Rick Mercer visited the University of Alberta this past week and the segments were featured on “The Rick Mercer Report” today. The main feature is the pandas volleyball team but Rick also pays a visit to the NanoFab and cooks dinner using the flame throwers in Mechanical Engineering.

If you are like me and can’t be bothered to fit your life in around a TV schedule it’s also possible to check out the segment online. I don’t know how long it will be valid for… Probably at least a week but here’s the segment anyhow. The Rick Mercer Report Visits UofA

I’ll let your read the email correspondence between my prof and myself and let you judge the results for yourself…

FROM: Josh TO: Z.W. GortelI’m interested to come and have a look at my Physics 311 final exam. Is this possible?, I mean do you have it on file or is it locked up somewhere and unaccesible. I didn’t feel particularily confident with regards to my final exam performance and was a bit dissapointed although not entirely suprised with my grade (B+). After talking with a number of peers following the break they also thought they didn’t do very well on the final but still recieved excellent marks.

FROM: Z.W. Gortel TO: Josh Thank you for getting to me. It looks like we have a once in a lifetime bad luck with reporting. In fact, your grade is A+ (you had a second best final exam). I have, mistakenly transcribed this as B+ in my final report. Well, you can treat this as a New Year’s gift or come and kill me for causing you such an anxiety. I will correct the record (and check if I did not do a similar error with someone else). And, of course, you can come and see your final exam.

Everyone boots their computer, in fact most of us do it more than once a day. Here are two questions for you

1. Do you do anything useful while your computer starts up?
2. Do you spend as much time praying as you’d like to?

I’ve got a friend on a missions project in Darjeeling India as part of a YWAM DTS based out of Brisbane Australia. (If you’re interested in more details check out her Blog). As financial support just wasn’t about to be something I had to offer I did commit to praying for her over this period of time. I’ll admit I didn’t do the greatest job of that while she was in training school but decided that I had to make a conscious effort while she was in the missions field. What I decided to do to ensure that I was praying regularly was to place This Wallpaper on my desktop to serve as a reminder to pray.

God’s call for us to pray is no mystery, we are to be “always in prayer”. The Bible tells us stories of people like Anna who “never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying” Luke 2:37. Paul’s example is similar as described in Philemon 1:4 “I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers.” I asked myself this past week whether or not the time I was spending praying was sufficient and the answer was no. Was I fulfilling the promise I’d made to myself to pray for Janneka while on DTS?… unfortunately No. A simple thing like a desktop certainly does remind me to pray.

If you’ve committed to pray for someone why not put them and their list of prayer requests on your desktop. It will cost you absolutely nothing. It’s a simple way to be reminded to pray every time you’re waiting for your computer to boot.

Engineering Week is now officially underway

I’m sure that attending class will be at approximately a rate of 60%. 75% if I’m lucky, I’m going to do my best to fit in a dozen events and meet the requirements for the beer fridge draw. Design competition, movie night, scavenger hunt, a couple parties and the noon events and I should be able to do it. Our progress is alright thus far, top 4 in the Tug of War (with a bunch of skinny nerds) is pretty impressive if you ask me.

My Phys 397 lab course requires that my lab reports be submitted according to a specific style. LaTeX is strongly recommended as this allows us to use a template provided to develop our lab reports and equations etc. in an efficient, neat and standard manor.

I therefore downloaded the freeware MikTeX distribution of the LaTeX language for windows operating systems. I got a bit of practice thus far, but I certainly have a lot yet to learn. For the most part all I have figured out is that TeX is an extremely powerful tool. The more I read (which is not much yet) the more I realize that I haven’t really made much progress yet. It’s one of those things that once I know it I doubt I’ll be using much else to create documents. The thing I’m interested in is how other people are going to respond to my communication via .pdf for all purposes rather than .doc? If you’re wondering how this is going to work out you’ve got about 1 month to find a solution because I know that once I learn I won’t turn back.

Here’s an Example of what I’ve figured out how to do so far. Focussed mostly on the math aspects of the markup, I’ll learn the other stuff as I go along.

