I didn’t have a wrench or plier in my toolbox. Last summer I came to a point where I desperately needed one to remove the screw tightly fastened to the end of one of my microphones. However, I ended up being a smart ass by taking my microphone to a Home Depot. I just did my job right there in a split second without buying anything.

Today I bought a set of adjustable wrenches simply because I couldn’t take the toilet with me. 🙂

Buying wrenches at the Home Depot

As of today, two orcas have resulted in the deaths of four human beings: a Canadian woman, an American woman, an American man, and a Spanish man.

Orca attacks are a First World problem.

Before I got my driver’s licence I used to practice parallel parking around my neighbourhood, parking my car in front of every house where there was already a parked vehicle as if I was another family member coming home from work. I even got out of my car and walked around (to check if I parked right). Thank goodness I did this in Canada. 🙏

Woman shot dead in New York state after friend pulled into wrong driveway https://t.co/OrW1dewEsZ

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 18, 2023

Went 70 in a 60 yet still annoyed those hoping for high 80s.

Welcome to London, Ontario, the home to edgy pilots on four wheels!

Did you know what made my day?

I was walking down the street and scrolling on my phone when I almost kicked a cobra chicken in the face. She was so nice a lady she didn’t even have a go at me!

What else?

I wrote the horrendous 3-hour CompSci 2212 final exam, which featured a 40-page booklet including 75 multiple-choice and 15 short-answer questions.

Now I have solid reasons to pop a bottle of champagne!

I had planned to rent a car in Victoria and drop it off in Vancouver the same day. With a Costco discount, that Budget rental, a Toyota Corolla, would have cost me $750 plus taxes.

Initially I didn’t opt for the ferries. I thought a rental for 12 hours or so would just cost 2x or 3x more than a ferry ticket. FYI, a one-way ferry ride is just less than $20.

Now I’m fixing to commence my ferrytale. ⛴️

For a whole day, I’ve been trying to find the right words to describe how saddened I am about the passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto. I listen to him on a monthly, if not weekly, basis. I share his music with all my close friends. I play his songs on my piano, albeit clumsily.

He was one of the few musicians in the world whose works literally touched my soul. His entire catalog of music has also been a great influence on many other musicians and the whole world. His influence will undoubtedly perdure, on many levels.

I’m sharing two videos here. One is from 1992, and the other 2022. We’ll remember this highly gifted crossover musician who once reshaped the soundscapes of Jazz, electronica, world music, and even hip-hop, before being recognized as an experimental and classical composer.

Rest in peace, Maestro.

Just learned from a YouTuber that one of my favourite singer-songwriters, Andrea Martin, passed away in 2021. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her before, but her passing is to me as Kobe Bryant’s death was to a Lakers fan.

What makes me sadder is that her only album can’t be found on any music streaming platforms. Fortunately I bought a copy of her CD back in 2000 and will load it into my iCloud Music Library soon.

Her songwriting skills were amazing; her singing voice was underrated.

These two tracks are among my favourites on this album.

Lately I’ve been watching a YouTube channel on compiler design, which one of our compulsory courses this term is all about. The YouTuber is an assistant teacher at an Indian college. I hope she won’t become a professor, though, because even Ivy League professors can never explain stuff as clearly.

the icon for the BuildingBuddy app
App developers: Team 14 at Western University
Icon designer: Jason Shew

Our group project (codenamed BuildingBuddy, or BB for short), a very heavyweight component of the course CompSci 2212B, has been launched officially on January 25, 2023, marked by the first group meeting held at 5:30 pm on this day at Middlesex College. To simply put, this project requires us, a team of five guys, to build a full-stack application that shows the floor plans of several buildings on campus. This application is expected to feature some required and extra functionalities.

a strange app that never got opened

the Cycle Tracking app

Sitting on the toilet, I was intrigued by this little strange icon on my Apple Watch app grid. I had never opened this app. After thinking for a minute, I still had no clue what it was.

Curiosity got the better of me. Voilà! It turned out to be Cycle Tracking: an Apple-designed app that claims to track my menstrual cycle.

I believe I have “told” my Apple Watch that I am actually a cisgender male by setting up an exhaustive health profile, which includes my gender and even sexual activity.

