Okay, so this entry originally complained about my linguistics test later today, and how I hope that everyone else fails horribly so that in comparison, my failing doesn't look so bad. But this was interupted by a more important topic. Google.

"What comes up when someone searches for your name?", my prof Alan J Rosenthal asked, as the topic of searching for names on google came up. (I say this very much aware of the fact that in a few months, this page will be one of the ones that comes up when he searches for his name - ha! But also that by that time I'll probably be out of his class so when he looks around here, he wont decide that he's teaching a horribly insane psychopath and fail her on principle).

"Heh, don't ask", I giggled.

"Okay, I won't ask. I'll just look it up", he grinned back.

Uh oh.

But then I got to thinking about it: what does come up when you search for my real name? Well, first of all, I don't show up until page 2. There's a billion other people by my name wandering out there, and who wants to highlight me when there's important vets that should get priority?

The scary thing is that this very webpage comes up on the bottom of the second page of google. I've searched and searched - there is zero reference to my real name anywhere here. Yet somehow google linked it anyway. Freaky, no?

The second thing that I realised is that its not google's fault that I'm only on page two - I never use my real name for anything. Whether Kat, Nephlym, Catspaw, or any other nickname, I seem to be leaving pawprints behind (pun not intended) in names other than my own. Is this good or bad?

When google looks up Catspaw, after that goddamn annoying band which still hogs the top of the page (get everyone you know to link here so we can push 'em off ;) ), we see me (in all my glory - smirk), two weirdos, my store, and then the moo page corresponding to me, then fourteen thousand or so pages of crap. Why oh why did I choose such a common nickname? I shoulda made something up from scratch. But of course, eleven year old me, bumbling around the moo aimlessly, had no idea that what I @rename'd myself to would end up being more famous currently than my real name. Damnit.

And yet, at the exact same time, I'm forced to think about the things I typed nine years ago onto the internet. Do I really want, in a dozen years, for people to look up my name and end up with my "lol rofl omg!??#!@?" phase coming up? Ew. (Then again, do I really want this stuff coming up, either? ;) )

I've also started purposefully anonymizing myself in classes, to avoid the "hey, are you related to..." problems. Jeffery Catspaw (that pesky guy who hacked Jason's computer) has an account to email "stupid" questions that I don't want associated with my name.

I guess for now, living happily anonymous in my deeds carries with it a kind of drama - two completely independant people slowly gaining worldly power by their own right, all of a sudden announce that they are, in fact, the same person. Oooo. I like that.

It also makes the voices in my head very happy.

Alright, its a month before my personal deadline for my next flash video...which means that its time for a little teaser so that everyone knows what I'm up to. Ironically, the teaser-trailer for this flash video is longer than most of my other flash videos.

So here you go, everyone, watch it and weep for it shall be a full month before you are blessed with this entire flash movie that this one promotes.

'Two Towers' Preview

Like any good UofT student, I'm just as willing to mock the other Toronto universities when required (ie: when my friends who go to them attempt to communicate with me in a civilized conversation), but I actually don't really have anything against them. Both Ryerson and York have their strong suits.

So, in a desperate act of betrayal, it looks like I might be working for York this summer. I'm not entirely abandoning the other possibility (the UofT guy who is looking for a hacktivist to work for him this summer), but he hasn't gotten back to my emails in a while.

To avoid all of your individual questions, I'll just answer a made up FAQ here ;)

Why on earth would you go work all the way out in York??
A fair question. What I'd be doing is an NSERC undergrad summer thing, which is 20% good for the experience, and 80% good for sticking it on one's CV when one is applying to grad school. It says "Hey, look at me! I'm good for research! You want me!"

Why aren't you doing an NSERC thing with UofT? Don't they offer them?
Yes, they do.......but my guess would be that competition is harder, plus you have to find a sponsor, plus etcetcetc. Whereas the York one just fell on my lap.

What would you be doing?
I'd be working for a pair of people who do perception and stuff, and doing some programming and web stuff for them, as well as touching the cog sci aspect a bit. See how this ties in to both my cogsci&ai and the comp sci fields? Ooooo. Aaaaaah.

That doesn't sound very exciting to me. Is your website going to stay boring? This past summer you promised to be more interesting again, like last year!
Okay, look, Complain-o, if you want to write the website you can go right ahead. Or maybe you'd like to read my psych textbook for me, or study for my linguistics test, or write my programs, or prepare my lab, or do my logic problem set?
There, I didn't think so.
As for this summer, as well as the job I'll probably be taking a stats course at night (because I (groan) thought that magic fairies would somehow make it go away and I wouldn't have to take it) meaning not a heck of a lot of free time. So don't expect flash videos every day, but I'll see what I can do.

Isn't working for/going to UofT during the year and working for York in the summer some kind of impossible state of the universe which will result in implosion and mayhem?
Possibly. But I think your universe is safe just so long as I don't touch Ryerson.

So I got my logic test back today. (In case you haven't already guessed, something went wrong. Why? Because this wouldn't be a very exciting entry otherwise, would it? I got my logic test back today and did exactly how I thought I would. End of entry. Ew. No.) And guess what? There was a mistake on it! Who is surprised? Not me.

That's okay though, by now I have a billion times over experience in politely asking for a question to be looked over again.

"Sorry, your answer is wrong", the TA said and shrugged.

Let me introduce you all to the question in question (wow, now there's an awkward sounding phrase)...

Symbolize the following sentences in SL. If food prices rise beyond current levels, then widespread famine will result if government policies are not changed. Then blahblahblahblah we do more stuff with that. Its the first part that he's claiming is wrong.

"The answer is F > (~G > W)", he says, pointing to the answer again.

"Right", I nod and smile with my I-hate-you-to-death-but-I'm-not-going-to-let-that-show smile. "But see what I put... (F & ~G) > W...that's the same thing."

He frowned deeply. "No its not."

Okay, so there's a chance that I'm wrong, so I whip out a piece of paper and draw the following:
(F & ~G) > W
~(F & ~G) + W
~F + ~~G + W
~F + G + W
F > (G + W)
F > (~G > W)

"See?", here comes the smile again, "My answer is equivalent to your answer."

He shakes his head. "What does this even mean?"

I sigh slightly. "Okay, well I took my answer, then did the -> law. Then DeMorgans, then double negation, then the -> law twice and I got your answer."

He smiles, as if to say he finally understands and shakes his head. "We haven't done these rules yet. You can't use them on the test."

"Right", I nod, patiently. "But, see, I wasn't using them on the test. I'm just saying that my answer and your answer are logically equivalent. Which means that if my answer is wrong, then your answer is wrong too."

"Where did you learn these rules from?", he asks.

(Uh oh. I can already sense where this is going.)

"I've taken a class that has done a unit in logic before."

"In another university?"

"In another department. CSC238."

"Well", he shrugs...and you have to get this sentence. In fact, I'm putting it in bold... "You know that its not necessarily true that logic principles that are valid in one department are valid logical equivalences in another department"

What I wanted to shout here was: "What?? I switch where on campus I'm standing and all of a sudden the universal rules of logic suddenly change? DeMorgans is valid in this building, but out over in this building suddenly ~(F & G) is ~F & F. Its completely different! The universe switches all of its rules. Why? Because you're stuck in the Philosophy department for this course, Catsy. That's right, your minor is housed by crackhead TAs (not to say that CS isn't occupied by equally dense TAs in their own right...)

What I said instead was, "Sorry, so are you saying that these logic steps are invalid?" C'mon, say yes. Just say it. And I will grind you to the floor.

"No", he says. (Damn) "But just because two things are logically equivalent doesn't mean that they're equal. Your answer may be logically equivalent to my answer, but that doesn't change the fact that my answer was a direct translation of the english sentence and yours involved numerous steps. You can ask the prof on Tuesday if you want, but I'm sure that she'll agree with me"

I'm sure she will too. I walked off, and now sit in Jason's office, staring from his window in Bahen down at the ant-students below and wondering what the odds are that the TA will walk by just as I happen to find a block of concrete to toss at him. So I know my answer is right. I know it. I can prove it. And, yet, its still somehow wrong.

