Do you ever wish you could transmit your current knowledge back in time to yourself in the past?

The co-op program made me realize what it takes to get good jobs in my chosen field. Unfortunately it didn't convey this information in a timely or useful manner; it was conveyed through failure and frustration...learning from your mistakes and all that.

I have an amazing job this term at Alias. I put a lot of effort into getting the job, and I put a lot of effort into the other jobs I applied for in the same term. I wrote custom cover letters and did research and all that stuff. Enthusiasm plus effort can get you almost any job you want in co-op as long as you are even remotely competent. If Alias didn't hire me there were 7 other companies who gave me offers and 3 or 4 of them would have been pretty good. All it took to get these jobs was confidence and enthusiasm and reasonable effort. It was so simple.

I didn't know this information when I started out. Perhaps that is my fault but I am grateful that I learned it eventually, even if it had to be the hard way. However, I can't help partially blaming the Co-op department and the general attitudes of those around me for the length of time it took to come to this realization. First year co-op students are told to apply to the crappier jobs to be sure that they get something. Personally I was told some variation of this line quite a few times. I think that I started believing that I couldn't get jobs that I might like so I often didn't even apply to those that I found most interesting.

But that is not the case. Sure, nVidia isn't likely to ship a first year down to California to help write device drivers for their latest graphics cards, but if you put together an impressive package and show that you care, they might bring you down to do some testing or some other job that can get your foot in the door. You can't knock the experience of working at nVidia, regardless of the position. Even if you don't go back for that "better" job, the contribution to your resume is considerable.

Also, there are many good companies (like Alias) that actively hire first year students for co-op positions because they acknowledge that the co-op program is more than an oppourtunity for cheap labour.

Although every individual is ultimately responsible for his/her own life, I can't help but think that if I had received more encouraging and useful information in my first year, I might have applied to "riskier" jobs and made that extra effort. But the goal of the co-op department is high employment rates and the "conservative" advice works out better overall I imagine.

I regret the lost opportunities, and wish I could change the past. It's not that I haven't enjoyed some of my other placements, but the type of work I get to do at Alias feels like a privilege whereas my other jobs just felt like responsibilities. Even if I get nothing else out of my current work term (which is impossible because I already have), I am glad that I got the chance to realize what it is like to really enjoy your work.

So I have 50 Gmail invites now, that is a really large number considering that I think I've given one to everyone I know who wants one. If anyone at all wants one, make a comment indicating so and I will send you one. Here is proof:

Lots of invites

Maybe I will just start registering variants of my name so that people can't take them from me, haha, that'll show 'em.

Today is Pancake Tuesday, the day where everyone not in New Orleans celebrates the day that God invented not only the pancake, but also maple syrup (of course everyone in New Orleans instead takes their shirt off and gets really drunk; probably not in that order though - goooooo Mardi Gras).

Since it is a Tuesday we had our "wing" night at the Golden Griddle so that we could have pancakes. It was alright, but I think I ate too much.

I think I want to buy the Ryan DVD. I should remember to do that when I get my credit card back.

Today was fun. I met Adrienne and Matt downtown and we went to Burrito Boyz for lunch. It was this tiny place near Much Music that had some pretty amazing food for cheap. Mmmm...I love food in Toronto. Then we went to Starbucks for the new "Drinking Chocolate" which is just ultra-rich hot chocolate, and was also really good.

The National Film Board has a free viewing location near my house where you can go watch movies from the archives (going waaaay back) for free. We went to see "Ryan" which has been nominated for an Oscar in the Short Film category this year. It's about Ryan Larkin who was an Oscar-nominated animator for the NFB in the 1960s and who is now a panhandler in the streets of Montreal (as the result of various addictions). It is mostly a computer-animated film made by a former employee of Alias using Maya, which is what I currently work on. So cool. The movie was really good, I hope it wins. I also watched one of Ryan Larkin's films from 1968 while I was there. It was interesting; those crazy hippies, they think up some crazy things. Haha.

After that we made the obligatory trip to Canada Computers and then went to Matt's house to have supper and just hang out.

I want to get a digital camera, specifically the Canon Powershot A95, but it sells for $460 at Canada Computers, and the cheapest I've seen on eBay is about $400. Too much I think for my first digital camera. Oh well, maybe it will come down in price by the end of my work term.

I don't really have anything to say tonight.

