Sparks of the Day

Playing games is no more a luxury for people that would like to kill some time. And in particular, computer games is what I am talking about. This month theme for cafe scientifique was game design and game theory. It was somehow interesting to see so many young people in the audience, but there was no new information we didn't know before going there. The discussions were not in the scientific direction ( which I was expecting). There were dragged more into morally good/bad and time and again the wonder if there is any correlation between violent games and aggressiveness in people playing them. And no wonder that even some scientific psychological studies results that were mentioned in a paper issued a couple of days ago reinforced the fact that there is no relation at all. It depends on the individual, dot!
Well, the new week is about to start and I would like it to be a productive one. For some reason very low temperatures send my brain to low reaction mode or how the bears call it: hibernation mode
Hem, I need some sun, I think maybe rent a movie or watch pictures of beaches and sun-full places.

Saturday evening, I was at the book club yearly party. It was a party for two book clubs : the Tdot and Toronto book club. One of the Tdot book club hosted the party at her home in Danforth. The house was really nice and there were around 35 people in the room. I wrapped my last book for the book exchange. Actually I got two books, none of them of great title or interest. I opened another of the presents under the tree and this book was even worse. So, I started browsing at the book left for pick if you like it and I found something about psychology and physics. It seems interesting and I was satisfied that I could get something worth reading. I still have to read the book I bought a week ago and I hardly have finished 15 first pages of it.

Tonight is PyGTA and the theme is "programming mantras"; quite intriguing as a title. I am looking forward to see what motivates people when writing code.

This month book was "Wise children" by Angela Carter. I thought December is the holiday month and didn't bother to see if there was any homework. So I ended up started reading the book two weeks before the deadline and I couldn't finish the last 50 pages. Anyway, a couple new faces showed up this month, both studying literature.
As I heard during the discussions, the author is one of the most well-known authors of the 20th century, though this book was not her most astonishing one. She belongs to moder-post-modern authors and apparently "Nights at the Circus" is the most famous and interesting one.
The discussions were nice and people brought some good insights. The book club leaders ( as we are in transition from one to another right now), haven't read the book and I kind of turned into the moderator of the talks. It was really a nice experience to teach myself to listen and not only get exited and jump into the discussions. After all everybody likes to talk and express ideas and opinions and respecting them is quite useful.

The white snow is softly covering the ground and leaves. I am at Linux Cafe', enjoying some blueberry juice and thinking..another winter is coming and everything will be cold and white. Time to go in hibernation mode. I don't think I've ever liked winters but the ones with snow I literally hate. I don't mind the cold so much than the lack of green colours. Maybe I need to collect more plants around me, so somehow to compensate the plain winter white-grayish ones

We moved this past weekend in the west end of Toronto. I have been busy with packing and unpacking this last 10 days and feel tired at the moment. The movers were not careful at all because this was their third move of the day and they were really tired and in a rush to finish asap. They dented my bedroom set in a lot of places even though I mentioned to them many times to be careful about it.

The good news is that the new place is 15 mins commute time from my work. There is a nice view from the balcony. I can see the lake and at night the bridge on the lake shore in Port Credit. The apartment is nice, but I still have things around or hidden in boxes that I cannot find a place to put in because there are not a lot of storage spaces or closets around. We threw out a lot of things and we are thinking to remodel our living room to fit the new space. On the other side my lesson during the move showed me that buying expensive furniture when you are not planning to stay for a long time in the apartment and move again is not a good idea.

Anyway, I have things from work that need my attention and off I go.

Apartment hunting all week
Last week has been busy and I haven't had time to write anything on my blog. We were mostly concentrated on apartment hunting, given we need to move out of the current apartment by the end of the month. We had a look at a couple of apartments in High Park area but there were too expensive for what they were offering. Some salesperson at a house near Keel station were trying really hard but they were asking way too much for the quality of the house. The apartment was going to be given to us "as it is"; which meant dirt everywhere and non-functioning electrical plugs. Another place we went to see, they have already rented and didn't bother to even call back to let us know not to waste our trip. I got really upset by that kind of service, given they had been in business for a long time and rented many apartments.
 

