A Soldier in Smoke

See this photo here? What do you think of it? Myself, I think it is a piece of shit. It was not taken that well and it is not in focus at all. Yet somehow this photo won me an honourable mention prize in a photo contest that was being held up here at SFU.

What that translates to is that I won a free 8 gig iPod nano. That’s cool and all but I already have an iPod Touch so I don’t need it. Now I am trying to sell it.

At the photo contest ceremony every seemed to really like my photo, and I kept thinking that I should have not won because all the other photos were just so good.

What I had wanted to win was first or second prize which were a Nikon D90 and a 24″ Dell flat screen monitor. I must say though, the picture of the person who won first prize was kind of mediocre so I am not sure how she won. She also won the photo contest the year before.

Well, at least I got a cool framed certificate I can hang up and add to my resume that I am a photo contest winner.

I still want a DSLR.

Here’s the page with all the other entries. Gala Milne’s was the one that won.

An interesting background to that photo. It was taken on the last day of training during my first basic back in 2007. We were in the field and on the last day we had to get rid of all of our explosives and pyrotechnics. So while my instructor was setting off a smoke grenade I wanted to get a photo of it and of course my friend at the time walked in front of the camera and I was not impressed with him.

Edit:

I also found these two articles on the photo contest. This one has a description of the winner’s photos and has a photo that makes me look like a retard. This one has all the photos winners and a description.

No Pants Pub Party

The rowing team was sitting around a couple weeks ago discussing what we should do with the pub for our pub fund raiser that was coming up in February. After discussing many themes including S&M, Pirates, S&M Pirates, Condom Balloons etc and after many beers when the team was in a very happy state the idea of a No Pants Party came up and the idea stuck.

The idea of this party is simple, you come to the party wearing anything you want, except pants. I plan on wearing a suit, without pants, just the boxers and business socks (so we all know what time it is) pulled up high.

Being part of fund raising group for this semester, it is partly my responsibility to organize this event. Talking with many people, there seems to be a very warm welcome to a no pants party.

There is also going to be a free pant check at the door.

Tonight we were at the pub sampling a bunch of different drinks so we can put some on special. We tried many disgusting drinks including some vial mixture that could have only come out of a game of kings cup. It was some combination of beer, vodka and ice tea. We eventually settled on three drinks, two shots and a cocktail. The shots are Hot Pants (some drink with cinnamon whiskey) and Tequilla Makes Her Clothes Fall Off Shots. The drink is something that is pretty good, it’s called Blue Balls and it’s a mixture of a bunch of drinks.

We also have Corey B going to be doing all of the DJing and he seems pretty excited.

All in all it seems like an epic night and you should definitely come out. The event information is as follows:

Date: Friday, February 13th.
Time: 7:00 pm to 1:00 am
Location: Highland Pub
Cost: $7 a ticket, or $10 at the door.

If you wish to buy tickets either contact me or email nopantspub [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Raul…

… he is young, has a 14 year old Perv Stache, and wear a Burger King Uniform. This is my nemesis and he fucked up my order.

So I go to Whopper Wednesday to have a Whopper with my friend the Whopper before he heads off to Prague for seven months. My friend Tom and I get in line, we spout off our order, the trifecta, the Holy Trinity of fast food combos: a Whopper Cheese, poutine and chocolate milkshake.

Normally, any competent fast food worker could punch up this order and have it to me within three minutes. However it takes him more than five minutes to punch in my order. Tom then comes along and orders the exact same thing and he takes, yet again, another five minutes. Two more guys come, each taking five minutes each to have their orders punched in while in the mean time the line is getting longer and I am just standing there wondering why the fuck is this 14 year old kid working by himself in the front?

I can see my food ready to go in the heat chutes… but he is not serving me as he is too busy slowly punching in more orders. The people in the back are mocking him for being retarded (I tried to nominalize that and it just didn’t work) and I do not blame them. Finally a supervisors realizes we are all standing there waiting for our food and she starts to distribute them… only to realize Raul has fucked up every single order.

When the surpervisor asked Raul if we ordered what we claimed he just responded, “I dunno…”

Clearly he should not working here.

He also made two guys get so agitated and they almost got into a fight. The managers had to yell at them to calm down, I was so excited for a fight, but it never happened.

Now I realize he was new, that is fair, but when I was new to the Burger King I worked at when I was 16, I was not this retarded, I was just less efficient than everyone else.

This is what happens when you hire people who are way too young to work.

Effin Scientologists

So I went to the Church of Scientology today for my weekly mass… ok I joke, it wasn’t for mass, but I did go to the Church of Scientology. Now I got you asking, “why did he go to the the Church of Scientology” and I went for my HUM-130 Intro to Religious Studies class where we had to interview a religious leader in the community.

