Tempest7: Blogger

A jobless schedule

There has been a number of times in my life when I have been without a job for a duration of time. The earlier portion of this current period seemed like any other; relaxed and wasted. Recently though I have noticed there are always things to do, enough that I can even feel busy dispite having no "job" to go to. The housing situtation has been basically resolved, I think it is pretty much a sure thing that this house has been sold. My brother has been making arrangements to move out to Oakville, and I have spoken briefly with Sai about moving into his basement. After I confirm with my parents that it has been sold and the process of closing has begun then I will start reducing the amount of material items I possess. Over the last 2 or 3 years I seem to have accumulated quite a bit of junk. Well, not really junk I have a lot of spare computer components, and a lot of old clothes. I hate the feeling that I have wasted money on buying these things, but truthfully I need to admit that if I do not plan to use them again, even keeping them around for emergencies is costing me space. When I move out to Sai's I plan to have only what I will bring with me to China.

My Mandarin course has been going well. I was a bit rusty yesterday in class due to lack of practice during the week. It is fairly hard by yourself not living in the environment to focus on studying a foreign language. The restaurant we went to (Sichaun Garden) was decent, I thought the food was acceptable and the fish dish recommend to me by Mingjian was good. We had a dish that looked just like streaded beef with pepper, except it turned out to be very spicey. Sun Qiang brought out a friend, Jerry, that came to Canada from Shanghai. He was a nice person, very helpful speaking with my classmates. He made some good recommendations about doing business in Shanghai.

I've been recieving a few e-mails from Akira recently who is still out in Montreal. He has been studying hard and plans to return to Japan sometime in November to December. I guess he can't stand the cold, Montreal being a great place to experience cold weather. He mentioned something interesting in his e-mails, that when he spoke to people in Montreal and informed them that he just arrived from Toronto, they often ask him which city is better. They then proceed to bring up positive points about Montreal as to sway his decisions. He likes both cities and made an analogy to this situtation, it is similar to people from Osaka and Tokyo. People in Tokyo and Toronto do not care as much about Osaka or Montreal (respectively) but the reverse does not seem true, the smaller city seems more self-concious in the shadow of the bigger one.

It has been a slow process redownloading Great Teacher Onizuka. I think the effort is worth it, this is one of my all time favourite dramas. Rewatching it agian has strengthen that thought, there are many points or "lessons" that are good for me to focus on, including the thought of Travelling to China. In one of the episodes Kuroda Miki (黒田美樹) who plays Nomura Tomoko has to make a decision to drop out of school in her hopes to become an idol, or to play it safe finish her schooling and live the normal life of a Japanese women. Of course everyone recommends that she do the sensible thing, except Sorimachi Takashi (反町隆史) who plays plays the teacher Onizuka forces her to leave class, because doubt stopped her from taking a risk. He doesn't want her to regret not trying something because of her inability to make a decision. When I reflect on the fun I had traveling to Seattle by myself, I know this is a chance I may not have again.

This afternoon I recieved a surprise call from Carol Calhoun of the SANS institute. I have worked with her twice before in separate SANS conferences. Apparently they had a drop out a week before the conference in Toronto so I agreed to fill in for the volunteer position. The volunteer work is actually hard work since the time period is so long. But I enjoyed my previous experiences and the information has always been good for me. I will be monitoring SECURITY 504: Hacker Techniques, Exploits & Incident Handling this time, so I will be downtown all day for next week starting from Saturday.

posted by Tempest7 @ 07:09