Adrian Dewhurst

I caught myself suggesting we use WvStreams for something at work today. In fact, I've spent the past week comparing things being suggested to how it would be done in WvStreams, thinking longingly about WvCont.

Apparently I was brainwashed back in 2004.

So I'm talking to someone about our wedding plans, making an appointment for Crystal to go visit.

Him: What's your name?
Me: Adrian
Him: Just checking, but are you two women?
Me: No, I just sound like a woman on the phone.
Him: Ah, ok. Because I know a female Adrienne.
Me: Yes, my parents gave me two gender-ambiguous names since they couldn't agree on two sets of names in case I was a boy or a girl.

Or, talking to a real estate agent earlier

Him: Does your husband work?
Me: My wife (well, fiancee for now) is a student.
The conversation becomes slightly awkward at this point since I think he assumes that we're a gay female couple. Which is ironic because he had just inadvertently implied we were a gay male couple.

Seriously, every time I call somewhere, they think I'm female. I wonder if I can use this to my advantage sometime.

Update: I guess this means I'm like Vaarsuvius. Well, I guess I always wanted to be a mage. Mwahahaha.

I cast magic missile. At the darkness.

So I should probably post something of substance if I'm going to write angry messages about my current ISP.

My mom recently left after visiting for a week. We didn't go too far (she was feeling a bit sick and we only had a car for the weekend anyway), but it was good to see her. I haven't spent much time with either of my parents for a while now.

crystalinentity is staying with her parents for the next few weeks (and has been there for a couple weeks already). The apartment is not the same without her... it feels more like I'm sitting here with a collection of personal property inside a couple rooms rather than inside a home. It's odd.

Wedding plans seem to be coming together nicely, thanks mostly to crystalinentity and her father figuring it all out. I like to think I've helped out here and there though.

( Car? House? Maybe? Perhaps I shouldn't get ahead of myself. )

On a positive note, work is going well. I seem to be in the swing of things and I think I've earned the respect of my coworkers (and just as importantly, they've earned my respect too). Although I get a little stressed out from time to time, I do recognize that it's mostly something I bring upon myself due to my personal standards, rather than something they demand of me (good for long-term sustainability). I work on interesting stuff and of course the food is great.

So overall, I figure that considering I graduated less than a year ago, I'm in really good shape. I'm happy in general, I have someone who I love (and loves me back!), I've got a good job and a great future ahead of me. A few years ago, I'd merely have predicted a decent job, neutral-to-happy, and a future I wouldn't think much about. So things have been going well :-)

Dear Comcast:

I switched to you from an ISP with competent support. Now I remember why I was originally willing to put up with decreased speed: when I start saying that my 16 megabit service is consistently only going at 2-6 megabit (and sometimes merely 1), do not tell me to delete my cookies. Judging from how you religiously instruct me to do this, you clearly do not know what cookies do, for it is merely a measure to make clueless people feel reassured that something is being done and so hopefully they will experience the placebo effect.

This insults both of our intelligences. Someone who describes things in terms of megabits probably has a reasonable idea about what's going on.

Thanks
-sailorfrag

P.S. Why did I have to open my browser to comcast.net before I could open the dialog box to clear my cookies? Further, why are you still assuming I use IE? It's actually pretty common these days to use something else.

In the end, I think I fixed it myself by power-cycling my modem before calling. I was planning to test if that fixed things while on hold, but there was inexplicably no hold delay today. Due to cable being more of a broadcast medium, I expected that a power-cycle would not help. If I cared more, I'd probably research the technology further.

The guy suggested that sometimes it's slower based on time of day. If there's that much variation, clearly their network needs upgrading. Maybe I should upgrade to the DOCSIS 3 service so that there's more neighborhood bandwidth available.

So I just switched (sadly) from sonic.net DSL to Comcast cable for my internet service. I really liked Sonic, but the fact of the matter is, AT&T has awful lines around here (in silicon valley no less!) and I can only get 2mbps. So I sacrifice my static IP and get 6mbps downstream in its place, for cheaper... and that's their 'normal speed' package. I could get 16mbps for the same price as I'm paying (the static IP is a high price premium)... which I would have done, but it apparently negates my downgrade promotion pricing (more on that later).

