San Diegan Christmas

For Christmas I went down to San Diego. I was promised warm weather, however it was rather chilly for the most of the time I was down there. But on the last day San Diego turned on its shine :)

St. Nick came and gave me useful presents I thought. Chocolate, memory game, socks, shirts, gift cards... Before that I did slave over the hot stove cooking pierogi :) but thankfully they were already made and I just had to boil and fry them.

As I had been to the Zoo (situated at Balboa Park) before, I went to the San Diego wildlife park this time. It's about forty minutes from San Diego and is nestled in a large valley. It has a big African Savannah part and bigger enclosures for the other animals - so it's pretty cool.

It had a petting zoo enclosure where you could feed and pat deer, antelope and gazelles. Interestingly the smaller antelopes and gazelles definitely had softer fur...

I also revisited Mt Soledad, Cabrillo Point and La Jolla. On Mt Soledad we could see very far. Even seeing the plateau past Tijuana and snow on the mountains to the north west of San Diego.

There were some interesting tidbits - La Jolla had seal pups and seals move funny, I saw a ridiculous car, had a giant meal..

Season's Greetings

How do I cope with the cold again?

After it being so mild and so warm for so long, the cold weather at the moment is a bit of a shock. I have to remember to wear more layers as the temperature of late has been in the low single digit range. Sure, this is not really that cold, however after having the vast majority of the year basking in temperatures above 15C, it's easy to forget the best options for keeping warm...

End of the quarter

As of this week, I have finished my first quarter of study and now have three weeks break before the new quarter starts in the new year. Studying for 10 weeks straight, and going over all the material you would usually find in a semester system was a bit of a change. You definitely felt that material went by quicker, however to compensate this meant that you had to put more effort into study and readings. While not a bad thing, it just could cause a little frustration when there were no examples given in lectures to help reinforce the material...

Merry Christmas :)

Raccoons!

Last night on campus I saw a trio of raccoons scampering around. This was my first sighting of raccoons. They look a bit like large bushy cats.. But the trio of them were wrestling each other and they looked like there were having a good old time...

Google Streetview Car Falls Off Cliff

Click the arrow facing toward you, i.e. as if you want to go backwards. You shall find that you end up at the bottom of a small drop... Hopefully the google streetview car didn't suffer too much damage... :P

View Larger Map

Zeppelin sighted!

There is a company that offers Zeppelin tours of the bay area now. The other day it took a flight over campus and I managed to get some pretty poor snap shots of it, but it did fly right over me...

Big game buzz

So last weekend was a 'big game' here on campus. I went for the free food, but as I was going to get the food, I couldn't help but notice the buzz around campus.

It was a beautifully warm autumn day, about 27 degrees Celsius, and there were lots of people out and about on campus. The stadium which holds 50,000 was sold out apparently, which accounts for the amount of people around campus I guess. What was cool was that the rival team had a whole lot of supporters up to watch the game as well.

Anyway I went for the free food, and stuffed myself with some sausages, and burger patties. The beer on tap from the keg was a great way to wash things down. Unfortunately I couldn't revel in the atmosphere for very long, as I had a test to study for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately I could hear all the roars from the game. So starting off I knew the game had started when I heard fireworks and a set of fighter jets boomed overhead. The roars were very loud for half the game and then they slowly subsided and were overtaken in frequency by the quieter roars, which I attributed to the opposing team. So as I found out, we lost...

Halloween, etc

Yes, well study is keeping me quite busy, but I still managed to find some time to enjoy the American tradition of Halloween.

A design Professor gets his students to carve pumpkins as a graded assignment. He then displays them on his lawn. So the pumpkins photos are of them.

Then there was a big graduate Halloween party, which was pretty fun. It rained slightly, but nothing enough to dampen spirits. My great toga costume was getting it's third run in about as many weeks [there was a toga party and an earlier Halloween party]. I did get a question whether I was Jesus, but after a brief history lesson, their opinion was rightly corrected.There were many crazy characters and costumes, however I did run into a person that was dressed pretty much exactly the same as me...

Yahoo Hack Day

So a couple of weeks ago I participated in the Yahoo sponsored hack day. No it's not a day that we try to hack into other people's computers, it's a day (rather a week in fact) where the objective is to code some web oriented things together. It's called a hack because the code created might not be pretty and you might be joining things together that weren't purposefully created to be with each other...

