Just as I promised…

The Walleye Whacker, freshly de-tarped and skeletal, ready for the new motor.

It’s been almost 9 months since my internship has worn thin. My mood started as boredom, transitioned to anger, rapidly towards bitterness, then exasperation, and a few months ago slowly settled on apathy, where it currently remains, fermenting. I received a favourable performance review, not because I’m an exceptional worker, but because I do exactly what I’m told, nothing more and nothing less. I’m organized. I challenge the status quo every so often. I can’t help it. I need to. Some of it has to come out, and maybe they respect me for it.

I’m tired of the ridiculous rationale behind departmental decisions. I’m tired of doing things for the “greater good” of the project when the decisions make absolutely no sense. It’s all a game. Here’s $2 million, go play for a year and a half and see what you come up with. There are no hard performance limitations or real concern for the end user. It just has to “look” good and follow company protocol. You’ll be happy to know that the knowledge accumulated will result in a flawed product, a list of tips added to the “Lessons Learned” library, and more jargon to stuff in the corporation’s private research database. Useless knowledge is best kept to one’s self, I suppose.

Being in an apathetic state, however, outwardly I just let it all slide. I mean, four months and it doesn’t matter anyway; the apathy will soon turn to elation as the end draws closer. I tend to be conflict-averse even at the worst of times. Sometimes I’ll get frustrated and drop a comment or two, but it usually goes over everyone’s head unnoticed.

As Matthew Good put it so eloquently: Don’t make nothing. Just go get paid.

Tomorrow marks the 365th day of my internship.

I’d like to take a 90-degree turn and start a fishing lodge, get into the lumber industry, or something like that. Use my CS degree as a conversation piece about accomplishing things just for the sake of testing personal limitations & tenacity, and not as a tool to get the one-up on everyone else.

The new 40HP Suzuki and controls are mounted on the Walleye Whacker. We’ve been waiting on some clips to secure the throttle and shifter cables to the connectors on the motor, but they’ve since arrived. By the end of this week, we’ll be hauling the Whacker down to the Promenade and testing her (boats have lives, stories and souls; and they are feminine) on Lake Ontario. And there’s two weeks until Victoria Day Weekend. Two weeks until the beginning of the end at Lake Nipissing.

The lodge owner had a divorce a couple years ago, and now his previous better half wants to collect. In other words, the lodge where we have spend so many years growing up has been sold. That’s right, this is the last year we’ll be in Cabin #9 on the shores of Lake Nipissing.

I believe I wrote a post last year after our annual Thanksgiving Muskie Hunt about sensing that the tradition was coming to an end. I’m almost glad that this is how it will cease, as opposed to its members no longer showing up, dropping one by one. At least now there is a legitimate excuse, and with it, reasons to not start a tradition somewhere new. It would read like a laundry list: It just wouldn’t be the same, it’s more expensive, it’s unfamiliar, we’ve simply grown wary of doing this kind of thing, etc.

I’ve yet to dig out my tackle box and electronics bag. I’ve a host of new gadgets to play with this year: My relatively new Canon Powershot G10 (whose exquisitely-detailed 14.6MP photos will be displayed on this website, I promise, albeit in reduced resolution since my website host has a cap on that), Garmin eTrex Legend HCx complete with nautical maps of all major water bodies of Ontario, a rockin’ pair of Bolle Anaconda marine polarized sunglasses that sharpens my distance vision better than anything and will be great on the water, my new boat stereo (which won’t get installed until a little later in the season), and of course, my 40HP Suzuki outboard.

Last year I sent my reels in to Aikman’s Rod & Reel Repair in Mississauga for a clean-up and lube job. I also sent in my beloved Fenwick walleye rod that had lost an eye, second-last one to the tip; looking forward to setting the hook on some post-spawn pike using that.

I haven’t made a decision on when I’ll be heading north; I’m thinking that I’ll do a half-day on the Friday, but that depends on who is coming and who can or can’t get time off. I’ve learned to not make any commitments of this sort until the day of, maybe the night before.

