Again, I find myself sitting here.

So I'm sitting here, waiting to go to bed. I'm looking at my clock ticking away (not actually ticking, it's digital) and wondering how the hell I"m gonna start going about studying for my 16 credit course final. It's on tuesday...yeesh.....

I played this rediculously easy game called ER. You betcha. It's stands for Emergency Room for those not familiar with ludicrous mini-series....holy crap I don't know the plural of mini-series! Either way, it's as addictive as Harvest Moon (look it up). And I also played Heroes of Might and Magic four for the millionth time and doing everything in my power to NOT study. I'm cursed to be a last minute guy for the rest of my life.

Well, I'll get down to brass tax here. If a certain somebody ever finds out I wrote this, he's gonna try and run me over, but here goes:

If you guys have ever read anything on my site, you'll know that I was involved in making a magnetically levitating, magnetically propelled train. Well our 'leader' had a million and one ineffective, but cool, ideas. We'd put an overhead power strip to power the train externally (turns out it slowed the trains movement too much), we'll put tons of current through the coils to make them stronger (heated up the coils so much that metal melting was a big issue), we'll put fans in the sides to make sure that the train has a cushion of air to buffer it against hitting the side of the track (CPU fans!? Come on here! They're way too weak to push a 1.5 kg train off of the side wall of a track), we'll make it levitate by putting a ton of rare earth magnets in the train and track and they'll be permanently repelling ($200.00 later), and the best part is it'll all be done fairly quickly (4 out of the 5 weeks we were alloted)...........christ.......

That wasn't the worst part. This guy is one pushy broad. Every idea he came up with I poked holes into. And there were alot of holes to poke. About 3.5 weeks in he finally blew up at me and actually said that I'm a guy where if it isn't my idea, it doesn't happen. Thing is, not a single one of my ideas went into the train. But all of his DID. I guess if you're the first person to blame, then the other person can't blame you back. Good tactic. It even got so bad that I mathematically proved that having 70 magnets all in line over a meter length was 2X more powerful and required half the weight than a system with two strips of 35 magnets spaced out over the same meter...that's a power:weight ratio of 4X. When I showed him the math, he said my math was wrong. And when I showed it and explained it extremely he said, well we have the double line built anyways, so we're not going back on it........I think that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting truly angry. Not frustrated, but the type of angry that illicits such evil thoughts it's closer to pure, dense, black hatred.

It wouldn't be so bad if it had worked. Turns out a week isn't enough to troubleshoot much of anything. Also, out of the six members in our group, two had pushy parents, two thought they had 'real lives' and one had a pushy, pussywhipping wife who nagged him every half minute. So with these four people and their difficult relations, I was the one who had to do FIVE ALL NIGHTERS IN ONE WEEK to get this fucking thing online. Best part is I'm the only one to have seen it work so beautifully it would have made me cry had I not been so dehydrated from lack of clean drinking water (It was during the the 60-70 hour mark of me being in the same lab with nothing but starbucks desserts to keep me going). It worked until the transistors started blowing up like popcorn. But I say good, they don't deserve to see it work. Take that you assholes. You were never there when it really mattered. Except for you Carol, if ever you read this. You are a diamond amongst coal. You rock (no pun intended).

The end is nigh.

I'll make this 'tag' as painless as possible.

4 jobs:
Banquet porter
Turkey Catcher
Stream Guy
Short order cook

4 movies
No movies nowadays, but back in the day it would have been:
Jurassic Park
Braveheart
Matrix
Speed

4 places lived
Nanaimo
Agassiz
Vancouver
......three places.....

4 tv shows
Sorry, I don't watch T.V.

4 places vacation
I haven't been out of B.C.....

4 foods
Any sushi
Cheese on toast
Ritz crackers and peanut butter
Balogna with cheese in a bun

4 website daily
www.thatvideosite.com
www.newgrounds.com
www.Xanga.com (just recently)
www.google.ca

4 places
Russian (Yukutsk)
South Japan (anywhere there)
Luxembourgh
In a nice car with a nice woman, all dressed up, driving somewhere fancy to eat.

0 people tagged
List completed.

Just wondering if anybody else really feels this way.

Spurred by a slight on my name, I feel like typing in a certain something, and I was curious if anybody concurs. Hell, I'm sure everyone felt this way one time or another....

Alienated teens are by no means a seldom seen thing in high schools. Everybody is forced to go to a crummy school and most likely be forced to learn and regurgitate academics or (not in my case) unwantingly submitted to forced physical labour. Some people don't want to study science and math, some people don't want to run, then there's people who want to do both, and obviously people who want to do a whole lot of nothing except float happily around aimlessly.

This is all well and good, except there's a whole lot of people who were not meant to be there. Cliques form in a public school because people hang around other people when they share a common bond. To some it's skiing and to others its cars. Good on you guys, it's natural to form "clan'ish" groups, and it's healthier than hanging around people you don't like.

With the formation of cliques (again, this is not used derogatorally) comes alienation of other, unlike cliques. The car clique sees the nerds as losers, the goths see the christians as zombies and vice versa, etc etc. In order to make lives more 'interesting' people would tease others from different cliques, form rumors, slander, and generally make school one big fucking soap opera with a little learning on the side...y'know...in case we got bored.

So school became a place of tricky politics and childish socio-political maneuvers. One had to try and fit in. But public school, again, was forced on us and this is just the way of the world.

Is it just me, or is it that in college, all cliques and barriers just fall away? All the people are there willingly, and all have a common bond that is academia. Since most people are there for the very reason you are, cliques just fall away. Everybody becomes friends with everybody, politics are kept to the elections for a school president, and teasing is a remote thing administered by people who are just ugly inside.

I for one, am happy that I'm out of that place. I met alot of good people at AESS (when it was called that), I think that I got teased less than most, and for the most part, I'm happy I can start saying exactly what's on my mind, without fear of insults coming back at me.

To Agassiz life and it's childish politics, I say, "Good riddance."

A little catching up to do. Brief synopsis.

Yes I'm in UBC. I'm actually in Electrical Engineering, specifically. I'm in the special program that they call PIP. Which stands for Project Integrated Programming. Essentially it's Electrical Engineering that's three times faster than traditional, with four major projects for the year. Just to let you know which projects they are, only because I'm proud of them. It is (and the last one is current):
1) Take a column of water, and display on the computer the height of the column of water. Make sure that the column of water is somehow measured, you guessed it, electronically.

2) Electronically measure, through sensors placed on the person's bicep, the weight of an object in that person's hand. Like if the person was doing bicep curls or lifting a book, the sensors on his bicep would say the weight is 20kg, or the book is 4 kg. Display this weight on an LCD module. (Just a little screen)

3) Develop a liquid tilt sensor that can measure from -90/+90 degrees using a liquid filled capacitor. Display the current angle on an LCD screen.

4) This one is the best. I've just finished the propulsion unit. Build a magnetically levitated and propelled train (also known as a mag-lev) that can display on the LCD its own distance travelled and the time travelled. It has 1 meter of track and it must "know" when to stop and reverse direction once it's about to run out of track. After 2:00, the train must shut off.

Well those are the things we had to do PLUS an Engineer's full work load multiplied by 3. Fun if you like punishment and hate parties....dating......socializing.......sigh...., not fun if you don't like quizzes and tests and projects and pressure and the occasional insult from a teacher.

All in all, I've grown up, gotten stranger, smarter, funnier, more skeptical...etc etc.....The only thing that's bad is I've attained a penchant for work....something that is detrimental to my peace of mind. Oh well. There's a tiny update.

More to come?

Should I get all that personal?......nah.....I just got here.