Normally reinstalling an Operating System is a rather painful and disruptive experience, however Linux, and specifically Ubuntu can be much happier then some of the alternatives.

On the advice of a friend I decided to attempt to setup XGL/Compiz on my Ubuntu installation to get all the fancy special effects that are possible when your desktop is composited by your video card. Unfortunately this stuff is still a bit new and so it has some bugs. In particular, the installation script I chose was very buggy and although the XGL/Compiz stuff did eventually work, it normally crashed and died after about 5 minutes. Also, even when it was not enabled, my system had become unreliable at best. I later found out that the installer script I used had been deemed "not ready for use" by the creator about a day after I tried it. Oh well.

So anyway, X.org was busted beyond all recognition and I didn't want to muck about trying to rollback to the official version. That meant a complete reinstall. Fortunately, my home directory and all my files are on another partition, thus my data was safe. However, I would still have to reinstall all the software I had installed already, which was a fair amount. I was able to export a list of currently installed packages from Synaptic, but I didn't have any hopes for being able to actually use it.

So I formatted my OS partition and reinstalled Ubuntu Dapper Drake. After getting the security updates, switching to a newer kernel and setting up the nVidia drivers, I opened the packages list with Synaptic. It worked perfectly and all of my old packages were downloaded and installed. Less than 2 hours after starting and with almost no effort on my part my system is back up and running exactly the way it was earlier this evening. Now that is amazing.

In other news I am finding that Real Time isn't as cool as it was and is now just a lot of work. Oh well, just 4 more weeks.

Oh man, I never thought Real Time would actually be this crazy, but I guess I was wrong. The Tracking #1 assignment was due today, and we spent all of the past week working on it, at least 8 hours each day. Then, to finish, we spent 17 consecutive hours working on it on Sunday (from 10am until 3am). Totally nuts, but I think it was worth it because our prof was really impressed by our demo. He said our tracking was much better than what he normally sees at this stage in the course and he gave us a 95% on the assignment. Hopefully we can continue with this performance for the rest of the term!

After the demo I decided to do nothing for the rest of the day. And by nothing I mean go grocery shopping, make some phone calls and then go to Morty's for wings with Matt, Keizo, Jen, Greg, Sean, and Rene. It was pretty fun and a nice break. I also went back to Greg's after to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Good times, even though Edmonton lost.

I also picked up a headset today to attempt to use with Skype. Since SkypeOut is now free, this may be my new replacement for long distance!

I went to home last night so that I could get a root canal today. And as fun as that wasn't, it was still a nice break from Real Time, which is becoming annoying. The next assignment is due on Monday and we arn't really all that close to being done. The next few days will suck. And if we don't get it done, then it's just going to make the following assignment even worse (because we will still have to finish this one). And the following assignment doesn't need any help with being bad.

In other random news, my family almost lost our cat this week. He escaped outside last Friday and didn't come home until just today. Whenever the cat goes outside he always comes back the very next day (lalala). So when he didn't we got worried that something happened to him. Normally we let him out in the back and he plays in the forest behind my mom's house, but this time he went out the front door and that is still a bit weird for him since my mom is in a newish house. We figured he got lost and then something bad happened. So my mom went to animal shelters and other various places looking for him to no avail. One animal shelter did give her "Lost Pet" flyers that she could pass out, so she dropped a bunch off to our neighbours. It turned out that the lady two doors down had found him less than two hours after he escaped on Friday and she took him into her house. She was planning on keeping him!!! She even took him to the vet and got him shots and stuff even though it is clear he is not a stray. We're also pretty sure that she knew he was ours, but she never came and asked. It was only the flyer that got him back. Stupid cat stealing lady, we knew she looked evil the first time we saw her!

Anyway, Angus (the cat) was very healthy and suffered not at all, and as you can see he is already back to his abnormal self:

Angus drinking from the toilet

I saw Cars on Friday night and even though it was opening night, it feels like I should have seen it a long time ago. Mike has been talking about how awesome it is for a long time now, so I've been feeling like I'm missing out. It was an extremely awesome movie, the story was solid as is usual for Pixar movies and the quality of the computer graphics was a HUGE step above anything that's been done before. Awesome! I saw it with Matt, Mike and Mike's friends Jeremy, Yung and Nick. Everyone went to get tea after the movie, but I went home and straight to bed because I had to get up at 7am this morning (which is much earlier than my normal 10:30am).

This morning I met up with some people from Alias/Autodesk to go bouldering at Niagara Glen. I've never been climbing outdoors before so this was an awesome experience. Also, the park was absolutely beautiful. Just a whole bunch of trails circling around the Niagara Escarpment and all of the wonderful rocks it has to climb on. The climbs were pretty challenging and some of them went fairly high, but we had three crash pads and lots of spotters so it was pretty safe. I had a great time, but I am definitely out of practice. I can't wait to start climbing regularly again once I am in Toronto.

The park was on the Niagara River, so we had lunch on some big rocks on the edge. I took a bunch of cool pictures while we were there, and here they are:

The view down stream of the Niagara River

The view up stream of the Niagara River

Me on a rock in front of the Niagara River

Cool macro shot with the Niagara River in the background