Working with a strong team is like going to the grocery store to pick up a lemon because you need lemon rind in that cake you're making, even though you suspect that it would be just fine without the lemon rind, but then when you arrive you realize that you haven't eaten lunch yet, so you decide to pick up some food for lunch and the whole chickens are on sale so you pick up one of those and you're able to make it into pieces of chicken for lunch and then chicken fried rice that lasts you for two meals, and then you also pick up some french bread with brie because they're sitting right next to the whole chicken and then later a friend comes over with a sad story to tell you and while they're talking you can offer them the french bread with brie, which they happen to love, and it somehow makes their day just a little bit better, and you can also have some later, and then because you're buying the brie you realize that you should also buy some veggies so that you cover all of the food groups and you grab some peppers but not just green and red peppers, you also pick up yellow and orange peppers because you feel like treating yourself and having a little colour in your life, and then you realize that if you also pick up an onion, a little bit of beef and a package of tortillas that you can have the most kickass dinner ever later of really colourful chicken fajitas, and you could invite some friends over, so you also pick up some juice, so that you have a variety of beverages to offer them, and realize that you're going to need a second lemon so that you can make two cakes since they're probably going to want to eat your cake, but then you realize that you accidentally put two lemons into your little carry basket at the very start, almost as if you somehow knew that this would happen, so you don't have to go back to get the second lemon.

That's what working with a strong team is like. Exactly like that.

Next term I'm taking several courses that are going to involve teams, so what will make or break these terms is going to be who I manage to wrangle onto my team (hereafter referred to as "Team Kickass").

Fortunately for me, there are several members of my dragon army in most of these courses. Which is a setup for a sweeeeet term. Grab a whole bunch of talent and lump it into one place and what you end up with is a fun ride as you surf the bellcurve to not only grade happiness, but also actual productivity and learning. It's a sweet, sweet ride.

Out of my four courses next term (that's right, take my insane schedule of this term and add another course onto it, and you'll see the mayhem I'm creating for myself next term....but you know I like it ;) ), three of them involve teams. Out of those three teams, I've got two Team Kickass teams nicely set up for myself. All that remains is the third course -- CSC318. I haven't worked out a Team Kickass for that course yet. I hope that I find them soon. Like, say, before someone else does. Or it's going to be a loooong term.

Working with a weak team is like driving a stapler into the back of your hand.

....But not in a fun way.

"Cute" and "funny-looking" were the two words most commonly associated with Bobby. He wasn't the brightest dog in the universe....he may have been one of the dimmest crayons in the box. But he was always bouncy and absolutely ecstatic when people arrived in our house, family or stranger. He probably couldn't tell the difference.

He was an old dog when my family got him, and that was seven years ago. This morning he was put down from his suffering of liver cancer, kidney failure, and a host of other problems.

He lived a good, long life and was well loved. We should all be so lucky.

Classes end on Wednesday. Wednesday also marks the day that I'm leaving to go to Harvard (read: Haw-vuhd) to the Internet+Society 2004 conference entitled "Votes, Bits & Bytes". I'm going to represent the Citizen Lab -- specifically the Civiblog project (which is really Graeme's domain, but he's on another continent, so I'm filling in).

While there, I'm also gonna meet up with our colleagues from the Berkman Centre at the Harvard Law school. They always chuckle when they visit us -- loud music and attacking each other in the basement is apparently not their style -- so I'll get to see what life is like from their side of the partnership.

But I'm gonna have a bit of spare time, too. I'm there until Sunday (and then I return very quickly into exam season). I've already got one recommendation of what I should see while I'm there. Any others?

No e-mail for a day. Sure, no problem. It's final-crunch time anyway, so it's probably useful that the cslab servers are down and I don't have access to my e-mail. This way, there's nothing to distract me. Yeah, it's probably a good thing in the long run. It's not that I need my e-mail or anything. I just normally like having it. Y'know. But it's certainly not that I need it. That would be ridiculous.

I can manage fine for a whole day without it. Cuz, y'know, it's just been a day. A day is nothing. A day is small. I'm sure I didn't get anything that important in just a day. What could possibly have been sent out in just one tiny little day?

And it's not like I'm never going to read it. I'll be able to read my e-mail as soon as the server is back. I'm sure it'll be back any moment now. And then I can read through whatever e-mail was sent to me over the past day. Which, as I mentioned, I'm sure isn't anything that important. You know, probably just a few little insignificant e-mails. There's no reason to think that there's anything life critical sitting in my Inbox right now where I have absolutely no means of accessing it. Because that would be oddly obsessive. I don't need my e-mail.

