The Sith Sense

The Sith Sense, if you haven't been yet, and feel like a game of 20 questions, it's really, really good. I can't guarantee that you won't lose an hour of your life trying to beat it though.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Väterliche Gedanken

There's a lot of really broken people on this planet. I'm finding it difficult to find ways of helping people who are fundamentally fractured (usually emotionally), to maximize their potential. I thought once that you could fix anyone, but I think I was being Naive. Many, many people have broken rungs on their ladders, not necessarly through any fault of their own, that's just the way things were with the environment that they grew up in, and the events that occured in their lives. But those rungs can never really be repaired. Sometimes they can be worked around, but those emotional lacerations will be factors that will challenge these people for their entire lives.

I'm not sure there is anyone without those cracks and knots. Are you trying to work around your slivers, or do they dominate your life? Do mine dominate mine? Do I even know what they are?

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

No boat racing today, as Thor (An alcoholic and drug user in greater amounts than Jon), wussed out on me, because appearantly "He hasn't done any school work in the last four weeks". Pussy.

Then Laura and Kate bailed on me this afternoon. It is extremely unlikely that Todd and I can go back and forth 5 beers each in rapid succession faster than a line of 5 people can. It is further unlikely that we can do this 4 or 5 times (20 - 25 beers) in under two hours (Be nice to your liver).

In other news, I thought I brought suits to Waterloo for interviews, but appearantly they have other uses. Last night, my friend Mike's Mother passed away. She was fighting Breast Cancer, and had complications during Chemo Therapy. She had been on life support for a week, but was getting progessively worse, and they made the decision to pull her off of it last night. Mike and his father are doing reasonably well, as they were preparing for this for a while, but in Mike's words "His Aunt's are Dramabombs". At any rate, Todd and Ruthanne and I are going to the Visitation tomorrow. Condolances to the Family.

Selected Quotes

"It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener".

"It was worth whatever it's cost me. I could afford the price of that show. If I had staged it intentionally, I would have beaten the record of Emperor Nero. What's burning a city - compared to tearing the lid off of hell and letting men see it?"

Absent

Tonight I have an ENGSOC meeting, then Kendo.

Tommorow I have to get up early, and go for a 241 lab, then class, then drive back to Toronto for the evening because...

Friday I have a meeting in the morning with Prof. Doggett from Queen's Downtown to discuss PCDEP, after which I need to book it back to waterloo for classes that afternoon.

251 Prolog Project is due on Monday, and it looks very cryptic, so time will have to spent trying to decipher what the hell i'm supposed to do for that.

Is anyone in the K-W area this weekend?

Weekend

For the record, I hung out with the following this weekend:

Iris
Cas
Jocelyn
My Dad
Whitney
Jon
Randeep
My 222 Lab
Jedi Knight: Academy

Michelle is AWOL, again, so i'm holding her laptop hostage until such time as she wises up and stops asking me to hang out with her, and then goes missing.

My XBOX is now plugged into my monitor, and much Ninja Gaiden and KOTR2 can now occur in High Definition.

Many People are beginning to irritate me, and Ayn Rand is starting to make sense. If you have concerns, voice them now.

Jobs so far

So far no interviews, no rejects either (But they're forthcoming, I totally buggered some of those cover letters).

Cities i've applied for jobs in:

Greater Toronto Area x7
Seattle Area, Washington x3
California x1
Vancouver x2
Waterloo x1



Who knows, I could be booking it across the country for four months if I can get a job over there. Not really a lot of reason not to anymore. We'll see once I get a bloody interview.

In other news, life is generally good. Still thinking about buying one of those wood flutes. We'll see We'll see.

Who is John Galt?

I don't like this, getting up early to go to the Lab business. Who trained me into thinking it's ok to wake up at 10 anyway?

Had a long conversation with Alanna last night over here. She was drinking Red Wine (Bleh. You'd think that given all you fuckers think i'm a pretentious prick, i'd like red wine, when in fact, red wine is a foul substance. Scotch folks, Scotch). I always enjoy it when people tell me they enjoy 'our conversations', as if they have a life of their own that swirls and dances in the night, and I suppose in a way they do. I have a way of approaching subjects from an angle most people don't consider, or finding one that they haven't considered.

I'm off to feed my code, which will hopefully work without a full 3 hours of debugging, into an MCF5307 Coldfire Processor. Aren't I a nerd.

I'm coming home this weekend. If you desire hanging out, let me know.

Random Spam

In the light of the king's countenance is life
and his favour is as a cloud of the latter rain.
The heart of the wise teacheth his mouth, and addeth learning to his lips.
The wise in heart will receive commandments but a prating fool shall fall.
And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding.

The Decadent West: DW Vs. Five Year Olds: Bring It On, Motherfuckers

Singha sent me this

This is neat

There is a language called Kwakiult, also known as
Kwak'wala.

This is an interesting language.

Unlike English, they do not have tenses as a neccesary grammar on their verbs, there is no difference between Run and Ran.

What they do have is grammatical Epistemic Authority, so basically every time you say a verb, you also say on what authority you have it, so there's a 'tense' for:
Joe Ran, and I saw it myself
and also
Joe Ran, and I heard about it from someone I trust
and
Joe Ran, and I heard it from someone else, but I don't believe them
and
Joe Ran, and I saw it in a vision.

