So, I'm in Waterloo all alone this weekend (I'm not calling people who should be studying for exams), so in order to stave off loneliness I started looking at OpenGL again and this is what I created:

A Robot Arm that can rotate at the joints, how fun.

It's an arm and by pressing one of 16 keys the various joints can be rotated (to a certain extent) in either direction. Technically I could make another arm and put them both on a body, I guess, but I think I have done enough for today. I actually used some of the code from a tutorial, but that just gave the two pieces of the arm, none of the fingers and no bounds on the rotation.

Time for supper now, I am almost healthy again I think, but I still cough a lot. It is hard to believe that I started being sick nearly two weeks ago when I left for Ottawa. I haven't been sick for that much time ever before, it has been very unpleasant.

Ottawa was fun, except that I was sick the day I left, bad headache and unpleasant stomach issues and stuff. Very not nice. I managed to make it to the train and get on without dying, but I think it was close. I should have taken a taxi to the station. Trains are fun though, never been on one before and it was very amusing.

I met Adrienne in Toronto since I had an hour and a half stop over there and we had some lunch at Harvey's, mmmm...meat. She gave me candy and a toy truck that when you pull it back it goes forward. It's really cool. :) Union station was pretty impressive, I wonder what the outside of it looks like?

In Ottawa I didn't have any trouble getting a taxi and I got to my hotel and got checked in without any problems. Then I went and had supper with Laura and Curtis and Aunt Joanne at a restaurant called the Black Tomato. I had Caribbean Jerk Chicken which was really good. It was great that they all came to see me, it was kinda lonely in my hotel room. The room was nice though, like a double but with only one bed, so lots of space. After supper I watched TV and went to bed early because I was still feeling pretty ill.

I checked out in the morning and went to the conference and stuff. It was pretty good, I knew most of the content already, but they still did a really good job of presenting it. I left early to get to the train station on time, I wasn't sure how easy it was to get a taxi in Ottawa. It turns out that it was really easy. I walked out of the building and got right into a taxi, no problem except that I was pretty early getting to the train station. The train home was uneventful and late. I was still feeling sick on Thursday so I stayed home and slept, that was fun.

The weekend was alright, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean with Matt and Kim on Friday night but that's about all we did because I was still feeling pretty crappy. My brother was really sick too (much worse than me), he had a fever of around 104 and he looked really bad. So I pretty much stayed away from him for the weekend. I don't want more illness. I hope Kim doesn't get sick at all. On Saturday night I went with Kim's family to Stratford for supper, and that was pretty good. I also got to meet Kim's new cousin this weekend, she was very cute. When I got back to Waterloo on Sunday I spent the whole night working on my last 370 assignment, stupid course. I made a "rocket" chase a "target" using the ordinary differential equation solvers of Matlab. Here's a picture (meaning not gauranteed):

Matlab 3D plot of a pursuer (O) and a target (X) with a helix-shaped path

Just a quick correction to the previous post...Jen's new toy is a "massager," not a vibrator. :)

Fun weekend, I got to see the extended version of the Two Towers which was pretty good. Most of the added scenes were useful to have in the movie, but not for anyone who doesn't care. Which is a lot of people unfortunately.

I go to Ottawa on Tuesday! It's going to be my first time on a train and I get to stay at the Lord Elgin hotel. I don't know if that is good or not but I guess I will find out. On Wednesday I'm going to a conference on "Common Look and Feel and Accessibility Guidelines for Government Websites," no comment.

When I got back to Waterloo today, Jen's mom was just leaving and I got to see the new toy that she bought for Jen. It's a dual function (vibrate/pulsate) vibrator with three speeds and three region settings. It is leather and uses rechargeable batteries. I tried it out but it was a little two weird for me, so I will leave it with Jen to enjoy.

Just a quick update, I'm currently making my room stop leaking water.

On Monday Jeff, Kenny and Brad came to Waterloo and we (Jen and I and them) went to Morty's for wings with Chris and Rob, then we went to Rob's house and played Chez Geek 3 while watching Family Guy and Futurama. At Morty's I had a suicide wing for some reason and it just about killed me. Very hot. But tasty nonetheless. :)

I think my Linux system is useable finally. If you like you can see a screenshot of my desktop. I'm running Fluxbox as my window manager and the 2.6test9 kernel.

