Posted on March 31, 2002
I just started a bit of work on an essay for my English class. One of the possible topics involves a close reading of the Bar Mitzvah scene in Duddy Kravitz and figuring out how it relates to the novel as a whole. So, I immeadiately jumped on the internet to see if I could find some information. Long story short, I ended up following a link to a bar/bat mitzvah store. They have some of the cheesiest t-shirts I’ve ever seen, I can’t imagine some people forcing these on their families. Like this shirt or this one. I have these images in my mind of Jordana’s purple clad family gathered round the Wailing Wall and Sam’s family celebrating his coming of age with a giant country-style ho-down. Yikes.
On a side note, the people at judaica worldwide seemed determined as hell not to let me link to their crappy copyrighted t-shirt images. Fuck that.
Posted on March 31, 2002
For some reason I’ve never visited david carson’s website, it surprises me. It’s fun navigation; part artsy, part pain in the ass. Link via Carey, who seems to be in the process of another redesign. At some point, he’ll realize that he’s his own harshest critic and will ride his website out for more than a couple of days.
Posted on March 31, 2002
This is what I have as my wallpaper right now. Something I whipped off earlier this evening. Enjoy.
Posted on March 30, 2002
At various junctures yesterday, I decided to watch movies instead of working. The first one, Meatballs was a decent comedy starring Bill Murray. It was made in 1979, so I can’t really tell if some of the gags would have been original back then. At this point, we’ve seen them dozens of times before and they’re not really all that funny. The second movie was How High. I got a copy of this movie on VCD, it’s really too bad that I wasted the cd’s on it. It’s not particularly funny — if you want good weed humour, go with Half Baked instead.
Posted on March 29, 2002
Golden Words has been breaking it down on Fark today — two articles! Love Fark or hate it, the site will give ours a whole load of traffic/exposure. It’s a good thing, except for EngSoc deciding that this afternoon would be a good time to do server repairs.
I decided not to go home for the weekend. I have a bunch of stuff on tap schoolwise during the week and need to get the ball rolling. I’m probably more apt to do work here than at home; not many friends around here. probably lots more distraction at home. I think I’m getting a bit sick and running out of food — no better time to go home. I’ve slept quite a bit in the last couple days, staying up that one night probably didn’t help much. No pity for idiots.
Posted on March 28, 2002
Like I said, the light outside was beautiful. Here are some photos, but they don’t really do it justice.
Posted on March 28, 2002
Bear witness to the return of the sun. The light looks fantastic outside, I must go photograph it. I don’t know why I’m still awake. I was out late working with Dave, Andrew and Eilis, on Dave’s final film project. We were doing some filming inside a bar after it closed. I ended up with some cool photos that I’ll probably get around to posting. There’s a little assignment due in a couple hours that I have to finish off. Figured I may as well just stay up for my morning classes and go to bed in the afternoon. Side note: I watched a couple episodes of Six Feet Under tonight. I loved it; it’s an awesome show. The ability to make life in the funeral business funny is astounding. It’s deffinitely worth checking out. On to the outside world to take some pictures.
Posted on March 27, 2002
The weather was complete shit yesterday and nobody felt like doing much of anything. We grabbed a copy of Training Day from the video store and stayed in. The performances of both Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington were stellar. The movie was pretty good, but wouldn’t have been pulled off so well without them. If you pick up the dvd, it’s worth watching the alternate ending — not that it’s any better, it just shows how the ending that’s chosen can totally change a movie.
Posted on March 27, 2002
There was a discussion on slashdot yesterday about algorithms, what ones people like and so forth. Here’s a whitepaper on skiplists, probably my favourite algorithm that I’ve learned so far this year.
For some reason, I forgot to put in the code to allow the comments window to pop-up. In theory, the comments should work now. In theory, the last couple days of post should be visible on the front page, but they’re not.
Posted on March 25, 2002
Does anyone know much about prolog programming? One of the questions we’ve been given is define a predicate eval_polish/2 that evaluates reverse polish notation expressions. I can’t figure it out at all. Bah.
Posted on March 23, 2002
At some point while I was dreaming last night, I decided that today would be the day I caught up on my sleep. Hence, not waking up until 2:30 and having to field a telephone call from my mother five minutes later. She didn’t believe me when I said that I’m normally up by noon on the weekend. At any rate, I should probably try to accomplish some school related tasks in what remains of the afternoon; on to my readings.
Posted on March 23, 2002
Fear of love. Fear of commitment. You want to reach out and take them in your arms. It would less challenging to ignore or to forget but that would make it too easy. Wouldn’t it? Yeah, right… the sleep thing.
Posted on March 23, 2002
I just got back from a By Divine Right show. It was awesome; they rock hard and put on a great performance. So much energy, so much. You can’t avoid jumping around and going nuts while they’re on stage. Try to find a copy of 5 bucks, it’s a great song. And now it’s the wee hours of Saturday and I should really get some sleep.
