Chris's Journal

I'm exhausted. Visited CIF for the first time today, checking out the weight room and arena. Such a nice building. Worked out in PAC. Discovered I have to wear athletic pants now when I exercise, which means I need to go shopping. I plan to work out at CIF or PAC every day, but I need those clothes first.

My room is pristine clean but the rest of my house, well, let's just say these: the kitchen floor isn't sticky anymore because a new layer of dirt has covered the stickiness, and the "cross off your name when cleaning finished" list on the fridge has nothing crossed off at all for December. Plus the fridge has no space for my food. I shouldn't have accepted one fridge for four people. I knew that was a bad idea. I'm glad my room makes up for it.

Last night I went to Molly Bloom's Irish Pub, and it was packed! I had to shout over the crowd and when my friend and I left there were 25+ people in line. Yikes.

Need to write my work report.

Whew... I'm exhausted. At last I am back in Waterloo and ready to study hard and play hard! I'm settling down, buying groceries and an alarm clock, course notes and textbooks, writing my work report -- all that usual stuff.

This term I subletted a room from Winnie, a girl I knew from West E, and it looks interesting with its bright blue walls, glow-in-the-dark stars and planets on the ceiling, and rainbow sharpies hanging on the wall. It's the "coolest FOB room ever," she says. The rest of the house is pretty messy and sticky, but my room is super-clean. I haven't really met the housemates yet.

I spent New Year's Eve in Toronto, going to a comedy extravaganza at Massey Hall followed by dropping in at The Duke of Gloucester for some (unlimited free!) champagne and good cheer. The extravaganza turned out to be pretty sexual. We were amoung the youngest there.

I've been thinking about my goals this term. Besides a nice and high term average, I want to try the DJ club, some PAC clubs, and make a lot of friends. I want to juggle all this with trips to Toronto. It'll be a packed term. I hope it goes well!

Yesterday I went to Wonderland for Fearfest, and it was cold!! Brr! Only hot chocolate cured me of the chill of almost a Canadian November.

The rides I went on (The Italian Job, the Vortex, Sledgehammer, and this 3D theatre) were pretty fun and they subjected me to some comfortable G-forces. There really is a feeling of near-death as you plummet down the first fall on a roller-coaster. I wonder what it feels like to pull up out of freefall in NASA's zero-gravity simulation jet?

I went out with Cindy and some of her Toronto connections. The group social thing was really fun. We went to dinner in Markham — land of first work term and great memories for me — where I won them over with my ability to use chopsticks correctly and hold fun conversation. These were Chinese who don't eat Chinese food with rice — “we're the new generation” as they put it ;-). I'll post the dinner pic as soon as I get it.

It was really good because I really hadn't gone out with completely new people like for a long time. Since I spent half of this term and half of last with my ex, it's been a while since I've felt unencumbered like that. I honestly enjoyed it a lot.

Fun evening! There was a WATPUB, and I was in the best of moods. I was running around bringing people to my table… very successfully, I might add. People were asking me if I was organizing it. I was dynamic and happy and had some great conversation with old Japanese classmates and friends like Dan. It was Thursday evening, pub night at The Madison, one of Toronto’s hippest bars, and I was energetic and playful. I think I actually frightened a couple people with my enthusaism… *laughs*

Further proof I was in a great mood — on my way home, I walked into Miyaki Sushi, which officially closed at 10:00. It was 10:45. I asked them politely if they were still open, because their sign was on, and they said “no.” I left, but the waitress pursued me. She brought me back inside and they offered to serve me. I asked for a serving of salmon sushi, which they happily began making. Since they were so kind, I asked for two helpings, but they gave me three instead. They also threw in miso soup and a 10% discount card for my next visit. Super impressive. I will definitely eat there again. Minna-san domo arigatou gozaimashita!

I know, I know, I need to write more about Startup School. In lieu of coverage from me myself however, you can read Imprint. They're going to have an article about it. Check next issue.

Update: There it is ;-)

Well, the week is drawing to a close. I thought I'd give you all an update on what's been going on with me.

I've been hanging out with various people in various places including High Park to Chinatown. High Park especially was a lovely time, and I enjoyed Edo with Dan, albeit it was a bit strange with the disturbances: a woman with pink lipstick walked into the Japanese restaurant and asked for spare change, and some guy came in and asked bluntly if the owners were Korean or Japanese.

I bought some 30% off summer clothes today at trendy Chinatown shop Ice Zone and ate at a lovely, but very strangely empty Chinatown restaurant called Lucky Dragon, which has its three-star reviews posted around and a note that the chef won silver in a cooking competition that looked pretty international. So, one would think it would be full of customers! It certainly wasn't the food that would keep people away, because it was really good.