Anyway Yahoo came out with a web monkey search plugin, so people could make extra stuff to help in certain search queries, i.e. if I search for a term, which corresponds to a term found in wikipedia, there could be a wikipedia plugin that will allow you to see a bigger snippet of the corresponding page, rather than having to click through to see if this was the thing that you were after...

Anyway my idea was to help search for the local bus schedule. So I wrote a plugin called VTA Bus Quick View. It allows you to see the route map, and the links the schedules from within the search results... With this I came second and won an iPod touch :D Sure there wasn't much competition, but hey I'm not complaining...

Just bear with me..

Yea I will try to update this blog when I have some more time. I have some interesting stories to blog. Hopefully I will get round to finishing them before the memory completely fades..

Polish Festival

So Sunday was the Polish Festival in San Jose. I had no other reason to go, apart from going to eat! I had kielbasa, some pierogi, and an assortment of cakes. Too bad I am a poor student, otherwise I would have feasted and bought more stuff to take home.

This festival did seem pretty complete. They had food, arts & crafts, games, Polish Folk dancing, and the Polish-American engineers club. At the latter I found out there is in fact a Polish club on campus and I also signed up to the engineer's mailing list...

Stanford Game

My first american football, a.k.a. grid-iron game was Saturday night. It was Stanford v San Jose State, at Stanford, at their massive stadium (see video).

The game itself was probably more interesting than I thought, probably because it wasn't televised so there wasn't any waiting around for TV commercial breaks. I did get a free supporters t-shirt - yay.


Stanford had a poor first half, but came back strongly in the second to win. The half time show was interesting. I got to see a marching band with some creative license (Stanford's) and a traditional one. Both were interesting, but they did give the insight to what all the marching band business was about, as I actually got to see one doing what it's made to do.

Anyway I think I might return next time to a game of sufficient caliber, like Stanford v UC Berkeley, otherwise I think I might skip a couple of games...

Busy Busy Busy

I have been quite busy this week; orientation activities, meeting people, eating food, buying food, looking at courses, rememebering people's names, sleep, swimming, etc. Basically this has been a pretty fast week!

This weekend is quite heavily booked also. There is some time to relax, however I will most likely be spending that time researching what courses to take next week, as that's when they start. So most likely I will be sitting in on about six courses of which I will choose three. Well this quarter the choices will probably be easy, given that I have to statisfy some breadth requirements, so it would be good to get them out of the way. Hopefully everything will pan out... :)

I have forgotten to take my camera around to the events that have been happening, but I will hopefully remember to take it from now on, so that I can pictorially represent what I've been up to.

Moving onto Campus

So in the weekend I also managed to move onto Campus. Thankfully I don't own any furniture, so it was easy enough to fit all my stuff into two car loads.

This was technically my first time onto campus, which some found hard to believe, even though I have lived relatively closely for the past year and a half. My impressions, are just like everybody else's in that the campus is huge, and is very pleasing on the eye. Well at the moment there is a bit of construction going on, however once that is finished, things will look really nice.

The interesting part of my move, was that the apartment I moved into, was a one bedroom apartment shared by two people. One person sleeps in the living room, the other in the bedroom. Of course I got given the apartment with someone living in it already. The story gets more interesting, as the person already living there was away for the Summer and had subleased it to a friend.

So here I am, unlocking the door and walking in. Gag.. Oh dear, the place stinks - a cross between stale curry and body odour - yuck! The kitchen is a mess, the stove looks untouchable, the blue carpet has lots of white dots all over it (which turn out to be rice...) and yea I'm pretty disgusted. Thankfully the bathroom was in a usable state.

Anyway the guy comes out, is apologetic about the mess and explains he thought I was coming tomorrow... So he goes about cleaning up, which he attempts, but doesn't really do well. I.e. he doesn't use the right setting on the vacuum cleaner so nothing gets sucked up, and he just tidies the kitchen a little bit so it's a bit better, but by no means clean.

