shinyPlasticBag

What’s that, you say? Mark isn’t dead? Why, that’s outrageous! What possible excuse could he have for going so long without a post? What does he have to do that’s better than this? Hard questions, sure. And I don’t have any real good answers, unfortunately. If you’ve ever done that whole university thing, though, you know what time of year it is. I’m pleased to announce that as of, oh, 3:00 PM today, I became free-freee-freeee for the next four and a half months. My last final (for my intro to ethics class) was today, and I think I did alright. Everything is finally out of the way and I can start doing all of the things I’ve wanted to do (finishing Linkpool 3.0, for example) and everything I’ve just been putting off (fixing Dad’s computer). At least I’ll be able to sleep in tomorrow — it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been able to do that at will. Note that sleeping for most of the afternoon after a backshift doesn’t count.

Anyway, to recap my life as of late, I spent the weekend working and being bored — my attempt to see Kill Bill: Vol. 2 on Saturday night was not nearly as successfull as one would hope — and then got up surprisingly early on Sunday so I could drive down to Western Shore for Joey’s 65th birthday extravaganza. Mom conspired with his offspring to organize a big surprise party (code-named Operation: Star Trek), and it seems to have worked. I’ve put together a photo gallery of the more interesting moments, although they focus on me and my stupid friends more than Joey and his fancy party. Don’t blame me, I’ve got the attention span of a fruit fly.

Monday was spent deep in thought (as in “what the hell am I supposed to be studying?”) due to my introduction to networking final that I had on Tuesday. It was rough, but I think I made it through alright. Thanks to the wonders of Murphy’s Law, I got two crappy surprises: a) my calculator seems to have run away from home, which required that I purchase a new one, and b) the cheat sheet I made was completely useless. I just didn’t need it. Oh, well, that’s life, I guess (there were a lot of commas in this sentence). Since the test was at nine AM, I got to get home relatively early yesterday and discovered, to my delight, that my memory card had arrived. This 128 MB SD card represents my first eBay purchase ever, and I’m pleased with the result. In a twist of events that’s almost unheard of in the modern world, my camera, MP3 player

, and laptop all happen to have slots for the same type of memory card. How often does that happen? Anyway, I love it. My camera only has 16 MB of internal memory, so this is a big improvement. I plan on buying at least one more card, preferably 256 MB or more. When cash flow permits, of course.

The memory card inspired me to mess around with my camera a bit. I took a few (mostly uninteresting) photos, but the best thing was a series of pictures of Russell, which were taken just to bug him with the flash. I put them into an animated GIF, which I find to be quite humorous. Maybe you have to know him. It sort of reminded me of the animated GIFs I made back when I got my first digital camera back in the dark ages. I had one of Mike walking up Portland with his pants around his ankles, and one of him stroking those big poster things in Halifax that look like penii

. Speaking of dark ages, I’m in the process of taking every picture I have, ever, and putting them all online. The first batch, from 1999, 2002, and 2003, are online now. However, they’re not really organized — they’re sorted by date, but there aren’t any thumbnails or descriptions, and there’s a few thousand of them (2,124, to be exact). At some point, I’ll do a “best of” thing. It’s on my list of things to do this summer.

Moving into an account of today, I studied for, and then wrote, my ethics final, and ended up being the first person to leave the arena. This is a strange sensation: when there are several hundred people in a room, you don’t want to be the first one to leave. However, I’m not concerned, and I think I did quite well. Only time will tell, I guess, but how much time remains to be seen, since a strike of part-time faculty and teacher’s assistants is pretty much inevitable at this point. Looks like we may never find out what our final marks were, which may be a blessing in disguise. Tonight, an aborted attempt at organizing a coffee outing led to mass frustration, but the evening was saved when Nick and Tony went with me to see Kill Bill: Vol. 2. I really liked the movie, and I thought it filled out the story very well — definitely recommended. And if you haven’t seen the first one, you’re a moron. After the movie, we drove around aimlessly in Halifax and did what Nick does best: yelled obscenities at random people. Tony took some pictures, but I can’t imagine there being anything too exciting. Overall, it was a fun evening (I’m not sure I’ve mentioned your name enough, Nick: Nick, Nick, Nick! And once, in a sidetrack

. Happy?). Nick.

Finally, does anyone else think this image (from the Kodak web site) is a bit, well, weird? Maybe my mind is just too cynical and perverse for my own good. Now, if we’re done here, I’d like to go to bed.