Born in the 90's: Some Overlooked Ways Internet Changed My Life

Merry Christmas and I hope everyone is having an amazing holiday break! While majority of my friends are done school or have just finished their co-op work terms, my work term doesn't end till the end of the month. So, I'll be back at work tomorrow.

I wanted to write this blog post about how my life would have been different had I been born 10 years earlier. Like I've said in my earlier posts, I've been around with a computer since I was really young with Windows 3.1. By 1995, my family purchased an IBM Windows 95 and we also subscribed to dial up (56k!). Now that I think back, the internet did change my life in a few ways. There are obvious ways that internet changed our world such as lots of material available online, easier to re/connect with people, endless entertainment (youtube, games etc...) and etc...

I then realized that if it wasn't for the internet, my Chinese would have been no where near as good. Why? I immigrated to Canada when I was 5 and didn't know very much about the language. After a few years, I forgotten how to read and write. I was enrolled into a Chinese school in Richmond but I wasn't very interested. I left after a few years because it was very impractical. However, I still really enjoyed watching Chinese television and they were available through cable. By the time I was 11, BitTorrent was available and I was able to download new shows. With these new shows, I was more likely to join forum discussions or read Chinese sites to see what online users talk about these shows. Because I spent more time watching tv (with subtitles) and reading online Chinese forums, my Chinese actually became quite good. On top of that, I learned how to input Chinese through using NJStar with pinyin and learned how to read simplified Chinese (Hong Kong uses traditional characters).

When I was about 13 or 14, I was bored during my spring break and decided to try to learn the guitar. I always loved the song of the guitar. Luckily, guitar wasn't too hard of a instrument. I found out by just pressing some frets and strumming some strings, I could make a tune out of it. But then, I wasn't getting much better. And of course, the internet played another role. There were tutorials online and UltimateGuitar that provided lots of tabs.

I would say that without the internet, you would think I wouldn't have gone very far with Chinese or guitar. Others may argue that I could have just bought tutorial books or pay for a tutor to teach me these skills. It's not necessarily true. When I was in my pre-teen years, I didn't have any allowance money nor would I ever beg my parents for things. Internet on the other hand, was free (to me at least). Everything turned out well because those years in my life were probably the best time to learn a language or instrument. A few years later, I was in high school and was very busy with other stuff going on in my life anyways.

There are probably other overlooked ways that internet changed my life. I don't think anyone can imagine what life would be without internet now. Every morning when I'm commuting to work, I see lots of people poking at their smart phones. As great as the internet can be, I really hope that the newer generations would use it in the good ways. For example, I used to have a friend that would only care about 2 things in his life. One was to go to school where he didn't care about his education at all and was barely passing his courses. The other was to game the rest of the time he had. He was so into gaming that he wouldn't even bother to finish his homework.

8 months have flown by!

I've been meaning to blog for a very long time but due to how busy I am at school and work, I've been experiencing a burnout. I am about to finish my 8 month work term at PDFTron and so I've working lots of hours to try to wrap up on my current project. I was also taking an elective course, EOSC 116 at UBC and wrote my final exam this week. With 9 days left in my work term, I still trying to finish all the features implementation, bug fixing and lots of documentations!

Next term is going to be very interesting. I'm taking CPSC 319 (Software Engineer Project), CPSC 304 (Database) and CPSC 314 (Graphics) and an economics course. It's going to be very project heavy and I expect some rough times when project due dates are bunched up together. However, I'm quite excited to see my friends on a daily basis and getting a chance to apply the knowledge I gained in the work force to academic projects! Having spent 8 months at PDFTron, I am definitely much more confident with my technical skills. I got a chance to expose myself to lots of languages such as PHP, C++, J2EE etc... In the mean time, I am still busy searching for next summer's internship. Who knows where I'm going to end up? I just got another interview opportunity today and I'll talk more about it another day.

I can't believe I have completed the requirements of co-op now that I am able to finish my 4th work term. It wasn't very long ago that I was sitting in one of those co-op workshops learning how to apply to jobs and how to succeed in interviews. I remember looking through all those placepro job ads and I felt so inexperience when I was far below the job requirements. To show my appreciation to the co-op program, here's a guide/ advice for co-ops that are looking for a placement:

1. Work on side projects - Okay, well, I was told that a million times and also didn't really do a side project back when I was looking for a placement. Obviously time is very valuable to a student and can be difficult to find time to work on a project. If you can't find the motivation to do a project, at least be curious and go read and learn stuff on your own time. Projects are amazing to show to your potential employers. That's how you stand out in front of all the other candidates.

2. Be Curious/Have the Passion to Learn - This field is consistently changing. If you're not keeping up, you're falling behind. Go read technical blogs or perhaps some books. Hacker News is a good start.

3. Design a e-portfolio/personal website/blog - Having an online presence is important. Your resume can only hold so much information yourself and your website can be an extension to showcase how amazing you are. Did I ever tell you I got interview opportunities because recruiters found my website?

4. Soft-Skills/Communications Skills

5. Extracurricular Activities - It's good to know that you're human after all! You can potentially show your leadership and organization skills here!

6. Be Confident - Don't worry too much about how you're not good enough. Your accomplishments are not flukes! Don't let Impostor Syndrome take you down!

7. Ask Questions!

What is your brand?

One of my favourite talks at the Grace Hopper Conference was about how to develop your brand. What is a brand? It's what people perceive you.

Unfortunately, I didn't exactly take notes during the talk and so here's what I remember and I'll add a little of my own perspective to it. With how everything is going online these days, one of the ways to develop your brand is your online presence. For example, many techies these days have an online personal website or blog that describes what they do or have done and their interests. Besides the online presence, a lot of your brand has to do with how you interact with people and that's usually in your community, your work place or school.

Many say that the internet is forever. It means anything that is uploaded can stay online for a very long time. One important piece of advice is to never upload anything that is offensive or gives you a bad image. Nowadays, I see that many people use Linkedin as their professional networking place where Facebook (or Tagged, Windows Live, Google+) is for personal online networking site. Because Facebook is intended for personal use, I see that people are more likely to upload more inappropriate pictures or comments than anywhere else. Granted, Facebook has permissions control if you use them properly but many do not recognize that the content is open for public. One important fact is that the user's facebook friends can also include employers, current or future colleagues. This means LinkedIn and Facebook don't have a very obvious boundary between professional and personal usage. As a result, it is important to be sensitive in regards of the content posted on all networking websites.

One of the questions asked during the talk at Grace Hopper was how do you separate your brand from the professional and personal world. The answer is you can't. Whatever comes up with the search of your name on the internet is part of your brand. One of the advice there was to google your name every once in a while to see what content comes up. Also, there are many applications these days that ask for your permission to access certain information from your Facebook account. Be careful with what permission you have given. Who knows what these applications do with your personal information but this is a big separate topic that I may save for another day to blog about.

On a side note, the UBC CS department is holding a competition on e-portfolios. I have entered in this and I look forward to remake my current website! Stay tune!

Short Summary of the Grace Hopper Conference

This is going to be a short summary post because I am exhausted from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference and I wanted to write this post now while I am still fresh.

