Wow, 5 months since my last update. I'm a very, very bad blogger. I apologize. [The rest of this paragraph rambles on about why I haven't been updating, so feel free to skip to the next paragraph.] I guess for awhile, I just didn't have any interest in writing about my life, since there wasn't too much interesting going on. But in the long run, I don't think I want to totally abandon this site. It is fun to have, and often times it's easier to write once about events in my life, rather than retelling them to everyone who is interested (even if that isn't very many people). Oh, and I'm not a fan of mass e-mails. So I guess that's why this works for me, or has worked for me in the past. (Obviously it hasn't been working lately.) People can read it if they wish, and I still try to correspond personally with friends, even if I don't get around to doing so very often.

So, lots has happened since I last updated. I had been living at home for the summer, but I got to Charlottetown often, where I stayed with my sister but hung around with Bride, Chris, Eric, and Aaron practically non-stop. Truly, my summer was awesome. Great friends, great little projects to keep me busy when I was at home, and the prospect of moving to Toronto when it was all over. So many people warned me about moving back in with my parents after living on my own for five years, but it wasn't bad at all. Perhaps it would have been if I'd not been able to get out of the house once in awhile, but for the most part it was nice to spend time with my parents. Not to mention the fact that I had access to a car for the summer! As for the projects I mentioned, they included re-typesetting a (rather long) family genealogy document, re-finishing my parents' kitchen table and chair set, re-finishing an old family tricycle that I'm giving to my nephew for Christmas, and digitizing all the family photo albums. Oh, I also touched up some rusty spots on the car. Even though I got so many things done, I feel like it was a very relaxing summer, and that it should have left me refreshed and ready to tackle grad school.

Well, fast forward to now, and my productivity hasn't been all that great. I moved to Toronto, as I think you all know, to start my masters in computer science at U of T. The city itself is fine, apart from the fact that I still don't really know that many people here. I've been meeting a few people here and there, mostly boys for the purposes of dating. So far I haven't really clicked with anyone. Though plenty seem to have clicked with me, somehow. I really don't see how I'm appealing at all lately!

Basically, I've had a bit of a rough time adjusting to all of this, and I can't even really say that I'm fully adjusted yet. The main thing is that I don't feel that I'm being integrated into the community consisting of the others in my research group. I'm shy. And no one has really made much of an effort to try to get to know me. Not even my supervisor. (But I think she's a bit shy too.) One problem is that I don't have a desk in our lab yet. My desk is still in a generic area with other random graduate students. There is space for me in our lab, but they want to move me in at the same time as they do a shuffling of desk assignments, and that process is taking a long time to complete.

So for now, I'm kind of in my own little world, attending classes and one reading group, and completing my assignments as best I can. Next semester I have a course with my supervisor, so I think that will be the catalyst to opening up our communication. This semester I had a very hard time choosing courses. Finally, I ended up in three courses, but I ended up dropping one about Machine Learning because I was finding it very difficult, and there was no way I was going to get the required B- in the course. So I'm in two courses now: Theory of Distributed Computing and Introduction to Computational Complexity. Both are very theoretical, and the grade in both courses is based solely on assignments. So all my schoolwork consists of proofs. Or devising an algorithm and then proving it correct. And this can be very difficult sometimes, especially if you don't understand why what you're trying to prove is correct. Also, if I want to make satisfactory process towards my degree, I have to pass two courses by the end of this semester, so there is some pressure now.

My only other work involves reading papers for a reading group I attend and TAing. The reading group is actually quite interesting at times, and it's at least getting my feet a little wet in terms of what is out there in my line of research (which I forgot to mention is Computer Systems - things like operating systems, computer architecture, compilers). My TAship only involves marking assignments, tests, and exams. I had to attend a lab session and help students with a Java assignment once, but since then I've had a course conflict with that time. So I'm not doing any teaching as a part of my TAship. Hopefully I will be able to TA next semester as well, because it is fun and it pays very well, but I'm not sure if I'll have the time, since I might take 3 courses, and the 2 courses that I want to take for sure are more applied and involve significant projects.

As I said, I've had a bit of a rough time since I arrived. I've had serious thoughts about quitting on several occasions, and I was quite stressed out for awhile. Dropping the Machine Learning course was a big relief, even though it added the pressure of having to pass my current courses (with a B-). While I continued to be in a rut for awhile after that, more recently I've started maintaining a task list in Outlook of things I want to accomplish, both in school and at home. I find it really helps to motivate me when I can actually check things off. So, I think that for the most part, my bout of depression is over. I still have days when I feel totally disconnected from everything around me, but I'm more relaxed about things now. I don't let the stress get to me as much. It won't be the end of the world if I fail, and moreover, I think I'm more confident now that I won't.

