Plus de faire l’aviron.

So I have been thinking about what I am going to be doing next summer because of the military and wanting to compete in summer regattas and still stay in shape for the fall semester.

I have came up with a list of what is most likely going to happen and in the order from most to least it is:

Go to Kingston, Ontario for eight weeks to do my phase training as a communications and electronics engineer. Then on the weekends and some weekdays I can row at the Kingston Rowing Club with the crew from Queens University. Then upon my return I would be living in Chilliwack working at the base there / rowing with the UFV crew.

If this is not possible then I will probably end up in Esquimalt where I will be doing my second language training. This would allow me to row with the gorge rowing club or the university of Victoria.

Of course if I am not training then I might be able to do a summer semester at SFU, this would allow me to keep rowing at Burnaby Lake which would be my preferred option.

Of course worst case scenario is that I don’t have training and they don’t let me do a summer semester. I would then row with the UFV crew all summer while working at ASU Chilliwack.

There are some bigger regattas this up coming year I want to go to as it will be my last year of rowing next year, at least with the university. We want to do Head of the Weasel next October in Calgary on the reservoir, as well as the Alberta Opens on the same waterbed over the summer. Finally we want to go to the states to do a race, maybe in Seattle or Oregon. California would be nice but we may not be able to do it.

All I have to do now is wait and find out what the military is wanting me to do.

Faire L’Aviron

I am not sure if I have said this before but Rowing is the oldest intercollegiate sport in North America, twenty years older than football. The first race was between Harvard and Yale in 1850s.

A few weeks ago we decided to go to the Head of the Gorge regatta. We definitely decided to go but it was definitely too late to have started to apply. We had only two weeks to prepare and get everything ready; since it was a yearly race we do, we had to go. Some how I managed to be the one who put the regatta together and I must say I have never been so stressed.

First thing I do was fill out the entry form. Great now I need to know our Rowing Canada Aviron numbers but no one knew who had them, let alone what they were. I finally tracked down an old rower on the team who had a list. Great, so I send off that form, three days past the deadline.

Fortunately UVic decided to allow us to enter, and without the late penalties, although I did get a nasty email from them saying the entry form was late.

Next thing I was supposed to do was fill out the travel claim for the SFU Rec so they knew we were off. It was supposed to be handed in five days prior to the event. It took me three days to get everyone to respond to me asking for their rec numbers, because I don’t have the list. I managed to get that form handed in on Wednesday.

Now we had to deal with equipment. Half of us have our varsity stripes, the other half are new so they don’t. So they had to find old rowers and ask to borrow their shirts. Luckily there was not too much hassle getting them.

Now according to the rules we needed to have blades that matched our uniforms. Since we didn’t have a trailer we still needed to find a way to bring our blades with us. In the end we decided to put them in the back of my truck and just tie them down. We looked like the most ghetto team ever.

Now the most important thing, our boats. We needed boats to race with and since we don’t have a trailer, or a quad (the boat the girls were racing in), we needed to start contacting clubs to ask them to borrow a boat. Normally this would not be a problem, but since it was only five days away from the race, most of the boats had already been called for.

I called UVic, they told us they could not help us. I called UBC they said they had a full trailer. I called UFV and they said they were using their boats. I called Maple Bay, Naniamo and Deep Cove and they were not responding. I called the Gorge Rowing Club and they told us because we were no longer a part of Go Rowing and Paddling, they could not help us. I called Vancouver Rowing Club and they would not reply. I called Inlet Rowing Club, they said they would have a quad for us, although it wasn’t the most race worthy. I called Vic City and they said they did have a double for us guys, but not a quad. Great, now we have half of the boats we need. I keep trying other clubs till Thursday night when I couldn’t find one so I called up the IRC and said, “hey can we get that boat?” They told us that they were not bring any more boats.

I was not impressed. This was on Thursday night when most boat trailers had been packed up or were going to be that next morning. I made some frantic phone calls and I got the number of an old SFU coach who now coaches at the VRC. He was luckily able to help us and convince the head of Rowing BC to lend us a quad, albeit it was a men’s quad, so for the girls it was a bit big since half of them were lightweights.

