ShinyPlasticBag

Ah! I'm all snug in my bed, playing with my beloved laptop (congrats to Apollo, who's now playing the waiting game with his) and my gigantic hard drive. Life is sweet (although my wireless router has been acting up lately).

Anyway, 2004 is pretty much over, and I have to admit that I'm somewhat glad. 2004 sucked: not any of the events in particular (although there was quite a bit of crapiness), but just because it was a boring number. Well, that and because nothing really interesting happened in the world. Sure, we thought an asteroid was going to hit us. And yeah, NASA sent some robots to Mars. I guess Google did their IPO...now that I think about it, there were some interesting events. But, I had enough crappy events with my computer from hell and the lawsuit that almost was this year to last me a lifetime.

Other highlights include the birth of baby Alex (aka Axel), 2004 Bloggies, our visit from the Scottishes, those wacky videotapes, Pugsley's many bad hair-related decisions (ie, the mohawk and the Hitler moustache), and the hilariously modified Wendy's sign. Other letdowns include Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, the dying of my web server's hard drive, and Tony in general. The incident with John's car falls into the “up for some, down for others” category.

This really was a year of ups and downs, wasn't it?

• Written on 30 December 2004 & posted at 03:33 AM.
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Well. It certainly is cold, isn't it? Halifax got hit with it's first blizzard of the season, and it was a doozie. We got dumped with about 30 cm of very cold snow, which caused much havoc. It picked up Sunday night sometime around 9 PM and didn't let up until morning. The drive to work last night was nothing compared to the drive home in the morning, which was full of all of those Weather Channel buzzwords — blowing snow, whiteout conditions, etc. Despite having the windshield wipers going on the heat up full blast all the way home, by the time I hit Cole Harbour, I could hardly see. It was not fun, and neither was the drive to work tonight. I hope it's cleared up a bit by morning.

Christmas at my Dad's was good. I received (oh joy of joys) a 200 GB removable hard drive. The cool thing is that it matches my removable DVD drive (the enclosures are made by the same people). I have storage coming out of my ears now — so much potential, it hurts. The first order of business is to copy all 113 of my CDs onto it, since some of them are starting to fade. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because I want perfect copies and there's no way to do that from Windows — it resets all of the timestamps to “now”. Very annoying. I'm working on a program called RFC (Reliable File Copier) to solve that problem. It accurately copies all aspects of a file and, should it encounter errors, does not just stop. At the end, a list of any files that couldn't be copied is provided. Right now, I'm having trouble with “System Authorization” exceptions. The program works fine when copying something to another part of the same drive, but I get the errors when copying from one drive to another. I'll sort it out.

Anyway, I'm obsessed with this new single by Lazyboy called “Underwear Inside the Pants”. It's a social commentary, talking over music sort of deal that was played on CKDU a few nights ago. Check out this interesting review and get ahold of a copy if you can. I'm going back to work.

• Written on 28 December 2004 & posted at 02:09 AM.
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Ah, Boxing Day. No one knows what it's good for, no one knows why it's called Boxing Day, and nobody likes boxing. Definitely one of the stupidest days of the year.

Yesterday (although still technically “today” for me, since I'm still up) was, of course, Christmas, and I got some great stuff from Mom and Joey. The goodies include a new toque (so-Canadian-it-hurts), gloves, boots, and a scarf to keep me warm, a new set of headphones (since my old ones broke back in October), and some blank DVDs for my brand new DVD burner (16X! Dual-layer!). Since I have a laptop, not well known for liking 5.25“ drivers, it's external. The case is very cool. I made my first DVD before coming to work, which consisted of Brian Greene's ”The Elegant Universe“ Nova special. Fun stuff. I also feel like I'm forgetting some items from today, but I'm very tired, so it's excusable for the time being.