Tuesday and Thursday this semester are certainly days that will teach me that even great things like physics need to be managed in moderation.

Hopefully this semester won’t turn me against it (I have little doubt that this is impossible) but I’ll certainly get my fill. Starting with Electrodynamics and then Quantum for 3 hours straight each morning I then roll right into 3 hours of labs in the afternoon. It’s a bit overboard but that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

I’m a little worried that I’ll get buried within a few weeks and won’t emerge until May.

27 outs in a baseball game, 27 days to mark a test…

So the waiting has finally come to an end, a mere 1 day short of the four week mark I was beginning to expect. Some people pointed out that our Statics mark in first year didn’t come until the Thursday of the first week of school, that may be the case but it was the last exam written on the last day of exams, they also had full lecture halls of students. And 27 days (Hiebert’s record) still has a significant margin over the 22 days record set by Hrudey and company.

Discussions amongst the other guys seems to suggest that things must have been tied up in the physics office

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to fill in the details regarding semester 6/8. my courses this semester consist of…

• EE 350 – Electronic devices, Instructor Jeremy Sit
• ENGG 405 – Engingeering Management Instructor Peter Flynn
• EE 323 – Partial Differential Equations Instructor Vien Van
• PHYS 381 – Electrodynamics Instructor Zbigniew Gortel
• PHYS 371 – Quantum Mechanics A Instructor Frank Marsiglio
• PHYS 397 – Projects in Experimental Physics Instructor Kim Chow

Things are looking busy but thus far not impossible. Engineering Management is something I know I will find harder than the average person, we’ll see how it goes. If I keep on top of things I should be in good shape. I guess that’s the situation for all of my classes, but staying on top of things gets tough when I have to write those big lab reports (one of which I picked up today – 89% woo hoo)

After skiing Louise on a bluebird day we managed to get through the road to Golden and skied there two days. The hill gets better every time I ski it, I feel like I’m just getting used to it. I even discovered a brand new run on the last descent of the day, I’d never bothered doing the little hike to get over to “Terminator” until then but, but boy oh boy it was certainly worthwhile, some seriously soft soft-pack at a pitch steep enough to fly but shallow and smooth enough to entertain the possibility of looking 3 or more turns down the hill while doing so.

We packed in 4 trips down Whitewall in the course of 2 days (it only opened at 2 pm the first day). Another 4 runs in Feuz bowl (accessed from Redemption-Ridge) and I think that’s pretty much all the excuse I need to tell you that my thighs are a bit sore (but not sorry!). The highlights were… Paula’s Line (on Whitewall), Horsefly (lower down Redemption Ridge) and Terminator (furthest south exit from Bowl-Over). Our second day grand total elevation was 35 152 feet. That’s the same as skiing Everest 1.21 times!

I could reiterate my frustration with Hiebert but I’ll refrain from that for the time being, but if I’m back in class on Monday and still don’t have any information on that course, the proverbial shit will hit the proverbial fan.

So, I’m sitting in Golden after *the* sweetest two back to back ski days of my life. Kicking horse had something like 40 cm of snow on Tuesday night, the road from Louise through field was closed due to avalanches so we skied Louise on Wednesday with the hope of still getting through to Golden in the afternoon when the road opened.

Louise was great, I don’t want to estimate how much snow there was because I know I’m going to do it wrong. It was less than a foot and more than six inches. The Whitehorn chutes had a bit more, partly blown in, and I don’t think it had been open the previous day. We did a bit of cruising around at Larch and the six-pack before actually making it into the back bowls. (Have to do a bit of skiing with Mom, it is a family vacation afterall). Anyhow the important thing was that the Whitehorn chutes weren’t open yet and when we arrived atop the poma, the ski patrols lifted the rope. There was already a line up to get in so I wasn’t the very first person down the run but I was probably third. Check out the evidence!

I skied ER face for the first time in my life (It had always been a “permanently closed avalanche area”) and had some sweet powder runs down from the top of Olympic towards the six-pack. Meadowlark was also superb and was really a thigh burner both last run before lunch and last run of the day.