Coastal Road Trip

I got the week off for Thanksgiving and an office move, so I'm going on a road trip to Northern California.  I hope to see more of this:

than this:

Sometimes I find myself missing grad school.
Then it snows, and I rejoice in the knowledge
that I'm not stuck up there anymore.

To the detriment of my attempt at NaBloPoMo, posts after today might be spotty.  I'll sure try though!  In the meantime, enjoy the snow, folks!

Updates

A lot has happened in the past few months and I have been so busy I haven't had time to blog about it all. I finished my internship in March and recently completed my thesis too. I'm on the home stretch now, and will defend in just over a week's time. After that, it's on to San Francisco for the 2009 Anita Borg Canada Scholarship retreat (I was selected as a finalist), so I'm sure I will have lots of adventures to blog about and photos to share!

Big News

Seems like everyone around me these days has some sort of big news. I have some of my own too! But I'm going to wait a bit longer before I announce officially. :D

April Fool's!

Well, not really. :(

Oh Dear.

I wonder what adventures tomorrow's commute has in store.

An Epic Bus Saga

I've spent the last few weeks mostly at my parents', since going home might mean being stranded by snow or poor weather (when the going gets tough, the buses get going...back to their cozy bus shelters without any passengers on board). However, three days ago there was a break in the weather, and I finally felt like I'd be able to go home without getting stuck there.

The next day, the weather was a bit inclement in the morning, some blowing snow, rain, and wind. But by the afternoon the skies had cleared, the sun was out, and everything looked fairly pleasant. I got invited to some friends who live nearby (although off the mountain, unfortunately). Checking the Translink website and the SFU Road Conditions site, things seemed to be running smoothly, and I figured it was safe to venture out of the house. I was wrong. :(

I left their house at 10:30pm, not too late, I thought. Unfortunately, the temperatures had dipped and the roads were frozen, and they couldn't get their car out. Not wanting to cause any trouble, I decided to take a taxi. The taxi came and made me walk half a block in this treacherous ice (because apparently people don't shovel their sidewalks anymore), and when I finally climbed in, the driver told me he wouldn't go up the hill. Admittedly, the side streets weren't in good condition, but the main roads were clear and perfectly fine! I got him to take me to the bottom of the hill, where I thought I'd wait for a bus. Except when I got to the stop, there were people there (not a good sign). They said they'd been waiting for about an hour, with no sign of a bus in either direction. The long and the short of it is, I waited about an hour and a half in subzero temperatures before a bus finally deigned to pick me up (several had gone by before, and although they were operational apparently decided not to stop for me).

Now, apart from the freezing cold and unpleasantness of waiting around for a bus for over an hour, a few other things annoyed me about the situation. At 11:15, I decided to call the Translink phone line to ask if the buses were running (apparently at this point, the SFU site said buses were 'delayed'). After being on hold for 15 minutes, the operators hung up on me. Apparently the 'service' ends at 11:30, so I guess they didn't feel the need to deal with my call. When I did finally get on the bus, the driver told me that he had no idea anyone was out so late (well, I didn't intend that, having left two hours earlier) and that we should just stay on the hill and never leave. I'm sure the professionals who spent hundreds of thousands on apartments and condos up there with the assurance that the community was 'green' and 'transit-based' would love that, too. Not to mention, what should we be eating for three weeks when the university is closed? There are no grocery stores to speak of on campus.

Looking back on it now, it wasn't too bad, since luckily for me I had a place to go. But the other person at the bus stop had to walk up to the top of the hill, because he didn't. That's a two hour walk in the dark, for a person without adequate equipment (flashlight, matches, emergency food). I hope he made it back ok.

Anyway, for a 'world class city' shouldn't we be able to do better than this? Cities like Toronto have more snow than us, and they don't grind to a halt because of it. Phone services shouldn't leave you on hold because they don't want to answer your call and then hang up when it's time to close up for the day, and we shouldn't be expected to shut ourselves in for three weeks in case we can't make it home again. :P

Hacking the Lab

You read correctly, that's not hacking *in* the lab, it's *hacking the lab*. Today we figured out how to hack our lab such that its internal temperature no longer matches the subzero frigidity found outside. Sitting in our now toasty lab during the holidays now seems slightly more appealing. :D

Surprise, Surprise!

You would think after last year's snow fiasco(s), the many emails regarding service improvement and emergency strategies, and the thousands of students stuck on campus without food last year, that there would at least be a good chance that similar situations would be prevented this year.

But no.

We get not even an inch of snow, and the same problems occur. After checking SFU's website and webcams (which were down, and at this time are still showing one hour old pictures) this morning, I decided to give it a try. However, I had to get off the bus I was on and head back downtown at around 9:00am after the driver told me that buses hadn't been going up since 8:00am and that there were whiteout conditions for the last hour (speaking of which, I'm not sure why he waited to tell passengers until we were halfway there, or why he didn't think to mention it until he was asked).

SFU's website did not indicate that buses were not running until 10:30am this morning. Exams weren't canceled until 10:30am either, so presumably many students were in the midst of trying to make it to campus in dangerous driving conditions when the alert went up on the website. Meanwhile, I have yet to receive a text message from the new emergency system telling me that the roads are closed and classes are canceled...

