Seeing Old Friends

Yes, it's always nice to get together with old friends to see how each other is doing. Sometimes when you meet people you haven't seen in a long time you have a different attitude towards them. When you previously had to spend many hours a day with these people you wanted nothing more than to eviscerate their intestines with a fork, but now that you meet them many months afterwards, you can both look back and laugh at times and events long ago. It's always nice to see old friends.

This past Saturday (Sept 24) I went out with a bunch of guys that I used to live with here on Nootka 4th. Many couldn't make it, due to being out of the country, out of the province, or otherwise out of reach. The eight of us that could get together met up at the UBC bus loop and went out for dinner at Shabusen. Shabusen is a nice little place in downtown Vancouver (Google it, there are only two locations in the world, the other in South Vancouver), where they serve Japanese sushi and Korean BBQ, with the availability of all-you-can-eat. All I can say is, "Oishii!" I've had sushi before, but only stuff like California rolls, and not really the "proper" sushi. This time raw salmon and tuna was had by all, along with a plethora of other vegetables, dumplings, wasabi, and other things for which I don't know the names. My personal favourite was the Korean BBQ, which was raw pork, beef, or chicken, marinated in special sauces, which you then cook yourself over a BBQ that is built into the table. My descriptions can do no justice, as I don't know what half the stuff was that I was eating, but it was very good. If you want to stuff yourself on Asian food sometime, try Shabusen. It is a bit pricey, at $23, and you will have to make reservations before going, but for a special occasion such as this, it was great.

To see some pictures of the outing, and check out the array of food, go to the pictures page. It might take a bit to load, as there are 29 jpeg photos. Clicking a photo will get you the Ultra-Extreme-Platinum-Super-Huge Edition (a full 5.1 megapixels).

Jogging Again, Windows Vista News

Well, I'm trying to get back into some form of exercise, and jogging would be it for now. I must admit that inspiration comes from Mikee, although I'm not following the Sun Run routine thing. I also haven't determined things like route and time just yet. I have found that I'm really out of shape, and just can't run like I used to. On the positive side, I can feel myself improving from one day to the next, because I'm so out of shape. Due to this, I don't have a set route to run, because after a couple weeks the current one will likely be too short. I'm also trying out the early morning run thing, getting up around 5 (more like 5:30) to do the jogging before my day starts. I don't have any good graphing software, so there won't be any statistics gathering (like I did for my meal plan points and my biking times). Should be interesting, to say the least.

There is a lot of stuff happening around Windows Vista this week. It seems that MS has decided to use the Professional Developers Conference (right now in Los Angeles) to announce things and show things off and lift NDAs on people like Robert Scoble. Two places to watch: Slashdot and Channel 9.

Settled In University

Well, I know it's been a long stretch since I last blogged, but anybody who has this on a feedreader will probably get it within a day. Those who were visiting the site manually will have dropped off by now and won't know anything about it.

I'd say I'm now pretty much settled into university. I'm back at UBC, taking second year computer science, and I'm living in Nootka 464. I'm right back on the same floor that I was on last year! The kids here are fine, they seem to be more the partying type than last year, but they also manage to find their parties elsewhere, which is fine by me.

One of my plans in coming here was to have my main box (Babbage, PIII 500MHz) as my work machine and then set up another box (Cerf, PI 90Mhz) as a server machine, hosting things like http, ftp, svn, and maybe even some bugzilla. Unfortunately, the bios seems to be going on it (can't boot from cdrom like it used to), so I think I will just junk it. If anyone needs a 2GB hard drive, a 1GB hard drive, or some old old RAM, they can talk to me. I don't think I'll get too many inquiries. Perhaps in a while I will get Apache set up proper like, with some ftp and subversion, just like I planned. That won't be for a while though.

UBC is also really messing with me. Someone put the wrong co-requisites on the registration website for one of my courses. Long story made short, I'm not allowed to take a course this semester that I wanted to, and I'm being forced to take it next semester (it's a requirement for my degree). This means that I will be taking 4 courses this semester and 6 courses next semester. My plan is actually to attend the classes for the course this semester so that when I have to take it next semester, I will already know most of the material (except the labs).

On the previous two notes, when I do get my Apache up and running, then I will add my timetable to my server. I have already copied it from the UBC webpage (dynamically generated just for me) and stripped the html down to bare minimum. You'll just have to wait.

On a non-personal, non-educational note, I've had this problem with XMMS (Linux's answer to Winamp) not reading the file length of some MP3's properly. It either reads them to be too long, or can't get the length at all and treats it as a stream. In the latter case, any seeking results in a "failed to seek" error. I tracked the problem down today to being a bug in the MAD decoder plugin incorrectly reading tags when XING tag reading is enabled. Perhaps over Christmas break I will make it my job to hunt this one down and fix it (or sooner if I can). One quick fix is to disable MAD and use MPG123 or to disable the XING tags in the MAD options.