British Student .ca

Yesterday I woke up early (10:30am) and decided to try video blogging by showing you just how close I live to Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

There were more road blocks around the venue than I thought and was to lazy to see if I could cycle down them. So I went Downtown briefly and on the busy (underground) Sky Train I made conversation with some other Vancouverites about the various routes that all get reffered to as Sky Train, even though most of my usual line (The Canada Line which opened one week before I arrived) is underground. After they left I realised I didn’t think about the simple way to date how old each line is. The Expo Line: 1986 when the World Expo was in Vancouver (Sky Train built 1985?). The Millennium Line, built in time to start the second millennium(actually late by 2 years). The Canada Line, well that must be the year Canada won the Winter Olympics in Vancouver? The Wikipedia Sky Train article has lots more interesting information.

Overall Vancouver transit (public transport) impresses me, it’s good to see it finally being used as much as it can handle, and still Vancouver staff and passengers are over friendly and polite. The busy stations and packed buses remind me of a normal day in London, so I really wonder how it will cope with hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Midterm exams and classes are over for two weeks (I have my midterms after the break), we no longer talk about marks but medals! On Thursday the Olympic flame made it’s way across the UBC campus, which was covered in police and campus security.

I went out on my bicycle so if boredom struck I could just cycle on somewhere else. I don’t see what’s so exciting about the torch, with all the crowds most of us could just see a flame as it went past the Forestry and Computer Science buildings. Yet everyone ran to try and catch up with it, how many of them even knew who was holding it? I casually cycled on, using some roads parallel to Main Mall to get ahead of it.

The Old Bus Loop demolition/construction/turfing finished just last week and formed a centre for celebrations. Some student clubs lined the pedestrianised street and to the side a stage was set up with some bands playing. I saw the torch go down the car park before the bus loop and then tried to cross the crowd. I knew I wouldn’t see it at all down the bus loop, but I caught glimpse of 4 cycling police officers and wondered where they were heading. They went the other side of The Knoll (a grassy construction heap that had expected to have protesters on) and around the SUB. There are lots of steps around here, but I know some cunning little step-free gaps and paths that clearly the police didn’t know. Turns out they were only getting to the traffic lights to see the torch leave the campus. I missed the UBC Torch Flash Mob but I’m not really bothered, it had so much organising and choreographing while pigging backing on another event, it was more ambush marketing than flash mobbing.

Last night (Friday) was the opening ceremony and torch cauldron lighting. I didn’t really think ahead for this and so didn’t arrange with anyone to go anywhere. I kind of suck at getting people together and going out anyway, I should be part of a group of people that can do that. So I ended up watching it in the floor lounge on TV with a few other people. I sat with my laptop to be able to research teams on Wikipedia despite the network port not working and a weak wifi signal. I wanted to watch the BBC coverage but their iPlayer stream of BBC2 wasn’t working.

After seeing most of the ceremony I actually missed Great Britain walk round the stadium. This was soon forgotten when we saw the mess up of part of the indoor cauldron not lifting up, so one of the 4 sport stars didn’t get to light it with their flame.

Later in the night, about 1am, the fire alarm in the building went off. Those that weren’t out partying, or staying in bed, went next door to the Commons Block. In the TV room they were watching a repeat of the ceremony, and I got to see Great Britain this time.

Forget classes, the Winter Olympics are coming to town and we have a two week reading break because of it. Actually the break doesn’t start until the weekend and will include an assignment deadline, but lately I’ve not been caring about listening to the lectures (which I still go to). Moving on…

Some events will be at the UBC Thunderbird Arena, that’s literally 2 small blocks directly down the road from me. But I’d like to brave the congested transport and get off campus to see if I can afford anything. There are a load of free music events, top of my list is Dan Mangan who I have loved ever since he played to us UBC Internationals on one of my first ever days in Canada. He’s amazing, the show is on the 19th, for all ages (let’s go floor mates), but is in ‘dangerous Surrey’ which I have yet to venture out to. Let’s go, cause robots need love too!

Apparently most(all?) countries have their own ‘house’ where supporters of their team can drink and eat together, watch their medal winning, and the team/press/sponsors can have meetings. I’d like to go visit a load to check them out. Most of all I’ve heard that Switzerland House is already open and getting wild on Granville Island (art gallery island near down town). This is set in an existing restaurant/bar that looks a bit pricey for me, maybe I’ll just hang outside with people on the veranda. They also have a house in Whistler for fun at the bottom of the slopes.

Secondly I’ve heard the sponsor of Holland Heineken House makes it a fun place to be with cheap drinks and a big warehouse full of bars and large projector screens. This should be a cool house to go to, especially when any game is taking place. I’ll need to round up people with IDs if I’m not to go to this one on my own. Sadly their website fails, I click the UK/English button (which doesn’t change the jjjj to yyyy for year, and from there the Dutch button is a broken link), enter my date of birth, and get a black screen. Thankfully “Tinkerblue” gives me an exciting cgi video of the Holland Heineken House and opening details in simple, standard, text.