So being proactive I went about thoroughly vacuuming so I could at least unpack a little. This took me about an hour of going back and forth with the vacuum. Luckily I didn't really clean anymore as the housing front desk lady called me and apologised and said that they would send someone to clean the place. Thankfully I handed the move-in evaluation form promptly, as otherwise I would have expended all this time and energy cleaning when I didn't have to.

Skydiving II

Well last Sunday we decided to try to go skydiving again. We had the vouchers from our last attempt, and we were a little bit wiser, in that we got there punctually at 9am so that we would be the first to jump.

So we were the first in line to jump - hooray! So we were thinking that we would jump. We even got into the harnesses, had the training, and were waiting for the GO word from the pilot to jump on the plane. The early morning fog did lift, however unfortunately for us, the low cloud persisted throughout the day enough to make the three mile clear sky radius never eventuate, so we were left watching the clouds... :( Oh well, we are just going to have to try for another weekend..

Nvision

So last week I attended the Nvidia driven Nvision graphics conference in downtown San Jose. It was an interesting conference and it definitely has got me thinking whether computer graphics (and related) would be a cool career path...

Anyway I got to see Buzz Aldrin at the premier of an animated movie specifically made for 3D viewing. In case there are people who don't know who Buzz Aldrin is, he was the second man on the moon. The movie was called "Fly me to the moon" and featured some flies that hitched a ride on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The 3Dness was cool, however I did leave the theatre with a headache. The movie itself is for five year olds, so needless to say I was a little bored. However the 3D glasses technology was interesting, as they were like spherically polarised lenses or something...


Some of the other things that I saw were at the exhibit hall. There were many stalls and some of them were by companies that were selling/doing lots of cool stuff. For instance I got to see what the latest developments with facial recognition technology were and play around with them; there were stereoscopic 3D LCDs, ones with glasses, the others without; graphics card manufacturers galore; unreleased games that you could play; etc.

There were also workshops and presentations that I could attend. So I went to one about how NASA is using graphics recognition for unmanned space station docking prototypes; SPORE (it's a game) and how they did some graphics stuff; some sessions on how to do cool stuff with photoshop; and a meet and greet with the guys from myth busters.

The conference I think was cool and well worth the $10 price of admission. Especially since I won a graphics card. It just so happened that the guy doing the photoshop presentations was from New Zealand, and he had free stuff to give away, and one of the questions was whether people were from out of the country. So I got given a graphics card since I was from New Zealand as he thought that was cool... :D

Status Update

Well it's been three weeks since I finished work. I have made some progress in brushing up on C++, otherwise nothing else from the list of todos has been done or started. My progress is a bit disappointing, but I put this down to 1) the Olympics, and 2) biking everywhere. I'm not overly complaining or stressed out as I have enjoyed the Olympics and biking everywhere means that I save money :) But what is surprising to me, is that it's the end of my third week of leisure!

Odd Stuff: at swimming today there was a mouse just going for a casual swim in the pool. Just swimming between the lane ropes, getting some exercise...

So I'm now in my second week of 'Leisure'

This is my second week already? wow, the time really does fly by when you aren't doing much at all... So what have I been up to? Well my dad came to visit, he was on his way home so he was just stopping by for a couple of days. It was nice to catch up with a person from the family :)

Other than that, I have been stuck inside escaping the heat - Thirty+ degrees Celsius... Thankfully the Olympics have been on, and I have been able to watch them late at night, so when I finally get to bed, it's a bearable temperature to sleep.

You could say I haven't exactly been following my initial plan of things to do, however I have another couple of weeks to go, so hopefully I will be able to get through them all and feel productive with the time that I have had off.

Linux World

So today I went to Linux World in San Francisco. I simply went because I had nothing else better to do. Well it just so happened that I decided to install the openSUSE linux distribution and they were having a community day at Linux World. Oh right, it was free too! So yea I learnt more about how to operate and use my openSUSE distro :) It has some nice desktop effects reminiscent of what vista and OS X have...

For the geeks out there, I have openSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.1, and I am quite happy with it. No problems thus far, well I haven't managed to setup up dual display to work properly yet... and I had some trouble with wireless - I would probably say that I hate knetworkmanager it doesn't give you nearly enough information about what it is doing. But I got my wireless working with my Atheros card after finding a decent post on figuring out what steps to take [to find out what's wrong]- which you can find here.