For those who hasn't been following me, I went to the Grace Hopper conference this past week in Portland, Oregon. Without any funding from UBC, I did a road trip with 3 fellow UBC grad students and shared a room with them to make the cost of the trip lower. We managed to keep the cost to $120 from transportation and hotel which was pretty good but lost 12 hours to driving. Not too bad!

I didn't know what to expect in what to get out of this conference other than I had lots of people tell me that it's great. I think I was a little disappointed at the conference but that was only because some fellow students made the conference as if it's the greatest week of my life. The bar was set a little too high but I actually really enjoyed the overall experience of the conference but not at a specific reason. So, what was so great about it? There were 2908 participants and I have never seen that many technical women before! The networking aspect was great. I got to meet so many people this week and it was amazing getting to hear their stories. I was a little shocked at the fact that only about 1/3 of the participants were only students while much less of those were undergraduate students. I thought it was great to meet people in the industry and hear about their struggles in the workforce.

The food was actually good for the event. Since they provided the food, I ended up more chances to mingle with other people. Also, there were very few UBC students (6?) so it meant I met a lot more people. The career fair was also great. There were a lot of companies there so I got a chance to learn more about their companies and internship programs since I'm actively seeking internships for next summer. Some of the talks were very technical, or practical skills to use or inspiration. I felt that sitting through that many talks was useful since I'm not very good at presenting. A lot of the presenters are actually students so they weren't always excellent but I got to see some amazing speakers. One thing I do have to critique is that while the talks do tell you what the topic is about, they don't necessary say whether they are for beginners or for a more advanced audience. For most of the PhD forum talks, they consist of PhD students talking about their researches but I was not familiar with their research topics at all. And after 5 minutes into their talks, I was clueless about what they were talking about. At the same time, I sat through some presentations where the talk was too simple and I got nothing out of it. Since the conference is so big, I guess it's very hard for them to make it fit for everyone but nonetheless I learned a lot through the many talks.

Some of the talks that I enjoyed were the CRA-W undergrad track, HTML5, technical speaking, how to maintain your confidence, and tips on negotiation. (I'll try to talk more about these talks later) Sheryl Sandberg's talk was inspiring. I wish I have the skills to have as big of a stage presence as she does. One of the best advice that I got this week about how to survive this conference was to take breaks and not attend certain talks if it meant you would get more out of the next talk. This was my first time at GHC and I have to say I was very overwhelmed and exhausted. The days there were like 8am to 8pm. I didn't have enough time to do everything. Luckily, my travel group decided to stay at a place really close to the convention center so I was able to go back to my hotel for a brief break and get away from everyone when I felt tired.

On the last day, I was at the Open Source Day working on the Google Crisis Person Finder. I actually quite like that project because it's written in Python using Django framework and Google App Engine and it's small and simpler than other open source projects that I know. I didn't get as much as I could out of it because I was absolutely exhausted after 3 straight days of the conference and frying my brain for the code sprint was a little too much. Nonetheless, I was able to fix a bug with a fellow googler and submitted it! I hope on this project for more.

Overall, I was very happy with this conference and totally glad I made the trip. The conference was very well planned and every minute was worth my time. I missed the tournament with my UBC ultimate team but I heard they won the Sundodgers tourney this year again! (Yay 3-peat). I hope that I'll be able to go next year to Baltimore for GHC 2012!

Women in Computer Science at UBC

With time flying, I can't believe the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is next week! I am so excited! Now that I'm an upper level undergraduate student, I always wanted to go to at least one conference and I'll be satisfying that personal goal next week! In celebration of the conference, let me talk more aout my experience as a Computer Science at UBC.

On one of my first ever visits at UBC as an official UBC student, someone asked me what was my major and I answered that I was in Computer Science. Her response was "Woah! Crazy science!". That type of response actually followed me throughout the rest of my undergraduate and continues to do so. More often, this type of response is only directed to women in Computer Science. The responses I get are usually people telling me this degree is too hard or it's not meant for women. I never understood that. If the degree is to hard, it would mean there would be very few people in that degree or students would consistently fail. I didn't see either of that. And of course, most people don't even know what this field is about.

I remember being in CPSC 111 and it was really my first exposure to Computer Science. I don't think I was ever intimidated by other students that were more knowledgable in CS or the lack of women in the course. Actually, I think there were actually at least 30% women in that course so it wasn't very obvious that I was a minority. The things that I did notice was that there were some very passionate CS students that knew a lot since they have been programming for a while and I don't think I often see this in other majors. Second, the department of CS is actually very supportive of their students and very willing to help students to make sure they succeed. However, there were always one or two students that knew a lot and would like to ask a lot of irrelevant questions in class to show off their knowledge.

I sometimes feel that women complaining that they're intimidated by other male students can be exaggerated. While there are more male students that are very passionate in CS, there are also many male students that are the typical students that don't do anything outside of school and are 'just getting their degree'. I've also seen quite a few female students that do a lot of work outside of school and in the department. I sometimes feel this intimidation is due to a lack of confidence of not believing that they know the material well. I used to be similar to that but I was curious to learn and I wasn't afraid of being wronged. If I was wrong, it means I get an opportunity to learn more, how great! I also believed that if I was able to show who I am or what I'm capable of, no one can possibly deny me an opportunity due to the fact that I'm a female. This in turn only led me to believe to work harder.

Another reason I could think of why women are intimidated is because women are conditioned in our culture to take a back sit or certain ways. For example, when I was a kid, I was told to play toys in a more polite, non-aggressive, feminine way because I was crashing my toy cars into each other quite hard. Also, I was told that women should not be playing sports because it's too unfeminine and are for boys. These are some scenarios that I saw women being discouraged from certain activities and I'm not surprised to see women less likely to speak up in situations because women were raised (depending on culture) to be polite and 'feminine' (whatever that means).

Anyway, this is really just my two cents. I'm quite curious to hear more at Grace Hopper Conference!

Why Computer Science?

I'll be heading to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Portland, Oregon in a few weeks so I thought I'll talk a bit more about women in Computer Science and my personal experiences. I'm hoping to write a few more blog postings about this so stay tune! I personally find it very interesting to talk to other women (or men at times =) ) about why we chose Computer Science and our unique paths that we took to achieve what we achieved so far. My story is not too amazing but I thought I'll share my experiences here on my blog.

Throughout my childhood, I was one of the very few kids that actually had access to a computer. I find myself very fortunate in the sense that I had a big head start compared to my other peers on using a computer but there were times that I felt being on a computer was a big waste of my time. When I was still in Hong Kong (age 5 and below), my family had a Windows 3.1 computer. I do recall playing Prince of Persia on it but I don't have much more memories. At the same time, I also had a SuperNES and Sega MegaDrive. One of my family games on my Sega was Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and with some cheat codes, I was able to unlock the debug mode where I could randomly add random objects from the game.(Objects? You see, I already was on top of CS when I was a kid!) Back then, I have no idea what the word 'debug' means or what that mode is used for. However, for some random reason, I had this odd question in mind as a kid on how Sonic was able to jump and walk across certain platforms but not on others. How is the console machine or game itself able to determine what is a walk stable platform or not? I never had an idea why until recently and I probably passed off that question as a kid thinking stupid things so I never took a second thought. I think this was the very first time I thought about CS without knowing.

