Busy busy busy day...now I have a headache and I'm really tired. Started with the proof reading of the Trinitarianism text. Then off to school for class, then attend Graeme's lecture, and then give my own lecture. Afterwards, office hours where one person came, and then the Bible study. It's been crazy.

So...about the lecture. It was in a much bigger room than last time. I tried my best to speak louder, and perhaps it worked somehow. I went slower than I thought I would, and my writing was huge, fitting very little in one board. I tried to interact with them, and that went well, except possibly the time when I accidentally almost got into a conversation with one of the students in the front row (he must do that a lot). I (accidentally again) made the students laugh a bit, so it's not all tense and stuff. Overall, David Jackson liked it, so it shouldn't be too bad. Still waiting to hear from Levent. In any case, I find lecturing very draining, both emotionally and physically. I was feeling weak after the lecture ended.

A note about the homework due today. I spent a ton of time doing it yesterday, and finally solved it. Spent more time trying to type it up, which wasn't easy at all. And then today in class, before the start of the class, Marshall (the genius of all geniuses) showed a counterexample to the theorem that we were proving. Yikes...so then the professor just said, "there are some complaints with the assignment, so it's now due on Friday." Oops. So I think what the problem is, there is an assumption that the prof said that we can make on the assignment which is not assumed in Marshall's counterexample. So I still belive my proof is correct, just with different assumptions. So anyway, that felt like a waste of time.

Yesterday: Morning church + grocery shopping + laundry + big lunch. Afternoon sleep. Evening homework madness + lecture preparation + Mythbusters border slingshot. Yeah, I started the homework late, again, but this time, it took a lot longer to do it, which made me panic quite a bit. Anyway, go tit done, and I went to bed at around 1:30am.

So I'm going to Saskatoon in December for sure now. I've booked the return ticket since I accidentally found a cheap one. As for the ticket to Saskatoon, well, I guess I'll wait until I get all the information I needed before making a booking, as prices are still comparatively low around the beginning of December.

How did I spend the extra hour due to the return of the standard time? I watched ep5 of Mars. Quality time, I know.

So...I did indeed go shopping, but I bought nothing, so there you go. My search for the Wallace and Gromit soundtrack continues...and after several considerations, I'm not buying online unless it gets cheaper (or if there's something else worth buying so that I can combine the two to get free shipping).

I guess I'm coming back to the puzzle craze that had periodically occupied me in the past. The recent surge in the "sudoku" phenomenon seems crazy, almost risen out of nowhere. I mean, I've been doing this kind of puzzle for years, and only now it's taking off. I don't really expect it to last long, though, so maybe just enjoy the surge in the general public's interest in puzzles while it lasts. And I really want something that I like to be popular in general, quite frankly...

Conclusion: I did nothing today. What a shame...

Today: Usual morning class, unusual lunch with 5 other C&O grads spanning 4 years worth of students, discussion with Graeme on next week's lectures, played with an online "fences" puzzle, my rare appearance at the Tutte seminar, the rush to get to myf, the myf, the meeting, and home. One note about the food...I ate salad, banana, and apple for breakfast, a nice and healthy pita for lunch, and 4 slices of pizza and a cup of 7-up for dinner. And my body felt very bad after eating the pizza...so...I guess I've always had some intolerance for bad food.

Tomorrow: Resist the temptation to go shopping. Need to do homework, prepare lectures, and scan the Trinitarianism book.

Wow...I think this is the first evening in the season to have below-zero temperature, -1. And this morning has probably the lowest temperature of the season so far, -4.

So I fell into the trap and bought some stuffs from that Japanese puzzle site... It was interesting to buy things overseas for the first time, actually. Now I just need to wait two to three weeks for this to arrive...

The final exam schedule is out, and the CO350 exam ended up on December 21...that's just way way too late. I will probably do some traveling before that.

I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday, actually. Don't know exactly why. Tired of research, maybe? Or maybe tired of Maggie's whining on the car? Hmm...