At work, I've been doing my own thing, building knowledge about the vast technology landscape. Partial list of what I learned about this week: aspect-oriented programming and JAspect, Dependency Injection, Service Location, object-relational mapping, JSP tag libraries, persistence frameworks, n-tier applications, transaction management (in Java), post-object oriented programming style, System on Module computers and their pricing, LonWorks, NetBeans, Blender, Struts/Tiles, Struts Console, Turbine/Intake/Fulcrum, Tapestry, WebWork, and the Spring framework. Not that we're using all those technologies, but I have a much better picture of the Java web programming landscape now, and some business ideas to post on a blog I need to create in time for the startup school.

Surfing the speakers page for the startup school, I found the page of Olin Shivers, a former AI Lab researcher and sinophile who taught computer science on exchange at HKU. He has a wealth of information about what HK is really like if you're interested in that sort of stuff.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~shivers/hk.html

I'm very impressed with the array of speakers they've chosen. I do wonder though, with twelve experts speaking, each of whom could easily present a couple hours' worth of material, would it not be better to have fewer speakers with more time allotted for each? Nonetheless, I don't doubt this will be the most educational day of 2005 for me, and I'm expecting to have a very sore typing/writing hand afterwards!

So, with my acceptance to Paul Graham's and HCS's startup school on October 15th, I'm searching for people at Harvard or mit with empty space in rooms that I can sleep in, as I'm already spending a couple hundred dollars to make it over to Cambridge. Does anybody have contacts over there? If I can't find anyone through my own social networking I'll try e-mailing the organizers.

Update: Visitors from Technorati or search engines, you can contact me by posting here or at designfu on gmail directly if you like. Looking forward to meeting you.

Update 2: Keith Casey has started a thread on his blog here to help with coordination for anybody attending.

Thanks for applying to the startup school. We're happy to report you've been accepted. Would you mind following this link and telling us whether you're coming?

http://sorry-link-is-gone-:-)

We've signed up a couple new speakers recently, most notably Steve Wozniak, and the HCS has managed to secure Harvard's biggest lecture hall, so things are shaping up well. We look forward to seeing you!

The Management

Yesterday was entertaining. First of all, at work, we had a production meeting, a chance to hear briefings from the executives and, more importantly, snippets of the studio's recent work. I was especially impressed with the algorithms R&D had been working on, which were being done in a proactive approach that impressed rival studios. I learned that I hate beer for a reason, because the Guiness Draught they served had me shaking because it was so bitter. All other drinks are fine.

In the evening, I went to the sending for my friend from last work term quikchange. The place, Green Room, was a bit sketchy and hidden, found in between University and Spadina but down a minor street. His friends are quite mature and diverse — everybody from political science grad students to software engineers were represented, many of them also attending different schools. Afterwards I went to a coffee joint with a couple more friends of his from high school, but the evening was interrupted when Liz called to say she really needed to talk and I left the group.

Second, I'm sick… my higher level thinking skills are affected accordingly. I woke up at 2:00 PM and cooked myself some chicken, but generally, I spent the afternoon googling aimlessly and lying on my bed. I hope the symptoms pass soon. I'm hoping it's the flu or strep throat and not, say, mononucleosis.

Those of you who've been following my life know that I'm working around Toronto again this work term. I'm working for C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, joining its internal applications development team, as the woman whose work I'm doing is sometimes at home or the hospital with her poor husband, who has cancer.

Thanks to a long cable, I now finally have Internet access in my room. Now I can fill my evenings with researching my entrepreneurial dreams and helping with CUTC, as I'm no longer limited to just evenings of reading Snow Crash, watching Gilmore Girls, hunting around Apple's reference library, and other pleasurable things. At last, I can be online and keep friends and family updated without looking over my shoulder to see if my boss is watching.

So, if any of you are around the Toronto area, especially near the Distillery District where I live, please let me know because I don't have Future Blue this term to deliver a social life. Further contact info to follow in a friends-only post.

Dear Mr. CEO of a Major Wireless Carrier,

I just wanted to tell you that your recent business idea, selling music wirelessly over your first-generation cell phone network, is a terrible one and is guaranteed to fail. There are several reasons for this, some of which I will outline below.

• There is no way you can afford to send files of high enough quality to your customers. Why? Because your wireless data services, at cheapest, are already $6.67 per megabyte per month. Consider that the average 128kbit song is 2-4MB. No way you can seduce customers into paying $12 for a song, no matter how flashily you present it. In fact, speaking of that:
• For backwards compatibility, you will make a crappy WAP interface. You'll say, "that's how we sell ringtones, so it's okay." It's not. Nobody wants to use a crappy interface where they do more waiting than viewing. And when they buy, they don't want to wait until you deliver one of your:
• Files of 48kbit quality. Now, Mr. CEO, music doesn't sound good until 128kbit. You want to sound better than the radio. You really do, otherwise people won't listen. And they certainly won't pay $1 for the song. And you can't afford ($6.67/MB?) to send them something good enough. You're screwed.

