Today I woke up after probably not enough sleep and felt rather groggy and tired… waking up tired is not a good feeling. Tonight I’ll try and get to bed a bit earlier. I headed off to Databases, which was so-so.

Today I get an email saying the money I paid that I thought was for food was in fact the next month’s rent and actually wasn’t due to be paid until the 1st. Figures. They should spell this shit out more clearly.

After class I head to the HUB, this time I find that the Bank of America ATM wasn’t accepting any cards for some reason, so no cash for me (without getting totally raped by international charges, of course). I have a bit of cash left in my wallet anyway, so I head into ‘etc’, which doesn’t appear to have a website so I can’t link you, sorry. It’s like a mini-mart/dairy type thing. It sells the usual dairy stuff, a whole bunch of asian food products, and the UW clothing paraphernalia. I got an icee and some “men’s pocky” (ha!) and figured to eat a larger meal later on.

I sit and look at a sign for cookies and cream milkshake and it triggers something in my head… I had a dream not last night, but the night before and it somehow involved some kind of discussion on ice cream. One of my friends (it was a girl) was busy telling me how great cookies and cream ice cream was… and then seemed really surprised that I liked it as well. There was something else, but I find it really hard to remember my dreams unless I write them down right after I wake up, and even then I lose a lot of the details. Huh, weird.

Turns out the icee was a weird flavour which isn’t sitting so well with me, so I didn’t finish it. I turn back to my computer and do some email and some blog entries before I head over to the CSE building for my afternoon Colloquium.

Colloquium was a very interesting talk about Operating System crashes. Pretty much anyone who has used a computer has experienced this, and apparently about 85% of them are due to device driver failures. So, the proposed system introduced an isolation layer to transparently detect faults and recover from them. It was implemented on the Linux kernel (open source is a wonderful thing) with extremely good results. Windows is a little harder because all of the code is proprietary, but apparently the Microsoft guys are working on a similar project. Anyway, very cool stuff.

I explored a new route back to my apartment from the CSE building in the rain… I think it might shave a minute or two off of the time, but the difference may be negligible. Not sure. In any case, I have to remember the path if I am to traverse it. Back to the apartment I go.

Put my washing out, start doing a bit of work, chatting intermittently on MSN. Switch the washing to the dryer, get called down by Aidan to try some of his fried rice which I ran into him while he was cooking when I went down before. Pretty good, actually. ^^

Kyung and I went to pick up some burritos. I learned my lesson and this time got two, coming back and watching Stargate Atlantis like I did yesterday. It’s a good pastime for eating dinner, I find. Just before I ate I ran down and got my washing out of the dryer.

After that I did some more work for a while, then talked to Anastasia on the phone as she was about to go to bed, then back to work. Work for a while, then go have a hot shower after finishing the next design template. Man, that shower was very relaxing. I surfed around the clubs on the UW website, keeping some links open on the ones that look interesting.

After that I watched some anime as a break, had a can of Sprite I picked up at the Colloquium then got stuck back into work. I finished up the section of work, then realize it was getting late, so I switched off work and watched the end of Trinity Blood before crashing.

Hurrah, extra sleep! I missed free lunch again though… ah well, sleep is totally worth a few bucks for lunch. Anyway, went to Graphics, talked to the TA about the fact that I have no office (and thus no place for him to come see when he assesses my assignment with me), turns out no problem… I do have a laptop, after all.

For lunch I had the messiest Subway sandwich I have ever had… this guy had to wrap it in an exta layer of paper and it was practically falling apart. Totally not cool, I won’t be having Subway for a little while until my brain registers that it must be an aberration and I can go back to the (relative) healthiness of Subway sandwiches.

Did some email, looked for an image to submit for my ‘artifact’ for my first Graphics assignment. This is basically just an image that I mess around with using my impressionist program to show off my brushes and stuff.

I then went to the CSE building and watched an old, black and white film on the relationship between mathematics and physics… it was supposed to be on the nature of symmetry (which would have been moe useful for graphics work), but turns out since everyone went to the Jorge Cham talk last week and so they didn’t show them as scheduled.

After that I sat down in the CSE building to do some more email and my graphics artifact. Took me a while but I turned this lovely picture into my weird ‘artistic’ impression of it.