I’ve discovered a sweet WordPress app that’ll display pictures in the best, most convenient way possible. Yes, more convenient than navigating an obtuse directory structure with useless file names. Watch out for it in the coming days.

The Toronto Blue Jays are 1-2 when I go down to see them. Last Tuesday’s game was a pitcher’s dual with Shaun Marcum throwing a great game for the Blue Jays. As a spectator watching their team lose a game with a final score of 2 to 1 though, the last thing you want is for the bullpen to walk in the winning run. At least make it worth my while and hit a bases-clearing three-bagger or something, not issue a four-pitch walk.

Yesterday’s game was just as boring. Something like 3 hits for the Jays against the Athletics and that was it. They made it close, scoring a couple in the bottom of the 7th to make it 4-3, but that was as close as they came. What is it with Toronto sports teams, forever getting to within one goal, run, or point, and then always falling short?

You know what that CR stands for? YAAAAAAAYYY!

Finally, the Walleye Whacker is in my driveway. Up till now, it’s been stuck between a shed, a barbwire fence, and two semi trailers in Woodbridge with no obvious sign of it being freed soon. The dashboard (which we plan on resanding and covering with stainless steel) can wait. I only care about getting the new motor and controls home as soon as possible so they can be cleaned up. For now, the winter framework and tarps have to be removed. After that, the Merc controls have to be gutted. If I have time, the fusebox’s terminals need to be decorroded. All this is a lot to accomplish in three weeks. Yes, that’s right. Three weeks until Victoria Day weekend.

I’m looking into grabbing a pair of rollerblades to use every morning before I go to work. My alarm goes off at 5:40am every weekday, and I’m usually in the shower no later than 6:00am. It might take an extra hour to skate around the neighbourhood each morning, but the thought of having the streets all to myself as the sun rises in the cool air while getting some exercise, instead of going straight to work and vegetating in my potbellied chair under the fluorescent lights all day, is appealing.

I am now the official bass player in my brother’s band, so band practice will be a bit of a commitment for the next few months.

Life is full of tradeoffs. Over the course of the past couple years/months, I traded the ability to breathe through my nose almost perfectly, a greatly-improved smile, and most of my free time for a practically-guaranteed credit in multivariable calculus, a chance of needing glasses, and my first tooth cavity. Was it worth it?

First, about the teeth. I’ve always been pretty obsessive about keeping my teeth as clean as humanly possible, but with braces, one can’t always accomplish that. Since I could never get the chore of flossing to take less than 45 minutes with the braces on, I compensated by brushing after every meal. But according to the dentist, I learned that too much of a good thing is bad. I’ve developed some toothbrush abrasion, and the only way to curb the damage done is to use extra-soft toothbrushes and brush both less-often and more carefully. Go figure, eh?

And my first cavity… my heart sank when they told me. It turned out to be very minor, on one of my upper molars. No freezing, no gas. Just a couple different drills, a bit of grinding, some Elmer glue, a touch of buffing, and that’s that. It was much better than the time when my ortho took the diamond-coated carbide to my two front teeth, or the time he unleashed the polisher on every nook and cranny when my braces came off. I have another minor cavity brewing on one of my lower molars.

My retainer is making my upper molars really sensitive. A couple times, I flinched when they took the little metal plaque-picks to where the metal of my retainer rests against the teeth. Very unpleasant.

Next, about the glasses. I was working with a Class-2 red laser (safe as long as you don’t stare into it for a week) and different optical lenses in a dimly-lit hallway at work a couple weeks ago when I noticed that a sign about 20 feet away was blurry. I panicked and went for a walk to look at stuff. More blurriness. I wondered what the hell I had done to my eyesight. Was it the laser? The medication I was on for my sinusitis?

When I got home, I immediately booked an appointment with my optometrist. When I went in to see her the next day, I was saying things like, “My vision was fine two days ago!” and “I’ve always has perfect vision; if I knew I had problems, I would have been here to see you earlier!”. Basically demanding an explanation, she didn’t have much to say after showing me my perfectly-healthy eye photos and other test results, including 20-20 vision. What she did do was write me up a prescription for distance glasses, in the weakest prescription available. I noticed that as I left she was wearing a knowing smile. I didn’t realize why until it dawned on me a couple days later: Matthew is very slowly creeping toward blindness, and has been since the day he was born.

