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.
Life
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.
Life
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.
[1] Life
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.
Life | Compilers
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.
Compilers | Life
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.
Life
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.
Life
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.
[6] Life
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.
Life
19 January 2004, late afternoon
I’ve been mucking around with my iPod since it arrived yesterday. I’ve been ripping my CD’s for the past few days, and am probably a third of the way done now. Right now my iPod is just filled with my albums. I’m not sure if I can get my entire CD collection on the iPod, but here is hoping. (I’m probably going to rip all my ‘fan ban’ chinese cd’s at 128 bit ACC to save space.)
You’ve probably read plenty of stuff on people raving about how great their iPods are, so I will try and tell you some things I’ve noticed that apple could improve on. First, the touch wheel is really sensitive, a bit too sensitive. It seems far to easy to accidently have your iPod do stuff while it is just sitting in your pocket. Secondly, I don’t like the way apple has engineered the syncing mechanism. It works nice if you want your iPod to mirror your iTunes music collection, but if this is not for you there are no real alternatives besides manually managing your music. I was hoping that I could upload all my albums, erase them from my hard drive, and then select some play lists in iTunes that I want to iPod to keep in sync with. I am hoping Apple will improve the syncing in a new release of iTunes.
All that said, the thing is very nice. I’m liking it so far.
[5] Life | Apple Computers
19 January 2004, the wee hours
My iPod arrived today. Well, it actually arrived last tuesday, but it was a long process getting it from my home in Toronto up here to Waterloo. I’m playing music from it now. So far, so good.
[2] Life | Apple Computers
18 January 2004, mid-afternoon
Nina got eliminated. Tragedy! All our dreams of meeting Strombo have been dashed.
[9] Life
18 January 2004, early afternoon
Shima’s friend Nina is one of the finalists in MuchMusic’s VJ Search contest. So go to their website and vote for her. I want to know a MuchMusic VJ, so make this happen people.
My cousin Vitty, doctor in training, is in the Miss Canada pageant. She’s Miss Calgary right now. You can also vote for her to be the next Miss Canada by sending an e-mail to vote@beautiesofcanada.com with “Vithya Gnanakumar” in
the subject line.
[4] Life
17 January 2004, late at night
Have you heard the new Britney Spears song, Toxic? If you haven’t, go and listen, it’s surprisingly good. I never thought I’d ever catch myself complementing Britney Spears on one of her songs. However, I don’t think it sounds like her singing at all. Anyone else of the same opinion?
[3] Life | Music
16 January 2004, early evening
Just got back from a talk given by one of the big guys in the Computer Science community, Al Aho. (He has written a lot of important computer science texts, most notably the Dragon Book.) The talk was quite good. He discussed the state of software today, and talked about his research in to compilers and programming languages for quantum computers. I saw Yang and Phil, Nabeel, Ju-lian and Ryan at the talk. The room was packed. I’ve never been to such a busy talk.
Computer Science | Life
15 January 2004, the wee hours
I seem to have forgotten a lot of C++. That sucks. I will probably know a lot when I am done this project.
Computer Science | Life
9 January 2004, mid-afternoon
I have ordered an iPod! There has been much talk on my part about getting one for quite some time now, so I decided with the announcement of the 15 gig model i’d bite the bullet and buy it. (My thinking is that with no big iPod announcements at Macworld that there would be no changes to the iPod for some time.) The iPod is in Shanghai, China right now. I’m waiting for it to arrive here.
Life | Apple Computers
6 January 2004, mid-afternoon
School has been pretty good so far. I had my marxist theory class yesterday, and it sounds like it will be interesting. I’m hoping it isn’t too much work.
We went to FED 102 last night, we being me and gary. We got there quite early, maybe 9:30 or so, and were surprised to see we weren’t alone. I left messages with people letting them know to go, so Gary and I sat around waiting to see who would show. Victor, Rick and Phoebe ended up showing up, which was cool. We spent most of the night with them. I saw a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while, which is always nice.