I headed down to Harbour Centre, where the church is located, armed with my interviewing questions, a laptop to record it all and a camera, just in case. I had phoned the previous week to set up an appointment to make sure it would be fine to do an interview today.

I arrive there ten minutes early, as I didn’t want to be late on my special day, and I walk up to the receptionist. After waiting a few minutes for her to get off the phone she informs me the Scientologist that was supposed to do an interview with me was not there. They didn’t know where she was, what was holding her up or when she would be back.

Great, I got stood up by a Scientologst and there was no one else there for me to do an interview with. So now I cannot do my assignment because I can’t write 2-3 pages on “the Scientologist never showed up” and then write a reflection of the interview in another 2-3 pages saying, “Scientologists don’t have a concept of time.”

Now I am going to have to try and contact her again so I can get this interview done on time. I am definitely not impressed.

This is just one more religion that I am adding to the list of religions I am not joining.

On Twitter

I am not a fan of social networking sites. I have been on Facebook for a long enough time to know that there is nothing there for me. Now there is a new website that is becoming popular, Twitter.

From what I can tell, Twitter is just the status part of Facebook. You can update your status and tell people what you are doing at every second of the day, and people can RSS their friends and know what they are doing at every second of the day.

And of course you can update what you are doing from anywhere in the world with the use of a cellphone and texting. So now when you are in the bathroom dropping a New Jersey, or hanging out with the bros at a local strip club, everyone else can know what you are up to.

Now while I try and figure out why this is so popular, I leave you with this comic.

My Tuition

My Tuition... in cash

So, it is the beginning of the semester and this means that tuition and other student fees need to be paid. This is usually not a problem for me because of my military situation. Usually I just use my credit card to pay it online, transfer the funds in my bank account and then collect the $3,000 worth of air miles too.

This changed last semester when they canceled the use of credit cards to pay for tuition because of their debt. I know why they did it and it is fair enough but I do not like it. It is now an inconvenience to pay, plus I don’t get the air miles.

Now this leaves me with a new way to pay for all these fees. I could have decided to pay by cheque, drop it off in the MBC but this leaves me with the problem that I have to wait till my cheque clears and that could take a while for them to do and in the mean time I could accidentally spend more than I should have, thus making the cheque bounce.

Other ways include online banking, I tried that once and it failed horribly. So now I had to figure out how to pay my tuition… and I figured it out… cash. I decided to pay my entire $3,203.51 in cash.

I went to my local bank and much to my surprise they were the ones who were shitting brix instead of SFU. First of all they needed two peices of ID which they compared to my face and to my signature before they took it from me.

When I got to the MBC they were not even phased, they just took the money, counted it and everything was fine.

This was probably the fastest and easiest time I had paying my tuition. I will probably end up paying it more often via cash.

Ma Nouveau Roommate

So, I got a new roommate this semester as my old one moved out. I am always hesitant to get a new roommate in case they are mean, or crazy, or messy or just someone that I don’t get along with.

However, I think I got the best roommate ever. She’s from Quebec and is basically the opposite of my douche roommate. I am definitely glad that she was put into our townhouse.

Spring 2009

So I have now done my first week of classes for the spring semester and I can write what I think for each of them.

CMPT 307 – Data structures and Algorithms
I think this will be my hardest class of the semester for a multitude of reasons. I have heard many horror stories about this class although I don’t think it will be as hard as MACM 316 or CMPT 275. So far the material is interesting and I am understanding everything in class. I guess that is what happens when you don’t have your laptop on in class. The professor, Gabor Tardos, is one who seems to have never taught before and his sister wrote the textbook. Currently I am having difficulty reading his hand writing and his accent is a bit thick but I think over time I will get used to it. Also there is a hot, white, blonde girl in this class which goes against all rules of Science… I must find out more about this mystical creature.

CMPT 376W – Writing for idiots
Now I know that my CMPT 376 prof is going to be reading this but I am still going to give an unbiased view of what I think of the class so far. Right now it feels like grade twelve English but this is good because we don’t have to sit there for an hour an listen to someone drone on about the rules of English. Instead we get to do class activities involving writing. The daily writing thing we have to do seem like a good idea, I mean I blog anyways so why not make it part of my grade. Plus there are no midterms or final, definitely a bonus. The prof, Ted Kirkpatrick, so far seems like a good prof, I know what he is talking about, he is clear and he is not boring. He also studies HCI which is the only CS class I have gotten an A+ in. There is also a second hot white blonde girl in this class, where are they all coming from all of a sudden?