Jump forward to a year to two, when I was in grade 3, I really enjoyed watching and playing Pokemon. With a little help from my sister, I was able to create a Pokemon website. Soon after, when I was in grade 5, I entirely created my own website called "All About Sonic" with Netscape Composer and Dreamweaver and hosted it onto Geocities. I recall being annoyed at the fact that my "All About Sonic" website was not searchable through Yahoo. My first programming book that I tried to read was on Basic but I didn't get anywhere. When I was in Grade 7, I had a teacher that proclaimed herself an IT teacher. One of the class projects was to create our own website. My website was one of the cooler ones because mine played randomized MIDI songs and had animated objects through using Flash (version 5). I can't believe that back then I actually opened the book on how to create Flash and did the projects inside. I was only 11 at that time but unfortunately, I did not keep up with the curiosity to learn. I spent a lot of time playing MMORPG games like Ragnarok Online and other games like GunBound and Bomberman Online. After a year or two, I stopped. I felt like living in this virtual world is meaningless and I do not want to tell my grandchildren that the most amazing moments of my life were unreal.

Not much happened after I graduated from elementary school. Other stuff took over my life and I became a very simple user of a computer. I took IT 11 when I was in Grade 12 but that class was a waste. We used Realbasic but I didn't knew what was a function or parameter. That class was very simple. All I had to do was read the tutorials (which I never did) and copied and pasted code. However, I did learn what variables are and how loops work.

IT class wasn't too bad as it was simple and easy. Since I was able to graduate, I needed to apply to post secondaries. I wasn't sure what to apply for. Since UBC Computer Science allows you to declare your major during the application process, for whatever reason, I decided to do that. After that, I just stuck with it and actually found out I am really enjoying this major. I was one of the few high school students that had a bit of background about Computer Science but I was still very unsure what the field was about. I think this is a major factor to why students do not choose this field even though it can lead to a decent career path. I hope this is something that can be changed in the future.

Online Education!

Since today is Thanksgiving in Canada, I got a much needed day off to do some work! The Stanford online database and artificial intelligence courses are now open and I got a chance today to start working on those courses! Stanford also provides Machine Learning but I don't have the time to do all 3 courses at once so I chose DB and AI. After some minor hiccups with AI, the servers are finally running and I got to watch some of the videos on the materials.

I've got to say, after spending a few hours watching DB and AI videos, these courses are quite well done. The videos aren't too long and they provide good examples and explanations to explain the materials. There seems to be some notes created by the general public too. Overall, I'm quite impressed. I'll see later how I do when the materials get a little harder.

As of right now, I'm also taking another distance ed course, EOSC 116 at UBC. Compared to the 2 Stanford courses, I am quite unimpressed with EOSC 116. Compared to the lecture version and distance ed version of EOSC 116, this online course provides no lecture notes other than a bunch of textbook like pages of material to read. There are a few videos but they are not made specifically for the course like the AI and DB Stanford classes.

My complaint is that this online course does not prepare students for the course at all. For example, I copied and pasted a module's material (to be done in 2 weeks of time) and it ended up being over 100 pages in Microsoft Word. Granted, these did include a lot of pictures so the reading material wasn't quite 100 pages. However, by giving students a bunch of chapters to read in textbook form, we would have to make our own notes in order to study. I think UBC expects students to spend 10 hours outside of a class per course and trust me, with that 100 pages, there's no way I can make notes, study the course, explore the material, ask questions, do practice quiz in 20 hours (aka 2 weeks of time). On top of that, some of the questions that are asked are so low level and pure memorization that are not even useful. An example would be, "Where did this occur?" Instead of asking high level questions such as naming a continent, near equator, a country, the answer was a specific small city in Australia. (I can't remember) I do not need to know this down the road if I would want to pursue a Earth and Ocean degree. The module test was open book I have to say, and hopefully these questions won't be asked in the final exam.

Another complaint I have is that in this online course verus a lecture course, without a professor, it's hard to know what to focus on. Usually in class, a professor might consistently reiterate a specific concept so students would know to pay attention to this or the professor specifically mentions to make note of this. The modules do have objectives but these objectives are very general and broad and so I don't find them useful either.

Somehow, the distance ed course at UBC is 40 dollars more expensive than the lecture class. If it wasn't for that I'm out on co-op right now and I'm not on campus, I won't even take a distance ed course. It is now too late for me to drop this course and so I'm stuck here. I'm definitely discouraged from taking another distance ed course at UBC. However, these Stanford online courses are quite well organized and I hope to have more opportunities to take courses with them in the future! I hear that they were also talking about a Masters online degree earlier.

Updates!

Wow, I've been busy. With school back, I've been working full time at PDFTron, one distance ed course and playing ultimate with UBC. The 2 Stanford online courses are going to start next week so I am only going to get busier. It's too bad that the weather is getting worse and it's getting dark very early. Not too much to update though. Last weekend, I was playing at the Canadian Western University Ultimate Championships (CWUUC) with one of the 2 UBC split squads. The competition wasn't that great but it was fun to play with everyone again! I look forward to playing at Sundodgers.

I found this blog about H1B salaries interesting: http://smokinn.com/blog/2011/09/28/h1b-salaries-in-the-us/ Seems like Microsoft is one of the main companies with employees on H1B. I read somewhere where companies try to save money by hiring foreigners with lower salaries. Also, what are the statistics of people on TN1?

Another thing I've noticed, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be quite a good business tool. Seems like the main solutions are SalesForce, SugarCRM and MS Dynamic CRM. SalesForce presale staff seem to be quite pushy and they're consistently in technical magazines. However, SugarCRM doesn't seem so interested. I'm a little surprised by that as I would assume most customers would stay loyal to the CRM system for years to come due to the fact that it's a lot of work to move from one system to another. These licences aren't exactly cheap either so why would SugarCRM throw customers away that are heading to their direction?

Need a 6PB Machine?

So I was trying to unzip a file that was about 24 GB with the extractor on Windows 7 last week and I came across this surprise. After selecting the folder to be unzipped to, I pressed "next" and expected to wait for 10 mins or so to unzip. However, after a short period of time, it says "There is not enough space". I wasn't paying much attention at this point and actually thought I did not have enough space. By going to my C: drive, I realized something was wrong. The drive has over 200 GB of free space. At this moment, I was confused. How could I possibly not have enough space?! What file am I trying to unzip again? Wait, it says 5.99PB. What's PB again? I know K, KB, MB, GB, and TB. PB? Err... No way.

With a bit of googling, turns out this is a known issue with the Windows Extractor. Apparently with file size above 2GB, it does not work. I downloaded 7Zip and turns out the actual file size is about 40GB. Too bad. I thought I found a zipper that could shrink my files by one million times.

August rolling by...