From the bad-news-we're-gonna-die-seriously-we're-screwed-here-guys, that asteroid that they discovered the other day (officially called ”2004 MN4“) has had its trajectory recalculated. The initial announcement said the chances of it hitting us were about 1/233 — not great odds, really. The revised probably was 1/63, which led to a bit of panic. They recalculated again, and as a Christmas present, decided that the odds are actually 1/45. That's really bad. (Sure, you can say that a 2.2% chance isn't bad, but think of what the odds of winning the lottery are, and look at how many people win.) I'm not freaking out at all, I'm just saying that the odds are such that they make me nervous.

Incidentally, Tony (voted ”Most Inconsiderate Basemas 2004 Participant" for forgetting to buy a present for Nick :) ) is now an uncle. Actually, it was a baby girl, so Tony is an aunt (please, somebody catch the Friends reference). Someday, he's going to be a role model. Isn't that scary? (Just kidding, Tony, we all love you. Sorta.) The little lady is named Paige.

Finally, I've gotten three out of my four marks back for this semester. I expected diaster, and woe, and much gnashing of teeth, since it was a pretty rough semester. However, I didn't do too bad: I expected to fail calculus, but got a C — not good, but not terrible. I expected to do really bad on algorithms, but got a B-. And in compiler construction, which I thought I did okay in, I got a B. Now, I'm just waiting for software architecture. I think I did okay in that.

• Written on 26 December 2004 & posted at 04:15 AM.
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Merry Basemas, everybody! December 23rd is here again, and this is the fifth year of celebration. Sure, we might not have any TV specials, or Basemas songs to sing, or big, traditional feasts, but it's still the most wonderful time of the year.

I've been working my sexy, sexy butt off for the past few days with all of my extra shifts at work, and I can't wait for tonight's shift to be over. Tonight, everyone convenes at Planet JJKP to open their presents. We're doing Secret Santa again, and (oddly enough) I never actually figured out who had me. Not that I tried very hard, but generally, it's pretty obvious. We, as a group, are dreadful at keeping secrets.

Today's poll question: who do you find more annoying: the Canadian Tire guy, or the Canadian Tire woman? I think they're married. I hate them both, even though they do have a lot of nifty gadgets. In particular, I want one of those fancy laser levels that they've been advertising lately, even though I have no need for one, and never will. The usefulness is immaterial. The “a” stands for “accounting”.

Anyway, I've got to go get ready to catch the bus to work. For those of you who are partaking of the Basemas goodness, I'll see you around 11:30. Until we meet again.

• Written on 23 December 2004 & posted at 01:08 PM.
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Wow! Only two more days until Basemas! Can you feel the magic? I feel like I've lost my Christmas spirit, but I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I'll be working so much: starting today, I've got three evening shifts that work (3 pm - 11 pm) followed by four backshifts. Ugh. I don't really mind — lots of people at work have more exciting things to do for Christmas than I do — but I'll complain anyway.

Last night, I finally got all of my Basemas and Christmas shopping done. I got a great ______ for ______ and you should see the awesome ______ I got for ______. And the crack was good, too. Today, I have to run over to Bayer's Lake to pick up one final gift before I head off to work. That, my friends, will be madness. I'd really like to cover myself in bubblewrap and sit in the middle of the mall on Christmas Eve, just to see all the panicked parents (generally dads). It would be great.

In other news, some insightful folks have managed to create...self-heating coffee. Wow. I really can't wait to get my hands on a batch of that stuff — pretty neat idea, actually. It reminds me of that self-cooling beer/pop can that was in the news earlier this year. If anyone has time to steal one from the labs and get it to me in time for Christmas, I'd be ecstatic. Self-heating coffee. What will they think of next?

The always amusing Diesel Sweeties is starting to get into the Christmas spirit. I woke up this morning to find yet another great comic in my inbox. For those of you who have never taken the time to absorb DS, I highly recommend it. It's pure pixelated goodness — I've been reading for more than three years. That's some serious staying power, especially for me. Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of web comics.

