Vancouver epic times

So, I got back from my first visit to Vancouver, British Columbia yesterday and I have to say I had a stellar 3 ish days. Below is the account of what as happened to me, and I will spare as few of the details as possible :D.

Background

I had found a deal about a month ago for cheap Air Canada domestic flights.  Also, I had wanted to visit some professors at the University of British Columbia regarding potentially working for them for my masters. I had been talking to Dr. Haukaas, Dr. Vaziri and Dr. Ventura about meeting up if I was able to make it in on a weekday. Originally I thought of doing this in August before the GRE, but I simply ran out of time. Having success with the first two, I schedule them for the Friday. Now, I had asked Chris and Jill, former Waterloo denizens now living in Vancouver, if I could stay a weekend. Even better, I found out that this particular weekend as the Rhythm City Mess Around, a swing workshop weekend in Vancouver. The 4 instructors were Thomas Blacharz, Alice Mei, Peter Strom and Naomi Uyama. This is very awesome, I thought, because Thomas and Alice are part of the Ninjammers and started the 'I Charleston the World' videos. I had to return to KW early Sunday because it was my dad's 50th birthday and that was not to be missed :).

Thursday

Leaving after work on Thursday, my parents were kind enough to drive me to Pearson. I had kinda overestimated the required time, so spend two ish hours even after a minimal security queue. As a side note, apparently large packs of alkaline batteries for a camera are of concern to newbie security guys.

I start reading the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a great used edition from the 1970's that I found earlier that week. I was simultaneously on my iPod facebook app talking to at least 3 people (John, Anna and Turlough), which made me happy to have their company before I left. The flight itself wasn't anything crazy, it was nice to have the seat next to me free. I tried reading more Sherlock Holmes with mild success, at this point I was getting rather tired and hungry so I kept nodding off. The trip was also interspersed with some 'Big Bang Theory' episodes. 

Landing in YVR, I met up with Chris and Jill who were nice enough to come get me at the airport at 10:30 at night. Taking the skytrain home we met a rather chatty homeless man who wanted to talk about the city and was trying to sell a bicycle. It reminded me how I miss my bike. It was then straight off to bed because I had plans at UBC in the morning and Chris had work.

Friday

The morning began great with a nice rest on Chris and Jill's futon after the flight. A quick breakfast, a pop over to the dépanneur for a day pass, and I'm off to UBC. First of all, I noticed the buses in the day time. I really think it's neat how they're on suspended cables like the streetcars in Toronto. There's no rails and it's a cleaner solution than the natural gas in Waterloo. Apparently these have been around for a while, just that the cities I've lived in have not implemented this.

Oh my goodness the UBC campus is so awesome! The mall roads (large walking boulevards) are lined with everything green. The buildings have ivy growing on them, and of course, the Civil and Mechanical engineering building (CEME), is a concrete bombshelter. Their labs are in an adjacent building clad in rusted corrugated steel appropriately called the 'Rusty Hut'. It’s kinda not fair considering that the computer science/computer engineering, chemical engineering, and every other building on campus are absolutely gorgeous. Touring the campus prior to meetings, I was very impressed at the size of the walkways, the plazas, the rose garden, and the view of the mountains in the distance to the north. I wandered off of campus to the coast where there was a magical rainforest. I descended the massive set of wooden stairs to the pebbly beach, and reached the Pacific Ocean. I sat around and admired the rainbow over the ocean while I was sitting on a pile of rocks next to a seagull.

Afterwards were the meetings with profs. I first met Dr. Haukaas, specialty in structural dynamics. He was very energetic and impressed that I set up meetings with profs at UBC. His specific fields included timber design, risk analysis on structures, and statistical minimization of construction costs due to earthquakes. The last point he was the most energetic about and is something completely new that I haven’t been exposed to. What drew me in was that it is very heavily math focused rather than experiments. I then met Dr. Vaziri who specializes in computational mechanics. He deals with modelling of composite structures like for aircraft fuselage, military vehicles, or armour. Working with him would be very programming intensive and it would be working in a large network of researchers in this field all drawn together by a side project company that was founded by his graduates at UBC. Both of these meetings were positive in the sense that they are willing to take me on as a graduate student, which is insanely awesome. I believe I would lean towards the topics that Dr. Haukaas presented based on my preference of non-industry driven projects.