Sigh.

(And don't even get me started on the rant about the three different ways to represent ands, ors, nots, etc. and how using the wrong one in this course makes your answer "wrong". And how on the test ten minutes before the end I'm told to change all my 1s and 0s on my truth table to Ts and Fs because 'This isn't binary class'. You don't want to go there.)

Note: This is a long rant. For those of you who can't stand watching commercials for 0.05 seconds without switching the channel, let me summarize: "I hate stuff. The end." There, now you can go back to Doom and feel satisfied that you've read my site today.

Alright, now that THEY're gone, lets begin. So I attended (hey, there were COOKIES) the meeting-thing described in the subject line. If you clicked on the link above (which is why it was there. Why do I even bother putting these things if you don't even use them? This is why we can't have nice things) you'll see that basically this was a chance for early-undergrad CS students to learn how to handle the pressures of a CS degree........for most people.

For me, this was a chance to scope out the competition. Glancing around: every single one of you is getting the same degree that I am, and a bunch of you are going to try out for grad school here and potentially steal my spot. However, it was impossible to have a scowl as I glanced around, because I was too busy eating a cookie.

But that doesn't mean that the competition couldn't be scoped.

How many of them glanced up suddenly when the words "grad school" were uttered? Too many. And this is only of the ones who came to this meeting. Its nearly impossible to scope competition in classes, because people are too busy taking notes to pay attention, and thus you never get to observe their reactions to things and figure out how they're doing and whether or not they've got a 4.0 and are applying to the exact same grad school spot that I plan to squeeze into in a couple of years.

However aside from the two obvious advantages (the scoping and the cookies), the meeting also gave me the opportunity to disagree with some of the things that the 4th year/grad students were offering as advice to the undergrads. I will elaborate on these disagreements here:

* Choose a partner for group work who matches your level. WRONG. The odds of finding someone who matches you perfectly are slim to none, and if you're close but slightly off, you'll spend most of the time hating each other. Physics last year taught me that. Nono, I've learned big time. I had labs last night with my partner (Mr. Random). We finished the three hour lab in (listen closely now) sixty-two minutes. How did we accomplish such a feat? We didn't get in each other's way. Here's how labs work, my style: I tell him which chips to get, what sizes of wires to hand me, and get him to strip wires that need it. He likes this arrangement because he doesn't have to do anything, and I like it because I don't have to deal with an annoying brat who thinks they know what they're doing but is just screwing up my lab work. THAT's partnering. "You're still just setting up the first question?!", the TA asked a pair of students as we were leaving, "Look at them! They're done all of them! They're going home!" The people the TA was talking to were both huddled together over two sheets of paper they had obviously worked on together. Seeing the problem? Working together = slow. Guy to hand you wires while you do everything = fast. Sorry grad students, you've got this one wrong.

* Talk to the people sitting beside you in CS classes. Eww! Worst idea ever! First of all, my history class last year has taught me that if you sit next to someone who you talk with, you'll spend 95% of the time talking. Even in linguistics this year, I made the error of sitting around people I hang with. Bad idea. Now linguistics class is officially "mock the front-row people" class. If I was the one giving advice in this talk, I would say: "Never ever make friends in your own department". If you want CS friends, find them elsewhere. Like, say, the moo, or that guy in fLufFy's house (chuckle). SECOND, it was very very obvious that these were three males in the front of the room. (I mean, aside from the fact that they were guys. You know what I mean!) I'm sure its exceedingly different talking to fellow male CS students as one, but the next CS male student who thinks that a female sitting alone in class means a female who wants to get with him is getting his eyes spooned out with a spork. Argh, and the other females in CS are even worse! By a lot. There are only two kinds of females in CS as far as I can tell (not like I have a huge data sample to work with): they're either incompetent and waaaaay out of their league, or talented and thus defensive and bitchy around the other CS females. You can enjoy the little mental game of figuring out which one I fit into. ;) So yeah: making friends with CS people in your classes = bad. Look to the arts or sciences, guys; not only will it broaden your horizons, but it'll also mean peace and quiet during class time. :)

* Sit in your prof's office hours while other people talk to pick up good questions Hey, that's a great idea. So not only can I look like a weirdo who sits quietly in the corner, but I can also waste precious time and not even get to talk to the prof during it. That's like paying for a McDonalds Happy Meal, and then not even getting to eat it. (Wait, no, not exactly like that, because that raises your life expectancy. Substitute the Happy Meal for a Coke. And "eat" with "drink". Unless you like to eat coke cans. In which case, put the second substitution in little optional square brackets. But wait, you're pushing me off topic!) So yeah, sit and listen to other people's conversations. How thrilling. Luckily we all have time machines so that we can have as much time to do anything as we want, eh? (And no one from the moo had better mention anything about the whole "listening in" thing. Can't you find something better in here to pick on? ;) That one is too obvious.)

* Go to tutorials *smirk* Alright, I want to like tutorials. I really do. They're such a great idea on paper: closer contact with a teaching figure for more focused learning. In practice, I must admit, they suck bigtime. Lets dissect the experience I've had with tutorials thus far (note that, blissfully, some courses like Near MidEast Civ/cog psych/cog sci/etc didn't have a tutorial):

MAT137	Grrrr. He was the third year TA who was too scared of accidentally "giving away" our problem set to help us. I think I went to tutorials for the first term (I really really tried with this guy) and then gave up permanently. They weren't helpful and they were on at the same time as the Simpsons. Geeze. This was about the same time that I gave up doing problem sets and going to lecture. And yet, I'd like to point out to everyone, I still did "okay" in the course (despite half a term of zeroes on problem sets). Lesson learned: you don't have to attend a horribly boring class if you can learn from the textbook.
PHY140	Okay, I can't really say I tried thaaat hard with these ones. I think I went to the first month or so. Then I realized that I had no idea what he was talking about and thus wasn't learning anything. So I'd show up to pick up projects, then leave. The result wasn't a mark I'm proud of, but damnit, this is Specialist Physics and I got through it. So I didn't really attend these tutorials either.
CSC108	Tutorials were worth 10%. I'd show upand then the TA'd hand out assignments and I'd do them in 2-2.3 minutes and then walk out. So then I realized that this went beyond not learning anything: it was actually making me over-confident and hurting my mark. So I stopped attending. Okay, now that I look back, the fact that 6 of the 8% I lost in this course was due to that 4/10 in tutorials is probably a sign that I shoulda kept going, just for the attendance. But it was soooooo boring. And if I had really needed them, I would have failed, right?
CSC148	HAHAHA. Everyone who's been reading this for long enough (or who lived with me last year...or talked to me last year....or lived on the same planet as me last year) knows aaaaaaall about this guy. The moron third year who challenged me with sentences like: "Oh, look, [Catspaw] got perfect again. Isn't she so perfect? I'll have to try harder to take marks off next assignment". And then failed me on the huge project. FAILED. On a project which, once remarked, got an A+. I hate him and hope that he gets hit by a bus. (But I'm not bitter....)
ENG237	Snore. The last thing that I want to hear about is other people's opinions on the books we're reading. Especially for an hour. And especially with Mr. "I *snort* believe it is pronounced Kel-ebron, not Cel-ebron, heh heh" in the front row gracing us all with his lovely opinions. My time would have been better spent stapling TTC transfers to my forehead.
CSC270	Okay, I'd really like to say I was a good little student and went to every tutorial and paid attention here. (I really would). But truth be told, my TA was a moron. I don't learn anything from people who copy down a piece of paper they've been given onto the board and then dismiss us. I don't care if this course woulda been easier if I had sat through it and learned C/C++ from her instead of from trial and error. It was just honestly too painful. Yet another useless tutorial (noticing a trend here?)
LIN100	Ugh. So we walk into class, get handed back the assignment we handed in last day, hand in the new assignment, then spend the rest of the class correcting the assignment we were just handed back. The thing is: once you hand it back to me, I know what I got right and wrong. If there's a big red line through my answer, I should have chosen the other one. I don't need to hear about it for a full hour.
CSC238	Okay, this tutorial totally sucked until I switched from the TA from Boredom-Hell to Anna's class. This became the only useful tutorial I've ever attended. And proof that in the right environment, I'm willing for tutorials to work. If I hadn't had insider past-prof info on this course though, the idiot I started with would have forced me to skip also. But in Anna's class I actually asked questions, participated, and sincerely believe that this pushed my mark up a good 10% alone.
PHL245	My feelings on this tutorial is best explained by my rant about my TA on the previous entry. Except for the few times this year, to pick up tests, I doubt he'll see me again. Once someone drives me insane, I can't learn from them.
CSC258	Okay: I do attend these! (I always expect like a prize or something) These would be more aptly named "What You Will See On The Exam". I don't actually learn anything during them, as opposed to say lectures, except for the TA's "subtle" hints about what we should expect on the test. Note that this isn't the TA who liked me (the one who was "impressed"). He got switched to another section, damnit. And of course I'm too lazy to change.
CSC209	I'd really like to attend these. But here's the thing...they're way up north on campus...(a) and (b)...well, I'm really having trouble seeing how they're going to be useful. I've tried three times now (excellent percentage considering my tutorial track-record) but it somehow just doesn't seem worthwhile. No doubt they'll say something beyond vital in them, now. ;)

