9 February 2004, lunch time
Firefox was a name that Roni Size used to put out some jungle jungle jungle jungle jungle. What I linked to was the new release of Mozilla’s standalone web browser, once known as Phoenix, then as Firebird, and now finally as Firefox.
9 February 2004, terribly early in the morning
Today Shima and I watched two documentaries. The first, which I had seen before, Startup.com, was a film about the rise and fall of a dot-com startup. The second was Helen’s War, a documentary about the current work of anti-war activist Helen Caldicott. Both films are quite good.
This week there are lots of interesting documentaries being shown on CBC Newsworld, and I recomend you check them out. Rough Cuts usually shows some great stuff.
7 February 2004, mid-afternoon
I’ve had broadband access for years, but it has been disappointingly slow for most of those years. Finally, living in Waterloo, connected to a DSL line that must be alligator-clipped right into Waterloo’s backbone, I am able to enjoy some good internet radio.
For those of you with fast connections, check out the statations at SomaFM. They have something for every type of listener, even for Mezan [Cliqhop].
Comment [1] Technology | Music
6 February 2004, early evening
An article over at Salon, written by Courtney Love, discusses the state of the music industry. In particular, she talks about how the record industry is basically set up to rip off artists. It is a pretty interesting read.
6 February 2004, terribly early in the morning
This past wednesday we went to the bomber. Cathy had come up from Toronto and the plan was to party it up that night. I had a Statistics Quiz the next day but I figured, ‘what the hell’. All the girls came out, Doris, Ah-sun, Cathy, Cat, Flora and one of their friends whose name I still don’t know. Gary, Yang and I got there early, and loitered about for a bit, waiting for the girls. There are lots of entertaining tidbits to share, though not on the internet. Gary documented the entire night on his digital camera. I think I have like 117 of his pictures and movies on my laptop now. It was quite the evening I must say. I’ve decided that it is time to switch it up and start going out more often. And the Statistics test was easy, bonus.
4 February 2004, early evening
I’ve been ripping my CD collection for the past little while, bit my bit. I’m disappointed because I don’t think I can get my entire CD collection on my iPod at 192 ACC. (Yes, I ended up switching down from 224. Most of of my electronica and my super-favourite albums are in at 224 ACC, the rest have been going in at 192.)
Today I ripped some of the singles I bought while in London and Sydney. There are some interesting songs on them I didn’t know I owned. For example, I bought the Go Deep single by Janet Jackson when I was in Sydney during the summer after grade 12. It features remixes of the song by Roni Size and Masters at Work. I have a very bizarre remix by the Mad Professor of Tear Drop. I bought two Natalie Imbruglia singles when I was in OZ as well, one was Big Mistake, the other was Wish I was There They both have some cool B-Sides and a few good live performances of her big hits.
Reading this over, I realize that this post, like many that have come before it, has no real point. One day I will figure out some purpose for this page, well, besides keeping every one up to date on the day to day boredom that is my life.
Comment [5] Technology | Music
4 February 2004, terribly early in the morning
Just got back from watching 21 Grams with Steph, Gary and Ju-lian. The film is excellent. Gary and Ju-lian found it long, though I didn’t notice so much. I recommend the film whole heartedly. I won’t say anymore, lest I give away something.
3 February 2004, lunch time
I arrive at school to be told the compilers class has been cancelled. Normally I wouldn’t care, but at 8:30 in the morning that is some cold shit. I emailed Kumar telling him not to come to class, printed out our documenatation, gave it to the angry CS secretary, and am now sitting in the computer lab. I’m apparently supposed to read four papers on error recovery and detection when you are parsing. What a dis.
3 February 2004, terribly early in the morning
Kumar is putting the final touches on the document we need to submit for compilers. The afternoon was spent hacking together a symbol table that we hope works well enough for the assignment. I’m hoping everything works! For the next assignment we have to do the serious semantic analysis, and the symbol table stuff we did for this assignment will probably be scrapped.