Recipe for disaster (or, valueable time wasting techniques 101): So, it is the day before supervisor meeting, and I have big plans to work hard and study hard to get lots of things done. And what happened? (1) Aaron called saying that he will visit me in the afternoon. (2) In response, I decided to go to school just to attend the lecture, and that is it. Go to school, attend an hour of lecture, come home. (3) Lots of sleeping at home since really, I couldn't do anything productive at home. (4) Turned out that Aaron couldn't come, so I wasted the afternoon. (5) More sleeping. Then watching television. (6) To redeem myself, I came to my office with big plans to work hard and study hard to get lots of things done. (7) For some reason, I got the idea that I should check out the WPC results. I did that, read some reviews, and yaddi yaddi yadda, I ended up salivating over the amount of puzzle books that I can buy online...from Japan! Sure, they're expensive, but you can't find this kind of good stuff here in North America... So anyway, I wasted the evening in the office that way... Conclusion: Me bad. Very bad.

It's unbelievable to me how popular the Tim Horton's at SLC is. It seems that they have long lines all the time, even when it was very late in the evening...on the weekend! Not to mention the longer lines on weekdays... It's kind of mind blowing to think about all the caffeine that's flowing around...

I seriously think that there's something weird going on with my right eye...

So I talked to David and Levent today about my lecture yesterday. So apparently it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. In fact, they said a lot of good things about it. Something they said in common is that they can hear my voice, but it can be louder. Other comments include I should close the doors, I should be slightly more careful about what I write on the board, I don't seem nervous at all, I seem to have control of the material, I paced it nicely (by accident). So, overall, not too bad. Now I'm afraid when I falter in the second and third lectures...that would be bad...

Finally uploaded all the photos that I wanted to upload... So the new stuffs: Two trips to Danshui, giant ferris wheel, extra pictures from Taiwan, Mid-Autumn evening BBQ, short trip to Elora Gorge, MYF trip to Ontario Maze, Paul & May's engagement, and finally, Ginger's post-birthday celebration.

I'm just really tired today. Couldn't really do anything useful. Burn-out from all the weekend and Monday things...

So there was this lecture that I was supposed to give today. Woke up early so that I can make it to school and prepare this thing. It was hard to prepare for it, especially with finding examples to work through. The difficulty rose when I couldn't even do congruences properly...so...that wasn't good. I had to prepare until about 15 minutes before class starts, and then went and delivered the lecture. The lecture was not too bad. Certainly I was nervous, but the nerves were gone about 10 minutes in. I had 2 examples, a proposition, and then 3 more examples. When I finished the first two examples and the proposition, however, I found that I have used only about 12 minutes of the time...it's supposed to be a 50-minute class...so I had to slow down in working away the last three examples, and actually finished just 2 minutes early, so...not too bad. I'm just glad that I'm not faced with silence when I asked questions. Also, the murmuring that started when I wrote down the 4th example was sort of funny...I couldn't tell what they were talking about, really, but I certainly hope it was a shocker of an example. Another funny moment, when I was doing my second example, I looked down and saw one person sleeping. I almost laughed really loud, but somehow managed to control myself. So that's my first lecture...going to receive feedback tomorrow...two more lectures to go.

There was an office hour today as well. And just when I was talking to Berkant about how nobody will come, somebody came in and asked for me. That was 15 minutes before the office hour starts...funny how coincidences happen. At least the student understood what I was talking about, mostly anyway, so that wasn't so painful.

To cap off a very busy day, there was a free lunch (yay!); there was going home briefly to pick up things; there was talking to Jessica to get her to hand in my homework and got a book from her to help with the lecture (thanks!); there was talking to Carlos, twice, once to get his notes from the class I missed today, once to give back his notes and basically chat for a while; there was a Bible study that was certainly a lot easier to digest than previous ones, and finished early; there was a lot of picture uploading; and finally, there was the return of Austin from America (yay!).

