Materialism is depressing. I’ve always wanted a tablet notebook, and found out that there’s this awesome one from ASUS that is available in Taiwan but not in Canada, and also found out that my dad could just buy it from his company at a cheap price. So of course I go for it, and as always, great expectations are usually followed by great disappointments.

Ok, so it’s not exactly a major disappointment, maybe I’m just not used to it at all. But so far it’s a bit underwhelming. It’s slow, as expected. I don’t know how to utilize the touch screen properly. I wanted to draw random things on the screen, but don’t know how to do that yet. The battery life is amazing, though, at least so far it is, as I try to drain it.

The thing that’s going to kill me is that I have a obsession of keeping any computer screen free of fingerprints, and that’s not going to happen with this tablet! I still haven’t pull out the temporary protective screen just yet…

Ah…somehow I can access my website again! It’s so much easier now…

The days have been really boring, wasting every moment here. Still jetlagging, and as with the last time, I don’t get more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep at a time. Unlike last time, however, I’m getting sick. So far it’s pretty mild, hopefully it doesn’t get worse.

I’ll note one interesting thing I saw here. We were driving under an overpass, and right beside us I saw a bunch of young kids with hockey sticks practicing puck handling on rollerblades. Then I saw two adults who were apparently the coaches, one was wearing a Team Canada jersey, the other was wearing a Maple Leaf jersey. Somehow I find it odd that this is happening in Taiwan…

In Taiwan now, and it’s been really really boring. I’m jetlagging, of course. Wedding is in 1 week, things are going crazy around me. But I’m just in my usual depressed state.

And, I can’t access this website from Taiwan! Except now I can, using a proxy. Which is annoying. And facebook is slow or not loading…more annoyance.

Probably won’t be updating this much. Will write more when I get back to Canada.

Spent most of the day marking the final exam. It’s not too bad, actually, and everything finished by around 4:30. As usual with this kind of communal marking setting, there are laughs and facepalms shared among the instructors and TAs. I’ll repeat what I wrote on fb here… “Alternate names for the Cayley-Hamilton theorem as seen on exam papers: Cauchy-Hamilton theorem; Cathy-Hamilton theorem; C.T. theorem; Cayley’s Hermitian theorem; Carey’s theorem; the last theorem the prof talked about in class; and Henkel-Key theorem.”

So…another day of long travel ahead. Starting with a special Go Bus + Mississauga Transit to the airport, followed by a long flight to Tokyo, a moderately-long connection before a medium flight to Taipei. Somebody’s getting married, and it’s not me. I don’t feel ready to travel again, but at least it would be fun to see the useless points grow (which would make it pointless). Hopefully the volcano thing doesn’t reach Toronto before I come back. Need to teach the next day. Already it has affected the final exam this term as one TA is still stuck in London…

As usual, I do most of my packing on the morning that I leave. Procrastination is one remaining constant in my life.

My student Tim’s 20th birthday was on the final exam day. The usual flood of happy birthday messages appear on his facebook wall, and the first one caught my eye. I’ll quote it here: “Happy Birthday Tim!! As a birthday present i paid off the prof to give you an A in linalg so enjoy your day:)” That was probably the most unintentionally funny thing I’ve read in recent memory. I tried to think of a clever response, and went through several different versions before settle in with a not-exactly-clever “hmm…where do I get the money? heh…”

I have my eyes on the ASUS Eee PC T91MT, which is a small tablet netbook. It would be very cool if I can find a way to incorporate it into the lectures. Unfortunately I suspect that this netbook is not going to do the job that I hope it does, and for the price of $500+, it’s a bit steep. I guess I’ll try to find it in Taiwan.

I don’t know why I would get extremely annoyed and angry about my housemate. He does things like making the bathroom floor wet when showering, and using my toothpaste and bathroom tissue without asking. These are really trivial things, and I shouldn’t make a big deal about it. Plus, he’s moving out by the end of the month, so I had no reason to make myself angry over small things like this. I feel stupid.

The final exam was on a Friday night, horrific time for an exam, but can’t do anything about it. At the start, I tried and couldn’t find the Tim/Jake/Janarthan group for a while, and I was baffled. Especially since they each have his own distinctive look. I did find the two Js, and then found Tim nearby, who was not wearing a cap, didn’t spike up his hair, and was wearing glasses! No wonder I couldn’t find him…but his pastel pants gave it away. Anyway, so that’s that.