We were so lucky with that.

So as we were about to leave I got an email from SFU rec saying that we had not provided them with enough information and that they were going to need to have a consultation with our club because we were putting ourselves in danger, or so they claimed.

I quickly fired off an email giving them everything they asked for and then I left to the island.

Friday night they had returned my email and said that everything was ok now given that I do a couple things upon my return.

So after all that stress and barely being able to get all boats, we had a very good trip. Saturday was a beautiful day rowing through the gorge. Blue skies, sun, warm day. We accomplished all of our club goals and we felt we had some of the best races ever, especially since we had been competeing against some very strong boats from UBC, UVic, UFV, Vachon Island, and other big rowing clubs.

Now we are going to start training for Elk Lake sprints in March.

Pics will go up when I have them.

Just for lulz

2010 Bound

Some people here in this province are against the olympics, but I am totally for them.

In fact I just had an interview today for the snowboarding events. Basically I would get to ride all over the mountains for free. Pretty sweet I’d say.

Stressed

So I think for the first time in my few years here at SFU I have become stressed from school. Why am I stressed? Because I have two midterms and two papers due in the same week where I have no time to study for them because I am either in class or I have to row because of a big regatta this weekend.

What is better is somehow I am the one in charge of getting this regatta together for our team since we do not have an official head coach. So I managed to get us entered into the race after spending a week looking for our Rowing Canada Aviron numbers. Of course our entries were late so the people at UVic putting on the regatta were not impressed. I had to get us hotel rooms, this was not too bad and now I have to fill out a travel itinerary, for SFU Athletics, which is already late. The worst part is I have to find us two boats to use at the regatta since we do not want to use the Inlet Rowing Club’s boats since we are having some problems with them.

Tomorrow I have my macm midterm, it could go well, it could not. What scares me is that we aren’t even allowed to bring in a calculator, and this could mean hard math we have to do in our heads, or even worse, math questions without numbers (ie proofs :S).

When I get home from my midterm I have to pull an all-nighter tomorrow night too in order to study for my CMPT 371 midterm. I will have missed two rowing practises which is not great but allows me to heal up before the race. I will still have to make up those practises on Thursday afternoon and Friday at 5:30.

Food is also getting low in the house. My mother came down on Sunday for the day and I am glad she brought me down a gift card to a grocery store. On friday I will have to go pick up groceries. Which reminds me of how much I dislike my roommate. He left a 2L bottle of wine sitting awkwardly on the kitchen door so when I opened the door, the bottle fell open and smashed. I had glass everywhere and wine going under the fridge. I was not impressed.

My CMPT-320 paper is due tomorrow. It is good I think. I will need to re-read it one more time to make sure I have everything straight. I am not impressed with at the last minute the professor is sending us shit on the essay. I also have to send the paper into Turn It In which is a site I am not a fan of. Not only does it violate my right of innocents, they also steal your paper and make money off of it. I tried to protest using the website but the professor wouldn’t give me an alternative option.

And what is it, with a week before a term paper is due, that someone is emailing the professor asking the class for notes from the first week. Definitely I was not impressed with them and I didn’t want to help them because of their piss poor planning.

My CRIM-355 (Forensics) class has a midterm paper this week too, though I think it will be easy. We watched a CSI episode and we have to critique the methods they used to deal with the crime scene. The crime was not perplexing nor had any plot twists so I should be all right. I think I will try and quote Pete Townshed in my paper and probably open it up with this: “Who are you?” (Townshed, 1978) a question commonly asked in the hit CBS show: Crime Scene Investigation (C.S.I.).

In my Artificial Intelligence class, thanks to Cory’s 1337 programming, our backgammon agent came in the top five of the class, beating out of 34 other groups.

In the spring I think I might try and have classes only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to maximize my Whistler-ness. As a result I will probably end up taking CMPT 307, ENGL 104 – Intro to Prose, CRIM 300 – Criminology Theories, CRIM 356 – Forensics II, and CRIM 317 – Prostitution in Canada.