Back to stopping the water. I don't think I can win. I will post a picture whenever Jen gets her roll of film developed.

Not too much exciting happened this weekend, but I did spend a lot of quality time with Kim which was excellent.

Days since Jen last updated her website: 31.

Double plus good weekend, very tired today though.

Matt and Keizo came to our place and them and us and Wilson, Angela, Chris, Sean and Greg went to see Matrix Revolutions Saturday afternoon. It was an alright movie, lots of cool action and special effects, but the explanations and plot left something to be desired. Saturday night the four people staying in our apartment as well as Angela and Ian went to the Bomber and that was fun, but I think it is the reason that I will not be able to do anything productive today. Still sleepy.

I switched the positions of my dresser and desk in my room on Saturday as well and for some reason, doing so caused my root filesystem to become corrupted. This is not one of the identifying features of a healthy Linux system and so I took the oppourtunity to completely wipe my OS drive and do fresh installs of Windows and Linux. Neither are very complete yet, no apps installed in Windows and I am trying to install the 2.6.0test9 kernel in Linux without any success. Bah.

Today at work we got to finally move to the new building, and it is pretty nice. The offices are not very well set up for computers and stuff but I think it will work out. Finally a nice chair and proper computer desk. I now have the ultimate workstation if you combine that with my fast computer and 17" LCD monitor.

Good luck to Adrienne and her tattoo-to-be today!

I'm sad. As I mentioned earlier, the third largest solar flare ever recorded occured on my birthday. That was pretty cool, but it turns out that it was just the start of the most active period of solar activity ever recorded which was topped off today by the largest solar flare ever seen, one much bigger than the one that occured on the 28th. At least this one wasn't pointed directly at the earth. Stupid Sun, now if I ever mention the solar flare on my birthday (which is now the 4th largest ever recorded) people (who care) will say, "oh, but a bigger one happened a week later!"

I just finished watching the the 3rd Indiana Jones movie: "The Last Crusade." I'm so happy with the DVD set. Hopefully the original Star Wars movies come out on DVD soon. I don't think I care about the new ones though.

On my birthday, the third largest solar flare ever recorded occured and today the the 2 tons of "coronal mass ejection" will hit the earth. Fun! Apparently the effects will include satellite and cellular disruption and aurora borealis type events in the Southern hemisphere.

View from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope which shows light from a specific type of iron ion formed at 1.5 million degrees Kelvin. Taken at 11:12 UTC. Given the size of the sun, that white spot is pretty big. Image courtesy of the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory

On a possibly related note, my CS370 exam sucked ass.

Last weekend was very good. It was my official birthday weekend so I did lots of fun stuff.

On Friday I kinda just sat around after getting home, hung out with Kim and talked to my mom a bit, nothing special.

On Saturday I got up bright and early for no reason at all. Then I studied CS370 for a bit and then Matt and Chris came over to install RedHat 9 on Chris's laptop. And they brought me presents! Matt brought me a Jones Soda and Chris brought me an adaptor which allows me to use a Playstation controller on my computer! Sweet on both things! Then Kim got home from work and we all went with my Mom and my brother to Jack Astor's for some supper (we wanted to go to East Side Mario's but they were too busy). Kim gave me the Indiana Jones trilogy DVD boxed set which rocks soooo much. She didn't think it was good because it was what I asked for and that meant there was no surprise, but I am still happy. After supper we went to Silvercity and saw the move Kill Bill Vol. 1 and it was really good, but brutally violent. I am looking forward to Volume 2. Apparently the movie is rated Canadian R, which means that no one under 18 is allowed in even if they are with a parent. This is funny because Kim and I were asked for ID when we bought our tickets. When we got back to my house we ate some really good cake and then everyone went home.

On Sunday I would have slept in but Kim came and woke me up at 9:30. Grrrr. :) So I went to Walmart and bought a Playstation controller to go with my shiny new adaptor and I also ate some more of my cake. When I got back to Waterloo I found out that the controller+adaptor works better and easier than any other PC controller I have tried before, in both Linux and Windows. Yay!

