memoirs on a rainy day

Image via wikipedia.

There are many different paper sizes in the world. Currently, the most widespread are the international standard ones, all of the A derivatives, and the North American ones.

The international standard is based on the German one. The base format is 1m² which is called A0. All other sizes are subdivisions of A0. They are formed by halving A0 parallel on its shorter side.

The international standard is almost universal, except in the US and Canada. Although Mexico, Colombia, Chile and the Philippines have adopted the international standard, the US letter format is still commonly used.

Each sheet of A4 weighs 5 grams, if the A0 weighs 80grams per square meter.

Moresukine is a weekly webcomic from Dirk Schwieger that has been recently compiled into a book (via moleskinerie)

I’ve almost completed my last assignment. Like most bloggers who are studying full time, it’s a challenge during the midterm or end of term exam period to update my blog as much as before.

I started working on my last Numerical Linear Algebra assignment last Monday. It’s taken most of the week to complete it, including two marathon coding sessions at the computer lab, where I coded on my laptop. The implantation of the Generalized Conjugate Residual [GCR] method was a bit harsh to say the least. The other methods were easier.

I programmed the Conjugate Gradient [CG], CG with SSOR, CG with ICC [using the incomplete Cholesky factorization], GCR with SOR, GCR with ILU [using the incomplete LU factorization].

I also had to code some sparse matrices. I coded the Relaxation Method to resolving linearized differential equations.

It was a challenge, but I liked it. This is why that I’m probably going to work with my professor in Numerical Linear Algebra over the summer, while in Taiwan. I really enjoyed this assignment, even though it clocked at 23 pages in a Word document. I plan to learn LaTex over the summer.

For these long assignments, I always do them on the computer. It looks more professional and I find that writing equations this way makes me think about them more then if I would write them by hand.

On Tuesday, I’m leaving for Ottawa to take care of my visa to Taiwan. I’ll be coming back on Wednesday to Quebec City. My flight is on Friday. I’ll be arriving in Taiwan during the weekend.

1.

Today I saw a girl in the bus. She was young. I’d say 18-21, but I have trouble really telling what her exact age was. She was in army fatigues. She was obviously in the Canadian Armed Forces. She had the beret and her unit insignia.

She was an incredibly striking girl. Very full lips, grayish eyes and striking features. I almost took a picture, but she was on the phone shortly after and the magic of the moment was lost. I was sitting in the back and she was sitting directly in front of me, on a bench that was perpendicular to my seat. She kept showing me this incredibly beautiful angle from her neck to her cheek lost deep in her thoughts.

2.

On Friday, I saw two guys practicing parkour in a park. I just saw them for a short while, but that was enough to see one of them to a backward somersault. I almost got off the bus to take some photos, but it was the end of a hard week and I wanted to relax.

3.

On the way home for lunch today, it started to rain. On the way back to work it was still raining. I saw a lady using her reusable grocery bag to shield her head from her head. It really looked bizarre since she really had the bag on her head.

I really hate having wet socks. As soon as my socks are wet, from sweat or just plain dampness, I change them. I don’t like having wet feet. I can change socks four times a day if they get wet. I’ve different types of socks. Home socks and socks for going out. I always wear two layers of socks, no matter where I go.

What do you hate?

My roommate is a smoker. I barely notice. He smokes a lot less than before. I’ve known my roommate for over 15 years, which is surprising to say the least that we happened to be rooming together for the last few months.

This made me think about other roommate smokers, some of them weren’t as careful as my present one. During my first semester at Sherbrooke University in 1995, I stayed in the dorms. Since I was an undergrad, I was bunking with someone in a double. It wasn’t the best arrangement, since he was a bit strange. Really strange. He was from the Maritimes, but his strange acts are another story.

The next semester, I was off on a paid internship for an aluminum smelter near Quebec. The following semester, I decided to rent a place extremely close to the university with one of my good friends named Ken. He’s an anglophone and in engineering and we got along well together. We signed a one year lease. The big perk was that the apartment was actually closer to my faculty building than the school dorms.

Amazing. It was called Le Montagnais.

Ken was a smoker, but he never smoked inside. He always smoked outside. I was a non-smoker and absolutely abhorred smoking. I hated smelling smoke on my clothes. But we had clear rules for our guests. There were numerous adventures during out stay there.

I was at the apartment off and on since every four months, I had another paid internship. As with all roommate situations, there was also the switching of the rooms which was important to us. One room was a big room. The other room was smaller. We switched periodically. This was common sense.

From time to time, Ken would also get to leave on paid internships. This was what our university was well-known for. I don’t know if this was good or bad, since a lot of undergrads decided to leave before they finished school when they got job offers from the places where they completed their internships. The most coveted internships were at Softimage, a special effects house in Montreal, and in Japan.

It had always been my goal to try and go to Japan on an internship, but things changed as time passed. My interest in Computer Science was stifled when I had my first Machine programming class. Lisp didn’t really help matters either. I changed majors and started in Mathematics, a subject which I had always loved and initially wanted to pursue but didn’t since I thought that there weren’t that many jobs in that field.