Sometimes, just be grateful for what you’ve got.

The exam for MAT235Y was much more reasonable than the term tests, and it was still adjusted. That bodes well for my final grade. So I’m going to say that I’m safe. Almost two weeks have passed, and I’m still waiting for the UofT administrative staff to stop watching Youtube videos and put my CR or NCR on ROSI.

What happened to April showers? Oh wait, I know the answer to that. All the rain will fall on Victoria Day weekend, as usual.

I’m hoping to haul down the Walleye Whacker and get cracking on that by the end of this week. The dashboard has to come out, the old Mercury controls are coming out, the safety supplies need to be checked and re-stocked, the hull needs to be buffed and cleaned, and most importantly, the new 40-horsepower Suzuki needs a tune-up and de-greasing.

Before the Suzuki can be used regularly, the lower unit water pump needs to be replaced. There’s a lot of grease and gunge on the pivot, and the Suzuki’s motor controls need to be lubed and installed. The guy we bought the motor from threw in some brand-spanking-new shifter cables to replace the worn ones, and the lower end of the motor was repainted by one of its previous owners, so it needs a touch-up as well. We’ll also check the direct oil injection system to ensure that it’s working properly.

There are these things to do.

I also got a sweet marine radio for my birthday with one of those stereo plugs on the front, so I can plug my MP3 player in and listen to music as I rip across open water in the pursuit of adventure.

I can’t wait to go fishing…

Just a quick note to say that I’m fucking done! I’m 99.9% positive that I’ll pass the MAT235Y exam I wrote this morning.

Mmmmm, early bed…

When I’m studying for finals, and I start losing focus over solving question after question, or begin mindlessly flipping through the textbook sections, or constantly make stupid arithmetic errors in my solutions, it’s usually a sign that I’m ready to write the exam. Things ain’t gonna get better. What hurts, and it never fails, is that as soon as I start to get impatient towards the end of the school year, the weather clears, the sun starts to shine outside, and the temperature soars. I am aching… aching… to tow my boat home and start working on it, power-wash my mountain bike and get it ready for the trail, polish up my fishing reels and rods & vacuum out my tackle box in anticipation of another fishing season, pull out all my outdoorsy gadgets (my Canon G10 camera, my new Garmin Legend HCx GPS, etc.) and start playing with them… in other words, get the hell outside and away from the prison of school.

Speaking of, I had a bit of a revelation the other day at work. I said to myself, I said, “SELF! You’re frustrated that you are not 100% satisfied with neither what you are studying nor what type of work you’re doing, so why not deviate from your plan in school a little?” Basically, I just want to graduate and get my life started. I’ve said it a million times, but it’s worth repeating at least once per blog post. So, in an effort to make things less ridiculous on myself in my fourth year, why not drop down from a Software Engineering specialist to a double major in Computer Science and Economic History?

Here’s my thinking behind this, starting with the CS side. I am only a single 300-level half-credit away from completing a Computer Science major (my CSC494H credit doesn’t count toward the program requirements; it’s more of a sweet icing on the cake thing) with pretty decent grades. That in itself is a big accomplishment, because that means, no matter what happens, I’ll get a degree that says “Computer Science” on it. And that’s really all that matters. I dropped CSC336, CSC343, and CSC373 in third year for legitimate reasons, and I really don’t want to take them again, for two reasons: One, I’ve used up almost all of my tenacity, and two, the only course out of those three that I can see myself taking is CSC336, thanks to the preparation that MAT235 has given me in terms of math skills. MATLAB is an important language to be familiar with. I don’t want to take CSC343 because I found it mindless and boring; I hated CSC373 and unless it’s taught by an amazing instructor, I would love nothing more than to avoid it. Leave it to people who like that kind of stuff.