Morning: helped Alex do his PowerPoint presentation. It was a bit screwy and embarrassing for me, since the PP versions between the church's computer and his high-end laptop are quite different...but it was good. He's a good guy. Afternoon: cook more of the meat and then sleep. Evening: Went to the office only to find both Berkant and Shengjun there. It was a Sunday afternoon, and all three of us were there! Wow...amazing... Anyway, got the homework done, and now really thinking hard about the lecture tomorrow...maybe I'll start serious preparation tomorrow morning...and there we go again with the procrastination.

Excellent episode of Mythbusters tonight. Bulletproof water has a shocking result, and the 360-degree swing is just a ton of fun to watch. Very good job, hosts & build team!

There's this fly that has been flying around the suite for about a week now, and I simply couldn't get rid of it...very annoying.

Yesterday: Went to school to class, came home immediately afterwards. Just trying to have a relaxing day. There was a Bible study, and it was good, I think. Then came the crazy evening...first, Paul & May got engaged at a private ceremony. 178 pictures were taken with my camera. I led a game that I thought of a few hours ago. The thing went from 9 to 11:30pm. And then, off to Roger's place to celebrate Ginger's birthday (even though it was past 12 already). Eventually came back at around 2. I haven't slept so late for a long time now.

Today: 4 cities, 8 hours, 5 people, 5 dishes at Congee Wong, 1 gundam at PacMall, 0 pillow for me, 89 dollars spent at T&T, 88.2 gas (wooo!), 1 ice cream cone, 273.0 kilometres. Yup, with only about 6 hours of sleep, I drove to Toronto and back. It was raining the whole day, so that wasn't particularly enjoyable. The temperature was ok for me, but cold for others. And there was the wind. I was so tired that by the time we return that I had to try really hard to keep myself awake while driving back (the rain was pouring on the drive), and eventually had to take the service station stop and get myself moving a little plus eating a cone... Anyway, I got more food to consume for the next month, and that's the whole purpose of the trip anyway, so it was good.

Tomorrow: Yikes. I couldn't face tomorrow. Nor the day after.

Yesterday: two stages of madness. First, research madness. Read things all morning, and eventually had a 2-hour supervisor meeting...longest ever, I think. Next, Bible study madness. I had to prepare a Bible study in under two hours, and then do a pre-study. It all went fine, actually, so that's not too bad.

Today: another two stages of madness. First, the MYF thingie. Then, the May & Paul engagement party. The thing about the party is that they want semi-formal wear, and all of my semi-formal wear are too small...so...maybe I'll be going without anything on...

Tomorrow: Toronto. Sunday: Write homework, prepare lecture, scan book. Monday: First lecture. Yikes. Chinese remainder theorem...hmm...

This morning, temperature dipped below 0 for the first time this season.  Weeeeeeeeee!

There's a mad rush to get more reading done in preparation for supervisor meeting.  Didn't do anything yesterday because of mental meltdowns...

It's good to be thinking about things while walking around the campus.  Good thing I didn't get a new mp3 player for that purpose...

Alright, this is the third time I'm writing this post. UW wireless connection sucks. So...the adventure of yesterday. I was given a surprise proctoring job. I somehow managed a "I wouldn't mind leaving early" and did indeed get home just in time for the sucky Amazing Race. For the exam, I first let the students in, and found out I was short two exams. I made a dangerous move and ran to the other classroom to get two extra exams. Came back, found out that two more students came in. But it was time for the exam to start, so I made another stupid and dangerous move and ran out again, informed Bertrand and ran back. Eventually everything was fine, and I got some extra exercise, so...not bad, I guess. They do ask a lot of questions, though...

There was an awkward class this morning. In the middle of the class, the prof suddenly stopped and cancelled the rest of the lecture because he couldn't continue...hmm...very awkward.

I'm driven to tears this afternoon, by the frustration with the wireless connection, and by the myf coworkers.