Today is my actual birthday, but unfortunately I have my CS370 midterm tonight from 7-9. I had a midterm last year on my birthday too. It's not fair. So I am staying at the school after work today and when I get home I think I will eat some more of my cake and play some Chrono Cross with my new controller.

This weekend was pretty fun, Matt came down to look for an apartment for the Winter, and so I stayed in Waterloo and attempted to help.

On Friday Jen, Rob, Chris, Sean and I went to Kelsey's for supper and I had the four-cheese spinach dip which was very good. It took so long to get our food though, we had to wait 30 minutes to get a table and once we were seated we had to wait a long time again to be served. This was bad because Matt was supposed to be arriving at 8:15 or so to our house. But his bus was late so everything turned out ok. Except that I forgot Sean's name for some reason, I feel really bad about that and so I am blaming Angela. Matt and I watched some Family Guy after he arrived, but didn't do much else.

On Saturday we got up early (9:00am) and Angela came over and we went to look at apartments for Matt. The first one was the best, so it kinda sucked that we even bothered with the others. Matt and I also watched Memento which was very good, but I think I need to watch it again because it went backwards so I am sure I missed a few things. We went out Saturday night with Mike and his girlfriend and his sister to a Chinese Restaurant and I had the Curried Chicken. I managed to eat it all but I was very full after, it was good though. We also rented and watched Adaptation and that was another very good movie.

On Sunday Jen, Matt, Angela and I went to Pizza Hut for the lunch buffet and I ate too much again. As a result of this weekend I have decided to not eat too much anymore because it isn't cool. I also did what had to be the easiest CS assignment ever (other than early cs130 stuff).

I made a sphere in OpenGL with lights and cameras and all sorts of things. I think OpenGL is going to take a while to get on to, but I found what looks like a good tutorial.

The lines are the axes:

The distorted (not by me) sphere.

Turkey weekend! Lots of turkey, well only twice, but still pretty good. I managed to not eat so much that I felt ill at any point.

I also got to go to the reception part of Krissy's wedding, it was great. Very nice decorations and food and stuff. The DJ was also an Elvis impersonator and he was very good. I told Matt and he was surprised because he thought that the music was just from a CD or something.

My birthday is coming soon which means so is Indiana Jones, yay! All good except for the midterm on the same day.

I watched Bowling for Columbine last night and it was pretty good. It may be a bit one-sided, but so are most things. It certainly did have a lot of interesting stuff in it. The one thing that I found most interesting was when Michael Moore was asking Canadians if they lock their doors. Everyone said no. At first I thought that he meant at night or when no one wa home, but then I found out he basically meant all the time. He was really surprised that most people here leave their doors unlocked when they are at home. I know people who don't even know where the keys to their house are and so haven't locked their doors in years. The US is a strange place.

I rebooted today, which was fun because I haven't in a while, see:

mclausch@duffman:~$ uptime
16:57:56 up 17 days, 18:36, 13 users, load average: 0.10, 0.10, 0.05

Now this is special because I updated all kinds of software on my computer during those 17 or 18 days, things that really should have caused me to reboot, like X. But whatever, it was fun while it lasted.

Anybody remember the b-trees? I sure do.

B-trees courtest of Michael McCool, destroyed by CS240

My site has a new feature! The "Pictures" section is now functional. The page parses my main journal file, picks out all the images I've posted and properly displays them with the alt text as a description of the image. Check it out!

Update time, wow I'm sucking with this.

I bought volume one of the Family Guy, which is sweet, no more crappy quick time and real media files for me. I will probably get the other volume for Christmas, if I don't break down and buy it first. I'm really excited about Indiana Jones though, hopefully I will get it for my birthday. I think I need more money, I wouldn't mind owning the Simpsons and Futurama on DVD either.

Work is good, its all about the Perl, which I enjoy very much. It is exactly my type of language, it knows what I want even when I don't. I may also get to help create an online ordering system using a database and...Perl! :)

This weekend is Thanksgiving and I think I am going to seriously try to not eat until I feel sick. It is very hard to do when everything tastes so good though. Kim is going to Krissy's wedding with Matt, congrats Krissy.