Note: I forgot to take my camera, so the only photo I took was with my phone... hence the lone penguin...

Cisco Aironet 350 and WPA

This is purely a blog post to let anybody who was in the same situation that I was, that no body has successfully managed to get WPA encryption working with the Cisco Aironet 350 with Linux. Wireless works, but the Linux driver only supports WEP encryption, and using the 'ndiswrapper' with the Windows Driver that supports WPA did not lead to any success as something didn't work. So save yourself some trouble and just buy a supported network device for $20-30...

Finito

Yesterday was the last day of my internship. Meh. I guess it will hit me on Monday, as everyone will leave for work... It was a nice internship and what I learnt easily surpassed my expectations of what I wanted to get out of it.

I now have about six weeks to relax... well I don't know how much relaxing I will be able to handle, but to keep myself occupied I have some geeky projects I want to experiment with ;)

They are:
- upskilling on linux
- doing some top coder problems
- brushing up on C and C++ programming languages
- dabbling with a facebook application idea

But yay! Onto the next chapter of life...

Great America ...

... the amusement park was a fun time. I have to say that I think I enjoyed this park better than the Disneyland and California Adventure which was next to it. The rides here were definitely more thrill, which resulted in some nice adrenaline surges :D It was also nice to have half price discounted tickets, all you can eat BBQ and a day when the lines for the rides weren't ridiculous.

My favourite would have to be the drop zone tower thingy. The ride takes you straight up twenty-two storeys and then it drops you for some fun free fall action :D :D

The wooden roller coaster was also interesting, and I can see why people admire the charm of riding one. So in saying that, it had the longest line, and I managed to find someone whose mother didn't teach them to dress properly, tsk, tsk... heh (well I thought he looked ridiculous anyway...)

New Laptop :D

So this week I bought an R61 Thinkpad laptop. It's a bit of a brick, i.e. it's not a skinny laptop, but I'm not going to be taking it around many places, so the size isn't an issue for me. I chose the other specifications so that it is robust enough to last me a couple years. It however comes with Windows Vista. So, impressions so far - everything works and runs fine, but not that I have extensively tested it. One thing I have noticed is that logging into Windows takes a really long time.

I am planning to downgrade to XP, however the Aero interface is a nice change to the XP one. But I guess at this stage I'll stick with Vista a little longer, as the applications I'm thinking of running I don't need to use yet...

Fourth of July

This last weekend
been and gone was a three day long weekend. I took the opportunity to relax a little...

The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, is ritually the day that fireworks are set off. In addition to that, people have barbeques, relax, etc. So the day was spent doing pretty much nothing, as for the evening, we drove up to spend the night in San Francisco. I was invited to a going away/4th of July party, hosted by my fellow kiwi brethren.
The party was fun, as usual, but the fireworks were a bit of a disappointment (not that I care about fireworks anyway). It seems that here in the States, you have to get a permit to light fireworks, thus they are usually left to the big displays in the cities. Unfortunately, the notorious San Francisco fog rolled in, and nothing of the fireworks display was really visible.


The following day was spent strolling around San Francisco. There was some really bizzare modern sculpture near the ferry terminal... Oh, I finally took a photo of the "Full House" houses at Alamo Square :D - the painted ladies as they are known.

Haze

So with the wildfires that are occurring around the Bay Area, the sky for the past couple of days has been very hazy. Well it looks like really bad smog, however it's attributed to the wildfires, and you can see it from ground level right up to the clouds. They were actually putting out a health warning to tell people to avoid staying outside for too long... I will try to get a photo when I remember :)

Bring on the heat...

Wow, these last couple of days have been hot. Nothing but sunshine and dry heat, we're talking mid to high thirties here! This is only the very beginning of a Californian summer, and hopefully it won't get too much warmer, as this heat is only just bearable in my non air conditioned automobile >_< .

Muir Beach and Surrounds

The other weekend, I went up to Muir Beach and the surrounding area in Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Other than taking in the sights and eating some food it was a nice place to watch the sun go down, as you had a view of the whole bay area, as well as up and down the coast. Another cool thing I thought was that you could see the haze/fog coming in off the sea into the Bay.