I went camping this weekend, up in Collingwood, at the Craigleith Provincial Park. Its a beautiful campground right at the shores of the Georgian Bay. What’s unique about this shore, is that the shore is made up of fractured pieces of shale, which in itself, harbors the fossilized remains of thousands of trilobites.

On Saturday, my friends Alex, Farah, Nia, Theresa, and myself decided to go canoeing. We had attended to go on the bay itself, but the winds were strong that day, causing whitecaps to appear (when the wind whips the tops of the waves faster then the wave energy can travel through the water, causing the waves to break and making it dangerous for smaller boats). So it was suggested that we canoe down the Beaver River. Supposedly, the waters were calm and it was a novice course, so it shouldn’t of been a problem. As you are going to see, that was far from the case.

The plan was to go from Epping to Heathcote, have a short break, then travel from Heathcote to Slabtown, so we rented two canoes. Farah and Alex in one boat, Theresa, Nia and myself in the other. We decided upon that configuration because Alex, Theresa, and Nia were beginners. Farah and myself had no canoeing experience either, but we have been dragonboating for 3 years now, so we thought the knowledge would transfer over.

The canoe ride from Epping to Heathcote was very smooth. The river was nice and slow, which was great because it gave us time to figure out how to navigate and steer the canoes. Sure, we crashed into the shore a few times, a few of us got hit in the head by a tree, but overall it was a smooth ride. The river was beautiful, and there were no signs of cars, houses, or even human intervention for miles and miles around. The feeling of isolation coupled with our gorgeous surroundings brought upon a sense of great peace and perhaps even euphoria at times. We reached Heathcote fine.

Nia had been sitting in the canoe the entire time, just relaxing, while Theresa and I paddled. She wanted to try paddling, so we decided to switch the seats. I think this was our first mistake. The boats were now Alex and Theresa, and Farah, Nia and Myself. So off we set to Slabtown. It started off smooth. My boat took the lead, as Nia became more confident with paddling. We went around a sharp river bend and saw the water was beginning to flow faster. It was our first rapids. We braced ourselves, but before we could go through, we heard a yell from behind! I quickly turn my head around, and see Theresa and Alex’s boat dangerously dipping far to the right. A few more yells then silence. We started screaming the names but we heard no reply. We were scared, we suspected they had fallen in, but couldn’t see them, because we were around the corner. So we quickly turned our boat around and started to paddle backwards, but were were caught in the rapids! We started paddling hard, and even switched Nia out. But me and Farah just couldn’t fight the rapids. We cried their names a few more times. No answer. So we quickly pulled to the river bank, and I climbed up and ran around to see what was happening.

Thankfully, they were safe. They had capsized, but were okay. The water was shallow, so they were able to pull the boat up to the river bank. The only casualty? Nia’s cellphone. Relieved, I ran back to my boat, and told everyone the good news. I climbed back in the boat, and we waited for them to join up with us again. After a few minutes, we saw them again, and they were about to go through the rapids. They were going too fast though, and not steering hard enough, so they crashed hard into the sloping river bank, causing the boat to fly up a bit and toss them back into the water! This one was actually hilarious, because the river bank was quite muddy, and so, while pulling the boat up, Theresa slipped a couple of times, while Alex played in the river. No one was hurt.

We bailed out the boat, and we were on our way. We thought the worse was over. Alex and Theresa were soaking wet, our boat was completely dry. Life was good. That was until we saw a suspicious looking wire running across the river. The wire was right at our heads, so if we didn’t duck, we’d get hit by it. Also, there was a yellow sign on the wire. From far away, it looked like a black bird resting on a wire, so we thought it said something like, “birds like to play on this wire”, so we decided to paddle a bit closer to see what it said. Here’s what I saw:

Yes. Someone put electric wire across the river! We had gotten too close, and were going to hit it. I yelled out, “ELECTRIC WIRE!”, and frantically tried to paddle backwards to avoid touching it, but I couldn’t paddle fast enough. Just as Farah and Nia were about to touch it, they both jumped out of the boat, and it flipped over, throwing me into the water! I re-submerged and quickly grabbed the boat, to prevent it from floating away. Lucky for Alex and Theresa, they were waiting off to the side, so they disembarked their boat, and walked it under the wire. Unfortunately for Nia, she lost her sandals when the boat flipped over, and had to walk on the sharp rocks with her bare feet! Theresa and I felt incredible guilty now, because when the boat flipped over, most of the contents of our boat was lost into the river, polluting the once spotless water. It was at this point, that we decided to go back to our original configuration. Alex and Farah, Theresa, Nia and myself.