I wandered back over to Chris and Jill’s where I stopped off at 49^th Parallel for some Ethiopian coffee beans and then met up with Jill to go downtown. As per John’s brother’s recommendations, we stop over at Milano Coffee for an espresso on their very lovely cedar deck. It had a very cottage-y feeling and the coffee was fantastic (took a bag of the la Futura home which has a cocoa note to it). Then we were off touring the downtown. We went to Gastown to see the street and the steam clock, to the harbour for the Olympic torch and lego whale. I tried to find Murchie’s Tea but was unsuccessfully looking in the wrong spot less than a kilometer away. Jill and I take the ferry to the Maritime Museum which lead us back to her place. Chris, Jill, and I got our stuff together and headed over to the dance at the Russian hall. We drove past East Hastings, which is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada, and it showed. It was quite amazing really, and it’s so close to tourist areas.

The 4 piece band, Careless Lovers, was playing lots of Tuba Skinny and Meschiya Lake covers, which made me think of my upcoming trip to New Orleans for the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown. It was a lot of fun but ridiculously hot and humid. We met up with Jill’s friend, Darcy (who was such a Turlough clone!! :P I even jokingly teased him in the same manner), who convinced the group to go to the blues night after the dance. I was so incredibly tired at this point (my eyes were really slow at blinking), but the blues was in an air conditioned sword fighting studio. Katanas, rapiers, and swords in massive buckets and lots of suits of armour. It was very very awesome. I even ran into a guy named Kevin that knows Mel from Waterloo. People know people. Due to people being slow and sluggish, we miss a few buses and tumble through the door at 4:30 am.

Saturday

On Saturday I roll out of bed at 7:30 and people are starting to get ready for the RCMA workshop. Jill and I had originally intended to go to Stanley Park but due to the super late night, that totally didn’t happen. Actually, all of us decided to try out for the auditions to get into the advanced track so we had to be at the locale at 11:00. Very cool, we all got in.

The first lesson was with Thomas and Alice. The basic pattern was a simple eight-count linear move but it played with the type of movement. The really fun part was mixing them up and reading how they change halfway through. The second half of their lesson was on weight and power followed by tension releasing stomp offs. After the lesson I got to talk to Thomas about the 'I Charleston the World' videos and told him about the KW one that's being made (by Turlough, almost done), and he said he'd totally be interested in putting up on their site. :)

The second lesson was with Peter and Naomi which used choreography to string a few solids moves together. Again, the quality of movement was the focus, which was very awesome and totally helped. When it comes to which was better, I really don’t know. I like the energy of the delivery from Thomas and Alice, but what was learned with Peter and Naomi may be more readily applicable to social dancing.

Chris, Jill and I all rushed back to their place as best as we could for being so darn sticky and gross. Darcy went to go visit a friend in far off Surrey, so we didn’t see him until later. We all showered, Chris napped, Jill and I ate chili chocolate, salt chocolate with coffee. Coffee is totally more effective than sleep. We got all fancily dressed up and headed to the dance at the legion, a little late because we got distracted by a YouTube Video of a giant centipede fighting a snake and a mother spider covered in spider babies. This time it was a 10-piece big band, Hoppin’ Mad Orchestra, and they sounded pretty great. I got to dance with Thomas again and Peter. I have to say, I’m still so impressed with the dance I had with Peter, just fun and just everything worked. Apparently he was Caitlin’s partner for a while so we chatted about things going on in Toronto.  The Jack and Jill was pretty darn epic, so it was fun to watch. Having danced with all of those leads that competed, I guess I could have tried, I just wasn’t up for it in a scene I didn’t know. The funniest thing is that I found so many parallel personalities in Vancouver to people in Waterloo and Toronto. Very interesting, so I guess there’s only x number of personalities, and they repeat? Even though there was no late night, we still got in at 2:00 am and basically fell right asleep.

Sunday

A brisk 4:30 am wake up call to leave Jill’s house at 5:15 for my bus to the train to the plane. I tried to wake Jill up like she asked so that she could accompany me to the bus stop, but no knocking on her door woke her. Getting close to 5:15, I guess I woke Darcy up and he actually got up to escort me…which was super sweet! He was totally bleary eyed, in his pjs, walking in the rain with me. I get to the stop just in time to catch the bus, and hug him goodbye. Once I get to the skytrain station, I find it’s closed, so apparently Google maps didn’t give me the right directions and thought the train was operational. I start to panic, so I see a cab with someone getting out. I hop in, but then I see the guy who has just gotten out trying the station doors, I offer to split a cab with him to the airport. Turns out he’s a cool guy who sells snowboards, skateboards and such from manufacturers to retailers and he was headed to Hawaii. Also it turned out that the cab driver was a civil engineer and studied in the UK which is awesome.

