Squirrel Hacker

Here is my reply to the article Out of Province Out of Luck in its entirety:

I have just been through the hassle of trying to get an OWSP job. I never thought of myself as an out of provincer having moved here from living in Holland for high school (that is four years of not living in Canada at all). I did move there from Alberta, but that was 7 years before I tried to apply for OSAP so that I could get a job on campus. I got a very short email that said:

“I was looking at Sean’s OSAP file and he is not eligible to apply for OSAP as he is a Alberta student. The work study program offered through OSAP is for Ontario residents only.”

How am I an Alberta student I wondered as I read the email… I have not lived there for 7 years… So I sent a short message back:

“I am an Ontario resident. I have lived in Ontario straight for the last two years.”

(I did go to Alberta for the first summer because I found a job at a refinery out there, good job if you can get it)

To which I got the reply:

“Have you lived in Ontario for at least 12 months in a row without being a full time student at a post-secondary school?”

Well, obviously not, because I wasn’t even living in Canada prior to that… it is in my record I am pretty sure. They must have access to that because they seem to ‘know’ that I am an Alberta student. Since I did not have a house in Alberta, and my parents were still living over seas for the first year that I was at Trent that means that I was not a resident of Canada by OSAP’s logic:

“That is what OSAP uses as a qualifier. If you live in Ontario for a year without going to school, you are contributing to Ontario and eligible to apply for OSAP.”

Apparently paying phone bills, utility bills, university bills, provincial sales tax (I should be exempt from that too seeing as I am an Albertan!), having an Ontario Health Card, living in Ontario, cut off from my parents by more than half of the country does not qualify me as an Ontarian let alone for the Ontario Work Study Program. What a crock… Maybe I should try applying through the TIP program.

Ok… so markers are assholes. They go through the assignments with the minimal effort that they can put into it. It is evident that they do this.

I got my Operating Systems assignment back and this was made very clear to me. There were comments on it such as “Needs more comments”, and then later “It should only be 2″. The combination of these two amused me because on the line where it said that “It should only be 2″ there was a comment explaining why it wasn’t 2… Nice.

On that question I lost 1 point for not putting comments in the code even though on every line it was quite obvoius what was going on, to make sure that it wasn’t just me who understood the code, I gave it to my friend (an arts major) and she could tell me exactly what was going on at any line that I pointed to. I am a firm believer in the fact that if the code is written properly there do not need to be a whole bunch of comments. If you name a function stringToInt… what else could be going on really? I managed to argue my mark up 1 point for that part as the marker realised that he was being an ass (I guess…).

The other problem I had was on the last question of the assignment. There was supposed to be a proof of some sort. The marker asked the professor how to mark this part, and the teacher gave him some guidelines to go by. This gave the marker free reign to just throw marks on the page without actually thinking about it. He then protested that he ‘couldn’t understand the proof’ when I said that my proof was right. It was pretty evident that the proof was lost on him and that he didn’t understand it, nor had he made any effort to do so. Way to go the extra mile there buddy.

Ok, so I decided that I would get a blog over here cause I got bored of the blogspot one, and hadn’t posted over there in a long long time. This also looked interesting and it is open source so I can see how it works.

There is a pipe that burst (apparently) under my house in Peterborough, so my house STINKS! It is terrible. We called the landlord today and he was here almost all day (he is a great guy) working on the problem. He still hasn’t fixed the whole thing quite yet, but at least we can now flush a toilet without worrying about it filling up the basement. We still can’t run the shower (I don’t want to risk it really) or anything on the main floor yet. I am not sure exactly why this is (I think it might be because this is the pipe that burst). He is coming back tomorrow to finish fixing the problem (he is replacing the pipes that were broken). Fortunately this is reading break and we don’t have to worry about being anywhere or needing to get anything done really so we can stick around while he fixes the problem. I am not sure whether or not we will be paying him for the pipe that he needed to buy (as it is probably our fault that this happened).

I think I know exactly what happened actually… Matt decided to put paper towels in the toilet and it got clogged so he used a plunger and sent them down the drain clogging it and making the pressure in the pipe build up and therefore breaking the pipe. If that is the problem we shall have to talk to him about the miraculous thing called a dish cloth, which can be washed and not flushed down the toilet.

Reading break is not really a break at all though, it is a time to do 2 assignments, to study for the math 260 quiz, and possibly to meet with teachers about the 401 project. Hopefully I will have enough time to figure out the assignments by myself as I have not really looked at them. The 332 one is probably going to be the hardest one as we have to prove one method of CPU scheduling is faster than another (I think). The 305 one will be a lot easier (I hope) because I think I have payed better attention in that class compared to 332 (and it is more interesting to me). I wonder if Steve will be able to help me with the 332 assignment.

The quiz that I have to study for is COSC/Math 260. It should be not too much of a problem, as it is a really short thing compared to the others (man I love Firefox 2.0 RC3 with its integrated spell checker and dictionary). The first one was not too bad, I probably should have studied a bit better for it though.

And I am off.