In fact, I bet that I won't even notice when it comes back up. One of these times that I'm checking it every 5 minutes will finally succeed and I won't even notice. "Oh look, my e-mail is back", I'll say casually. And there won't be any sign of pained relief in my voice. Just as there isn't any sort of twitching panic every time I check my e-mail and it's still not there and there's no way for me to check it and see what e-mail people have sent me and I have no way of knowing when it'll be back and oh god what if it's never back and I never get to see my e-mail ever again and all this important stuff is sent to me and I never get to find out about it because the server just stays down from now until eternity and then AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

*gasp gasp* Uh, what was I saying?

Right, my e-mail. I don't need it. I'm okay without having access for a day. It's not like I have some sort of e-mail checking obsession problem or something. Because that would be just weird.

I like things to be extreme. Extreme programming (coding while leaning back and balancing in one's chair), extreme sledding (going down hills not meant for safe passage), and extreme biking (queen street...at any time). Today I decided to take extreme biking to a new level: blizzard biking. Blizzard biking is when snow is being whipped at your face, the roads are slippery, and you decide to bike to campus. Blizzard biking is fun. Unfortunately, blizzard biking often results in death. Here are some tips for how to avoid this tragic fate.

Problem #1: Visibility. - When the wind is whipping snow at your face, it's pretty hard to keep your eyes open. So how do you avoid biking into a car, ditch, little old lady, or column of fire? Here are some suggestions:

• Blink rapidly. Downside: the world begins to look like a high speed movie and you may find yourself banging into a few cars.
• Wear some sort of snow goggles. Downside: you look like a dork.
• Only bike away from the wind, not towards it. Downside: you may have to bike around the entire world in order to reach your destination.
• Look down. Downside: you'll probably end up dead.
• Cast a magic spell to keep snow away from your face. Downside: you may have to sell your soul to an evil deity.

Problem #2: Traction. - When the roads are icy, cars have a habit of swerving infront of you, and avoiding them becomes very difficult when your tires are meant for pavement, not ice. How do you prevent falling down?

• You don't prevent it; you just fall. Downside: your ass hurts all day long, and you look stupid because your jeans are wet.
• Only take side streets. Downside: side streets haven't been paved. So though no cars will hit you, you'll fall down more. See the above point.
• Spend all day and night training so that you're able to swerve around slipping cars. Downside: not enough time to conquer world and train for car-swerving.
• Go really really fast and don't break for anyone. Downside: WHAM!
• Cast a magic spell to keep cars away from you. Downside: you may have to sell your soul to an evil deity.

Problem #3: Warmth. - It's damn cold outside. Your fingers are freezing. But the more you bike, the warmer you get. How do you find a happy middle?

• Wear the warmest clothes you can find. Downside: you'll die of heat halfway to campus.
• Wear a light jacket. Downside: you'll die of frost bite before you make it out of the driveway.
• Wear many layers and stop multiple times to remove some of them. Downside: every time you break to stop, you risk death. See #2: Traction.
• Wear many layers and strip while you bike. Downside: ....well, none, really.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Catspaw's guide to biking to campus this morning without dying. If she could do it, you can too.

Is going through customs always an adventure for everyone, or do they pick on me a disproportionately high amount of the time? This time, though, it was a little different.

There are four checkpoints: entering the pre-security area, the passport check, the post-passport check and the metal detector area.

I walk up to the pre-security area guard and he opens my passport. Closes it, hands it back to me. "Thank you", I smile. "You're welcome", he smiles back, and then pauses, "Hey, can I ask you something?"

I'm not used to security officers at the airport asking if they can ask me a question. So I nod and smile. He asks: "How do you get your hair that colour? The blue and green mixture. It looks really nice." ..........What the hell? What ever happened to the mean-and-stern guards I'm used to? I chuckle, "uh, thanks. Well, it was dark blue. And then it's just started fading to green." "Looks really cool." "Thanks." "Have a good time in Boston." "Thank you."

And I walk to the next area. Weird. Totally weird. The passport-checking guard is the type that I'm used to. Quick questions, no smiles, all business.
Him: "Where do you live?"
Me: "Toronto."
Him: "What do you do?"
Me: "I'm primarily a student."
Him: "U.S. citizen?"
Me: "I'm entering as a Canadian citizen."
Him: "U.S. citizen?"
Me: "Yes."
Him: "May I ask why?"
Me: "Why I'm entering as a Canadian citizen?"
Him: "Why you're a U.S. citizen. What led to your birth in Palo Alto?" (Yes, I did consider explaining the birds and the bees to him.)
Me: "My parents were working there at the time."
Him: "Military?"
Me: "Academics."
Him: "Do you enjoy living in Canada?"
Me: "Yes."
Him: "Alright, go ahead."