August is about to blow right by and September is right around the corner. Oh wait, this September is going to be different because I am not heading back to school. I’ll be continuing with my co-op work term at PDFTron for another 4 months before heading back to school in January. The non-exciting news is that the rain is going to come back, weather is going to be cold and transit is going to be packed again! Luckily, Translink did mention that they will be increasing the frequency of Canada Line during peak hours. Not to mention, be aware of the new policies with the UPass. There are 20 UPass Machines available to get your UPass at the UBC Central (aka Bookstore) and so there’s no need to get into massive lineup for it.

I read an article on Hacker News the other day about whether 0^0 is equal to 0 or 1. http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/12/q-what-does-00-zero-raised-to-the-zeroth-power-equal-why-do-mathematicians-and-high-school-teachers-disagree/ It’s very interesting to see all the hot debates in the comments section.

HP Touchpad. $99. After HP decides the slash the prices, there was a high demand to get a touchpad. So, what are the implications to HP selling at such a low price? I personally feel that it would hurt the tablet market now that a lot of people have a tablet and no one would want to buy other non-iPad tablets. I never looked closely to tablets since I was never interested but I was surprised at how expensive tablets were. Most of them were being sold similar to prices of the iPad. Does this potentially mean the market is there as long as the prices are lower?

Too long without an update… :(

Writer’s block? No. As usual, I haven’t blogged in 2 weeks because I’ve been dead busy. Somethings that I have noticed in the last bit:

Want to view a minified JS file but don’t want to waste fixing the formatting yourself? Try http://jsbeautifier.org/. All you have to do is copy and paste your code and it will beautify for you. However, some minifiers (spelling?) change your variable names from “book_name” to like “a” to save memory space and time used for parsing so jsbeautifier would not help you in this case.

Love JavaScript but too lazy to write the code? Try CoffeeScript. It is a little language that compiles into JavaScript and might save you time when you write the code. One down fall that I would see is that I’m not sure if it’s good to debug code that you did not write.

Buying books for the upcoming school year? UBC Bookstore prices are not a good value. Although I understand that the bookstore is a business after all, I find it very sad that they’re trying to make big bucks off the college students. Luckily, there are always alternatives. Discount Bookstore on campus is one choice while there are Amazon and ABE Books. If you’re thinking ordering online, there are international issues that have the same content but different questions (check if this is okay) and make sure to order these books in advance. Shipping might take a while. If all that fails, the UBC library usually has a copy of your textbooks available for reading only (no signing out).

New Ways to Sell?

Lately, I’ve been looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) for the company that I work for and I’ve noticed some techniques that companies use to sell their products. Since there are many CRMs out there, one of my first steps would be to compare CRMs to see which ones are better. While I was trying to compare Salesforce and SugarCRM, I saw this site: http://www.worketc.com/compare

WORKetc is another company that sells their own CRM and noticed how in that table, they were the only CRM to have ‘perfect’ in every categories. Thinking back, isn’t SalesForce and SugarCRM the one and two most popular CRM right now? How can they be so poorly rated and be so popular at the same time? Oh. The comparisons were made by the company, WORKetc that gave themselves perfect and they are using this comparison as their selling point.

While searching for different CRMs, I found it quite difficult to get a more fair and useful comparisons. The example I showed above shows bias but other comparisons often do not show the pros/cons towards the features that I require. On top of all the difficulties I have in choosing, because I entered some of my data to watch a demo on Salesforce.com, I have had their sales people calling and emailing me daily to get my attention. While I appreciate the fact that Salesforce is serious about their customers, I find it annoying by being bugged repeatedly. Also, I find Salesforce’s website hard to understand. It took me a very long time to figure out how their products integrate (say Sales Cloud and Force.com). Force.com’s development page was just as difficult which would make development even harder when it’s so hard to find what you’re looking for. Perhaps of their difficult website, this is why Salesforce’s sales are calling repeatedly telling that I need their guidance.

HTML5!

Since people at work are consistently talking about HTML5, I was pretty curious and I spent some time looking into the stuff. I have to say, I was VERY impressed. I was looking at this site:

http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide1

There’s a lot of very amazing features and all the API is already available. If you go on to slide 19 of that link above, there is a drag and drop where you can upload and download files. It seems like most of the stuff is done through JavaScript. I am definitely going to try to do something in the near future on HTML5. I really want to test out all those amazing features myself. I think I am concern about is that depending on which browser the user is using, the HTML5 feature may not be supported. In the mean time, seems like Chrome has the upper hand on these features but I may be bias. I really hope that this is something to be changed in the future!

Other sites that I saw:

http://diveintohtml5.org/ – Good read if you haven’t read about HTML5 before

http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/html5-whats-new/template/index.html#1 – Some cool features. Note that the slides sliding template is from this: http://code.google.com/p/html5slides/

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/ -

Finally got Google+!

Yay, I finally got Google+. When I first signed in, it was asking me to give up my permissions to my photos? I didn’t read it fully but isn’t this the same reason why Facebook is consistently being criticized? Anyways, since there are not that many users on Google+ right now, I don’t find it very useful right now. Perhaps in the next bit, we will see more users coming from Facebook to Google+ or using both. One thing I really like about Facebook is that almost all of the users use their real name instead of a random username. This makes it so much easier connect with my friends. If Google+ does become the new social media site for the future, I cannot imagine how much we’re going to rely on Google in the future. Right now, it’s being used heavily for web searching, email, youtube etc… This goes back to my previous post, what happens if you lose your Google account? How would that affect you? I still haven’t had a good chance to figure out how to use all of Google+ features yet so I’ll update on my thoughts about it later.

Oh, one thing I do realize that Google+ is better than Facebook is G-Chat. I don’t know what’s going on with FB chat but it doesn’t work half the time.

PS. Does someone need an invite? Message me!

Awesome long weekend!

Not going to discuss about tech stuff this time but it’s always great to update this blog about myself! This past weekend, I took advantage of the long weekend (Happy 144th birthday, Canada) to head down to the US to watch Potlatch (Ultimate tourney) in Redmond, WA. It was nice to be in Redmond again and I really enjoyed the Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue. The best part of the weekend was definitely to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and watch UBC compete at the Big Muckamuck tournament that also happened at Potlatch. For those that are out of the loop, the Big Muckamuck is a tournament that consists of college teams represented by their alumni. I still have at least 2 years of school left so I did not play for UBC this weekend. It was definitely nice to see alumni from the last decade or so play for the team!

I also went to see the Boeing Tour at Everett and I have to say I was a little disappointed. For the steep price of $20, I was expecting a little more. I am pretty interested in aviation but just telling us facts about the 777, 787 etc… aren’t enough. I wish they covered more about previous airplanes and how they got to where they are today. Also, my tour had a lot of people where I found it difficult to find a spot to see the airplanes at times and hearing what the tour guide was saying. Maybe I’m not really that interested in just Boeing airplanes but more interested in the history of airplanes and more in depth information on what makes airplane fly in the sky so smoothly. An interesting fact was that Boeing does not deliver airplanes, companies have to send their own pilots to pick up the new airplanes!

