Trouble falling asleep?

This is going to be a short one.
Why?
Because I am about to fall asleep.

I am not sure about you, but whenever I concentrate on something late into the night, I sometimes forget to eat, to rest, and to take a break. It is especially true when I am debugging or writing some code. I always feel like I can get it fixed or written faster if I work on it on one go, rather than taking a break, and then coming back to it. I always feel that taking a break in the middle of debugging makes me lose my train of thought or something, which could mean making or breaking of a code.

Anyways, whenever I end up working on one thing for hours and hours on into the night time, I have trouble braking the momentum in my brain and cannot fall asleep.

Those of you suffering from the same issue as me, please let me know how you cope with it. Because, for now, I am going to see if having a shot of baileys in my one and only espresso cup followed by a warm shot of milk in the same espresso cup will do the trick for me tonight. I vaguely remember it working like a charm sone days ago, but we’ll see if it works. So far, I am widely awake.

The big red E.

Usually, I find the big red E in the middle of Main Mall. The big red E, symbolic of engineering at UBC, is painted onto a somewhat pyramid-like concrete structure that is large enough that you don’t want to lift it yourself, and shows as large of an ego of engineering that other departments want to paint over it out of jealousy – or so I am told.

This morning, I took my usual walk from the Thunderbird residence to my lab in the ICICS building. Including the time I take to pick out and put on my shoes to laying down my bag on my lab desk area takes only about 3 minutes. Literally. So my morning walks are usually not very eventful other than me noticing something about the weather or seeing how full or empty the parking lot near the Forestry building is. But this morning was a little bit different.

I found the big red E on the entrance of the forestry building. Yes, it’s true, and here’s a picture evidence to prove it.

The place where the big E was found this morning.

But what I read at the bottom of the big red E made me laugh. It said “We are a real faculty”.

Of course we are, I thought. And we are a faculty with a sense of humour! I am guessing that Forestry took over the big red E in the Main Mall recently, and the engineering students are trying to get back at them. Regardless of what the behind story is, I think it’s fun to have such a tradition, and a symbolic item for our faculty. It gives me a sense of ‘fun’ and ‘community’, and a somewhat eventful mornings even in my three minute home-to-lab walks.

The Post-Conference Madness

Hey guys….
So… I was at a conference all of last week, and missed the gloomy weather of Vancouver while I was gone. But believe it or not, I actually like Vancouver better than San Francisco, where the conference was held. I didn’t take too many pictures, as I didn’t even bring a camera. But when I got back from the conference, I had to take a picture of my desk, and the mess I had created as my usual post-conference ritual.
What is this ritual? Well, it’s sorting out receipts from the entire week of being gone. Sometimes it feels like going to a conference presses a pause button on your life. But it really doesn’t work that way. While you are gone, you still have to sleep, ride, walk, see and eat. So I had to do all those things too. That also meant that I have receipts from all those activities I did during the conference, which means I must’ve spent money, which means I need to file an reimbursement form to get the money back.
So detailed notes on filling out the form aside, I pretty much ended up with this kind of a desk space in order to tape together and organize the paperwork, that is so necessary for all conference goers.