Thursday, November 9, 2006
Got my travel immunizations taken care of. I made sure to get immunized for Cambodia and Laos, as well as Thailand, since I’m still not sure where I’ll be going and I don’t want to limit my options. I am now resistant to Polio, Yellow Fever, Cholera, Diphtheria, Typhoid, Hepatitis A, and Hepatitis B. Malaria will follow. For a healthy person like myself, nothing quite brings home the power of modern medicine like laying down a hundred bucks and getting vaccinated against an array of the last century’s most virulent killers.
For some reason, it makes me think of a video game powerup. Finally, with my Typhoid shield, I can get past the Cambodia level!
The doctor also told me I didn’t need to get treated for rabies, but helpfully suggested that I avoid getting scratched or bitten by any rabid animals in southeast Asia. I was relieved to find out I didn’t need that one — death by rabies is very high up on my list of desirable deaths. It may sound morbid to rate causes of death, but I feel if you don’t make an effort to plan these things, you’ll just end up dying anyway, but from some lame disease like cancer. And let’s face it, “Eric… isn’t he the one that died of rabies?” is actually a pretty great way to be remembered. Plus, Edgar Allen Poe died that way.
light & magic, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.
I saw Ladytron last night at the Fabulous Commodore Ballroom. I ended up going by myself, and while I wouldn’t do that regularly, I kind of enjoyed it — just sitting with a drink and doing some people watching. I don’t know if it’s the loud music, or the alcohol, or something about being in a crowd, but I can really get some serious thinking done. In fact, I made my decision to move to Vancouver at the bar of an industrial club in Toronto in 2001 and decided on my MSc thesis topic at an Amon Tobin show.
Oh, and Ladytron was okay.
Saturday, October 7, 2006
These last few weeks have been pretty stressful, but what’s kept me going is thinking about taking a trip to Asia this winter. And today, as my Vancouver Art Gallery project “soft-launches” and I limit myself to two hats — PhD student and start-up-iste — I bought my ticket.
The plan is to leave Vancouver on December 16, meet up with my friend Janelle in Bangkok, travel around Thailand and Vietnam for a bit, and then stop off for a few days in Osaka on my way back to catch up with fellow Saskatchewan expats Tyler and Carla and possibly Meghan, returning to Vancouver on January 14, at which point, I’ll immediately be throwing myself into completing a paper for ICML, and then trying to complete my PhD proposal (tentatively titled Chawinda Random Things I Have Researched, Hastily Wedged into a Common Framework) not so ridiculously late that people start wondering if I should be be given the boot.
How’s that for a plan? Thought you’d like it.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
On one of the problems with leaving the 9-to-6 corporate world for grad school is that the alternative hours can sometimes be a lot worse. Due to a combination of over-committing myself, underestimating the amount of work I’m taking on, and a confluence of deadlines, I figure that in the seven days between last Saturday and yesterday, I put in 90-100 hours of coding, much of it pretty tedious. This is really not the way I would like to do things.
Still, it’s interesting to observe the kind of state this puts one in, though not entirely pleasant. Mostly, I feel remarkably hollowed out. My actions feel mechanical. My interactions feel scripted and overly efficient. My empathy, enthusiasm and humour have left me. (Though the empathy thing may be a pre-existing condition — touch-feely, I am not.) Not only am I not my usual witticism-dropping self, but one night I tried watching an episode of The Daily Show, but all I could think was “this is boring, I should debug my controller class and go to bed so I can wake up in time to catch the 8:47 bus”.
However, I think I’m finally done the Vancouver Art Gallery ActionScript side project that has become such a time sink, and I will never, ever use ActionScript for client-side computing again. Which means I can spent this weekend going to the film festival and planning my trip to Thailand. So huzzah for me!
Also filed in
|
|