I found another class I want to add to my wish lists of classes, EASC 310 – Paleontology. Though it is not as interesting as EASC 103 – The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs. It is a writing intense class and you must do some research proposals and there is not that much to do on dinosaurs.

My project, which I am calling Blackwood, has sucessfully started, I have started the planning stages and have some great ideas. I found another site which I am going to steal borrow ideas from, it’s called Travian and basically you build a town from nothing. You get resources, expand, and then use your economical or military powers to take over other villages.

So now I am done ranting for a bit, so I am going to go and try and wake up, down a can of redbull, take a shower, and finish studying MACM-316 for the night, so I can wake up at a decent time, finish my paper and not fail any classes.

Inches

Just a cool rowing video I found on Youtube:

I am in a generation of idiots.

Seriously, what is it these days with students, my age, who are idiots and do not know how to send emails properly. We do not even need to get started on the Alan Lau – Engineering Student, situation.

Just take a look at this email a student in my CMPT 371 sent to the professor:

Dear Prof. Liu:
What is the platform the programs in Prj 1 run on? Is it Windows or
Linux? And what programming language should we write in? What do you mean by “include your code in the report” ? Does that mean we are not gonna submit our programs in executable files?
Looking forward to your reply.
Thank you!

Michael Tong Man

I do not know if you know this Michael Tong Man, but when you write an email to a professor, unless you are close friends, you do not address them as “Prof”, you do not use words like “gonna” and you sure as hell need to learn to type in proper English.

So next time you decide to fire off an email, just take a second to think about it.

The Rhinoceros Party of Canada

So apparently we just had another federal election yesterday. The results are not really different than before, the tories still have a minority and the grits are still the opposition. I am happy with these results, they could have been better (ie the tories getting a majority).

One party that did not run was the Rhinoceros Party.

“The Parti Rhinocéros, commonly known as the Rhinoceros Party in English, was a registered political party in Canada from the 1960s to the 1990s. Operating within the Canadian tradition of political satire, the Rhinoceros Party’s basic credo, their so-called primal promise, was ‘a promise to keep none of our promises.’ They then promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public”

They described their platform as “two feet tall and made of wood.”

Some things in their platform include

• Repealing the law of gravity
• Paving Manitoba to create the world’s largest parking lot
• Providing higher education by building taller schools
• Instituting English, French and illiteracy as Canada’s three official languages
• Tearing down the Rocky Mountains so that Albertans could see the Pacific sunset
• Making Montreal the Venice of North America by damming the St. Lawrence River
• Abolishing the environment because it’s too hard to keep clean and it takes up so much space
• Annexing the United States, which would take its place as the third territory, after the Yukon and the Northwest Territories (Nunavut did not yet exist) in Canada’s backyard, in order to eliminate foreign control of Canada’s natural resources
• Ending crime by abolishing all laws
• Paving the Bay of Fundy to create more parking in the Maritimes
• Turning Montreal’s Saint Catherine Street into the world’s longest bowling alley
• Adopting the British system of driving on the left; this was to be gradually phased in over five years with large trucks and tractors first, then buses, eventually including small cars and bicycles last
• Selling the Canadian Senate at an antique auction in California
• Putting the national debt on Visa
• Declaring war on Belgium because a Belgian cartoon character, Tintin, killed a rhinoceros in one of the cartoons
• Offering to call off the proposed Belgium-Canada war if Belgium delivered a case of mussels and a case of Belgian beer to Rhinoceros “Hindquarters” in Montréal (the Belgian Embassy in Ottawa did, in fact, do this)
• Painting Canada’s coastal sea limits in watercolour so that Canadian fish would know where they were at all times
• Banning guns and butter, since both kill
• Banning lousy Canadian winters
• Renaming the country Nantucke
• Building a bridge spanning the country, from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland.
• Making the Trans-Canada Highway one way only.
• Changing Canada’s currency to bubble gum, so it could be inflated or deflated at will.
• Donate a free rhinoceros to every aspiring artist in Canada
• Counting the 1000 Islands to see if the Americans have stolen any

