ni hao

I'm chugging away full steam ahead on my 6-credits-in-one-month intensive Mandarin course for the summer. I'm not sure if I should shoot myself, since we didn't hit the meat of the course content yet, but I'm enjoying it so far.

This post is only going to be a short vent. A goals post is coming up soon - it's kinda late right now and I'm getting sleepy.

First off, I'll mention a failure I went through. I went for an interview at some corporation. I went home. I sat by my computer for days. I worried. Then I got a call that they gave the job to somebody else.

Now, my job hunting experience is hardly extensive. I've worked here and there, volunteered a bit, but never worked what would be considered a 'real' job. This could've been my first - sitting at an office dressed slightly fancier than usual plugging away at a computer making $15 an hour. My friend who worked there said that it bored him out of his mind, but I don't care about that right now. This job could've helped me pay off a full years worth of tuition and more. Damn, it hurts thinking about it.

I guess the only positive thing that came out of this experience was that the HR rep decided to call me to inform me of the decision, even though she was e-mailing all the other candidates their rejections. As I looked sad on the phone, she said that I did ace the interview, and that she wouldn't have me change anything on that. But someone else had SQL experience, and although it was not required to apply for the position, it was definitely an asset. She told me that she'd keep my application on the file and consider me for any upcoming positions. At least it softened the blow.

Now what? Now I gotta spend some $1600 on my summer courses.

:(

On the side, I've been practicing Android app development. There are a hell of a lot of things to remember when setting up an app, but things seem to be simple enough once the basic framework is set up and you understand the flow of things, from XML layouts to the Android manifest to the Activity classes. The only thing I'm stuck on right now is with the illustrations. I've had Paint.NET open for a day now, and I've been struggling to figure out how to draw a colored circle out of all things. My sister laughed at my incompetence with digital art (she just finished up her Art AP submission).

Well, I'm going to play a round of Dota 2 now, and go to sleep. Another post coming soon.

mid-life crisis

I don't know if I can call this a mid-life crisis. I'm not even 20 yet, but heck, I can't think of another term for it.

I don't really feel like typing out the specifics, other then that I am questioning a lot of things about my life, not not feeling too good about them. It's definitely preventing my short summer break from being the cheerful one I was expecting. Not being able to land 2 jobs that I got interviewed for was probably a catalyst for this, but it has existed in my head for a while now.

I think I'll sit at my table for the next few days and just think this through.




:(

and some Skrillex

Damn if this doesn't get me moving with the volume cranked up to 11.
Skrillex and Nero at their A game.

removing the middleman

(Not really a blog post per say, but I can write whatever I want on here. That means no proofreading, hell yeah.)

I've been thinking about the removal of the middleman in business services, and how it's becoming a fairly common thing. What do I mean my that? I'm referring to when there is a person who wants a service, and there's another who can provide that service, the transaction between them is done directly with absolutely no mediator. The big middlemen I've been thinking about are publishers, and even banks.

Bitcoins are getting some serious attention nowadays, and in case you don't know what they are, you should go read up on it. It took me a few hours of reading and research to fully grasp the idea of a peer-to-peer currency system, but once I caught on, I realized that the creators of this currency algorithm were onto something big here. The significance of this really shows, with the current value of a bitcoin estimated to be at $75 CAD.

What Bitcoin sets out to accomplish is to remove banks from transactions. Crazy? Yep, but it's been proven to work so far with the thousands of drug deals that are done through the currency with government agencies having no way to track the transactions. Each transaction is stored as a bitcoin block, which is added to the previously existing blocks that are distributed on the peer-to-peer network that powers bitcoin (which requires bitcoin miners, but that's a whole other topic). Anonymously. Money can go in and out of accounts, and the people behind them can never be tracked.

In a world dominated by bitcoins, there will be no banks. Also no taxes, since the government can't track the money - which would result in all sorts of nation-breaking problems. Plus probably a massive surge in hackers who want to take over other computers to gain access to either the bitcoin wallets or their untapped GPU power for extra bitcoin mining. This will never happen, but the important thing is that this is allowing for money transfers through the internet with nobody needing to regulate the exchange.

Publishers, like banks, are not going away anytime soon, but there are instances popping up where they seem to have less control over their own domain. In the video game industry, Kickstarter is gaining some serious momentum and allowing for AAA titles to be developed with money straight from gamers who want the game in the future. The biggest project I can think of at the moment is Project Cars, an incredibly ambitious racing simulation that's schedules to release on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. Without the aid of a gaming publisher, they have been able to raise almost $5 million directly from fans. The developers will earn 100% of the revenue without having to fork over a chunk to publishers, who would probably blow a couple million on things like marketing and focus testing. It's a huge win for both sides.

Even without Kickstarter, games are adopting models where fans can pay to support development and gain early access to games to provide feedback to developers. A lot of people refer to it as the Minecraft model, since Minecraft was the first major game to allow early purchases at a cheaper cost (less than $10 at the pre-alpha stage, I believe). Games like Arma 3 are getting massive sums of money from fans even before the game's even coming out.

In the book industry, big shot book publishers are starting to feel the early pinches of the ebook model, which allow for self-published authors to succeed in the online marketplace. The Wool ebook series has been selling like hotcakes through Amazon's direct publishing system, and the author Hugh Howey has been making bucketloads of money. He started off with modest earnings in the couple thousands per month, which soon skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands per month. The guy even sold movie rights to Ridley Scott!

Naturally, book publishers wanted a chunk of the pie, so they offered him million dollars deals. Howey refused them all. Sensing how big this was going to be, they started offering deals in the tens of millions, but they couldn't get appealing enough offers for Howey, considering that he was making serious bucks without any corporation aiding him.

As of right now, he's one of the very few successful self-published authors. I believe the reason they're not prevalent yet is due to the marketing. When people walk into a bookstore and see a cool cover of a book, they want it - or at least want to check it out. With ebooks, especially the ones that never hit the physical market, it's difficult to get that level of exposure. But considering everything that is going on, it's not unreasonable to believe that consumer behavior will change to be online-focused, and more authors can make it big without taking a gamble on publishers.

With all this going on, it's probably safe to predict the direction of these industries. Big corporations cannot change fast enough to always keep up with changing consumer demand. Smaller groups of people who actually develop the service can. These groups of people do not want to be constrained by the corporations. Once effective lines of communications can form between the providers and the buyers, we'll start to see some serious overhauls in the industry.

goddamn daylight savings

My weekend is an hour shorter. Too much shit to work on!

damn i'm fast

I don't normally post this often, but I'm feeling good today.

Last time I attempted a cycling trip to UBC, it took about 1 hour 50 minutes. And I was tired as fuck afterwards.

This time, I got to campus in 1 hour 10 minutes. That's fast. Just as fast as taking public transit from home, if not faster.

Holy shit. Not gonna lie, I'm pretty proud of that.

Unfortunately, the way to UBC is an uphill battle, and I don't want to arrive at school feeling like I just ran a marathon. I think I will be doing the standard half bike half bus on my way to school and biking the full distance on the way from. Maybe I'll meet a prof or two on the way!

Only two photos this time around - I wanted to minimize stops.

Damn right, someday I'll beat all y'all lazy asses taking public transit.

My ghetto $100 dollar bike. 1980s Norco Model.

Suck it haters.

Generic sunset shot off of the Arthur Lang Bridge

buying a pc

I've been wanting to build my own PC for a while. I actually never understood how a PC worked, since my home only consisted of laptops. I believe that last time we owned a desktop PC was back in 2003.

On a side note, my dad purchased a PC for $3000 back in the 90s when they were just starting to enter the consumer market. Apparently the thing was massive, and my mom got pissed at how expensive it was. Of course, our smartphones are exponentially more powerful for a fraction of the price. Crazy how technology evolves, right?

I thought about buying the parts and building myself, but I figured that it woulds be really inconvenient. I am new to online shopping, and from my experience, I find deliveries to be quite inconsistent. Also, I didn't want to buy all the components brand new, as parts like DDR3 RAM sticks and coolers can be bought used on Craigslist for very reasonable prices.

So I just bought a used PC. $500 cold hard cash. How did I pay for it? I sold three sets of Kendo armor lying around in the closet for $800. Plus an old piano keyboard nobody was using for $110. Not too shabby. Maybe I'll write a post on my Craigslist adventures later.

Now that I've owned the PC for a week, I really understand the ins and outs of the inner PC components. It's not so bad. The power supply (ideally at least 750 watts, if you plan on heavy gaming) and the motherboard are attached the the case, and other PC components such as the network card and the graphics card are attached to the PCI / PCIe slots on the motherboard. A cooling solution must also be installed on the CPU, the RAM attached to the RAM slots, and all the cables attached correctly.

To be fully honest, the PC isn't 100% perfect. It was a good value, yes. The seller was very helpful, offered support even after the purchase, kept the PC in great condition (complete with cable management), and most importantly, delivered straight to my house so that I wouldn't have to lug a 40lb (or whatever the weight is) hunk of metal around via public transit.

1) The motherboard only supports first generation Intel Core CPUs.

This is probably the biggest issue I found with the PC, but for my purposes it's not a huge deal. At the moment and in the forseeable future, I don't think I'll be running incredibly processor heavy tasks that the current processor (Intel Core i5 750) cannot handle. Even games like Planetside 2, which is the only recent game in which gamers experienced CPU bottlenecks, runs silky smooth. In the worst case scenario, I could probably find a i7 950 (which surprisingly, still sells for $300 at retail stores despite the fact that the model has been discontinued for at least 2 years). However, I can see the motherboard needing an upgrade in a few years to accommodate the new and relevant processors.

2) The graphics card only supports Directx 10

Normally, this wouldn't bother me at all. Every game in recent memory has supported dx10, heck, sometimes dx9 as well... however, things are going to change with the release of Crysis 3. Crytek has decided to make the game require a dx11 card in order to even run (the application does a check before it starts up). This time, I'll be siding with the conspiracy theorists with the belief that Nvidia paid them off to set dx11 cards as a minimum so that their more recent models will sell. The graphics are nice and all, but it would require minimal effort on the developers side to make the game dx10 compatible.

Well, I guess I'll be skipping on this game.

Well, we all have to start somewhere. Before, I didn't even know that motherboards support limited types of CPUs, or that graphics cards were designed around specific Directx versions. This is technically my first PC, and now that I have gained a huge understanding in how the components work, as well as what components in the market are currently overpriced or worth buying, I can guarantee that my PC upgrade in a year or two will transform this machine into quite the beast.