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so i was reading this article (and this column) about IBM's new deal with Lenovo.. and it seems like they're serious about expanding into China in a really big way. They're already so big it boggles my mind, and they're just getting bigger.

the whole thing reminds me of this conversation i had with william (he's in CS and is a co-(former rim co-op)) back in my first work term about how companies are getting so big they're gonna be meta-national and actually contain countries within them. that would be really weird.

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i added a page to view the latest comments on my blog/snippets.. it is here.

switch statements are cool. i never realized how cool until just now. particulary when they're inside a loop.

it snowed a bunch more yesterday/today. and i think it's still snowing. there's a layer of white a few inches think on top of everything. :)

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next term should be fun.. got some pretty decent profs.

Econ 102 - Larry smith. Recognized by many as "the best prof ever!". I think he's won the prof-of-the-(arbitrary-time-chunk) award x times, where x is big.

ECE 427 - William Bishop. Seems like a pretty cool dude. I'd heard some not-so-good things from '08 class about his SE 141 behavior, but ratemyprofs seems to contradict that. I'll assume he's good, particularly since this is a non-frosh course. Also, he's gonna be teaching the '09 class SE 141 next term too. Cool!

CS 343 - Peter Buhr. (THE guy for concurrency)(?). Or so I've heard. I haven't read mathNEWS this term, but if i recall, he shows up pretty often in the profQUOTES. can't be all that bad.

SE 362 - Norm Young. aka Associate Director of Software Engineering. aka my academic advisor (of sorts). when i met him at frosh week, he seemed to be the total opposite of matt armstrong (former associate director). his lack of administrative acumen also supports this. therefore, i conclude he's gonna be a good prof.

SE 382 - William Cowan. Hm.. haven't heard too much about him. the ratemyprofs seems to be so-so. looks like a forgettable prof. on the bright side, that means he can't have done anything terribly bad.

SOC 232 - John Goyder. I'm taking this course distance ed, so it doesn't really matter. but meh, seems to be a good guy.

CS 444 - I didn't actually get into compilers, but I'll probably sit in on the lectures. Hurd (aka Cormack) is teaching, as usual. good stuff.

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i wish they'd clear off the ice around here. walking is becoming very difficult.

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went to the texas chop shop for lunch today with the rest of the VM team. mmm, fajitas.. :)

in other news, i was walking by the river today and it's in this semi-frozen state with large chunks of ice floating around in it. it looks really cool, like giant water lilies or something.

and finally, it's about time MS publicly released their 64-bit OS.

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so there's only 13 work days left. well, 12.25 really.. tomorrow's a quarter-day because we're having a release party for most of the day. w00t. so little time left! i still haven't talked to my boss about whether or not i should come back next term. i should probably decide if i want to come back first. hm..

on the bright side, less than a month before i'm back in waterloo and get to see everybody again! w00t++.

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so i came across this really weird bug today.. haven't quite cracked it yet, but it has something to do with aligned memory access. i write to a variable and then read it - that works fine if the variable is aligned on a word boundary. however, if it's not, then the value written gets shifted so that it IS aligned, and then when i read it back, it reads the unaligned value, which is messed up. argh.

stupid arm processor.

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first snow! current weather conditions:

Cloudy
1 C
22 km/h WNW
997 hPa

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the back to the future trilogy is on! as dave would say, best trilogy ever!

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ah.. the things you find on slashdot.. The Memory HOWTO. The phonetic alphabet actually seems pretty useful.

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