Freedom!

At last, the semester is over! The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of business, due in no part to my procrastination over the rest of the semester... It's always a weird feeling, the first few days after exams are over - what to do?

I guess I'll be spending some time getting ready for my trip to Ottawa. I'm probably leaving on the 7th which means we'll have to have a killer birthday/going away party on Saturday.

Well, I'm pretty free for the next week so if anyone gets bored, give me a call!

Very nice...

Maybe there's a silver lining to my Ottawa trip this summer... Looks like Hawksley Workman is playing at the Blues Festival in July :) Hawksley concert #7, here I come!

***UPDATE: Looks like The White Stripes are going to be there as well! They're also going to be in Saskatoon in July for those of you who are fans.

Also at Blues Fest: BOB DYLAN, Kanye West, Sam Roberts...

Boo to The Man!

I've been parking in the 15 minute visitor parking spots at the UofR on weekends for a long time and never have I got a ticket. Apparently the same was true for the rest of the cars who also had tickets...Grrrr!

Representin

Man, there's a lot of Saskatchewan boys in the NHL playoffs this year...

Colby Armstrong (Pittsburgh)
Derek Boogard (Minnesota)
Curtis Brown (San Jose)
Garnet Exelby (Atlanta)
Jeff Friesen (Calgary)
Ryan Getzlaf (Anaheim) --- Regina boy!
Scott Hartnell (Nashville) -- Regina boy!
Darcy Hordichuck (Nashville)
Chris Kunitz (Anaheim) -- Regina boy!
Patrick Marleau (San Jose)
Kyle McLaren (San Jose)
Travis Moen (Anaheim)
Brenden Morrow (Dallas)
Wade Redden (Ottawa)
Robin Regehr (Calgary)
Cory Sarich (Tampa Bay)
Peter Schaefer (Ottawa)
Nick Schultz (Minnesota)
Michael Sillinger (New York Islanders) -- Regina boy!!
Rhett Warrener (Calgary)
Brendan Witt (New York Islanders)

Did you guys know that Cam Ward was from Saskatoon?

Flushed Away

Unlike the mouse in Flushed Away, I don't think my belt buckle is coming back. What are the odds - just as I pulled the lever to flush the toilet, my belt buckle fell off and was swept away into the shit and piss abyss. So long rusty belt buckle, you always held my pants up with a quiet dignity.

Einstein Biopic?

We're going mainstream! From I Watch Stuff,

Speaking at the press junket for Perfect Stranger, Giovanni Ribisi revealed that he'll be playing Albert Einstein in Liliana Cavani's biopic of the famous physicist. The film will begin at the star of Einstein's relationship with his first wife, Mileva, and end at his death, never reaching the historical point where your idiot roommate insisted on hanging up a poster of the scientist sticking his tongue out, turning off every girl you brought back.

While Einstein is known as perhaps the most important scientist in history, having used facts and theory to further human understanding, Ribisi is famously a Scientologist, using nonsense and science fiction to invent crazy shit. Also, the two have similar hairlines. Overall, good casting.

Who ya got?

The season is over and here are the first round match-ups:

East
(1) Buffalo Sabres vs (8) NY Islanders
(2) New Jersey Devils vs (7) Tampa Bay Lightning
(3) Atlanta Thrashers vs (6) NY Rangers
(4) Ottawa Senators vs (5) Pittsburgh Penguins

West
(1) Detroit Red Wings vs (8) Calgary Flames
(2) Anaheim Ducks vs (7) Minnesota Wild
(3) Vancouver Canucks vs (6) Dallas Stars
(4) Nashville Predators vs (5) San Jose Sharks

My money is on Buffalo but my heart is on Pittsburgh...

The Girl Without a Face

Tonight I watched a show on TLC called "The Girl Without a Face". It was really quite disturbing. It told the story of a girl, Juliana Wetmore, who was born with a disease that causes severe facial development problems. Essentially, from her forehead down the bone structure is non-existant. She's been undergoing countless surgies to allow her to function (e.g. eat, breathe...) normally. The show is really haunting me now and I find that all I can see is her face.

I guess that I should have learned my lesson after watching that last TLC show, The Boy Who's Skin Fell Off...

Going to London?

The trip gets tricky around step 34...

Back to the Capital City

Well, it looks like I'm heading back to Ottawa for a few months this summer... >:-( We're shifting our hardware research from the calorimeter to tracking so that we can join up with the rest of the Canadian Universities. I guess we were the oddballs... Anyhow, the group at Carleton (in Ottawa) has some work that needs to be done with testing their tracking system as well as converting their simulation code from Fortran to C++ and then using it to study the tracking system. Enter Blair... The work that I do there will largely make up my Masters thesis, so I suppose I should do a decent job.

I'll be there for 2-3 months starting in May, likely closer to 3 months. I was really hoping to stay in Regina this summer, just like I was really hoping to stay in Regina last summer...Guess I'll have to sell off a few of my Rider tickets once I get a better idea of my timetable.

Anyone feel like takin a trip to Ottawa this summer? It's gonna get lonely.

Out with the old...

I finally replaced my 3.2 MP camera that I bought in Vancouver nearly 3 years ago. It's always been horrible on batteries and as of late it only turned on when the planets aligned juuust right.

My new baby is the Sony Cyber shot DSC-W50. It's a perfectly capable 6.0 MP with a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 3x optical-zoom lens, giving very crisp photos. It is capable of taking photos at ISO 80, 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1000. My favourite feature, however, is the fact that tests of the camera showed that it was capable of taking 390 pictures on one battery charge. That beats the hell out of my old camera, which sometimes stretched for that 20 picture mark...

Here's a real detailed review of the camera, as well as a bunch of sample pics.

My Jagged Little Humps

Hey Alanis - What ARE you gonna do with all that junk...all that junk inside your trunk?