They can also state when it happened, but they have to state it explicitly, the same way in english you would have to explicitly state your authority. I just think it's neat that these people have an automatic reliability of data grammar built into their language, but not a time one, where as we (being all indo-european languages) are so concerned with time that we have it built into our grammar.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

It's that drippy kind of peaceful rain out, like the Scene in Hero where Nameless fights Sky in their minds. Maybe I should go buy House of Flying Daggers. Finished reading The Pelican Brief, have started the Client, and also Atlas Shrugged at the behest of Steve. I'm going to finished the compelation of Philip K Dick Stories I bought in BC at Munroe's (Munroe's is a large bookstore, about half the size of a typical chapters, but they basically only stock books that are worth reading, which doesn't mean they don't sell paperback fiction books, they do, they just only stock the good ones.)

Todd is gone for the weekend, off somewhere I would be if I hadn't freaked out on monday. Bad Angus. Too late to do anything about it now.

My External Harddrive had a nervous breakdown today. The power electronics inside the drive are right buggered, and the drive won't even spin up, in fact, if you plug it into a PC power supply, it will overload the supply breaker and turn off the computer. All my data is on that drive, music, images, documents, all my installer files, all my PCDEP stuff. All of it. Fortunately I have an offsite backup of PCDEP, but i'm basically forced to start my electronic life over. It's non-recoverable.

My Tercel is gone tomorrow. My mom bought a new Grand Am today, and they're giving me her old Grand Prix. Goodbye feature car. I'll miss your fuel line like, broken Carbeurator, exhaust leak, oil leak, disfunctional fuel gauge, broken trunk lock, unreliable tires, and the general impression you give people that the slightest breeze would blow you into a zillion little flakes of rust.

Marvin

I think that part of being happy means to lobotomize your awareness at a certain point and just work in that framework. Generally speaking, the smaller the framework, the easier it is to be happy.

I took a lesson from watching Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy today.

Don't Panic. It doesn't matter, just live and go nuts.

Rafting

Appearantly the Engineers are having a White Water Rafting trip up in Ottawa Next month. I've always wanted to go, so i'm signing up bitches. Boo ya.

No lack of Logos

I remember that summer, when I came on you had moved away. So I went running to try to find you, try to chase you in my stupid way

Gas leak during a lab today. All of Engineering was Evacuated. Sweet. Now I have to make up the time sometime else. At least it's nice out and nobody blew us up the bomb.

Began the 4 month process of getting up every morning and being rejected by a slew of companies. Gotta love Coop. The jobs i've applied to so far are all either in Washington (Seattle or Redmond), Vancouver, or the GTA. I'm not against leaving town, but it's expensive. It's unlikely i'll be considered for any of those jobs anyway, but all you can do is keep plugging.

I haven't played a video game in over a week. Something must be wrong.

Why am I worried?

Is this the fourth night? Fifth? In a row?

I went to bed at midnight, woke up at 4 in the morning. Woke up at 5 in the morning, woke up at 6:30 in the morning, woke up at 7:15 in the morning, couldn't fall asleep after 7:15 in the morning. And I wake up worried about things, anxious. Like a rabbit who knows there's a fox lurking in the trees somewhere. And it's not one thing, it's one of a handful of things, waking up thinking about them, and waking up often.

I'm going swimming today, and can someone please turn the volume down on my brain, or just tell it to shut the fuck up entirely? Thanks.

To be

The drunken insights of my friends seem to make me out to be someone I don't feel I am anymore. Well, think what you like guys, we were all teenagers once, and we all did stupid things at one point or another, and probably will again.

I do still resemble that flirty mack who would hit on everyone in some ways, i'm not a completely different person, but i'm not the same. Maybe some would see me as boring, I don't really care.

There's more happening behind the scenes that you're not hearing about, and one of the things I have maintained from my highschool days is not particularly caring what people think of me.

If life is a game, do I want the high score? I've never been one to ever try to get the high score in any game, much less this one. I only care if the game is fun or not and if i'm enjoying it. Any high score I obtain is merely a result of me enjoying the game enough to acheive it. High Score are a more malleable concept in life as well, since you get to choose which score you care about.

I'm about ready to get the hell out of here and go back to waterloo, i've gotten entirely less done this weekend than I want to, and a lot of that needs to be rectified tomorrow.

Hope all is Well Jon, sorry I'm not going to be around, somehow I think you'll be ok.

Stolen from Gizmodo

Carlo bought the OpenX blister pack opener, and guess what? It comes in a blister pack, labelled ‘This is the last package you’ll struggle to open!’

That’s just cruel—it’s like wrapping condoms in babies.

First week of School

241 (Electrical Circuits) is going to kick my ass.

The prof is the kind that just keeps rolling, brutal hard grind, lots of work and screaming to understand what's happening the whole time.

4 new programming languages (C++ which I sort of know, Prolog, Assembly, and Matlab) for my various courses

222 and 251 (Digital Computers, building ALUs, digital circuitry, processors, etc. and Languages/Translators where I write a compiler essentially) look both good, interesting, and challenging, as opposed to 241 which looks like having rasps dragged up and down my body for 3.5 months.

An interesting invite that I had forgotten about and will not talk about so don't ask.

Barbequed tonight, steak and perogies. Twas amazing.
I am doing a lot more of that. Tomorrow After school i'm getting into the whiskey sours and cooking more meat. Feel free to drop by.

Just finished signing up for about 15 labs. I am going to be drinking and breathing labs all summer. I can tell this is going to be one of those firey burning life consuming terms. This will require serious entertainment when I can get it.

I'll see whoever of you are going drinking with me on Saturday night in Richmond Hill then, and whoever is going to BOT on Friday, on friday. Until then, Reviewing ECE 100. Ciao.

Weird

I have a Dr. Seuss book called The Sneetches and Other Stories on my reading list for Linguistics.

How's that for Studying?