Dear Apple: as the next step to making your smartwatch smarter, try removing Cycle Tracking from every male user’s device.

For someone born in the 1980s, I have to admit I had a little hard time distinguishing between Atlantic Starr and Midnight Star — probably because both are American bands, both have/had multiple members, both had R&B hits, both were formed in the exact year of 1976, and both have “Star(r)” in their names.

But is it really important to tell one “star” from another? As far as I know, many people outside of the Anglosphere still think Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley were the same person or mistake Marilyn Monroe for Madonna. (Beyoncé vs. Rihanna might be even more challenging for them.) On hearing the first eight bars of Billie Jean, however, they can sing and dance to it with total abandon.

Perhaps I’m among the guys on earth who have the least patience to wait. If your new service has hit the market but runs on an invite-only basis, you’ve lost my interest. I opted for Fastmail over HEY.com and felt happy. I ditched Clubhouse in the end and had zero enthusiasm for going back. Should I mention Dribbble, Pinterest, and Quora, where I do not have an account to date because they were once invite-only? Now Post finally gave me the nod, and I slammed the door on them there and then.

Have you ever realized that, when you’re washing a carrot and two black plums in a kitchen sink filled with water, you’re actually messing up a snowman at room temperature?

I didn’t sleep in this morning. I had to get up early for work and later head to the nearby Costco warehouse to get my flu shot. After work I was told the location had run out of vaccines, so I grabbed a quick lunch and went back to bed, in hopes of tacking on some hours of sleep.

I’ve always loved dozing off to some music. The moment I opened Apple Music Cuco’s new single popped up. It was released today, fresh from the oven. I should’ve ignored it and picked out some Max Richter track good for a nap. Now it’s become an earworm precluding me from snoozing. (But I am still sleepy.)

The cold covered in the recent news not only made living creatures suffer. I accidentally left a 24-pack case of Diet Coke (355 mL per can) in the back seats of my car days before Christmas. When I took out the garbage tonight, I found that most of them had burst open due to the extreme cold.

coke cans burst open

coke cans burst open

We rescued 11 survivors from the wreckage. Meanwhile, I cut my index finger on a broken can.

the survivors

my cut finger

There is still some dark brown ice on top of the car seats. Fortunately, thanks to its sugar-free nature, it won’t leave any disgusting sticky stains when it dries.

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It’s Christmas again. Here we have almost everything one would expect of a “traditional Christmas” — snow, gatherings, foods, wines, Christmas songs, gifts under the Christmas tree, etc. I can’t be bothered to mention Santa because we don’t really have a fireplace in this house. Despite that, some elements even got an “upgrade.” Instead of snow flurries, for example, many people are travelling against a province-wide blizzard warning. We chose to stay in because none of us would love to get stuck on 401 or at YYZ for eight or more hours straight.

Derek Sivers offered a bundle of four books before Christmas

Today I received the Derek Sivers Christmas bundle, which I thought would have been delivered to my doorstep but had actually been dropped into the mailbox two days ago. Thank him so much for the generous offerings as well as emails helping clear things up. It’s nice to have something really meaningful to read during the winter break. ☕️📖🎄❄️

The following block of text is from Mark, an intelligent, philosophical friend of mine:

One thing that suddenly struck me several years ago is this: ALL negative emotions all stem from one single one: fear.

Grief comes from having lost something or someone, and the fear that you know they will never come back.

Hatred comes from when someone does something bad to you, that you fear can never be fixed.

Envy comes from someone else having something you want, and the fear that you will never be able to get it yourself.

Jealousy comes from the fear that someone that you love will leave you.

When there’s no fear, there’s no negativity. If you have a partner that you trust implicitly, there’s no fear of them leaving, hence no need for jealousy.

Today marked the end of the fall semester, as the last final exam was written earlier in the afternoon. I had kept myself busy for a prolonged period of time, with quite a lot on my plate. Some professors were either disorganized or lacking in proper approaches to delivering content, meaning that I had to be self-reliant.

That said, it is not necessarily a bad thing because people working in computer science often find it needful to acquire new knowledge on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.