Okay, so that's my take on tutorials. And why I think the "go to them" advice is dumb.

Alright, so those are the main points which I seriously disagreed with. If I was going to offer undergrads some advice it would be as follows:

- Do your undergrad in seven years. That way, there's no chance that I'm in competition with you for grad school spaces and thus I won't have to harm you.
- Learn to distinguish which tutorials are essential and which are a waste of time.
- Never ever ever ever ever make a CS prof hate you. You can make as many TAs hate you as you want, but you never know who might end up on the committee for grad school applications.
- Don't, for the love of $deity, take the specialist physics course unless you're a goddamn physics specialist!
- Ask all your profs for me to be your TA. (A little second-hand coaxing never hurt anyone)
- Work on your 209 project that's due later today instead of writing an infinitely long rant on your website.

Sleep, who needs that?! Only wimps. I'm fine. I'm not tired. Hey, where did the dancing bears come from?

Sometimes you've been awake for enough consecutive hours that going to sleep seems like an awful waste of time. And yet, you might imagine that I'd be intelligent enough to learn from experience that despite the growing volume of voices in my head who tell me with increasing persistance that I'm only becoming more coherent, lack of sleep will eventually take its toll and reduce me to a babbling moron. Fortunately, I refuse to use the backspace key for any reason under the sun when posting to this site under normal circumstances, so its not exactly like my entries usually have a melodic flow with which this can contrast. (A large part of me is still convinced that I program and write essays best when there is a minimum amount of blood in my coke stream and I couldn't tell you if it was night or day outside. But this voice is the same one who likes to tell me things like "You should have a who-can-eat-more-sushi contest with your brother to the death" and "your TA will find it amusing if your your linked list node class is named Hippie and the joining method is called holdHandsAndSingKumbaya". So I'm not exactly certain how trustworthy this voice could possibly be...) Anyway, with that warning in mind, on to today's rant!

So yesterday I took the bus aaaall the way out to York again, to drop off my NSERC application. Included in the application is a paragraph about what I'd be spending the summer doing. Although it is heavily encoded in Grantese, it still should provide everyone with a vague idea:

Under this NSERC Undergraduate award, [Catspaw] will undertake a project to develop, evaluate, and program an audio generation/recording suite to be situated within the CSEB at York University. This laboratory will be used to assist in the generation of response curves (HRTF's ) for users in immersive environments, and in the development of algorithms for the generation of audio cues using speaker arrays. A web-based display system and interface will also be developed to provide monitoring and information about the audio environment. The project will provide exposure to immersive virtual environments and programming for them.

There, now that you have an idea what I'll be doing....could you please share this information with me? Because I have zero clue what any of that meant.

I'm exaggerating, of course...(I know - you're all shocked beyond all measure. What?! Catspaw, exaggerating on her site?! But I always believed everything word for literal word!)...but still a little frightened about this project, regardless. It ventures deep into unexplored territory which I planned on eventually learning, but just haven't yet. Auditory Perception...how much do I know about that? Hmm, not much yet. And programming audio? Not much either. So what if I totally suck beyond all measure and they tattoo "DO NOT ALLOW NEAR A FUNCTIONAL COMPUTER" onto my forehead as they shun me into the world and then I have to quit UofT and spend the rest of my days calling some poor tech support guy with questions like "I can't find my mouse" and "Hi, I think the internet is down".

(Yes, I do realise that neither of those were questions. Mwaha, see, I preempted your comments before you were even given an opportunity to make them. Now what are you going to comment about?)

Let's see...what else happened recently that I can complain about?

* I found out that this year there were 800 applicants for UofT CS grad school. And they're accepting only 40 of them. -sob- Maybe I'll do grad school using one of those "Get a PhD in only 30 mins AND lose 50 lbs!" emails, instead.

* (Moo rant. 80% of you can skip this one.) So I want to know where the idea started that the best way to impress the imps is to hack them while they're away all term trying to stay afloat ontop of a gazillion assignments. This drives me sooooooo crazy. I haaaaaaate connecting to find out that my dupes have been hacked, or my character re-described, or my verbs abused, or anything barely mentionning #7921 even touched with semi-malicious intent. No, I will not think you're cool. No, I will not invite you to join the imps. No, I will not refrain from newting your ass from here to ctime($maxint). Nothing makes me want to apologize to the wizzen for ever making the imps in the first place, like twelve year old cheap-imitation-me morons. GRRR. I so do not have the free time to deal with these people.

Oh, and on a happy note (cuz I feel like I have some kind of karmic debt after a whole page of complaints), I got a free lunch yesterday and I'm getting a free lunch today. Yay free food! So despite the complaining and the sudden deafening pounding in the back of my skull as the last can of coke wears off, I'm in a great mood! :) Now I'm off to bed before its too late for this night, too....

Alright, as six or seven of you already know (you can stop laughing already!), I had a little "accident" on the cdf computers at UofT a few hours ago (yesterday).

"Hi my name is Catspaw, I think its a good idea to try to learn more about files and C by deleting 1389 of other people's files!" ARGH! So combine me in my "poking around" phase with a typo and 1389 writeable files, and you end up with 1389 suddenly empty files. Completely void of any text. Including several projects, assignments, etc. Just a whole lot of nothingness.

Then again, now that I think about it - in a department where plagarism is such an issue, shouldn't there be more protection against people and an itchy +r/w finger?

Then again, now that I think about it even MORE - in a department where computer security is such an issue, shouldn't there be more protection against me, in general? Like not letting me touch a keyboard?

The most horrible part was that it wasn't even like I had a great diabolical scheme which was simply ruined in the last minute. (Though I still wonder about the fact that our graders compile and run our C programs - couldn't we write the program to sabotage everyone else's program by changing their files?) I was just doing some basic experiments.

These experiments came out with a very strong, obvious conclusion: instead of spending your time improving your C knowledge, you should spend it eating cookies.

Reading week starts in just five days. They should just name it "party week"; who do they honestly think they're kidding? I may spend chunks of it reading stuff, and it may take place over a week (although I'm a strong believer that all nine days count) but damnit, I'm not setting my alarm for one single day, nor do I plan on touching any of these evil textbooks. Obsessive-academics is being tossed out the window in favour of absolute and total laziness.

