Today it's snowing very hard in Coquitlam. It reminds me of the snowstorms we used to have in Ontario. It's a very nice packing snow, and so I couldn't resist the temptation to build a snowman despite how busy I am. In order to be economical with my time, I opted to make a miniature snowman, no taller than about half a meter. This was also partially to demonstrate how good the packing snow was.
Now all my friends are posting to Facebook their hopes that tomorrow will be a snow day at school. Snow days at SFU are pretty common, because the University is situated at the top of a mountain; even the slightest amount of snowfall can make the roads too slippery for the buses to get up there. It's also pretty common for people to get stranded at SFU while the roads are too slippery. Luckily this has never happened to me before, but I try to take the bare necessities in case I wind up stuck there overnight sometime. As for today, the snow doesn't really affect me, and I will continue doing my assignments and playing games unhindered.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The Joy of Phone Interviews
I am applying for an internship at Amazon over the summer, and I had scheduled two phone interviews with them a few weeks ago. The first interview went very smoothly, but there was some confusion over which number they could contact me at. I had arranged to use someone's office for my interview, so that I would have a quiet place without distractions. I had provided Amazon with the office phone number, but on the day of the interview I checked the email they had sent me and I realized that they were planning to contact me on my cell phone. Everything went smoothly in the end, however, because I contacted someone at Amazon about an hour before the interview, and was able to change the number.
The next day, when I had my second interview scheduled, it snowed very hard and the buses to SFU had stopped running, which meant that I wasn't able to get to the office to take the interview. I tried to call my contact at Amazon to change the number again, but unfortunately he wasn't answering. What I had to do was contact one of the coop coordinators at SFU, have them intercept the phone call in the office, and provide the interviewer with my home phone number. The interviewer was about 10 minutes late contacting me, so I was very nervous that something had gone wrong, but once he did finally reach me the interview went very smoothly.
I sincerely hope I don't have to do too many more phone interviews.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Puerto Rico
A while ago I bought a new European boardgame called Puerto Rico, mainly because it has been the highest rated game on www.boardgamegeek.com for several years. I had never played this game before I bought it, but I had played many other Eurogames over the past few years, such as The Settlers of Catan, Amun Re, Bang, and Dominion to name a few, and so I figured I was well prepared for Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico is so popular not just because it's fun to play, but also because it's a very engaging game, requiring a high degree of strategy. The strategy comes from the fact that there are many different things in direct control of each player, and every decision you make affects all the other players. There are a number of different roles that the player can take in the game, which determine what actions may be performed during the round. The player needs to choose each of these roles many times to do well in the game, and there is a lot of strategy in deciding the best time to choose each role. Each role is very different to play, which helps to keep all the players engaged in the game at all times.
The game is a simulation of building a settlement in Puerto Rico, growing resources, building factories, growing goods from the resources in the factories, selling goods, and shipping goods home to Europe to obtain victory points. The ultimate goal of the game is to obtain more victory points than anyone else by shipping the most goods to Europe, and in order to do this one must be proficient at all the tasks involved in producing those goods. You must be a good settler, farmer, builder, and trader if you are to produce and ship more goods to Europe than your opponents, and that's the basic idea of Puerto Rico.
It's a really fun game to try if you're familiar with Eurogaming, and I highly recommend it.
Puerto Rico is so popular not just because it's fun to play, but also because it's a very engaging game, requiring a high degree of strategy. The strategy comes from the fact that there are many different things in direct control of each player, and every decision you make affects all the other players. There are a number of different roles that the player can take in the game, which determine what actions may be performed during the round. The player needs to choose each of these roles many times to do well in the game, and there is a lot of strategy in deciding the best time to choose each role. Each role is very different to play, which helps to keep all the players engaged in the game at all times.
The game is a simulation of building a settlement in Puerto Rico, growing resources, building factories, growing goods from the resources in the factories, selling goods, and shipping goods home to Europe to obtain victory points. The ultimate goal of the game is to obtain more victory points than anyone else by shipping the most goods to Europe, and in order to do this one must be proficient at all the tasks involved in producing those goods. You must be a good settler, farmer, builder, and trader if you are to produce and ship more goods to Europe than your opponents, and that's the basic idea of Puerto Rico.
It's a really fun game to try if you're familiar with Eurogaming, and I highly recommend it.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Day without Internet
Last week, in the morning while I was at school, my next door neighbor hired some professional yard workers to trim her hedges. One of these workers was relatively new at the job, and caused my family a lot of trouble.
My driveway is separated from my neighbor's driveway by her hedge, and the young, inexperienced yard worker needed to use my driveway in order to cut the hedge all the way around. He didn't even come to the door to ask for permission to use my driveway, which I feel was his responsibility. Somehow, while trimming the hedge, he cut straight through my phone line, which meant that my house didn't have any internet, TV or phone for about 24 hours. Needless to say I was pretty upset.
Thankfully it was during the week, so I could use the internet at University, and I wasn't inconvenienced very much. The next day someone came over to fix the problem. He told me that the yard worker was very lucky, because he almost cut through the main power line, which would have electrocuted him.
My driveway is separated from my neighbor's driveway by her hedge, and the young, inexperienced yard worker needed to use my driveway in order to cut the hedge all the way around. He didn't even come to the door to ask for permission to use my driveway, which I feel was his responsibility. Somehow, while trimming the hedge, he cut straight through my phone line, which meant that my house didn't have any internet, TV or phone for about 24 hours. Needless to say I was pretty upset.
Thankfully it was during the week, so I could use the internet at University, and I wasn't inconvenienced very much. The next day someone came over to fix the problem. He told me that the yard worker was very lucky, because he almost cut through the main power line, which would have electrocuted him.
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