Presentation at IEEE on fuzzy logic on Tuesday

Mike and I went to an IEEE fuzzy logic presentation: how to stop the car when the driver will not. Very interesting tittle which intrigued us for going there but we left the place very disappointed. The presenter was an AI professor at College of Ontario and we were expecting some real research from his part, or at least a very good understanding of the subject. Instead the 1.5 hours out of 2 that were booked, were spent in showing how to create a couple of elementary graphs in Matlab. Pitiful! The presentation was good for some high-school level students and definitely not for engineers working in the area. There was a guy from the audience that worked for two years in a project using fuzzy logic and had real questions worth to discuss.

The presenter demonstrated x=y function as fuzzy logic to stop a car where a simple subtraction would have done the job as well. No conditions other than the speed and distance were discussed when trying to stop the car. How about having some incline/decline , ice on the road, flashing signals, etc?
He even mentioned neural networks but didn't have time to put together some slides( even though we had more than 1/2 hour to discuss about it). He even tried to show us something from his lectures but he couldn't find any slides. All in all a very "fuzzy" experience and somewhat waste of time.

Cafe scientifique' on Wednesday

The topic was quite fun: Why are we stressed? And the discussions were the day after the elections in US, so it sounded really funny when a guy said that even though he is Canadian he felt more stressed about elections down south than the Canadian ones. People get stressed for so many reasons; some need to survive war and some feel miserable for not being able to buy a Ferrari like their neighbours. In most of the cases our brains play tricks and put us into so many "stuck" situations. The stress sensors are natural when related to fear and hunger, but we do not need them any more. So the modern life is demanding
 higher performance, more beauty and less weight, efficiency, etc, etc, the list gets longer and longer every day. And the stress resonators give way when their is a confrontation between what we are/have and what we WANT to be/have.

Free-times Cafe' on Thursday
Brian, one of Mike's friends had a little, sweet presentation at Free times cafe' on College and Spadina. He played on the keyboard some nice songs that he has written recently. We haven't seen him for more than a year even though he lives 20mins walk from our place. The melodies were nice and he seemed more confident on the keyboard. After Brian, two girls come on stage and sang some easy-going fun songs. They used some interesting instruments like ....., ..... We had our grocery shopping in our backpacks and Mike commented that "only old people do that when they go to musical shows"

Mee-tup Book Club on Sunday

Sunday at noon, it was the monthly meeting at Queen W. and Dufferin and this time I have read both books entirely. Eight people showed up and the discussions were really interesting. The first part of the discussions concentrated on Orbinski's book. I expressed my deep impressions from the book, the sad stories that turned into nightmares. And of course the waking up of the inner desire to do something to make the world a better place. One of the guys didn't like the book from the fact that there were no solutions put in there but only the frustration of the writer to deal with helpless authorities. First of all, he worked as a medical doctor and not a journalist. Second, he tried his best and has put a very good example on how to deal with very dangerous situations and trying to keep away from dirty politics.And, third and most important is the fact that there are so many problems nowadays and they are so complicated that just a book cannot be the resolution for all. IT needs many many books and many many discussions till people get into solutions. And I would like to call his efforts: "another brick in the wall".
The second half of discussions were about Plague from Albert Camus. Given that Camus is my favorite author this was the part that I enjoyed most. There a couple of places in the book that always fascinated me with the genuine way the author has brought powerful ideas. One is about the writer that in the middle of plague, when hundreds of people were dying every day, worried recklessly about the first line of his novel trying to reach the perfection. The other story is about Dr.Rieux and his friend going for a swim and the sentence: "For once plague has forgotten us". Things we take for granted every day, can one day turn into the source of endless joy when the situation changes and we are banned from them. The most powerful line in the whole book and in his writings is the observation of human activities. People have the tendency not to accept the thing unless the word is spoken. At the beginning of the event( in this case plague) people were overwhelmed and try everything to escape or at least play the role of victims; but after a couple of months they got used of it and no one had a special status any more; even the dead ones. One cute reference was the one about some guy that killed an Arab and the court is asking for his capital punishment. Well, who has read the Nobel Price novel of Camus can catch the point here, even though there is no relation at all between the books.