Yeah, I got screwed by Amazon in their strange pricing. Usually, the pre-orders cost less than the regular orders. Well, I made a pre-order on one, a post-order on the other, and it just happens that I paid more for the pre-ordered one, and the post-ordered one (compared to the respective pre-post prices). Sure, I only suffered about $5, but that still doesn't feel good. And now, the Wallace & Gromit soundtrack suddenly jumped by $3 overnight. I have no idea. Probably not going to buy it now...

There was the morning homework typing. There was the walking to school and realize that I forgot to bring my wireless card while I was in the office. There was the smack in the head for being dumb. There was a nice lunch. There was an office hour where 3 people came by, and I couldn't answer a lot of their questions. There was a Trinitarianism Bible study, where 5 people attended, but the sad thing about it is that we lose focus a lot.

The frequency of exercise recently has decreased quite a bit...I don't think that's good.

I know I've said this too many times, but I really don't like people being late. Case in point, this morning, I needed to pick up four people to church. Appointment times: 8:05 for Laura, 8:10 for Anyu, 8:15 for Christy, and 8:20 for Ray. These times are tight, as I need to arrive church a few minutes before the service starts in order to set up the computer and stuff. So...what exactly happened? 8:05 at Laura's place. Waited until 8:09. Decided that I should skip Laura, and started backing out the driveway. Laura showed up just as I was completely off the driveway, and got on, just barely. 8:11 at Anyu's place. Waited until 8:14 before she showed up. 8:16 near Christy's place. Apparently nobody knew where she lived exactly, just the intersection near it, so we tried to get Ray first, who lives nearby. 8:18 at Ray's place. Ray was not ready yet, so we turned back in search of Christy's place again. 8:20 at Christy's place. She had been waiting outside for a long time. 8:21 at Ray's place. Ray showed up at 8:22. Mad dash to church. Arrived at 8:26, which is good, but just barely. Of course very few people were at church this time, for some odd reason... So anyway, it ended up being all good, but this lateness thing really made me panic too many times, and I really don't like it. And I think I have a serious issue with trusting God...it's still hard to trust without panicking.

An excellent episode of Mythbusters tonight. Having them driving while talking on the cellphone and then driving barely drunk is really funny. But not as funny as having them sit on airplane seats and then drop 5 feet to the ground. Hehehe... So anyway, the conclusions are, talking on the cellphone can be as bad as driving drunk, and the brace position on the plane is actually safer than the upright position. Nice finds.

Finally had the momentum to do laundry. I've been delaying this for so long. But I guess this time the delay is an accidental blessing, as I pretty much messed up my jeans yesterday at the corn maze. One of the obstacles in performing the task of laundry is the fear that all the washers and dryers are being used. So this time, I went downstairs to check on them first. Noting that basically none of the washers were in use, I happily came back to do laundry. On the way back, however, I bumped into Omran, and we had a nice conversation on the topic of complaining about our TA job. That was nice...hehehe. Anyway, in other news, I managed to solve the homework in under an hour. There were false positives during the hour, though, but it turned out well. Now I just need some momentum to type up the solutions...well, maybe tomorrow morning?

13 hours, 4 cities, 2 trips, 123 photographs, 6 continents (made of corn), 1 pair of dirty pants, 68.6 + 102.6 = 171.2 kilometres. In the first trip, I suddenly decided to go to Elora Gorge to see what exactly does the "post peak" condition look like for the "fall colours" (as described on the weather network website). I was utterly disappointed to find that most of the "colours" had fallen off the trees, leaving only the green ones to see, and coloured ones to stomp on. So that wasn't really good...but at least I got some exercise out of it, I guess. In the second trip, the felloship went to Ontario Maze. It wasn't too bad, actually, despite all the random rain and mud. The best thing about the trip was spending time with Kevin & Ray. Ray was constantly complaining that we didn't go through enough deadends, and Kevin was making strange noises. The mini-golf was ok, I guess, I'm not a fan of that, certainly. The roads leading up to the maze were unpaved gravel road, so that made for some "interesting" driving... Kevin was the navigator for the car, and on the way back, we became unwilling volunteers that lead the rest of the cars back to Waterloo. The funniest thing about that is that when I made a wrong turn, everyone turned with me, and eventually I had to do a U-turn on a T-shaped road, and everybody followed that as well, making quite a hilarious scene in the middle of the night. So anyway, those were the adventures of the day.

