Wining

I attended a wine tasting event at the Grad House on campus last night with a few of the other CGL students. While the event was intended to be at least partially educational, I mainly went for some cheap wine (not that the wine itself was necessarily cheap, but tickets were only ten dollars - a bargain!) And while I did actually learn a few interesting things, it mostly reinforced my notion that "wine tasting" takes itself far too seriously, in my humble opinion.

For the event, we sampled eight different types of wine - four white and four red. Some salad and bread was served with the white wine and some lamb skewers (tasty, tasty lamb skewers) with the red. We also got some port (which was very sweet - I liked it), accompanied with some brie and crackers.

We were provided some papers with the wine list on it along with some space for taking notes, ostensibly for recording our impressions of the wine, though mine consisted mainly of things like "tastes like wine", "yup, still tastes like wine" and "remarkably, this tastes like wine." My palate is rather underdeveloped (I don't drink wine very often). I used the "notes" section for drawing a few sketches which more or less summed up the evening:

Overall, with nine glasses of wine and some food for ten dollars, the event was quite affordable (putting those grad association fees to work) and fairly enjoyable - I'd certainly go to another similar event in the future. It was more than I usually drink in a two hour time span (and wine seems to have a higher alcohol content than most things I drink), so yay for public transit.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

The Sound of Silence

My graphics card has been dieing a slow and rather noisy death - or, at least, the fan has been. Last night, the way it was acting up, I decided that it's final death was probably imminent and that it should be replaced as soon as possible.

Now, I've been putting off replacing it for a few months or so now because getting a new graphics card necessitates upgrading my PC's power supply as it's a lowly 300W and most new-ish graphics cards seem to require at least 400W. This increases the cost of replacing my ailing graphics card (approximately doubling the cost, depending on power supply/graphics card) and, as a student on a limited budget, I have been hesitant to spend the money to upgrade even though it was fairly obvious that I would have to sooner or later.

However! I recently received word that a funding application my supervisor and I put in over the summer was approved so now I have some confirmed funding for next year, and a decent amount more than what I've been getting to date. Thus, I decided now was the time to go ahead and upgrade. I went out today and bought myself a new graphics card (Radeon 5670, for the curious) and a 700W power supply. And it's so quiet! I can barely hear anything at all! It's so wonderful.

I also noticed, whilst I was buying the new graphics card, that there were some 24" widescreen Samsung LCD monitors on sale ($70 off) so I decided to pick one of those up as well as I've been kind of itching to upgrade my monitor. Yeah, I'm splurging. But it's worth it! The new monitor is so glorious! I'm running at a resolution of 1920x1080 and everything is crisp and smooth. It's freaking fantastic!

That is all,
-Freak Out

Adventures in Proctology (And Other Random Things)

So, I've been meaning to write something about the state of being a student again, but I've been a bit remiss so this could end up long and rambling as a result.

Anyway...

I've been back to school for about a month now and am starting to get settled back into a bit of a routine. With only two courses, it's much more laid back than when I was an undergrad, a bit moreso even than when I was doing my Masters since I had three courses per term (for the first two terms) at the time. Even with marking, it's not bad since marking (so far) is pretty easy, just boring. Eventually I'll have research to do as well, but I'll probably be pretty much done my classes by the time I really get into that full swing, and I expect I'll be taking at most one course at a time after this term anyway (unless I see more than one thing that I really wan't to take).

As to the courses I'm taking, the Networks course is one of the ones that I've often thought, in retrospect, that I'd have liked to have taken when I was in undergrad (a lot of the 4th year courses are also cross-listed as grad courses) compared to a couple of the courses I did end up taking (databases, I'm looking at you) and, so far, that opinion seems to have been confirmed. So, it's nice in a way to be able to actually go back and take the course.

The other course is about colour in computer graphics and is not cross-listed as an undergrad course (though there is an undergrad in the course). So far it's been pretty interesting with lots of stuff about how people perceive colour. Haven't really gotten into the computer graphics bit yet, but I'm sure we will eventually.

As to the TAing, I'm marking for a first year CS course for non-CS majors, so it's easy (as noted above) but dull. The annoying thing is that they use scheme in the course and I'm not really fond of scheme. The first midterm was this past week, so we spent a couple days marking exams (half days for me as I had classes and whatnot). Again, it was rather boring, but we got some free pizza out of the deal, so that's ok.

In regards to the midterm, I had my first experience proctoring an exam as well. It was, well, uneventful which, I suppose is good, since I don't think I'd really have wanted to deal with anybody cheating or fire alarms or anything, but as a result it was rather boring. I mean, two hours of watching people write an exam in not exactly the most riveting thing in the world.

I did, however, find myself thinking that "proctoring" sounds somewhat like "proctology" and wondered whether or not they shared the same root. I rather doubt it, but the thought amused me nontheless.

So, yeah, that's my first month of returning to student life. It's also been a bit interesting reacclimating myself to the unix/linux environment that the school uses since I've been pretty much exclusively in Windows land for the past five years. I'm a bit surprised how much I actually remember, but it does seem to be coming back relatively quickly.

Anyway, that's enough for today.

Freak Out,
-TFitC