Lastly, anyone got an extra Google+ invite to spare? I would love to check out what it’s really about! Is this going to be the new Facebook that some people are saying or a very optimistic opinion?

Security?

I haven’t posted in a while because I have been dead busy everyday. Things have settled recently so I found myself sometime to blog. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten this blog just yet.

Regarding my blog topic for today on security, I wanted to talk about how secure online accounts. Recently, I have noticed a lot of online websites that use Google accounts as a way to login. We all know Google’s presence in our daily world. Not only is Google being used for simple searches and emails, Google is almost a sensor to what we see in our daily lives through searches. But what happens if one day your Google account gets hacked or for whatever reason, Google accidentally releases your account info by mistake? This recently happened to Dropbox where no DropBox account required a password to login for 4 hours. What happens if this happened to Google? How would losing your Google account impact your life?

There are also many online website that requires membership where you have to provide a username (or email) and password that doesn’t use Google accounts as a way to login. Are those websites trustworthy? How secure are they and can you trust that they won’t use your password to exploit you? I can imagine many people not creating a new password for every single account they make. How often do you recycle a password? In our lives, I think there are way too many account numbers, passwords, emails, telephone numbers, pins to remember. Is this something to consider?

Media bias?

I was reading some technical news on CNN the other day and this article happened to catch my attention.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/technology/rim_playbook/?section=money_latest

This article talks about how RIM gives reporters products to try out and return them after trying them out. Even though CNN at the very end reported the mix up between the reporter and RIM, I don’t expect such a big organization, CNN, to report such a bias article. Because of this delayed response of RIM’s contact of retrieving the playbook, CNN can produce an article to deceive readers that RIM doesn’t want their playbooks. I wonder if the writer behind this article, Mark Stuart, was paid by Apple to give a bad image to RIM or he dislikes the playbook. I haven’t had a good chance to play around with the Playbook but I definitely don’t believe it’s quite as bad as Stuart has described it. With all the competition between companies, are readers going to expect these bias articles bashing products to out compete each other?

I seldom read entertainment news and lately have been reading lots on sports news due to the Canucks cup run. I thought those news were highly exaggerated and taken completely out of context. This leads me to believe to always be careful at reading news regardless where the origin is from.

Happy IPv6 Day!

Woohoo! I got home early and felt like blogging! So yes, you’re getting another blog post from Crystal within 24 hours!

It’s currently World IPv6 Day! Are you ready for this? Currently, only 0.50% ish of the world’s internet traffic is in IPv6. Is it possible that we’re going to have doomsday if the world is not ready for IPv6 or going to have another Millennium scare? I guess we’ll see what’s going to happen in the next bit and hopefully will get results at the end of the World IPv6 Day. We better not run out of IPv6 addresses when there should be 2^128 addresses available now!

Anyways, didn’t have too much to talk about. The Canucks are playing against tomorrow for Game 4. I believe in them that they’ll get it done! Let’s go boys!

Flowerbowl Champion, College nationals, life!

Wow, college season is officially over. I can’t believe the season started in January and it ended last weekend in Boulder, Colorado when my team went there for the USAU college nationals championship. Even though we didn’t get the results we wanted, it was definitely a fun season. There were some bumps along the way but I guess that is what makes the college series so much more unique than any other Ultimate teams I have played on. This was an expensive tournament to attend but I was quite amazed at how well the tournament was organized. The media coverage (daily reports, videos), observers, fields, competition were absolute top notch. I haven’t been to Canadian nationals for a while. I wonder how that tournament will compare to this one.

This past weekend, I was a little sick and needed some time off and so I decided to watch Flowerbowl from the sidelines. This is the first tournament of the season and so teams looked a little rusty at times. Traffic played very well in the final and beat Riot 19-16. It’s definitely going to be different for me to play on a team with such a big roster and not being the top players on the team (as compared with college ultimate). Solstice will be around in 2 weeks and I’m definitely excited to play in that tournament! I also got to see some of my old teammates from TC 2008 on Fusion. It’s nice to see how much they have improved as well!

I can’t believe I am already on the 6th week of my co-op work term. I feel like I have so much more to prove but I am definitely ready to be better and accomplish more as I get more settled into my job. It’s definitely very different working in the real world as compared to small projects in academia. One thing I noticed for sure is that a lot of effort is spent to make sure the code is maintainable. In school projects, as long as the program still works after a month or 2 is all you need. This isn’t true in the real world as projects might be around for a very long time. Anyways, there is so much more for me to learn and I am excited to tackle new challenges!

Few days to Boulder!

It doesn’t feel very long since January was around and college season just started. I still remember how our practices were so cold, running around on frozen fields and twice was playing while it was snowing! Well, for the most part, the weather has been excellent but still likes to rain. Most important of all, my college ultimate team is heading to Boulder, Colorado for the USAU College nationals! I’m so excited! We didn’t qualify in the last 2 years and this is for all the marbles! This season has been very interesting as anyone in the top 12 teams has a really good shot at winning. I recall last year at Club regionals, when my club team Traffic qualified for club nationals, I was really sad that I made it to Club nationals before College. There’s something special about playing in college that is not the same in juniors or club. I’m not sure if it’s because of the age or how we’re all college kids or something. Anyways, I feel that my team has a really good shot as long as we are determined to win.

Canucks win again! This means they are up 3-1 and 1 win away from the Stanley Cup finals! Wow! I recall in 06-07, the first year with Luongo where the Nucks were eliminated by Anaheim, winning a playoff series was so damn hard. It’s been a real treat to watch the Canucks this season as they have almost done everything right this season so far (but not finished yet). They are the President trophy winners and are almost first (if not top 5) in every category. I hope they keep rolling through the playoffs and obviously helps when the other team decides to give us 3 5 on 3′s in a row. Thanks SJ!

I have another story to tell. Yesterday, I went to the NCIX at Aberdeen to look at some desktops and external hard drives. I was some what inspired by my friend, Richard who is looking to build his own computer. So, I was interested in looking at some computer parts that they sell the store. One thing I noticed was that no one at the store was there to help me but their salesman would be interested in helping other male customers despite that I was standing/looking for a long time. Stereotyping is fun eh? I walked out of the store and walked to this other computer store at Aberdeen and the same thing happened. There was a male customer that was obviously not paying attention and randomly browsing and their sales walked right past me to ask if that customer needed help. I wonder if the tech industry would see an increase in females anytime soon.

Busy busy busy!!!

Why is this always a reoccurring theme for me? I've started my new co-op work term at PDFTron which has been pretty awesome so far but I have been very busy! This is much different than what I have been doing in my previous 2 work terms but getting the chance to be pushed around has been rewarding. It's definitely a big change from being a student to working a solid 8 hours everyday. Anyways, I'm starting to really settle down so I hope it'll get easier from here on. Last weekend, my ultimate team was at Burlington, Washington to compete at the Northwest regionals championships in order to qualify for USAU College Championships. My team played pretty well and after 3 hard years, I'm finally going to get my first chance at USAU. So on Memorial weekend, I'll be in Boulder, Colorado to play for the title. I'm pretty stoked to finally have a chance to compete for the title! The bad news with qualifying is that now there's a lot of logistics work... After going to work for 8 hours a day, going to practice and commuting around with no car, I see myself at home spending another 2 hours dealing with email and random logistics work... I'm starting to feel pretty burnout but I feel that at the end of the day, it's going to be worth it!