I've been in a pretty foul mood recently, actually...don't know why exactly.

Something's wrong with my eyes.

It was a weird day yesterday. First, I missed a class. Yeah, that's probably the first time I've done that accidentally in quite a while. I overslept, maybe because of having a really tough week. I did eventually go to school, got the notes from Carlos and all is well. Alex paid a visit to my office, which is quite a surprise. Always very nice to see him, but too bad I didn't get to participate in much of the conversation because a 350 student came in almost right after he came in to ask for help...sigh. Good luck to Alex, who is going to work for Amazon...nice. Later talked to Carlos for quite a while, actually, and it was really nice. That sort of carried over to the Tutte seminar, which I haven't attended in ages. Went home, and then probably the worst evening in recent memory happened. I don't know why, but I simply could not do anything that I have planned. My head was woozy, wanted to sleep, but couldn't. It was painful...anyway, that's over, so I'm fine now, maybe, I don't know.

Started watching some of the huge ocollection of TV-DVDs that I bought recently. They are nice...too bad I don't have much time to watch them. I also want to watch them on the fourth-floor giant tv...

My computer has been very slow these days, even slower than the slowness that is already happening before. Not sure what to do there...maybe one of the security downloads from "automatic update" slowed things down, I don't know. Also, the wireless connection in UW is really frustrating to deal with. Strange disconnections all the time, and most recently some downloads just suddenly disappear for no reason. Hmm...

I woke up today by the alarm clock (and not by waking up naturally), this is so that I can actually go to school and do some reading before supervisor meeting. And surprise, I actually did read something, and that turned out to be very important as what I read in the morning is exactly what I presented during today's 1.5-hour supervisor meeting. Not too bad. Felt like hastily prepared, but still ok, I guess.

Received the goodies from Amazon today. Weeeeeeeeeee! Saw a bit of Amazing Race DVD, and man is it different from Amazing Race today. Very little background music, things clearly out of order, and there's even a guy holding up the race flag in the Johannesburg airport (which is kind of odd). Anyway, they have these additional material embedded into the episodes, which is nice. But from the jacket, I see that these additional material decreases as we go along the race...so that's kind of the editors doing a lot of work in the beginning, and fading towards the end. That kind of sucks...but that's only a minor complaint.

I found out that the voice of Yakko and Pinky is also the voice of Carl from Jimmy Neutron! That is so cool...

Marking madness #1 for this term is over. Conclusion: 4 straight days of marking isn't good for the mental health. Again, it's not the brain power that is draining, it's the sheer volumn that's scary.

I went for a walk around campus again today. While that's not really surprising, what's new this time around is that there was a light rain going on while I was walking. It wasn't too bad, actually...now see if I can walk while it's snowing...

I have one morning to prepare for the supervisor meeting...yikes.

One note about the Wallace & Gromit movie (and I don't think this is a spoiler, really): The bad dog in the movie looked very familiar to me...and then I realized, that's the same dog as the bad dog in Chicken Run! (I think...) Anyway, the soundtrack is coming next week, and looks like I'll definitely get it for sure. Speaking of shopping, I'm expecting a couple of packages to arrive from Amazon some time this week...should be exciting...or not.

Marking all day long, and marking all day tomorrow. This kind of marking is different from the previous terms' because this time, it's just brute force and endurance. Before, it takes brain power, so it was more fun that way. Not having good days, I tell ya. Also, the very sad part is that now that I have finished marking about 80 papers, I realize that I have about 140 more to go...yikes. And there's the looming supervisor meeting on Thursday which...well...let's just hope it doesn't go too badly...

Amazing Race was pretty bad tonight...so not going to say much about it. The one thing I got out of it is that I remember how I really really wanted to have a brother...anyway.

