My citizenship ceremony today went well. I was one of about 450 new Canadians sworn in. One of the officials said that there would be 1200 new Canadians in Vancouver today, so we should hold off on applying for a passport unless we need it for immediate travel.

One of the judges read off the countries of origin of the crowd. It was a long list, from Afghanistan to Vietnam. Notably absent were Zimbabwe and, um, Yemen.

Then I had an exam a few hours later, so I'm a little tired now.

Last week, I finally got confirmation that I passed the rigorous citizenship test. I'll be swearing allegiance to the Queen of Canada at the Italian Cultural Centre in a couple of weeks. I love it.

I was in Whistler for the weekend and tried to visit a record store I've heard a about a few times, but it was closed. 1-7pm Wednesday-Saturday? Mike, I respect your hours.

There was a guy with a laptop and webcam in the front row of my tutorial last night. I figured he was just "taping" the prof, essentially replacing one of those convenient little tape recorders with a bulky laptop setup. I found out later that he was connected to the campus wireless network and sending a live audio+video stream to his room mates who were too lazy to come to class.

After class, I showed my prof how to connect his iBook to the wireless VPN server. I had flashbacks to elementary school when everyone wanted to work the video projector.

A while back michal and I heard that the Canadian goverment was updating the classic Hinterland Who's Who TV spots. For me, those spots are Canada distilled down to 30 seconds. I remember watching them while eating grilled cheese sandwiches after school. While doing some research for my environmental ethics class today, I found out that there's now a Hinterland Who's Who web site including the original clips, the re-releases, and even some parodies.

Canadian nostalgia top ten

• Hinterland Who's Who
• Hockey Night in Canada theme
• Bob McDonald
• reading the French side of the milk carton while eating breakfast
• David Suzuki
• that kid everyone knows who got his tongue stuck to the flag pole in winter
• Sorels
• Participaction
• toques
• goofy French-Canadian presentations in elementary school

I went to a talk by Dan Gelbart, CTO and co-founder of Creo yesterday. I'll admit I was initially drawn by the free pizza, but the presentation was even better. Mr. Gelbart spoke casually about starting Creo and gave some advice about starting a technology business. He's an excellent speaker - very much at ease in front of a crowd, well-spoken, and quite funny.

I asked him if he ever looks back on his education and wishes he'd paid more attention in any particular classes. He enthusiastically answered that yes, he wished he'd paid more attention to most classes in university. For example, Lempel and Ziv of LZW fame taught him at one point, but he skipped so many classes that he didn't take advantage of their genius. He went so far as to calculate the minmum number of hours he needed to study in order to renew his scholarship each year. But he said that what he didn't realize at the time was that one doesn't often get a chance to listen to so many people who really know what they're talking about and that we should enjoy university while we can.

He also suggested that we pay attention to any good professors and try in particular to understand math and physics because everything else follows from there. In a room dominated by physics and engineering physics students, I think that message was pretty well received. "When you open a new book and it starts with 'this triple integral obviously shows [...]' and you don't see it, you'll just close the book and go on to other things." Words to live by.

He also mentioned that his passion is electro-mechanical systems and he has a pretty fancy lab at home, so now he's mostly a gentleman of leisure.