A fairly long rant about this issue. For the curious, I want out. More after the jump.

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Today was my course registration day.

The original plan was to go and do a distance ed course because I am heading out east for a week and a bit in June. If I carried on with that plan, I would have probably taken either CMNS 130 or CRIM 131, thanks to recent developments that have encouraged me to do more than just a Computing Science degree.

For the curious, the option that was on my mind for the longest time was a minor in Communications due to my primary interest area in Internet communications through websites. I figured that understanding how communications have evolved and developed and where it can go all thanks to technology would be a good thing to pair up with a computing degree.

But after hearing during a career fair last week (and I was one of the people running the booth where I heard it from) that there is discussion going on about a joint major in Computing Science and Criminology on computer forensics, I pretty much got hooked on that idea.

However, a desire to get a U-Pass for the summer (apparently, I am not eligible for a U-Pass if I take only distance ed courses) has encouraged me to go and take a course. And that lucky course does not fall into any of the two aforementioned courses, but CMPT 419.

The topic? Machine learning. The prof? Greg Mori, who also happened to teach my CMPT 310 course.

Two things make me worried about the course though. First off, it is quite math-intensive and requires a good knowledge of calculus and linear algebra, pre-requisites in the lower-level CMPT stuff. I did not do so well on those. Second is that the course is cross-listed with a grad course.

However, the course material does sound interesting and my interest in the material will be my main driving force in keeping me going. After all, my desire to do MACM 442 has already forced me to take MATH 342. For the curious, it was not as bad as it looked.

Jenn, this one’s for you.

LOLGrace – It’s like lolcats, except with someone I happen to know named Grace and features her.

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.

Basically, a mash-up post covering what happened over the past while. I’ve been busy with other things and it makes everything just kinda crazy.

Dine Out Vancouver 2008

Dine Out went through quite well this year. I went to four different places this year.

First up with J.J.’s Fine Dining. This is located at the VCC Downtown Vancouver campus and is actually ran as part of the culinary arts program VCC has. I have gone there in the past for their buffet on Fridays and it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the dine out experience. The thing that stood out strongly was the fact that I was never asked for how I wanted my steak done, which left everyone who ordered the steak entree with well done steak. Even those who stated how well they wanted their steak done never got their requests made either. I can not exactly blame them though; the restaurant is a training facility for up and coming chefs and servers after all.

After that came a trip to The Cannery Restaurant. This restaurant is located within the Vancouver Port and one will need to go through port security to get to the place. At $35 per person for dine out, it was a worthwhile experience. The food was absolutely delicious and they do something new as well, which was quite interesting. Most restaurants would give you bread and butter. Others would give you bread and a mix of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Here, they give you a mix of balsamic vinegar and lobster oil, which is quite good. Definitely going to be going again next year if possible.

A camp later (which will be talked about below) and before the snowstorm that saw SFU closed for two days, I found myself at Horizons Restaurant on Burnaby Mountain, a short bus ride (and if I did what I was planning to do, a hike up) from SFU. The food was quite delicious and the night view of the city was beautiful.

Finally, I went to Gramercy Grill. This small-ish West side eatery on Arbutus had a pretty good dine out menu. Usually, you cannot get quite full from the various dine out experiences, but the portions served up were quite large and I left fairly full. Maybe that was why they charged extra for extra bread..

All in all, the whole dine out experience this year was quite good and I look forward to next year’s Dine Out Vancouver!

Winter Camping

When my co-workers found out that I was going camping in the snow in late January, they were in disbelief and going on about how cold it is and all that stuff. Some were curious about winter camping too.

To be honest, before heading off, I was quite nervous myself. Ever since I became a Scout leader, the winter camping component of the program was done with a winter camp at the Mount Seymour group campsite, which usually would not have too much snow. The campsite we went to this time around was the Cambie Creek site at Manning Park, home of the annual Rovent camp for Venturers and Rovers. Usually, what the site would look like is a big open field full of snow, several feet deep, providing good opportunities to do very awesome stuff like snow caving, snowball fights, tobogganing/sledding, snow sculpting, and, of course, camping in the snow.

Of course, the Manning Park campsite itself is a lot colder than what the Seymour site is, so various safety concerns were going though my head as the date loomed closer. “Would the kids get frostbite? Would they be warm enough? Did we prepare them well enough?” The list went on.

Thankfully, the camp itself was one organized on an Area level (so various Scout groups together at once) and with everyone’s joint efforts, the kids were well prepared and the camp went without incident.

I guess the biggest highlight of the entire camp itself happened on Friday night before everyone else got in. After going in and setting up the various shelters for first aid and stuff, I took some time to shut off my headlight and just look up. The skies were clear and you could just see all the stars in the sky. It was really beautiful and made me wish I had a camera that would be able to take such detailed pictures.

五月雨 ~samidare~

Astute readers would perhaps recall a previous post that mentioned that I wanted to try out a game called 五月雨 ~samidare~. Well, I found the game and holy crap is it hard. But like all shooting games of the variety, 五月雨 ~samidare~ is all about observing and understanding the various shot patterns to dodge them effectively; however, the game makes that somewhat easier with a rechargeable shield that absorbs the shots to temporarily increase your firepower as opposed to a finite number of screen clearing bombs.

