I've been working a lot on Real Time lately, and we've managed to finish the first kernel assignment almost a week early. Hopefully we can finish the second kernel assignment this week before the first one is even due! Just like Graphics!

The only other exciting thing that has happened lately was that the cleaning lady for our apartment came today! First time! She was really nice and cleaned almost everything. She vacuumed, mopped, cleaned counters and the bathroom. So awesome! This is such a non-student place!

Oh yeah, one other thing. I signed an offer from Autodesk (at the old Alias office in Toronto) to be a full-time software developer on the Maya team starting in September. Yay jobs! I need to find an apartment in Toronto now, preferably downtown. My biggest requirement is ensuite laundry, but I'd also like to have all the nice fancy things that the new expensive condos have.

It's been a while since my last update, and a lot has happened. But this will probably be a fairly abridged version as I'm kinda tired/busy. Real Time is going to be a lot of work.

The day after my last exam of the term I flew back to California to interview for two more positions with Apple. It went pretty well and Mike managed to come down to visit for an evening which rocked as usual (mmm....Outback Steakhouse). I also got to stay in California for a reasonable amount of time (3 nights), so things were much less rushed than last time and I think it made the interviews go a little smoother (lots of time to relax and get settled).

I got back on a Wednesday to meet Mike (who arrived the day before) at the Westcourt apartment for pizza and a bit of chillin'. Other than Pizza Hut taking two hours to deliver our food (yay for future credit!), it was a pretty relaxing evening. The next day we ran down to Kitchener to pick up a rental van to move to our new place down the street. I'm now on McDougall, which isn't much further from the University than Westcourt. The place is really sweet though, brand new stuff everywhere and gigantic. Plus, air conditioning for the summer.

Here are some pictures of my room, note that I have opted to use the double bed someone left here and that it means I finally get to live the true student experience by sleeping on a matress on the floor.

Mike in front of my closet

Mike shooting a basket in front of my desk/dresser

Mike in front of my bed

Matt's room:

Matt in his room

Mike's room:

Mike's room at McDougall

The common areas:

The hallway at McDougall

The kitchen and living room at McDougall

The kitchen and living room at McDougall

Bathroom at McDougall

Laundry Room

After getting all moved in we relaxed, watched a bunch of Simpsons on my new DVD/DivX player, and just generally hung out. Kim helped move and she stayed for the weekend, and Adrienne also came to visit on Saturday and Sunday.

I'm only taking one class this term, and it is Real Time Programming, which many people will tell you is more than enough all on it's own. I think I can already say that I agree. We've only had a week of classes and I'm already worried about being able to finish the work. Tonight (a Sunday), after getting back from my trip home, I went straight to the lab and worked for more than four hours on my current assignment. Despite the work, it looks like it will be pretty fun, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot.

This weekend was also really fun. Friday was Kim's birthday, so I left Waterloo early to visit her on Thursday night and all day Friday. We shopped a bit and did the dinner thing and just had a good time. My mom's birthday is also in May (the 30th), and my brother and I decided to take her to see the musical "Hair" this year in Toronto. Saturday was a good day for it, so that's what we did. We hit up the Hot House for supper afterwards and it was about the same as usual. The show was great, and I think my mom really enjoyed the day (which is all that really matters). Sunday I went to lunch with Kim's family (as usual), but this time we had cake and presents for Kim and her dad (his birthday is the day after Kim's). The whole weekend was a nice, last break before Real Time takes me away.

Just a quick update, it's exam time so not much interesting is happening. This term's exam time time wasters have included Mario Adventure and working on my Ray Tracer (no updates to the online docs yet, but that will come eventually). It's been pretty fun, but my real exams are coming now (Compilers and Coding Theory) so I think I'm going to have to actually start studying in a more organized fashion.

In other news I have a sweet apartment for the summer and I'm going to try pretty hard to go to the Siggraph Conference in August.

I joined Facebook which is a social networking site for University/College students. Normally I have much disdain for social networking, but the post-secondary nature of the site appealed to me. Oh well, it's a good alternative to work and now I can say that I am familiar with social networking. Damn you kids and your music!

Funny times today. Ryan got this big bag of mini-potatos at the Wholesale Club here in Waterloo a few weeks ago, but since there were too many to eat all at once they've been sitting in our freezer. Unfortunately this makes them hard to get apart when he wants to eat some. Today he tried hitting them against the stairs to break some off...but the bag broke instead! The potatos also chose this time to conveniently break apart, making a really fun mess. The pictures tell a much better story:

Ryan and his messy potatos

Close up of the spilled potatos

So I got back from New York last night at about 11pm...not too bad considering I left La Guardia at about 7:30 and there had to be about 1000 people ahead of me in the customs line at Pearson.

I was in New York for a job interview with Google, at their New York office (located near Times Square). I think it went pretty well, and I have to say that it was an awesome experience. All the things you hear about working at Google (the free food, the on-site massage therapists, the awesome everything) is totally true. It would be such an amazing place to work because they care soooo much about their employees. They go way out of their way to ensure that the environment is perfect so that they can get the best from everyone who works there.