Anyway, it's time for me to head out to work soon, so I'm going to go. You know what I love all of a sudden? Regular expressions. I know — weird.

mysql> select * from seasons where reason = 'jesus';
Empty set (0.01 sec)

• Written on 21 December 2004 & posted at 10:51 AM.
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Joy to the world! Exams are done! The inevitability of exam scheduling has led to an early Basemas present for me — I'm so very happy to be through with exams. The following is a brief list of things that I will never need to think about again:

• Shift/reduce errors
• Maximum-flow/minimum-cut
• Derivatives
• Taylor and Maclaurin series
• The Architectural Business Cycle (ABC)
• Online math assignments
• Building a compiler

Oh, it's sweet to be finished. Now I can enjoy life with my new laptop, Ion, which I love. When I first took it out of the box, I thought it looked incredibly wide. It's weird the way your brain adjusts to things. After I had to switch back to using Mom's normal CRT monitor, I thought it looked very square compared to widescreen. Fortunately, it doesn't take too long to adjust to such things.

I found a great ambient Shoutcast station, Digitally Imported Chillout. Normally, I'm not into such music, but I was looking for something to get rid of the silence while I was studying last night. It's very relaxing — none of it is the sort of music where you'd ever seek out a particular song, but it's good for background noise. Just try not to think about it too much.

Anyway, I'm off to enjoy my Ionic goodness. Steve dropped off his removable hard drive, which contains the contents of my previous laptops. It's time to figure out what to keep and what to ditch (and by ditch, I mean “burn to CD”, since I never get rid of anything).

What do you have planned for tonight?

• Written on 16 December 2004 & posted at 02:40 PM.
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Arg. I feel like my head is going to explode. I'm so sick of finals season, not because I've been working/studying my ass off, but because I'm sick of the constant, nagging, niggling stress. Stress! I hate it. I can't wait until this time Thursday, when I'll be cuddled up with a brand new laptop and done with school for another semester. Have I mentioned before how incredibly sick of school I am? The way I look at it, I've been doing this every year since 1988. I don't remember 1988, but I'm almost sure I wouldn't think that I'd still be doing school every day, sixteen years later. I don't understand doctors and lawyers and all those people that stay in school until they're thirty. It's insane.

Done ranting. It's time to do some Basemas planning. As all of you know, Basemas is an annual celebration that commemorates the birth of Basemas. It is a glorious celebration with a long and varied history — and by “long and varied”, I mean “short and predictable”. Gifts have traditionally been from the dollar store, with gifts intended for Tony being offensive and crude (take a moment to remember the sheep sex doll). Last year, we tried the whole secret Santa thing and bought each other books, which was pretty good. This year, we're sticking with secret Santa, but there is no theme. Buy your person whatever you want, just make it something nice.

Anyway, I've got to resume pretending to study. Wish me luck on my two remaining exams (FYI, Monday's calculus exam murdered me). I'll wish you luck on yours. Incidentally, check out Jesslin, who is in the second annual Blogger Idol.

• Written on 14 December 2004 & posted at 09:01 PM.
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Has anyone else tried Google Suggest? I think this is an awesome new feature, and to be honest, I'm just blown away from a technical standpoint. It's so fast! The Google folks have a real knack for impressing me, and all of the other geeks out there for that matter. I love it, and I can't wait to see it get out of the labs. If Google News is any indication, though, we could be waiting a few years for that to happen. Sigh.

Has anyone started buying Christmas presents yet? Am I a freak for not even thinking about starting?
I am one ludicriously excited dork. The suspense is killing me!

• Written on 10 December 2004 & posted at 02:49 PM.
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I've had the song “I See Right Through to You” by DJ Encore stuck in my head for a fews days. Whilest digging through old CDs to find a copy of it, I found a pocket of greatness from the summer 2002 region — songs and bands I had totally forgotten about. I'm now listening to “All in a Day” by Failsafe3, and I've got Goldfinger's “Open Your Eyes” album queued up. Let's not forget Spek, the Doves, and As Advertised...so much greatness. Old music really rocks, although I'm worried that I've gotten to that point everyone reaches someday, where they don't like new music anymore. Bah.

