Service culture

The nice man in the uniform at the buffet ladles your soup for you, and the nice man in the uniform by the coffee pours that for you, and asks you how much milk you want, and if you add sugar he uses your spoon to mix it in for you. And there's full waiter used-plate-pick-up service during/after the buffet meal. I thought that the point of a buffet was that it was self-serve, lol.

Anyway, just another culture difference

Impostor syndrome:

The recurring feeling that you don't know what the hell you're doing, regardless of whether or not anyone else knows what they're doing. Brought on in this case by reading blogs written by people while they were attending TWU.

Right now, my flatmate is watching... some show... about cops, I think? In her room. So that's cool, although I can hear it pretty well.

Passport: I lost mine. I spent most of today and yesterday looking for it and trying to figure out where it could have gone. if it were in my apartment, I would have found it. But I'm reasonably sure that it hasn't left my apartment since September. We haven't been burgled or anything, so... where could it have gone? I have no idea.

On Tuesday (the earliest appointment available) I have to go downtown and get a new one (in person, for a painful amount of cash). Then I can send my Indian Visa application, which will be lovely. In fact, there is a faint chance that I can even make the hoped-for deadline that Lily from TW sent me, or at least not miss it by more than a day. Sigh. I'm very upset with myself for misplacing my passport. I don't know how I did it; it was in a safe logical place... and now it's not there. I obviously moved it while cleaning, or used it for some purpose which doesn't come immediately to memory.

I was going to go to RHoK today but instead spent the day looking for my passport (and being somewhat ill from the typhoid vaccine). It snowed somewhat excessively earlier. Biking in snow is difficult; it would help if I had larger tires...

I wish I had gone to RHoK. But at the same time, I know that opportunities for communal freeware opensource coding are not all that difficult to find. And I can always just scout github and request a fork of something. The human interaction is valuable, but it can be worked without.

Right now I'm trying to make a coherent summary of what I think would be good to learn while at TWU. Messy version is at http://notepad.cc/share/SQnRYrimN5 for now.

Oh hey. I should have used http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-0 sed to deal with euler 13.

non-techie babble

Things I am trying to do right now

1. Research vegan and sugarfree recipes for family thanksgiving dinner so I can practice making them today/tomorrow
2. Set up afternoon coffee hangout today (with crappy cell reception in the canyon)
3. Get an appointment for getting travel shots for India set up (gotta find some relevant numbers on id cards)
4. Set a finalized schema for the code test that's being written
5. Get tix to take me and the parents to HP7 :)

Update:

1. List that my mom may or may not think much of http://notepad.cc/share/iZi2FdAiji
2. Done
3. Done
4. Getting there
5. Postpone

Might get Grandma an iPad for her birthday. Need to figure out 1. what apps and 2. How to help her get used to them

App ideas...

reading stuff

playing games

Sigh.