All in all, Mr. CEO, your customers will try your service, go through the pain to buy a single song, and then run back to their iTunes+iPod combination that delivers songs in less than ten seconds each for a regular price of 99 cents a track with a world-class interface that makes browsing and searching easy.

Sorry, your service is a dud.

All the best,
Chris.

One more thing I will never fear again — I have now been in front of a hundred people and I have given a serious technical seminar. Yes, it was a great success! The auditorium seats were about 80% full, and there were people lined up watching from the side. And when I was done, only three people ducked out before the questions.

Afterwards, lots of people told me I did a great job, from my advisor Chad to the woman in charge of CAS talks and, today, the woman in charge of the co-op program, who had indirectly heard it was good. Other positive comments I heard included “you didn't read from the slides,” which I certainly didn't, because I know this particular subject better than anything else in modern technology. Also, the organizer wants me to do a lunch talk for the CAS students. For the CAS students — I didn't realize until a friend told me that apparently, they're all grad students with Ph.D's and masters'. They're practically three halves my age. Total role reversal ;)

Also, it has inspired me to write a Nordia-style entrepreneurship plan. The plan is to take the plan the CBSS guys and girls (Joanna) wrote and rip it off, learning the business concepts along the way, and making a report of my own about video on demand boxes that basically provide TV streamed from the Internet, something which won't happen until IPv6. It's coming. It'll be big. Unfortunately, I couldn't get enough money to finance doing it myself, but I certainly can write up a convincing document of how it'd be done.

Here's the weekend plan:

• Friday: Sin City with Eric and the unofficial Future Blue boys and girls.
• Saturday: TSO with Tony, Mike, and other cultured IBMers.
• Sunday: Get-together of the Homeland Security Technology Co., which I was invited to by Tony.

I've been quite bipolar lately. Those who know me (or can read friends-only entries ;) would know why. One hour I'm writing the most vile, disparaging things… the next I'm chipper and happy and playful.

I'm trying to be as routine as possible — sleeping right on time, for example — to get myself back into the old happy routine I had last week. It takes a while to recover from such disappointments. Hang in there, Chris!

I'm going to have no life and no time until next Wednesday, when I'll have my CAS talk prepared and ready. It's a lot easier to motivate yourself when just walking around the lab you see posters up advertising it :)

Um, I'm also not feeling very talkative. Sorry people, if I'm kinda distant… be understanding…

Topic: 	 	An Introduction to Internet Protocol version 6
Date: 		Wed April 13th
Time: 		11:00am EST 
Location: 	Amphitheatre (front half)
Speaker: 	Chris Erbach

Fetch me my quill — it's time to shape some ink into words and practice the gentlymanly art of writing.

Actually, I'm more in the mood to start wars, raze cities, and brush my teeth to KOMPRESSOR. I want to hold wild rituals worshipping evil gods and I want to sell pamphlets explaining the deepest secrets of Scientology OT III for five bucks outside its local Church.

… I swear I was going somewhere with this entry. How about I talk psych for a while?

There's this thing that's been bothering me about people as they grow up. They strive to understand the world as rigidly within the “rules” of the world as they can. For example, they find it very strange that I consciously skew my thoughts so optimism blossoms and so I avoid depression. Given a rational mind with the power to shape its own thought, why not skew emotion to be positive?

So I went to Ottawa with quikchange and Ange, meeting canoe_drew and Shannon. I went rock-climbing for the first time in many years — nothing like tying the rope that, if broken, would end your life! I did a couple of their easier climbs and very much tired myself out. We also went skating on the Rideau canal, and clearly that skating instructor from the Barbados knew his art, because I was told I did very well for a second time in recent history. The trip was fun and informative :)

Okay… randomness ends…

The joy of being late to post about your weekend is that your friends have already talked about it for you. For a summary of last last weekend, look attyg's or tony_on_rails's. Since then:

Wednesday, I got in a car wreck, which must have sent the value of poor Michael's old car straight into the negatives. A lady ran a stopsign and sailed right into us even as we were trying to turn and evade her. No, don't worry, nobody was hurt in any major way — my right arm won't be weightlifting for a while since it was slammed along with the rest of my body into the right rear car door, but we all escaped otherwise unscathed. The best part was sitting in the back of a cop's car, which, having a metal cage and doors that only open from outside, made me feel like a convict. We were just outside IBM and heading to Toronto for the evening to see, amusingly, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. I never knew it could be so dangerous!

I spent $78 on a monthly York Region Transit pass this morning, but lost it before I had a chance to use it :(
Guess I'll be buying some more tickets, lol

Jennifer, the landlady, locked herself out of her car after shopping. Problem was, her dog was in the car, so she couldn't leave Ginger overnight, right? So she walked 20 minutes home, and found she forgot her key. Now, there was an extra hidden, but it was misplaced by her son who came to visit. End result? She broke in by smashing a window, got the car key, and drove Ginger home.

Okay, so there have been a couple of unlucky events in this otherwise fun day :)