I'm studying for my first final, which is in compiler construction. We're allowed two sheets of notes (both sides), so I'm composing a fairly detailed cheatsheet. I really have no clue how it's going to turn out, actually, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see. The suspense, however, is killing me.

In HP news, which (fortunately) has been sparse lately, the cheque for FutureShop has been sent. It should actually be at FutureShop's headquarters sometime today, and applied to my account within a week or so (cheques take way too long to clear!). There will be a $950 difference left over on my account, so I'll have to wait for FutureShop to mail me a cheque. That's going right towards paying off my Dell. $950 is a big chunk of change towards it, about a third. So, my goal of having it paid off by my birthday remains within my grasp.

Speaking of my birthday, I discovered that if you multiply the digits in my year of birth (1 x 9 x 8 x 3), you get 216, which is my date of birth (February 16th). How cool is that? Yeah, I'm a dork. Deal with it.

• Written on 08 December 2004 & posted at 02:31 PM.
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I am so stressed out — I don't think I've ever had a crunch like this one. Fourth year definitely sucks. I'm still struggling with my compilers assignment, which is due tomorrow and nowhere near completion (although I'm not alone in the class). I have another assignment due in software architecture that I haven't started (although it's not nearly as bad as the others), and I'm really sleepy (although for good reason). After working backshift last night, I got up around 1:30 (which is very early for me) and went to see The Polar Express with my dad in IMAX 3D. It was a great Christmas movie, and I recommend that everyone go see it. Seriously. If you like Christmas movies, you'll like it for the “ho-ho-ho” factor, and if you like 3D stuff, you'll like it for the “hey-this-is-the-first-full-length-movie-in-3D” factor. So, yeah, I'm sleepy, socially deprived, and frustrated beyond belief.

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.VerifyError: (class: Main, method: _main signature: ()I) Expecting to find object/array on stack. Arg! There IS an object on the stack! Curses!

So, what colour is your favourite song? If you were to look at a swatch of fairly basic colours (you know — red, green, purple — not “tapioca dream factory” or “salmon kidney” or other so-called colours), which one would most remind you of your favourite song? The implied question here, of course, is “What is your favourite song?”, which is difficult enough to answer on its own, let alone abstracting applying a colour to it. Think about it, though. I think mine is sort of a royal blue.

Check out this fantastic video on recovering the sound on old records and even ancient wax cylinders. Amazing. Via Daily Planet.

• Written on 05 December 2004 & posted at 08:55 PM.
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Before I begin, let me briefly review my laptop adventures over the past six months or so:
Mid-May: Somehow, my beloved Pixel gets broken. I get it fixed, but decide I want a new laptop anyway.
May 21st: Bought a HP Pavillion widescreen notebook at FutureShop.
May 26th: Took it back and exchanged it, because it made weird noises.
October 13th: HP breaks for the third time (not including that first exchange) and I start the refund process.
November 18th: Buy a Toshiba Satellite from FutureShop.
November 25th: Take it back and exchange it because it turns off for no reason sometimes.
December 1st: Take the second one back and get a refund.
December 2nd (that's today!): Buy a Dell. This is my fifth laptop that I bought since May. The stats are juicy (and I'll post them later) but the interest kind of sucks. Either way, I think I'll finally be happy.

That's right, I've gone and got myself a Dell. I really hope I'm happy with this one — if it doesn't work, then I'm the problem. At this point, the only common factors are FutureShop and myself. This will rule out FutureShop as being the source of my curse.

I'm currently writing this entry on the tiniest computer ever, a 12.1“ subnotebook from Dell that belongs to my Mom's boss. We have it for the weekend so I can get used to Dell's and Mom can work on something. It's a nice computer, but, um, very tiny. Seriously. I have a lot of trouble typing on it, and thus am slowed to about 60 WPM instead of my usual 90 - 100. I hate typing this slowly.

Anyway, I've got to get going. I just wanted to actually update the blog. In the meantime, check out the band ”VHS or Beta". They have a great song called Night on Fire.

• Written on 02 December 2004 & posted at 04:20 PM.
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