February 28, 2002
A general question; what do you want to see? Why have you come here? A regular? Just passing through? Are you here for some daily reading, to look at pictures, do you want more writing? The return of fonts and wallpaper? A few songs for download perhaps, weird shit. Hmm, it’s deffinitely a good idea to get a bunch of projects started during the last month of the semester. Avoid work at all cost.
February 27, 2002
There’s a free version of Maya out now. It’s crippled, but it might be nice for a little test run.
From one programming assignment into another. From one programming language into another. Followed by this and that. The world will be a nicer place come April. That’s what we all say. And I’ll be so happy once this semester is done. I think part of it is the weather, the end of school coincides with the start of spring/summer. It brings new life and happiness.
February 25, 2002
I’m fighting with the theoretical part of my computer assignment right now. I didn’t really have many problems with the programming. Two ordered dictionaries, S and T, describe an O(log^2) algorithm to find the key greater than exactly n keys in the union of S and T (given there are 2n keys and no duplicates).
I just ate a damn good sandwich. At this point you think, shit, this guy’s writing about eating a sandwich, I’m leaving. Well yes, it was a damn good sandwich and should be recognized. Some good quality bread, some mayo, some mustard, some Montreal smoked meat and slice of havarti cheese, oh yeah.
February 24, 2002
The photo section has been touched up a little bit. The design of the main page hasn’t changed, but the navigation for the subdirectories is a whole lot better.
February 22, 2002
Dave Barry on curling:
[Curling] is one of the very few sports that combines the excitement of a heavy piece of granite sliding slowly across the ice with the excitement of chunky broom-wielding people in bowling attire sweeping furiously in the stone’s path, like janitors on speed.
No Canadian gold medals in olympic curling, what a disappointment. We always seem to do well during the round-robin in international play but tend not to be able to keep it up through the playoffs. And then there’s the men’s hockey, we’d love to get our hopes up about that one but they have a tendency to cop out at the end too. Here’s wishing them the best of luck.
TSN has been pimping Men With Brooms during their commercial breaks, I’m looking forward to seeing it. A Canadian comedy about curling? There’s no way this one could go wrong.
Epitonic is a great site for killing time. It’s easy to dive in and start downloading music without being forced to jump through hoops. It’s worthwhile to pick up some tracks by Wheat — make sure to grab Off the Pedestal.
February 21, 2002
I watched Ghost World last night. I enjoyed the last half of the movie, but thought the first half was crap. I sat there listening to the angsty teenage bullshit and was prepared to stab myself in the eye to make it go away. It got better and I started laughing, so things were better. I think it’s worth watching. Some of the visuals in the movie were pretty amazing; there was some nice framing and awesome s. I watched it on dvd, there isn’t a whole lot of extra stuff there (a directors commentary might have been nice).
Passed my road test this afternoon, it wasn’t all that difficult. I made a couple mistakes, but nothing major. There’s really very little difference between the two phases of the license, other than having to take a road test. There are only two things that change: i can now drive with a beginner and I can have a couple of drinks and still be legal to drive. I don’t know anyone who’s just beginning and drinking and driving isn’t a bright idea, what an incredible waste of money.
February 20, 2002
The Kode-Fu Rosetta Stone, see what programming structures look like in different languages (including C++, Java, Vb, etc.). It’s a useful resource for the computer geek. The guy who runs the site appears to have taken compsci at queen’s as well.
February 19, 2002
I forgot to mention that I saw The Count of Monte Cristo at some point last week. What a horrible movie. Maybe that’s a bit too harsh, the acting was pretty good and the scenery/costumes were great, but the script, wow. Clichés, clichés, more clichés and a lot of cheese thrown in for good measure. It all seemed contrived and just plain bad. And what genius of a casting director put Luis Guzmán in it? Yes, Luis Guzmán in a period French movie, makes sense to me too.
Just read an interesting article over at Canoe. The author talks about converting all his CD’s to mp3 and setting up linux servers, etc. It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. My computer is my stereo, so most of the stuff I listen to is in mp3 format anyway. For that reason, I tend not to listen to CD’s that I buy unless I put them on to the harddrive.
February 18, 2002
It’s reading week and I’m actually doing reading, go figure. I just finished reading the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one of the many required books in my English class. At this point, I’ve started all of them but haven’t finished three or four of the books, so that’s one of the tasks for the week. As far as the Bell Jar goes, I enjoyed it and probably would have more so if I had been a woman. It’s in a similar vein to Catcher in the Rye, one of my favourite reads. The remainder of the evening beckons, I’m off.
I’m back home in Brockville for a few days. It’s really kind of weird, my parents are at work and my brothers are at school, so the house is empty save the dog and cat. The cat doesn’t want you near her (I don’t care that much, i’m allergic to it anyway) and the dog is not used to people being home, seeming a little bit attention deprived. There’s that overall detached feeling as well; my room isn’t really my room anymore, all my stuff is at school, it doesn’t have that personal feeling. Maybe it will allow me to get some work done. Maybe not.
There’s an interesting article in the boom! section of The Toronto Star (feb 12) written by Christopher Hutsul. It was about the current generation of twenty-year olds, with our designs on a higher education and upper class living. He talks about a generation which was told that they should aspire to achieve greatness and look down upon menial labour. A basic argument, ending in the realization that we’re probably going to have to attain the zen of gruntwork to be happy later in life. At any rate, I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it’s not available online. Update: I scanned the article.