Learning openGL isn't going so well since I keep not doing it. I should really start. Just like I should really add more content to this site and learn a bunch of other stuff. But work just takes the motivation right out of you. I hope real life isn't like this.

Recent movies: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and American Wedding. Both were quite entertaining although the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was only original in its premise. I hope that American Wedding is the last of the American Pie series because it seems like a good place to end. Next up is hopefully Bowling for Columbine and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, both of which won't be quite as uplifting I'm sure.

Busy September, so not many updates. Although I don't think it has actually been busy, I am just lazy. Work makes me not want to do things in the evenings. Adults tell me this is normal and that I should get used to it. I don't like that very much. I don't think I am an adult yet.

Kim came to visit last weekend, we went to the Mongolian Grill and had good food. She liked my new apartment, I like it too. Except that the landlady has a sewing fetish and a very loud sewing machine.

CS370 is showing me the joys of MATLAB. And so I (like all others who take this course) have created an ampersand using cubic spline interpolation. Here it is:

SpLiNE!

Isn't it lovely?

Now I just need to vectorize some loops and I should get a decent mark on the assignment.

It's a September entry!!! Let's see, lots can happen in a month.

Exams went well, although my CS246 exam apparently didn't go well according to the markers who have yet to reply to my email. Stupid course. Florida was fun after exams, not exactly relaxing, but fun just the same. People in the US are weird, I actually felt a bit relieved when we crossed back into Canada. The move to my new place was also all good apparently, I was enjoying the sunshine state at the time so I don't actually know. The apartment is good except that I don't have a window in my room which some people tell me is illegal. Oh well, my room is bigger and the apartment is clean, good enough for me. I started my new coop job yesterday and it seems like it will be alright...hopefully.

Updating when things actually happen is the key to long journal entries.

And the year's record for file transfer speed over our junk cable connection goes to....the series finale of FUTURAMA!!!!!

WHOOOOSH!!!

I wonder what dsl will be like....?

Haha, Michael's siblings are amusing. Here are some pictures:

Katelyn

Mark

For some degree of sense, see this site: Star Wars Kid

Can't update much now, need to study. Had gooooooood Morty's wings though, mmmmmm.

Thus ends my streak of only updating once a month because today I feel inclined to update and because something other than school happened last night. Also Jen updated her website so I have to too.

Last night I went to Wilson's house party and it was fun. Jen and Angela got really drunk and amused themselves by giving me a bunch of their alcohol which amused me because it meant I didn't have to buy my own as usual. Jen made me three orange juice/pepsi twist based drinks and then a vodka based drink that everyone agreed didn't actually contain any orange pop as she claimed. We were tipped off by the lack of orange colouring. We played lots of bubbles too, over 140 matches I think. Drunk bubbles is harder than normal bubbles. But I still beat Jen and Angela mostly.

Today I'm very tired, we worked all day yesterday trying to figure out why stupid Gtk crashes at random times and found out it is because it is not thread-safe and so our multi-threaded program kills it well. But not in the good way. Once we found that out we went and got 4 large pizzas, one for each of us. Mmmm...pizza. I guess the main reason I am tired though would be due to the getting home at 4:00am. Oh well. Need to do more work today.

Jen and Angela are whores from the future! Only 27.99! But they bought each other so they arn't for sale anymore. :(

Oh, I also found out that they are really screwing up the CS program that currently exists in favour of...something else. Not sure what. It means I have to take OS and then concurrency, like that makes any sense.

I need to go work.

Look, its an update for July. Took me a while this time. So much work to do...

One entry a month, that should be enough for anyone.

Look, it's my car!!!!

My First Car: 1990 Toyota Tercel

I'm back at school now, and this term looks like it will be very busy. I probably won't update much due to this fact.

No updates i a while, I must be lazy or something. Last Thursday was cool, my fellow co-op students and I went to Morty's to get wings, mmmm....wings. I tried some dry cajun and they turned out to be quite acceptable. It is cool to put some of the dry cajun spices on a normal hot wing, it makes it quite a bit hotter, but very tasty.