For now, I need to get back to work and continue my blog another time.

Why we, human beings, with brain and heart, kill and torture each other in such a cruel ways. I sometimes think we should show more respect to animals, at least their fight is fair and they don't use guns to kill hundreds of thousand within a couple of days. The book I am reading these days talks about the massacres in some of the countries in Africa, the genocide and destruction of human race. It has been days since I started reading that my dreams are turned into nightmares. Every line I read I say to myself: How is this possible?! and my stomach gets up ready to puke.  So many times I struggle to keep my tears falling down my cheeks. How a whole population transforms into a manipulated machine gun and commits the mos horrible genocide to the other population that yesterday was their neighbors and friends. And no one can escape the death; the children, women and other civilians are tortured in the most macabre ways. Before reading this book I would have never imagined that such things existed; even in the fantasy of the most horror book writers. But they are true stories and you can never forget them. You feel fear, anger, revenge, sadness. And what is worse ..these things continue to happen even while I am writing these lines.

The IEEE organized a small presentation about how to be licensed as an engineer in Ontario. The goal was to attract graduated students to enroll in IEEE and
EIT program. The first speaker did a very poor presentation about why should one be a member of IEEE. She kept reading the slides and some times repeating what she has just said, the pitch of her voice was not at all friendly and her presentation in general looked very shallow and not at all convincing.
The main speaker, the manager of the license application program at PEO (Professional Engineers of Ontario) answered a lot of questions professionally and tried to give a good insight why and how to apply for the license.

The main requirements are:

1. Academic background ( graduated in an Engineering field) - all the documents translated if not graduated in Canada/US

2. Work experience by describing the main projects and the role in them.

3. Canadian experience for 24 month under the supervision of an PEng from Ontario.

4. References

5. Extra exams if the committee that is reviewing the application thinks are necessary

6.  interview(Optional)

At this moment, I think the focus of my career is the technical skills. Given the size of my company and the nature of our applications, I doubt there any P
Eng. So that will my application useless. There is an alternative way to gain this experience by enrolling into one of their programs: Engineer In Training (EIT) but that might require for me to quit the current job which I am not intending to. Anyway, it was nice to get informed about the application process even thought the rules might change in the future.

My mother-in-law and I went to Lenny Kravitz's concert yesterday evening. We had really good seats were, just across the stage. The warming-up band was nice, but some parts of the songs needed more elaboration in both melody and lyrics. Anyway, that was short and we had to wait for almost an hour till the main band came in. The songs were quite nice and Lenny had a really nice voice. One young couple showed by the end and the guy proposed to his girlfriend. It was quite an improvisation. The singers words, inviting the public to cheer up were quite simple and sweet, opposite to really salty ones that most of the rock bands throw at people in concerts. I liked one of the songs where he wanted to bring the attention that although involved in daily chores, we still have moments when we think who we are and what is the purpose of our life and what is going on around us. I was surprised that I could remember so many songs. All in all a very nice concert.

One of my university friends, Aksel, was in town yesterday and we got to see each other and chat about old times. There were more wrinkles in our faces, but I could see in him same patterns of behaviour as before. I on the other hand, have changed more during these years we haven't seen each other. And not so much physically (amid my extra pounds) then as a character. I could see myself more relaxed and free to express my ideas and opinions. It was nice to mention what someone we both knew was doing these days, married, children, career. After an hour of talks, two more girls joined our conversations. I knew one of them years ago, whereas the other was a complete new face. Somehow the discussions fell into routine topics: movies, clothes, shoes, yoga classes. I could speak in my native slang and that was something that I miss from time to time.

