Graduate Student Life Is So Hard

This weekend was just miserable.  On Saturday morning I barely managed to roll out of bed, just to have the bright sunshine outside scorch my poor eyeballs.  After recovering my site I had to slip into my SCUBA thermals at go to ten-mile point, where I jumped into the frigid north pacific because the tides were just right (current table).  As you may expect from a lousy site like ten-mile the dive was just dreadful and I barely escaped from the dreadful critters lurking in the ocean down there! On top of that all the cheerful folks from the UVic SCUBA club had the audacity to praise all the "life" they found in the ocean.  After finally hauling my under-appreciated bum out of the water we decided to go to Smugglers cove for a beer.  If you know me at all you probably figured out how much I dislike alcohol in general and beer specifically ...

As if all that wasn't enough I just had to run into the folks from the AquaSoc at UBC who had just returned from that windswept waste known as Race Rocks.  They twisted my arm into going out to ten mile again with the the next day, why I agreed to that I still don't know.  But let me return to things at hand:  after all that diving that dreadful rogue Ian called me up and forced me to go for a sail in Cadboro Bay.  Again I had to deal with the sun burning my retinas and the freezing wind chilling me to the core.

In conclusion I hope I convinced you how life as a grad student out here is just not worth it, why am I even bothering to tell people about all this ;-)

Now, taking off my cynicism hat, it's too bad that the UBC folks caught a bad day out at race, I hope that the diving at ten-mile made up for it at least!

Awesome Linux Screensaver

I found a really cool screensaver for those of us cruising in linux. I first found it after my first dabbeling in kernel hacking ... but didn't think of posting about it till now. Makes me feel leet for having some swanky code scroll past my screen, especially if i recognize a passage.

The practical upshot of all this is that when I am nodding off at work and the screensaver kicks in it looks like I am coding. Upon further inspection the more astute observer my note, of course, that I am not actually typing :)

Gource just made me feel productive

So, I have been at a bit of a standstill with my analysis of late, not for lack of trying, but mostly due to some the evolution of the atlas code base. In an effort to get my PhD done however I have been coding like a maniac over the last month. Since I have been tracking my development via git I decided to make a little video of what I have been up to (code-wise) and it made me feel good about myself.

See I wasn't completely useless over the last month!

Wordle

So in their events bulleting the UVic GSS folk pointed out wordle, a webapp to create world clouds from text you may find in places such as your blog. Seeking out any opportunity to procrastinate with a vengence I prompty made a wordle of this here blog (let's hope that I can sidestep any recursion problems). have a looksie at the result:

Seeing that we at ATLAS have our very own blog talking about the progress the experiment has been making I churned it through the app as well, and this time not coming up with my own colour scheme and rather using my own, here is what came out the other end: