A Case of the Mondays

Monday is typically the crappiest day of my week. A big contributing factor to that is the lack of sleep I usually get on Sunday nights, partially because of the coffee I usually end up drinking during the day, and also because I tend to stay up late working on something I’ve been meaning to accomplish all week.

Last night I had my second big battle with Garageband, and I’m starting to learn more about the inner workings of it. The one problem I already see is that most of the recordings tend to be slightly noisy and echoey. The echo is obviously due to the fact that I’m recording in my bedroom, but I’m not really sure where the noise is coming from (could be the microphone, could be the fan noise from the computer). Either way, if I cared enough to do anything about it, I could easily remove the echo or the hiss using Matlab (thanks to that DSP course I took years ago). I still haven’t recorded anything I really like, but the confidence level is going up slowly, and I think that helps the end result.

I finally hit the sack sometime around 3am, and was up around 8:30am, so it’s fair to say that I’m pretty much running on fumes today. When I left my house, I grabbed my knapsack that usually houses both my digital SLR and my Macbook pro, and made the 30 minute trek to work. When I got there, I realized that my bag had neither my digital SLR or my Macbook Pro in it. And it’s moments lilke that that force me to reflect on the two university degrees up on my wall at home and wonder if it’s at all possible for me to be any more absent-minded sometimes.

Friday night was Chris’ birthday, and a few of us headed down to Saltlik after work for a few drinks. I hit the hay pretty early that night, and woke up just in time to head down to Discollection to help Kim and Kris dismantle the store. Kim gave me the task of ripping stuff apart using a hammer, and if you didn’t know it already, giving an engineer a hammer can sometimes result in completely unpredictable behaviour. I made pretty short work of the front desk, and then helped Kris rip apart the cubby holes on the back wall. Afterwards, I had my first drink of the day, and then headed across town towards Rebecca and John’s house. Apparently John and Rebecca are some of the finest margarita-makers in the entire city, so if you ever find yourself in the west end with a bottle of tequila, I suggest you stop by their place and see if you can convince them to make you one.

On Sunday, I made my way out to Richmond to spend the afternoon hanging out with Brennen. We ended up down at Silvercity Riverport watching Spiderman III and stuffing our faces full of popcorn. I read a pile of mixed reviews before going, so I really didn’t expect too much, but it was actually better than I expected, and for those of you that have been following the series, I’d definitely say it’s worth seeing at least once.

In other exciting news, my Flickr account has expired, and I’m now officially part of the Flickr steerage class. I thought I would be cool and pay for my next Pro account using money in my paypal account, but apparently there’s a big time lag on the transaction, and in that time my Flickr account expired. So, until that’s fixed, you won’t be seeing a lot of new photos go up.

On Wednesday, the majority of our office is heading up to Whistler for a day of skiing, snowboarding, ziptrekking and in my case (since I expected to be recovering from surgery this week), sightseeing. It looks like the sun will be shining, so it should be a great, relaxing trip. And on Thursday, I have a meeting down at UBC with a surgeon to discuss the possibility of having my next surgery sometime next week. That’s it for the weekend. I have about ten blog entries I’ve started over the past few months, and I’d like to finish a couple of them soon and get them up here.. Maybe sometime this week.