It's such a new change to see the Canucks still playing at this time of the year. Can you imagine having your team not qualified for playoffs and they've been done since the first week of April? That's a while ago! This year's Canucks team is one special team. I haven't seen a team that has been as solid as this year. I'm so glad there's no more Nashville! Nucks vs Sharks series is definitely much more exciting!

Last but not least, the quick search feature in ReviewBoard that I was working on has been released in 1.6 Beta 2. It's quite an useful feature! I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to look at ReviewBoard... Grr.... Another annoying thing that has happened recently is that UBC is not funding students to go to the Grace Hopper Conference and now I'm trying to find ways to make this affordable... Anyone interested in going?

New site! www.crystalkoo.com

Not much of an entry but I got a domain for my website at www.crystalkoo.com. With the whole new cs.ubc.ca site, I am afraid that I am going to lose my old site so I might as well buy my own domain and host it! Neat eh? Check it out!

Summer!!!

Now that I have completed all my exams, it’s summer time! Well, not quite summer summer but at least summer term is around! This also means, my co-op work term starts next Monday! Ahh! I can’t believe that once again, I am out of school for 8 months. Most of my best friends in CS are all on co-op work terms so I guess this means we’ll have tons of time to meet up this Summer! Fortunately for one of my friends, Bessie, the travel advisory for Japan has been lifted and now she’ll be heading for her work term in Japan in 3 weeks!

So what have I been doing in the last week since exams have been over? I’ve been working on redoing the layout of my website and been reviewing stuff on C++ and PDF. With my website, instead of using tables, I’m working on CSS this time. I’ve never used CSS other than some minor tweaks while I was working on ReviewBoard. It’s not very hard to learn but when you need it to do exactly what you want, it can be difficult sometimes. I ran into some major layout problems when I resize my browser. After spending hours to make things stretch when resizing to an odd dimension, I found a quick fix of making minimum heights and widths so things don’t overlap when the dimensions get small. I’m enjoying this learning process but hopefully I’ll get the new site up soon.

On Easter weekend, I went down to Eugene, Oregon for the Conference Championships ultimate tournament with UBC. It was a long car ride but at the same time, I enjoyed it. We played great in 2 games but I’m looking forward to the team being even better at regionals. It’s somewhat silly to play this tournament since it didn’t make a big difference to the upcoming regionals. I really hope my team will qualify for nationals this year!

I’ve been also watching a lot of hockey lately as well. Of course, I’ll be cheering for the Canucks but hopefully they won’t give me a heart attack every game. Game 7 between the Nucks and Blackhawks was much more than I can take. I’m not so excited about having Nashville as the Canuck’s next opponent. They’re pretty boring in terms of how they usually sit back and wait for mistakes to occur. It’s amazing how much life is brought into the city from hockey. I hope the Canucks keep rolling! I want to wear my Canucks jersey for the next bit.

ReviewBoard recap

Crystal blogging twice in 2 hours? No way! Well… actually this was written 2.5 weeks ago and it was supposed to be posted on to the UCOSP blog. That didn’t happen or it might be posted later, so instead of potentially wasting my effort of writing that blog, let me post it on my blog!

Time has flown by!

I can’t believe there’s only 2 weeks left in this term. Unfortunately,
this also means that it’s almost time to wrap up loose ends for this
term. I have had such a pleasant experience working with the mentors
and interacting with other groupmates that I am feeling a little sad
that this term is about to be over. However, I am hoping to continue
with my task after this term is over. For those wondering, I am a
third year UBC student majoring in Computer Science.

While others have wrote about what they have done for this term, I’ll
talk more about my experience being a UCOSP student. When I first
received an email from UBC Computer Science explaining about the UCOSP
program, I was really excited about all the possibilities. After
sending in a brief application, I got accepted into the program and I
had to choose a project. When I looked through all the projects,
ReviewBoard definitely looked the most appealing to me due to the fact
that I have never really worked with Python and Django looked really
interesting. Before this project, I have only coded in java, C++, C
and C# and have done testing in my co-op work terms. I didn’t know
what to expect out this program but the chance of getting to work on
an open source project and getting credit for school were too good to
pass up.

One of the coolest part of UCOSP is the opportunity to meet up with
your groupmates across the country. I honestly did not know what to
expect at the code sprint in Edmonton. Before the code sprint, I spent
lots of time trying to figure out how ReviewBoard works but I did not
find much success. During the code sprint, the best part was how we
were all working together to solve very simple problems due to the
fact that we were very new to the project. This definitely brought the
group together even though we had very little time together. One of
the funniest fact about the sprint was that all of the our mentors
besides Kevin were unable to come to Edmonton, so we spent lots of on
IRC. While other rooms were busy chatting away, our room was dead
silent while we were talking on the IRC the entire time. While IRC
meetings can not truly replace a face to face conversation, I
definitely had a more positive experience than I believed at first.
Being restricted to IRC for communication has definitely improved my
way to communicate with my fellow groupmates and mentors.

For my project, I am working on a quick search feature that uses the
autocomplete widget. It’s actually pretty simple but it took much
longer than I thought because I was so green. One of my major
struggles at the beginning was not reading good tutorials. I had some
issues trying to find a good Django tutorial when the entire time, the
Django book, was available to me. I definitely struggled when I had no
idea why things would work. The next time when I join in on a complete
new project, I will definitely take some more time to find proper
tutorials to get a solid understanding. Christian was able to give me
very good advice on how to approach this project. After that, I took
some time and organized it into parts to complete. Luckily, I did not
run into too much road blocks that stalled me for long periods of
time. But for the start of each part, it took a lot of time to figure
out how to do approach the code. It was a pretty big hill to climb
each time but I felt the most important thing was to keep trying and
know how to ask smart questions. I definitely felt happy at the end of
every single time I accomplished something! I’m pretty sure I’ll be
able to finish this quick search project. In the mean time, I am
starting a new project on issue tracking. I don’t think I’ll get that
done in time but hopefully I’ll be able to continue on with this
project during Summer while I’m out for another co-op work term.

All in all, I’m very happy with my decision of joining UCOSP and
ReviewBoard. If you are a prospective student reading my entry by any
chance, definitely give it a thought! A huge thanks to my mentors,
Christian, David, Mike and Kevin for being so patient with me and
giving me such good guidance. Also, without UBC faculty Thomas and
Megan and UCOSP committee, I would not have this awesome experience.
Thank you so much everyone!

- Crystal

Uh oh! Haven't posted in a while!

