Term Fin.
Its over now its over...let's...go..home.
Well i am home actually. And after an hour or so I've got the stupid wireless networking to work. Jeeesh. I had to disable the WEP encryption to get my laptop to work. Its been giving problems ever since Windows SP2 had to be installed. So now it's like our internet is going commando. Fortunately only old people live around us, so I don't think there's any risk.
Starting April 22nd, our grades will be revealed on our online system. They like to torture students since we'll have to go check our grades only to find that some amount of marks are yet to be posted, and therefore the chance of failing miserably still hangs in the balance!
Now that its summer I can re-energize and get started on all the projects and crazy ideas that I've been thinking of during the school term (when I should have been paying attention to course materials instead).
Here is my to-do list:
ACQUISITIONS
- Buy new cell phone (actually this got done today, so I'm off to a good start)
- Classical guitar (this should be quite enjoyable as well as costly, but its worth it)
- Possibly look at PSP's, IPODs and the like. But I don't think I'll buy either.
- More Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Metallica!! Now that I have my internet back...ill be acquisitizing music. Yes, I like making up words.
PROJECTS
- visualmetaphor.com :
personal space to showcase my artwork, pictures, resume (how does one do that accent thingy on the last e?) , thoughts on metaphors with relation to reality, religion and society, as well as information about all my projects
- Anti-Spam:
Don't know what the status on this one is, but I'm suppose to be developing an spam fighting software with my supervisor from the last work term and eventually merge it with an A.I club at Waterloo.
- Metaphor Engine:
This is my one little diddy that I got the idea from another project that a couple of guys in our class are working on. The original project is about simulating fish evolution/life and hopefully finding some signs of emergence (a very fruity concept it is). My idea is more of a meta-project. Yes, i like the word meta. Essentially, I want to simulate fish evo-life without actually simulating fish evo-life. I think Matlab's Simulink is actually quite close to what I was originally thinking, except i just want to strip it down to a barebones artificial intelligence simulator that has some unique features (which i shall not reveal).
- Utopia Project:
This is just an unoffical title just for that sake of calling it something at the moment. Me and Taneem have come up with an idea for a graphic novel set some time in future, of which I won't mention any details. I'd like to think of it as a cross between a novel and a comic book. This definitely has the most potential to 'do-ability' ratio. I'll be working on some preliminary sketches and possible plot and character development issues over the next couple weeks.
- PAINTING!!
Ahhhh, I started a painting last December...got frustrated cause my idea wasn't working out, so now its just a big dark background cause I mixed up lots of paint..and i haven't been able to work on it since university started. And our pet cockatiel (Tammy).....crapped on the canvas!! Omg..u bird. And she's like "what? it wasn't me. this bird came out of nowhere and just..i was trying to stop it...honest". So there's this bird doodoo dripping down the centre of my painting that I have to scrape off now. Or i can leave it on and have rich stuck up people 50 years from now trying to decipher what "meaning" i was trying to state ("He must have been a frustrated artist, a child of the ghettos")
"There's no difference between art and shit other than the smell". Thats what.
- Photography:
Now that summer is here I'll be more comfortable playing with manual features on my camera without the fear that stuff inside will freeze. For now I've just been doing point-and-click, but I bought it specifically for its manual abilities. Its a Sony DSC-W1 btw.
COURSES
- I will make another post when I finalize which courses I plan on taking. For now here is the rough plan...
- Classical Guitar and possibly also Piano
- A language course (either Mandarin or Italian and I'd also like to continue French from last term)
- 3D modelling with Alias Maya (I've been trying to get into their company, so maybe learning their software would help...i did get one interview last term for a non-tech position tho)
BOOKS
I "plan" to read these books but know that I can't finish all of them, but here are the ones that are on my shelf to-be-read
- Angels and Demons:
I've already read half of this (250pgs or so at the moment) in a...hehe..day. Dan Brown is awesome. His stories are like puzzles that include historical fact about art, symbology, religion all coiled up into hundred year old mysterious cults vying for world domination and such. AND to top it off, he includes particle physics in this novel (I read his Da Vinci Code last term)...so its like he wrote the book just for me.
- Digital Fortress:
Also by Dan Brown. I bought this and the last book after reading DVC about 7 months ago (cause e-shopping is so damn easy)
- Entanglement:
A book about the quantum physics phenomena known as entanglement by Amir D. Aczel. I went my friends to see Anton Zeilinger (from the University of Austria) the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics lecture . He talked about actual experiments they performed to test if two entangled photons could be used to send information over a distance. PI is located at 2 mins walk from our residence, but they held the lecture at some high school cause it seated more people. All their talks "sell out". Quotes are used cause there's no price for admission. But its good to see so much interest in theoretical physics. They have a link where you can view the lectures online!