The rest of the trip was pretty normal, got a coffee, went on Facebook on my iPod in the terminal, read on the plane. I was happy to see my mom waiting for me at the arrivals gate and to celebrate my dad’s 50^th birthday.

As for now, it’s 1:17 am on the Thursday morning of my departure to New Orleans for the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown. I get driven by my dad at 6:00 am with John Ladan in tow to Hamilton where we meet Dean. From Hamilton we cross the border to fly out of Buffalo airport. The flight there stops off in Chicago and Atlanta on the way back. Three days of insanely good dancing, jazz music, food, and culture. I can’t wait. We’re meeting Anna there so the four of us plus the Toronto crew will make for a very fun weekend with a mix of friends and new people. I think John said it well that it won’t sink in until we’re actually there. So true. Plus, the benefit of two dance weekends in a row, I learned I need more shirts, so I’m armed and ready like there’s no tomorrow…but there is a tomorrow. Anyways. Allons-y!

Paintings

I had these pictures up on Facebook eons ago and when I did a clean up they got deleted, but I figured this is a good place to share them without being too overt. They are presented in choronogical order. I did not really get into the texturing of paint (in case you were wondering). All paintings were based off of pictures, the last one is a conglomeration of pictures in my own way.

History: I used to do a lot of oil painting between grades 1 and 5 (until I moved to Waterloo essentially). Why I didn't continue? I don't know. But my billions of brushes still sit in my little painting backpack with the smock that fit me 16 years ago... Enjoy!

Yes and my name was Annie back then. I tried to change my name to Ann a few years before I moved but it was tough. I legitimately became Ann (my real name) when I moved.

First painting (1996) 10x14

Sent to my aunt and uncle as a gift (1997) 10x14

A personal requested picture (1995), 10x14

An annual painting in our living room (1996), 10x14

Taken from a Christmas card (1996), 4x6

Was in a calendar but got disqualified from the contests because judges didn't believe a 7 year old did it (1996), 10x14

A product of my interests (1999), 4x6

The longest running painting project spanning a few years (1999), 15x17

An ode to a good bike

Today at 6:30 in front of Ye's Sushi in Waterloo, I became bikeless. I had used it thoroughly earlier today by biking to school for a meeting with Sriram, biking home to get my SIN card so I could get my OAN number to apply for OGS, biking back to campus, biking to sushi with Mike, John, Cass, and Gilad. I had locked the main frame to a 3 foot high handicap parking space sign. There was no lock in sight and I noticed the sign was folded that would conclude that the bike was slipped off the sign. I was so disillusioned, I thought Waterloo was safer from bike thefts these days. I remember my friends Alex and Michael from WCI having their bikes stolen on campus multiple times. I filed a police report with the serial number, checking Kijiji, and drinking copious amounts of tea, there's not much more I can do now.

After having my bike stolen I was off to campus to meet Tim to start discussing Troitsky bridge building plans. We bought some popsicle sticks and white glue and discussed design ideas and how to connect the major pieces together. It seems like it's just Tim and I for the building this term, which makes scheduling easier.

 Last of the evening was my private dance lesson with Giulio at Fred Astaire dance studio thanks to a groupon deal. We learned the foxtrot, tango and waltz (which I knew basically already). Funny, they're very different compared to their figure skating equivalents.

Tomorrow is CampusRec open house so a few of us will hopefully be dancing tomorrow to promote the UW Swing Club between 11:30 and 1:00 outside the PAC on campus.

UW Swing Club: Your information station

Hey everyone, it's that time of the year where students go back to classes...on the weekends...WHAT!

This of course refers to the UW Swing Dance Club's weekly lessons that will be starting on Sunday, September 18th at noon in the PAC Studio 1. The beginner lesson goes from noon to 1:30 and the intermediate lesson does from 1:30 to 3:00. The lessons will be about 45 minutes long with some time at the end to practice what you've learned with the other dancers. Partners are not required since this is a social dance and dancer partners will be rotated frequently throughout the lesson. No experience is necessary, so come on out to our first lesson which is a trial lesson. We're registered through CampusRec which means you require a CampusRec membership in order to join, apologies.

Be on the lookout for the UW Swing Dance Club during CampusRec's Open House (September 14th, it's in the PAC but we may be elsewhere) and Feds Clubs Days (September 22 and 23 in the SLC)! Come, say hi, dance with us!

