone wrote on the instructions: “Now do the PEANUT BUTTER JELLY DANCE“. Needless to say, I did not do it because a) I did not have a banana suit and b) although it would probably have been fun, I was at work.
• I got my picture taken at random. I think my face kinda said “what the?” in said picture.
• Someone else wrote on the instructions “Say I scream for ice ice cream aloud” (that’s what it said – no typo here). This was due to the fact that co-op was giving out free ice cream during open house and dressed up WIL Fraser in an ice cream cone (basically, a large-ish cutout of an ice cream cone with ice cream, then cut out a section for WIL’s face to show)
• One of the instructions I got was “make sandwich”. “Sorry, can’t do that. I don’t know how!”

It occurred to me that something was missing (besides the banana suit and music track if we wanted to make this silly) was some great geek humour. And of course, what better to related to Computing Science than this timeless classic on XKCD.

Work had a Christmas party yesterday and one of the things happening there, besides the free food and games, was a raffle draw, for which I bought six tickets for.

So a few draws later, I now have two white poinsettias, one sitting in my office, one at home. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket..

But yeah, there have been so many free things as of late it is not even funny. At the Network Support Group open house last week (they are the guys who run FASNet), through answering questions, I won a small football from Dell, a small bottle of hand sanitizer (also from Dell), and an Adaptec SCSI Card that is currently sitting in the office. Then sometime earlier this week, Brad came by and gave me a copy of NHL 08, which was left over from the ACM draw or something.

Yay free stuff!

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).

Well, where to begin?

Co-op has been going quite nicely. I’ve certainly found myself getting better with things I suck at (ie. public speaking), so that’s quite fun. We’ve visited several schools so far, including University Hill and Maple Ridge Secondary. More schools are on the way though, which is good since we can promote the really nice program we have.

I got my first ever co-op site visit today. It was quite interesting because we went over the things I’ve done so far and looked at just what my future goals are. I also saw the importance of doing the whole learning objectives thing. Two really nice things that came out of it: 1) I was given permission to do another co-op term after taking a break over summer (generally, I am supposed to do one school term at least between work terms) and 2) Harriet will vouch for me to take part in co-op Japan when the time comes (probably either late next year or 2009).

As for Scouts, as you may know, I have been promoted to Troop Scouter this year, which pretty much means I’m head honcho for an entire section. A bit intimidating for someone who would rather prefer to be in the sidelines doing the whole supporting effort thing like myself, but a good challenge nonetheless. We’ve been doing some new things, like selecting our PLs and APLs with scenarios to observe their leadership skills, amongst other types of skills. For those who aren’t familiar with Scouts, we divide up the Scouts into patrols, who are led by a PL (patrol leaders) and assisted by the APL (assistant patrol leader). I have also been taking a somewhat relaxed approach to working with my leaders, making things more in their hands and allowing them to take on new initiatives. Would it work out in the long run? Who knows, but I guess I’ll find out!

I’ve also been tasked to do Group Camp for a second year in a row. Now admittedly, last year’s planning, along with various responsibilities at school and such, got me so stressed out that I did terrible with school. Ideally, things do not go into that area this year, but I did learn over the year and I will probably start delegating things off soon to capable people.

Speaking of Scouts, October 13 is Apple Day, which means Scouts selling apples on the streets by donation. My group will be out in the Chinatown area, so if you see kids in white and yellow neckerchiefs, buy an apple from them.

As for my part-time job that I got before starting co-op through Marcel, I’ve been pretty much given the reins on the project I worked on when I started there. Unfortunately, I know I will not have much free time to do it, so I will be working on it in the various pockets of time that I have when I actually am well-rested enough.

And for those who are looking for part-time work and are capable of doing PHP/MySQL web applications, the company that I am part-timing for is hiring full-time employees. Just go to Appnovation’s website for more information on available careers.

On the gaming side of things, The Orange Box just came out and I am seriously thinking of buying it. I already have Half-Life 2 though, so that means if I do actually end up buying it, I will have one gift-able copy of Half-Life 2 available. Any takers?

First things first, I will be at SFU next semester. Luckily for my sanity, I won’t be taking classes, but rather doing my co-op term with the School of Computing Science.

Lightning Round went nicely for me. The week after finals were over, I had six interviews over the span of four days for various people, mainly in the public sector side of things (ie. government and government-affiliated groups). However, by Tuesday, when I had four interviews, I already had a job offer from the school. Other offers trickled through, including one from the SFU library doing development on their projects, such as the Public Knowledge Project, as well as one from the Provincial Health Services Authority, associated with the province of BC, doing development in .Net.

All the offers had something interesting to offer and something to learn. For example, working with the PHSA would have given me a chance to learn C#. Working with the library would have given me valuable software development experience

But what set the school apart from the rest was simply because it gave me numerous opportunities to develop myself in areas that I know I am lacking in; namely people skills. Since the job is around 60-70% recruitment (of students), it gives me a chance to work on things like public presentations, which usually make me nervous.

It is with this mindset that made me decide on that for my co-op term. This starts on Thursday.

