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I arrived in Athens several hours ago. The Swiss flight was really great, but tiresome. The weather is cloudy, with a very comfortable 20 degrees Celcius. The garbage collection strike seems to be over, and what’s dominating the news is Rice’s warm welcome when she visited Athens last tuesday.

I got a chance to take a shower, a nap, have supper and check on my e-mail, but now it seems that I am ready for a good night’s sleep, as it is past midnight here

I haven’t yet set plans for what I am going to do. I haven’t unpacked my suitcases yet. I guess I will see about that tomorrow.

Thought of the day: Dial-up internet is ALWAYS slower than you initially expect it to be.

w00t!

Exams are over!!! At least for me But that’s not so for everybody though, as this year exams are running through the first week of May. So, User Interfaces was quite easy, Software Metrics and Architecture were both kinda toughish. I guess they know that we are good as a group (they keep telling us how we are better than last year’s group, where there were only a handful of good students while the rest were… you know), so they have figured out that they can make finals tougher for us. It kinda dissappoints me though, because I was top of the class in Metrics up to now, but that may be compromized by a “sponge” that memorized everything, while I truly understand the material well and am ready to apply it. In architecture it’s another story. I slacked off quite a bit during the term, so I was counting on that to pick myself up a bit, as I really wanted to get, at the very least, a B, but an A is always preferable. But on the other hand, everybody got screwed just like me, so I guess I’ll call it fair.

I am now done packing my suitcases and will be taking off for the airport soon. I will be blogging from time to time in Greece, and perhaps post a few pictures from there, otherwise I will post them when I come back. Of course, I will be staying in touch, i.e. checking my e-mails, blog comments, etc.

Today Greek Orthodox people will celebrate easter, or “pascha” as we call it. The dates for eastern and western easter are calculated differently, with the result that most of the times eastern christians will celebrate easter a week later than western christians. Sometimes it falls on the same date, and I think sometimes it can occur before. For Greek orthodox people, easter is the most significant holiday, even more so than christmas, as it symbolized the resurection of the christ, a fundamental belief in the religion. Anyway, I am not going to dwelve much deeper into that, as I am not really qualified nor too passionate about religion, but if you are interested, there are plenty of resources out there to read up on.

Unfortunately, pascha (I will call it that from now on, to avoid confusion) ends up smack in the middle of my exam session, and it isn’t a recognized holiday here in Canada to get a few days off for it. As a result of this, I am stuck down here bookworming missing out on all the fun my family is having. If you have seen a Greek easter celebration, you probably know what I mean

Enough crying already. I have to review software metrics tomorrow, because there are a few specific things I have forgotten here and there, not particularly hard stuff, but I feel that I can easily get a good mark in this course, so why now. I am pretty much done reviewing architecture, except for the last miniute memorization part, and I have quickly looked over UI, although it is kind of hard to do because we have not gotten any specific pointers on what to look at, so I went through the basic stuff quickly, but I don’t think the prof. will want to catch us

On the other hand, I am pretty much ready for my trip. The suitcases are 3/4 packed. Just need to pack my laptop, mp3 player, headphones, some more clothes and maple syrup cans they love so much over there, stop by the Jewish bagel shop near park-ex I always forget the name to get some “Montreal” bagels my aunt likes so much, and off to the airport.

Site Updates: I have posted my music list online and Alex’s blog, a fellow student. On there you can find our famous Stuart playing DDR and drinking maple syrup from a cup. Why didn’t you guys invite me? Damn!

Perhaps many of my readers will be surprised, but I have not touched online banking till… now!

Don’t get me wrong. Online banking is a great idea. And, as long as you don’t have any spyware or other nasty stuff running on your computer, it’s safe, as it uses SSL, which has not been broken yet. Obviously that’s not a problem with me, as I don’t find smileys, games, and Bonzi buddies appealing, and I regularly monitor the processes running on my PC, network connections and disk activities. Oh, and I don’t use Internet Explorer.

What has kept me so long from it is Royal Bank charging a monthly fee for that service. How about that service? Is it THEM providing ME a service, or ME providing THEM a service, by keeping their ATMs free? I brought it up to them several times in the past, and they gave me the excuse that running their secure servers costs them money. True, then howcome Google is letting me use their search, and their other stuff for free? They require servers too, no? I really don’t mind going to the bank to pay my bills. It’s like a 5-minutes car ride away, open 24/7, and it gets the job done. Well, given that this account doesn’t pay interest, I get already slapped with a 50 cents sodomy to pay bills, do I need to give them an extra 3$ a month for “maintaining servers”? NO.