The weekend wasn't anything special, and it is also halfway through the following week, so I am having trouble remembering it. It seems like I measure my life in weeks and weekends though. Seems like an appropriate length of time, not too long or too short.

The term is almost done...time to start thinking like a school type person again.

Weekend was fun, and long. But not as long for me as it was for some people...grrrrrr. I went to my Oma's house on Friday for food and we had Lake Erie perch which is very very good. I also got chocolate. On Saturday I went to my Aunt Joan's house for more food (ham), and again, more chocolate. Saturday night we went bowling since it is Chris's birthday (22) around now and that was also cool. I didn't do as badly as normal and got over 100 points in 2 of 3 games. We also went to William's afterwards but we couldn't get a table all together because there were about 10 of us. Feelings of segregation embittered the participants and we all went home. Actually there was no bitterness, but that was a cool sentence. Also on Saturday I helped Matt start to build his new computer. Now I want a new computer. On Sunday I went with Kim to her Aunt's house and had more ham and also cherry cheese cake...mmmm. And chocolate. My mom gave me chocolate too of course.

Concept of the weekend: chocolate; Personal wonderment of the weekend: why were there so many poorly labeled wires in Matt's new case?

Wow, that last post is really boring to read. Must be because I wrote it early in the morning. It does not accurately convey the enjoyment of the weekend so I would just like to assert that the enjoyment level was high. Too bad it was the last official book club meeting because it was the first that I had been to.

Friday: Matt came to Waterloo to stay over since he had his DE exam on Saturday. Keizo also came down. He wants to buy a new car but is having trouble deciding which one. Out of his short-list I think he should get the Toyota Celica for no concrete reason whatsoever.

Saturday: Tried very hard to work on my work report, but failed massively for most of the day. I went with Matt when he left for his exam and got some Campus Pizza....mmmmm. I also installed original Doom in Linux which amused me somewhat. After his exam, Matt went home and I actually managed to make progress on my work report. Then about 10 people came over for a book club meeting. Very amusing, Brad had 3 flower vases full of margarita. I don't think our special roommate was impressed with noisy drunk people being loud outside his door until 2:00am.

Sunday: Didn't bother trying to accomplish anything on my work report, I figure I will get it done this week at work. Nobody looked too well in the morning, but everyone went to see Keizo's sister's piano recital anyway. Except Chris. It was really good, and made me wonder why there are no Math recitals. I'm sure there's a good reason though. Simpsons was funny because Homer drank a pitcher full of margarita. After Simpsons we went and saw "The Core," which was bad, but better than I was expecting. The ship that penetrated deep into the earth's hot juicy core was appropriately phallic. Time for sleep...I mean work.

Mmmmm....wings from Morty's. Soooo full....Must get less next time.

I don't like it when the power goes out. This weekend I went home and for some reason we had a big ice storm thingy which just happened to relieve my house of its power. Usurp it, if you will. Our society relies too much on electricity, it would be completely crippled if the supply were cut off.

Please hurry up with the warm weather, I'm cold.

April Fool's day is amusing on the Internet. I wasn't caught by anything this year though.

Tuesday is a good day for updating, so here we go.

The weekend was fun, didn't do too much but still quite enjoyable. Sunday was Liz's birthday so we (Matt and Kim and I) got a cake on Saturday night and spent some time with her and Emily and Chris. I also rented the other two DVDs of Fawlty Towers and they are quite amusing.

Yesterday I went to Morty's for the first time and got some wings. They were very good, but they were also the biggest wings I have ever seen. I had 5 medium and 5 hot and was completely stuffed afterwards. I'm going to try a suicide wing next time I go, should be interesting.

One of my fellow coop students brought me every episode of the Simpsons today...excellent...as long as I can make room on my harddrive.

I also learned some Perl today and it is not as bad as I thought it would be. Regular expressions and pattern matching are fun! Time to update my resume.

A random quotation should now appear at the top left corner of this website. I don't have too many yet, but the list should eventually get quite large. I am trying to only use quotes that make some sort of useful observation. I was wondering though: is it vain to add phrases that I think of myself? I probably will, but to be fair I guess I will also have to add quotes from people I know if I hear anything worth preserving.