My reading week is being divided into three uneven sections based on what I'll be doing. The first will be named "Recovery Period" wherein I sleep 23 hours a day, rolling out of bed only to grab a snack and maybe watch the She of Little Faith or HOMR Simpsons episodes a few times on my computer. The second I name "Free Time??? No way!" where I shall play FFX, work on the flash video, get some non-school reading done (Steven Levy comes recommended), maybe connect to the moo for once, chat with all of you, make a whole bunch of longterm food for when classes start up again, rip Windows off of this machine, maybe visit my cat at my parents' place, watch some of the billions of movies I own but never get to see, break a random moo somewhere, fix up this site a bit (notice: you no longer need javascript in order to browse various months - I'm so proud of me) and then sit around making little "coo"ing noises at the fact that I have nothing that needs doing immediately and everything is optional. Then, the third phrase is called "Brandon's Cottage" which involves (ironically) Brandon's Cottage, and the contents of this cottage - me, some of you, and some other people - where the "party week" will be blown into full force.

There is a fourth, secret, hidden section to reading week called "ARGH!" which happens the Monday morning after the week is over, when I sit in class and cry about how the next time I have a week off, it'll be the December Holidays again. (Update: Just remembered that I'm taking a week off this summer to go to the IJCAI 03 conference, so I don't quite have to wait until December. But still. August is a bazillion months away)

Anyway, I seem to be getting a little ahead of myself...there are still five long days between now and freedom. The longest of these are today and tomorrow. (ie: I'm going to be a happy little monkey on Wednesday morning)

* Monday (10th - today!) - Go to bed (its just past midnight now). Wake up, attend two hours of a class (I think that if you don't leave your chair, you're allowed to count them as one class), then head over to Jason's Bahen office where I'll take care of the place (did I mention he's away in Japan for a month, so Mud and I have taken over his office ;) ), and read through my Cog Psych textbook which I'm four chapters behind in. And since I can probably read through that in an hour or two, but have until 6 pm to kill, I'll probably spend three hours working out the eight trillianth digit of pi and counting the number of dots on the ceiling, bored to death. Then comes my linguistics tutorial where I'll get the test back (and either cheer or sob), then linguistics class (where I'll continue to cheer or sob, but this time with Lou and Ariebeladon as an audience). Then bike home, answer some emails, do some non-school work work, continue to mope/celebrate re: the test, and then sleep.

* Tuesday (11th) - Wake up, and sit through two hours of "Hello My Name Is Ms Logic Prof And I'm An Idiot"'s lecture. Then put on my best "I'm an un-jaded, happy little undergrad student" smile and politely ask her to reconsider the question on my test. Then, when she explains to me why CS logic rules are different from Phl logic rules, torch the building. Then a few hours of "AHHH I'm going to FAIL!" studying of my cog psych notes, hopefully coupled by encouraging emails from those of you who are doing the same test in the daytime. Then, at 6, I write the test, realise that I have no idea what I'm doing, I'm going to fail second year, never get into any grad school, and spend the rest of my life sweeping peanut shards in some bar...and then bike home and complain to all of you about it.

* Wednesday (12th) - Just two hours of class this Wednesday. That's right, Wednesday is gonna be Happy Day where Reading Week is just around the corner and all of my recieving/writing/complaining about tests, will be done. Go home, do some work for Jason, some work for the cgi thingy I'm doing, and then do my csc258 assignment.

* Thursday (13th) - I was planning on skipping class on Thursday (the weeks without my csc258 lab, I only have logic tutorial on Thursdays), but then someone mentionned that he had really enjoyed taking phl245 eighty million years ago, so I'm gonna give it another shot and try to invest some interest in it and see if anything comes out. (Unless my test doesn't get changed. In which case I'm going to have to wait until after reading week to gather any motivation to invest in this class)

* Friday (14th) - csc258 and csc209 tutorials, then lunch with a certain parental figure on campus, and then I'm freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Sometimes its nice to fully plan out your weeks in advance - including your emotional state and responses to various conversations you'll be having. That way, you can just hit 'play', and go into cognitive screensaver mode.

What happened?
With what?
Your linguistics test.
My what?
Your linguistics test! You got your linguistics test back yesterday!
Oh, that. Yeah, that was okay.
Okay?! What does okay mean?!

Okay means enough above average, but not so well as to meet my impossible expectations for myself. I have a feeling that most things this year are going to get stuck in the horrible category of "okay": a mark which, had I gotten it on a physics test last year, I would have celebrated for days, but which seems kinda unencouraging now: is this the best that I can do?? So I'm trying to look at it from a 'healthy perspective': you beat most people, yay! (Nothing is more 'healthy' than evaluating your accomplishments based entirely on how they faired compared to everyone else).

However, something cool did happen in Linguistics tutorial when I noticed that something was wrong with some of the grading of the test (I think one day I'm going to try to not be surprised). "Hey", I raised my hand and asked, "I'm just curious how we're supposed to know if the AdvP or NP comes first in this question?" I like to state "I think you're wrong!" as a question, so that the answerer feels like they discovered something and I'm ignorant, rather than me being a cocky little kid who is challenging their authority. 'Good TA', I whisper soothingly as I stroke them on the head lightly and feed them little TA-biscuits. To my absolute shock she glances at it for a minute and then says: "Oh yeah, that's a mistake. I'll give you the mark for it." Woah! That was the easiest test correction ever! I don't even bother bringing up the other problem I found because I'm so stunned. (I wish my logic TA had been even half that willing to just look at the problem).

Also, I was in people-watching mode as our tests were handed back and started peripherally examining the reactions of people right before and during the time that they got their test back. I can't help but wonder...

How long is it after you stop taking classes before you lose the memory of that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as stuff is being handed back?

You know the one. When your head is screaming: "We could get perfect! We could get 100%! PERFECT!" and your stomach is screaming: "We're going to fail. This will ruin our lives!" and the two are having a little argument that just rips you into little tiny shreds of worry, hope and doubt. And everything seems to go in slow motion, doesn't it? You watch whoever is handing out the papers/tests/essays/projects/whatever as they glance at the name, and then glance around the room, and part of you really hopes that they make eyecontact with you so that you can finally get your work back, but the other part is hoping so much that s/he'll hand it back to someone else and you'll never ever have to find out. And then there are those last few seconds, once eyecontact has been made, and they begin walking towards you...

Its too late to change your grade now. Its been too late since you handed it in. And yet it still feels like you're personally responsible for the mark you get, based entirely on what you do during those century-long seconds. Then you're given the paper, and I assume that they walk off but you don't ever notice; your attention is no longer on them. Its now on the paper, despite not having looked at the grade yet. And everyone plays that little game with themselves where they pretend that they're calm and don't need to rush to see what their mark is, but the game lasts for only a fraction of a second as the climax between absolute fear and absolute optimism finally bind together and your eyes rest on those little symbols in red that hold more meaning right then than any other symbols in the universe...

And its all a downhill feeling from there, because that's the only place that you can go after you've been worked up this much. Either your stomach wins and you feel sick with guilt, or your head wins and you feel elated with pride, or they both kind of tie -- which is almost worse because its such an anti-climatic end. But I only say that because my stomach didn't win today.

I can remember getting back our Oh Canada translations to french back in Grade 1, and going through these exact same steps which I'm now doing a hundred years later. But despite how horribly stressful those ten seconds are, everyone knows that deep down inside they enjoy them. Cuz being stressed beyond all compare for short bursts is a nice way to break up an otherwise boring evening. And if you'd stop living in a delusion, you'd probably have been able to guess how you did, anyway.

...the email said, so I responded immediately. "What's up?"

"We're trying to decide which fonts to put on the top of our email letter and need your expert opinion."

Fonts. I get called away for fonts. These are, of course, the guys that I'm doing the cgi work for. The utter morons who I can't mention many more details about, for fear that this will get googleated. (One day I'm going to write a book about the Google Phenomenon: you can write anything you want about someone, just so long as you avoid any words that they might ever look up. Privacy by obscurity?)

So I deal with the "emergency", and head back to drawing my circuit diagrams. These are due tomorrow, and though I'm just copying my messy scrawl into "good copy" ('less messy' copy) form, I don't have time to be explaining why some fonts are a bad idea because they won't be found in all OSes. I go back to working on my bed with my computer volume up loud enough that if an email gets through, it'll summon me. Another email pops up (BEEP-BEEP), not too long afterwards, once again interupting my train of thought, and not even for a fun email to read. "More problems!" is what the subject line states. I read salmon's and El's and a few others' emails first, since I've already been called to the computer, but eventually I have to open theirs.

"How long would it take to redesign the site?" is the question.

The site they have needs it, as its almost as bad as JeffK's. And redesigning it would provide a nice cashflow ontop of the cgi work. But they want it by Feb 23rd when they're doing some inter-city conference or something. This means that it would hog my beautiful, well-needed reading week. I need a scale: money, sanity, money, sanity, money, sanity... I don't know if I can finish the second half of this term and remain lingeringly sane without this break.

I've decided I'm suddenly "unavailable" from their perspective for the next 24 hours (gee, sorry, I didn't get your email until just now. The internet must have crashed.) so that I can think about it before getting back to them.

You know that life just suddenly got better because you're on the corner of Pure Evil and Reading Week when...

• You take the TTC to class instead of biking, and cackle at all the cold people outside.
• Your breakfast is a huge bowl of fresh fruit from Dominion instead of breakfast starting at 9pm after classes.
• Last night consisted of more TV/movie watching than of homework (including dinner at fLufFy/CPwr's place).
• jl,,,,,,,,,,,,. <-- this was Mota's contribution to the list.
• You wake up 3 minutes before your alarm goes off.
• You have enough time before class to think of a bunch of reasons why Reading Week is just around the corner, instead of trying to find where your other sock went.
• You're able to spend a good ten minutes mocking your brother whose March Break isn't for another month.
• You can afford taking the half of an hour to laugh at the fact that every e-card site out there is down because everyone is trying to get last minute valentines day cards in.
• You can just bring a few sheets of lined paper to class instead of eighteen binders for each of the eighteen classes that you're taking that day.
• 'Sleep' suddenly becomes a much less precious commodity and inflation begins springing everywhere.
• The phrase "this too shall pass" no longer makes you want to start crying dramatically.
• The compulsive desire to walk around the streets chewing on your own shoulder and hum "I'm sailin' away" while blinking just a weeeeee bit too frequently, disappears.
• You start to see wood under the piles of paper on your desk (as you shove them all into the trash can - mwahahaha!)
• All memory that classes will resume post-reading week fades very quickly and you begin to accept the comforting delusion that this will last forever.
• You start hitting 'flush' on your brain repeatedly to try to clear some of this junk (who needs the names of these psychology experiments anyway??) to make room for more important things. Like nothing.
• You stop doing homework-programming so that you can start doing play-programming.
• When you wake up and turn on your computer monitor, a reminder pops up: "READING WEEK!"

Things I did do today	Things I did not do today
Wake up naturally at 8, grabbed a snack, fell back asleep until 11, woke up to feed Mota, answer an email and grab a book, read for a few minutes, fell back asleep until 12, talked on the phone for a bit, fell back asleep until 2.	Wake up to BEEP BEEP BEEP at 9:30 am screaming in my ear
Worked on the latest flash a bit. Got a whole minute done on it (this may seem small until you actually try animating little stick people) and then reviewed all of the flash projects which were abandoned mid-way which none of you have ever seen.	Got back a test, assignment, essay, project, whatever, wherein I did horribly.
Got some actual cleaning done (waaaait a minute, this house has floors???) which sounds boring but was playing the noir soundtrack loudly, and had the fuzzy caffeine blanket wrapped around me and it actually kinda rocked.	Take notes in two colours - blue for examples/programs/logic problems and black for instructions/notes/explanations/definitions - and then accidentally use the wrong pen for an entire section and ruin the colour co-ordination.
Spent the entire day eating (still eating now).	Get breakfast at 9:30 pm after evening classes, lunch at 11 pm as a homework break, dinner at 2 am just before bed.
Spent some time with the fam.	Ran from that crazy stalker guy in logic class.
Notice that my tense conjugation on this entire entry has been horrible and jumping between past and present...and then not care.	Lose marks for somehow thinking "happy" was a noun under the stress of test-writing.
Able to actually use the phrase "your pseudo-technocrat, sexist, haughty bullshit" in an angry email to someone! Yay!	Able to use the phrase "but its logically equivilant, so couldn't you at least give me half marks?" in an angry email to someone.
Watched Bowling for Columbine finally (grrr, so many idiots in this world...why aren't I in charge yet???)	Watch logic prof spend 20 minutes trying to remember how Implication works.
Visited my brother at his work. "Well hello there young man. Could you please help me out?"	Spend three hours reading about simultagnosia
Giggled at CPwr/Lao's perl-versus-python religious war.	Choke at my C program deleting a whole bunch of files.
Counted dots on the ceiling of my room.	Counted dots on the ceiling of Jason's office.

Wow......is it ever good to be on reading week!!

Three reasons why I'm better than you.

1) I have a website that people read because they're either so absolutely bored with their lives that mine seems interesting in comparison, or because they actually care...and you do not have such a website. Or you do, but no one reads it. Or people do read it, but not me. Or I do read it, but then it is only cool because I read it and thus I'm controlling its coolness which puts me higher on the cool hierarchy than you, and thus this is still a reason why I'm better than you.

2) I have so much karma coming my way after last year that my life is only going to improve. Your life is just a dangerous downhill spiral from here. The only way to avoid plunging to absolute bottom is to invest now in Catspaw Taking Over The World stocks! Already most countries have been claimed by those who have invested early in Catspaw TOTW stocks, but there is still room for citizens who don't want to be thrown into boiling lava for my enjoyment. Don't be one of the horrible masses who is going to end up on my ever-growing list of hate: invest now and be one of the few to live happily in Catstopia. Small font: investing does not guarentee happiness in Catstopia unless you are Catspaw herself or have some skill of particular value to her. Start looking for your usefulness now! Now now now!! If you're unable to think up your own usefulness, there are some key positions that are still available. Like "shark food" or "person who tells me that what I just did was great" or "live laughtrack" or even "red carpet before my feet placer". But don't just take our suggestions! Look for your own, personalized way in which you can be useful to me. Or at least do something funny while you're dropped into the lava pit.

3) I got an email that told me so.
From: jqqddoisam832035@aqxscr.uyV
Date: Saturday, February 15, 2003 1:58 AM
To: khepra
Subject: omg! [ovb041345047]

Hey.. I joined up to 38 different free porn sites..
Here are the best 7 that i found.. out of all of them.. Join all 7 they all are free.with good content..
You are better than everyone else.

See? Told you that I got an email that said so. (Yes, that's the real "from" address that it came from). I believe that these three reasons prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that I am better than you. QED.

earlier: Nothing to complain about yet today. Sorry. Try again later. ;)

Or give me something to complain about. And then I'll complain about you.

So, it turns out that I really have absolutely nothing to complain about this week. I'm busy eating some breakfast that fLufFy delivered earlier, I have nothing that needs doing today. I could spend all day spinning counter clockwise in this spinny chair, yelling some abnoxious camp song, until sundown. That's right. There's just nothing really to complain about.

What about everything that's wrong with the world?
Oh, you mean like real, intellectual complaints? Oh no, we don't do those here. Just childish whining.

Of course, you should take what you can get with these pseudo-entries, since after Thursday there won't be any for a few days while I'm off cottaging with the crew. So all of you addicts will have to get your fix somewhere else. I've heard that any of the following can be equally addictive while adding as little positive to your life as this site does: cigarettes, drug problems, alcohol addiction, gambling, kids, compulsive sexual behaviour, compulsive internet use (not that any of you suffer from this? Ha ha. Getting these from a list, folks, don't blame me), eating disorders and finally, stalking.

Let me know in the middle of next weekend how your new obsession is coming along. Just make sure you keep it nice and transferable so you can go back to sitting on the 'refresh' key here when I come back.

Alright, so nothing particularily traumatizing happened today. Sure, I slept till 3, my streetcar hit some guy's car, had a cool day, and I'm already ready for bed at 11....but there's nothing to complain about there. So instead, we're going to use this opportunity to discuss an important issue - finding ways to make streetcar/subway riding fun!

You Torontonians know that streetcar/subway riding just isn't as exciting as it was when you were five and would get the very front (or very back) seat and watch from the window. And you non-Torontonians don't know squat. (Ha ha, little bit of Center of The Universe humour there for everyone to enjoy). Anyway, my point is, just sitting there is boring. So I've invented some ways to make it fun!

• The "try to sit alone for as long as possible" game. As the area fills up, people will become more and more likely to cross the barrier and sit down next to you. This game involves trying to postpone this time for as long as possible. However you can't do something like put your bag down on the seat, or hog more than your share of the seat-pair, or talk to them, or try to look crazy, or anything like that. All of this is cheating. Here's what I recommend doing: frown deeply, and make eyecontact with everyone who starts walking towards you. Its a guarenteed way to scare them off! People hate being looked at directly. Anyway, invent your own methods.
  
  
• The "make ads better" game. Choose a random ad. Now, using only the letters found in this ad, spell obscene phrases that could accompany the pictures in the ad. Its creativity-expanding and funny! What more could you want in a subway game?
  
  
• The "save/kill" game. Look around and decide: if the entire subway/streetcar was going to explode in ten seconds, and you had enough time to save just one other person (and yes, Floydy, you do have to save one other person in this game), decide who it would be. And why. If that game is feeling too happy for you, pretend that you had a magic killing rock, and if you chucked it at anyone's forehead, they died. Whose forehead on the vehicle would you most like to chuck it at?
  
  
• The "what are they scared of?" game. Pick random people. What is the one thing that you think they fear more than any other?
  
  
• The "cynical" game! Sit there and be cynical. Its fun for the whole family. There are many different ways to play this game, but its more fun if you make up your own! Yes, the world needs more frowny cynical people sitting on the subway thinking cynical thoughts -- and you can help!
  
  
• The "go over all the stupid things you've said in your life" game. Yeah, nothing makes a long ride shorter like going over all the times you've ever been an idiot and are ashamed to be associated with you.
  
  
• The "why I'm better than them" game. This is a personal favourite. Go through everyone in the area, and come up with at least one great reason why you're better than them. Yay.
  

Well, that's all the time that we have for today at Catsy's Ways To Waste Time. But tune in tomorrow, when we have a nervous breakdown because we suddenly realise that we had work to do this Reading Week, but we're away from Thursday - Sunday.

First things first. Before I scream a few lines of "ahh", a special announcement is in order: Happy Birthday Ender! Today Ender is turning three hundred and twelve, and yet he doesn't look a day over thirty seven. May his next three hundred and twelve years be as exciting as these ones were.

Now that we're done that, on to the screaming.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHgaspAHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I can't believe I didn't #@&*( $&#*&$ $&#@&$ do my $&#@*$ $@&*$@ #!@&#*@&# $&* $&#*ing work this week instead of $@*($@ing #&*$& $&#*@ $&*&$& $&@!)(!$*$&$ off. ARGH!!!

So now I have the cgi people breathing down my neck, workstudy stuff I wanted to get done, midterms crawling up my back, assignments getting ready to pounce, and only one day (well, its 1 pm now, so not even a whole day) to get it all done in. *sigh*

Next week looks as follows:
Monday: Wake up obscenely early, workstudy moo stuff at the Triangle program, run back to campus just in time to barely make it to class, class, run to go meet someone about possibility of working at Citizen Lab this summer, get linguistics homework barely done before evening class, class, get home at 10, absolutely exhausted from not getting any sleep at the cottage.

Tuesday: Wake up obscenely early, more workstudy moo stuff at the Triangle program, run back to campus (though this time there will be slightly less danger of arriving horribly late), class, argue with the logic prof, three hours to study for csc258 midterm, class, get back Psych midterm and cry because I failed, get home at 10, absolutely exhausted from not getting any sleep at the cottage or the night prior.

Wednesday: Wake up less obscenely early, csc258 midterm, go home and cry because I failed, study for phl245 test ("this is the one you'll all fail"), finally get some sleep.

Thursday: Wake up, phl245 midterm, go home and cry because I failed (notice a theme? ;) ), run home, start on csc209 assignment 2, and hope that there aren't any more-than-one-day-of-time problems.

Friday: Wake up, attend those blasted Friday tutorials, submit csc209 assignment 2, and then sit around on campus, absolutely amazed that I'm still alive.

Doesn't that sound like fun?! So why wasn't I preparing for these festivities all week long? I don't know!

Alright, get used to the look of this entry; you'll be seeing it for a while. Depending on how much sleep this weekend involves, this is either all you get until Monday when I can afford a few seconds to put together something like "ung." here, or until next Friday, when I have time to breathe again.

Of course, despite promises to myself that this weekend would involve no work, I'm bringing a bunch with me. Wow, suddenly all those television shows where the father would bring work to his son's baseball game and miss him scoring a homerun all make sense. However I'm still optimistic that it will be a "Cottage extravabonanza!" as a wise person put it.

Ooo, and got the paycheque receipt from UofT for the year of Workstudy this year. Gurgle. Despite the money not actually sitting in my account yet (they're going to have screwed something up. I know they're going to have screwed something up. Its literally impossible that something good happens that doesn't get screwed up), its nice to have the receipt sitting on my desk. Yay.

Lastly, here are six things that I've been told over the past 24 hours by various people with respect to workload. Sure, they all seemed innocent at the time, but look at them all together in one giant pile!

- Hi, we've thought of something else that we need you to do for next week. You don't mind, do you?
- You know, I'm pretty certain that the university of toronto doesn't accept corpses into their grad school. You should keep that in mind.
- Are you going to be okay? You're not going to regret this for the rest of your life are you?
- You won't fail, you'll do great at everything. Failing Catsy is like contrary to the definition of failing.
- Jebus...don't you sleep??
- How's your reading week going? I'm all caught up on all of my readings, and I've done almost all of the work due next month. Isn't it nice to have a chance to really get ontop of things?

And thus, until perchance we meet again, fare thee well....but not better than me.

Nothing like an awesome long weekend to make returning to classes tomorrow feel as shitty as absolutely possible. Anyway, lemmie just hook up my laptop here and grab all the back-entries I wrote.

Thu - Its 3 am right now, Thursday night (Friday morning?) and the entire cottage is already pin-drop silent except for the quiet clicks in this room that my laptop and I are responsible for. So why aren't you going to bed, moron? Look, I'm not tired! Or maybe I've just fallen so deeply into the habit of uploading something to insanecats before bed that now I'm unable to sleep until I do so (wow, now there's a scary thought...) Anyway, what have I been up to? This trip began with me displaying my mastery of stuffing many house-sized objects into the trunk of the car Mud was driving up...which was accompanied by me whistling the tetris themesong. Since then, it feels like a billion things have happened:
"Do you happen to remember where she lives?"
"How many litres?"
"Are we there yet?" "Yes. Get out now. Go on. Go."
"Could you eat cell-divided meat and still be vegetarian?"
"You could fit the house I grew up in three times over inside this cottage."
"I bet [Catspaw] would know. She's our science person."
"What's in the barn, Brandon??"
etc. (No, none of that should make any sense unless you're one of us up here, and maybe not even then). I should probably point out that we're hardly living in a shack, either. AND, we've got several game consoles, a dvd player, a gabillion movies, enough CDs to open an HMV and ten people who are all more than willing to help pitch in time and effort to make elegant meals (food preparation with this group is more like an organized dance than a chore). Life here is sweeeeet. Now I just have to put more effort into ditching my work during "fun time" and trying not to contaminate the two. Anyway, I'm tired now so I'm going to bed.

Fri - I'd like to start by saying: waking up in the afternoon simply because you can...rocks. Everyone else was already awake, but were being gracious enough to let me catch up on a fraction of the sleep I've missed this year. Then, on came the outside gear and we went on a hike into the wilderness. Cliffs were scaled and rivers were crossed. This rocked, even though no one let me cross the river using the fallen tree, despite the fact that I desperately wanted to hands-on test my theory about why the ice would be thick at that point. After a few awesome games in the snow, we turned and came home. Then I kicked everyone's ass at monopoly ("Fine, just take all my properties then, [Catspaw]. And my soul. Want my firstborn son too?!") which was upsetting because it surprised no one ("Ha, of course she won. She figures these games out.") Grr. I love chasing to be the best but dislike being there, because if you do amazingly well, its just expected, but if you don't, people are disappointed in you. Then we just hung around. Brandon, Rodrigo, Alice and I invented/played a game involving dominoes and a twisted version of the knapsack problem, which turned out to be surprisingly challenging, and thus unappealing for those who were trying to avoid mental labour: "What?! I do not come to a cottage to hear [Catspaw] use the word 'algorithm'!!" Thereafter, Brandon and I employed great creativity for sneaking out from the group to go play videogames, but we were swiftly caught and sent back to "be social". Then there was a few more hours, a lot more laughter, and soon the group dwindled in size as people left to sleep. And its 4 am now and I'm seconds from sleep. Tons of fun. OTOH, still haven't gotten any work done, and work/school haunts my mind during any moment of silence. Sigh...let it go...

Sat - Ha ha! Relaxation finally! I've ditched the "getting stuff done" idea here in favour of reclaiming at least some sanity before the next half of the term starts. (I'm going to regret this later, no doubt, but damnit I really $#&*$#@ need a break or I'm going to go crazy). And yet, of course, as soon as I'm able to ignore work/school, we're leaving the cottage tomorrow. Its 4 am (Sunday morning) and in 28 hours I'll be waking up to start my week of hell. Doesn't that just figure? Anyway, today was a fun mix of games, movies and conversation. Sal decided that I'm "pure evil" when playing any game, which made me happy. Then everyone took part in a few rounds of "I've never" which was reassuring to learn that I'm not falling way behind in terms of what I've done. ;) Also, jokes were made about how shocking it is that we're all still alive: ten university students in a cottage in the middle of nowhere sounds like the plot for a really crappy horror movie. Then again, Brandon still isn't telling us what's in the old barn...so maybe its too early to make any assumptions. If this never gets posted, call for help. (Ha ha, get it? Bah, humour is wasted on you people).

Sun - Well, I'm back home. Here sucks. Don't get me wrong - I love this place - but the stuff attached to it sucks. Like, oh, say, the fact that I got 198 junk mail messages that got through my filter by just Friday afternoon and hotmail stopped accepting any more mail because I was too full. Argh! Or the work that I should be doing instead of typing this up. Or the classes I should be doing work for. Or, I could just pretend that it all doesn't exist and maybe it will go away.

Let's try that. Ready.....set....

...said my linguistics prof, when asked in class what a "schlump" is. Gee, thanks, lady. That really clarifies it. (She wasn't being sarcastic or joking, either).

Today in linguistics we learned about the Great Vowel Shift. We're all convinced that this should be said with a slow deep voice. It could be like a movie preview: "This summer, see Richard Gere like you've never seen him before. Critics everywhere are claiming that its 'the best movie since Titanic'. The Globe & Mail says, 'a masterpiece!' The New York Times gives it five stars. THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT. Rated R."

Anyway, so I asked a question in class, despite fearing looking like one of those front-row people who spend all day asking questions. (In fact, I made a dime by asking the question since I was dared to). My question was: "Do we know what caused the great vowel shift?"
She kinda frowned at me slightly, and then shrugged the question off. "No, but we don't really study that sort of thing. We study what changes it had on linguistic structures, not the causes of it."

Oh, brilliant! Lets not try to figure out how our minds process language by trying to dissect reasons for a historical linguistic metamorphosis. No, then we might actually learn something.

Oh, AND, I'd just like post a brilliant idea I had, so that one of you can steal it. You know what would make a gabillion dollars? A coffee stand on the corner of College and Spadina which was placed in the middle of the road where the westbound streetcar stop is. After waiting for like half an hour in the freezing cold (I could have almost walked home by then), most people waiting for the streetcar had hopped in a cab. Someone selling coffee could have made millions.

Okay, now I have to try to program as quickly as possible, as I need this python cgi thing fully working before bed tonight, but I have to get up obscenely early tomorrow AND be well rested since I won't get home until ten again tomorrow, but have to start studying for a midterm the next morning, then. Here's to hoping that my arrogance about circuits will pay off.

AHHHHHHHHHHH its early!! I'm typing blind as my eyes refuse to open for more than a few microseconds at a time. Oh, and this is probably just a temporary entry that's gonna change when more exciting things happen throughout the day (like teaching this morning, then a job interview, then class, then logic test corrected, then finishing cgi stuff that I couldn't finish last night, then evening class, then home to cram for midterm). I suspect we'll probably hit entry-equilibrium somewhere around the the complaints about the logic test, and the psych test I'm getting back, with some "which job should I take??" angst thrown in there for dramatic comedy.

Evening update...

Cool things that happened today	Why I'm in such a crappy mood
Had an awesome interview for potential summer job, the one that I'm considering abandoning NSERC for. A chance to use programming skills and really make a political difference, its close, the dude doing it is cool, etc etc. They look amazing. (If you want my long rant about this, just ask). But...NSERC is still a pretty-looking grad school letter. This will require more thought.	Logic test was remarked. I got a third of the marks the question was worth. "That's still a pretty decent mark overall", the prof commented. Look, you close-minded stubborn roadblock, I don't want a goddamn decent mark in your class. I want a good mark, or an excellent mark or maybe even a really kickass mark. She admitted that my answer was logically equivilant to hers, but then said that she couldn't give me full marks because hers "was better". I was quite honestly feeling too worn out at this point to fight about why it was "better", so I just gave in. Fine. Give me the 1/3 mark. sigh.
Got to have a quick conversation with an awesome prof from Australia who's being a guest-prof or whatever at the cs department here for a few months. We hung out a lot during IJCAI-01 and he's faboo. Conversation started with him saying: "So, now that you're an undergrad, rumour has it that you want to change everything in the department". This refers to the fact that every time I head to my family's place I have a new complaint about how this-and-this course shouldn't be required, but this-and-this one should, and these should be joined, and these should be seperate, and this dude shouldn't be allowed to teach, but this one should be winning awards, and these TAs suck and this tutorial should be cancelled and this programming language sucks, and these units are too overlapping, etc etc etc. Apparently my father passed my "improvements" along to him, for amusement's sake. One day, they'll all listen. *shake fist threateningly* Anyway, its really cool that he's going to be around the next few months. Yay!	Got my psych midterm back. No .wav, .mp3, .mov, .avi, or .swf could possibly be included here to allow you to feel the full extent of my pained groan. How the hell am I supposed to keep the ambition of working hard for the rest of the goddamn week after a disaster like that? Wow, you're an absolute moron. You're just going to fail everything. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I'm eating a cookie.	I can't get the people from this cgi job off my back. I need about fifty straight hours to get all the work for them done, but the work keeps increasing with every day that goes by that I can't get it done. They're producing work faster than I can do it, and I feel incompetant having to mail them every two days with a "sorry, I just honestly can't fit this project into my schedule" email. Especially when I'm relying on them for cash. I'm getting a dozen emails from them a day with new stuff to do. Quote from their email that arrived ten seconds ago: "Hi. I know you have a lot of stuff on your plate. But, here's another issue to deal with. This one needs to take priority over the pages we need for Thursday." ARGH! Maybe I'll just quit sleeping.
I'm not a close-minded stubborn roadblock.	I'm having specialist doubts. The opposite of last year's. Here's how it works: I'm great at CS, and it interests me, but I worry that since its both study and play that there's a chance I might go crazy and hate it in twenty years and wish I had something else to fall back onto. I love cogsci, but apparently I'm not "amazing" at it, just, you know, "good". (Not cog psych - apparently I'm "absolutely horrible" at that - I mean cog sci). So this year, my thoughts are: maybe I should drop the cog sci specialist and move into a cs specialist instead, and drop the cs major. BUT, last year I thought I should drop cs and go into cog sci because I had an amazing cog sci prof who was horribly influencing me. This is like Mr. Luca convincing me that I should go into Physics, all over again! I assume that good classes mean good content and they soooo don't. What happens if all my cs profs are Suck (tm) next year?
If marks and the few bad TAs/profs were suddenly removed from the picture, I'm absolutely loving my classes this year. Learning lots, and learning cool stuff.	Marks aren't removed from the picture. And I hate being neurotic and obsessing about them, but I can't help it. And the last few haven't been up to what I've been hoping. MEH. Meh, I say!

There you go, there's your horribly whiny complaints of the day. In case you felt like there hadn't been enough in the world previously. Now go about your business. Go on. Go.

Yes, my midterm did go well today, thanks to all who asked (which was a surprising number of you). And thanks to the forces that be, who allowed me to know that it went well now, instead of friday.

I'd also like to thank this glass of juice, for not spilling all over my papers when I thought it was going to. (These "thanks"s are beginning to sound like a sucky awards ceremony).

And lastly, thanks to C.Pwr for his inspirational message: "...your problem with psych is that you think too hard. The psych dept likes students who yack up the same stuff they cram into you..."

That's all I have for today.

Alright, there have been "your entries are getting too technical and academic, its boring" complaints. Look, tweed, I happen to be doing a lot of "technical and academic" shit at the moment, so unless you want to come over here and do this programming for me, you can just shut your yap and listen.

Whew, now that that jerk is gone.

Anyway, since this complaint is "technical" I divided it into two for those of you who care about the computing details, and those who just want to hear the complaints.

You've Got Mail! for dummies: So I'm writing a program to send out an email to like a gabillion people. But because I'm a moron, I screwed up and can't tell if they're sending or not. And because everyone on the list is such a boring person that its not even funny, I don't know any of them, so can't ask "hey, buddy, did you get an email?". So do I send it again, this time checking to see if they got it, but risk everyone getting two copies? Sigh.

Technical smtplib stuff: Okay, so you know what's really scary? Running a program completely blind. I'm doing all of this without shell access (grr, don't make me go there) and have to write a program to send an email to everyone in their database. But the server they're on has REALLY slow smtp abilities. So I write the program and attach it to a webpage, visit the webpage, and it heads off, printing email addresses as it goes (it has to send it to the thousands of people or whatever who are going to be attending this thing). After a few minutes it hits andersvl@ops.org and IE decides that this is the end of the content....and stops. Well....shit. Of course, if I'd thought about this more, I would have put a whole bunch of my email addresses scattered throughout the list, so I could check to make sure that its still working. Or better yet, I would have had the email addresses print to a log as it went, opening and closing each time so that I could view the log without access rights problems. But I didn't...its like what, 8 am? How am I supposed to think of that at 8 am? I'm goddamn tired! So anyway, I wasn't *completely* stupid: I put mine at the end so that I could see when it finished. Now its running, but I'm completely blind. Maybe it stopped halfway when it got to some of the "broken" emails (I'm not the one inputting them, so there are some like 'joe'. No @ or anything. Or worse: 'andiamo@shaw..ca:' Yes, with the double dot and the colon.) or maybe its still running, just really slowly. I have no way of knowing. I mean, I'll wait a while more and see if I get anything. But if I don't....how do I know where it got to? I don't. So do I re-email everyone (watching more closely this time) and risk a billion people getting two copies, or do I choose a random point on the list and email from there, or argh! So this was one of the dumbest ideas I've had, because now I have to sit here and wait for an email that may never come. Or maybe I'm fixing the wrong problem. Maybe what I should be doing is composing an email to them saying: "Find a way to give me goddamn shell access or else get someone who knows how to type to type in all your email addresses, you dipshits!"

Sometimes I threaten people that I'll put the dumb things that they say as my subject line. I usually do. This is your last warning. :)

Anyway, today's rant is about a topic that's come up before so its about time that I finally get to growl at it on here: cheaters.

I wrote my logic midterm yesterday afternoon. Sat down on the edge of a row with four people (three others and my lovely self) with an empty chair between each of us. The TA starts handing out test papers and we're one of the first few rows to get it. They're handed face down. As soon as the TA is behind us, passing out papers farther back, the three of them open their booklet and begin flipping through the pages. Okay, they're clueless and don't realize that they're not supposed to start yet -- whatever. The TA finishes handing out the papers a few minutes later, and everyone begins.

The first question is absolute ass, proving something dead-obvious, but we're restricted on what logic rules we're allowed to use...ARGH; but that rant has been mentionned before, and is for another day. So I skip over to the next page, figuring I'll come back to the over-restrictive question. La la la, easy easy easy. But there are a lot of really long questions, so I flip back to the first one so that I don't forget about it.

As I'm flipping my page, I notice something odd. There's an open binder on the floor beside me.

I glance at it more closely. Sure enough, the guy beside me has his binder open to the page with all of the SD rules. But...maybe he just doesn't realize that its open. However, this immediately sends all of my senses into overdrive mode, trying to pick up on proof of whether or not he is using his binder, without ever glancing over in his direction. Its only because I normally spend so much time listening during exams (its amazing what auditory cues you can pick up from those around you) that I notice something odd. There's the noise of paper flipping beside me, but not the sound of when you bend a page (to turn it) or pages landing (to flip a booklet over). Its the sound of an individual sheet of paper. So against all my determination not to look over, my eyes dart towards the sound and catch what's happening: they're passing a sheet of paper between the three of them.

Shit, I sigh, don't do this. But just as I notice it, the TA announces that a quarter of our time is done. And I've been spending way too much time focused on the events beside me. So I push it aside, and get to work on the logic problems. One, two, three, four...they're long and complicated but not difficult. But the lingering memory that cheating is happening beside me is haunting my thought process.

I want to get them in trouble. I want for them to fail. First of all, it'd bring the class average down and thus my mark up. Secondly, I really hate the idea of idiots cheating and ruining it for the rest of us. I like to play the mental game of how to cheat (and would never claim that I didn't) but actually doing it...grr. Vervaeke's lecture last year on plagiarism comes to mind: "When you copy someone without giving them credit, someone isn't getting that credit. And that someone could be anyone. It could be me. So if you plagiarize in your essay, I take it as if you were plagiarizing against me, and thus stealing from me. And I will hunt you down and ensure that you pay the highest cost that the university can inflict on you." When they're passing notes back and forth, they are literally bringing down the value of my accomplishments.

"So, what happened??"

Sigh. Nothing. I didn't call the TA over. I didn't talk to the TA afterwards.

I'm a very huge fan of catching stupid cheaters and a dream job of mine would be to invent ways to catch them better...but in that situation, I felt like I couldn't do anything. If I called the TA over during the test, it would be probably about ten minutes of distraction. They would put everything away quickly, then would deny it, the TA would be questioning them right beside me, blahblahblah; then afterwards my mind would be completely focused on that, and unable to return to the test. If I had lots of extra time, sure, but this test's difficulty was based on its time restrictions.

"So why not say anything to the TA afterwards?"

I didn't have their names. They were generic looking, so I probably couldn't even identify them again in a class of that size. These are both good reasons, but not my main one. I didn't feel like the TA would do anything about it. This is Mr. "My Answer Is Right" TA, and I honestly couldn't see him caring enough to do anything about it. And the prof wasn't there.

So, I did the next best thing.
I decided to approach the trio personally after class.

No blackmailing (although I would have really liked to), just a very simple "I saw what you guys were doing. Don't do it again." as if I had the authority to say such things. No response. And then I walked off.

As is the way with most things, with every step I took I thought of things that I should have done...each better than the last. Bah. Now I feel like I owe the collective ethical equilibrium of the universe a favour.

I strongly pity the next person who is cheating around me, as now I've invented all the juicy and delicious ways with which I can ruin their life, and I feel like I possess the karmic excuse to do so.