The Wallace & Gromit movie rocks. I don't think I have ever laughed so hard for so long in any occasion. So...go watch it. I just hope that they release a soundtrack. Good to see Elgar's Symphony No. 1 made it...I always knew it would be good movie music. Anyway, this marks the 6th movie that I have ever watched in a movie theatre.

I have an idea for the homework due tomorrow, so that's good. I marked one question out of my pile...one more question to go, plus another pile. I think I panic too much before this kind of pressure. Trusting God isn't an easy thing.

People found a special way for locating my car...it's about the same as Finding Nemo, if you know what I mean.

Photos of yesterday's trip to Collingwood and area are up on the web now. By the way, Windows zipping is really slow...should have used WinZip much earlier...

Yesterday, for the first time in recent memory, the temperature of my room dropped below 79 degrees Fahrenheit on its own (i.e. without the help of air conditioner). Sign of things to come, I guess. The high temperature for yesterday was only 12.

I'm in my office right now, doing marking and homework. I'm really frustrated with both. I can't solve the homework problem (there's only one...), and the marking is just so tedious. I'm not having a good evening, am I? Oh well...at least I cooked another pot of pork this afternoon. It tastes great, actually...

12 hours, 5 cities, 5 people, 5 (or more) times lost, 202 photographs, 377.9 kilometres = the trip around a little bit of Southwestern Ontario. It began at 9am, and after picking up the people, we promptly got lost using the Mapquest system. I think they have pretty old maps there...so...not a good start. First stop: Orangeville, where we needed to use their fabulous service known as McDonald's. After the short stop, we were off to Collingwood and the Blue Mountain. It is a pretty short mountain, really, but still, in Ontario, that's kind of rare. We took the open-air gondola up, spent about 2.5 hours there, walked around, had some exercise, enjoyed the beautiful sea (which is not green...but the sky is blue). We were hoping to see the so-called "fall colours" from the trees, but all we saw were mixed-coloured trees. It's still a great view, but not as spectacular as we had hoped for. It was all downhills from there...literally (as we took the gondola down) and figuratively. Our next stop was Craigleith Provincial Park, had a picnic, and walked around the "shale" coastline. People were fishing (although what they caught were a bit questionable...including that black thingie), lots of dead ladybugs around, and my camera battery went dead. That's never happened before...so there was a minor panic, but that sort of resolved itself when I took the battery pack off, played with it a little bit and then put it back in. Next stop: Eugenia Falls. It's a waterfall that looks more like a water leakage...very little water coming down from it. We then learned that it's better in Spring, so I guess that's when we'll come back again... Disappointed by the water leakage, we backtracked a bit to visit Beaver Valley Lookout that we passed by earlier. It wasn't too bad, except the sun is at a particularly awkward angle that makes photography almost impossible. So anyway, we returned home after that, passing Swiss Chalet on the way. Interesting how it took about 2.5 hours to get from Waterloo to Collingwood, about half an hour from Collingwood to Eugenia, yet only about 1.5 hours to get from Eugenia back to Waterloo...hmm... Anyway, at least we figured it's not that far, so it's kind of feasible to visit again. Overall, I really enjoyed this trip, and mom would have enjoyed it immensely with the driving around country roads.

No, I don't trust my balance, hence the inability to do anything involving perilous heights.

Eating Swiss Chalet two days in a row isn't really good...especially when the chicken in the second day's SC is overcooked...

I really need to stop the urge to do some online shopping.......... As a trivial note to myself, the most expensive single purchase that I have done online cost $556.55.

The thing about the supposed "fall colours" here in Ontario is that it really isn't spectacular in the Waterloo region. Usually the trees change colours at different times, and because it's also windy season, the leaves are gone soon after they changed colours...so, not so good.

I'm afraid I'm wrecking my sleeping pattern again...need to say no to long afternoon naps...

A surprise for me on Jeopardy today. The lady that I met during contestant tryout back in April, Helen, who just happened to come from Waterloo as well? She was on the show today. Too bad she didn't win, but at least she had the lead after Jeopardy round, so that's something good. So now I can claim that I have talked to a contestant (in person) who had been on Jeopardy! Woooo!