Waking up this morning for my Compilers class was hard. I think I have been to 2 other 8:30 classes my entire university career. The first time was when I was taking CS 251 with Robert Mann. There was another section being offered, and I used to go to that one because it was later. One day I happened to wake up early, and decided I’d go and check out the class I was supposed to be attending. The second time was when I was taking Group Theory. I skipped all the lectures and taught the material to myself because I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. (Apparently Prof. Ng taught so slow that there really was no point attending class anyway.) We had an in-class midterm for the class, so I had to go to that class.
I’m in the C&D now, waiting for my statistics class to start. I am not looking forward to the class at all.
Life
5 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
Tomorrow is my first last day of school. I’m not really excited about it. I have moved back to my old place in Waterloo. My room was bare all of last term, so this term I have decided to fix that. I finally put up the Chungking Express poster that I received as a birthday gift two years ago. The poster is looking pretty damn cool in my room. I have also put up a hello kitty calendar, it’s above my bed. Dave drew me a picture of myself for christmas, and that is hanging above the light switch to my room. The picture actually replaces one he had his brother draw of my many years ago, that was stolen when I moved into Cardill Crescent. All in all, my room still looks pretty bare, but this is all a start.
I’m slowly moving this blog from blogger to moveable type. Eventually I will host it from the domain ramanan.funkaoshi.com. I will make www.funkaoshi.com be a sort of index to all the things I have up on the web, for examle my photoblog. Expect to see changes shortly.
I’ve been waking up well past lunch during the entire christmas holiday. I don’t know how I will be able to wake up for class tomorrow. We’ll have to wait and see how this goes.
Life
1 January 2004, terribly early in the morning
Happy new year to everyone. We are watching 24 right now. It is quite good. We’re almost at the end of it all. This season is quite good. Lots of torturing. And putting people in ‘the room’.
Life
30 December 2003, early morning
Started watching season 2 of 24 today. The show is still quite good, although a bit predictable at times. They still manage to throw in some crazy plot twists. Being true to their winning formula last season, most of the women on the show are serious dumb asses. I’m hoping they kill the daughter this season, but I think she is too hot to go. If they kill the dumb sister I will happy, but she has 16 episodes to redeem herself.
Life
26 December 2003, late afternoon
The past few days have been great. I got some cool stuff for Christmas, and really, isn’t that what Christmas is all about.
Tony came back from the states yesterday, and I spent the evening with him, Howard, Derek and Rishi. Christmas Eve was spent watching Bowling for Columbine and X2, the greatest comic book movie ever. My friends are coming over today to start watching My So Called Life.
Life
22 December 2003, evening time
Friday night I loitered about with my friends. Watched Lord of the Rings in the afternoon, which was wicked, and ate at Alice Fazooli’s at night.
Saturday I went down to System Sound Bar for Fukhouse’s latest party. It was a wicked night out. All the DJ’s were wicked. Two of the sets were done live. The music was crazy. James, Constantine, Rishi and myself went down for the party. There was booty house in the vip room that was also quite good.
I had a big pot luck last night. Lots of people showed up, which was great. As usual we had way too much food. Even Howard brought something this year. Well he brought KFC, but that’s a start. Everyone loves fried chicken.
Life
20 December 2003, evening time
The new Faye Wong cd is excellent. I can’t stress that enough. Track 3 and 9 standout right now as really strong songs, but the album is solid. Will try and write a longer review once I’ve listened to it a bit more.
Life | Music
20 December 2003, early evening
I saw the last installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy today. What an excellent movie. I can’t wait for them to make the mother of all box sets for it. I wonder how long we will have to wait for such a thing.
I have been reading quicksilver. The book is good so far I suppose, though not much has happened yet. It is a confusing read keeping track of all the characters however. I want to finish it before school starts again, though I don’t know if that is possible.
Movies | Life
