I was in London the last few days, just hanging out and visiting with Kim and my family. We had a really nice lunch in the park on Sunday, and on Monday I got to visit with Mike for a while before he takes off back to California for 4 months. I didn't get to visit with Kim as much as I would have liked because she had to work at her new job at the bank a lot. But that's OK because it sounds like she is enjoying it.

Yesterday I came back to Toronto and we did the wing night thing at Fresh on Spadina. I had a Buddha rice bowl and it was super tasty. I really like peanut type sauces. We also played games after dinner and I hope we continue with that because it was really fun. Rob has so many cool board games!

In other news I have managed to start reading again (yay!) and lately I've been reading some Robert Heinlein. He's a classic science fiction author who is really quite talented. I just finished "Stranger in a Strange Land" and it is definitely one of the best books I've read in a while. It's also very accessible to people who may not normally lean towards the genre. It takes place almost completely on Earth, and all of the main characters are human. That being said, I love the more inaccessible kind of science fiction too, but it's nice when I enjoy a book to be able to recommend it to others who don't have my more nerdish leanings.

I went to see Spamalot last night and I must say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. Lots of great recreations of stuff from the movie, along with lots of new stuff written just for the show. It seemed pretty true to the general Monty Python style, it even had little animations at some points. We had dinner at Fran's before the show and I had really good Macaroni and Cheese as well as an awesome milkshake.

On Thursday night we saw Clerks 2 and had supper at Salad King. Both were awesome as expected.

It's been a long time again since my last update, and a lot has happened. I tell myself I haven't updated because I'm too busy, but the real reason is that the amount of stuff to write about has gotten to be so large that the task is just too daunting. Rather than writing in detail, I will just do a quick catchup now, and then I'll try really hard in the future to not fall behind (yeah, right).

Matt and I moved into our place in Toronto last Monday, and the whole production went very smoothly (probably because we have very few possessions). We do need to buy a lot of things now, like a couch or maybe a chair, or any furniture at all for the living area. It's pretty bare right now.

We hooked up Internet right away, and it is really awesome. The building we live in shares an OC-48 line with a couple other condo buildings near by, which means that we get 100Mb Internet right to our suite. It's about 35 times faster than the average cable or DSL connection and it is only costing us an extra $5/month. Pretty sweet deal.

After moving in, we spent a couple days running around to get some things, but for the most part we accomplished very little. On Thursday morning we went back to Waterloo to write the Real Time exam (easy) and then I left the next day with Mike and Alex to go to Alex's cottage on Christian Island (it's the big one west of Thunder Beach).

The cottage was awesome! We basically just relaxed, ate food and went to the beach. We played lots of cards, and also got a change to drive a Sea-doo which was really cool too.

I'm back in Toronto now, and I am really enjoying myself. I love how easy it is to just walk out and get stuff, and I've already been out to eat at lots of fun places (and I'm going out for another *wing night* tonight).

Here are some pictures taken from my balcony, I'll take some indoor pictures once we have some furniture:

View off my new balcony

View off my new balcony

View off my new balcony

View off my new balcony

View off my new balcony

View off my new balcony

Well, classes are done, and Real Time is over (except for the exam). We had our demo on Tuesday, and it didn't go overly well. The trains and the tracks took quite a thrashing over the last couple days of development and as a result our models were no longer very accurate. Also, the trains in the demo kept getting stuck/derailed which generally screws things up in ways that can't be avoided. The prof and TAs understand however, because they all took the course themselves at one point. We will pass and that is all that matters. I'm officially tired of school. I've had enough.

I finally beat "Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" today, after starting it a couple months ago. I never played it when I was younger and I always felt I missed out, so at the beginning of this term I fired up the trusy SNES emulator and started playing. Unfortunately Real Time put a stop to any regular playing, so it didn't progress very quickly. But that's all taken care of so I played a whole bunch yesterday and today and now the game is finished (I even got all of the heart pieces). I thoroughly enjoyed playing it, just as much as Super Metroid (which I played for the first time this Spring). Nintendo rocks, they make such fun games. If they do the Wii right, I will definitely be picking one up!

We're moving to Toronto this coming Monday. I can't wait to get settled in my new place and start acting like a person instead of a wandering vagrant. I'll be able to give people my address and not have to remember to update it with them every four months! I'm also looking forward to starting work. Mike has been working a lot in Maya lately and I'm really excited to start working on it again. Computer Graphics rocks! On a related note, I'm going to rewrite the base code for my ray tracer and start trying to keep it up as a personal coding project. It's really fun to work on so I don't think this will be too hard.

I need new shoes. The 5+ year old Dr. Marten's have just about had it.

It's been a while since my last update, and a lot has happened, but I've really spent most days just working on Real Time so it feels like it's been just more of the same the whole time.

Matt and I have entered into a year lease for an apartment in Toronto at Front and Spadina. It's part of the Concord Cityplace complex which means we get to become weird downtown condo people. On the plus side however, the building is wired (with fibre) so we can get 100Mb Internet, and it only costs $50/month!! I'm pretty excited to move in, I like Toronto, and I get to start being a real person with a few nice things, instead of a student with whatever I can scavenge from random people.

I was in Toronto on Saturday for Rib-o-Rama at John's house. It was a pretty good time and I got to chat with a bunch of people who I'll be working with in the Fall so that was really awesome.

I ordered a cell phone today, so I have officially entered the ranks of the rude people. I figure I can't live in Toronto without one, but I feel as if a piece of my soul is now lost forever.

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

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.