The Debaters | CBC Radio

I won tickets to tonight's show from The Early Edition...thanks CBC! ♥

The Smell of Fresh Basil

This summer I experimented in growing some plants, including tomatoes, parsley, and dill, with later additions of ginger, basil, and chives. The basil has done especially well, and after a late start I am getting lots of tomatoes too. Some of the tomatoes are not doing too well due to the rain and cold weather we had this summer, but I still have quite a few ripening. The basil smells especially nice.



I think this is an easy project anyone can do at home, and it does save some costs in buying fresh food. Imagine if everyone grew a few plants in their window boxes or balcony/patio. I tend to think we'd all be a bit healthier and doing our part to eat local food. Give it a try next summer!

A Good Deal at Save-on-Foods

I've been taking my cloth grocery bags on my occasional trips to Donald's Market, where they are quite welcome. I've found the cloth bags not only hold way more than the plastic ones (without breaking!), but are also much easier to carry. Today I went to Save-on-Foods and discovered that not only do you get points for bringing cloth bags, but you also get money taken off your bill! Ok, so it's only about $0.01 per bag, but that's still cool. For some reason I never thought that Save-on would be friendly to these bags...it took the cashier ages to pack them, but she did a really good job and it was worth the wait. If this program was more well-known, I'm sure the use of plastic bags would be cut substantially.

2008 International Model Your Campus Competition

If I could somehow fit more hours into the day, I'd be up for this. Unfortunately, no one has invented Hermione's Time Turner yet (although several nice replicas can be found online).

Pity the person who tries to model all of SFU...

Wedding Weekend!

First ceremony down, two receptions and one more ceremony to go! Luckily, the weather has improved, the snow is gone, it actually seems like spring has finally arrived (knock on wood). Let's hope the weather lasts into tomorrow. :)

Is Winter Actually Over?

Ok, so I've been saving this blog post. Why? A while ago I posted about snow in April, which is pretty unusual for Vancouver. Well, any kind of sticking snow is strange in Vancouver, but we'll put that aside for now.

Last Friday it snowed, and I took a picture, all ready to complain but at the same time gleefully declare that the last snow of the year had finally occurred. But I was wrong, because it also snowed this week. So I've decided that we may get snow in July. By the time summer is here, it will be time for winter again!

So here's what it looked like on Saturday morning:


Despite many people telling me that the Sun Run was going to be the Snow Run on Sunday, I did end up running it. If I was any faster than last year, it probably wasn't by much, but it was fun anyway! There was quite a good turnout despite the chilly weather:



Even though I don't think my time improved much, I felt a lot better this year than I did last year. I guess all that hill training up and down SFU helped after all!

This week has been quite busy so far; I have been working at my internship, which means getting up at uncivilized hours, and getting home quite late. Sometimes I love living up here, but I wish it didn't take quite so long to get downtown!

It's back to the lab tomorrow; looking forward to seeing what this week has in store for me (I think). :)

In other news: what is up with Battlestar Galactica?! After watching last week's episode, I have to wonder, why does R. D. Moore have it in for the Chief? He's really one of my most favorite characters. Poor guy. And on that note, I happened to go by HMV on my way home and had to pick up Season 3. Now I *own* them all except for Razor. :D

The First Thing I'll Do Once My Exam is Over...

BSG 4x02 episode promo:


So I have an exam on Saturday, right in the middle of the day. I haven't blogged much because of this and a few other things that have been sucking up all my time. And I can't write about what I'm working on because it's all pretty much confidential. However, after this weekend I should get *a bit* of a break.

Oh, and next week, I plan to attend Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, on the groundbreaking CGI work done for various films such as Star Wars. One of the speakers also worked on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, known for the unforgettable "KHAN!".

When Will Spring Come?

It snowed again last night. There's not a lot, but it's cold, wet, and miserable outside. We've officially passed into spring, but unfortunately the weather hasn't caught up with that fact yet. :(

I Spoke Too Soon

One should never do that when living on a mountain. Apparently, "Winter's Last Hurrah" was one of many. It has snowed twice since I made that post. Don't believe me?



Yes, here at SFU we do get a lot of snow. But being that it's nearly April, this is a little ridiculous.

It Pays to Monitor Your Bank Account

This is for those of you with student bank accounts. You may not be aware that every year you are required to provide the bank with information proving you are still a student. No one will tell you this. No one will remind you that you need to do this. Instead, they will simply switch your account over to whatever will make them a large amount in monthly fees.

It seems to me that it is downright sneaky just to automatically change the account type without consulting the customer, and that banks must lose customers when they exhibit behavior like this. Wouldn't it save them customers in the long run to simply phone or email or send a letter to the customer before changing the account over? Is this too much to ask? The especially annoying thing about the whole affair is that they could easily tell I'm still a student as I'm still paying tuition fees from my account to SFU; it's clearly marked on my bank statements.

Luckily, when I caught them taking exorbitant fees out of my account, I called them on it and got the money back. But I'm sure this does not happen to everyone, and I'm sure a lot of students lose a significant amount to bank fees they shouldn't be charged for in the first place.

Winter's Last Hurrah

Or at least, it's what I hope is winter's last hurrah. I woke up this morning to a nice dusting of new snow, and it's still snowing. On March 3rd. Oh, the joys of living on a mountain.