2 February 2004, the wee hours
Our assignment is due in two days. We are quite close to completion, though there are still two components we need to get working. First, we need to make a symbol table. This shouldn’t be too difficult, and I think Kumar is almost finished implementing one. The second task, which will be trickier to do, is error recovery. Right now, when an error occurs, the program prints an error message and terminates. Ideally, the behaviour our compiler should exhibit is some sort of recovery strategy that allows it to keep parsing, looking for more errors. I hope we can get everything done in time.
31 January 2004, early evening
My cousin Jana showed me this site. Somebody has dubbed the ending lessons from GI Joe. Some are quite entertaining, the reggae one in particular.
Ahilan has informed me that there is a live action GI Joe film in the works.
31 January 2004, early evening
The trailer is out for the next Kill Bill film. Frankly, the trailer sucks, but that isn’t saying much. I am quite sure this movie will be very excellent. I can’t wait to watch it.
Comment [3] Interesting Links | Movies
31 January 2004, early evening
Yesterday, I went to Fred’s Not Here to celebrate Cathy’s 24th birthday. Cathy is my old roommate. I haven’t seen her in quite some time, since she graduated last term. The food at the restaurant was excellent, with an asian-fusion twist to all the dishes. Because of the current winterlicous event, the meal was 20 bucks. I had a Sczhewan-Peppercorn Sirloin Steak which was quite tasty.
We went to Up afterwards, which is a lounge above Al Frisco’s. The place was quite nice. There was some sort of Hawaiian theme martini night going on. Up was filled with an interesting mix of people. There were plenty of boys for Cathy to mack on, though she declined to do so this evening.
Lien, the other girl I lived with when I lived with Cathy, is in San Fransico. Such a shame that she wasn’t around. I’m sure she will be jealous when she sees Cathy’s photos.
I wore my peach shirt from Mark’s and Spencer’s. That shirt is very slick.
30 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
Finished watching Better Luck Tomorrow just now. I was impressed with the film, though it really didn’t live up to all the hype. The ending was pretty dark, and quite unexpected, which I thought was quite good. My favourite character in the film was Han. You should check the film out if you want to see a movie that features asians as the lead protagonists.
29 January 2004, early evening
Taking advantage of the extension given to us on our compilers project, I went to Fed hall last night with Shima, Gary, Simon and Matt. Yesterday night was the Lunarfest celebration put on by the various Asian student associations on campus. I have a lot of friends in the Japanese club, KonJa, so I thought it would be a fun night out.
They began the night with a sort of cultural show, showcasing Asian clothing, music and dance. I love seeing stuff like that. The rest of the world is so interesting. My friend Dan’s Kung-fu group did a little presentation that was quite cool. There is this one little kid in his group that is wicked. One of the girls in the group, who Shima says also does gymnastics, was also quite good at flipping and kicking generally looking very much like someone out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
They also had some break-dancers. I love break-dancers. There was this one fat guy in the group who you would think couldn’t break dance at all, but who could do all sorts of crazy flips. If I knew how to break-dance I would drop out of school and just break-dance on the street for money. Truly it is the greatest form of dance.
There was a ‘jam’ afterwards, which was alright.
28 January 2004, mid-afternoon
Mezan sent me this link a long time ago. This is a wicked black and white photo. I feel like loading up my SLR and going out after looking at it.
28 January 2004, mid-afternoon
Dave has finally put up morose code again. The newly designed page looks quite slick. You should go check it out. It’s definitely a better read then the crap I write. Hah.
28 January 2004, the wee hours
I woke this morning this morning at 7:30, hoping that there would be no school. I have my compilers class at 8:30, and I was in no mood to go to class. Normally I wouldn’t even bother checking to see if it was a snow-day, but today I decided to hope for the best. Lucky for me, it was infact a snow day. I went back to bed, quite content.