We set off again, a bit shaken from this “near-death” experience. Theresa and I would try to find any piece of garbage we could and throw it into the boat. We spotted a huge pine tree that had fallen down and our bag of chips had been caught in it. We heroically planned to grab the bag, to clean up a bit. Our intentions were good, but our planning was flawed. We thought that if we paddle right into the tree, we could grab a branch, pull ourselves to the garbage, grab it, then pull away. In reality, we crashed into the tree, knocking Theresa under the tree (but still in the canoe), since the water was quite strong at this point. The current was so strong, that we had to push off, or risk capsizing again. So yes. We failed.

Disappointed, we continued our journey. The water started getting stronger and stronger. The rapids got faster and faster. Eppings started to appear. Before I went on this canoe trip, I had no idea what an “epping” meant. Then I got home and googled it. An “epping”, is somewhat of a small vortex in the water. We really should of read that pamphlet more carefully. Our boat traveled swiftly down the river, trying to catch up with Farah and Alex’s boat, which was now far ahead.

Faster and faster we went. We headed around a river bend, only to see another huge pine tree that had fallen down to the right! We tried to steer hard to the left, to avoid it, and for a while, it looked like we were going to make it. But we couldn’t steer fast enough, the current was pushing us too quickly. The pine branches loomed before us, and we braced ourselves as we crashed into another tree. Theresa was knocked over. Nia was knocked over. I was knocked over. By the time the branch hit me, the boat was already leaning far to the left, causing us to capsize once more!

We lost everything again! Suddenly, I noticed that we only had one paddle, I cried out to Theresa, “your paddle is floating away!” Theresa frantically tried to run after it, but there was too much water, so she tried to swim after, but the water was too shallow! So we yelled to Farah’s boat, “The paddle! Grab the paddle!”, they too were too far to get it, so Alex jumped out of his boat and successfully got the paddle!

Nia had lost her slippers earlier, and now she was in the water once again, with rocks as sharp as ever, so we had to carry her to the shore, or else she’d cut her feet badly. Alex helped us bail out the boat, and walked back to his boat and we set off on our way again. We paddled for 45 more minutes until we finally reached our final destination. We have never been more relieved to have seen land.

We originally intended to only canoe for 4 hours, but ended up taking 6 hours! However, despite all the problems, we had so much fun. It was a great adventure that left us with a memory that will stay with us for a while.

In conclusion. This is a geek blog, and nothing has been very geeky yet. I could calculate our speed going around the corners, the distance, velocity, etc… but that would be too troublesome. So I am going to leave you with statistics!

Capsizing Statistics

This is how many times each person capsized:

Farah: 1
Alex: 2
Anton: 2
Nia: 2
Theresa: 3

Since the boats capsized 4 times, here’s the percentage of times each person capsized:

Farah: 25%
Alex: 50%
Anton: 50%
Nia: 50%
Theresa: 75%

Interestingly enough, Theresa was in the boat for every “human-caused” capsize. Does this mean she is bad luck? I am tempted to say yes, but the sample size is not large enough to warrant a conclusion. Perhaps next year, if we go on another canoeing adventure, I will be able to tell you. Until then, I want to say that camping is awesome!

A lot of people have dreams they wish to achieve. I, like most humans, too have a dream. I have decided to document the path to achieving my dream, so that others may follow in my path and increase the happiness-even if it is only momentarily-in their lives. So what is my dream? I discovered it last week, and excitedly tweeted it:

I used to be content with life. That is, until I discovered I could have this hanging on my wall: http://is.gd/sH2

Yes!  The VELOCIRAPTOR HUNTING TROPHY!

Can you even IMAGINE how amazing it would be? To have guests over, give them a tour of your home, while nonchalantly pointing out the velociraptor head hanging on the wall along with your bookcase of Django books? You watch their eyes literally jump out of their sockets, as you try your darndest to hide that smirk that’s just begging to burst free. They ask you, “how did you manage to kill a velociprator?!” You reply, “by following Anton Nguyen’s Guide to Achieving Your Dreams of course!”

Let me outline the 7-step process for you.

1. Decide what your dream will be
2. You need to deeply desire your dream
   
3. Visualize yourself achieving the goal
4. Make a plan for the path you need to follow to achieve the goal
5. Commit to achieving the goal by writing down the goal
6. Establish times for checking your progress in your calendar
7. Review your overall progress regularly

See? Its that easy! I will show you how I plan to achieve my dream, so that you can see an example.

