The holidays have been pretty nice for me. My favourite aunt and uncle came up to visit us from Oregon. We ate out almost every day. It's been great.

I'm blogging away right now on a used laptop I got from an OTI auction just recently. It's a pretty old laptop, but it suits my needs and it was dirt cheap. Thanks OTI! I think I'm already hooked on having a laptop. I don't really use it for much right now, but it's such a fun toy and I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of it once school starts. It gets really hot after I use it for a while. I named it El Scorcho. :)

Dang, it's been 4 months with hardly any decent Chinese food, 2 weeks of obscene gluttony and now probably another 8 months without much decent food again. Now I know what you're thinking. As Andrew Lin put it:

Come on, man, make your own decent Chinese food! :)

Unfortunatly, since my cooking skills are still embryonic, I think I'll have to settle for V1 stir fry. :)

So I think this term is going to be quite painful for me. It's supposed to be our hardest one. Still, I don't think it'll be that bad. I think I'll learn a lot more of the good stuff that I wanted to learn when I started engineering. My boys (and girl) Kevin, Derek, Steve and Elaine will be probably be sunning themselves on a beach in Singapore while on exchange. Ahhh... that's the life. Tune in to Derek's blog for all the lurid details. :)

I don't really have much to say about the new year. It's been a decent year for me, but honestly, I can barely remember what happened in the first few months. Celebrating a new year seems so arbitrary. Still I hope you had a good one and that the next one will be even better.

Happy new year.

The end of my work term is just around the corner! With Christmas less than a month away, you would think that things would be nice and relaxed in my world. Unfortunately, I've been pretty busy lately. My Distance Ed exam is this Saturday and I've decided to take on a relatively ambitious work report. So it goes...

This past weekend I stayed indoors and worked all weekend except for a brief interlude to buy groceries. Because the closest supermarket to my place here moved to another location, it took me 2 hours to get groceries. Gross. I got a lot of work done though. Because I always work best at night, the side effect of my getting a lot of work done is that I became almost completely nocturnal this weekend. I was sleeping at around 5am and waking up at around 3pm. Needless to say, Monday morning was painful.

If you haven't done it yet, go read Microserfs. I just finished it. An excellent read. Especially for techies.

Have you been back to your elementary school since you left it? A few weeks ago I got to take an extra long weekend and I went back to Toronto to chill. For the first time in ages, I found myself at home on a Friday afternoon. So, on a whim, I decided to go to my old elementary school and see if my favourite teacher from back in the day, Mr. Stanford, was still there. It was a little surreal. When I first walked in, I thought, "wow, things have changed." On further inspection, I realized that they hadn't. I had. I ended up finding Mr. Stanford and having a nice chat. It brought back a lot of nice memories.