Tag: school Posts

It’s one of those questions that everyone always asks you at parties — what do you do? I guess the normal answer is to tell people what you do for a living, which in my case would currently be web development. That being said, some people tend to tell people what they are trained to do. For example, if you have a CA, you’d say you’re an accountant, or if you have a mechanical engineering degree, you’d say you’re a mechanical engineer. If you took software engineering, you’d say you were a software engineer. I did my undergrad in engineering physics, which is one of the few engineering disciplines where you don’t really have a bone fide title when you come out. I guess I could say I’m an engineering physicist, but I’m not really sure what that means. In terms of a graduate degree, I did my master’s in […]

So, something happened tonight that kind of irked me a bit. It was completely offset by the fact that I went out and did a pile of Christmas shopping, but all the same. When I was 17, I was at a summer party in Chilliwack at this guy Geoff’s house. Of course, being in a small town, we were all drinking our faces off at that point. Thankfully, most parties back then were in houses and everyone just spent the night, so for the most part we were all safe. Anyways, in walked these two girls, one of which completely caught my eye. I spent a bit of time talking to her and her friend, and ended up leaving with a really great impression of them both. They went to Chilliwack Senior, whereas I went to Sardis Secondary, so I had never met them before. This one girl, and I […]

I’ve had a few requests lately from people asking if I could send them a copy of my master’s thesis. So in the interest of saving time, I’m throwing it up here in case anyone wants to download it and read themselves to sleep. My research was primarily in the area of high definition video compression, specifically on a new codec called H.264 that is used in the new HD DVD formats such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. I proposed a novel scheme to combine concurrently broadcoast MPEG-2 standard definition (SD) streams with H.264 spatial difference information to create a HD broadcast stream at a reduced bitrate. So, here it is. Enjoy.

Well, it’s official — I passed my master’s exam with a whopping mark of 84% (A-) — good enough for me. So, all that’s left to do is get a few pieces of paper signed, print off a nice copy of my thesis, and hand it into the library for processing. And then it’s done. The guys from CounterPath took me out for a few free rounds of drinking last night. We started at Nevermind in Kits for a few beers after my defense. Then Des and I went for dinner on Granville Island (Bridges) and met up with everyone at 8pm for some drinks at the Yaletown Brew Pub. Here’s a photo of me waiting to catch the ferry to Granville Island (a few hours after defending my thesis).