The trip was fairly similar to my California adventure: get on a plane, go to a hotel, do the interviews the next day, leave that evening. The main difference was the city, and the fact that I didn't know anyone in the area so I was on my own for the evening of my arrival. The hotel was pretty sweet (free HBO among other things), but I couldn't just hang out there all afternoon and evening so I went for a 3 hour walk around the area. Went through Macy's (damn that store is big), wandered around Times Square and went up the Empire State Building. I toyed with the idea of getting food from some random tasty looking place that I had never heard of before, but decided against it and just got a sub from Subway. Didn't want to make myself sick on bad food before the interview.

Here are a few pictures I took from the top of the Empire State Building:

Picture from the Empire State Building looking north-east towards the Chrysler Building

Picture from the Empire State Building looking north over the city

Picture from the Empire State Building looking south towards the financial district, skyline missing the World Trade Centre, Statue of Liberty barely visible in top right corner

Here are some pictures of my hotel room:

The beds in my room in New York

TV and entrance to my room in New York

Tempting expensive food left in my room

Cool shower head in hotel in New York

Here is a picture of some of the swag Google bestowed upon me for coming down to interview with them:

Google swag

The last two days definitely count among the craziest I've ever had. I was down in California for my interview with Apple and I managed to squeeze in a tour of Pixar, dinner/hanging with Mike, and a complete trip around the San Francisco Bay in addition to a day of interviews. And I wan't even in the state for 30 hours!

I had to get up at 5am on Wednesday to catch a shuttle at 6am from the University to the airport in Toronto. From there it was on to San Jose with a very brief stopover in Phoenix. Pretty cool to see all the landscapes and stuff as we crossed the continent (although I didn't get a window seat so I didn't have that great of a view). The thing that struck me the most is how flat everything is. I guess they didn't have glaciers carve the countryside into thousands of small hills and valleys like around here.

The flight back (which left at 8:30pm on Thursday) had a two hour stopover in Las Vegas and I must say that was an interesting experience. First of all, flying into Las Vegas at night is a really neat. The strip looks really cool and there are soooo many lights. Other than that though, the experience was mostly strange. The airport was full of slot machines (never saw anyone get any payout whatsoever) and had a whole bunch of designated smoking areas which wern't really separated from the rest of the airport at all. Just places with chairs and ashtrays. Very uncool. Also very old-school, I remember way back in the day when most public places were like that but I haven't seen it in a long time. My plane was delayed in Las Vegas, but not enough to make me miss my shuttle back to Waterloo in Toronto. My plane trip can be seen in the image below (green on the way there and red on the way back).

Flight to and from San Jose

So I arrived at San Jose just before 3pm local time and instead of checking into my hotel, I decided the best idea would be to go visit Mike. It turned out OK, but I cut it pretty close getting back. I'm pretty sure midnight was the latest I could check in to my hotel and I finally got there at 11:30pm. Crazy.

Anyway, Mike and Pixar (Emeryville) are kinda far from San Jose. I had to take an Amtrak train (in red below) from San Jose to Emeryville which took about 1.5 hours. Pretty cheap though, just $11. Ended up chatting with a random girl the whole way, but I think she was kinda crazy. She told some pretty unbelievable stories (more and more as we went). Pretty sure she was trying to see how far she could go before I called her on it and told her she was a nut. Well, I didn't break so I won the little game!

To get back from Emeryville to Cupertino (where Apple and my hotel are), I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit system) which is basically just a subway, part of which actually goes under the bay (in blue below). Maybe I'm wrong, but an underwater subway seems like a bad idea in an earthquake prone region. Anyway, the BART stops at the San Francisco airport so I had to transfer to a commuter train (like Toronto's GO train; in red below). Unfortunately I arrived like an hour early for the 10:24pm train which meant I had to wait around for an hour in an essentially abandoned train station. In the dark, alone, in some random ass place in California. It turned out OK, but seemed a bit sketchy at the time. The train only took me as far as Sunnyvale, so from there it was a cab ride (yellow below) to the hotel. This map shows my trip around the bay.

Trip around San Francisco Bay

So that is all the travelling I did, but I actually did a lot of fun stuff too. Mike took me on a tour of Pixar, which was absolutely insane! It was just so cool to be there, it must be amazing to work there. I got a cool Pixar t-shirt with Luxo Jr. on it and I got to meet a lot of really nice people. Here are a couple of pictures of the Pixar front gates (they are taken at night, so they arn't the best, but still pretty cool).

Pixar front gates

Me in front of Pixar front gates

After the tour we got some supper at a pretty good Indian restaurant and then headed back to Mike's apartment. It was really nice, but I couldn't stick around too long as I had to catch the BART to attempt to get back to the hotel. We did mess around with his mom's new digital SLR though, here is a picture.

