Alex's Alliterative Adventures

It’s been three months of pain, three months of suffering, and almost three months of repeatedly broken appliances and suspiciously absent spoons, so we decided to have an anniversary dinner the day before the anniversary of our being here for three months. Why the day before, and not the day of? Well, that just wouldn’t be crazy enough for Sankt Lars, that’s why. That, and somebody probably fucked up.

I’m off to Stockholm at 6:28am tomorrow morning. That means I’ll be waking up before most of you bastards go to sleep. I may blog this weekend, I may not. With any luck, team WaterLund might just have a bit of success at the Northwestern European Programming Contest.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

My friend, lab partner, and future neighbour Felix recently blogged about Swedish weather. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Housing in London is dirt cheap. I’ve been digging through ads for rooms that average around $350CAD/mo, with the low ballers coming in at a tight $250. You can land a bachelor pad for around $500-$600, or even $450 if you’re willing to adjust your definition of the word “pad” to include closets. Some places offer free daily breakfast and weekly barbecue, others tempt me with a jacuzzi and galley kitchen, and most wave the cost utilities with a quick hand, a bright smile, and a loud, plaid jacket. I just hope I don’t let my lust get the better of me, since I’m weakened by the most tempting vixen of them all: a private bathroom.

I just can’t understand why prices are so low. I mean, Waterloo offers some pretty fan-fricken-tastic deals when compared to Toronto, but you can’t really go much lower unless you’re compensating for things like frequent drive-bys or plagues of locusts/frogs/miscellaneous. Those are pretty unlikely, though. Infestations don’t normally crop up during Canadian winters, and the salted roads are bad for rims, so there has to be another explanation. My best guess: Hellmouth.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Python is roughly analogous to the Worst Thing Ever, No Questions Asked, Amen.

Thought of the day: why is bureaucracy so damned hard to spell?

A German physicist lives across the hall from me. She’s really nice, I have a great time hanging out with her, and she seems to be pretty damn smart. She’s currently studying quantum mechanics, so I took it upon myself to repeatedly bug her to teach me quantum mechanics, since the concepts behind it intrigue me so. She hooked me up with a little video that covers very, very basic quantum mechanics. Although the video does a great job of scratching the surface of quantum theory, it didn’t really answer any questions for me, so I dug through the video’s comments. One of the comments offered something that sounded like a plausible explanation to one of my questions, until I realized that it was incredibly wrong. A response to that comment lead me to a quick googling, which lead me to a wikipedia page, which then lead to thirty–six other wikipedia pages.

I can’t stop reading, and I’m not going to be able to sleep for a month. That German girl is such a jerk.

I impressed someone with my cooking today. I didn’t really see that one coming, since the dish that caught her eye was grilled cheese sandwiches.

Recently, I’ve had this bizarre little voice nagging in the back of my mind. At first it was a whisper, then a gentle nudge, and now I have full-fledged conversations with it during the ritual morning shower. Since it only says one thing, the conversations are usually short, and muffled by a mouthful of Wash & Go, but it’s hard to ignore it when my brain is invaded by this pervasive thought:

Do something great.

What? What should I do? What can I do? Cure cancer? Run for prime minister? Soup up my Delorean? Make the most kick-ass video game ever? Watch a really, really great movie? I really have no clue what it is I want to do, but I think I want to do it. I’m going to give myself a bit of time to stew it over, though. With burning desires like this one, it’s always hard to tell whether it’s just a passing phase or a lasting force, or perhaps a simple case of gonorrhea.

Even during my “free time”, I manage to be never-endingly busy. Programming contest in a week, two assignments due every Tuesday, trying to nail down housing, idly playing with the idea of a trip to Ireland and the UK, and just life in general.

In other news, I recently watched Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, and I thought it was extremely well done. It managed to give you just as much information as was required to get you worried about the issue of climate change, while still managing to keep things simple enough for the general audience to find clear and understandable. Admittedly, there was a bit of damn lies & statistics going on, since he showed a lot of powerful graphs without giving any indication of the range or scale of the data and he contrasted photos from generations past without indicating when the photos were taken, but I’d like to think that his message was relevant and worthwhile in spite of these things. Yous all might want to give it a watch. I, on the other hand, will take my new socially responsible outlook and use it to laugh all the harder when introducing my floor to Shawn of the Dead.

With a little bit of luck, I’ll be back in the Great White North before the witching hour on the 19th of December. I was originally planning on spending a bit more time traveling before coming home, but apparently other people had the same idea before I did. I can hardly believe that I’m planning my departure already, it seems like I’ve only just arrived and there’s still so much I have yet to see. I love the fact that I learn something mind-blowing about the rest of the world almost every day I’m here; it’s nice to be reminded how little I know and how much knowledge is hidden away in the cultures of the world, like ancient scrolls waiting only to be unfurled. I also enjoy how Swedes are just really weird.

That being said, there are some things I won’t miss.

When he wasn’t busy getting a black ear, a buddy of mine from the floor just hooked me up with all of Prison Break.

This does not bode well for my future.

I recently had to come to terms with a terrible epiphany. At first, I was disgusted by the idea. I tried to bury my emotional reaction, to silence the self-doubt bubbling out from every porous thought that crossed my mind, but you can only lie to yourself for so long. I had to face the truth:

I love CS at Waterloo.

The classes are excruciatingly, senselessly difficult. The subject matter generally covers a few select topics, most of which are boring, irrelevant, painstaking, or meaningless. A startling number of professors are completely incapable of expressing themselves to English speaking undergrads. The school’s websites are a joke, at best. While the coop program is extremely valuable, the implementation is laughable. It seems that the administration’s only purpose is to make students’ lives more miserable in as many shocking new ways as they can. It seems that every time you overcome one of their seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you’re rewarded with yet more hardship. Most upper-years at Waterloo no longer look at their degree as an opportunity to learn and immerse themselves with knowledge, they’re instead trying to find the best way to scrape up a few more passed credits and counting the days until they can return to a life of sleeping at night. It’s sometimes difficult not to imagine a malicious office worker working late into the night, drafting a plot for your next ill-fated encounter with a Course Permissions Override Form.

I don’t know if my epiphany was a sudden rocket-powered leap into a more maturely cynical viewpoint of the world, a world where life is hard and no one goes out of their way to make life easy for you, or if it was simply Stockholm syndrome caused by my recent traveling to said city, but now I can’t get over how great it is to be studying Waterloo. When I compared my experiences to those of the students I met from other schools and countries, I initially felt jealousy at their tales of easy, well-taught, low-pressure courses. I’ve felt some of that spectacular European educational bliss by coming here, but I only recently appreciated how much Waterloo has shaped and hardened me. At Waterloo, showing up and giving a good effort is synonymous with failure. In order to succeed, or even just to pass, you have to add new ends to the candle from which it can then be burned. Studying CS Coop at Waterloo is a lifestyle; one where free time means a taking a break from the assignment with a Tim Hortons coffee run at 4:30am, a long-term friendship is one that survives more than one academic term, accomplishment is getting 63% on the midterm with a class average of 39%, and a good night’s sleep is when you don’t accidentally pass out on your textbook or in a library, classroom or lab. In comparison to the real world, Waterloo is hell. And when I’m honest with myself, I can’t think of any way I could possibly become better prepared to not just deal with the real world, but to also gain the knowledge, cunning, and perseverance I need to be able to thrive in the the worst life has to offer and walk away with a smile on my face.

“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.” – Winston Churchill