So today some guy from Royal Bank calls me at home, and offers it to me for free. I accepted. He asked me a few security questions and then gave me the necessary info I needed to access the site. Great! Well, I guess I could now sit back and enjoy online banking. Rather, I must get the hell back to studying.

It is unanimous that this SOEN 390 project pushed pretty much everybody to their limits. I mean, I spent days in a row in the lab coding the project until lab closing time, so I wasn’t home before midnight. Yesterday was our demo, it went pretty well, apart from a little annoying error message our testing could not reveal. And we DID do quite a bit of testing. Software development is just another situation where Murphy’s law applies!

So I went to bed quite early yesterday, to catch up on some sleep. I woke up this morning to the sound of my parents leaving up north for the weekend, and I found my PC dead frozen. It has happened a couple of times in the past, but generally this pc has a very good uptime (it can stay on without problems for months at a time). I really hope it’s not the new RAM I installed a couple of weeks ago crapping out already. I have had a couple of RAM sticks fail in the past on the slot closest to the CPU, and I suspect the issue is that the motherboard is stupidly designed in a way that the memory slots end up getting all the hot air from the CPU. The other suspect may be my ATI AIW card, which does crash periodically, because it is an ATI after all. Anyway when I have time I’ll run memtest86 to check my RAM.

So I went to the gym this afternoon, something I have not had a chance to do in a long time, again because of 390. I don’t have much time to catch up between now and the time I am going to go to Greece, but I will indeed take it more seriously this summer. I also have to start watching what I eat so I can finally lose that spare tire.

So, I am now waiting for a sign of life of Rokudaime so we can work on our last SOEN 337 assignment, which is due… tonight. Then all that’s left is to study for these finals, ace them and leave for Greece!

EDIT: I am really addicted to this song right now, rather, pretty much the whole album. It’s called Ashtiki Meeno by Nancy Ajram. That’s what my team-mates were listening to over and over in the labs while working on the project!

For those who aren’t yet aware, one of the courses I am taking this semester is SOEN 390, a software development project course. We had to develop a Task Manager (a sort of groupware scheduler that helps the users manager their tasks and to-dos). The platform was Java, Tomcat, Eclipse and all that crap, and it had to be documented using RUP, obviously a documentation bloat when it comes to projects this size.

The deadline has finally struck. After months, and a few hundred hours spent working on it, the project is now resting here and is ready to be demonstrated to a group of profs and TAs tomorrow morning. Even though we did quite a lot of testing, I still have the fear that something might just go wrong somewhere, and I know my architecture prof is just waiting for that special occasion to screw us on the marking. This semester, so I am told, there is no team that did horribly bad, so they are going to nitpick in order to differentiate between As and Bs. Many of my team members want that A, so I hope we will get it.

So here I am sitting on my home PC, waiting for any signs of desperation from my team still working on the presentation, while I had to leave for home otherwise I’d have to struggle to find a cab. There have been none, so I think I am going to go to sleep now. I will blog about the presentation tomorrow, as well as other things that I am too tired to even think about right now…

Update… it just seems that there’s a syncronization error that lets the application crash waiting for a semaphore. damn… I guess we are going to have to live with that.

Update: The semaphore bug was solved, but I posted the fix in my context rather than the group’s…. Semaphores did not come back to haunt us, but I had my laptop ready to restart our tomcat during the demo if need arose.

I have just regsitered for my last academic year of Software Engineering at Concordia. Well kind of, because for a few courses I need permission from the department. So next year will be graduation, iron ring, and the start of my career. This is lots of stuff happening, and is quite a big step in my life. Right now I feel quite overwhelmed by the news, as I have never taken the time to determine when I would be graduating. I have been saying to myself that I’d graduate when… I’ll graduate!

For the record, I have registered for Computer Graphics (COMP471), Artificial Intelligence (COMP 472), my two science courses (GEOL 206 in the fall and 208 in the winter), Software Management Principles (SOEN 384) and Control Systems (SOEN 385). I need to get departmental permission for my capstone project (SOEN 490) and a 1-credit course called Special Technical Report (ENGR 411) to fulfill 0.25 credit requirements of specialized computer science courses. I’ll be looking into that. And I will post my schedule when I get it.

For now I have to get around finishing the task manager over the weekend, to ready it for tuesday. Signing out.

Hourray!

I have found the cure for information overload!!!!

Check it out!