I went back to the apartment to say goodnight to Anastasia, then went and grabbed a burrito for dinner (this time bring it back to the apartment) and watched some Stargate Atlantis while I ate. That worked out fairly well, I imagine I’ll be repeating that exercise.

I did some work, talked to Mike and Siobhan, did the reading for tomorrow’s class, wrote an email then crashed.

Ugh. Alarm goes off… I stay in bed for another half hour or so trying to wake up properly. At some point someone from maintenance comes by to inspect the place (I thought we were supposed to get warning about that, but hey) and informs Kyung that the stovetop needs cleaning… maybe I missed the memo. I get myself together and head off to class.

Today was actually very, very sunny… totally bizarre.

Database class: load shedding in streams, I won’t go into details because it’ll bore everyone silly… even I didn’t find it particularly interesting, and this is something that I’m actually interested in. After that, Ubiquitous computing class: analysis of mobile behaviour. That was very cool as usual, although the papers presented seemed to be lacking in something which we couldn’t really put our fingers on. Robustness, perhaps, of their arguments in some cases.

After that I met up with Marisa and had lunch (stupid Husky card was not working!). I then headed off to class only to find that it’s not on today. Naturally. From there I headed to the CSE building and sat down and watched as they set up everything for the Xbox tournament tonight. I answered a few emails and was generally frustrated over my sickly looking bank accounts, did a blog entry then started to hook into the Xbox thing going on around me, which had free food, giveaways, all kinds of stuff… ah, the perks of being the CS department that is closest to Microsoft. ^^

I entered the Xbox Halo 2 tournament, despite having never played before in my life… I actually made it to the second round (I died twice and killed no one, but the rest of my team carved up), but failed dismally (we were robbed! Even the other team admitted it was unfair advantage to them) in the next round. I got free pizza, candy and drinks at various stages throughout the evening; I played on Xbox 360s, but not a lot… I picked up a free “Let’s get nerdy” t-shirt which had been compressed into packaging the size of a coffee brick, I won an Xbox360 hoodie and also managed to snaffle up a Halo 2 action figure and as I was walking out the door one of the recruiters, Jill, came up and gave me a 360 t-shirt as well. Sweet… I wonder how much Microsoft-pimping gear I can get before I leave Seattle next year. A lot, I’m thinking.

My friend from Graphics, Rob, managed to get 3rd in the Halo 2 tournament, and scored some cool gear of his own as well. After the whole thing was over, he was good enough to give me a lift back to my place and we just talked some shit on the way back. He also tried to get me to trade action figures with him, as I have the cooler character. No dice.

I watched some bad television to take my mind off of things and did some homework.

Well, I read a little as I tried to unwind, got some broken sleep then my alarm got me up way to early (I realized this after seeing my class wasn’t until 1.30) so I got another hour and half or so before I stumbled around and got ready, then headed off to class.

Went to Graphics class, a bit maths-intense today. My phone also died… I later found out that I’d knocked the charger so the plug wasn’t fully in the wall which meant that instead of charging up last night it was just dying some more. Figures.

Subway for lunch then back to the apartment. I got the magazine subscription notice in the mail… after some quick research finding out that (unsurprisingly) it’s a total rip off I ring up the number on the bit of paper, cancel subscription, then get stuck into adding some extra features to my assignment.

I talked to Anastasia a little, then went and got some dinner (Chipotle burrito). After that it was back for more assignment work (and briefly talking to Siobhan, who it looks like I won’t be able to see on her way through the US later on this year, which is a bummer). I did the readings for class tomorrow… lots of interesting stuff, actually, particularly for Ubiquitous Computing, which is dealing primarily with user interaction with cell-phones. I flopped on to my bed and read a bit of my book for a while before heading to sleep.

Well, I got some sleep… broken, but I got some. Woke up at lunchtime. I did some emails and talked to Anastasia for a bit, my emails took a bit longer than I thought they would as I was getting a bunch of new ones and trying to keep them under control. I finished off my pizza from last night (I had a couple of slices left over) as a snack, took a relaxing shower then got stuck into my assignment. That took a really long time. I took a brief break to talk to Anastasia when she went to bed and then again for some food later on, but that’s pretty much what I did. Next thing I knew, it was 4am. Yeesh. I submitted my assignment and then got into bed, hoping to sleep.