log 517

Study week is coming to an end and yet I don’t feel I’ve done much studying or rest at all. I’ve been working at my home office as though I got a full time contract. Anyway if you have been following on the stuff I wrote, I found the bug in friendster’s search. The postal code is case sensitive. When I type it in lower case, it just doesn’t search right and use the next limitation I set, which happens to be Canada. So….finally got an answer of why the search didn’t work. woohoo!  It does bring a strange though to my mind. Are there any postal code that’s all lower case?

Yup that’s right. Interview went really smooth, and I got the job. It was great. People were nice and relaxed there, the drive to work is nice. I think this might be the first place I will be at where I’m not tied to tight deadlines. Hope I will adjust to that work style. I’m usually under pressure against time. A lot of times, the pressure doesn’t come from a client or employer but from me. I expect a lot from myself. Anyway it’s great, now that the coop situation has been handled, I can put my full….eer most of my concentration on assignments and test. Need to pump the marks back up. I’m a bit disappointed by my marks lately. Only manage to get low 80s. I should find some time to have fun too. Heh heh after the interview today, I rushed back to work on my freelence stuff. Worked the whole after and was so exhausted I fell asleep around 6. It was alright, woke up at 9 and head right back. Finally finish the day’s work sometime just after midnight. Gotta start working on my other freelence thing tomorrow.

one more thing, the new work place isn’t one of those corporate enviroments so my long hair is staying for another few months. How looooong can it grow.  ^_^

Got some free time after preping the stuff i need for the interview tomorrow, so i start browsing people’s profile on friendster. Problem…about a month before they introduce the chat feature, things start to go funny with the search. Profiles which doesn’t fit the limitation I set start popping out. So today I fiddled with the setting to see where it went wrong. First I though it was matching the word "Richmond" to where I live, and cause the BC profiles to show, but later, I found out there are more than just Richmond, BC profiles. There were profiles from all over the world, The most noticable repeatition are profile from manila and BC. After 15 mins of fine tuning the search params, I gave up. There has to be something wrong with the friendster db, either that or they just dont’ have a geographical db to support the location search. I know for sure neither BC or Manila are 5 miles from Ontario…..sigh….for spending time trying to diagnose the problem, I give myself 10 nerdy nerd points.  ~_~  …there goes 15 mins of my life that I won’t get back. 

took that long drive to OPG this morning. Took an hour by city, and only 20mins by highway.  Sure the highway would be the choice if I want to get there quickly but I might just decide to drive by city instead. The city route is what I would call the scenic route. Pass by a lot of farm lands and areas segregated from the busy city. You can tell those are the places where you can see the stars at night. For me, those area are what makes Canada a great place to live. It’s always been this way, I despise the modern day town home with the beige bricks and white doors. The idea of building 50+ almost identical houses in the same area and call it a town simply sounds wrong to me. Pickering north is the type of town I like to live in, fill with those ma & pa stores around the corner, you know…small town charms.

Anyway, after I’ve located the destination, I went browsing around and ending up in the Pickering town centre.  The mall is not as big as the ones in scarb or missi but nice never the less. Very typical mall, with a little twist. Besides the big name chain stores they also houses little independent store, which I found to be nice. The food court is a bit dead. not in the sense that choices are limited but rather ….let’s just say I was there around lunch time and there’re more than enough seats to laid around. oh well….happy day, just bought Billy Corgan’s album. ^_^

First night of the break, went to watch a movie, and then dinner with the guys. The movie was alright, your average zombie movie. Dinner was nice, Shang Hai style food, noodles, dumplings and all that.  After dinner we move on over next door for drinks. As usual, I do more listening than talking. Interesting though, one of the guys was talking about his break up with a girl and what a mess he’s in, sometimes I do wonder how that feels. But most of the time, I just don’t have the time to think about it, ha.  Seriously, I would like to have a companion of the opposite gender some day. Aside form the odd days (valentines and christmas), I’m pretty used to being alone. I shop alone, work almost alone. The only thing I don’t like to do is dine alone in context of dinning at a restaurant. It’s alright when Ijust need a quick meal between work. Tomorrow (today, sunday), I plan to go for a dry run of the route I will take on Monday to the interview. I suppose this is the type of thing I drag a friend or the non-existent companion to. Not a long drive but it helps to have an extra pair of eyes.  I’d probably just do it alone anyway. It seems like a waste of other people’s time, since it’s all towards my own benefit. gotta sleep….planning to head out around 9 tomorrow.

One class to go before study week begins.

Finally…it’s a well deservered rest. For the past 2 months, I’ve only taken a day off from my busy schedule. Yup you heard right, for the past 2 months, I spent almost every waking moment on assignments/labs/test and work. The sad part is I had to drop the oop344 subject. Feeling a bit disappointed because I really thought I could handle that amount of subjects at once. Oh well… Why am I working so hard? Guess something snapped in me after my 3.9 gpa ave last sem. I expect myself to do no less or better this sem. Quite a difference considering when I started I was planning just to get a min of B and take things really easy. Anyhow, dropping the subject was a wise decision. I was starting to crack under the pressure. Last time I worked so hard was at GI and that was only 14hr work days for one and a half months. yup…one and a half month of non-stop work is the limit.   gotta get to class… woohoo perl scripting.

Got up pretty early this morning (for a phone interview). Out of bordem, I looked inside the fridge and search for stuff that needs to be eaten. : )   Found one, an unripe avocado. Didn’t know what to do with it at first, because a rock hard avocade isn’t quite the stuff I want to chew on, so I pan fried it.  It was perfect, all soften with a little crunch.  Oh I also had eggs and strips of hot pot pork to bring out the flavour. Why hot pot pork? Because that’s all I could find, and it’s less fattening than bacon. Sure makes for a good breakfast.

was typing away (working on assignments) today. All of a sudden, I stopped, save & closed all my documents. I just sat there idle as the sky darkened. 5 mins later, the power went out. It was almost like I knew that was coming.

anyway, not work (code) was lost and I’m happy.

been enduring a load of stress of late. Lots of assignments, plus the really irritation group project, ….so much stuff unattended. like thanking my aunt and uncle for the b-day e-card almost a month ago, writing back to a friend in hk, constructing the prototype for the re-designed restaurant site, cleaning up around the house, just to name a few. but within the mess of tasks, I received something that brightens my day. I’ve got a reply from one of the three coop application I sent out last week. …last week…wait I think it was three days ago. Anyway, I’m glad I got a reply so soon. I wonder if I will get the job over the phone like the first design job I got years ago….man…that was funny.

back to work. falling a bit behind on my c++…gotta give it my 120%. you know it, sometimes 110% just isn’t enough.

been so busy and stressed these few days. That group assignment is really getting to me. Anyone got a shot gun I can borrow and shot myself in the face?  Almost every time I open the inbox, I have to ask…what is this guy thinking? Oh and there’s my other class, which isn’t too bad. It’s pretty enjoyable. Just that I find there wasn’t enough syntax taught to make the first assignment efficient (dynamic).  Sure, I can fill it up with pages of "if" statements and get it to work, but that will making editing hell. …when will this world make sense?