- Freedom Evolves:
I started reading this over the school term (since i bought it at our UWbook store sale). It has an interesting concept although the writer isn't too good. His position is that materialism and determinism do not nullify the concept of free will. He's obviously an atheist who deals with primarily Christian philosophers who insist that determinism nullifies any free-will a person can have. How he pulls off his argument in this book I don't quite know, but he has brought up good points as to why this world IS deterministic i.e. if you are reading this, then all previous events in the universe would "cause" no other possibility. What happens had to happen, there is no reason if the same set of events happened that a different outcome would occur (you breakdancing spontaneously on the floor) . Yet somehow free will is going to be tied with it.
Dr. Strangelove's Game: A History of Economic genius:
I also started reading this during the term (..studying is for the weak..). This is an awesome book for people interested in how our current economic system started (the first dot-com like bubble-burst was due to........................TULIPS). It also talks about Game Theory. Dr. Strangelove is also the same character emulated in the classic movie with the same name appended with How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Apparently he is based on a real life person.
- Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid:
This book is by Douglas Hofstadter, I read a 150 pages of this during the last work term...its so intellectually intensive that it takes a while to read (it totals to about 700 or so). What is it about? I'll talk about it in another post. It won the Pulitzer prize a while back in 1980. Its quite well known amongst Cognitive Science fans (maybe that word is not appropriate..but ..heck I am a cogsci fan!!).
- Other books: A collection of poems by Rumi that I started during the school term and didn't get back to, a book by Dr. Deepak Chopra on How to Know God (something I need help with)
Now i'll obviously not get thru all of these but i do have a 2 hour commute to work.
OTHER
- Yes mom, I will also clean our house up and study for next term
Well i am home actually. And after an hour or so I've got the stupid wireless networking to work. Jeeesh. I had to disable the WEP encryption to get my laptop to work. Its been giving problems ever since Windows SP2 had to be installed. So now it's like our internet is going commando. Fortunately only old people live around us, so I don't think there's any risk.
Starting April 22nd, our grades will be revealed on our online system. They like to torture students since we'll have to go check our grades only to find that some amount of marks are yet to be posted, and therefore the chance of failing miserably still hangs in the balance!
Now that its summer I can re-energize and get started on all the projects and crazy ideas that I've been thinking of during the school term (when I should have been paying attention to course materials instead).
Here is my to-do list:
ACQUISITIONS
- Buy new cell phone (actually this got done today, so I'm off to a good start)
- Classical guitar (this should be quite enjoyable as well as costly, but its worth it)
- Possibly look at PSP's, IPODs and the like. But I don't think I'll buy either.
- More Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Metallica!! Now that I have my internet back...ill be acquisitizing music. Yes, I like making up words.
PROJECTS
- visualmetaphor.com :
personal space to showcase my artwork, pictures, resume (how does one do that accent thingy on the last e?) , thoughts on metaphors with relation to reality, religion and society, as well as information about all my projects
- Anti-Spam:
Don't know what the status on this one is, but I'm suppose to be developing an spam fighting software with my supervisor from the last work term and eventually merge it with an A.I club at Waterloo.
- Metaphor Engine:
This is my one little diddy that I got the idea from another project that a couple of guys in our class are working on. The original project is about simulating fish evolution/life and hopefully finding some signs of emergence (a very fruity concept it is). My idea is more of a meta-project. Yes, i like the word meta. Essentially, I want to simulate fish evo-life without actually simulating fish evo-life. I think Matlab's Simulink is actually quite close to what I was originally thinking, except i just want to strip it down to a barebones artificial intelligence simulator that has some unique features (which i shall not reveal).
- Utopia Project:
This is just an unoffical title just for that sake of calling it something at the moment. Me and Taneem have come up with an idea for a graphic novel set some time in future, of which I won't mention any details. I'd like to think of it as a cross between a novel and a comic book. This definitely has the most potential to 'do-ability' ratio. I'll be working on some preliminary sketches and possible plot and character development issues over the next couple weeks.
- PAINTING!!
Ahhhh, I started a painting last December...got frustrated cause my idea wasn't working out, so now its just a big dark background cause I mixed up lots of paint..and i haven't been able to work on it since university started. And our pet cockatiel (Tammy).....crapped on the canvas!! Omg..u bird. And she's like "what? it wasn't me. this bird came out of nowhere and just..i was trying to stop it...honest". So there's this bird doodoo dripping down the centre of my painting that I have to scrape off now. Or i can leave it on and have rich stuck up people 50 years from now trying to decipher what "meaning" i was trying to state ("He must have been a frustrated artist, a child of the ghettos")
"There's no difference between art and shit other than the smell". Thats what.
- Photography:
Now that summer is here I'll be more comfortable playing with manual features on my camera without the fear that stuff inside will freeze. For now I've just been doing point-and-click, but I bought it specifically for its manual abilities. Its a Sony DSC-W1 btw.
COURSES
- I will make another post when I finalize which courses I plan on taking. For now here is the rough plan...
- Classical Guitar and possibly also Piano
- A language course (either Mandarin or Italian and I'd also like to continue French from last term)
- 3D modelling with Alias Maya (I've been trying to get into their company, so maybe learning their software would help...i did get one interview last term for a non-tech position tho)
BOOKS
I "plan" to read these books but know that I can't finish all of them, but here are the ones that are on my shelf to-be-read
- Angels and Demons:
I've already read half of this (250pgs or so at the moment) in a...hehe..day. Dan Brown is awesome. His stories are like puzzles that include historical fact about art, symbology, religion all coiled up into hundred year old mysterious cults vying for world domination and such. AND to top it off, he includes particle physics in this novel (I read his Da Vinci Code last term)...so its like he wrote the book just for me.