Supervisor meeting went fine today. I guess my meetings are always pretty short...

Thinking of going to Blue Mountain this Saturday...still not sure, though.

I've been thinking about the physics of opening a door. Suppose you are faced with two doors. Somebody passed by from the other direction, and the door that he used is half-opened and closing. Being my size, the opening is too small for me to fit in. So the question is, which door should I open: the one that's closing, or the one that is already closed? My answer (and I could be wrong) is that I should actually open the one that is closed. The reason is inertia: to re-open the door that is closing, you need to reverse its inertia to close and then push (or pull) it in the opposite direction. For the door that is already closed, all you need to do is defeat its inertia to stay there and push (or pull) it open. So that should take less initial force to open the door. Does that make sense?

The current battery life of my computer: 3 minutes.

The Wallis and Gromit movie is coming out tomorrow. I looked forward to this for a while now, but too bad it's a Halloween movie, which makes me hesitate a bit on whether I will go watch it or not...

Surprise visit from Aaron this evening, and we had some exercise, weeeeeeeee! It felt really good, the exercise part...of course now I have some pain in my left arm...

Apparently the udon + pork soup lunch was a moderate success. Now I am a cook! Sort of...

Only 55GB left on the 160GB external hard drive. I've been downloading too many things...

In Dan Younger's class today, he was in a reminiscent mode and started telling some history behind the problem we are learning. Among the history, he passed around a group photo of a conference in the 1970s. He made a specific point that we can look for him, he's on the right side of the picture with a tie on and stuff. So I tried to find him. I had to go to the list of people before locating him. I looked at him in the picture, and I almost (and it's very tempting) made the joke that he looks a lot "younger" in the photo...

I forgot to do my daily Bible reading this morning, again. It's been a bit difficult to remember to do that since I have changed the regular reading time from the evening to the morning since last week. I guess it will take some time to get used to it. And on a pseudo-related note, I forgot to bring a bottle of water to the office, again! This is like the 3rd day that I wanted to bring the water, and I just keep forgetting about it... All of these remind me that my memory is indeed deteriorating...

Things to do: read the difficult papers, do homework assignment, marking. I'm not having an easy week this time around...

So there was a Bible study yesterday. 6 people came, including me. Not too bad, I guess. We had some interesting discussions, and Francis just happened to sleep during the study. Oh well, not my problem.

After serving the Lord for so long, I gained the "insight" that unexplainable difficulties are bound to happen while doing work for the Lord. Today is another example. I tried to work on the audio files from the past weekends. I needed to edit them, essentially cutting off segments from the beginning and the end so that each has one sermon and nothing else. Well, the sound editing softwares that I found all have trouble dealing with one of the huge files: 120mb in mp3, but 1.2gb in wav (and apparently all of them turned the mp3 into wav before I can do work on it). Plus I don't have much disk space in my hard drive. So...after many attempts at converting the files, editing them, many times unsuccessfully, and about 5 hours later, I finally got it done. Really, it's as simple as chopping off small bits from the file, but it took that long. And surprisingly, I wasn't really panicking or gotten angry or anything. I was mostly calm, knowing from experience that this kind of thing happens a lot. So...I did indeed learn a lesson in my life.

It has been very warm this week, up to 27 degrees with the smog advisory. Really, 27 degrees in October? Yikes... Also I finally noticed a difference the high temperature makes with the sky. With the high temperature, the sky is grey, with no clouds in sight. With the low temperature, the sky is beautiful blue, with extraordinary cloud formations sometimes. So...smog bad, clean air good. By the way, I made another attempt to walk around the campus tonight. It was slower than usual, since my legs started to get a bit tense and I couldn't walk fast. I saw some fog developing, so that was interesting...