Contact Us:
website: http://swing.uwaterloo.ca/
facebook: UW Swing Club http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16596961702&ref=ts
twitter: UWswing

Other opportunities through the university for dancing:

UW Swing Dance Club's hosted 'Dancing in the Park'
Every Thursday, we grab the club's boombox and head over to the gazebos on the boardwalk by Silver Lake in Waterloo park and dance. This event has been run for many summers and keeps coming back due to its popular relaxed, social (and FREE) vibe. Dancing starts at 8:30 with a mini lesson upon request and goes until the park closes at 11:00. As for the long-term duration, I am up for coming out until the snow falls but it'll likely be mid to late October.

Practice at Perimeter Institute
If you're interested in learning some dance moves or working on stuff you've seen, a group at the Perimeter Institute will be hosting a practice on Saturday afternoons around 3:00 in their squash courts. No official lessons, but feel free to ask any of the physicists how they do those moves. Contact the UW swing club for more information.

Settling in, modelling, and frosh week

And thus concludes this year's frosh week, folks! For once I was actually involved in it since my sparse attendence of my own frosh week four years ago. I was going to take a picture of the engineering frosh teams that I could see through a window down the hall from my office, but then I realized it was not entirely impressive. I definitely heard the chants, cheering, and praise of Ed Com, I saw the strings of yarn taped along every walkway and lots of hard hats, pink ties, and lanyards.

This past Tuesday I co-taught swing dancing lessons for the frosh Variety Night. Since this event is so free form, there's just a whole bunch of student everywhere overloaded with activities. Even a basic lesson of jig walks in 30 minutes is super speedy. Though it seemed like people enjoyed themselves, tried something new, which for frosh week is what counts.

On Thursday was the student team lunch where the engineering frosh got fed after their morning of junkyard wars. The whole week I was trying to work out how to get the concrete toboggan out to the V1 green, but I didn't know how the display case was locked and who was in charge. After much running around and the people seemingly in charge being away on vacation, I threw in the towel because I didn't want to take off the whole morning from work just to figure it out. When I got to the GNCTR table though, Richard the lab tech pulls up in the CivE truck with the toboggan. It seems the 2013 team got enough people to lift the display case - yes, lift, it's bolted together to slide the panels out but it's not secured to the floor - and loaded the 300 lb sled into the truck. The luncheon turned out great, I conveniently had my laptop so I had the GNCTR 2011 highlights and the RMR segment on loop for people to watch. It was overcast but the weather held out which made it more pleasant, windy as heck though. It's definitely fall now and I'm enjoying it tremendously. Heading out to a forested area for a hike in a few weeks will be very pretty.

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As for work, I successfully got keys for my office on Tuesday. It's quite silly how the whole process to acquire keys involves civil eng. deparment, student accounts, civil eng. department again, then key distribution. It was a lot of biking around campus for something so simple. Though I had fun parting the crowds of froshlings with my speedy bike while ringing the bell. They have to learn and there's no time like the present!

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Work-wise, I'm beginning to get somewhere in my work. I understand the basic of Open Sees and I've been using their well-laid out wiki page and examples as a framework for that I need. Turns out that all that the MTO would require is a stick model of the bridge, which avoids me trying to get the 3D slab models to work for the bridge deck. Like any program, you can go into more detail, but at this point, only a theory-level model is required. Due to Open Sees having its own commands, the error messages are complex and hard to decipher, so I've spent a lot of time trying to understand where and what goes wrong.

Since I mastered the 2D framing system, I moved onto a 3D frame and I will be sculpting it to the shape I need. Rather than a simple, equal dimensioned bay 2D frame to use as a basis, the 3D frame example incorporates complex cross sections, being the actual concrete column dimensions with geometrical accurate rebar. This adds a few text files to the program, which I feel some information that I would still require would be buried in there. Another issue is that while I'm currently just augmenting my 2D frame model with 3 dof to a 3D model with 6 dof, I feel that some commands may not operate in the same way or work at all. It's hard to tell with the cryptic error messages. The only way that Asim said you can find the error is just to return a line to the command prompt so that you know if the error happens before or after that ouput.

The end of this week also boasted the installation of and tinkering with Abaqus, the FEM software. The pretty convoluted setup included a static IP to my machine and transferring of an unused license. Now that I think about it, the process was simple enough, it's just that no one who takes care of this type of thing was around for the past two weeks. My first impression is that it's like AutoCAD and Photoshop in the sense that its GUI is complex, technical, and insightful once you know what on earth is going on. I look forward to it :P

They're going back!