ARCH 200 – Special Topics in World Prehistory: Vikings
Well this class is about Vikings, what else can I say? The first class was not too bad although the professor tends to go into a mumble so it is hard to figure out what he is saying to take notes. We have a quiz next week on the countries/capitals/bodies of water/rivers in Europe. The professor himself is a viking (well… he is Danish) and we get to write a paper on whatever we want. All in all I think this will be an interesting class, but a hard one because he doesn’t have anything online, have powerpoint slides, or write anything down. Basically it is the traditional idea of a lecture where he talks and we copy everything down.

CRIM 356 – Forensic Sciences II
Well I did CRIM 355 last semester with the same prof and TA, so I think this will be fine too. The marking distribution is pretty easy, a 40% seen final where we get the questions a week a head of time, a 40% paper and 20% tutorial participation which is then further divided up to 6% for showing up, 4% for printing the title page of every one of the online journal articles (to prove we read them), 5% of a real world forensic critique and 5% for a short presentation on another article.

CRIM 402 – Biological Explanations of Crime
This class is so far interesting. My father claims that the biological explanation of crime is stupidity because the RCMP have only caught the dumb criminals, the smart ones avoid getting caught. My only problem with this class is that the readings keep invoking Godwin’s Law. Can’t the author think of other examples? For marks we have an apparent easy midterm and final and we have two online discussion questions where we must answer two questions in 200-400 words and then rebut people’s arguments.

HUM 130 – Intro to Religious Studies
This is the controversial anti-bible course that is offered here at SFU. Really what it seems is a giant overview of every major religion in the world. So far it is interesting but not my favourite class. There are two main assignments to this class, one is an interview with a religious leader in the community. I contacted the church of Scientology this morning requesting that someone be able to have an interview with me. They will hopefully get back to me soon. I also have a paper on anything I want relating to religion, I was thinking a comparison of the Matrix and the Bible.

What a Shitty Situation

As many of you probably know by now, I hate my one roommate, for many reasons. I now have a new one.

Now before I go into the problem I needed to do some background research and using myself as a control group and did some quantitative work. In the end I came up with the result that the average male’s number of days used to toilet paper ratio is about 14:1 to 21:1. This means that the average male uses an entire roll of TP to himself in 2 to 3 weeks.

Now the reason I needed to know this because I noticed my roommate uses a lot of effin’ TP. Now that I had some data I could compare to. To figure out how much toilet paper he was using I did not use any TP in our bathroom for a long time and I could record when I noticed there was a new roll.

My roommate’s ratio: 2.5 to 1

That’s right. He manages to use an entire roll of toilet paper in 2.5 days. That is more TP than a girl uses.

I have no idea how he uses so much but I have three hypothesis:

1. He uses TP to dry anything that is wet in the bathroom (hands, body after shower etc).
2. He likes to dress up as a mummy.
3. He puts one end into the toilet and flushes to see how much goes down.

Now all are equally likely. With (1), I know he doesn’t have any towels because I have never seen him use one. (3) is unlikely because there is too much friction, so unless he is so daft that he keeps trying it over and over.

Other than that I have no idea why he uses so much. I need to figure this out because he expects me to buy half the TP but he clearly uses more than that.

So until I figure this out, it is going to bug me for a while.

News Report

Chilled Vancouver commuters faced their second day of winter hell today, as an additional 2 centimeter of the peculiar white stuff fell, bringing the lower mainland to its knees and causing millions of dollars worth of damage to the marijuana crops. Scientists suspect that the substance is some form of frozen water particles and experts from Saskatchewan are being flown in. With temperatures dipping to the almost but not quite near zero mark, Vancouverites were warned to double insulate their lattes before venturing out.

Vancouver police recommended that people stay inside except for emergencies, such as running out of espresso or biscotti to see them through Vancouver’s most terrible storm to date. The local Canadian Tire reported that they had completely sold out of fur-lined sandals.

Drivers were cautioned to put their convertible tops up, and several have been shocked to learn that their SUV’s actually have four wheel drive, although most have no idea how to use it.

Weary commuters faced soggy sushi, and the threat of frozen breast implants. Although Dr. John Blatherwick, of the Coastal Health Authority reassured everyone that most breast implants were perfectly safe to 25 below, down-filled bras are flying off the shelves at Mountain Equipment Co-op.

“The government has to do something,” snarled an angry Trevor Warburton. “I didn’t pay $540,000 for my one bedroom condo so I could sit around and be treated like someone from Toronto.”

- I didn’t write this, I just found it on the internet