( Background )

Lesson #1 (for me): Actually read the terms and conditions. Apparently it's not possible to assume they'll be reasonable.

( Mystery contract )

Lesson #2 (for Sonic): You can turn perfectly happy customers against you as soon as you do something dirty like sneaking in a contract when there is no expectation of one. There seems to be some improvement here by removing that.

Lesson #3 (for Sonic): If you say you have a contract, make sure you keep it on file. Because it's kind of ridiculous to hold someone to something if neither side knows what it said.

( A touch of reason )

Lesson #4 (for Sonic): You make people feel happier when you seem like you care. You did a pretty good job of that in all contact before today. Waiving the stupid contract cancellation fee shouldn't count because it should never have happened in the first place (although it did help simply because I know it's special even to be that nice, which is sad). They should have asked me if they could do anything to help, or like... shown some sort of indication they were sad I was leaving (especially since I was paying the extra $20/month for a static ip, which is almost pure profit for them). Apparently I didn't matter after all. Cable companies have this down to an art.

( Lack of choice )

Something that I should probably mention right away is that I'm engaged to crystalinentity and we're getting married May 18 2009. We don't have a guest list yet. The intention is to keep it small, so I won't be able to invite everyone I want to (sorry!).

So here is 2009. There was a leap second and the world didn't explode, which is always an excellent sign.

crystalinentity's parents were down here for Christmas and the New Year, and we had a pretty good time. It was great to see them again and we all enjoyed ourselves. Among other things, we drove down to San Diego along the coastal highway and then came back up inland. Quite the contrast between the two.

I've got one of the G1 developer phones now, so I think I'll try hacking on it a bit in my spare time. That should be fun to do. Speaking of hacking on things in my spare time, it's kind of interesting how the nature of spare time changes when in a relationship. Before, I'd have spent hours upon hours playing with the innards of my computers at home, but that's actually not all that appealing to me anymore. Sure, I like to play with gadgets a bit now and then, but things that require prolonged deep concentration (like coding) really don't appeal to me when there's someone else to talk to, cuddle with, etc. That has the handy side-effect of making work mostly stay at work (except for the fact that I still check and sometimes respond to e-mail way too often).

Living down here is kind of weird in that it feels the same as living in Ontario, except when I suddenly run into something that is different. And these are just random things that I'd take for granted. The grocery store is an excellent example... it's just like any grocery store in Ontario, except that things are more expensive, the frozen dinners section is about 4x the size it should be, and the frozen burgers section is less than 1/4 the size it should be, and I don't recognize 1/2 of the brand names. Oh, and it doesn't snow here.

In other news, apparently I'm too excited to file my 2008 taxes. I have to wait until software is certified for netfile in Canada and for my T4/W-2 forms to come in. Boo.

Anyway, hopefully I'll post more this year. Maybe?

So.

Despite my best intentions to begin posting again, it hasn't really happened. I guess I should start back when exams finished.

... except I wrote the above about 4 weeks ago and I still haven't actually managed to write the whole update yet. It's actually quite sad.

But something else came up I wanted to post:
Something that I've really been noticing since declaring my old computers obsolete and moving without bringing them along is that no matter how carefully you try to preserve everything of importance, you're going to miss something, or forget where you put it for safe keeping. This applies just as well to computers as real life. I'm actually fairly well set up now, except for my ~/.xchat2 directory (but I'm convinced it's somewhere here if I remember to look).

I thought it would be really hard to go without my computers and get by with just my laptop. It was far easier to give up than I ever imagined. Strange.

Really, the only thing I miss is having a machine always hooked up to the TV that I can play videos on with a minimum of hassle (no fiddling with cords, no playing with video settings). Well, something's been ordered so that's going to be taken care of. Now I just need a NAS. My "old" laptop (the one that I had before work gave me a MacBook Pro) will probably do this for a little while. But I really do need the reliability of RAID or something before something bad happens.

Anyway, what got me thinking today was how crippling it would be for my productivity to have to start fresh without my ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.screenrc, ~/.ssh/config or ~/.vimrc. It's astonishing to think about how much work has gone into tweaking those to do what I want, and how weird it is to try and use a system without them. Right now my work machine is only half configured with these so far, and it really interrupts my flow. I should probably finish getting everything set up sometime.

So it's exam time. Again. A time of stress, a time without routine, a time of many video games, and a time of sadness as people start to move out.

Exams started today and I've already written one. None of my exams this term are really capable of stressing me out, except perhaps the philosophy take-home final. Even though I've written an exam already, it doesn't feel like exam time except for the part where I don't have to go to class. It's weird.

This exam schedule is going to be different from the others. Not really in structure -- as per usual I have a gap of over a week ended by an exam right near the end, but in that it's my last set of exams in my undergrad career. Due to various circumstances this fall/winter (due to a combination of workload, not being around, and growing apathy about everything related to school), I haven't really connected with the people on my floor. It sucks, but I also don't really have a great urge to reach out, especially not now when it's almost over and I just need to get out of here. Maybe this means that it will be less depressing when everyone starts moving out? We'll see.

( ... and my brain proceeds to dump its views on Life, the Universe, and Everything )

Latest proof!

In other news, I just finished my last class of the term. Or of my undergraduate career, for that matter.

Very weird.

I probably owe everyone more of a post than this, but meh. I still have a lot of work to do for Monday and right now I am off to see crystalinentity for the last little while before she departs for Italy.

I couldn't sleep last night. So at around 3:30am, I decided to start on my taxes. Interesting discovery: you can use QuickTax online for free up until it actually does the filing. I used this to figure out a general idea of what deductions I can claim and such. Next step is to go to the NETFILE site, find a free piece of software they have certified, and then do the actual return I file through that. Best of both worlds: the free stuff might not be very good at suggesting what I can do to maximize my return, but QuickTax costs a fortune (relatively speaking). Of course, I'm actually lacking my T2201 form from UW, but I was able to get an estimate as to how things will go.

At 4:30am, after having come to some reasonable degree of completion, I was finally able to sleep.

I'm not weird; what are you talking about?

Apparently I'm continuing to be negligent in posting on here. Sorry.

My thoughts on classes this term:

Computer Networks

Mostly review for me at this point. The material is very easy for people to make subtle mistakes with (myself included). The issue I think is that I've worked with networks enough and read enough extra material in the past several years to have made most of the dumb mistakes already. So I'm pretty much doing stuff I did on previous work terms and/or in realtime, except with an awkward API to follow and it has to be written in Java. Ew. Actually, the API started out OK, but then clarifications on the newsgroup at the last minute made it far more murky.

Distributed Systems

I feel like I'm essentially re-implementing what I did this past summer, except I'm required to provide an icky API, probably because it's "easier".

Computer Security

Apparently security is composed of only a few things:

1. Be moderately smart
2. Read some background material
3. Have an automatically paranoid brain.

Cybernetics and Society

A feel-good course that's mostly about discussion, with an essay at the end of the term that will maybe kill me.

Philosophy of Science

A course where we read about people endlessly debating semantics, with an essay next week that will very likely kill me.

In other news, I'm not involved in FASS this year :-(. But I'm going to see it on Friday!

Also, it is now 2:45am and someone is using a snowblower outside of my window. Apparently I am destined not to sleep.

Visa seems to feel that I have changed social status. Today when I called, instead of the usual "miss" or "ma'am", they called me "mrs".

...

Classes start in the morning. I'm on a purely tuesday/thursday schedule, so I'm going to be working on resnet tomorrow. Still it's a milestone in everyone's university life here.

Showers are wonderful. I do a lot of my best thinking in the shower. It's so peaceful, away from the world, and my mind just wanders. Often, the shower has been my sanctuary where I go when stressed out to take a break so that I can calm down without feeling guilty about wasting time -- it's a requirement anyway (no, not even Real Time was able to stop me from having showers at tolerable intervals, even if the intervals were occasionally a bit longer than ideal).

I have all my textbooks for this term except one -- the two big CS ones were at the used bookstore and one of the others came from Chapters. I'm probably going to wait and see if I need the last one. Apparently I haven't learned my lesson though -- CS textbooks have never been useful to me in the past, yet I keep purchasing them and rarely are able to sell them after. Plus they're bloody expensive, even used.

Tonight I was able to locate the syllabus for one of my courses (CS 456: Networks), along with the first batch of lecture slides. This course is going to be dangerous because I know a lot of the content already, but in my way rather than how the prof probably wants me to think. This is going to lead to a lot of napping in class, and I run the risk of getting into the habit of not paying attention early, then missing the threshold when I pass into material that I should pay attention to later. It's happened before in some of the earlier CS classes. Its tentative midterm time conflicts with another course's lecture. Lovely. I've already e-mailed the prof about it.

CS 454: Distributed Systems and CS 489: Advanced topics in CS: Computer Security should be a little safer than Networks for my attention. I have a basic understanding of both, but I think the courses should be able to cover more depth than I currently have. I hope. I really seem to pick up a lot of skills on my own and/or on co-op terms long before I can take that material in a
course setting. It makes for a lot of boredom while in class.

I don't have any actual math courses this term (as long as you don't count CS), and 3 of my 5 classes are in CS. This should be a positive influence on my marks. I don't know if I can pull it off, but I think it would be fun to try and make the term Dean's List (it's utterly hopeless for me to get on the Dean's List for my overall average, but I knew that pretty much since 1A). That goal may help keep me giving some level of care to my classes.

Resnet installs today went well. The winter installs are typically pretty laid back, so the slow pace wasn't too surprising, but it was slower than I expected -- I'm going to estimate that over half of the new people here haven't come by yet (and thus don't have their phones either). Ah well, it means that I shouldn't be bored out of my mind tomorrow (no class, so I might as while work and make some money to pay for my textbooks). I didn't actually touch many computers for installs today; I was mostly running around making stuff function properly (that is, after I was awoken at 10:30 since I failed to set any sort of alarm and the first person finally arrived... I had planned to be down to set up at 9). Fortunately, everything went reasonably smoothly despite Richard not being around.

Today I ran into a girl that I was quite fond of a little while ago, but I hadn't seen much of lately. I was surprised that I didn't really feel anything when I spoke to her. Part of my brain was bracing for the inevitable tug of a bit of attraction (I think it's fair to be able to appreciate that she looks good, even if I'm completely uninterested on doing anything with her), but... it never materialized. Thinking that was a little strange, I searched for what it was that I found so attractive back then (clearly, it must have been something), but failed. Like, ok, she looks pretty, but nothing specific that drew me in. It's amazing how tastes can change. The reason why I stopped talking to her probably doesn't help matters much, but I don't think that's responsible for the change. My heart is with someone now that appreciates me, loves me, is so very talented, and makes me happy just thinking of her. It's probably for the best that I stopped talking to this other girl, since otherwise it's possible that this relationship may have never occurred, and (no offense intended, but) I don't think I would have felt this deep a connection with the other girl.

Hopefully the previous paragraph wasn't too confusing, but it's hard to juggle the references without resorting to names, which I wanted to avoid.

Apparently I've actually come up with a lot to say despite having no particular goal in mind when starting the post other than a few disjoint topics that are relevant to me at the moment.

I should probably start participating in TopCoder again sometime. It's been like a year since I've done a match.

Now I should sleep.

Random thoughts alert: I'm rambling and you may just want to ignore me.

apenwarr points out recent changes in dietary advice. A thought crossed my mind: even if a "balanced diet" isn't optimal, at least you're hedging your bets so that no matter what the nutritionists think is good this year, you'll always have a bit of what's good. And anyway, some people still claim the "balanced diet" optimal, so you're actually doing above average that way.