This weekend was Emily's birthday so we all went to The African Restaurant which was very good. Very spicy as well which added to the tastiness in my opinion. I will have to go back there soon, it is great. We got Sega Alicha, Zignie, Zil Zil, Tsebhi Dorho and Vegetarian Alicha. They serve it all up on one big flatbread type thing called Injera and you break off pieces and scoop up the meat and vegies. The guy who runs it is also really nice, we were a bit loud but he didn't seem to mind at all.

Today I helped Kim move all her junk back to her Aunt's house and I also rented volume one of a british comedy series called "Fawlty Towers." It stars John Cleese so it should be amusing. Kim also has a job interview tomorrow with CIBC Wood Gundy which apparently does investment stuff so I hope that goes well for her.

I'm hungry, I think I will try to find some food now.

I officially signed up for all my classes and I think it will be all good for the summer. I have CS 240 and Economics 201 in the morning on Tuesday and Thursday, and then Statistics 231 (boooo) and CS 246 in the afternoon. Then on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I have Introductory Combinatorics and Opimization from 9:30-10:20. Very unbalanced, but with two programming courses I will probably need lots of free time to sit and stare at my computer.

I am wretchedly unmotivated lately. I haven't really started my work report, I haven't worked on my website at all, and I am not learning C/C++ like I had planned on doing. I can't think of a reason why this is happening other than the fact that I use a computer all day long at work so when I get home I don't feel like doing too much. Work is annoying that way. I would rather have lots of assignments and other school stuff (not coop, though, *shudder*) than have to be in one place for 8 hours every day. There isn't a lot of time at night after you make/eat supper and before you go to bed. I think that this is an issue that I will need to work out or else my post-university life will turn into a mindless mash of nothingness. Maybe if my job was more inspiring. Or perhaps I should watch "Requiem for A Dream" again, that is a good movie for putting life into some sort of perspective. Or breaking it, breaking it into tiny itty bitty pieces.

Now that I have Linux working well it is kinda boring. I mean it is a good operating system and I am happy but there is nothing left to do on it. It just works and I since I am not really doing anything on my computer currently (other than downloading of course), it isn't that interesting.

"War" has started in Iraq, although to me the word "war" should only be applied to conflicts where the outcome is uncertain. There is no question that the US will trample Iraq and claim victory even if Saddam escapes like Osama bin Laden. Now if a bunch of other countries in the region joined with Iraq and started fighting against the US it would be war. This is just an invasion. And a silly one at that.

Illness sucks.

Last night I went out to Williams with Kim, Liz, Chris, Emily and Matt, which was fun, but for the whole day I basically slept because I felt like crap. Friday wasn't much fun either. I think I am better now though, lets hear it for drugs!

Linux is now working as it is supposed to. I can watch DVDs, DivX and Xvid movies withough any special effort. Also I have anti-aliased fonts which look much nicer than the ordinary fonts. The only thing that I cannot do in Linux is compress DVDs to DivX, but I think I may look into that soon. I also can't play games, but I didn't do much of that when I was in Windows. Now if only my monitor supported high resolution and a high refresh rate.

Yay! Our heat is fixed! Now my fingers arn't falling off due to cold+typing.

Haven't done an update in a while so this will be long. And reverse-chronological for fun!

It is rather cold in our apartment today, I am now convinced that the heating is broken in some way. I know for sure that my ears are much colder than they should be inside a house. I hope it is fixed soon.

The weekend was fun, Matt and Adrienne came to visit. On Sunday we went to Krispy Kreme donuts and got a dozen death objects which are now mostly gone. Michael also came over on Sunday and watched me play with Debian while doing his Chemistry homework.

On Saturday, Matt and I installed Debian Linux on my computer and it seems to be working pretty good. Only complaints are that DVDs don't play right (so far) and that I can't play anything encoded in DivX 5 or XviD (for now). I really like apt-get and being able to login to my computer from anywhere that has a Secure Shell Client. On Saturday evening we went to the Mongolian Grill with some of Adrienne's friends (total of 9 people). It was very busy and they forgot to seat us until we complained. It turned out alright though because we got to eat on the comfy couches and they gave us the Feast meal (unlimited trips to the grill) for the price of the normal meal (1 trip only). Also the manager came and apologised a great deal.

