Litui.Net

I’ve been really busy the past few months with work, social activities, being ill a couple times, kung fu, and other things.

Just last week I was in Denver for two days for a conference. I absorbed a fair amount of info on the GPS-related technologies we work with and enjoyed the weather (and the pool, and the hottub, and the sauna). My company may be shipping me to Ottawa within the next few weeks as the beginning of an attempt to get me out to all the offices for mainentance, active directory rollouts, and inventory audits. Fun fun. I’m going to try to manage a weekend stay in a couple of locations as well. If I can co-ordinate my stays in Edmonton and Burnaby around AnimeThon and Anime Evolution, I’d be very happy as I’d just have to pay for accommodations.

Work is going pretty well in general. I’ve been a bit late in the mornings lately, which I need to correct soon, but in all I’ve got a good sense that my work is appreciated and the general perception among staff is that I’m doing a good job. The pay could be better, but I’m pretty satisfied otherwise. This is the first job I’ve had that actually feels like I could make a career out of it. It’s a strange feeling.

For kicks, I’ve been going to Nanta (a local Korean karaoke bar) a fair bit lately with various groups of people. I hate that my singing sucks so much compared to how it used to be, but I’m getting my confidence back on the mic and learning how to sing in different genres a bit more. When I sang classical I couldn’t sing anything else really.

About a month or two ago I went to a Korean language meetup at Nanta and met a guy named Jun who’s here studying ESL conversation. I ran into him again on Monday and we decided to do a language exchange. So I’m learning Korean in exchange for using my mad Linguistics skillz to tutor him in pronunciation. He’s already said I’m better than his teacher and we’re meeting again next week. Huzzah.

It’s reading week right now and I see haven’t updated in awhile. Where to begin…

Educationally

My marks are not so extraordinarily high as usual on account of a couple of things. In Japanese, I don’t relate well to my teacher and so many other students have been to Japan already that their conversational skill is WAY beyond mine. I barely understand what they’re saying most of the time and I’m certainly not at a level where I can formulate sentences at the rate they can. I think after this I’m done with Japanese in courses for awhile. I’d like to keep studying it on my own though now that I’ve got 2 years of building blocks.

In Linguistics I’m taking two courses, Language and Power and Phonetics II. The former, while incredibly interesting, is also highly subjective and I have trouble gauging the professor’s expectations. There is a term paper due in that course at the end of the semester. The second course, Phonetics II, is also incredibly interesting and is taking up the majority of my study time so far. I think that paper will go well if I can keep up my motivation to do it. I have a lot of work ahead of me still.

Computer Science, strangely enough, I’m finding to be the most enjoyable of my courses right now. So much so, that I’ve started looking into the requirements if I were to take on a combined degree program (B.Sc. Computer Science and B.A. Linguistics). I would have to do a couple more years of school to meet all the requirements and I’d have to stop with the options (all my options in each degree would be satisfied by courses in the other). However, I think it might help me to stay motivated. For instance, if I get bored/unmotivated in Linguistics, I could take a bunch of Computer Science or Math and ignore Linguistics for awhile, and it would still be worth something to me in the end and vice versa. The only caveat is I have to seek approval of the Associate Dean of the faculty of science for admission to the faculty as I lack high school science prerequisites. My past work experience and GPA might help. I’m not going to officially switch until I’ve finished the current computer science course at any rate.

Occupationally

I’ve got my resume on file at an ESL school here in the city and on Friday I got a phone call stating that I should come meet a student who wanted tutoring. I met her, arranged a schedule (3 hours a week!) and we went our separate ways. The next day, I got an email from her stating that she decided to go with her friend’s tutor instead. So, I’m still without work for the moment. I need to go drop resumes within the next week or so.

Personally

There is damn good stuff going on in my life right now, and I’m incredibly happy. That is all for now.

Shooting

On Wednesday night last week, I went to The Shooting Edge with xenocide and learned how to shoot a CZ-75 pistol with both .22 and 9mm ammo. Wew. I’m apparantly not too bad a shot.

Kung Fu

I went to kung fu on Tuesday and Saturday of this past week. Scott, co-president of Verbatim, jumped at the chance to try out kung fu and is now putting on the pressure for me to attend more =). That’s not a bad thing. I can always use added incentive. He came along both days and appears to be ravenous for knowledge. As for me, my shape is lousy again. My footwork isn’t great, my forms are in need of some work, and my reading as usual is off. Ah well. Nothing I can’t recover from.

School

I have term papers to do in each of my linguistics courses. I have an introductory astronomy course with 400 students in it. Japanese continues as before. This looks like it’ll be a somewhat difficult semester. That said, all my courses look like they’ll be highly interesting and informative.

The Move

I’m enjoying the new place. The people are great, the environment isn’t bad, &c. The only item of recent annoyance is that now, after being told I wouldn’t have to worry about a damage deposit by tozetre, I’ve been asked for one by Sparky. He seems to understand I haven’t the means to pay one being on student loans, and he wants me to keep him posted, but honestly I don’t see myself having the means until summertime when (if) I’m holding down some stable work.

My first mark below an A- since I started this post-secondary thing, and I couldn’t be happier.

Greek 201: B+
Japanese 301: A-

The Greek exam was rough going, and I think it’s only by virtue of the niceness of the prof that I managed to scrape a B+ out of it. Therefore, highly content am I.

That’s all I’ve got so far. I’m still awaiting marks back on my linguistics courses.

I’m all moved into the new place, and just trying to relax a bit now that exams are over. Tonight I have to go to the old place and dump a couple more things.

Today I got a plug-in kettle with an automatic shut-off for my room. Much tea will be had.

My new server, though not yet bearing an IP of its own on the intarweb, is currently functioning as my network fileserver and thanks to its 300gig hard drive, I’m currently ripping my CDs to FLAC, and encoding an mp3 mirror. All my music was previously encoded only in Ogg Vorbis, which is great, but doesn’t play on my PSP and I hate transcoding. I should theoretically still have gobs of space left even after that’s done.

I’ll probably update again when I have all my marks back and after this weekend is done-with. I want to tell you all about the move, but I’m just not feeling a long post at the moment.

I think I did pretty well on my phonetics midterm. I left feeling as though it wasn’t too difficult. I made use of most of the test time (1:15) and struggled with very little. That could be good or bad, but I’m leaning toward good. My Semantics midterm is on Friday and I expect I’ll be able to do respectably in it. I made some stupid mistakes on our last assignment, but I don’t think it’ll be hard to avoid those again.

On account of my lack of will to look at books anymore today, I hung out in the Verbatim office all afternoon and chatted it up with Scott et al. I introduced him to the the following wonders:

• Playstation Portable
• Language Log
• The amazing number of famous Jewish linguists
• The technology behind UTF-8 character encoding (in a nutshell, math modified slightly for ease of comprehension).
• FLoP coordinations.
• Snow Clones.
• Eggcorns