The personal blog of a regular guy

I recently went to Sidney on a day trip with family for some crabbing and fishing. It’s not the Sidney in Australia; it’s not even the Sidney in Nova Scotia, but rather the Sidney I went to is a town located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada near the city of Victoria. Sidney is a nice little town with great views of the waters, and the fishing and crabbing was pretty decent. Read on to see what my family has caught during the trip.

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This is probably the last article I’ll write about my experience at the University of British Columbia. UBC has been a pretty good place to me, and so I decided to write a little guide about my Alma Mater. There is a bit of general information about UBC, but a lot of this post is focused on things that I found interesting and relevant through my five year experience at the institution. As such, this is far from a comprehensive guide to the university. More information can be found in UBC’s website, Wikipedia, and the other links contained in this post.

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This is the last yearly reflections article featuring me as a college undergrad, because of course I finally managed to graduate. This was actually my fifth year as an undergrad (due to co-op), but since I took fourth year courses then technically I was a fourth year student. During the past year I spent two terms in school and only one term on co-op, which is in contrast to my last two years where I spent eight months on co-op and only four months in school. This means there’ll be more stuff on my courses and less on my work, but either way it won’t be too exciting. If you still want to find out what I’ve been up to in the last year, keep on reading.

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Now that I finally have my degree, it’s time to write a bunch of posts on my time at UBC. I’ll start off with the most straight forward one which is about the courses of my last undergraduate term and what I thought of them.

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Today I finally received my Bachelors of Applied Science from the University of British Columbia. It took me five years to reach this point. It was a lot of work and a good chunk of time, but I think it was worth it (hopefully ). I have to thank my family… and friends I suppose… for their support through the years, and I have to thank some of my professors as well.

Even though five years of university is more than enough for many, I’m not done with school yet. I’ll be heading elsewhere for graduate studies, but until then it’s vacation time. There is a lot of stuff I need to get done, but I should have plenty of free time as well. This will probably mean, among other things, that I’ll pay more attention to my websites and produce more artwork. I do have some sizable plans for my sites, and hopefully I’ll actually follow through with my plans.

I’ll probably write a post or two about my last year as a undergrad student, but I’m too tired to start writing today. I’ll end this post with a photo of my graduation.

This is a research report that I wrote for one of my fourth year engineering courses. We are supposed to choose topics that are related to renewable or distributed energy, and I chose to write my report about Stirling engines and micro-cogeneration, two topics that have a connection with one another. It’s not the longest report I’ve written, and probably not the best either, but I got a decent mark in the course so the report can’t be that bad. Keep reading if you feel like wasting a couple minutes of time.

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I’m finally back from my three-week vacation to China. I come from China, but I haven’t gone back to my homeland for a long time, so you could say the trip was long overdue. During the trip, my family and I visited a good number of places, and this post is primarily a photo dump of sights and scenery that I saw over my three weeks in China.

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As part of my effort to visit all the notable attractions at the University of British Columbia before I graduate (or my bus pass expires), I visited to the Nitobe Memorial Garden and UBC Botanical Garden. As a current student, I can get into both of these gardens for free, but for some reason I never thought about visiting them until a few weeks ago. Here is my post on the visit accompanied by lots of photos.

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Having been a student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver for the better part of five years, it’s rather sad that I haven’t visited some of the notable attractions within my university. This is especially sad given that, as a current student, I can go into any of those places for free. So before my undergraduate career at UBC comes to an end, I am going to make an effort to visit all of the notable attractions at UBC, and I’ll start with UBC’s well-known Museum of Anthropology (MOA). The museum just recently completed a renewal project, so it’s the perfect time for me to visit.

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There is still a bit over a month left until I’m finished with this school term and my undergraduate career, and I have to wait until June to get my degree, but today I (along with many other graduating engineering students) took a step towards my graduation and got my Iron Ring. For those who don’t know, the Iron Ring is a tradition for Canadian engineers and it comes with accepting an “obligation” to do good work as engineers. It’s not required for graduation or professional practice, but most of us get it because it is a tradition and it’s something to show for (other than our degrees).

The ceremony for taking the obligation and getting the ring was a formal occasion. Since it’s supposed to be “private”, I’m not going to reveal any details about what went on. Instead, below is a picture of me wearing my new ring. For a big guy, my hands are kind of girly, but my hand seems wider and less feminine in this photo .