On Friday Adrienne and Matt showed up and Angela came over and we went to Pizza Hut for supper. I got to drive Adrienne's car which was fun because it had more power than any other car I had ever driven before. After Pizza Hut we watched the movie "Pulp Fiction" which was excellent.

I had my second macroeconomics midterm on Thursday and it was much easier than the first. Also the lecture was very entertaining because Larry Smith finally revealed the secret of the "Matrix" which he has been talking about all term. I cannot relate the secret here though because it is apparently too much for the average person to handle.

I think that is enough now, especially since my fingers are starting to get numb and they will soon be unable to typeeslas.f

Mmmmmm...pancakes and assorted meats. Jen and I went to Brad's house (as did Rob and Chris and Sean, Brad's roommate+fiance were also there for a bit) last night for pancakes because it was pancake Tuesday, also known as Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday. Apparently "Mardi Gras" actually means Fat Tuesday (which is pretty obvious if you have ever learned some French) and so, logically, Mardi Gras just happened in New Orleans. I did not know this previously and I thought that Mardi Gras was just some random drunken, naked, bead filled party/riot.

Anyway, the pancakes were very good (there was also bacon and sausage) and after eating we watched Superman 3 which was clearly a very bad movie. Then we played a really good card game that had a name, but people kept pronouncing it differently and it sounded too hard to spell regardless. The end result is that I didn't get home in time to study much for econ before I feel asleep.

Look! Its a new month and my website handles it right! Yay!

Yay weekends! On Friday I got to go to the Mongolian Grill with my dad for his birthday. Mongolian Grill rules. On Saturday I went to my grandpa's with my family because it was his birthday recently. Sometimes the family visits can be boring but it wasn't too bad this time. We didn't get home until around 10pm, so I didn't start the rest of my evening until late. I went to Liz's and we had really good cake (Snickers cake I think). Then we watched the Princess Bride which is always an inconceivably good movie. Finshed up with some South Park episodes and some stimulating discussion about flexibility and religion. Got home about 4am, but I am surprisingly alert this evening. Yay stamina!

The drive back to Waterloo was pretty bad this evening, really high winds with lots of drifting as well as very slippery roads. I saw two cars actually go off the road (one right in front of me), and I saw dozens of cars in the ditch.

My economics lecture was quite amusing last night. Our teacher (Larry Smith) likes to role play and I got to be America while he was Japan. He was talking about trading partners and the global economy and such. So he basically talked completely to me for 15 minutes in a class of 300 students. Then he went on to say how tightly trading partners are linked and to demonstrate he made me hold hands with him for another 5 minutes while he continued to talk. Everyone at the University of Waterloo should take a class with this man, he is an excellent teacher.

Also interesting about last night was how both Mike and I brought our respective girlfriends to the lecture to show them the amazing Larry Smith without previously planning to do so on the same night. I am beginning to be disturbed by coincidences. Maybe Robert Anton Wilson is right (see the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy).

The weather outside was also cool this morning: frozen mist. Its like normal mist except frozen. Interesting smell and interesting feeling when it enters your nose. :)

Weekends are fun, so much better than the week, where i have to work and stuff. I got free panzerotti on Friday night because the people at the Pizza Place thought they burnt it. It was actually just a little bit brown but it still tasted good! Then I went and saw the movie "Daredevil" with Kim, Matt, Chris, Liz, Emily and some other girl. The movie had many, many bad moments but was still pretty cool (not worth ticket price though).

I was supposed to go to my grandpa's house this weekend cause its his birthday, but on Saturday the weather forecast called for badness so we stayed home instead. I got to help Kim babysit Thomas instead. That was alright because I got yummy food and got to watch a movie.

The weather forecast was right, it was bad. That was the reason why I took the bus home today instead of getting a ride. The bus driver sucked though, he didn't know how to get to the bus station so he had to keep asking people for help. The guy behind me kept screaming "I'm just a Girl!!" whenever the bus drive asked something. It was weird. Especially since my brother apparently performed that song (by "No Doubt") with his band on Friday at Medway's coffee house. I like random coincidences. Like how I saw 4 limousines this weekend while I haven't seen one in a long time before now.