Oops… School and ultimate took over and I realized I haven’t blogged in about 4 weeks! The past 4 weeks have been really hard and I am almost through. Let me somewhat recapped what happened. After coming back from Stanford and my consistent battle of trying to get ahead in school work, I felt pretty tired. Unfortunately (or fortunately), 2 weeks after Stanford, Centex came along which didn’t help. For those that don’t know, Centex is a tournament in Austin, Texas. Austin’s weather was pretty amazing during my time there but that was definitely not the weekend to run away to another tournament. The week before that, I spent every night trying to finish and get ahead in school work and I basically burned myself out. I spent every day stressing out to get things done and often forgetting to eat and working well past my bed time. Sometimes, I found myself working till 3am in the morning without realizing time and I am for sure going to work even harder (as if I don’t work hard enough at organizing) to make my life is in order. One thing I know for sure is that I will never take 5 courses with Ultimate and work again. To save some money, some of my teammates and I chose to fly out of SeaTac airport but I felt that only added more stress and time wasted which didn’t really help me. Battling a shorter roster, my team as a whole played a lot, succeeded at most aspects but most importantly gained very valuable experience as a team.



Being silly at Austin's capitol building!

Upon returning to Vancouver, I was mostly ahead of my school schedule but spending an entire weekend running around and having had the extra stress of travelling really didn’t help me. I had time to do homework and other stuff but I was mentally too tired to do anything. At that point, I had loose ends to wrap up for ReviewBoard and that took up a lot of time. Overall, I still really enjoyed my experience with ReviewBoard but the last week of the term wasn’t so fun. I had some code reviews which took a little too long, a presentation and a screencast to do.

My screencast of the features that I have done.

Reviewboard was fun and I definitely want to spend more time on it. There’s definitely a lot more than can be done!

So after all that, more assignments and projects are done but those are over. I definitely enjoyed CPSC 320 a lot more than I thought. I finished 2 exams so I only have 1 more to do. Not too bad! This term has been a real challenge at balancing everytime and I’m definitely looking forward to a slightly chiller summer. I’ll be off on a co-op work term at PdfTron (so excited!) and I’m looking forward to doing more development work outside of school. I hope I’ll blog again sometime real soon!

California!

Continuing the same old, week 9 is half over. I need to find another feature/task to do for ReviewBoard but my quick search feature is basically done. I'm excited to get it reviewed and have others get to use my feature! Just coming back from San Francisco, I'm exhausted and so sore. My team played so well this weekend and I am extremely excited for the rest of the season. We came 3rd at Stanford Invite after a tough loss against Oregon in semis. Even with the loss, I felt the entire team played really well and I am confident we will be better. It was hard for me going into this tourney. I am consistently in some sort of crisis for time with so much homework to do and I just had to forget about all my stress and play my game. In addition, this is really the first time of being the captain since I was too ill to play at Bellingham Invite. Personally, I felt that I had a strong weekend. Defensively, I could close my buffer a bit more and make sure I don't get my mark broken as well. Offensively, I felt that I could have taken more charge when things weren't going as well. Anyways, I'm very excited for upcoming practices to improve on areas that I felt needed to be improved. The weather in California was gorgeous. It was sunny on Saturday and had moments of rain on Sunday but overall, it's still much better than Vancouver! =D I don't have much to say today as I am very tired and there's too much assignment to do. :(

Getting there...

Week 7 is over! I’m almost there! With only 6 more weeks to go, I’m telling myself that I can do this!

UCOSP has been going quite well. I’m almost done my quick search feature other than the part where if I click on the suggestion, it should be a link to an URL instead of autocompleting my suggestion. One thing that has amazed so far is git. At first, I thought the learning curve to git was quite challenging and I found it quite frustrating at times. I have always been using SVN and making the transition to git and all the branches was hard. On top of that, I didn’t know how to use gitk properly. When I was using git, instead of doing gitk –all, I did just ‘gitk’ which meant I couldn’t visualize the git branches properly. But now that I got the basic ideas of how to use git, I find it quite amazing to keep a lot of files organized if you know what you’re doing. It seems like these distributed repository systems might be the future.

I don’t have much to talk about this week. The weather has been insane and it snowed yesterday. I’m heading to California next weekend for Stanford Invite and I am seriously hoping for some nice California sunshine. In the mean time, I’ll be very busy trying to get ahead in school work. Hopefully, the next time I blog, I’ll give some good news about Stanford!

Back to school?

Wow! School is right around the corner and I’m proud to announce that I’m on pace to get things done before school starts. Luckily, I don’t have school on Monday so I actually have an extra day off! Not too much happened over this break for me though. I’m mostly interested in getting ahead in school work and spending lots of time working on ReviewBoard. In the past couple of days, I think I spent a lot of time banging my head against the desk while trying to write the wrapper javascript function. It actually wasn’t supposed to be that hard but my lack of experience with javascript and json got the best of me. But, I managed to get everything to work! I can now autocomplete when I type things into the search field! It’s just lacking a bit of user friendliness for the time being.

California in 2 weeks! I’m seriously looking forward to some nice sunshine and it better not rain while I’m there. It’s too bad that my team is not at Pres day in San Diego but I heard that it has been raining hard this weekend. Good luck to the UBC Boys that are there!

Canucks are back winning again! I’m surprised with all the injuries they’ve been having. As much as it’s nice to maybe win the conference or President’s trophy, it’s only the Stanley Cup that matters. I hope they can continue this winning streak into the playoffs!

Reading week!

Yay! I made it to reading week! This is usually something I’m not proud of but with what happened 2 weeks ago when I fell extremely ill, I am very happy that I made it through without crashing to rock bottom. That being said, I am by no means behind but I am very excited to have an opportunity to seriously get ahead! FUN!!! It’s somewhat hard to believe that school is going to be over in 7 more weeks. With that, summer is going to come and I’ll be off for 8 months again for another co-op work term! I’m excited this time around! I talked about this 2 posts ago but I’ll be off to PDFTron for 8 months as a software developer. Their job description was appealing to me in terms that they’re looking for passionate students to contribute to their projects and that’s what really caught my attention. I only have so many work terms and I’m willing to work hard to make the most out of them. The interview with them was definitely positive and excited to see what’s ahead!

ReviewBoard. As much as I enjoy getting the challenge, it’s been a love and hate relationship. For every step I make, like what Steve wrote on the ReviewBoard wordpress blog, it’s a massive hill to climb in order to get any success. (As of today, I’m getting owned by an AutoComplete widget). After some researching, lots of banging head to desk moments, and asking questions, things get better and I start to understand what’s happening and how to proceed with the task I’m trying to accomplish. That’s what you reach the peak and really enjoy the process of contributing to the project. After finishing, I hit rock bottom and start all over again. It’s a never ending cycle! Like what my high school math teacher said, “There’s always more”. So true… Git has been something completely new while working on this project. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty neat! It’s definitely something different compared to SVN that I have been consistently using.

I was looking around on Facebook’s career site and I saw that they have puzzles. Maybe when I have some time, I’ll go solve a couple. What caught my eye was the email address that they provided, {oxFACEBooC>>2 in decmial}@fb.com. So cool! Alright. I’m dead tired and I have practice tomorrow morning. I need some zzz!

BUSY!!!