I just had a pretty embarrassing office hour. I thought the assignment was easy, based on duality and complementary slackness, so I didn't really look deep into it. I didn't have the official solutions, obviously. The first half hour of the office hour was quiet. Really quiet. The calm before the storm hit at half past three, when a group of 4, led by the guy who came to visit me last week, came into my office to ask for help. Later another guy came in, but because I was mainly dealing with this group of 4, I didn't have time to help him. So anyway, I was flustered here and there, claiming that I misread the question or I simply couldn't decipher their solutions. It was bad. But the half hour was over soon...I would have been able to stay past 4pm, but they left anyway. It's too bad that they will probably never visit my office hour again, because that guy with the Sesame Street t-shirt is really funny.

I made an unprecedented move today by going home...just for lunch! Yeah, kind of a first, actually. I guess I can do this while the weather is still not too cold...which means I can only do that this week...

I downloaded and uploaded way too much with the wireless connection here in the office today. About 800mb, which is normally more than half of my weekly quota at home...

Class resumed today. I got a bit of a scare when I visited Carlos' office beforehand and found out that they have been working on that "optional extra" question. But all fear is gone when the professor wrote down that question for assignment 2. Ok, not too bad, I guess. It's nice to be back to a group environment instead of spending time on my own all the time.

Just a thought on the subject of honesty in "instant messenger" type things. I have been able to talk to people who were "idle," "busy," "not available," and the most common one, "away from computer." Think of it literally, it's kind of funny. But really, why do people do that? Ok, I can probably think of a reason why, but it just boggles my mind a little bit. I won't generalize this to society level, though...

The number of visitors to this site has been, as I have predicted, slowly back to normal now. That's good, I think.

Yesterday: I don't remember exactly what I did in the morning and afternoon. It must have involved a lot of sleeping, scanning, and editing. There was a really depressing coworkers meeting late afternoon. Then the love feast that isn't too bad, I guess. Interesting speaker talking about the importance and the difficulty of Bible translation and how it relates a lot to missionary work. Today: Morning church as usual. Lunch at Swiss Chalet not as usual. Afternoon intense exercise definitely not as usual. Evening mass cooking was borderline usual, I guess. Now here we are, trying to do an assignment due tomorrow, which we had 2 weeks to work on. And of course I didn't work on it before... But now I see that it's not hard, just the nitty gritty details to write down.

I was really impressed with my laser printer today, spewing out pages after pages like crazy. In total, 170 pages printed (manual duplex) in under 20 minutes. Amazing. And I don't know why I'm so excited about this Trinitarianism Bible study tomorrow...

Weather becoming hot again, and I don't really like it. But it's the fall now, so it won't last long. Looks like the leaves will have to hold on to their green colourings for one more week.

Signs that Fall is near: the temperature has been dropping like crazy. Two days ago, it never went above 10 degrees. I didn't think it was too cold, actually. Maybe the amount of body fat helped a bit there... It warmed up a bit yesterday, going to 17 degrees, but it was a chilly evening for sure. They're saying that the temperature will be back in the 20s again starting today, so it looks like fall is falling away for a bit.

Yesterday: Laundry. Scanned the Trinitarianism book. Shopping for MYF. (4 PDLs at Costco, 1 Mere Christianity at Chapters Kitchener...the interesting story about Mere Christianity is how hard it is to find it. There was none at the Waterloo Chapters, none at the Gospel Lighthouse Bookstore, and 2 at the Kitchener Chapters, one of which is damaged...) (Note to self: Driving through King during the afternoon is not a good idea.) Frustrating MYF that started way too late. Slightly awkward dinner. The thing about the dinner is, I had to send some people home before getting there, and that's already more than half an hour after everyone else arrived. When I went there, they were still ordering! Just as I predicted... Also, it felt to me like 10 minutes after the dishes were served, the food was almost all gone. So I didn't really eat a lot, a mixed blessing, sort of. I drove the "golden triangle" twice, and probably logged more than 100 kilometres for the entire day. Gas prices jumped 10 cents overnight, so good thing I still have a little bit in the tank to survive the weekend...

I still don't know why I'm insanely jealous of many people...