I am downloading Metallica MP3's tonight because I liked the Apocalyptica covers of some of their songs. The real stuff is also quite good, lots of energy and more like real music than all of the crap available today. I wonder if I will ever buy music again. Interesting that Metallica was one of the first bands to take action against MP3's and yet I had no problem getting any tonight.

I also watched the movie "Signs" on Sunday, it was weird. The movie could have easily degenerated into typical horror film campiness, but it managed not to. It still had a couple plot holes though. Like why a species that is hurt by water would come to a planet that is mostly water. Or why they wouldn't bring weapons like ray guns or at least swords or something. Also why does Mel Gibson's face move the way it does? Oh well, the movie was ok, not sure if I will burn it yet.

Hey Jen! Your dad is here, hurry up and come home!

When I was walking to work this morning there was a weird guy with a giant furry ear flappy hat walking slowly in front of me. Because of the snow I wasn't able to pass him so I crossed the street. While I crossed the street he kept moving forward so he got a little ahead of me. I eventually caught up again, but when I did he completely stopped walking and turned to look at me. It was kinda weird.

It is really nice out today, smells like Spring. That is one of my favourite smells: morning while winter is trying to change to Spring. I hope it succeeds because I don't really like winter and I want all the snow to be gone and it to be warm enough out to not need a coat.

Major update today, not that it is anything normal people would notice. Now the default page will only show the current month's entries and you will see a link at the bottom which will take you to the previous month. Also, if there are no entries it will give you an appropriate message. If you are interested you can type your own query string to get a specific set of entries. The format is: ?date=YYYY-MM or ?date=YYYY where YYYY and MM represent the month and year respectively. If you make enter ?date=showall then you will get all available entries. I also changed a few colours and some spacing.

Doing laundry sucks, you have to keep remembering it. I want to go to bed now but I have to wait for my clothes to dry. Grrrr.

Jen asked me today if her bread was bad. I think it probably was but i told her it was ok. She is eating it now.

Jen asked me to write her a story today while I was at work. She didn't like it because it had a disgusting rodent in it. I say that she sucks. Here is the story:

Once upon a time there was a mouse, except it wasn't ordinary, it had an extra long tail. And it could curl the tail up into a springy thing and bounce around on it it a cute sorta way. Then one autumn day the mouse realized that winter was on its way so he found a nice apartment to stay in while it was cold outside. He figured that after the winter was over he would use his amazing tail powers to give the people living in the apartment each the one thing they most desired as a way of thanking them for letting him stay there.

So he made a nest in a cupboard in the kitchen and started looking for food. He came upon a black plastic thing with some peanut butter on it. Now, the mouse was smart, and knew that when food was left out like that it normally meant it was a trap. But he also knew that all mouse traps were wooden, not plastic, so he figured that it was probably a gift from the people who lived in the house.

Unfortunately he was wrong, the trap killed him and the people threw him and his magical tail out in the trash. The End.

Look, its a real update! Work was unique today, I had stuff to do (that's good), but it was hard and I didn't know how to do it (that's bad). Also by the end of the day I had a really nasty headache (that's bad). I did manage to figure out something with regard to the difficult work, and I think it may go better tomorrow (that's good).

I get my econ midterm mark back tonight, should be interesting, but I am not in the mood for the accompanying 3 hour lecture. I sorta just want to sleep. I have been staying up late too much to work on this site. Bah!

TODO: - define and write a dtd for my xml; - sort entries, no need to enter in any order; - make parser work if file is bad; - archive previous months, only display current; - make real sections; - make text box like entry tool for updating; - hidden function for personal notes; - comments!;

This is a test (3) of my new XML journal, maybe it will work.

This test has two paragraphs, fun!

This is a test (2) of my new XML journal, maybe it will work.

This is a test of my new XML journal, maybe it will work.

Look at me! I'm a faked January entry, tralalalala!!!

Reena!

Content to add: - Lists of stuff (music, movies, etc)
- Books read, good books
- ideal computer system
- thoughts/diary
- courses taken + commentary on them
- neat quotations
- resume
- random unix commands page