1) Decide What Your Dream Will Be

This is important. It may be obvious, but you’ll be surprised how many people don’t know what they want. So take some time and think about it. As you know, I’ve already decided. Velociraptor head, the most badass of dinosaurs, hanging on my wall!

2) Deeply Desire Your Dream

This is what will motivate you through all this. When you’re succeeding, it will be easy to work. When you’re not, it will be difficult. So you need to want it badly, to drive you to achieve it. Besides, weak desires produces weak results.

3) Visualize yourself achieving the goal

The mind is a powerful thing.  Studies with patients, drugs, and placebos have shown people’s health improving drastically, if they thought they were given the real drug. To put it into perspective, a wish man once said, “if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything!” So imagine yourself doing it, and it will happen. Here’s me imagining:

4) Make a plan for the path you need to follow to achieve the dream

You gotta really think ahead and make a plan. You can’t just go around randomly just “hoping” it will happen to you. I guess this has parallels to software engineering, where you must plan everything out. Here’s my plan.

1. Find out if an island of dinosaurs exists
2. If it exists, visit the island. Then go to step 15
3. If it doesn’t exist, find an amber mine
4. Find a piece of amber with a mosquito in it
5. Extract blood from mosquito, use blood to find raptor DNA
6. Once found, repair deteriorated DNA by filling the gaps with frog DNA
7. Reconstruct raptor, and have it hatch from an egg
8. MAKE SURE YOU’RE THE FIRST ONE THE RAPTOR SEES!
9. If you’re the first one the raptor sees, the congratulations! The raptor thinks you’re its mother!
10. Raise raptor until it is of an appropriate size for your wall, then chop its head off.
11. If you are NOT the first one the raptor sees, you’re in trouble. Build a pen.
12. Put the raptor in the pen
13. Build security infrastructure to raise/feed raptor
14. Make sure ALL doors have rounded door knobs with NO handles! (So that if the raptors escape, their claws won’t be able to turn the doors. They’re really smart you know!)
15. When raptor is of age, “accidently” turn off the power, so that the raptor can escape
16. Smear your blood in a trail leading to you
17. The raptor will smell your blood, follow it, then it will get to a handle-less door with a round door knob! As it tries to learn how to open it, it will be distracted, which gives you a chance to chop its head off!
18. If by chance, you’re in a place with doors with handles, be scared. Very scared. Fortunately, you have the backup plan. Clone a T-Rex.
19. Have the T-Rex kill the raptor
20. Chop its head off

See? Wasn’t it that easy?

5) Commit To Achieving The Goal By Writing Down The Goal

This is almost like the “first step” step you take. It makes it a reality. It sets it in stone. It makes you see what the goal is, so that you can’t change it later on. I’ve already done it, so lets move on to the next step.

6) Establish Time Frames

This is important. You gotta know when each step will happen, so that you can plan accordingly. It helps you keep track of your progress, lets you see if you’re running late or not, etc… My plan has a lot of uncertainties, so I can’t provide dates, only “estimates” of how long it will take.

1. 5 minutes. Just google it. Apparently, a place does exist called “Isla Nubar”.
2. 8 hour flight. Done!
3. Easy. Google it, book a flight. I’m there! 8 hour flight.
4. Easy. Get the miners to do it. Next!
5. You might have to go through a few mosquitoes. Should take a most a day.
6. Easy! Get a network of computers to collaboratively do this and you’ll be done in 24 hours (DES was broken in that time frame)
7. Incubation times for birds are like a month. So I will assume it takes the same amount of time here.
8. 10-15 minutes. You gotta wait around until it hatches that’s all.
9. 1 minute.  After it sees you, you gotta play with it a bit, to let your image register.
10. This could take a while. So you choose how big of a raptor head you want and raise it until its that big. Should be 1 month to 2 years.
11. Construction? 1 month.
12. 3 Hours. You gotta build a crane to lower the raptor down.
13. 1 month. Construction + Security stuff to build.
14. This should take just a day. Hire constructor to change all the door handles.
15. Finding the power supply should take an hour, maybe quicker if you can find the blueprints. Turn it off, then run for cover.
16. You have to do this quickly, or else the raptor will tear you to bits and pieces. I’d say 1 minute. You HAVE to finish it in 1 minute. Once they sense you, they can accelerate at a rate of 4m/s^2, reaching a top speed of 25 m/s. You do not want to die! This would be the opposite of achieving your dreams!
17. 10 minutes. It might take a while to chop its head off.
18. The T-Rex cloning should take as long as the raptor cloning. So I’d say a month.
19. 5 minutes of awesomeness!
20. 10 minutes. Dream Achieved!