Mike and I went to the Cafe' Scientifique of Toronto on Saturday afternoon. The subject was very interesting and the room was full of people. The speaker, an UofT professor at the Department of Physics made a short presentation about The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from CERN and the expectations from the experiments that will be conducted on it.

Everything is expected practically from "nothing new that we don't know so far" to "ground shaking principles on particle physics ". The questions were also intriguing and as it always happens with big experiment there is curiosity, enthusiasm, fear and skepticism.

This is the largest experiment ever in history from the size of the lab , around 27 km ring around French-Swiss Alps to the most expensive and the most involved. It was funny to listen at questions like" If we find dark matter, will the world collapse?" even though the levels of energy we are dealing with are tinny.

I remember yesterday reading an article about putting the results of these experiments and finding into technology.

About the contribution of Canada, it's to the order of 15 million dollars and a team of about 150-200 people, scientists, researchers, technicians which made almost 3% of the contribution in the whole project so far.
Unfortunately due to the issue last month, we have to wait for one more year till we get excited again on what the experiments will reveal for us.

It has been already a year since I started this job and it is time for me to prepare my yearly self-assessment. Actually I see this as a good opportunity to review my performance during the past year and put some new goals for the future. It  is also the right moment I could ask for more support on my future career development. I have been brain-storming and written down some thoughts and ideas and I am planning to put them in the official document this weekend given I needed to hand over the report by the end of this week. Before that, some research will be needed for some programs I am planning to apply and also estimating the cost will be very helpful  in order to get approval from my employer.
The focus of my report will be discussing:
1. the strong and weak points in my performance
2. ways to overcome obstacles and improve my skills
3. activities to not only succeed the expectations but become an expert in the field.
4. career development plan
5. time line of my goals

It was one of those nights that I was walking to the subway station looking at the yellow leaves on the stairs, when I felt the autumn. One of the best Albanian poets once wrote "Autumn in nature, autumn on the faces of people". For me it was "autumn on the stairs of a subway station". The colours of leaves just ignited inside me a feeling of lost; the warm long days fading away to leave the seat to short days with the wind blowing and snow carpets.

I ran into a Book Club Meet-up group while browsing the web and I decided to join the group. I saw some interesting topics chosen for the books and I thought, well, I'll give it a try and see. So, the group meets once a month and there are discussions about one or two books. The members come from different background and spices up the discussions. I had to confess, I didn't do my homework this time and I waited for Mike to come back from work and asked him to give me a summary of the book at 1.30 am in the morning. I found it fascinating how people have different perceptions for the same thing. The book and the words put are the same but people have different experiences and feelings while reading them.

The most interesting discussion was about how we as humans can survive if the majority of us will die and the resources are hard to get to. Apparently, some canned food can last many many years. We can end up malnourished by not having fresh food, but we can survive. The transport eventually becomes a challenge in case we need to reach a very far away place. There are some reserves, but how can we get access if e.g we are surrounded by the enemy. We take for granted the abundance of food and then we complain of gaining weight due to over-eating. For the sake of our own health we should appreciate more the resources we are able to get into. I remember a saying in my own language " Eat to be able to live, don't live for food", said in plain English would be: don't be slave of food and commercial cravings but treat food as a mean to keep you alive, something that body needs.

Well, there will be two books for next month. One is The Plague from Albert Camus and the other "An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century" by Dr. James Orbinski. The later is Canadian writer, who describes his experiences as a member and later director of Canadian MSF (Medicens sans frontiers). The book is published this year and there was a long queue at TPL to get it so I ended up buying it. Mike would like to read it too. We found it at BookCity a couple of days ago and I am really enjoying reading it. But for the impressions and thoughts from the book , I will talk about another time, maybe once I read it completely.

I decided to join the gym in my office building, which is convenient and I am planning to do it during lunch break. Well, I already recruited two more to join me for the "Gym Fun"  three times a week. The lady running the gym gave us a very good rate. And, there was a special room just for women, which I am sure will also turn into women talks room, fun fun.