Just this past week, Luke (my roommate) was gone to Taiwan for a conference. I thought that I was going to be quite lonely while he was gone, but actually, this was the week in which I re-instituted to-do lists, and the week just flew by. I think I was fairly productive, too. One thing I'm still struggling with, though, I must mention, is my sleeping pattern. I only have courses two days a week (three if you count reading group), and these are all in the afternoon (12 noon at the earliest), so I've fallen into a pattern of going to bed at 2 am or 3 am and then getting up around 11 am or noon. I'd really like to change this, because I feel that I would be more productive in the mornings. There are fewer distractions, and my brain is fresh, if I've been well rested. One morning I managed to get up at 6:30 am, but in order to do so, Luke and I had to agree that we would get up and go get breakfast at McDonald's. That's right, folks, I had to bribe myself to get out of bed with McDonald's breakfast. Luckily it worked, because I had an assignment due that afternoon that I wasn't quite finished. Of course, I finished it with a few hours to spare, so I could have slept later after all.

Right now, while I am being somewhat productive because updating my website has been on my to-do list for quite some time, I am still in a way procrastinating, because I have assignments to work on, and they should be higher priority than this. However, the good news is that I've gotten a head start on these assignments, so there's not a lot of stress right now pushing me to work on them. I worked out today that if I do one problem every day on these assignments, I'll be finished with 4 or 5 days to spare. So I probably don't have too too much to worry about, as long as I don't hit any snags.

I do plan to update this site more often, but I'm not making any promises. It's definitely more interesting to read when it's about individual daily events I think, rather than about general trends over a long period of time. And I feel like I've left out so many details about the past 5 months. Like, for example, how when I first moved to Toronto, Jeff was still living here, and we got to hang out quite a bit. He moved back to Fredericton around the end of September, and that had quite an impact on my life. Not to sound like a cry baby, but it left me without a friend that I would feel comfortable calling up any time just to hang out. (I mean, other than of course my roommate Luke.) I've made some progress in that area, but as I said before, I really haven't met all that many people that I want to continue spending time with. Wow, that sounds harsh, but it's true. Anyways, in regards to updating more often, another item on my to-do list is to implement some kind of system that will allow me to update this site more easily. Currently I do everything by hand. Can you believe it? Like, I'm supposed to be a programmer. I guess that is why I like to have my own site, rather than using some standard service, because there is quite a bit of JavaScript I've written that makes this site easy for me to maintain, but when I update, I still have to go in and edit files and cut and paste stuff into the archives, and map out which archives exist... so, I could definitely improve that process. Hopefully that will motivate me to post more often, and to post when funny observations about life strike me. Can't say that it happens all that often, but when it does, I tend to forget about it before I get around to posting.

I should also mention that a problem of using these to-do lists is that they make me ambitious, and things tend to balloon out of control. So I find myself constantly adding more items, and in turn, that means it's going to take me longer to get around to doing all of them. But in time, I think they'll get done.

Nearly forgot to mention... I'm building myself a second computer! I love my ThinkPad, but the system software came pre-installed on the hard drive, with no backup disks. Now, I would really like to have Linux installed at home so I can experiment, but I'm too afraid to mess up my hard drive and lose all my stuff in XP. So, after considering buying a larger hard drive for my ThinkPad and copying my partitions onto it, and then creating new ones for Linux, I decided that a separate computer would be better. And after considering buying an old used one, I decided it would be more fun to build a new computer. I'm getting a "barebones PC kit" which includes the case and power supply and a motherboard with lots of onboard features, like integrated VGA, audio, and LAN. I found one I liked at an online computer store, but then I found a slightly cheaper one on eBay. The case is a small form factor XPC from Shuttle, as shown. Pretty sweet looking, eh? You can even buy faceplates in other fun colours. I'd like to get a red one eventually. Now I just have to get a CPU, hard drive, RAM, optical drive, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It's going to cost me a little over $1000 (with a crappy monitor, mouse, and keyboard for now), so I think that's pretty good for a computer with reasonable specs that could be very useful to me in my research. I think having my own computer running several distributions of Linux/UNIX will make me more comfortable in experimenting with things.

Once I get this computer up and running, it will be the fourth computer I have owned in my lifetime. Not so many for a computer scientist. My first was a Laser 486SX handed down to me from my brother-in-law. I never named that computer, but since then I've made a tradition of naming them all. My Compaq Presario 5330 with AMD K6-2 380MHz processor was affectionately called Penelope, and I refer to my IBM ThinkPad R40 with Intel Pentium 4-M 2.2GHz processor as Ajax. You can probably guess where I'm going with this... I already have a name picked out for my ShuttleX PC. It's inspired by the very small size of the system, and by Issue 7 of Teen Girl Squad. Yes, I'm going to call him Tompkins. (The Compaq, which I handed down to my sister, is a girl, but since then, my computers have been gay males. Yes, that's right, I give my computers names and sexual orientations. Hmmm, I'm thinking I might need a lesbian computer next.)

Well, I could go on about other topics, such as politics, music that I've been listening to, websites I've been reading, etc., but I'm getting tired, and I think this is enough for now. I don't want to strain any blogging-related muscles... you know, since it's been 5 months ;) See you all at the zoo!