7) Review your overall progress regularly

You gotta always re-examine your progress, to make sure you’re on track! Or you will fall behind! So for example, if I havn’t reconstructed and hatched a raptor yet after 1 month, then I know that obviously, one of my scientists have screwed up, meaning I would have to fire them, and hire someone who really knows what they’re doing.

There you go! How to achieve your dreams! I’ll be starting up soon, make sure you come by in a few months, to check out my “bookcase”.

I was happily browsing the internet, when I accidentally stumbled upon some sort of Twilight fan site. I thought to myself, “what am I doing here? I should just leave”, when suddenly, I was bombarded by thousands of ads! I started closing them one at a time with my mouse, closing them at a rate of 88 ads per second. I thought I was going to come out okay, but then I accidently clicked on one of the ads! Bolts of lightning started coming out of my computer screen, until I ended up at Stephanie Meyer’s blog in the year 2003! I guess I clicked on some sorta timewarp hyperlink, which sent me and my laptop back in time.

Stephanie had written a post, asking for some romantic monsters, so being a helpful guy, I suggested “zombies”.  But after I had commented, my laptop started flashing again, and I arrived back in the future, and to my shock, the twilight site was renamed to “midnight”, and the poster now looked like this:

I had turned Edward into a zombie! So I quickly checked out the wikipedia page for “Midnight”, and here was the summary:

Bella Swan moves to rainy Forks, Washington and attracts much attention at her new school and is quickly befriended by several students. When Bella is seated next to Edward Cullen in class on her first day of school, Edward seems utterly repulsed by her, muttering to himself “braaaaaainsss…” while limping away in disgust However, over the next few days Edward warms up to her, and their newfound relationship reaches a climax when Bella is nearly run over by a fellow classmate’s van in the school parking lot. Seemingly defying the laws of physics, Edward saves her life when he pushes her out of the way, gets hit by the van, loses his hand, but is miraculously able to reattach it by himself.

Bella becomes hellbent on figuring out how Edward saved her life, and constantly pesters him with questions. Bella concludes that Edward and his family are zombies who eats animal brains rather than a human’s. Edward confesses that he initially avoided Bella her brain seemed so fresh and delicious. Over time, Edward and Bella fall in love, despite Edward’s constant hunger for Bella’s brains, and Edward’s rotting odor.

At first, I thought it was kinda cool. I mean there’s zombies right? So when my girlfriend dragged me to go see it, I thought it’d be a bit more exciting. I was wrong. Here’s an excerpt:

Bella: You’re incredibly slow, your skin… falls off all the time, you don’t go into the sunlight, you only eat animal brains…. How old are you?
Edward: Seeeveeeennnteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenn….
Bella: How long have you been seventeen?
Edward: … a whiiiilllllleeeeeeeee…hmmmm….braaaiiiiinnnnssss….
Bella: I know what you are.
Edward: Saaaaay ittt….saaaayyyy itttt outttt louuuuuuddddddddd….
Bella: Zombie..

I could not handle it. As bad as Twilight was, Midnight was far worse! The zombies were soo incredibly slow! Eevvvveerrrryttthiiinngg theeeyyy saaaaiiiiddd waaassss likkeeeee thisssssss! And they’re be losing their limbs all the time! I mean, wow sexy is a make out scene with Edward and Bella, if Edwards hands and lips keep falling off? And how stupid are the zombies? They try to fit in at a high school, but don’t even bother to patch up their scars or fix their bleeding orifices! Oddly enough, girls still found Robert Pattinson sexy. Despite his mangled appearance.

I knew my girlfriend would be dragging me to see every single movie, and I don’t think I could of handled it, so I hopped back on my laptop. Went back to that fansite, closed ads at a rate of 88 ads per second, accidently clicked on one, and got sent back to 2003! I then went back to the blog, found my commented, DELETED it, and then suggested vampires!

I went back to good ol 2009, and everything was back to vampires! My girlfriend will probably drag me to New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, but at least I won’t have to endure the vampires limping everywhere they go!

I’ve been playing with Google Trends a lot lately, and discovered a whole bunch of cool new ones!  So lets start with the periodical ones:

At first I was confused by this one, I mean why would black just keep getting bigger and bigger every year?  What was the correlation? I figured it out. It was people searching for “black friday“, so if you compare the two graphs together, they look almost identical:

So that nicely explains it. I then decided to look for cheat:

For some reason, there’s a HUGE spike in the Christmas/new years season, with somewhat of a hump during the summer season. This one perplexes me. I mean, are people more promiscuous during the holiday season? Perhaps in the summer, people wear less, and thus more wandering eyes followed by some action? Who knows! But that got me thinking about pregnancy:

Which gave me perioidc results! This one surprised me, since its so distinct. Maybe the cold weather? As well, note how “birth” correlates quite nicely with pregnancy. I’m thinking, that when girls find out they’re pregnant, they quickly google the birthing process to see what they’ll really go through.

