While many people advocate going to school and getting an education, the reality is that education costs are more expensive than most people realize. Canada thankfully provides reasonably priced educations compared to the rest of the world, but it is far from free.
Given that I grew up in Chilliwack, and that I had to move out to Vancouver to attend UBC, I spent approximately $11,000 per 8-month period, which included housing on the UBC campus along with a university food program (which tasted fairly similar to prison food, I imagine). Of those costs, approximately $3,000 went towards tuition, ...
Most people probably don't know it about me, but I used to be involved in weather forecasting a long time ago. My first exposure to it was a co-op job I had in the summer of 1997 up in Whitehorse, YT. I was working for Environment Canada's weather centre, helping to develop JAVA programs for visualizing some of their data. JAVA was a new technology at the time, so it was essentially one big prototype. It worked decently enough, but I doubt it survived much past the end of my co-op term.
Years later I would be employed by the Department of Ocean Sciences at UBC as a part time software developer. ...
It seems that after eight years of university I've acquired a fairy large array of engineering books. Since I haven't read any of them in years, I figure I might as well sell a few of them off. Here's a list of some of them. If you're interested, drop me a comment. Also, please feel free to forward this list on to any physics or electrical engineering students.
Materials Science and Engineering, William D. Callister
Digital Signal Processing, Emmanuel C. Ifeachor
Introduction to Electrodymanics, Griffiths
Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, Griffiths
Microprocessor Systems Design, Clements
Computer ...
Yes, today I briefly debated getting out of my bed at around nine, but decided sleeping in until noon was a better idea. I've had this recurring dream for the last few years that always feels so real. In it, someone (usually my friend Jeff) tells me about some university exam that I'm late for. Of course, everyone is completely prepared for the exam except for me. So I get to the exam and struggle for a good portion of my dream trying to come up with answers I don't have.
For whatever reason, that one always seems real to me. When I wake up, I sometimes almost want to make a call to the university ...
I'm sitting here with John and Rebecca waiting for the Northern Voice keynote to begin. This year it's Wordpress' own Matt Mullenweg, who will be talking about blogging and Wordpress 2.5.
Boris Mann and Matt Mullenweg
Keynote is over. It was really entertaining and enlightening, and I thought some of the points about advertising overload with sites like Facebook were interesting. ...
Northern Voice is officially rolling out at UBC. Since today is an unconference, people are putting their ideas up on the wall for sessions that will happen during the day. I'm still waiting to here when the Internet Bootcamp and Photocamp sessions are.
Megan Cole
I have to finish my plan for the little talk I'm giving, so I'm chilling out on the side right now. Will drop a few more blog entries as the day goes on. Check my Flickr stream for photos as they happen. ...
Today I headed out to The University of British Columbia for an appointment with Dr. Kevin Bush, one of the best plastic surgeons (who specializes in cranial-facial reconstruction) in the province. I had some time to kill, so I spent 30 minutes just walking around enjoying the sunshine, reminiscing about the nearly eight years I spent wandering around the campus. It's really weird being on campus in the summer. Most students don't really have a chance to see the rose garden in full bloom, or enjoy campus life when the weather is nice out (since the school year coincides with the bad weather seasons ...
I've had a few requests lately from people asking if I could send them a copy of my master's thesis. So in the interest of saving time, I'm throwing it up here in case anyone wants to download it and read themselves to sleep.
My research was primarily in the area of high definition video compression, specifically on a new codec called H.264 that is used in the new HD DVD formats such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. I proposed a novel scheme to combine concurrently broadcoast MPEG-2 standard definition (SD) streams with H.264 spatial difference information to create a HD broadcast stream at a reduced ...
I'm sitting in room 1005 at the Forest Sciences Center at UBC, eagerly awaiting the "User Generated Content and Activist Campaigns" session to begin. Prior to this was the keynote address by Anil Dash, which gave some great insights into the importance of blogging, and a few allusions to where blogging may go in the future.
One of the most interesting part of this conference, for me at least, is a glimpse into the nature of bloggers. The other night at the social, Lee LeFever gave a presentation about his trip around the world, and one sentence that stands out in my mind from his presentation ...
Well, it's official -- I passed my master's exam with a whopping mark of 84% (A-) -- good enough for me. So, all that's left to do is get a few pieces of paper signed, print off a nice copy of my thesis, and hand it into the library for processing. And then it's done.
The guys from CounterPath took me out for a few free rounds of drinking last night. We started at Nevermind in Kits for a few beers after my defense. Then Des and I went for dinner on Granville Island (Bridges) and met up with everyone at 8pm for some drinks at the Yaletown Brew Pub.
Here's a photo of me waiting to catch the ferry ...