Well, today I picked up a laptop that Roger sent me for doing testing for the work I’m doing for him, did a bit of work for Dad, answered a lot of email and generally enjoyed receiving birthday wishes from everyone in New Zealand. ^^

I also had dinner with Jenny to make sure she got out of the CSE labs alive. Other than that, I did some laundry, read and evaluated a paper I needed for class tomorrow and talked to various people online.

A good day.

I had a good sleep, caught up with Joe about his Halloween party adventures the night before, watched a couple of episodes of anime to chill out.

I worked on my next assignment for web weaving (not actually due until Tuesday!), wrote some emails, looked over my accounts (being a poor student sucks), general admin stuff… just that kind of day, really.

I didn’t go to basketball again in the morning, needed the extra sleep. I’m going to mail out to the basketball mailing list and see if there’s another time people meet, because Friday morning clearly just isn’t working for me.

Had my meeting with Magda, my adviser. This was really productive, we talked about what I’d been reading about and what to do next, I showed her my proposal document… all in all, a good meeting and things are going well.

I then spent a very, very long time looking for some clothes. I went and got a black turtleneck in fairly short order (I like wearing these anyway, so I’m not exactly unhappy about buying it) and then spent a long time trying to find some black pants/slacks. Most were way too expensive, and the ones from the second hand shops and such (that I could find) were too small (couldn’t get them on) or too big (were falling off). I ended up bussing out to Northgate mall and going to Macys. There were some nice slacks on sale, so I got those. Again, I’ll wear them a lot more, I’m sure, so I wasn’t too worried about spending a little more on them. They’re nice pants, in any case.

Oh, in the middle of all of that I also went to the ISO and picked up my completed forms for my Optional Practical Training (read: work permit), which I’ll need to photocopy, highlight, sign then send off fairly soon.

After that I came back, had a quick shower and then got into my costume and headed off to the showing. When I got there I got given my cane and Kindra was kind enough to sew on my clasp and lace up my waistcoat (more of a vest, really) with the silver cord we got yesterday. I looked awesome! I was Lucius Malfoy, although I kept laughing which kinda ruined it. Not only that, I got third place in the costume contest! Yay! Hilariously, I think I got the best prize as well, which was a whole bunch of manga. I wouldn’t have minded the first prize (complete DVD set of RahXephon), but I didn’t like the second prize and I actually wanted the manga more than the DVDs anyway. So… sweet!

After the showing the usual suspects went out for bubble tea (although Sean and Kari went home ’cause they needed sleep). I was taught how to play “The Great Dalmuti“, which is basically Scum in reverse and with a special set of cards. Fun game, anyway. Somewhere along the way it became a rule that the loser for each round had to wear cat-ears (which I’m not sure how they got in the first place) and on the last round the loser also had to wear them on Halloween Day… guess who lost the last round. I had a sinking feeling when I saw my hand, and it was completely justified. So, I’ll be wearing cat ears on Tuesday (along with my costume). Now picture this, if you will: Lucius Malfoy walking down the Ave, holding manga, a sandwich (I picked up a late dinner) and wearing cat ears. I got some strange looks. The guy at the sandwich shop thought it was awesome though.

Back home I watched a little anime to wind down, then crashed.

Ok, so I thought I’d post what I got up to around the Halloween time. It started the Thursday before Halloween… all of this I actually did write down at the time, I just didn’t post it. Woops.

Had a meeting in the morning with YongChul, another student of Magda’s that is working on the Borealis system I’m going to be modifying for my research. That was ok, although I’m still not sure I follow everything that’s going on.

Went back to my office and worked on doing some emails and stuff, then working some more on reading papers and extracting useful information for research. It seems like “research” involves a lot of paper-reading.

Went to my web-weaving class… again reaffirming that I could be teaching the class, although at the least it’s getting pretty interesting now with some more complex JavaScript.

I then went on a costume mission with my ADP friends and got some stuff for tomorrow night (and Halloween Day I guess). All in all a fun trip, although I spent a little more than I thought I would. ^^;

Animation class was pretty good, we had a technical game artist come in, which is like the in-between guy between the artists and the programmers. He talked at a mile a minute about what he did, but it sounded pretty awesome. His company has some internship opportunities as well, so I’ll follow up on that in the next couple of days to see if there’s something there.

After that I went home and did a whole bunch more work.

I also had a discussion with Jenny today about movies and movie ratings. Since she doesn’t watch “R” movies, I was looking up all the movies I thought were awesome and seeing what they were. This has further embedded my belief that Americans are silly and prudish. They have movies rated “M” or “PG-13″ in New Zealand that are rated “R” here in the US. How stupid is that? I mean, really. Such excellent movies as Lost in Translation (figure that out) and lots of other brilliant movies as well. Truly bizarre.

I got off to a reasonably good start today: Jean didn’t make it to our appointment so I ended up working in the HUB for a little while before visiting the ADP for costume ideas for Friday… that was a fun discussion, and they boiled it down to either Legolas or Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter. Apparently I’m going as Malfoy, which ought to be a riot.

Went to security class, which was a very interesting guest lecture on electronic voting… looks like it might not be too far off having electronic voting that actually works!

From there I did some work in my office for a while before meeting up with Jean at our revised time in the afternoon. We then went around various places on campus looking for places (and permission) to set up our Bluetooth sensors for our class project. Reasonably productive, all in all.

After that I dropped in on Jenny briefly in her lab before going back to my office and doing some more work. After a few hours Jenny came and saw me and we went for dinner at Ichiro, which was pretty good. She then went to choir and I went back to office to pack up and head back to my apartment, where I then worked for several hours more before packing it in and calling it a night.