skrud.net » ccss

ECA Molson Banquet 2006

Skrud — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:24:09 +0000

This year’s Molson Banquet was a huge amount of fun. I ate three servings of roast beef and drank plenty. Guillaume won the award for most outstanding contribution to student life for the CS/SOEN department, and Stuart won the award for most involved graduate student. Dr. Constantinos Constantinides won the faculty-member award, and explained aspect-oriented programming to me without using a logger as an example. I can’t wait to take his course in the fall (Mmmm programming paradigms…).

A huge thanks to Bridget for being my smokin’ hot arm candy for the evening, and to Leilani and Mel for helping shop for a suit, shirt and tie. (But I picked out the shirt all by myself!)

I can’t wait for the pictures to be posted. :)

CCSS Exec Dinner 2005

Skrud — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:40:01 +0000

It’s finally official! I’m the president of the Concordia Computer Science Society for the next year! We had our dinner at OM, a Tibetan restaurant on St-Laurent Blvd. Since we were over 15 people, we had a fixed menu that consisted of the following:

Churu Soup. (Blue Cheese & Lamb)
3 Tashi Delek Momo. (Beef, Veggie & Lamb Momos)
Shap-ta (Beef sauté with red & green peppers)
Beef & Veggie Momos
Butter Chicken
Lamb Curry
Veggie Curry
Aloo Gobi (Potatoes & Cauliflower)
Chana Masala (Chickpeas and stuff)
U-Shang Bag-leb Bread, Chapati Bread & Steamed Rice
Dessert (Chocolate Cake) & Coffee

We each got our own soups, 3-Tashi Delek Momos and desserts. The rest of the dishes were brought out (about three plates of each) for the whole table. The food was (once again) amazing. I think OM is my new favourite restaurant. I’ll go back there time and time again!

I think most people had a good time tonight. Congratulations to all the new execs. I’m sure we’ll find something to keep the ancient old fogies busy with something. :D

Linux Fairy

Skrud — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:37:44 +0000

I’m the Linux Fairy, happily prancing about with penguin wings, tossing free Ubuntu Linux CDs to all in my wake!

I ordered some 200 Install CDs from Ubuntu (they’re free!) after giving away all the CDs that Nadia ordered long ago. They finally arrived today. Only instead of going to ECA (which is where I ship parcels addresses to CCSS), they were delivered to the Department of Computer Science. So I got this weird e-mail from Dr. Lam (the chair) saying that there was a parcel of 200 Linux CDs with my name on it in the CSE Department Office.

Now, when you receive 200 CDs from Ubuntu, it comes in a big ass box:

(I made a little mess in the CCSS Office… sorry folks!)

So now we are 200 Ubuntu CDs richer. Well, 150 x86 CDs, 25 PPC and 25 AMD64 CDs. Mike suggested putting them in Frosh bags. I think that’s an awesome idea, that way every Froshie will get a nice, fresh copy of Linux as soon as they come to Concordia. Excellent way to set them on the right foot.

There was a ~$10 delivery charge that Canada Post tacked on, likely due to the fact that the box was pretty damned big. The department happily footed the bill, which was awfully nice of them! So a huge thanks to the CSE department from me!

The Coolest Nerd

Skrud — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 08:09:27 +0000

We cleaned up at the Molson Banquet tonight! There was a huge skrud.net representation, so thanks to everyone for showing up! The beer was yummy, the food was great (although rareer than usual) and everybody was (for lack of a better word:) awesome. I walked away with the Faculty-Wide “Engineering and Computer Science Council on Student Life” award “For Outstanding Contribution to Student Life in Our Faculty”. Wow. I’ll take this blogging opportunity to thank everyone who was involved in ECA and CCSS this year for making it a phenomenal year. I’ve had a lot of fun, and I think I was a little too active this year. So maybe I should cut back a bit. I also want to acknowledge the four department winners of the ECSCL awards: CCSS’s own Ahmed Kamel for CSE, Phillip Gauthier for MIE, Franklin Dagba from ECE and Cherisse Vanloo from BCE. These are all incredibly hard working and dedicated students and it’s been great working and partying with them all year. :)

But that’s not all! For the second year in a row, the CCSS won the ECA’s Society of the Year award. This year they switched it up to include a Gold, Silver and Bronze Society award, and we got the Gold. And we’re going for the hat-trick, too. Because next year, I hope to be the CCSS president. :) A huge shout out to CASI and EWB who received Silver and Bronze. I have to admit that I was somewhat suprised when CSIE didn’t win the award… I’m sure we were neck and neck for that one! Well, they were great competitors!

And to top it all off, I was awarded the Joke Award for “The Coolest Nerd”. You know what? That’s even more awesome than the other two. :P I’m glad people have noticed my computer geekery, and I’m proud to be a geek! They said “This guy makes it cool to be a computer nerd”. That’s awesome. And now for a long list of names of people who I think have made outstanding contributions to the ECA and the betterment of Concordia, and have always been around to help me out when I needed it… (please excuse me for misspelling your names, and tell me if I forgot anyone!)