[As a side note, I'm not worried about closing doors to opportunities by making a move like this. I'm worried about leaving doors open to opportunities that I may fall victim to, and then later regretting it, something I've done a couple times already.]

Anyway, let’s switch to the Economic History side. I’ve pretty well decided that I don’t want to end up working a hardcore tech job in a faceless corporation all my life. I’ll be miserable. So, why don’t I distinguish myself by not filling my remaining courseload with technical CS courses? In other words, not pigeon-hole myself? I didn’t realize this until this past week, but I’m actually only three whole courses away from completing a Major in Economic History: I have ECO100Y, MAT137Y and ECO200Y completed already, and all I’ll need is three 300+ level credits to get it. Besides not involving a computer, these courses would let me read some potentially interesting literature, learn some knowledge that may indirectly transfer to a less-intense tech job, and would give me practice writing documentation and papers. It would make me more well-rounded, and if it doesn’t reduce my workload in fourth year, it will at least serve as a break from non-stop CS.

So, let’s do some arithmetic. I have 6.5 credits remaining (well, 7.5 until I pass MAT235, so for the sake of being optimistic, let’s assume I will). Three of those credits will be allotted to the Economic History Major. That’s 6.5 – 3.0 = 3.5 credits. I need 0.5 credits in CS to score my CS Major. That’s 3.5 – 0.5 = 3.0 credits. That leaves me with 3 whole credits to play with. Since I do really enjoy CS and there’s nothing else I can take otherwise that I deem worthwhile at this point, I will pick the most interesting, most stimulating and most enjoyable 6 CS half-courses I can, and use them to round out my degree. 3.0 – 3.0 = DONE SCHOOL FOREVER.

While I’m on the topic of procrastinating studying for MAT235, let’s play with some more numbers. Thanks to a 93% on my last assignment, I am going into the exam (which is weighted 55% of my final grade) with a 72.7%. Let’s not forget that since I’m doing this course credit/no-credit, all I need is a 60% final mark to pass. That means that I need to score a 49.5% on the final exam.

But that’s not the end of the story. The two tests I’ve written have been adjusted on the order of +18% in my favour. For example, my 58% on Term Test 1 got adjusted to a 76%. The third term test, which I missed, was adjusted even more heavily: the raw average was 40%, adjusted to 64%. That is an absolutely insane +24% boost.

Chances are good that the exam will be as difficult, if not moreso, than the third term test, but for the sake of this argument let’s say that the adjustment will lie intermediate to the others, like around +20%. With this reasoning, if I somehow score a 30% on the final exam, thanks to the magic of normalization, it will be adjusted to 50% and I’ll pass. So all I have to do is follow the same strategy I’ve been using: show up Wednesday, solve whatever I can, and then for all the tough questions, modify them so that I solve an easier version of the question, thereby demonstrating that I kind of know what I’m doing. That’s gotta be worth more than 40%, no matter how impossible the exam is to solve.

So in conclusion, I’ve convinced myself that there is absolutely, positively no way on God’s green earth that I can screw up enough to fail this course.

In life, confidence is always more than half of the battle.

I feel normal again! It’s a miracle! I can mostly breathe throughout the night, I’m sleeping again, I don’t ache or feel like shit all over, and I actually want to get off my ass and do stuff now. The only thing wrong with me is that the oral decongestants I’m on are making my heart rate go up enough for me to have become restless enough not to sleep a couple nights ago. So, as long as I don’t keel over from cardiac arrest this weekend, it’s back to work on Monday.

11 days… that’s it! Then I’m done and I can work on my boat motor and play guitar to my heart’s content.

A few more concerts to pencil down for this year: The Eagles, Them Crooked Vultures and Green Day for sure, and I’m still waiting on Them Crooked Vultures and Kings of Leon, though I don’t really care if I see them or not.

I need some more expansion in my upper jaw, so every Saturday I need to crank my retainer a notch and pry my jaw open a half-millimeter at a time for 6 weeks.