After some research I found out that there is even a Canada House. In Whistler which takes too much, time, money, and probably an Olympic ticket/pass to get there (the highway there is heavily patrolled by police & security). But where oh where is the Great Britain House? If anybody knows of one existing and the details then please let me know. If any other countries have a house (and perhaps want to buy the first drink for a poor BritishStudent.ca) then let me know!

Photo pinched from Richmond O Zone.

On Friday I got the e-mail stating I was taking a year out while paying for tuition. I spent the weekend vaguely depressed (the food here continues to do that to me) and sent a response on Sunday evening in time for it to reach Durham by the morning. A few hours later I wake up and I have a new e-mail that starts my day of well this time.

“Firstly apologies for my short email earlier which has clearly caused upset and uncertainty. It was certainly not my intention to do this and I don’t want you to think you are abandoned in Canada.” blah blah blah “I reassure you that a degree programme called Computer Science (International Studies) is in the process of being created retrospectively and as such you will be awarded this degree on completion of your final year. Please don’t be de-motivated any further by what has happened and be assured the University is taking steps to investigate further what has gone wrong.”

So it seems that the previous message “Therefore no new programmes will created i.e. International studies.” is no longer the case. I am doing a degree right now, and I am in Canada, which will soon gain independence from Europe. I don’t know that this means anything for future Computer Science students, but even so I’ll be able to field any questions general students might have about studying abroad or UBC/Canada (fire away in the comments if you want).

The department staff back home are now interested in talking about stuff when I get back. I guess I better type up those blog posts I’ve mentally been writing for a while, so I have some notes to refer to when I see them. In other news it seems to be a week and a half where every class is giving out assignments and exams, I could get a respectable grade if I avoid collapsing under the overload.

I’m putting together my initial thoughts on my classes this semester, ordered by the timetable. It’s strange here that everyone refers to class by the code, e.g. “are you in econ 102?” rather than “are you taking micro econ?“.

This semester I’ve also seen a lot of photos of timetables added to facebook. The idea is you tag you tag your friends as the classes, or they add the tag of them, and then everyone knows who’s in the class so they can walk there or do homeworks together. I good idea you may think, unless your an exchange student living in accommodation of first years, so I have no friends in my classes.

CPSC 313 – Computer Hardware and Operating Systems
This is more about the operating system than the hardware, and writing programs that know a lot about how it works. I’m not really sure how this class is going to go, perhaps I will after I’ve had the first tutorial next week.

GEOB 270 – Geographic Information Science(aka -Systems, or -Software)
My one class not in computer science, and something that I have an interest in as a hobby. The first lecture he asked lots of ‘raise your hand’ questions and I was the only person who did so for “if you’ve used GIS before”. I was looking for any chance to mention OpenStreetMap(what wikipedia is to librarians, this is to geographers) or Neogeography(a term for what us OpenStreetMap volunteers do, possibly deogatary), but there wasn’t a great oppportunity. It will be fun learning to use ArcGIS (the software of paleogeographers).

CPSC 304 – Introduction to Relational Databases
Yay, I know two people(Louise and Lance) in this class from my HCI lab last year. The professor shouts everything because she wants to make it so exciting, this gives me a headache. It’s the only class I need an iClicker for ($43.20/£26.12 remote control that each student buys to vote on polls in class) and she loves putting up polls in the lectures. I’ve done lots of database stuff before so I think it’s good to get a full class about them ticked off, but hopefully I won’t lose interest due to half doing a lot of the stuff already. Plus I have to forget UML and Crow’s Foot notation and learn a notation similar to that of Bachman (it’s a UK-US difference apparently), pity anyone who understands what I just said.

CPSC 301 – Computing in the Life Sciences
How to deal with lots of big data of scientific results or use computers to help with fly swarm studies. The lecture side tracked a lot on the grounds of biology and DNA. The first tutorial/lab we got to play with Scratch, a programming tool that can be used by any age. Then we each said our names and course program, I was surround by every subject but compsci. I was registered on a 3rd year course teaching programming for those that have no idea, this would be easier than a walk in the park for me. Unfortunatly (thankfully really) the professor was there and caught on to me at the same time as I realised. I’ve de/un-registered from it, but it’s a good course if you want a science credit and think programming is about 0s and 1s. I’ve already recommended it to someone.

CPSC 422 – Intelligent Systems
This is the class I found to replace 301. It’s an advanced Artificial Intelligence course and the description includes the word ‘applications’ so it might be more interesting than binary search trees of AI. It’s the first level 4 (generally 4th year) course I’m taking but I think they should have encouraged me to take some at the start. It has no timetabled labs so my Thursdays are down to just an hour and a half.

In the Totem Park residence on UBC each of the 6 houses has it’s own colour. Yesterday (Saturday) we had the first colour war of the year. This means we all dress up in our house colour and play some games against the other houses for a couple of hours, with a lot of chanting in that time. Then I went to Homecoming of the UBC Thunderbirds. More chanting took place, but in a stadium with bam bams.

21 photos