“The Rhinoceros Party never succeeded in winning a seat in Parliament. In the 1984 federal election, however, the party won the fourth-largest number of votes, after the three main political parties, but ahead of several well-established minor parties. Rhino candidates sometimes came in second in certain ridings, humiliating traditional Canadian parties in the process. In the 1980 federal election, for instance, the Rhinoceros party nominated a professional clown/comedian named Sonia ‘chatouille’ Côté in the Laurier riding in Montréal. Côté came in second place, after the successful Liberal candidate, but ahead of both other major parties: the third place New Democrat, and the fourth-place Progressive Conservative candidate. Chatouille received almost twice as many votes as the PC candidate.”

Happy Thanksgiving Canada!

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving. I guess this will just be another miscellaneous post. Today is Thanksgiving. Usually I am excited for this holiday since I get a long weekend off and a Turkey dinner. However, this is my first Thanksgiving without my brothers or parents so I am not doing anything. My goal for today was to study 310. I definitely am not getting too far in this goal. The only thing I have studied is the four definitions of AI, and which one we choose.

I spent the earlier part of the afternoon working on my 310 assignment. I definitely did not need to start it now but may as well get it out of the way. It wasn’t extremely difficult, just answer some questions out of the textbook on logic. This class is really good so far and one of my favourite CS classes to date. Our first programming assignment was really cool. First of all I’d like to say thanks to Cory for doing so much work on that assignment. What we were supposed to do was make a game tree, for backgammon, and look two moves ahead and decide what is the best move our agent should make. Since backgammon is a game of chance you only need to look ahead two moves, unlike games like chess where you need to think upwards of twenty (much akin to Deep Blue).

As well, a second part of the assignment was to make an evaluation function which would help the tree decide what is a good move to make. Our evaluation function was really cool as it tried to make primes to block the other player from moving. Ultimately making a greedy function that it’s only objective was to hit blots was pretty hard to beat.

Moving to the world of sports. The most exciting news. SFU beat UBC at Shrum Bowl XXXI at the last second with a field goal when there was only 2.1 seconds left. This allowed us to win 20 – 19. We are still in first place in the CIS West with a record of 5 – 2. The football team has pretty much guaranteed a spot in the playoffs for the first time in a while.

The world series is coming up. In the American League we have the Tampa Bay Rays and the Boston Red Sox currently tied 1 – 1. In the National League there is the Phillies and the LA Dodgers playing. As a Yankee fan I hope Tampa Bay beats Boston. I have no idea who will win the National League since I have not paid too much attention to them, though the Phillies have won 8 more games than the Dodgers.

In my sport of rowing things are starting to get exciting. We had the Undergrad regatta yesterday at the UBC Boathouse. SFU entered six eights of novices who ended up racing against UBC, UFV and UVic. It was a giant gongshow but SFU ended up winning first and second in the mixed eights, my cew was on the one who won second. So that was exciting. In two weeks I will, hopefully, be racing in Victoria at the Head of the Gorge regatta, in the heavyweight double category. This will be a warm up regatta as two weeks after that will be University Championships where I will also be entering in the Heavyweight double category for those sprints.

Hockey also started. Canucks played their first two games this week, both of which they won. We finally have all defence healed and healthy. Our forwards are pretty much all new so this year is going to be a bit different. I predict that we will have a better year than last year, but this is only basing on what I have seen in two games.

I am going to be starting up a new online website for a fun project. If you know what Elarune was, it will be like a new version of that site.

But now time to go back to my studying.

Playing for Pizza

I recently finished my 11th book of the year. Only one more book till I have read one book a month for this year. The book is called Playing for Pizza and is by John Grisham. This is the second book that I read by him this year and he is definitely a good author.

The summary of the book’s plot is that the main character was a horrible NFL player, so much that no one in the NFL or CFL wants him. He ends up getting drafted to an Italian football team where hi jinx happens as this stereotypical anglophonic American tries to live in Italy.

Definitely a good read and a shorter one at that.