CCSS Execs: Nadia Chaouch, Ahmed Kamel, Neil Conlan and Tahir Kahn; ECA Execs: George Papadakis, Peter Maroulis, Elena Petrova, Kirk Papagianakis, Ahmad Sadr Ghayeni, Jon Covey, Dean Sam, Jakub Biernacki and Manal Abd El Sayed (even though she left ;) ); Shahnaj Shimmy, Paul Figura, Nathalie Burnett and all the other ex-CCSS Execs; Guillaume Theoret (aka Smokinn) and Louis (aka Canuck, I don’t his last name), hopefully future CCSS execs; Alex Limoges (ECE Rep – aka Tilex) for being a fantastic friend and ally; Juliana Jasinski (MIE Rep); Rosalynn Nguyen (aka soybean); Harley Cooper (aka larley), Josh Haller (aka Phrook – for asking his dad to lend me a suit), Michael Haller (for lending me a suit ;) ), Leilani Ku (aka IronArms), Laura (I don’t know her last name either – for beating Josh), Melissa Noodelman (Mel), Melissa … from Texas? (aka Vendetta), Kevin Branco (aka NivekTheEvil), Thien-An Mac (mak2k); Sylvie Medeiros, Ting-Ming Chen, and the rest of CASI; Spiro Govas; Catherine Rheiner for being entertaining and council meetings, and for being a superb bartender at Reggie’s; Aw, hell, everyone at Reggie’s; Nick Papas and the Loyal Order of Beer Buffaloes, for being the best people to drink with; Alex Fong, for not killing me; Liselle Rego and Jacelyn Daigle, our gorgeous Frosh Leaders; Mike, Chris, and Alain – the coolest Froshies ever; All the students in my SOEN 229 tutorial, even those that just trickle in from the other section; All the students in my COMP 229 tutorials, for writing in C; All my professors, for not failing me (); Fred Brassard from Ubisoft, for the partying and help; Martine Poisson from Electronic Arts, for saving my ass when Fred bailed to go to San Francisco (really, a huge thanks for that one). Dr. Clement Lam, Dr. Peter Grogono and the rest of the Computer Science and Software Engineering department at Concordia, for putting up with me and listening to my whining; Pauline Dubois from CSE for getting me a computer lab whenever I needed it, hiring me as a TA, and all around excellence in planning and organizing; Bill the CS Games team: Xaio Feng Qiu, Thien-An Mac, Alexandr Lebedev (CD), Aaron Farmer (unit00), Guillaume Theoret (Smokinn), Neil Conlan, Ahmed Kamel, Tahir Ali-Kahn, and Nadia Chaouch; Dave from SAE for telling me not to take the SysAdmin position at ECA (too late!); All the skrud.net forum members that I haven’t mentioned yet; Bill Lynch (Associate Dean of ENCS) for getting me to talk to the CEAB, and for letting me have some wine and cheese at the Dean’s List party I accidently ended up at with Paul; Anyone else who has helped me out in any way this year, from the random people that talk to me in the halls to the people that drink with me at Reggie’s. You’re all awesome people and I look forward to the rest of the semester and another great year with all of you!

Doing Something

Skrud — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:43:37 +0000

Yep. That’s right I did something. I made a web site for the Concordia Computer Science Society’s Soft-Dev group, who are currently working on making some sort of adventure game. So far we have most of an engine in OpenGL written by these two brilliant programmers who have graduated from Concordia but at least they’re still helping us out. In fact, in the upcoming couple of weeks there might even be an Extreme Programming session to familiarize the rest of us with the engine parts that we have and get us to help out in finishing it. This should be fun. Unfortunately, I have no practical programming knowledge whatsoever. That’s right. Zero. There’s a massive difference between the programming that you need to know to do anything, and the programming that you need to for school. The latter is not so much more “theoretical” than it is just straight up data with very little meaning. This is actually one of my pet peeves with the way programming appears to be covered at my school in particular. The focus is not on how to write programs, but more on translating a design document into C++ (or Java) syntax. They feel like courses in syntax. The flipside of this is the whole contest scene. Stuff like the ACM Coding Comepetion demand challenging (often math related) problems to be solved using programming. These contests require skill since you have to come up with efficient algorithms for doing (often) complex operations and things. Of course, syntax is not as important as you are allowed to bring in as many printed materials as you want to help you out. The problem remains that I still lack the Practical programming knowledge. I haven’t slightest clue how to tie in code to a GUI for example, or use any kind of event handlers at all. Anyway, hopefully I’ll learn something out of this whole experience.

Oh, and I found this hilarious comic at Ctrl-Alt-Del (the web comic). Indeed, this is how love should be explained. It makes much more sense that way. (And on an obscurely related note, I took this random personaly test from OSDN (Open Source Developers Network) since I figured that a geeky-match-type-personality test would be more accurate… Well, if it accurate, it turns out that I am like 5% of men, and that 58% of women are “not my type.” And furthermore, I seem to have stumped the test many times (I am a freak, after all) and got results like “You would probably like a person with these similarities: … No similarities detected” and then on the next page “You would probably like someone with these opposite traits: … No opposing traits detected” … so on and so forth. It’s good to be weird. Yet, I still can’t understand why I enjoy taking personality tests. It’s not like they tell me anything I don’t already know.)