Posted on March 22, 2002
It sure would be nice if computer programs wrote themselves. You see someone walk up to a computer and say, “Hey, I need something to do such and such, make it.” And a couple minutes later the program spits out another program, which isn’t so much having the program write itself as having another program write it. At any rate, it’s not really possible; having a program that could write any other program would in essence solve the halting problem. Although some would claim it is solveable, that’s geeky computer/math humour for you.
Posted on March 22, 2002
I’ve just spent a bit of time reading google’s initial proposal. I’ve found it pretty interesting because we’ve just finished up a bunch of string theory stuff in my data structures course. One of my favourite bits:
[A] PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation.
They have a nice little linear time algorithm that they’re using. Those kind of statistics are pretty impressive considering that this paper was published a couple of years ago.
Posted on March 21, 2002
It was yet another uneventful morning; didn’t make my 8:30 class, but I did make it to the other two. Looks like we’re heading into graph theory in my data structures class, it looks like some pretty crazy shit. For our last assingment, we’re going to be given a data set representing a map of the London Underground and asked to write some functions to calculate the shortest route from point a to point b. They’re probably thinking, these kids keep asking for real-world examples, maybe if we give them one they’ll shut up and not bother asking us again. We’re doing graph theory in my logic class too, so it’s nice to start getting some overlap/correlation between courses.
Posted on March 21, 2002
Moveable Type 2.0 was released today, so I decided to migrate over. I’ve been wrestling with it for the better part of the night, thus avoiding my software specifications assingment. This was the first cgi/perl script I’ve tried to install, I think it went ok. I’ve learned a number things about scripting, chmod and so forth (here’s a good little resource concerning common cgi problems). The long and short of things is that I seem to have MT up and running ok, but it’s late, I have an assingment to finish and I should really get some sleep. I’ll probably mess around with the templates either tomorrow or the day after.
This has to be one of the more bizzare pieces of junk mail i’ve received. I have to admit that I can’t remember for the life of me what my dealings with the British Chamber of Commerce were. I can’t really figure out. Anyway, here’s a good response to the message.
Posted on March 19, 2002
My official position at the paper next year is Staff Writer, no more webmonkey for me. I’ve been told the eds are working on defining the positions better this year, so the staff writer’s actually have things to do, rather than just having a nifty title. Booga booga, I’ll probably still be involved with the website.
Posted on March 19, 2002
If I somehow become involved in politics remind me to make a push for the full pint. It’s reassuring to know that Great Britain has their priorities straight.
Posted on March 19, 2002
I posted a few more of the things I’ve written this year online.
Posted on March 18, 2002
I took the plastic off my window a couple days ago. I remember thinking — hey, it’s pretty nice outside, I should really let some fresh air in. I also remember checking out the weather network for the local report before bed and thinking — whee, decent weather… no more snow. I woke up to the sound of cars whizzing by outside on wet pavement and thought — oh well, rain is fine at least it’s not snowing. Of course it turned out that there was snow on the ground; that ugly wet slushy variety that turns the world into a huge cold and messy puddle. No fun, no fun at all.
So, other than class, I’ve stayed inside all day. It’s been one of those days when you feel that you’ve been productive and have accomplished a lot, but realize at some point that all you’ve actually been doing is procrastinating. It’s fine, provided every day isn’t like that.
Posted on March 16, 2002
Look, it’s more bizarre home-made science — a guide to help you build a stable plasmoid at home.
March 15, 2002
Another day, another midterm; friday afternoon… stupid bastards. This one would be my data structures course — AVL trees, (2,4) trees, the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm and so on, fun stuff. This is a nice AVL tree simulator if you feel the need to learn. Onward with the simulators! Here’s a fun little one for the physics behind jumping on skis. And there’s Cygwin, which isn’t so much a simulator as a unix environment that runs under windows.
March 14, 2002
I’m starting to get sick of this minimalist pure text thing. It’s nice, but I need some change. Fuck words as the art itself. The question is, “Do you want to focus on the writing itself or the presentation of the writing?” Hmm… almost makes you think Jacob Nielsen has a point. However, humanity likes things that look pretty. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover? That’s bullshit, everyone does it.
March 13, 2002
I’m thinking about switching the website from blogger over to moveable type or greymatter. I have cgi/perl available on my account now, so I can play around with stuff like that. Anyone have a preference or suggestion either way?
You can download a registry file that will make google your default search engine. This is a good thing, the default msn searches aren’t all that great. And yes, I’m going to stick with IE for awhile, at least until mozilla hits 1.0.
Two midterms left to go for the week, then I can start finishing some of the things I have waiting around; website stuff (some different mp3’s, more written stuff, some photo galleries, a reviews section), a bunch of reading, St. Patrick’s Day.
“Uh… St. Patrick’s day isn’t something you have waiting in the wings.”
“Yeah, but it’s coming up and it’ll act as a catalyst for unwinding.”