Okay, time to hit the Multivariable Calculus books hard. Concentrate, concentrate…

You remember those green horse pills I was telling you about? Well, the nasal specialist I saw today told me to throw them, all $75 worth of them, in the garbage along with everything else my family doctor gave for my nose. To replace it, he gave me more pills and sprays than I’ve ever seen any individual person take for anything. Apparently, the pharmacopoeia that the specialist prescribed will be my immediate salvation. The mix of ingredients in one of the sprays he gave me, he crafted himself, and the spray can only be picked up at the pharmacy in his building. Yea, this guy is serious. He says I’ll feel amazing in two days.

*Checks calendar and writes current time on it*

We’ll see about that.

Who wins at the end of the day?

The pharmaceutical companies, once again. $$$. That university health insurance coverage I pay into every semester will be getting a thorough workout.

In other news, after all the nasal doctor visits ended this afternoon, I immediately went to see my ortho. He had my removable brace for me, but turns out that for all intents and purposes, it’s a retainer. Instead of wearing it only at night, which is what he originally said, I have to wear it all the time, except when I’m eating or brushing my teeth. So, I’m back to my speech impediment days. Except this time, I can take it out whenever I’m speaking a lot or eating! Yay.

One problem set question tonight, and one more tomorrow. Then the full force of the pills will set in, and we’ll see how I feel.

It turns out that gut-rot, nausea and very bad breath are the side effects of the horse pills the doctor has me on. Imagine waking up at 3:00am, congested and gasping for breath, inhaling a load of rancid antibiotic gas… yea, not pretty.

So I’m down to one pill a day as opposed to two, and I’m trying to return to health by walking on a treadmill and cutting back on the amount of remedies I pour or snort into my nose.

I figure I should be back to work mid-week sometime, but I’m not sure when I’ll feel 100% again.

My last 235 problem set is still looming, I need to take a hike downtown some day this week to submit my medical slip for missing my term test, and just when I start feeling a little bit better, it gets cold outside and starts to rain.

I can see the buzzards, I can hear the crows, 16 days to go,
And now I’m swingin’ and here I go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!

For the last two-and-a-half months, I’ve felt pretty bad. Finally, whatever was floating around inside me came out last weekend in the form of yellow snot, sneezing, fatigue, and a ringing head; sinusitis. I’ve missed another complete week at work, and I’m on these huge pale-green horse pills that look like they’d glow in the dark. I’m not sure how they work, but they somehow target respiratory tract infections.

So, I’m lying down for seven straight days, having to deal with listlessness, extreme nasal congestion, and boredom. It didn’t take me long to get sick of daytime television. Instead of staring at the glorious weather outside the front window, I decided that I needed to follow a story. Over the course of four days, I’ve watched the entire first season of House. And before I went to see a doctor yesterday, after seeing 19 separate diagnoses, I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

I used to think devoting yourself to something was what life was all about. Engineering, medical specialists, even law… becoming a professional and making a difference in your chosen profession. That was the leverage one needed to maximize the difference you’d make in the world. But now, none of those paths seem especially noble. They all come as a result of studying your ass off for the better part of 20 years of your life, and the rest is spent keeping up with the latest knowledge and techniques. All of these “professional” professions require an obdurate, non-typical personality. It’s the people in those professions that are different and that do not follow the stereotypes which turn out to be the most valuable in their fields, and it is those people that I admire.

Probably because I am such a poor fit for “professional” life, and I can’t understand how they can tolerate it when I can’t.

Anyway, since I didn’t feel like dragging myself to the shower for the last four days, never mind downtown to write a two-hour test, the 15% weight of that will be added to my final examination. Which means that, assuming a good mark on my last assignment, all I need to do on the final is pass. That’s all I need; a passing grade on that will give me a 60%, and hence the credit.

Hmm… what final exams have I failed in my time at the University of Toronto? I completely failed the exam for MAT223. I also tanked on CSC148, CSC207… and that’s all that comes to mind. What was so special about those courses? They were in my first year, when I was working and doing school, to the excess. The same situation I’m in now. I better be extra careful that I don’t fail the one I have to write in three weeks.