In one month I will be going off to Montreal. I just bought my plane ticket to Quebec for the Canadian University Rowing Championships. I fly from YVR to YUL on the 28th of October where I will have two days to practice in the olympic basin. On Hallowe’en day I have my Time Trials and then on the fridged day of November 1st I will be racing in the finals (hopefully the A final) in the Canadian University Rowing Championships.
The following day I will have to bounce to London as I will be racing there on the 3rd of November for the National Rowing Championships with the 4th being the finals of that regatta. I am going to try and re-do my 2km and 6km erg tests this week so I can make Provincial Development and thus get more funding to go.
I also found out that the military has an option where I can go to grad school right after I graduate. This would mean I would get two more years at university and two more years of rowing. I would not be limited to SFU so I could go to a school with a full rowing team. I would have to decide if I want to stay in BC or go outside. If I went out it would be a school such as McMaster, UWO, Queens, UofT or Brock.
If I say in BC my three choices would be UBC, UVic and SFU.
UBC would allow me to stay in Vancouver, with a great rowing team, amazing academics but I would really have to pull up my socks this school year and study to get in.
UVic would require me to move with average academics but an amazing rowing team that would allow me to move farther in rowing in my future with the potential of the national team for 2012 and the London Olympics.
SFU would be the easiest to get into, with the best CS of the three schools but still rowing would all be self motivated and more importantly, self funded.
So while I think about that I am going to go work on my CMPT-412 assignment on computer vision.
It is steaming in this tiny cell. The walls drip, t he floors perspires, and another bead of sweat rolls down my tattoos. Even they itch, rebelling against the heat and prison ink.
What to do? Go outside anad hang out in the the elbow-to-elbow, dust-caked, dog-kennel of a yard, listen to another man’s drab lies of thug-life grandeur? Or drip sweat on a typewriter while tapping out my own lies. Make no mistake, it is all a lie-the system, who we are, why we are in here.
What is not a lie, this slow burn of incarceration, eating away a man’s life an hour, a day, a year at time?
… Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much-the sweating walls, the deprivation, the hypocrisy, the spirit-squelching confinement-if I thought there was a reason…
Let’s see, there has been a bunch of stuff I have wanted to post for a bit but basically was too busy to make individual posts on each one so I will post them all here.
Firstly I had a race today, the head of the river that I mentioned a few posts back. It was pretty solid and I think I placed 3rd in my category but I haven’t seen the official results yet. There were some hard 90 degree or greater turns in the race which really kills your momentum. There was also open water which is rarely fun in a single. I drove my boat out to White Rock on top of Emelia’s car. Just to give you an idea of how long they are, take a look:
For some reason a flag lady got mad at me for my boat. I was at an intersection when it was red and she decided to ream me out because of the hang. I had to sit there for two minutes while she was yelling out random stuff like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!! WHAT IS THIS THING!! PEOPLE LIKE YOU SHOULD NOT BE ON THE ROAD!! LEARN SOME LAWS!!”. All I could do, while not necessarily the most mature response was flip her off as I drove by.
But it was not the only time people were being ridiculous today. After the race I was in Burnaby Lake Rowing Club parking lot, taking off my boat, derigging it and trying to put the racks away. Of course there happened to be a wedding being set up. The people setting up obviously did not want me being there as every five minutes they kept asking me when I was leaving, despite not being in there way. Now I still have the single rack on top of the roof rack and I cannot get it off without a pair of vice grips.
In other news, I got a new colour scheme for this blogs layout, and I have a twitter account, so you will now find me sending in twats.
I use last.fm a lot and I have found some really cool sites that use it’s API. I think I have mentioned it before but I will re-post the links again. There’s bandsintown which uses your last.fm feed to tell you local concerts coming up you might be interested in. As well there is also the last.fm tumblr which generates an rss feed with yahoo pipes from your last.fm account showing the top artists of the week you have listened to. Of course I link my last.fm feeds on this blog so you can see my recent plays if you were actually interested in that.
At school classes have started and most of them are good though I haven’t been to all of them yet. I should make a post on that soon, and I must say now that CMPT-412 is an amazing class so far. Novice recruitment is really good and we haven’t officially started it, and we also seem to have about 10 walk-ons onto the team, a number I have never seen before. Froshweek is also over, that went fairly well in my opinion, specially with a small budget, but now I need to be reimbursed.
So I have a 6 km race I am doing next week. I will be doing it in a single. Usually I am not too worried about this, even though it will be my first head race in a single.
Here’s what’s interesting, look at the course map:
That’s a lot of turns, narrow waterways, a bridge and then open water.
I think it is time to review my classes that I did this summer semester. I haven’t posted in a while but that’s because all I have been doing is rowing. I hurt my back a week ago so for the last week I haven’t been doing much. I can cycle and that is about it.
Last sunday was my 21st birthday. I climbed Mt. Seymour, Mt. Baker and I took part in Critical Mass. I have been working on my project website and I have been planning the Novice Recruitment and Froshweek for the rowing crew and the CSSS respectively.
So let’s review my classes shall we.
English 101 – Introduction to Fiction
I took this class with a professor named Chariandy and it was really easy. We had to read five books of which four were really interesting. It is a typical 101 arts class where the professor walks you through the material and the TA holds your hand in tutorial. If you show up to all the tutorials, say at least something a class you will get an easy B. The final was also easy, some word definitions (which we were told ahead), pointing out which books passages came from and a short essay.
CRIM 413 – Terrorism
This is supposed to be the “hardest” Criminology class and I can see why they would say that. There is definitely a lot of stuff that you have to read and remember but honestly it is not hard. The only reason these art students claim it is hard is because the names are mainly from the Middle East.
CMPT 383 – Functional Programming
This class started off really easy and interesting… until we hit the midterm. Then I was screaming for the lube. Burton is no longer teaching this class so I dunno what it will be like in the future.
CMPT 475 – Software Engineering II
Unlike CMPT 275 this class is really ridiculously easy. Dan Ridinger is a good professor as well as gives out easy assignments worth 15% of the year each. There’s no midterm and I would really suggest taking this class if you want an easy upper level CS class.
If I haven’t mentioned it before I will be doing the following classes this fall:
