Post Industrial Brambles

Chris got me a custom made Bob the Angry Flower drawing for xmass. The author, Stephen Notley, was pleased with his work so he decided to include it in his regular lineup.

We’re all set to start building the basement. We’re going to take official measurements tomorrow. We also just found out that we have to get a building permit from the city. We need to submit a detailed drawing and specification for what we’re doing. I hope this is for our own safety and not just bureaucratic silliness. Now we actually have to make official drawings. I would not design software without doing this so, though I was shocked at this at first, I think it will be a good experience.

If you’ll notice, I’ve updated the tree picture in yesterday’s post. I like the tree this year. I haven’t been happy with my tree designs for a while now. This one, though not perfect, has some promise.

Happy Yuletide everybody!

The four cards that HAD to ship to Korea by Friday finally passed the FIST test and I was off the hook. Then I handed in my project and was off the hook some more. I’ve spent the rest of the day catching up with facets of my job and life that were on the back burner. After work I went to get a xmass tree but was disappointed with the selection. I finally made off with a 20$ wreath that is more funerally then xmassy but that’s what I get for paying too much attention to my school and work and not enough to holidays. I’ll go see if I can find some wreath decorations.

* The Smiths

Since we live on a corner, our driveway is not only full of snow from regular winter snowing activities, but also from snow trucks shovelling snow onto our driveway while turning. Most of the time this annoys me but today I don’t mind. I’ve been cooped up in the house for the week (semester actually) programming. Today I took a day off work, but went to a meeting because I was giving a presentation. When I came back I decided to shovel the driveway since the weather was nice and I needed some exercise. An hour and a half later I am finally in front of my computer all worked out and ready to go. Yay snow!

I got pretty cocky about grad school last year when I had three A+ in a row. This year wasn’t so great. I got an A in Distributed Systems Verification class. This is by no means a bad grade, but I had set the bar higher and now I am grumpy about it. I don’t expect to be terribly happy about my Distributed Systems Engineering grade either, thought the whole class seems to be getting bad grades (at least the grades that are posted on prof’s door) so providing that he curves, it might still not be too bad. I admit to obsessing about it too much, but I have my reasons for this and I am sticking to it.

I still have one deliverable to go, a programming and research project. So far it’s fun and I hope I will have enough time to finish it, being a quarter end at work and all. Even though I am getting flustered about not getting the top grades, I am still happy to have taken this course. For one, I actually get to program in something other than C so I am learning quite a bit. On top of that, even though I did not find some material in the course appealing, at least now I know what approach to research appeals, or does not appeal, to me. So there you go, one more learning experience.

I wrote the Validation Methods for Distributed Systems exam today. Overall, I quite liked the course, though, as always, I will reserve the final judgement for after I receive my grade. It was the first CS course I took in a long time, the last one being FORTRAN77. In any case, it gave me a pretty good glimpse into an area of research I was not familiar with before.

I still have an exam and a project for the other course I am taking this year, Distributed Systems Engineering. This course is a polar opposite, it is very engineeringy in a sense of let’s try a few things and implement the one that seems to work most optimally. I like the project so far. I’ve used Poisedon UML tool and so far I am quite impressed with it. It is a lot easier to use that the Rational Rose tool I used last year. Right now I am using the free basic version, though I might consider buying the actual software (they have student prices) if I have to use UML again. One of the drawbacks of the free basic version is that images are exported with a giant Poisedon watermark on it and you can’t print directly from the application. I was also considered using Eclipse as I’ve heard it was quite good, but with limited time that I have, I was willing to pilot only one new software application at the time so I stuck with the trusty Netbeans.

Geek out.