I woke up later and went to the mall with Steph and Jen. Shima and I have been going out for a year, and to celebrate the occasion I wanted to get her a dozen roses. While at the mall, I found a nice sweater for 20 bucks, and a pair of FCUK jeans for 30.
I have been stressing over my compilers assignment for a few days now. It still isn’t working, but my partner and I are getting much closer. The assignment was to be due this coming thursday. I say, “was”, because my partner informed me in the evening that we have been given an extension till the 3rd of Febuary.
Shima and I made this stir-fry shrimp salad today, and it turned out really great. Shima got me a really nice watch and a book, a persian book called Layla and Majnun.
It has been a good day.
27 January 2004, mid-afternoon
Damn it, I spoke too soon. The parser is a little bit on the broken side. Hopefully I can figure out what’s wrong and fix it quickly. Kumar is working on the symbol table now, though apparently another problem is that the huge parse table won’t compile for him.
27 January 2004, the wee hours
Our compiler seems to be parsing stuff now. We need to do some serious testing to make sure this is indeed the case, but I am hoping that there are no problems. Kumar is supposed to be working on a testing document now.
I used a program called ilalr to determine the states of a DFA that we could use to parse the context-free grammar. I had to write a program that would convert the output of the program into code I could use to make a parse table. The parser implemented is an LR-parser, which people usually refer to as a bottom up parser because of the way the parse tree gets built.
Kumar and I still have to write the code needed to produce a basic symbol table, and I think we need to improve our error handling. Hopefully that isn’t too much work.
26 January 2004, the wee hours
Documentaries are cool. My cousin was telling me about one he saw recently called “the Corporation”. The film describes how corporations, if treated like people, would be classified as psychopaths by clinical psychologists. The film illustrates how corporations behave like psychopaths. It sounds quite interesting. Another film I really want to see is Fog of War, a documentary about Robert McNamara. The film is about his reflections on the things he has done in his life, and the mistakes he made. Watch the trailer. The film looks amazing.
26 January 2004, the wee hours
My cousin ended up winning the People’s Choice award apparently. Grass roots spam campaigns do work. Nicely done. I’m hoping she wins the contest. She’s very smart and pretty, so I don’t see why she won’t, but you never know with these sorts of things.
25 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
My parents 25th wedding anniversary was today. Our house hasn’t been packed with people like it was today in quite some time. All my dad’s sisters were in town for the occasion, as was his close friend from England, Kum-mama. I must have snapped 160 or so pictures today. If there are some nice ones I’ll put them up at We Must Abuse the Broadband.
We were four cousins shy of being all together again. It was nice seeing Ruben, who I haven’t seen in quite some time. Vitty is competing in the Miss Canada pageant, and they aren’t allowed to go out apparently. My cousin Arjuna will get married this August, so I think that will probably be the first time we’ll all be together in one place since my grandfather died.
Shima came tonight as well, and managed to survive the evening, which is good.
I need to get back to compilers tomorrow. Sigh.
24 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
Krishna is watching the Transformers Movie as I write this. I find it incredible how much of the film I remember, and with what clarity. My memory is incredibly bad, yet I can remember this film, which I haven’t seen in years, so well.
If you haven’t seen Transformers the Movie you must do so now. The film is truly a masterpiece. I wait with baited breath for the Criterion Collection to add the movie to their roster of DVDs. I really do hope someone puts out a re-mastered version of the movie, the ghetto DVD they have out now is so lame.
I’m back in Toronto for the weekend. Carvill came over and we watched the first 2 episodes (after the pilot) of My So-Called Life. I think the show is done really well. We have 4 more DVD’s worth of episodes to go.
22 January 2004, evening time
My cousin Supitha works in a bank as a teller. She has been held up at gun point while working this job, not once, but twice! Twice. All in the span of 2 weeks. I don’t know what the odds of that are, but I doubt they are very high at all. She is unemployed now. I’m not sure if they shut her bank down, or if her parents won’t let her work the job anymore.