At this point, I moved onto parties and hang overs. There’s gotta be a connection.

Although both are periodic, there seems to be very little connection between the two. I did however, find a correlation between diet and gym:

Why does everything happen during the winter/Christmas season? Anyways, this one makes sense. Dones of turkey during the holidays, followed by gym for a bit. This got me thinking about the seasons, and I got really nice results:

See that? Isn’t it pretty? A lot of weddings happen during the summer, so I decided to check it out too:

Which worked as I expected. Lots of weddings in the summer followed by a  sharp drop in the winter. I was actually surprised that “date” was periodic too, and it sorta followed the winter drop as well. Although I suspect it may be a coincidence more then anything. What else is popular during the summer? Festivals!

This one was very distinct, which is why I liked it so much. Here’s one I found disturbing:

The activity with colleges and universities decreasing each year. What does this mean? Are people getting dumber? Here’s a happy one:

Haha, did you read that? I made a “punny” pun. HAHA, did you see that? Alliteration! Whoa I’m on a roll! Okay… I’ll stop now. The trend of happiness and care is quite interesting. It seems to suggest that people are happier during the holidays, but in return they care less. Could this mean that you’re happier the less you care? Well, they do say that “ignorance is bliss”.

Our final result is quite a funny one. You know how you can use google as a calculator? Try it out. Calculate 1+1. I dare you. Its a simple enough thing, but for some reason, Ukraine doesn’t think so:

I mean, searches for “1+1″ from Ukraine drawfs  everywhere else!

That’s all I have for now, enjoy!

I read a rather interesting article last night, “MySpace shrinks as Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo grabs its users“, and I thought to myself, “That might be an interesting Google Trend to See”.  So I went on Google Trends again, and lots of fun stuff was discovered. Have a look.

According to this trend, I don’t believe Bebo affected myspace at all. Even Twtter hasn’t been much of an impact. Its Facebook that seems to have had the biggest impact. At the beginning of 2008, it was about the same, until Facebook began its explosive growth.

At this point, I got interested in finding “periodic trends”, so here’s a few of those:

Best Buy has big spikes at the end of each month. This is probably due to Black Friday, and Christmas/Boxing Day.

Wine is surprisingly periodic as well. But as you can see, its always near the end of the year, where people are having lots of parties and dinners. The same trend  can be seen with Turkey:

So you got your Thanksgiving peak and the Christmas peak. There’s a mini-peak before the big Thanksgiving one. That’s probably due to our Canadian Thanksgiving. Here’s one I can’t explain:

Why is breakfast periodic? And what does it peak during the summer? There’s too many possibilities. Maybe people are sleeping more during the summer, so they wake up and have time for breakfast? Or possibly because people are on vacation, and wanna try out some breakfast. Lets see what the trend is for vacataion:

As you can see, the breakfast and vacation graphs match each other rather well. Especially in the summer! However, people on winter vacations don’t seem to be so interested in breakfast.

Lets check out the trends for pie and pi. I didn”t expect pie to be periodic, but I expected pi to be so:

But I was proven wrong. Spikes for pi (pi day), and spikes for pie near the end of the year. Pies are usually eaten at thanksgiving dinner and at christmas, so this probably explains it.

A really nice graph I found, was for sports:

Very nice graphs! All periodic, I’m guessing, peaking for the finals, then falling during the off seasons. Its quite interesting as well, because you can see the various sports scheduling their finals so that there’s no “conflicts” with other major sports.

We can look at various past times as well:

I liked these results even more. Vacation peaks in winter and summer, skiing peaks during the winter, and small gardening peaks in the summer.

I decided to look up Kama Sutra. Why? I don’t know. I just did. The results per region were very interesting though:

Very surprising, I thought India would be first, since they were the creators, but no, it was little ol’ Indonesia!

At this point, I decided to get a bit more serious, and touch on a very serious subject: Rape. The results weren’t intereseting, however the locations were:

As you can see, our friend “Pakistan” makes up a huge chunk of the searches. Unfortunately, women’s rights in Pakistan isn’t too strong, and you frequently hear stories about “honor killings”.

On a happier note, lets check out programming:

India comes out on top. I guess it makes sense, considering how many projects are outsourced to them.

Hope you enjoyed this session of Google Trending!