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

Kim's mom gave her two tickets to the Lord of the Rings musical in Toronto so we went to that this weekend and it was not too bad. Probably about as good as a musical version of the Lord of the Rings could be. But I don't see it doing a multiple year run like other shows have done at the Princess of Whales (Phantom of the Opera -- 8 years or something). We also wandered around the Eaton's Centre a bit and got supper at the Pickle Barrel which is always good.

On Sunday Kim and I went to see X-Men 3 in Waterloo, and it was alright. Fun action stuff with more mutants that remind you of the original cartoon or comics (if you happened to have partaken in those as a child). We also went for supper at the Mongolian Grill with Mike and Matt for Mike's birthday. We even got the staff to give Mike a free dessert and sing to him. Afterwards Mike and I hung out at the tea shop next door with a couple of his friends until after midnight. Good times!

This term has been pretty relaxing so far. I work on Real Time and that's about it. The rest of the time I just hang out, do stuff with Kim or other friends, or just play Legend of Zelda for SNES. We've been working our way through the first six seasons of the Simpsons on DVD and we're probably going to start watching Arrested Development soon as well.

The new version of Ubuntu is coming out this week. I'm planning on installing it right away because my Debian installation has become a bit broken in the last few weeks. I really shouldn't have done that last "dist-upgrade" but you never know that before it's too late.

Our Waterloo apartment is nice (as I mentioned before) and I appreciate the fact that the air conditioning allows me to sit at my desk and type without sweating (last summer term was HOT). But, we're in the basement and as far as we can tell the air conditioning is ALWAYS on. We all wear sweaters, jeans and socks when we're home and it's over 30 degrees Celsius outside! It's just not right when I have to remove extra clothing to go outside.

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.