Back to the Grind
Two months has passed already?! D:
Two months ago I was at RIM on my second co-op. Now I’m back to school in Waterloo, applying for more jobs. Between that time I was in Italy for the holidays and my birthday happened. I’m old now – twenty.
I would say “I can’t believe I haven’t written for so long!” but I can. For many weeks (starting from when I was still in Italy) I kept saying “I’ll update tomorrow”. It never happened! Arg! It definitely was not because I had nothing to write about or that I had no internet. Like I mentioned at the end of my last post, once I think of something to write and outline it in my head, it’s gone. It sounded like such a great post so I effectively ‘posted’ it in my head. Now I update, while procrastinating on CS241 homework. I should be fixing my assembler and working on the next batch of MIPS instructions to implement.
Italy
I’ll blab about things in a chronological order. On the last day of my employment at RIM, I was actually travelling from Ottawa->Washington->Roma. The entire trip as a whole was different from other trips we had been on as a family, probably because we (Tori and I) are old now. We’re well aware of our surroundings, don’t need to be babysat and can stay up late. I found that affected the outcome of the trip. Anyways, Italy was great! It wasn’t very warm – but warmer than Ottawa. It was damp and rainy sometimes which was nice.
Our trip was split into two weeks: First week was spent in Nemi (40kmish from Roma) and we drove to a train station to take the train into Roma for the day. In Roma we visited places like the Colosseum, Vatica city (including the musem and chapel), Trevi Fountain, and generally walked around. Some days we spent relaxing in our place (it was nice) and others visiting the surrounding villages. Our place also had internet, so of course I abused it. :)
There was a restaurant attached to our place (which we later discovered is very common – restaurant with inn attached) and we ate there frequently. The food was soooooooo good! I loved all the pasta, bruschetta and pizza. None of this crap frozen pizza like in North America. We ate at other similar places for lunches and dinner. Surprisingly enough, lunches always ended up being much more expensive than a dinner. There was one lunch we had in Nemi that left us all so full, that we would all explode if we ever saw a noodle again. Amazing food though!
The second week we drove down to a port town called Pozzuoli (near Napoli) and took a ferry across to the island called Ischia. It cost an arm and a leg to get over there, but it was well worth it. The island had natural hot springs (among other awesome things) that we walked to visit. Our new place on Ischia was also nice but with quirks. We had to pay for hydro and no internet! I nearly died (not). Main attractions for that week included: Pompei, Napoli and almost-Vesuvio. Almost meaning the weather was crappy and ferrying back to mainland would have been iffy.
Now that I remember, one huge con of the whole trip was getting lost a lot. Well, I didn’t think it was that bad, but 50% of my family did. Regardless, we were epic lost going from the airport to our place (I would also like to mention that waiting for 12hrs due to missed/delayed flights of Mum/Tori was not enjoyable), going from Napoli to Pompei (and just getting to Pompei), and other trips. There was a fairly high percentage of trips that involved getting lost. Once we knew the area around Nemi well, we moved to Ischia. :P
If I get around to it, I’ll put up my trip notes and good pictures on separate little site. I uploaded the majority of my pictures to Flickr.
Back to school + Job-mining
Immdiately after Italy, I took one more plane than everyone else to get to Waterloo again. Packed with me was just clothes, since Q was nice enough to bring most of my crap to school for me. :) On the first day of classes, I moved in and went to class, while being jet-lagged. Was that ever fun. My first class was STAT230 (apparently a joke) and then BIOL112 at 18:00-21:00. When I got home and finally unpacked, it was so relieving. I could then sleep in the surprisingly comfy bed.
Fast-forward to about now, and I’m well into term with CS assignments piling up and STATs quizzes happening. It’s not nearly as busy as 1A or 1B was though, with the lack of weekly calc/algebra assignments. Meanwhile, I have 10 interviews so far and 25 more applications to be screened for. I’m starting to regret applying for 40 positions. Thankfully I applied for things like Google and AMD, then was quickly rejected. Interviews have been going well, but I find I’m still nervous and saying stupid things. I stumble over my words frequently. Blah.
I like my classes this term and hopefully I will be less noob and try harder :P I’m not a big fan of PHIL145 – I should have taken the next Japanese course instead. :(
So far in CS241 we’ve learned about basic MIPS stuff and we’re writing assemblers in either Java, C or PLT Scheme. I was initially going to do it in Java for the challenge (but not as challenging as C) and since I don’t really know it, but I decided on scheme. The language is so pretty and makes pretty colours in my xterm.
I’m OLD
Not really – only 20. Another big step, though. I wasn’t really expecting too much apart from previously hinted things, until the ’surprise’ was hinted at on the night of my birthday. It was on a Monday, so I was in biology until 20:30ish. I was going to go to Harry’s because I honestly did not expect anything to happen, and all of a sudden Harry was saying “NO! You have to go home!” So that somewhat was…. a huge hint :P I walked into my flat and I saw half of Q’s roommates sitting on the couch. :P Surprise! Yaay! :D They gave me things like a Little Mermaid puzzle with matching card and chocolate (can’t go wrong with that). One of Q’s roommates made me a cake too! It was delicious, yummm. The most surprising thing of all was the rain stick Q presented me with. It was so epic – he hammered in all of the nails himself. Rather inefficient, but I guess it was built with love. It sounds really nice! It was all really nice and planned so well. Thanks guys! :D
I feel like I’m missing something to this large entry and maybe I’ll remember later. On another note, I think it’s definitely time for a new design. I think this one has been up since… November last year. I never even finished it. I’m horrible!
Comments
2 responses to Back to the Grind
Holy epic post.
You ARE old now, but that’s okay. We love you the same :) Instead of making a new design for your blog, you should commit to posting more :P
Andrew on February 4, 2009 at 10:50 (542 days ago)
D:
Rebecca on February 5, 2009 at 23:40 (541 days ago)
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