Wow, I’ve been extremely busy! Balancing everything (school, ReviewBoard and Ultimate) has been insanely challenging! I guess balancing everything will be the theme of this term in order to survive. I’m not behind in any of my school work at all but even trying to stay on par has been hard. I feel like I’m doing school work every chance I get. I guess one thing I can do is to even increase my efficiency at doing work. Aiya! I have posted a small post on the ReviewBoard wordpress but then I found out afterwards that that post isn’t very exciting. If I get the time, I’ll make some changes.

ReviewBoard has been a very rewarding experience so far but yet, it’s been very hard too. (My theme of this post is about hard I guess). I’ve never used Python, Django or RESTful API and other stuff. Git has been tough on me as well. I’m always afraid of making a mistake with it but good thing everything seems to be undone. I’m slowly making progress and I’m hoping to push through and get more done soon. I can’t wait till reading week where I’m going to really get ahead in everything. Muahhahahhaa! I don’t have anything planned for reading week other than doing my work! So fun!!!

Ultimate continues to be exciting in it’s own way. This weekend, I went to the gym with fellow teammates to learn some weight training tips from a trainer. I found out that real squads when you’re doing properly is extremely hard… I had trouble of trying to not fall over. Blah, today is not a good day for blogging; I’m too tired. I’ll blog sometime real soon again.

Too many updates! Microsoft Interview, UCOSP, Bellingham Invite

Darn, it’s been about 3 weeks since I have updated this blog. Sorry Too many things have happened in the last couple of weeks and let me try to recap on most of them.

2 weekends ago, I was at Redmond, Washington for my Microsoft interview. So, I flew down to Seattle on Saturday and checked into Marriott Redmond (near Redmond Town Center). Marriott was beautiful and had absolutely excellent service. I checked out Bellevue Town Square and had some cheesecake there! It was really awesome too! The Windows store and Mac store were completely packed. It was ridiculous. It was so picked to the point that I couldn’t even walk in and check out their products. There were so many people that it was even worst than Boxing Day shopping but there were no special sales on! The following day, Sunday, I spent most of my time doing homework and having some last minute prep for the interview. I was very nervous that night and I couldn’t really sleep. I probably had about 4 hours of sleep before the interview. Very bad idea!

The next morning, the big day, I woke up at about 6:30am and I was too excited and nervous to go back to sleep. At about 7:30am, I got a knock to the door and room service for breakfast was here! I only got a hot chocolate and bagel with cream cheese. That was around 8 or 9 dollars, very expensive! After a small mix up with some taxi problem, I headed to Building 111. I signed in at their reception place and headed over to the Microsoft Experience Lounge. Holy smokes, there were a lot of (mostly) college candidates there! There were food, computers, TV, video games for us to play before our interview. It was weird to see candidates playing violent shooting games before an interview though. I got to talk to a couple of them before my recruiter came and talked to me. Turns out, I was interviewing for the Internet Explorer team for the SDET position at Building 50. I didn’t do too well for my first interview and maybe that basically put me as a no-hire. I thought the coding questions for all 3 of my interviews were really easy. My day ended at around 2pm and I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to get hired. Afterwards, I went back to Building 111 and waited to talk to my recruiter again. Afterwards, I stayed around for 2 hours to talk to other college candidates and what/how their interview was about and where did they go to school etc… It was really fun to meet all these people! I met two guys, one from Duke and another from UofMichigan Ann Arbor and went to dinner with them.



Here’s a picture of us 3 at dinner. Anirudh (guy on left) got hired! Congrats to him! Sam (middle guy) will be off to Cisco in sunny California while I’ll be staying in Vancouver for PDFTron! It’ll be a fun and rewarding summer. Too bad that we won’t be working at the same company!

For UCOSP, I’m working ReviewBoard and so I flew out to Edmonton on the Thursday with another UBC student, Kenneth. We stayed at Holiday Inn Express in downtown Edmonton. It was a pretty nice place and excellent that we got our own beds! Unfortunately, I fell extremely ill on Thursday but I decided to go on the trip to Edmonton. Upon getting to Edmonton, I wasn’t getting any better and got much worse on Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, I was too weak and feeling too sick and so I decided to drag myself to the UofA Hospital. It wasn’t too bad. I was there for 4.5 hours and had 2 IVs and I felt much better. Doctor felt that everything was going to be okay and I got discharged. For shutting down my phone for 4.5 hours, upon turning it on, I got extreme number of emails and text to deal with. I’m way too busy! For the rest of the sprint, I spent the time either working on the project with my teammates or I’m in bed sleeping. I didn’t do too much. Luckily, I’ve been to Edmonton before so I didn’t miss out too much. I figured out what to do for my project, adding a Quick Search functionality. After all this, I flew back home on Sunday and got home by 6pm.

I forgot to mention, I did have a co-op interview with PDFTron (downtown Vancouver) on the Wednesday, right before I got super sick. The interview was about 1.25 hrs and went pretty smoothly. I think I’ll actually really like what this position will offer. It seems to be lots on C++, C# and getting a role in software development. I’m very excited to finally have a chance to actually work on some project and be able to contribute to them. This will be a very good challenge for me and I’m excited! So, this will be my 3rd and 4th work term and I’ll only have 1 more after this.

Yesterday (Saturday), I was in Bellingham at Western Washington University for an Ultimate frisbee tourney playing for the UBC Women’s team. Unfortunately, since I’ve been so sick, I couldn’t really play. I was too weak to play so I only managed to play in 1 game. I think I played about 6 points. My team went 3-1 but I think we have lots more potential to be better. I think the deal is that the team needs to continue to work hard at practice and keep up our intensity and focus at all times. I’m excited for upcoming tournaments! On another note, I’ve been voted by my peers as 1 of the 2 team captains for the team. This will be another good challenge for me.

That’s it from for today. I’ll also be doing some blog postings onhttp://reviewboardstudents.wordpress.com/ Take a look when you have a chance!

Update: Random, UCOSP, Microsoft Interview

Wow, first week is already over. Guess what? There are only twelves left in this term! Not too many right? School shouldn’t be that bad as long as I stay discipline I guess. I have a very heavy term but I get a 3 day weekend every week! Awesome eh? On top of that, I have no tutorials this week so I have a 4 day weekend!

I finally know what open source project I’ll be working on this term for UCOSP! I’ll be working on the Review Board project. I think it’s going to be very interesting and challenging at the same time. I’m going to work hard to make the best out of this. I’m very excited to get to know the rest of my teammates and my mentor. I’ll be heading to Edmonton next next weekend! My trip to Microsoft is also finalized. I’ll be heading there next weekend. I’m so excited to just even see what the Microsoft campus is like. Unfortunately, I have no idea which team I am interviewing for. I love to talk more about this after I come from it.

Ultimate season is starting! It was great to get the last month off from sports to just rest up. I have a huge ultimate season upcoming and hopefully I’ll be playing for Traffic again this summer. I was so lucky that it wasn’t raining last night and it was so fun to see all the girls again! I look forward to a big season and hopefully we’ll accomplish lots! Our team has tons of potential and we just need to keep working hard to find success.

Not much to say but I’m sure I’ll have lots of interesting stories to tell in the upcoming busy weeks! Stay tune!