Life is Sweet

Life has been busy and I have neglected this blog for a couple months, so here is an update.

In the last few months, I worked hard on editing my thesis, successfully defended it and submitted an 8 page paper to a conference on my thesis work. I am done all my school requirements now and will attend the convocation ceremony on June 15th! I'm not interested in doing a PhD, so I'm all done school. I am the main developer of my research group's software though, so they are going to hire me full time to continue working on its development. Thus, my normal life will continue without the thesis stress and with more hours of software development than before. The current deadline is a demo at a conference on May 7th and 8th.

I haven't had much time for fun and games with all the thesis work, but I regularly went to drop-in ultimate and indoor soccer to stay active. Soccer is over now because it was through school but ultimate is just getting busier now that the weather is improving. Today I ran in the Vancouver Sun Run, the largest time 10km run in North America. I finished it with the same time as last year, 52 minutes. Maybe next year I'll have more time for training.

I haven't had that much time for socializing but recently I've spent more time hanging out with other grad students, as well as the usual board game nights with friends and making sushi with my siblings. I also traveled to Edmonton for a week shortly after defending my thesis to visit my friend Toni. The trip was really fun and relaxing even though I was sick the entire time. We played in the snow, went to the museum, watched a lot of movies and played many games. It was great to escape my regular life for a while, although I did do some paper editing while there.