February 17, 2002
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if something is a bad omen or just bad luck. The situation: me, standing in the freshly cleaned kitchen deciding that a slice of bread with peanut butter on it would make a good snack. What happens: finish buttering the slice, put the peanut butter away, put the kinfe in the sink, pick up slice, drop slice (peanut butter side down onto table). End result: stare at the table with disbelief, pick slice up off table, eat it anyway.
An interesting article that offers a good argument for porting OS X to the Intel architecture. My favourite line would have to be, “[It] would be like Disney selling porno movies in Thailand.”
I put a quick-fix photo section tonight. It’s not all that slick, but it’s somewhat functional. I’ll get something better up later.
February 16, 2002
Another redesign of the daily section. I found the old one was too dark and not condusive to easy reading. Thus, it’s plain and simple. I’m not planning on taking my computer home for the break, so I’m not really sure if i’ll get the photo and projects sections up during the next week, unless I feel rather ambitious tonight.
Beyond that, i’ve been doing a bunch of cleaning today. We’d all been in some sort of work mode, so things haven’t been cleaned in awhile. Most of the dishes hadn’t been cleaned in at least a week, so that’s been the biggest task. Andrew and Shawn both took off without really thinking about cleaning any of the upstairs. It’ll all end up working out in the end.
Spring break time as some would like to call it or reading week for others. Nothing really exciting for me this time around, just some relaxing and visiting old friends. There’s a driving appointment as well; Ontario and their damned graduated licensing program. I have one more phase left to go on my license which i’ve been putting off for awhile; one last road test and that’s it. Stupid shit, the real reason the government does it is so they can get more money out of us.
February 13, 2002
A generator of 100,000,000,000,000 poems by Raymond Queneau [via metafilter]. He composed 10 sonnets in such a way that they could all be chopped up and put back together in any form. It reminded my of an Interdisciplinary course called Mathematics and Poetry. I’m probably going to try taking it at some point, the professor for the math parts was my algebra professor last year. I really enjoyed his classes.
One more assignment to go, then I’m free for awhile. I think all of the work so this week has gone pretty well. I was a little bit sketchy on one or two of the questions on my test this morning.
Have you ever written a story or drawn a picture in the space where the answer you didn’t know was supposed to go? What about one involving time travel? What about one with Dr. Slippy and Timmy accidently traveling to prehistoric times and getting eaten by dinosaurs? At this point, I leave to go put the paper online.
February 12, 2002
The Oscar nominations came out today. I’m somewhat dissapointed because there was a lot of good stuff out there this time around. Waking Life didn’t get an animation nod, Memento and Royal Tenenbaums both got shafted too (especially Gene Hackman). David Lynch was nominated as best director for Mulholland Dr., but I don’t see the Academy actually giving it to him. All in all it’s a bit of a pisser, but what do these people know?
I really have no idea how my essay is going at this point, I’ve taken a somewhat different approach to writing it. Well, different in the sense that it’s not how I usually go about it. I might post the essays i’ve written, not entirely sure though because I’m not really a big fan of them.
Something worth checking out if you’re in to math and numbers. It’s a java applet that analyzes that popularity of specific numbers in our society based on the number of times that they have appeared on websites. It’s really interesting, but it’s processor and ram intensive, meaning odds are higher than usual that it’ll crash your machine.
February 10, 2002
Just plugging away at some work right now, midterm tomorrow and essay due tuesday. The essay will most likely have something to do with the critique fo the American Dream in the Great Gatsby. I enjoyed the novel and don’t think it will be that hard for me to write. The most difficult part will probably remembering little details because I read it some time ago. I’ve put a decent number of articles up in the written section lately and I’ll probably be able to get the photo section up soon. I’ve been trying to find some php script stuff to do galleries for awhile; something that I could use to generate the galleries and what not automatically. I’ve found something I hope will work and plan on testing it soon.
Head over to Epitonic and grab a couple of songs by Royal City: Bad Luck and Spacy Basement.
February 7, 2002
Simon has had a new design up for a couple days.
I’ve been experimenting with themes and stuff in winxp, you can make things look quite different. Well, i think it has to keep the same format, but you can make it look a lot nicer. Check out ThemeXP for lots of cool stuff.
February 6, 2002
I have two midterms tomorrow morning. I really have no idea how their going to go, i could do pretty well or pretty bad. We’ll just have to wait and see.
A couple of cool things: the google programming contest and in the beginning was the command line. If you go to the command line page, you have to download the zip file to read the rest of the article. It’s a little on the long side, i’m about halfway through it.
February 4, 2002
I’ve managed to have a fairly productive evening. I finished up an assignment due tomorrow in my programming paradigms class, it basically involved writing a bunch of polynomial functions in Haskell. I also started looking for a summer job. There’s a bunch of jobs they have around campus that pay pretty well, I’m hoping to get one of those. A couple of them involve teaching children about computers, so I figure I have a pretty good shot with those ones. I also switched my email from pop3 to imap. Imap allows for better integration between the server and email client. In English, I can use webmail and a software email program and the mail that I have in both will be the same. Beyond that, I have to finish the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath for my English class tomorrow.
February 3, 2002
Spent most of the day in EngSoc helping put the paper together. I have one article going in and had my hand in a bunch of the other production, namely a couple of fake ads. It looks like it’ll be a pretty good issue this week. The next week or two is home to lots of midterms and assignments, much work to be done.
I finally created the written section, so go check it out. I only have five things up right now, but that should grow rather quickly. I downloaded most of the stuff I’ve written for the paper this year, so I should be able to get all of that stuff up. There should be at least 25 more articles around for me to post.