It was the duty of the leaving roommate to find a replacement roommate for the apartment. I remember clearly that once I had trouble finding one. I don’t remember when it was, but the only person that I could find was a hard-core smoker, who smoked everyday and he had told us that he would smoke inside. I had put him on my very short list since it was hard finding someone else. In the end, I didn’t find anyone else. So hard-core smoker became Ken’s roommate. Ken wasn’t happy, but there was nothing I could do. The only other option was for me to continue paying half of the rent, while I paid my own rent in Montreal. That didn’t really work.

So the hard-core smoker moved in and Ken told me that it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Then again, Ken was also a smoker so it must not have been that bad.

I’ve been teaching this lawyer Annik for the past few weeks. She’s actually a director of a legal department of a financial institution. I’ve actually written more than one post about her. This is the first and the most recent. More will be coming.

Annik is a thirtyish lawyer. She’s about 5′6″, with short brown hair and brown eyes. She’s attractive and the mother of two young children.

Annik is an advanced English student. She’s actually my most advanced student. At the end of our last class, which was on Friday, after my last exams, we started talking about food. I said that I loved oranges, and the Americans really knew how to grow them. In Taiwan, they weren’t any good. She said that she liked oranges as well, but she was the only one in her family who liked them.

As we started talking about food, I started thinking about food. I hadn’t eaten all day. Well I ate a banana in the morning before going to my first exam. I had a cup of tea as well. But that was it. I had thought about getting something from the cafeteria at the financial institution, but I remembered that giving classes and eating is awkward at best.

And I didn’t have time after my last exam to eat anything, since my exams lasted from 8:30 to 12:30. I started teaching my class at 12:45. As I thought about this, I told my student about it. She was immediately worried about me and her maternal instincts appeared. She is a young mother of two young children, ages 3 and 5.

You should have told me before we started, she said, I could have gotten you something at the cafeteria. I said that I didn’t really like cafeteria food and that I had some home cooked food waiting for me at home. Well, then you could have eaten some biscuits, we have some here at the office. I said that I don’t eat any biscuits, bread or pasta anymore. I eat a lot of fruits.

I found her concern touching and heart warming. It’s been a while since someone worried like that about what I had eaten.

I left for home and ate some fruits, veggies and pork skewers that I had prepared the night before. It was very good and I felt sated.

The billionaire author of the Harry Potter books JK Rowling has gone to court to stop Steve Vander Ark from publishing an A-Z encyclopedia on Harry Potter. She was tearful in court and says that this controversy has stopped her from writing. What a crock! She’s already made a billion. Fan fiction is a fact of life.

Blogging has become a part of my life since I started in 2006. I blogged in other ways before in HTML files that were constantly updated from 1998-2003. I wrote this post about my blogging habit. Today, I will go into the reasons why I love blogging.

Suplado tagged me with a meme, so here are my reasons for blogging.

1. Power of blogs

More than once, I have seen a positive change in my life due to blogs. For example, there was the time that I had topped my upload limit in a month on Zooomr. I blogged about this. A few hours later I received a comment and an email from Kris Tate CFO of Zooomr. He reset my upload limit for the month so I could upload my photos. I really appreciated that. Earlier this year, I had trouble uploading my photos. Kris managed to resolve my issue in a few minutes.

More recently, I blogged about losing a Better Bottle from CamelBak. I was running at full speed in order to catch the bus. I made the bus, but immediately noticed once in the bus, that I had lost my bottle in my full out run. I asked myself which I preferred, losing a bottle or being in time for my university classes. It took only a fraction of a second to decide that I’d rather go to school on time. I will receive a new Better Bottle from CamelBak later this week, courtesy of their marketing department.

2. Immediate results

As an aspiring writer, photographer and artist, I love seeing an immediate result. This happens when I push the “Post” button in my WP dashboard. Immediately, my post is published on my blog and sent through my RSS subscriptions. With a good Pagerank, what you write has immediate impact as well. The power of your blog relies on how easy it is to find your content.

3. Exposing racism and other injustices

As a visible minority in a largely Caucasian population, I am extremely sensitive to racism. This means that I notice it easily. A look, a word, a gesture. I can interpret these when they are racist. I have said before that between France, Germany and Canada, Quebec is by far the most racist place I have ever lived. I won’t count Taiwan, since the Taiwanese are pretty much racist towards anybody. That’s not necessarily true, but from a certain point of view, it is.

4. Sharing my writing, my photos and art

From paperblogging, to watercolors, to photography, to creative writing, I do create things. Some of them are crap, others are good. In an effort to better myself, I post these. Hopefully some people will like them. I don’t really post them to receive criticism. In that sense, I am my own harshest critic.

I was messing around with a paint brush and ink a few weeks ago and this was the result. I have been researching ways to do some calligraphy. After a few experiments, I decided on using ink dip pens as they get the best result. I’ve seen some typographers and calligraphers working with brushes, but they are hard to use. It will take a lot of practice.

This piece actually turned out to be a short poem. Click the image about to read or read it below.

The weight of the world lay on his shoulders, but he could not tell.
Like the abyss that spawned him, his heart of hearts told him different.
What could be said?
What could be done?
No one could tell.

It crushed him slowly into pieces.
The gaps became larger.
No one knew if he could ever be put back together

Things would always fall apart.