Some examples to illustrate:

• Before my final year of high school, I had never even heard of Engineering, let alone considered entering that faculty.
• When I started University, I never expected or planned to ever be a member of the student council. If you would’ve told me that four years later, I would be Senior Stick, I would’ve laughed at you.
• At the start of my year as Senior Stick, I never expected that I would be speaking and rallying on the steps of the Legislature.

If I keep this up, I might just have an interesting life — but I won’t see it coming. Ah serendipity.

Want to run an “adult entertainment club” with music for your “entertainers” to dance to? There’s a SOCAN tariff just for you. How about the music you hear when you’re placed on hold in a telephone system? You bet there’s a tariff. Even muzak has an applicable tariff, by the square foot no less. It’s a good thing elevators aren’t that big.

And you wonder why they say piracy is rampant.

Having been a bad blogger as of late, I trawled through my iPhoto collection looking for an interesting photo for the ol’ blog. The perfect thing to do on the eve of an Engineering Economics midterm.

And here you are dear reader: September 30, 2005 — Ryan, me, Scott, Jane and Daryl sitting behind our interlocking brick handiwork, seconds before an unfriendly PCL guy came and told us to remove it. A shame really… they should’ve worked our design into the finished sidewalk.

I had to speak, and while I don’t think my speech was all that amazing, I found a good quote for it, an excerpt of which is given below:

George Bernard Shaw once wrote:
“Some see things, and they say ‘Why?’
But others dream things that never were, and they say ‘Why not?’”

As you continue on in life, and especially as Engineers, never forget to say “Why not?”

I never cease to enjoy the Dean’s Benediction.

• First off, I’ve been elected as the new Senior Stick of Engineering. I’m excited, but right now it adds another level of complexity to an already busy life.
• I also have a job for the summer doing research under an NSERC Student Research Award with Gabe Thomas (he has a beard now and is generally much less serious that than picture would have you believe). I’ll be doing medical image processing of one kind or another, which I’m looking forward to.
• Thesis idea: real-time, hardware implementation of an encryption algorithm in an inline device for IDE/ATA hard disks. Sounds like fun with FPGAs, discrete math, and key management. Now for a thesis advisor, and partners.
• Doug Buchanan’s Digital Systems Implementation (DSI) is rocking my socks. It’s amazing that we have high-speed desktop computers at all, given how complicated and error-prone the IC manufacturing process is. And yet we keep asking for more from those poor IC designers, who must curse Moore’s Law every day they arrive at work.
  Corollary: I think I’ve discovered my two loves in Engineering: signal/image processing and VLSI.

• Speaking of Dr. Buchanan, I’ve created a top five list of my all-time favorite ECE profs. Here they are, in no particular order:
  - Doug Buchanan
  - Gabriel Thomas
  - Dean McNeill
  - Witold Kinsner
  - Joe LoVetri

  Not to be outdone, Trim is in a separate class of favorite non-ECE professors. He’s right up there with H. M. Soliman.

• Engineering Grad is next Saturday, and I need to write a speech. What would you like to hear me talk about?
• Finally, SEP2 sucks. That’s what I’m supposed to be studying for right now, but I can’t bring myself to look at the Visitor pattern or other such BS. I hope I don’t have to study comics that somehow represent design patterns. Sigh. This course needs to be put out of it’s misery. Come on, CEAB.

Come one and all to UMES’ upcoming social, The Big One: Urban Sprawl, on Saturday night (Jan. 28).

We’re turning the WAG into an urban wonderland, complete with a good and bad side of the tracks. Feeling upscale? Stay on the good side of the tracks with the Posh Café and full service bar. Want to go slumming? Then wander over to the rough side of the tracks…

Tickets are only $10, and you can pick them up from us (UMES), amongst other places. Check out bigone.ca for all the details.

// END SHAMELESS PROMOTION

In other exciting news, the U of C recovered SuperCow tonight after a four month-long Ontario junket following le PM. Suffice it to say, they’re glad to have her back.

Ah, Congress.

More thoughts will follow soon, but the random thought of the moment is that Manitoba’s public smoking ban has been sorely missed on this trip…

ETA: It turns out that after being such a “nice roommate”, I forgot my key card in the room. Luckily, a hotel employee happened by not too long after (before I tried knocking hard) and allowed me back in.