Good Bye to WoW

Finally I canceled my WoW subscription. My account will run out on August 10 ... In the end I was just not playing enough to justify spending a good $200 on it every year :(

Flying Home

I booked a flight to Halifax to visit my family and friends there on August 3, arriving at 23:15 or so. I'll get to stay there for about 10 days before I have to head back to Vancouver on August 15. Ahh, sweet oblivion of lan gaming and lazyness here I come!

Driving

This Wednesday my friend Shawn gave me an intro to driving standard on Wednesday so I could drive him to the airport. This morning then we head to the airport for a flight at stupid o'clock in the morning. Smooth ride there, nobody on the roads, barely anyone at the check in. So after getting Shawn's tickets and checking his bags (that just sounds wrong) we went for some good breakfast at Timmies.

On the way home I was for the first time in my life driving a standard, while I was the only person in the car. After a first bit of anxiety I had a pretty smooth ride home. While cruising along South West Marine drive I realized once again how much I enjoy driving, even if it's just casual. Cruising along the road with some good tunes playing (Yay for The Fox) just puts my mind at ease. Just cruise, no worries but the road in front of you ... and I guess the traffic around you. I miss it here in Vancouver where I don't have a car.

Anyway now with a good Timmies breakfast I am sitting at work, time to get some coding done!

Appartment Hunting

So Saturday I finally made some appointment to look at two 1 bed room apartments for Wes, a friend of mine from Nova Scotia. Wes is will be coming to Vancouver to work as geologist in mineral exploration in northern BC (correct me here if I am wrong Wes). I was to look at a place located at

1. East 12th @ Glen Drive, and
2. 3800 West 37th. <- Address advertised

(these maps brought to you by the letters M, A, and P, and the word quest) Anyway I call place number one, and make an appointment with the couple in charge of the place next weekend, since they were busy at the time. "Well good enough" I think an call place number two, and hence the reason for this blog entry:

OK first I just get an answering machine, where "Chris" (female non the less) asks me to leave a message. So I leave my name, number, email, the address of the apartment, and ask to be called back to make an appointment so I can take a look. And what do you know, while I am showing Unreal Tournament to Kafui I get a call back.

After breaking out of my FPS trance I tell her I am checking out the place for a friend who will be working here. And Chris clarifies that she is renting out only to the high an mighty "UBC Graduate Students". Well fine, so I say I'll check the place out for me since I need a place as well. Apparently this nearly too much for her, I needed to explain twice that I am a graduate student here looking for an apartment. Next she clarified that the apartment was for one person only ... I restrain a sexually explicit remark, and tell her that I shall drop by in 30 or so minutes, repeating the address of the place (which I was suspecting to be a block number after my mapquesting). She confirms and I head off on my bike.

Long story short, the address was in fact a block number, but just to make sure I asked some of the people that lived around there. They could not help me either.

I get back home a little cheesed about just having wasted about 45 minutes of a perfectly good gaming ... err, I mean working time. I call Chris back and tell her i could not find a house at the advertised address (which I had repeated to her multiple times, asking for confirmation). At this point she informs me: "Well that is just the block number. You could not find my place because I did not give you the address."

For about a minute I consider firebombing that block of Vancouver, then I hang up. I log onto World of Warcraft, and promptly for got to take screenshot of the conversation I had with Wes on there, but here is his final remark: "Yeah, fuck that noise. She sounded like a bitch in my email too, thanks for confirming that she has sand in her vagina - I won't waste my time there anymore." Which is a pretty good reflection of what I was thinking about Chris at that moment.

If you are reading this Chris I hope you send me some hatemail that I can post on here for everyone to enjoy. I am sure you can figure out my TRIUMF email address seeing this url. if not my first name is Frank (as you already know), the last is Berghaus, there is only one Berghaus in this city, there is one more on Vancouver Island. That is it for BC.

Diving!

I went to Cuba with my family back in May 2003. While enjoying the sailing and free drinks at the all inclusive resort we were visiting my sisters (Felicia and Lisa) had been chatting to this fellow running a dive shop right next to the resort. Together with my sisters then I did a Discover SCUBA diving course at the resort, and the next day the guys from the dive shop took us out diving around a nearby coral reef (not quite legal since we were not certified divers, but nobody seemed to mind). Well a lot of fun was had by all and we, well I, had been considering going on to do more diving.
After finishing my thesis then I came out to UBC where I promptly found the UBC dive club in the Student Union Building. I quickly hurried by making a mental note to get back here, but for now I had a quantum assignment to do. So on it went; a summer came and passed, until finally two friends of mine (Shawn and Marie-Andree) twisted my rubber arm into taking the Open Water course offered by the UBC dive society. I just returned from my first lesson, which was pretty much a reiteration of the Discover SCUBA course I took before. I thoroughly enjoyed the lesson, and am looking forward to more (on coming Monday). But what really has me excited is the open water dive at the end of the month (30th and 31st) I just can't wait for to see what the waters of BC have to offer below the surface (yes I did a good bit of sailing here last year, and there was much rejoicing).

Long Time No Post

It's been a busy few weeks, I have a lot of data to analyze so I can finally start writing my masters thesis. On top of that I started worrying about what to do for my PhD, and have concluded that I am totally undecided on this subject. I am feeling tempted to do another masters or try this 'job' thing for a while.

On the "social life" side of things the return to Vancouver has been very nice. It feels good to be back in action at SJC putting on movies, enjoying cartoon-filled weekends and gaming whenever I find the time.

My friend Shawn had found a free 14 day trial of this MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) that let's you play as a superhero. The ability to modify your character in this game is just amazing (I hope my character at least kind of looks right). Of course the game did get into trouble with Marvel since a lot of players imitated their favorite superhero in the game. Following that they started erasing characters that closely resemble any copyrighted material; luckily my character has not been deleted yet. How good is my modeling? How obvious is it what this character is based on?