Labour Day weekend marks the end of summer vacation and the beginning of school. The back-to-school advertising innundates the radio, the mall, even Uptown Waterloo (and television for those who are familiar with this technology).

I went to Staples today to get UW Swing Club posters and flyers photocopied and definitely saw the kid-dragging-parent-to-gadgets happening and then parents-dragging-kids-to-loose-leaf. I used to work at Staples in the summer of 2006 selling computers, electronics and furniture. I definitely worked the back-to-school week (the pay was great). As I crossed the store to the backroom, I would approached by several frazzled parents about paper and stationary. Good thing I used to go to Staples a lot so that I could help them. I couldn't imagine actually working in this section at this time of year though. In electronics I did get the funny occurrences of parents asking if their elementary school child needs this calculator holding up a TI-89 graphing calculator.

Even though I started work last week, it will definitely feel busier this upcoming week with the frosh running around doing their orientation. This also means that the administration will be back in their offices after their vacation from those impetuous students who had academic terms in the spring :D. This also means that I can get a key for my office and keep the number of times that I'm locked outside my office to a justifiable two.

Tuesday evening, John and I are teaching a few beginner lindy lessons as part of the frosh Variety Night in the basement of the SLC. With these kind of events, the focus is to get the people socializing and having a silly time. It'd be awesome if they get excited about swing dancing and want to join the club, but I feel it's a fun event to be a part of regardless. Plus it's a chance for shy mathies and engineers to hold a person of the opposite gender. In other UW Swing Club news, it now has a twitter account at UWswing.

Thursday at lunchtime is the teams lunch for which I will be there with the 2013 captain to do a presentation, answer any questions the first years may have, and hopefully pick up a few members. As opposed to swing dancing for Variety Night, recruitment is more essential for GNCTR because we can use all the helping hands we can get for design/build/costumes.

On Thursday night, Giulio and I are going to try Tango/Cha cha at the Fred Astaire dance studio in Kitchener in light of a groupon that sold a group lesson, 2 private lessons, and a dance for $19. I have been interested in trying ballroom without the term-long committment of the UW club and I also didn't feel like spending much on this endeavour. Trying it out with a friend should be fun! :D.

I've heard really great things about Chantelle's initiatives to start a swing club at MUN in St. John's. I can't wait to see it when I go (eventually). She's got lesson plans, a website, a contact email, and spreading the word. That's really awesome and I hear there is a lot of interest.

Diary of a grad wannabe: Day 3...

After a good Tuesday where I got a desk, got briefed on what I'll be doing for the term and starting to find out what to do with my computer situation. Abaqus needs a static IP for the license to work, it's also a Windows only software. The available towers are old and controlled by the univsersity, not so desirable. Still working this out, but it might work on my Mac on boot camp, here's hoping!

Day 3 was nice. Started off at home with more readin on OpenSees and doing practice work. I headed into my office where we I got a bunch of papers to read over and get acquainted with the soil-structure interaction project. There was one paper in particular that will be very helpful because it studies the surface vibrations of trains on structures using Abaqus.

What was particularly great today was my discussion today wit Sriram about grad school. He knows that I'm interested in continuing education, but that I don't know where yet. Asking where I'm interested in going (I mentioned Berkley, Cornell and Austin for the US, and Waterloo, UBC, and UofT for Canada), he give his open opinion which resonated with what Rob had told me a while ago. Apparently one of his colleagues from Cornell is due to arrive in Waterloo at the end of October who does stochastic structural analysis. Apparently he's super nice and I'd get to see if I'm interested in his work. I'm told I should also check Michigan, Standford, and Illinois, this is a corner of the states that has so many colleges that it just confused me a bunch and I gave up (so this helps). Like Rob, Sriram made an indication that he'd like me to stay here but that it's my choice. What was really great of Sriram was his attitude that he'd help me with my application even if in the end I chose not to stay at Waterloo working for him. I guess that's the kind of nuturing behaviour that would attract people to stay.

[Thursday's update]: I got boot camp to work on the Mac so I have Windows 7 and Lion on one omnipotent machine. Also I got locked out of my office again and I locked my bike but failed to lock it to the bike rack. It was still there though. I supposed I was distracted today.

Sorry and I need to point out the shoes I found. I don't wear heels unless it's a special occasion, and even then! But when I was in Uptown Waterloo once I saw those and I had liked the style but hadn't found a pair I liked. I waited until they brought in my size and I'm so glad I did! They're lovely and they smell great! (and look pretty darn awesome too!)