Discovery of Laser

The following takes place between 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM.

10:01 AM
The weather ees so fine ... not really. It's started raining early morning, and if this is an indication of how the day is going to be, then I can say with confidence that this lecture series that I am attending is nothing short of another wasted hour. I walk towards MP, head down, and counting the number of puddles on the sidewalk.. I lost count after 3.

10:10 AM
I see a friend waiting for the elevator to arrive. I call him and ask the proverbial greeting of fourth year undergraduate, "Heard any good news?" or "Have you decided? Standford or MIT?" or "Have you started writing your thesis?". The answer, most of the times, is not. We go up to 4th floor, wait for a couple of minutes while continuing our idle chats, only to find that we missed a notice about room change. The bastard (I think by now my loyal readers should know whom I'm referring to) didnt tell us!!!

10:15 AM
In my 4 years of undergrad, LM holds many bad memories. And today is another addition to the pile. The speaker, an old professor from the separatist province, read a book once about the history of laser, and decided that it was a good material for his last lecture during his visit to our famous campus. He promises that this lecture will be full of thrill and mystery like a blockbuster movie. I hope he doesnt mean brokeback mountain, because we dont have lubricants handy with us, or good night and good luck, because we see in color. I suppose the chemistry store in the basement may have a replacement.

10:30 AM
The lecture is really boring. He starts from the early 19th century. And it's hard to concentrate because of his french accent and the silent 'h' treatment, which keeps reminding me of steve martin in pink panther, and miniPO. "ee was black listed from the patent", "ees paper wasnt accepted", and so on.

11:00 AM
I wake up from my stupor, only to find that he has reached the late 50s. Thank god that he means to deliver his speech only up till the 60s, when laser became a household tool. I'm quite proud when my AS&M prof's name is up in the Canadian contribution slide. He sure has contributed a good portion to the discovery of laser, and the discovery of my hate towards old profs.

11:29 AM
The lecture ends. We collect our quantum structure homeworks, another couple of perfects for me, adding to the pair of hundreds (midterm and quiz) for condensed matter.

11:30AM

Stuck in SF

Fuck I'm stuck in SF reading match commentary of Arsenal-Liverpool... And the match sounds, or.. reads really exciting... I've turned into Yaser with his late night cricket party, if you can call it as such. Jens just saved a penalty... Never in my life I expect a written paragraph to be as exciting as what I'm reading right now... This is truly magical. Arsenal is not playing very well, which is what I gather from reading this slowpoke 1 HP lazy man text commentary... I have never clicked on the refresh button as many times per minute as what I'm doing now... I'm in a dreadful state... just had a condensed matter quiz, which is not as bad as what one usually expect of Kee's exam. I heard many horrible tales from the physics student about this particular prof. The commentator just wrote a factoid, Arsenal has scored only nine in twelve away matches. I dont like that, that's 3/4 or 75%. That'll lower down my GPA. What am I talking about... somebody call a doctor! I don't need no doctor!!! LOL, the commentator is really funny. The grass is green and innocent. Don't blame miscontrol on the lovely pitch. There's about 12 minutes left before my next match, I mean lecture, and the course that will have the pleasure of my attendance is mse550. I cant say much about this lecture... FUCK what is wrong with the backspace on this keyboard, you have to press it right at the centre of the key to depress it... It's not DELL's keyboard, the CPU is DELL, but the keyboard is BELKIN... IT IS SHIT!

Wrappers

I can't quite wrap my fingers around why the university assigns incompetent teachers one after another for important, fundamental courses. In first year, it was Mrs. Giant; granted I skipped most of her dull classes and thus my accusation may be unfounded; but letting an anti-science devotee teaching a class of engineering students is not something that the university should be proud of. Then the NSci chair came in second year, to teach the infamous thermodynamics, tied in position for the worst of the year with the fatty acid donut loving bio prof. Note to self, I must look for that viagra commercial that had an actor who looks not unlike my bio prof. Dick face shared the award for the most useless lecturer with egg head, although my current quantum prof, discussed in more detail later, could easily steal the award were it not for the mark that both dick and egg gave me.

SO after three years of yearning for a 'good' teacher, after all the lows I'll gladly take an 'okay' prof any time. But in came a chinese prof, you've all heard of my distaste of asian profs, in our quantum course. And oh boy, if you've ever wondered what an Indian teaching Mandarin to Uzbekistanis would sound like, you can come to room 219 for up close and personal viewing of the 769th wonder of the world. The relationship between students and professors arent as bad as students and tas, because despite their degree in bachelors, the inequality is not well defined; it's more like a squiggly line than a less than. They are still easily caught speechless when we ask out of the book questions, they wear jeans and sneakers, and they chew gum. The difference lies in the amount of swear words students say aloud and proudly in open spaces. However, the relation between student and profs is more akin to eating a sandwich/toast/sub/pita. We choose our courses as carefully as we choose our toppings. We make sure that none of the ingredients doesnt suit our taste buds, just as we checked the course description and syllabus for any mention of the word project. So a good, excellent profs in this dogma, is like a sandwich wrapper made of zip lock. You get what you paid for, your fingers are comfortably wrapped around the sandwich, preventing any sauce or small pieces of onions or green peppers to fall out, the wrapper is folded neatly so that you can kind of peel of the wrap to expose more sandwich for eating, instead of picking dropped toppings from the table into your mouth with the expectation that the flavour will combine as if nothing happened, no extra cleaning liquid aroma. But a terrible prof, like the quantum one, is like having a sandwich wrapped with a toilet paper. You dont know if he's come from a decent background. The sauce, the meat of the knowledge pours out of the wrapper. All you hear is mumbling, isolated phrases here and there that mean absolutely nothing. You look around, hoping to see your classmate having the same difficulty eating the meal. Some of them smiled knowingly, some are full of adrenaline, as if ready to pounce on the person standing in front of the class.

I got nothing else to write... it a quarter to midnight, and I better sleep.

No email/phonecall/letter as of ...

And so the waiting period has begun. All the letters, transcipts of demise, and nitty gritty details of the application were sorted out. Oddly, no complaints from Defoe about not having time to write, or copy and paste rather, more than 4 letters. He's done 5 so far, and when pushed, I'm certain that he'll write me one more. Confirmation emails have been piling up in my inbox, alongside numerous nano club emails announcing the start of world war iii, and top ten guide to surviving the nuclear armageddon that will surely end the war. Seriously, five emails in the space of a week, regarding the same thing, is a bit of an overkill in my taste.

I wasnt prepared for this waiting period. I didnt really expect any admission from the US unis, or if I had any expectation, then it was overshadowed by the excitement over the letter-hunting until the point where it no longer exists. But the news that one of our classmates got an email from NWU about visiting the campus on March, my hope resurfaced. One of us, yeah, I'd like to treat all nanos as equal, except for certain individuals who are too much of an assfuck to be called a nano engineer or human for that matter, from now on, because it gives me some confidence. But as of 7.58pm est, no contact.

By the way, those taking 550, have you guys noticed that the instructor loves, to the point of addiction, writing sub-section. It's normal to see chapter 2.2 --insert title here--, but it's abnormal to write 2.2.2, and worse, I think when you have 2.2.2.2 in your notes, it's a sign from the creator above and below that your time is up. Your brain is officially and theologically fucked up.

Retards

There comes a point in a man's life where he wonders if he'll ever see anything more idiotic than what he's seeing now, and that point appeared to me at 11:30 pm Sunday night, after watching Grey's Anatomy, when I was filling in the graduate application to the Electrical Engineering Department in University of Toronto. I was reading the requirements for enrolling in the master program, when a line caught my attention, it was about transcript. I thought to myself, humm, as a UofT student, surely they won't ask me to pay 10 bucks just to print my transcript, put it in an envelope, seal and stamp, send the envelope to the UofT mailing system, wait for a couple of days before it is sent to the electrical department, which is right across the road. What a fucking waste of money!!! I hate these cunts!! FUCK!!! Shit, I paid 7 grand for this crap, the MP washrooms still have two fucking taps, one hot and one cold. This is my last year of undergrad, and I still havent seen anything impressive in the campus, save for one massive rock that looks like a titan's testicle outside Galbraith. To top it all off, the application also asks detailed information about the PERSON responsible for my transcript. What the hell am I suppose to put?

Name: Sidney Smith
Address: Sidney Smith
Telephone: (416) 773-8258
Email: utoronto.ca@utoronto.ca? I tell you who's responsible for my transcript, yeah those profs who made life miserable because their lives are miserable and they want you to have a taste of it. It's your turn to have a taste of my crap, here's a 70% grade feces, signed, sealed, and delivered.

Book Cover

Some people say don't judge a book by its cover, and I say judge a professor by his/her group website. When looking for research groups in US universities I subconsciously taught myself to drag the mouse to the upper left corner of the browser and click. As a proof, I can now go back to the previous page without looking at the arrow symbol... oh, Firefox just poped up a warning that there unsaved changes on the current page. None of that fancy mouse action needed anymore. Anyway, a lot of group websites are frankly speaking, full of bulltestis. You can tell if a prof is more concerned about his image than his research. The main page would consist of either: his full body image, staring into nothing, as if an opponent is bound to appear from nothingness to attack him, he is ready to face this challenge with his stare (see Lieutenant Robert's page for proof); or his close-up portrait, revealing all his humongous pores and blackheads, with an exotic look that is meant to hypnotize you into thinking that he is concerned about you, the future generation, the hope of all mankind, but instead in reality he is hoping for a talent agent to stumble upon his picture and brought him to recognition, in Hollywood no less, from his sad life as a prof. They spent more time designing their websites than looking after the grad students, or spending money to hire a web designer when the lab needed a new mass-spectrometer. Sadly these wannabe's are the ones that are somewhat popular, but if your inspiration is a belly dancer named Greta, I doubt I can describe you in any other words than cunt.

ARRRGGGHHH

AAAA Bullffuck!!! Pussy football delaying 24 premier!!!

Seven Nil

Aaahh, what a great weekend. Due to two factors, actually; one being the make poverty history event that my friend organized. It's for a good cause for sure, but undoubtedly, the highlights of the night were the blunders and fuck-ups by the performers, one of them the particle physicist 68'er. Somehow, he and the Argentinian maestro stopped half-way through their song, proceded to start a staring contest, and mouthed curse words, both in French and Spanish I presume, at each other. And if you thought they would learn from their mistakes, being engineers and all, then you thought wrong, because it happened twice. I expect better performance by mr. sixtyeight in Nocturne, with painted nails, wearing leather jacket and badminton shorts no less.

The other, the 7-0 drubbing of M'Boro by Arsenal. 4-0 in the first half, Henry's hattrick and a bunch of skills and flair shown when we were 7-0 up was glorious. Great performance all over the pitch. Ashley Cole is back, we signed a couple of players, plus Manu lost.

20 minutes from now, Jack is going to save the world again. I've waited for so long...