I added a comment feature to my website! And it only took a year to implement (it actually took about 2.5 hours, but I originally intended to start last February and that is about a year ago now).

Yay procrastination.

This weekend was pretty good, Kim came here to my apartment in Toronto and we hung out and did Toronto-like things for the weekend.

On Saturday we went to the ROM which was neat since I haven't been there in a long time. Kim really enjoyed the ancient Roman and Greek exhibits (she is minoring in classical studies). Afterwards we walked around Toronto a bunch and I got to see some parts of Toronto that I haven't walked through before. It was neat. I had a sub from Quizno's for supper and it was really good, I have to remember to go back there. Mmmmm...sub. In the evening we watched The Notebook which Kim has been begging to watch with me. It was pretty good.

My apartment is just a room I am subletting from a guy in a condo downtown so I have access to all of the condo facilities such as a workout room, pool tables and a hot tub. After we watched The Notebook, Kim and I decided to use the hot tub for a bit before going to bed. It was really nice because it is in a room with lots of windows on the roof of the building so while you soak you get a really good view of the city. Anyway, after we got back we got a call from security, apparently the "back board" that is in the hot tub room was off the wall and on the floor and they were concerned that someone had been injured. They called me because they knew I had been in there because you have to use a pass card to get in. The pass card transmits your room number whenever you use it and that information is logged. I know that this is useful information for security purposes, but I personally find it fairly creepy. You have to use the card to get into the building and for lots of other things too so they have a lot of information about my movements. Now I'm not paranoid, it's just that they are all out to get me.

Today Kim and I just sat around. We slept late and watched Spiderman 2. We also checked out this market-like store that is close to my house, Rabba's (the website might not be working). It is about a one minute walk from my place and carries most groceries at almost reasonable prices. It's not really much worse than the Dominion which is the next closet grocery store. They are both expensive though, No Frill's should open a downtown store, that would rock.

I'm reading "Planet Simpson" by Chris Turner and it is pretty cool. I personally like it because it shows that the Simpsons has real depth which is something too many people are unaware of. It always bothers me when people say they don't like the Simpsons because it just means they haven't watched enough of it. Or they are completely without a sense of humour. Both of which are inexcusable. People shouldn't pass judgment on things they don't know about, and the world is too ridiculous to take seriously.

My only complaint with the book so far is that the author is too hard on the Family Guy, calling it "mediocre" and "nakedly derivative." While the concept of Family Guy is derivative of the Simpsons (intensely dysfunctional family), Family Guy has many merits of its own. Family Guy helped popularize a type of humour that I greatly enjoy, specifically the blatantly absurd and random. I've noticed that new episodes of the Simpsons tend to use this type of humour more than before Family Guy was popular. Sure, the Simpsons has always been random, but Family Guy is the king of random crap. The show might not have the same depth as the Simpsons but it is still funny as hell. Maybe if it had had a few more seasons it could have become something more.

I'm in Toronto now. Yay me.

I have an interest in computer graphics. Specifically modelling I think. Sometimes I like to examine real world objects and think about how they might be modelled by a computer. Of course I have absolutely no experience or knowledge of this field, but I still like to contemplate nonetheless.

Today I was looking at the towels in my bathroom and I noticed that they look like crap. They have been used and washed and dryed so many times that they have become distorted due to varying amounts of stretching among the composite threads. It made me think that if I were to attempt to create a computer model of those particular towels, that no one would ever think that the model looked very realistic or accurate (no matter how good it was) unless they were shown the original towels.

The reason for this is, of course, that the towels are pretty crappy looking. The only reason my family and anyone else who sees them accepts their appearance is because people assume that the world around them is accurate. When you see something on a TV or monitor however, you are more inclined to see fault and doubt what you see. So the computer model fails while the real things are accepted.

My point is that there is a distinct possibility that computer graphics may never fully be able to recreate the real world. We (or at least me) always like to look for flaws in things that appear on screens and we avoid looking for flaws in real life (because we assume real life to be correct). So when we see a computer generated image that contains something out of the ordinary (such as horribly deformed towels) we might very well interpret the strangeness as evidence of a failure of the computer to correctly render the real world, regardless of the accuracy of the models.

Thus, even if we get to the point where everything can be recreated by a computer, it is possible that the audience may not be so accepting because the real world is full of very strange things that we only accept because they exist.