So to pass the time, through a referral from Marcel, I am working on a contract job for a friend of his, working on a restaurant guide website written on PHP with the Fusebox framework. It’s an interesting framework and I can’t really say too much about it yet, having only worked on it for a few days, mainly making fairly specific changes. The circuit system with fuses and all does seem quite interesting though, to say the least.

Well, looks like things would be busy.

I need to pick up my parents from the airport tonight after their trip to Las Vegas.

Tomorrow is a Scouting Centennial Celebration held by the Vancouver East Area (ie. the area which my group belongs to), so I’ll need to wake up early (just like the past few days) and help setup and oversee the booths our group is running.

Then on Sunday, we have the WCCCLC pre-camp meeting, then work, work, work, with WCCCLC over the Labour Day long weekend.

I think I’m going to be sleep deprived. Best get used to it..

I have gotten my paperwork together and begun the long and arduous process of finding a co-op job. As of now, I have applied for two jobs, both software development jobs at Business Objects and Orbital Technologies.

Since attending this year’s OpFair at SFU and various other encounters, including an international co-op seminar, I have decided I’d like to go through my co-op terms as such:

• One local work term
• One national work term
• One international work term (thinking Japan)

In addition to those companies that I have some interest in from OpFair, I am also considering seeking co-op work with CSIS or CSE, which, although rare, do exist and are quite difficult to get in due to the whole security procedures needed to get a job with those groups, for obvious reasons.

As well, something else of interest would be doing things related to system administration and networks.

Hopefully more things come up soon! I really hope my work terms will be very interesting.

I decided to hold back on co-op this semester and start in fall.

It was not an easy decision to make, with all the potential backlash and lost opportunities that are there, such as a chance to try out doing system administration and seeing if I would enjoy such a job.

But this semester just feels right. I’m on the ball with my academics, starting my assignments early on, spending a good amount of time studying and focusing on my studies and managing my time a heck lot better.

Since my current state of grades aren’t really all that great, I should be able to make use of this momentum to boost them up and attempt co-op in fall. At least, that’s my reasoning.

Wednesday was OpFair 2007, put together by both the Engineering and Computing Science Student Societies, where over 20 high tech companies in the local area, had booths set up to look for potential employees. As most of these places are also looking for co-ops, I just had to go out and see just what’s available. Going through most of the booths, I began to worry a bit as most places will be making use of C++. I will most likely need to spend some time making use of good old g++ and some good website to self-teach myself C++ from my light-to-moderate knowledge of C.

But the companies there are quite interesting. I certainly didn’t know that Sophos had an office in Vancouver until walking around. Computer security is interesting and doing virus research through reverse engineering viruses to see what they do and how to make fixes is even more interesting. Unfortunately, I only have interest, not experience, in the area, which is quite disappointing for myself.

Then there’s IBM. Having gone to their information session a week or so earlier, it would be a nice place to apply for. Knowing people already there (well, one really), is a big plus already.

Orbital Technologies does some contract work and such. The variety of jobs you might be doing sounds intriguing enough for me to want to apply and try it out. At least you’ll never get bored as what you’ll be working on changes in between projects.

There’s other companies there as well, but these three were the ones that interested me the most during OpFair. Other companies there that I would probably be interested in working for include Business Objects, Telus, and Electronic Arts.

But yes, I really need to take some time to go and do some things with C++ and reverse engineer some stuff. Thankfully, I don’t really need to look around to find things that I can reverse without getting into trouble. I just need time..

Which brings me to the next thing. Time. I just feel like I have way too many things to do. My parents kind of made me think about this when they gave me a good long talk, in which I felt irritated simply because it’s things I’ve heard before and am trying to change myself out of, including wasting time and time management and all that other crap. Let’s see now..

There’s school, work, Scouts, two websites, and WCCCLC promotions (which will include the website, not accounted for in previous count). I do feel like I have lots to do, but then again, I cannot really focus on one thing at a time these days, simply because I’m worrying about something else. I feel that I should drop some responsibilities, but there are some things holding me back:

• School: too high on priority list – cannot drop
• Work: also pretty high on priority list, mainly for the work experience that is involved with it
• Scouts: Several things holding me back on this one. 1) Attachment to the group, since I’ve been in the group for about 10 years.. 2) Guilt over if I leave, what will happen to the group? It’s growing these days and they say they might just start a Beaver Colony next year..
• Website 1 (99th SFX Scouts): I’m the only person working on this, so I can’t really do that..
• Website 2 (Pacific Coast Council): I’m part of a team of people doing this, but I value the work that we put into it, so nope..
• WCCCLC: it’s a great event and I would like to encourage others to go, as well as get more experience out of it, so nope..
• Gaming: my stress relief and what times turns into when I lose focus, although these days it’s mainly Minesweeper (in the form of Mines, part of the GNOME package) and Battle for Wesnoth.

So yeah, lots of things to do, lots of things to worry about simply because I care too much, which leads to a general inability to focus on things that really should be done. But what can I do?

I guess what I could do is hurry the 99th SFX Scouts website such that it’s complete, then I don’t need to do much for it anymore, leaving more time for other things.

But will it work? Will I be able to balance out my time between all these duties without breaking down? What will I drop?

I don’t know. I’ll need to think it through.