Of course, this does lead to the question that always lingers in my mind: if people were less worried about their appearance (i.e. casually attempt to look good rather than letting it stress them out), would that have greater gains than any attempt to further tweak a moderately-healthy diet?

Similarly, I've always wondered if teenagers would have fewer pimples if they didn't get as stressed out about the possibility that one would appear.

I just retrieved my realtime marks. It turns out that they give us a lot of credit for simply surviving to the end. Our project mark wasn't the hottest thing in the world (7/10 on the demo and 12/15 on the docs/code), but the other marks were good so I've got about an 83% going into the exam (only 30%). So yay! Even if they weren't overly impressed with our tracking or routing code, I was really proud of the UDP/IP stack, and that's what matters the most to me. I really learned a lot.

After the craziness of the realtime demo last week, I headed to California for more interviews. They went quite well, and although I was rather lacking in sleep when I returned (and waited through numerous delays each way due to snow in Chicago), I enjoyed it.

Then I had an amazing belated (due to homework/interviews) birthday dinner with my dear crystalinentity. It was a wonderful evening. I love her. The next evening we went to the Norfolk Hospital Christmas dinner/dance. It was a good night and after one of the dances we won an enormous poinsettia for being "most romantic couple". :-D

At some point I should probably learn how to dance, however.

Oh, and I have a car I can drive now. I bought it a few months ago but didn't have my G2 until later, and then waited for my birthday to buy insurance (rates are lower now, but still ridiculous). It's a strange feeling.

Now I just have 3 exams to get through (hopefully none of them will be terribly difficult) and then we have a cottage to ourselves (with a hot tub) for a week! :-D

Then one last term of school, some vacation time, move to California, get settled in, then start working in August at Google. Wow.

xkcd sums up the realtime experience quite well.

Also possibly of interest: last year I attempted to predict a timeline of how this term would go, by way of a custom Despair, Inc. calendar.

September: Achievement
October: Dare to Slack
November: Quality
December: Burnout

I'd say it's way closer to reality than I should have been able to predict back then. Gragh. It will all be over in one week. Yes, this means my birthday will probably involve an all-nighter. Gee thanks, School.

I look forward to vacation in December.

Somehow classes are almost over this term.

It's been a lot of work and I haven't noticed much of the rest of the world. For example, my posting frequency is about 1/20th what it used to be. :-(

I've pretty much finished everything for concurrency now (just have to write some testing documentation), game theory doesn't have a lot of work left, and REC 100 is, well, REC 100. Now I've pretty much got a week I need to dedicate to realtime and hopefully we end up with something good for the final demo. In any case, I think that passing won't be a problem, which is all that really matters in the grand scheme of things.

I'll have my post-graduation job situation figured out soon. It will be nice not to have to worry about that anymore.

Money is starting to run low, but I think I'm doing quite well, all things considered. And it won't take a lot of time working to make up for what little debt I will have by then.

And then there's the future. It seems a lot less scary than before. Amazing how having someone else around can change that, and so quickly. Sure, the future isn't clearly defined for the next few years (and the next several months are completely up in the air), but in the long term, things are going to be just fine.

So... it seems that the connection information page on VIA Wifi includes GPS coordinates.

First thought: Plug it into google maps
Second thought: Calculate train speed and ETA
Third thought: Hey, that sounds a lot like realtime...

Gah! I can't escape!

You know, VIA's on-board wifi used to be far more stable (either that or the stretch between Kitchener and London is uncharacteristically good). Now I can't keep an ssh connection going for more than 5 minutes. While I'm at the hotel tonight, I think I'll come up with something more resilient for the trip back from Ottawa tomorrow.

Earlier this year, I had free wifi on the train because they said there was degraded service. The connection then was quite a bit better than it is now (it met my expectations for decent service on something moving at high speed). This is poor.

Gra.

I think I'll send a whiny e-mail complaining to VIA.

Update: Wha? The wifi in the station is broken. Completely. I couldn't even get to the login page. Grumble.

It looks like the number of pirates are on the rise again!

Yarr!