Next is the post-passport check, where they look at the little form that the passport check guy fills out with a super secret code written on it. The post-passport guy glances at my form, starts to hand it back to me, then stops.

I freeze. He starts reading it more closely. He looks up at me. Back at the passport. Up at me. Down at the form. "[My lastname]? Hm. Do I know you from somewhere?"
"I don't think so, sir" <- I like calling people "sir" when I don't mean it.
"Hey, yeah, you're from TV."
"Oh, uh, it's possible."
"Thought so. Go on ahead [Catspaw]. Good show, by the way. My wife watched all three."
"Thank you."

Friendly, suspicious, friendly. Wow, better nice ratio then I'd ever seen before. One more to go.

"Take off your jacket, ma'am", the metal detector dude said.
I did so.
"Take off your sweatshirt, too."
I was wearing a jacket, an unzipped sweatshirt, and a t-shirt. I took the sweatshirt off.
"Now the shirt."
I gave him a very confused look. He laughed. "I'm just kidding. Go on through."

Summary of US security experience this time:
- Guy who wants to know how I dyed my hair.
- Guy who is suspicious about my birthplace (typical).
- Guy who recognizes me from TV.
- Guy who jokes about stripping me down.

Not exactly the fierce-and-cruel security that I'm so used to. Maybe they're starting to relax. Maybe it's the hair. Or maybe I've just come to expect a stern reception so this is their new way to throw me off. Regardless, I'm now in Boston. w00t me.

After the shindig at Harvard this evening, I decided that it was about time for me to take over the city of Cambridge. So at 10 pm I was wandering the streets, exploring the buildings, atmosphere, and people. Psh. Gimme a few years and I could totally own this place.

Alright, the buildings are nicer than at UofT. But you have to walk way out of campus to get any sort of decent food. My first attempt at dinner resulted in a slice of pizza that makes Baldwin John's Pizza seem grease-free in comparison. After enough of a walk, I got some decent thai food.

I was finding it a bit eerie how easy I could see myself being one of these students (in a wacky alternate universe). Academically focused? Check. Obscenely arrogant? Check. Belief in one's entitlement of ownership of the world? Check. Hm. And yet, at the same time, I really really don't want to ever be them. The blue/green hair helps that. No one but me on the entire Harvard campus has coloured hair.

My wanderings eventually took me to MIT. "Whoa, I'm at MIT!" So I went exploring. Among some buildings that I recognized from movies, photos from talks I gave, etc., I eventually wandered in to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Wow. Kinda feels like a h@x0r mecca.

I was up on my tiptoes, trying to look through a tall window into a large lab room, when a voice behind me said, "Can I help you?" I must have looked immediately guilty because he chuckled and said, "Don't worry, you can look. I was just wondering if you needed help."

After explaining why I was here so late ("I'm just visiting and this is the only free time I've got while I'm here, so I thought I'd take a look around"), he introduced himself as Robert ("I'm an assistant professor at the labs here") and asked if I was a visiting grad student.

"No, uh, I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto."
"Computer science?"
"Yep."
"Neat. Thinking of coming here for grad school?"
"Oh....um.....well....."
"You should apply. It's a very neat place here. There are always tons of interesting projects. What part of computer science interests you?"
"I haven't narrowed down to one specific interest yet."
"Well, we could use a green-haired girl who wanders the hallways at midnight." He grinned. "If your marks are high enough, you should definitely consider it."

Damn. Sometimes I wish that I was flying with an impossibly high average. Bah. Anyway, on the walk back to the hotel I helped some student fix his laptop ("you've got it set to fixed IP, it should be dynamic"), picked up a bottle of coke, and tried not to think too much about grad school.

And thusly passed my first day visiting Harvard.

"Hi, I'm [Catspaw] from the OpenNet Initiative. Prior to the election, I checked the georgewbush.com website from 50 countries and only US and Canada were able to access it. I'm wondering why this was done."

The day was nearing an end when I asked this question. I'd noticed that one of the final panelists was "Chuck DeFeo, eCampaign manager, Bush-Cheney '04". I immediately remembered the georgewbush.com report and decided this was a perfect opportunity to demand some answers. An IRC channel had been created ad-hoc by some of the conference attendees and they all liked the idea. So I took a few deep breaths and asked it.

Chuck refused to answer. "In the final weeks, it was more important to get our message out to the electorate."

The microphone was taken away from me, and I worried that this might be the end of the conversation, but one of the other panelists helped out: "What does that have to do with preventing people in other countries from seeing it?"

Chuck dodged the question and the moderator decided that it was time to move on. "Let's take another question."

The audience's reaction genuinely surprised me. They started shouting back that they wanted an answer to the question. Up until then, they had been virtually silent for the entire day. "No!" "Answer it!" "I want to hear why!" "Answer the question!" Wow.

The question never was answered, but the support was all I needed. And Chuck came across looking like a jerk.

From the IRC channel (Thadner is Andrew McLaughlin the Sr VP of Policy of Google; RMacK__ is Rebecca McKinnon, JoiIto is Joi Ito is the famous blogger, Joho is David Weinburger, etc.):

    Thadner has connected.
    <Thnadner> anyone get burned?
    <scrawford_> no; attack on bushie, brief
    <scrawford_> for blocking georgewbush.com to non-us IPs
    <joho> The attack was because he wouldn't answer the question.
    <Thnadner> well, that *was* a dopey thing to do.
    <RMacK__> ...and the moderator helped him avoid it.
    <JoiIto> can I quote you on that Andrew?
    <JoiIto> ;-)
    <Thnadner> who lit the fuse?
    Catspaw looks innocent and whistles a tune.
    <joho> catspaw done good.
    <JoiIto> Sr. VP of Policy of Google calls GW site blockage of international access "dopey"
    <Ori> catspaw reminds me of when I used to have bluegreen hair
    <Thnadner> catspaw = fierce
    <scrawford_> lol
    <Ori> don't you hate how it washes off in the shower?
    <metac0m> catspaw = pride of the citizenlab

After the panel, a whole slew of people came over to ask about internet censorship, security, about the OpenNet Initiative, how we check websites remotely, handed me business cards, asked for mine (dammit! why don't I have a business card?), etc etc. It totally rocked. And I got to talk with a bunch of awesome people.

Remind me why I want to return to Toronto and exams?

Those of you who read insanecats outside of your comfortable little RSS feeds may have noticed a sudden change in layout. Yeah, well, y'know, that happens sometimes.

Another successful day at the Harvard conference; I'll have more comments later.

I think, however, most of the crowd can be divided into one of the following four groups:

1. Interesting professional contacts.
2. Interesting personal contacts.
3. Boring people who have nothing to offer anyone.
4. Technology-Politics Architecture Astronauts.

There were several people who I believe need to have the below Joel quote printed out and stapled onto their foreheads. When you try to find a common denominator between too many groups, you just end up with some sort of completely abstract phrase like "We all like to help people in our own way" that really doesn't help anyone or explain anything. Yeesh.

"When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all." -- Joel Spolsky,Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You.

There's nothing quite like arriving home in order to find out that your bike has been stolen again. I've completely lost track of how many times this has happened in the past few years, but I've blogged several of them. Please allow me to reiterate for emphasis: once again, like clockwork, someone stole my bike.

So why can I not make it through six months without having my bike stolen? I have several theories:

1. The karma against me right now will add up so that I'm allowed to do something really, really bad in the future, and no one can complain about it.
2. Some anti-Catspaw rebels have been sent from the future to try to generally discourage me, in order to prevent my world domination plan. They may or may not be robots, and they may or may not turn into mercury when you kill them and then glide back into unharmed-robot shape. They may also enjoy bowling and long walks on the beach.
3. Life sucks.
4. I never actually buy a new bike. I'm actually just crazy and *think* that I'm riding a bike, when I'm really just running really fast. Thus, there's nothing to ever steal so no crime is ever committed.
5. The bikes are being transported to an alternate universe where a museum dedicated to me is being erected. Unfortunately, the cross-universe transporter can currently only support bike-shaped objects, so it's an all-bike museum. But they soon hope to also be able to transport sock-shaped items.
6. It'll be good comic relief for The Life Of Catspaw: The Movie.

Whatever it is, this totally bites. I'm a little ball of stress right now of the worst sort (really, ask Mud) from the upcoming exams and such, and really don't need this crap right now.

But I'm back in Toronto. Yay Toronto. Home of bike thieves, exams, and snow. It's nice to be back.

"J'n'veux pas des autres, I've a passenger ici", my taxi guy said into his microphone, on our way to the Boston airport. It took me about five seconds to realize that he was switching rapidly between French and English. Cool, I thought to myself. The CogSci&AI part of me that hides behind the software engineer found listening to be a fascinating event.

"Parlez-vous français?", he asked me eventually. And I decided to give replying in French a try. I'd grown up in a french immersion school (75% french, 25% english) and was enrolled in extended french in high school (50% french, 50% english) until Grade 11 when I was offered the opportunity to do a co-op --- something normally only Grade 12 and Grade 13 students were allowed to do, but they let me do it early because of my "special circumstances" (read: I knew how to use a mouse and keyboard) --- but I had to give up French entirely, in order to have time in my schedule for it. With the language off of my academic schedule, I never spoke French again. Years and years of learning dropped in a second. BAM!

"It's interesting", my Boston taxi cab driver noted in French, almost seven years later, "that your accent is perfect but you sometimes have trouble finding the right words." I suppose, living in Canada, it would be useful for me to pick up the second language again. Probably wouldn't take as much work as I imagine it being.

Language came up a lot at the Harvard conference, as it should in a conference about politics and technology: what good is having access to infinite amounts of information if you can't read it? Everyone agreed several times that more tools need to be unicode-compatible with easy language bindings. Blog software, wiki software, everything. Anything that you can't drop a new language into is going to become very useless very quickly. "I wonder if that includes people", I'd thought to myself with a chuckle while it was being discussed. "People who you can't drop a new language into are gonna become useless?"

The thought didn't seem so abstract later that evening. We were at an excellent Chinese food restaurant and Rebecca MacKinnon started talking to them in Mandarin, to the surprise of well, everyone. It was awesome. I need to be able to do that, I thought to myself. Need to be able to speak a bunch more languages. (And, if you reread that last sentence, it would seem that I need some lessons in English too ;) ).

Over dinner I asked someone a question and JoiIto started giggling. I raised an eyebrow and he explained, "You said 'eh?'." I went over my words in my head. Sure enough, I'd ended in "eh?". Well, I might not be able to order our food in Mandarin, but at least I could speak Canadian, eh?

Apparently Canada is being used a lot by translation software developers. They require a large number of texts in two languages to hand to their software so that it can begin to learn (in the Geoff Hinton meaning of "learn") how to automatically translate a new bit of arbitrary text. But they need a lot of these texts. Where can they find them? Well, the Canadian government requires bilingual documents by law in so many aspects of government, that it has suddenly become a bank of wealth for the translation software developers. I thought that was cool.

"So what were you doing in Boston?", the taxi cab driver asked. "I was attending a conference on the intersection between technology and politics", I replied. "Wow," he said, "that's unusual. I can't even understand technology, I'm not sure how anyone could speak both technology-talk and politics-talk." Hm. Perhaps bilingualism has a wider meaning than I'd originally thought.

Either way, it certainly seemed to be the common theme of the conference. Language, language, language. Looks like learning Unicode just exploded in importance.

Catspaw's list of top five worst gut-wrenching nightmare-creating feelings ever:

• 5) Your brain decides to pull the wrong word out of your vocabulary at a public speaking moment. "This species of fish is a very interesting orgasm. ...organism! I meant, organism. Aw, shit.."
• 4) You forget about something important, and only remember after it's too late. Oh right, I was supposed to pick up your son at daycare before it closed...
• 3) You write stuff about someone on your blog because you, stupidly, keep thinking that it is nearly-anonymous, and then months later that person finds your blog and decides to read the archives. This has happened to me so many times that I wish that I could just die.
• 2) You get caught doing something that you're not supposed to be doing when it's really, really obvious that you're doing it. Panic!
• 1) You think that you're prepared for an exam but when you sit down and open the booklet, you realize that there's an entire section that you forgot to even glance at while studying. Doom.

sigh...

The great thing about being sick is that....

Hrm. Oh, wait. There is no great thing about being sick. It just totally sucks.

So it's about 3 am in the morning and I can't sleep because I'm too busy sneezing my head off from this stupid cold that I seem to have caught at the most inconvenient time of the year: right when I need to be healthy most, so that I can do some serious exam cramming and then think clearheadedly at my exams.

I just want everything in the world to disappear except for my blankets, kleenex, tylenol cold medication, tea, and warm bed. But instead of being able to sleep this thing off all day tomorrow, I have to get up early to study all day for my two remaining exams. Aaaargh. I feel like shit.

The year ended with the fanfare of the exam supervisor yelling at us all to sit back down until all the exams were collected. It's amazing how quickly it no longer matters how my exams went (they varied from "ugh!!" to "really good") and all that matters is beautiful, glorious freedom.

....in the form of getting some sleep to try to shake off this flu.

I actually learned a lot today though. And I don't just mean last-minute-cramming stuff, cuz believe me: those facts have been long since flushed away from their temporary three-hour repository in my brain. Here's some more permanent knowledge brought to you by the last day of the first half of my fourth year of undergrad (wow!):

• It turns out that my 465 TA was this guy who sat next to me for the whole summer this summer at our Helium office. We'd totally chatted a bunch over the summer. But because I'd never attended tutorial, I never knew that he was my TA. Huh. How 'bout that. I guess that attending tutorials might have some value after all.
• Having a prof pat you on the head when he walks by while you're writing an exam does not actually magically make you smarter. Contrary to popular belief.
• Fevers in the middle of theory exams are actually useful! I was having a hard time concentrating on numbers during my first exam, but I kept having these flashes of brilliance from my fever-driven delusions. Fever = helpful. Who knew!
• Always always always always bring a spare calculator. Having your calculator's batteries run out halfway through a numerical methods exam and having to do the second half by hand (how do you calculate e^-x of -1/2 by hand?) is totally sux0rs. Les sighs.
• Not answering e-mail for four days while studying may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but boy do people ever start panicking quickly at your lack of response. Sheesh.

I'm headed to bed (again -- it's been off and on for several hours now). The term is over. Done. I was so unhappy with my classes at the start of the term, and now they're done. ..... Cool.

As I start drawing up a schedule of how to use the next fifteen days of holidays to accomplish the nine billion things that need doing, it occurs to me that I'm in desperate need of four categories of helpers.

Monkeys - Are you a young undergrad who needs something to do with your time? Do you know how to program, bake cookies or answer e-mails? If so, you should apply to be one of my monkeys. I have so many little things that need to be done by someone but that don't require me to do them. Coding little scripts, going shopping, that sort of thing.

Ninjas - There're some tasks that I need to get done that will require a coding ninja, writing ninja, or ninja ninja to complete them. These require far more brain power than the monkey tasks, but are still tasks that can be delegated. Stuff like making contacts with people who I'll need two years from now, working on the various projects that I have in progress, Chestnut, Psiphon, the map, and all that.

Clones - For the tasks that only I can do, I'm gonna need clones to help me out. PyWebOff, Crawl, visiting with family, y'know, those things.

Ensigns - When landing on a foreign planet, TV has taught me that it's always important to keep a few ensigns handy so that they can die instead of you. I need a few ensigns who I can throw to the lions: people who I can manipulate to do/say things that will probably result in their (at least metaphorical) deaths, but who are necessary for world domination and all that.

However since I suspect that I won't receive a shipment of a dozen monkeys, ninjas, clones and ensigns for the winter holidays, I guess that it's just going to have to be me. Plug in the coffee machine: I've got a whole lot to get done.

Today Mud and I bought a lowercase-c christmas tree. We decorated it with lights, placed it in our huge living room window, named it, and then sat on a nearby couch and basked in its glow. I've decided that I'm okay with christmas trees because they have more to do with memories of being a child than with religious affiliation, so they're Okay (tm). But it's a fine line. Of course, that's another discussion for another day.

It was freezing cold when we picked up our tree. CPwr has an interesting theory about the correlation between cold geographic regions and leftish ideals. He'd probably explain it better than I, but the gist of it is that cold weather forces you to take care of your less fortunate citizens because if you don't, they're in very real and immediate danger. As we picked our tree and I desperately rubbed my gloved hands together to try to bring feeling back to my fingers, I couldn't help but start to feel guilty that we had money to spend on a tree when some people would be living out in this cold tonight. Add to this fact that I had the song "Do They Know It's Christmas" in my head, and that I'd spent a bunch of time looking at the OxfamUnwrapped website (highly recommended if you're not sure what gift to get someone), and well, somehow it made us being able to buy a tree even more special. I like our tree. Did I mention that we named him?

Today was successful beyond just the tree acquisition. I finished the CherryPy section of the PyWebOff. And I have about half a dozen Cool Ideas running through my head which gives me lots to think about while I sit on the streetcar or OCDly twirl my finger around the cord of my headphones (listening to Jeff Gibbs -- very cool passionate instrumental music). All in all this puts me in a good space.

Of course, the holiday is disappearing too fast, but we all knew that it would.

The epic battle between good and evil is one which rages often in my odd little head. It is not unusual for evil to win --- "we're not good vs evil, we're traditional ethics vs unconventional ethics", she claims --- but last night the side of good won. I decided to give up what could have potentially been a whole lot of mischievous fun in favour of doing The Right Thing. I can't decide if it just means that I've grown up, or that I've gone soft, or if the side of evil won after all and she just made it look like the dead soldiers on the battlefield were wearing evil's colours. I'll let the historians decide. ;)

Anyway, happy holidays to all. Have a good one.

I had two more exam dreams last night. It's amazing how long they continue to bother me...even long after they're done and I should be past worrying about the previous term and not yet ready to worry about the upcoming term. Yet there they are, sitting on the edge of my unconscious, ready to pounce at any moment.

In the first dream, I was taking a class from flaps again. We were all in an exam room but there were a few minutes before the exam began, so everyone was studying. Noah, the TA for the course, sat next to me and we began chatting. After a little while, flaps came around and said to me, "Uh, I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but did you know that the exam already started?" I glanced up and everyone was writing as quickly as they could. And apparently had been for the past hour. It was a two hour exam. I started answering the questions, having a fairly good idea what the answer was on most of them, but all too quickly time was up. I'd had to leave a lot blank due to lack of time. I couldn't decide if I should tell flaps it was because Noah was talking to me: I doubted that I'd get more time, and I didn't want to get Noah in trouble, and I didn't want to put flaps in an awkward situation, so I decided just to leave it and I handed in my failing exam.

The second dream took place during my CSC465 exam. In my dream, it took place in small rooms --- one per student --- with a one-way mirror connecting it to another room from which a committee of profs watched. The night before I'd gotten Lou and Ob to help me break in and hook up a series of microphones and such to the profs' room so that I'd be able to hear what they'd be saying while I wrote my exam. It turned out to be a disaster though, because I was too distracted to concentrate.

They began to argue about whether I was "going places" or "overrated and not half as bright as everyone claims". I concentrated hard on the voices, trying to match up their comments to a face so that I'd know who thought what about me. They argued about whether it was better to be an expert in all areas of CS, or to be very good in some areas of CS but be able to excel in other disciplines too. They argued about whether they should call up my high school teachers for a second opinion (fLufFy?? What are you doing there?). Finally, one of them (Malloy?) said, "Let's not forget all the times she tortured people for fun, all the imp stuff." My pencil tip broke off in surprise. I didn't have another pencil with me. And the rules were strict: if you had nothing to write with, you had to hand the exam in. I wasn't even done the first question.

One day exams will stop haunting me. One day...

I feel sorry for life sci students. When they go home for the holidays, they're probably attacked with a series of medical questions that have absolutely nothing to do with what they study: "I have this thing on the bottom of my foot that won't go away. Can you tell me how to fix it?"

But I am not a life sci student; I am a comp sci student. And thus, when I go home for the holidays, I am asked a series of tech questions that have absolutely nothing to do with what I study.

This year these included -- but were not limited to...

• In the Spongebob Squarepants videogame, how can he brush his teeth before going to work if he's not allowed to pick up the toothpaste in the other guy's house and his house doesn't have any toothpaste in the bathroom?
• In this specific CD burning software, what's the difference between the button that is a square and the button that is a square with a squiggle line in it?
• If I save all my files in AAC format, how long should it take to convert them to mp3?
• If this software intercepts sound between the computer and the sound card and saves it to disk, how can I make it ignore system noises?
• This website used to connect just fine but now it gives me an error. Any idea what the problem could be?
• Is there any quality difference between these white headphones and those black headphones?
• The internet is broken. Can you fix it?

I found Spongebob's toothpaste, figured out what the squiggle-box button did, explained how to do sample timing, described how Windows handles system noises, enumerated the ways in which a website might be inaccessible, explained how colour has no impact on sound quality, and said no, I cannot fix the internet, it is broken forever.

And for my next trick, I will multiply twenty digit numbers in my head in a matter of seconds. Cuz, y'know, what else could I possibly be learning in all these math courses?

Picture a random conference that you've attended, during its break. Everyone is walking around with a beverage (it's a fundamental law of the universe that beverages must be served during the breaks of conferences); people are clustering into little groups and talking to each other (smiling a little too broadly and shaking everyone's hand); business cards are exchanged; quick and very rehearsed introductions are shared. Everyone has only a few minutes to sell themselves to everyone else --- to establish some sort of relationship that's worth persisting beyond the borders of the few hours or days that is the extent of the conference.

As this unspoken dance unfolds, I'm usually found one of two places: off to the side, trying to pass unnoticed and unswarmed by the networking masses, or in the middle of the group, playing charming, and whoring myself to the gods of useful contacts. But no matter where I stand in the room, I spend most of my time watching people. I observe the rare people who are worth learning from, and I monitor the people who I hope that I'll never become. I start mentally placing people along the spectrum that I've fondly dubbed "nurses and leeches".

A pure and perfect nurse would be someone who was doing their job solely because they love what they're doing and they genuinely want to help move their field forward. A perfect nurse would be an aid worker who would be willing to go bankrupt in order to help others out, or an academic who cares more about solving a problem so that it can help people, than about people finding out that it was he who solved it. A perfect nurse doesn't see contacts as people who might later be useful, but rather as people who are fighting the same battle and who could do a better job if they fought it together. Perfect nurses don't exist, but there are some people out there who come close.

Leeches, on the other hand, don't have jobs. At least, not in the way that a nurse would think of a "job". A leech's career involves creating work for himself. A leech's purpose in life is to create opportunities that will later allow for the creation of even more work for himself. When a leech shakes your hand, he's wondering how much this handshake will benefit him later in life. A perfect leech is able to convince everyone of his greatness so that they'll come to him with more and more work until he's making millions of dollars doing nothing but creating even more work for himself. Perfect leeches don't exist either, but there are many people out there who come close.

Most people, however,...well, they lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the perfect leech and the perfect nurse. Some leeches are obvious --- they rampantly declare themselves to be leeches --- and some are sneaky, having mastered the skill of pretending to be a nurse. Some nurses brilliantly stand out amongst the crowd, and some are so quiet that no one ever notices them throughout their whole life. The path from nurse to leech is an easy one to take: your funding gets cut, your cause becomes threatened, and the only way to stay above water is to take some leechy tactics, and the next thing you know you've forgotten what you're fighting for. The path from leech to nurse isn't unheard of either: you're genuinely thanked for your work by someone who you (accidentally) helped and start finding that the thanks are reward enough.

Leeches and nurses. How much of each are you?

fLufFy calls our house this evening at 11 pm. Mud picks up the phone. "Hello? ... Yeah. It's a little tumultuous in this house right now. ... Why? Well, okay. See, here's the thing. So Angel and Buffy are totally in love, right, but then Angel loses his soul and turns evil and starts hurting everyone and then Angel and this demon dude are linked so that only Angel can bring him alive but if he does so than only killing Angel can kill him or else he'll suck the world into hell. Which is no problem, right, cuz he's evil Angel so you kill him before he makes the demon alive or right afterwards before he sucks the world into hell, so no worries right? .... Exactly! Nothing is ever that simple! So what happens? Well, while Buffy is off going to kill Angel the others decide it would be a good idea to give Angel his soul back. .... I know!! So he brings the demon alive and then right when she's about to kill him he gets his soul back. ... No, she can tell cuz his eyes flash and stuff. Anyway, so then he's like "Buffy?" and she's like "Angel?" and they kiss and then she has to KILL him to save the world. ... No, she has to, but he's back and she loves him. ... AND he doesn't even know what's going on because he doesn't remember anything from when he didn't have his soul. And now she's leaving on a bus -- oh AND they play Sarah McLachlin as she goes off. And [Catsy] and I are like, "You fuckers! Toying with our emotions!" And none of the others know that she left and her mom kicked her out of the house because she found out that she's the slayer and just like argh! Oh. My. God. It's unreal. It's so sad."

Watching this show is like a full time emotional investment.

Everyone knows that the real delimiter between years is the start of class in September, but let's play along with the common misconception that the year begins on January 1st, and examine the previous year on insanecats to see if anything exciting happened.

January
- Gforge project begins
- Class sucks all my time
- Average 4 hours sleep/night for two weeks

February
- Complaint about grade curving, my operating systems course, etc.
- Offered a high paying full-time job and turned it down
- Chromatron
- Panama for a week!
- Wrote fundamental issues with open source software development

March
- Drool over csc104
- Complain about pre-requisite chains (update: I'm bypassing these)
- Class is skipped on multiple occasions in order to get work done
- Rants about the lack of security in CS curriculum

April
- Op Sys remains the stupidest course ever
- Fundamental issues published
- Writing the 49x report drives me nuts
- Fundamental issues slashdotted (yikes!); the world hates me
- Slashdotted for something else
- Slashdotted for a third thing
- Invent term "proxyherding"

May
- Bought iBook
- Exam stress
- OSConf
- Start of summer work on Helium

June
- Made everyone sick at work
- Got free stuff in exchange for tech support
- The "maybe dead fish"

July
- Frighten the incoming frosh
- Learn pyobjc
- Miss the hacker grow-op
- Gave money for harry potter stickers to the brothers
- Pulled aside in airport for "I read your email" tshirt

August
- Vanpy[re]!
- Signed up for giving at least 9 lectures/tutorials in the upcoming year
- Complaints about changing msn names
- Discussion about how I'm gonna be The Man

September
- Princess of the cs dept
- Classes start
- Back at citlab
- Genuinely unhappy with classes

October
- Mission: stickcat in window
- Mission successful. Mwahahaha.
- Difficulty in getting US voter status

November
- Spending all day at meetings
- Time? What's that?
- Finding own dragon army

December
- Trip down to harvard
- Bike stolen............again
- Sick (fever) during exams

There you go. That's the summary of what insanecats has discussed for the past year. There will be an exam later.