“Gee, you make no sense.”
March 11, 2002
I’m tempted to make a wobblevision, although the warnings of certain death upon touching some of the wires inside the television deter me somewhat.
March 10, 2002
Three midterms on tap this week. I forsee myself not enjoying any of them.
I’ve taken to drinking coffee with just sugar. I used to put cream or milk in it, but ran out a month or two ago and started drinking the coffee without it.
If I get bored later tonight, I’ll probably put up some pictures from breakfast yesterday, some of them turned out pretty well. Back to teaching myself some more Haskell and learning the basics of Prolog.
March 9, 2002
Fortune Cookie, Message One: You are heading for a land of sunshine.
Fortune Cookie, Message Two: You are always welcome in any gathering.
I feel like I’ve accomplished more than usual today. I was up nice and early this morning to go for breakfast with a bunch of friends. At that point, the weather was beautiful but it has deteriorated since then. I proceeded to coop myself up in an office during the afternoon and hammer out the new design for golden words. It’s up and it looks a lot better. There’s still a fair bit of work to be done with the site, but nothing extremely pressing.
I also made a new splash for Simon either last night or thursday night, I can’t remember. I think the image is alright, go check it out.
March 8, 2002
I threw another template over top of the photo section, not entirely sure if I like it or not.
It was one of those nice boring days; the ones where you do some productive stuff but spend a large chunk of it vegitating. I attended a presentation by Bruce McDonald this afternoon. He’s a relatively notable Canadian director, responsible for Hard Core Logo amongst other movies. If you haven’t seen it, I’d deffintely recommend doing so. He showed his final year film presentation, and another short based on a Michael Ondaatje. He also talked about what he learned/didn’t learn in film school and fielded some questions.
Of course, I’m not a film student but my housemate is, so I just tagged along to the screening. His final project was way too long (something he admitted) and had a lot of gratuitous shots/scenes (those showoffy-hey-look-at-this-isn’t-it-cool kind of shots). I really enjoyed the second film. All in all, it was pretty interesting.
March 7, 2002
Bit of a pisser of a day yesterday; test in the morning and two interviews for positions that I didn’t get. The first interview was a followup to one of the ones I had on sunday. It came down to me and a guy I know, we were both equally qualified but they ended up giving it to him because he had a bit more experience with kids. It is kind of nice to know that it wasn’t something bad you said or did in the interview to not get the job, must not have been easy. The other interview was for golden words business manager. Once again, pretty equal footing and it didn’t work out. It is kind of good, it’ll mean a bit less work next year. I’ll go for staff writer, concentrate on that side of things and maybe make a run for ed next year.
I started out liking this article that points out that people shouldn’t feel they’re stupid because they can’t use a computer. But, he ended it off with the cd-drawer being a cup-holder joke. I want to punch the author in the mouth for regurgitating such a stale joke. The point it is, the analogy between plumbing and computers is good, the article is not.
March 5, 2002
Lots of work and fun stuff to do. I have another logic test tomorrow morning. The wednesday morning logic test, every two weeks without fail. I dislike the morning. I’ve discovered my best marks this year and last have been for afternoon classes. Is it a coincidence? I’ll never know.
This article in Car and Driver is pretty damn funny. I love the in-line editorial comments, it hits home; many of them are like the ones I get. What the hell is this? Is this supposed to be a conclusion? And so on… [via MeFi].
March 4, 2002
Lo-fi Gameboy imaging collection. The shorts made me laugh, I really enjoyed this stuff.
Two job interviews, one went well, the other not so well. I enjoyed the first one and thought it went well, one of the girls is in my english class, they seemed like good people. The second one; I’ve already received notice that I won’t have a second interview. It was a group interview, i didn’t get the right impression from the people interviewing and think that I sabotaged it subconciously. Ever done that? Looking back, it seems like i stabbed myself in the foot on that interview. I did some things you’re not supposed to do in interviews and knew that I was doing it and didn’t really care.
Fun stuff. I was originally going to run for editor of golden words next year but changed my mind. I’m going to go for business manager instead. I’m going to be around two more years, so I’ll go for ed next time around. It’s the last year for two of the guys running and I feel that they’d do a good job with the paper, well better than I would at this point. I spent most of the day at the paper (and doing the interviews), I think there’s at least a couple of my articles going in for wednesday. More fodder for the writing section.
This article is one of the best pieces regarding the current state of the music industry that I have ever read. One of the first relatively intelligent and informed pieces that I’ve read. The gist of things: mainstream news site with the author saying that people are starting to get pissed off at the top forty crap being shoved down there throats and that we’re starting to get a generation of kids who expect music to be free.
March 1, 2002
I went to bed nice and late last night (decided it was more important to put up a music section than sleep), causing me to sleep through my morning classes. Some afternoon class and the rest of it installing windows xp onto Rachel’s computer, kind of boring, but I probably would have wasted a couple hours on my computer anyway.