Dan asked me to ask two TAs to do the ID checking thing with a seating grid to fill in. It took 45 minutes for the two TAs to get it done, which is ok. And then we discovered that the number of students don’t match the number of exams out there, with a difference of 3. Hmm…and the games began! The students occupy two sections of the exam area, and each TA checked one section. The first section is fully filled out, so it must be a problem with the second section. Poor TA who had to go and search for the missing signatures. He found one soon, and later found one exam being left at a different table, so that accounts for 2 of the 3. But the last one took a while. Dan was checking all the blank spaces on the grid, but still couldn’t find anything. After some commotion, it was discovered that the TA missed one student sitting at the front of the second section, on the border between the two sections! That was Calvin from my class… Anyway, our silent laughters probably disturbed some of the students nearby. It was fun while it lasted.

Talked to some students afterwards, and overall the response is average. So it will be interesting to see what kind of marks we get. And sadly, that may be the last time I see some of these students…they’re a good bunch.

I’ve lost all interests in playing boardgames and poker with friends. I only do them because they want to play. I no longer have any desire to initiate such playing sessions. It feels meaningless. All the complex arbitrary rules just to create imaginary situations which somehow have the potential to be fun and enjoyable. I don’t know, it doesn’t work for me anymore.

I had briefly thought about this whole mathematical research thing. I recall just being sick of it because it’s all pretty much meaningless. I don’t see the point of doing these hypothetical research which produces nothing beneficial to almost all situations (unless, of course, P=NP). So I’ve been very reluctant to apply to any jobs with a research component, and I think by the end of this postdoc, it will be the last time I get paid to do research.

Most scary of all, I’m finding the sermons and Bible studies to be meaningless. I have trouble focusing for an entire sermon or Bible study, and certainly not learning anything, let alone applying to living. I get that sense where I feel there’s nothing new, yet at the same time feel so distant from God.

So, there was snow yesterday. Dry and light snow, so it blows away quickly. I’m indifferent towards having snow in April, just because I don’t mind it so much and I don’t like the hot weather coming up. It caused a bit of commotion among other facebook users though…heh.

Back to being depressed for no particularly good reason. Today, I add the sense of being an outlier at church to another no good reason to being depressed. At this point, I just see the road ahead to be a really bumpy one, so I’m just not looking forward to living it.

I was bored last night, and decided to go outside for a walk. Planned the circuit on google map ahead of time, and finished the walk of 2.4km while listening to the sermon in about 30 minutes. Don’t know if this is fast or slow, at least it takes my mind off of the real world.

I recently had this profound thought. Ok, probably not that profound. But basically this job searching thing is going nowhere. So what if I’m out of a job in September? Do I just sit around and hope that something happens? No, I’ve decided that if I do not get a job by September, then I’ll take a year off to travel the world. I have enough money saved to do this for at least a couple of years. Granted, the money is supposed to be for a house, but what’s a house for if I can’t get a job? So…travelling it is. Well, what if I get another contract teaching job? I’m getting sick of the temporary jobs, so I might not even want to do that. Anyway, there are lots of places that I want to go, and this is probably as good a chance as it can be.

The main reason I had this thought is because of some readings on worrying. Obviously the Bible teaches us to not worry, and obviously I’ve been a worry-er all my life, especially now with a job nowhere in sight. The main point of the Bible, of course, is to trust God. But I have very little idea on what that means… Certainly God never promised to get me a job, so I don’t know what to think of this. The idea of travelling is simply an alternative that makes me feel better, gets me to stop worrying about jobs, knowing that there could be something good even if I don’t get a job. Of course, this sounds like Abraham using Hagar to get Ishmael…oops.

Meanwhile, I’ve been wasting so much time, it’s disgusting.

The last lecture, and it ended well, I think. Started by re-proving Cayley-Hamilton which I’m sure very few students understand as it involves induction. Then some review, and that’s it. Finished! At least for now… There were some applause at the end, which I’m embarrassed about, since I didn’t think I teach well…

Chatted with Michael and Jason after the lecture, with a variety of subjects, and that was enjoyable. Tim came in to chat in my office later on, and had positive words to say about my teaching, which helps with my low-confidence issue…heh. Nice students.

I learn so much more about the students after befriending them on facebook. It’s easy to tell what some of their major interests are. And in one case, I found out that one of them is writing this final exam on his 20th birthday…and it’s a Friday night…yikes.

It was a fun lecture. Started out with normal matrices where Liam joked with me on some of my questions. Then I took class photos, which turned out not too bad. I talked a bit about facebook, and somehow it got Janarthan laughing hysterically…heh. Oh yeah, I took one of the rare pictures where Jake was smiling…heh. And the class ended badly when I couldn’t prove the Cayley-Hamilton theorem precisely…oh well. One more class to go…

I made a mistake of saying that the draft of the final exam is on the easier side. So Dan replaced a question with a difficult one that no one is going to get…except maybe two or three. Oops.

I think I’m going to miss this class. Like I always do.