- Digital Fortress:
Also by Dan Brown. I bought this and the last book after reading DVC about 7 months ago (cause e-shopping is so damn easy)
- Entanglement:
A book about the quantum physics phenomena known as entanglement by Amir D. Aczel. I went my friends to see Anton Zeilinger (from the University of Austria) the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics lecture . He talked about actual experiments they performed to test if two entangled photons could be used to send information over a distance. PI is located at 2 mins walk from our residence, but they held the lecture at some high school cause it seated more people. All their talks "sell out". Quotes are used cause there's no price for admission. But its good to see so much interest in theoretical physics. They have a link where you can view the lectures online!
- Freedom Evolves:
I started reading this over the school term (since i bought it at our UWbook store sale). It has an interesting concept although the writer isn't too good. His position is that materialism and determinism do not nullify the concept of free will. He's obviously an atheist who deals with primarily Christian philosophers who insist that determinism nullifies any free-will a person can have. How he pulls off his argument in this book I don't quite know, but he has brought up good points as to why this world IS deterministic i.e. if you are reading this, then all previous events in the universe would "cause" no other possibility. What happens had to happen, there is no reason if the same set of events happened that a different outcome would occur (you breakdancing spontaneously on the floor) . Yet somehow free will is going to be tied with it.
Dr. Strangelove's Game: A History of Economic genius:
I also started reading this during the term (..studying is for the weak..). This is an awesome book for people interested in how our current economic system started (the first dot-com like bubble-burst was due to........................TULIPS). It also talks about Game Theory. Dr. Strangelove is also the same character emulated in the classic movie with the same name appended with How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Apparently he is based on a real life person.
- Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid:
This book is by Douglas Hofstadter, I read a 150 pages of this during the last work term...its so intellectually intensive that it takes a while to read (it totals to about 700 or so). What is it about? I'll talk about it in another post. It won the Pulitzer prize a while back in 1980. Its quite well known amongst Cognitive Science fans (maybe that word is not appropriate..but ..heck I am a cogsci fan!!).
- Other books: A collection of poems by Rumi that I started during the school term and didn't get back to, a book by Dr. Deepak Chopra on How to Know God (something I need help with)
Now i'll obviously not get thru all of these but i do have a 2 hour commute to work.
OTHER
- Yes mom, I will also clean our house up and study for next term
posted by fahd | 10:10 PM
7 Comments:
Thats my boy!!!!!!!
That was long!
And those are some plans you have. All the best for them. You seem quite a fan of multitaksing (alongwith CogSci, particle physics, classical guitars, painting, photography, and God knows what else). And since I am such a kuyain' ka maindak, so I can't really say anything about them.
A little word about Dan Brown's novels though. I read the DVC; the wealth of knowledge there was precious. Then I read Angels and Demons; liked it more than the DVC, but in the end I was so bored of all that Church thing that I skipped some parts of it at the end about the greatness and importance of the church. And then I read Digital Fortress, which is my most favourite among the three (although it's quite predictable). The reason might be that there's no church there. And by the way, if you could figure it out, then do tell me why Dan Brown's novels start with a murder.
And looks like your pet successfully resolved the difference between art and shit! ;)
And oh, you can put the accent thing like this: é :) Take help from Windows Character Map (Accessories > System Tools).
Ah, my hypothetical life is way more interesting than real life. I actually wanted to type it all out since I attended this seminar where the CEO's advice was to write out your goals for the next 5-10 years. I thought I'd just plan the first 4 months and then take it from there.
I finished A/D last nite; it definately has a more interesting theme than DVC. The whole clash between religion and science (secularism). I really like what Vittoria says about religious organizations being afraid that humans will find a Higher Power OUTSIDE of their walled structures (be it church or mosque) by pursuing different avenues of reaching a greater understanding of our reality. The book makes you think about the perspective from both sides. How science has no ethical guidelines and humankind is morally on an immature stage then our technological progress.
I knew the Windows Character Map thing, but thats just so much work. I should be able to just make two or three clicks and have that fancy e. Or I can copy paste the one u did : é . hehehe..brilliant.
Vittoria's saying is a truth, which has existed form the very beginning of human race. Whether they are the leaders of ancient Makkah, or the mullahs of our present times, or the cardinals of modern church, in the end it's all the matter of one's own chaudharahat, which one is not willing to let go.
VL: I plan to not sleep. Ahaha. Ok thats a lie. I love sleeping. I don't know how I will do things, but planning (more like dreaming) is the first step. I know that some things won't get started or completed so I have to learn to prioritize. Or just do things that interest me more. But I have so many interests :(
Saadat: chaudharahat? My urdu ain't that good.
Chaudharahat from chaudhary. Monopoly.
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