However, despite the shield and all that, the game itself is still not easy. Just give it a go; you can see why I say that for yourself.

はじめまして。僕はドミニック（Dominic）で。でも、ドッム（Dom）がいい。僕は二十二歳で、男の人だ。僕の誕生日はシークレットだ。

今サイモンフェア−ジア（Simon Fraser）大学の五年生だ。せんもんはコンピューターだ。コンピューターのトピックの中で、ウェッブデベロップメント（Web development）が一番上手だ。

今コ−オップ仕事がある。サイモンフェア−ジアのコンピューターのデパートメントではたらいている。この仕事はぼしゅうだ。後日、日本ではたらきたい！

よろしくおねがいします、みんなさん。

And so begins another semester. This one is a bit different because I am actually doing a co-op work term while taking classes.

Yay co-op and making monies!

As far as I know, I am only allowed to take one course while doing co-op. Since I am working at SFU, I can get to my class without much trouble; I just need to make up the time for it (two hours a week that go into my work time).

What course am I taking in addition to CMPT 427? Why JAPN 200 of course!

To be honest, after my first class in JAPN 200, I feel like I am going to get my ass kicked unless I study hard and review all the stuff from JAPN 100/101. At the present time, since there was a semester-long break between JAPN 101 and this class and I did not exactly find time to review content for this class despite having the resources (I have the textbooks and the CDs already), I feel under-prepared and everyone else seems like they are coasting.

Theoretically, I should have enough time, but there are lots of commitments outside of work, like more work (in unpaid forms).

One very interesting thing so far was when people were sharing study tips, one student said that he recently started blogging in Japanese. Maybe I should start doing something similar..

As well, I heard over the holidays from quite a few people that I know that they are taking CMPT 475. It’s an evening class (starting at 5:30 on Tuesdays going for three hours) and from what I hear, the instructor is a person in the industry and will be quite interesting. I am thinking of checking the lecture out next week, since there was no lecture during the first week. Although if I do end up finding the course interesting enough, I will be stuck in a pretty tough spot, unless I somehow manage to squeeze in two classes, along with a full-time co-op job and volunteer work (Scouts).

I’m pretty sure some form of intervention is going to take place should I ever make that decision, so I best find out what I want to do for this semester soon. Of course, I will need to wait untl Tuesday before I get sufficient information to make this decision.

ねこみみのかけら (Nekomimi no Kakera) released DieFeen, which is a shooting game (like most other games I have been talking about these past couple of days). Unfortunately, there are no trailers and there are no gameplay videos to leech, so I will have to provide screenshots instead, which fortunately enough for me are available on the website.

It is a very pretty-looking game and quite different from the general STG. For starters, your two characters have three different firing modes, just like Ether Vapor.

Both player controlled characters have four Feens (at least, that’s what I think they are in-game; the general term are satelites or options I think). Depending on what firing mode you choose, they form a different formation. It appears that they do take damage if hit with enemy fire, but I don’t know if they actually can die. I never tried it but you, the reader, can and let me know afterwards.

Ariel, the 猫耳少女 (nekomimi shoujo) is a catgirl that flies on a broom. She can put her Feens out in front of her (front), get them to follow her around, like Marisa’s first choice in Mountain of Faith (follow), or fly around her with the shots going around like a windmill (rolling).

Nebel, the うさみみ少年 (usamimi shounen – not really sure what it means although Gjiten says sad-earred boy, which does not make any sense) is a boy with dark rabbit ears that has little wings on his back, which are used to fly around. His firing modes have him putting his Feens to the side (side), facking backwards (back) or overlapping himself to get a wide firing arch (hide).

Personally, I like using Nebel more, since the side and back formations are really effective in taking out enemies in the front and back respectively.

Another thing that makes DieFeen a bit different is the fact that you have a ridiculous number of bombs. In this game, Feens are also your bombs, although they are inside a bag and you start off with 16 inside.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the Feens get replaced by the ones inside your bag if they die…

Oh well, like I said, you readers can find out and let me know.

The general impression that I got when I heard about this game from the various places I look around for Comiket games is that this is hard.

After playing this, I concur. And it’s only the trial! The actual game itself is not finished!

RefRain ~prism memories~ is from RebRank. From my limited knowledge of Japanese and skill of observation, they are a doujin group focused on STGs.

Due to the lack of trailers from RebRank, I present a gameplay video instead (stolen from here).

Please note: this guy makes it look easy -.-. However, it provides one thing that people should note when playing STGs: use your bombs!

Pretty awesome techno-based soundtrack as well. In any case, I think I will need to try out their previous game 五月雨 ~samidare~ while anticipating the complete game. Good luck for me finding it though; finding games from previous Comikets is near impossible, unless they are extremely popular like the 東方 games.

If you have 20 minutes and 40 seconds of time, please take a look at The Story of Stuff.

I will not going into it in much detail because I do not want to accidentally ruin the message, which I believe is very true and something I absolutely believe in, even before watching the video.