Me and Mike in his Emeryville apartment

The hotel was really good. I actually had a suite with a bedroom, bathroom and living room. King bed in the bedroom, two TVs, and they even gave me a free shuttle to the airport the next day after I had checked out. Here are a couple pictures of the suite:

Living room in suite at Cupertino Inn

Bedroom in suite at Cupertino Inn

The next day was the interviews at Apple (you know, the point/funding source of the trip). Eight in total, it basically lasted all day. It was pretty challenging, but the team seems really awesome and I think it would be a really cool place to work. Actually I know it would. The only question is whether I want to live in the US or not (and whether they like me, of course). I think I performed OK, but I missed a couple questions I should have got and I have no idea what my competition is like.

After the interview I got on my plane and headed home. In the last 48 hours I've only had 6 hours of sleep and I've changed time zones twice. I'm pretty confused about what I should do right now, so I did this blog entry. Probably going to sleep/eat now.

Such a crazy day! First was class, then my 2.5 hour Sybase interview and then my Psychology midterm. But wait! That's not all! Between class and my interview I heard back from Apple! They want me to come to California for more interviews! So awesome! And, I finally got chat in Gmail! And I got dairy queen tonight! And Kellie's car got here! Way too much is happening! Hence the exclamation marks!

Crazy times lately, not much time to post.

Last weekend was fun, I mostly worked but on Friday I got to help push Keizo's car around the parking lot and help create a trap for a mouse we found in our downstairs bathroom. Both activities were successful, the car ended up in our parking spot and the mouse was put outside (alive).

Compilers is a bunch of work of course, but I haven't been able to pay enough attention to it because of job stuff and midterms in other courses. At the beginning of the term I applied for jobs at Sybase, Google, Apple and a couple other places. I got interviews for the three listed above: Sybase by phone last week, Google in person this week and Apple in person this Friday. I spent a lot of time preparing for the Google interview and it was still really challenging. Sounds like a great place to work though. The Sybase interview went well too and as a result I have an additional interview with them next week. Hopefully Apple goes well.

This term is disappearing really quickly, it's pretty nuts. I'm really glad that I'm taking an extra term for Real Time because if nothing else it will give me a few extra months to prepare for the "real world." Or something. I'm sure I won't be any more prepared by then but it's comforting for now.

I need to figure out what to do for housing next term. It looks like Kellie is moving out, so I need an extra person if I am going to live here with Mike and Matt. Anyone interested? If not, I will have to find a new place. Residence is pretty tempting since it's cheaper in the summer, it's close, it's air conditioned, and best of all it doesn't require any extra effort for things like utilities.

Update: This post seemed kinda boring without a picture so I took a couple with my camera using a fun new feature I found for using the auto-focus in a manual sort of way.

Fun with depth of field and the crap on my desk.

I suppose I should put in my two cents about the election, isn't that what blogs are really for? Valid social commentary from the point of view of real people? Haha, yeah, right. :)

Anyway, the Conservatives won a slim majority and I think it will probably be OK and even beneficial in some respects. They don't have enough hold on parliament to try anything too risky. Also, they get a chance to show Canada if they are a bunch of crazies or if they deserve to carry on the "conservative" name. My main issue with politics in Canada right now is the lack of a valid right-wing party. Social conservatism has no place in Canada, however fiscal conservatism is a very valid political ideology that can help balance the governing of the nation. Unfortunately social and fiscal conservatism have been merged just like in the United States.

On the positive side of things, the Conservative party has very tight ties to Alberta and so hopefully relationships between the west and the rest of the country will improve. I think that the west was really starting to get pissed off at the way they are treated. They generally feel that the rest of Canada benefits off the vast amounts of money generated by their oil while at the same time giving them essentially no say in the running of the country.

Also of note, the NDP made significant gains. This is nice because it means that we are not a two party system like in the United States. There is a third option that actually can have an influence. The success of the NDP was somewhat muted however by the disproportionately small number of seats they won compared to their share of the popular vote. A parallel of this issue can be seen with the Green party, which achieved the highest number of votes they ever have, but still failed to win any seats in the house. As someone who has never taken a political science course I don't know how to fix this problem, but I'm sure there must be a solution that merges the ideals of regional representation with the nationwide popular vote.

Finally, I think it is a good thing that the Liberals are not in power because a change is good every once in a while. Also, it is time for a new leader so that the party can become disconnected from the negative events of the past few years. While those events did not bother me personally, I think that I'm in the minority with regard to this opinion.

I do have concerns regarding the upcoming government. These include health care (the possible two-tierization thereof) and the various human rights issues that go along with the social conservatism of the hardline elements in the Conservative party. Although Stephen Harper has said that he will not pursue abortion or same-sex marriage related causes, I wonder whether the latent Reform/Alliance members of the party will really just let him go ahead with those plans. Finally, I am also saddened by the loss of a national childcare plan. While it very possibly would have failed, a success like the program instituted in Quebec could have really helped shape the next generation of Canadians in a very positive way. Remember everyone, children are important! Stephen Harper's tax credit is essentially useless. The free market philosophy is not perfect and this is one of those instances (like health care) where government intervention is required.

In other completely unrelated news, I finally tried a White Russian which was the drink of choice of the Dude from one of my favourite movies, The Big Lebowski. I must say, I'm a fan of the drink. Very tasty.