Someone at the UofT admin office finally caught on that a flukey error had set my UTORid status from "student" to "faculty". After months of fun, this error has been corrected. I'm now back to the mundane world of being just another undergrad.

Three new things that I think are cool:

1) The hottest online store ever. Drag and drop. Nice poof effects and everything. Someone sell this design to amazon! I want more of this.

2) Sushi pillows. C'mon. Too damn cool.

3) ...um....okay, there is no number three yet. Someone help me out, here.

The walk from my house to campus takes anywhere between forty minutes and an hour, depending on what music I'm listening to while I walk. St. Germaine sometimes causes my stroll to take up to an hour and a half, whereas the Hackers soundtrack guarantees a forty minute trip.

I have to admit it. An iPod makes the walk soooo much better. I genuinely appreciate musicless walks through the city sometimes, but c'mon, how often can you walk the same route before landmarks like Trinity Bellwoods Park lose their edge.

I know they're overpriced, glorified CD players with a large handful of flaws, but I'm one of the lemmings who just loves her iPod.

Even the iPod ads make me happy. So, of course, I had to insert a stickcat (13 MB --- note: if it doesn't play video, try downloading it and playing it locally) into one of them. If you watch it about twenty times on repeat, you'll start to understand what I mean. Or go crazy. Or just have the song stuck in your head for the rest of the day. Or all of the above. Enjoy!

Ever wondered what your life would look like as a comic book?

Well now I don't have to.

Personally, I think that my life is in need of a few more "POW! BAM! WHAM!" scenes. And maybe even a few "KABLAMO!"s. This clip is part of a piece that'll be airing on the CBC at some point. Oh, and for the record, if thought bubbles were included, they would look something like this which happened the day that we shot this footage. "Dance, monkeys, dance!"

One of the until-now best kept secrets of Bahen (the computer science building at UofT) is a 5th floor reading room. The best feature of this room is not the huge windows, or the comfy chairs. The best feature of this room is that it's quiet. Until now.

Somehow a large group of second year students have discovered this room. They're all working on 263 and 318 together and are doing so while being amazingly noisy. One is playing music from his laptop, four are working on 263 together (note: you're not supposed to work on it in teams greater than two), and two are loudly laughing about how they're faking 318 interviews and some other ones are making offensive sexist jokes. They're yelling stuff at each other, their jackets and bags and papers sprawled all over the room, such that eventually I gave up and went up to the 7th floor to find a quiet space.

How did all these people suddenly find out about this room? Who gave it away?

The other problem is that there is currently no assigned rules for this room. Because so few people knew about it, they didn't have to say grad-only, or quiet-only, or anything like that. The only people who were ever in the room were some members of the CS staff, a handful of quiet grad students, and some Greglings. That's it. Nice. Quiet.

Is this the end of my wonderful office? Will this room become polluted with sound and swearing like the 2nd floor undergrad lounge? I fear that it's not looking good...

Someone should lock the room 24/7. That way, only grad students, staff, and undergrads with access (ie: me -- the important exception to the no-undergrads rule that I want to enforce in here ;) ) can get in.

I hate undergrads.

Total reading week hours so far: 68 hours
Reading week hours spent sleeping so far: 19 hours
Reading week hours spent playing Chrono Cross so far: 16 hours
Reading week hours spent working so far: 15 hours
Reading week hours spent reading so far: 1 hour...and, like, 8 minutes
Total reading week hours remaining: 148 hours

Off to the cottage in a few hours, and'll be there for a few days. Unlike most trips there, I won't have internet access this time, so I have to make sure to download all the online content that I need for being productive: work, school and PyWebOff stuff.

If only every week were reading week. Such a happy person I'd be...

So before I left for the cottage, I downloaded about 50 megs of webpages -- from general resource materials to course websites to wikipedia entries I might need -- onto my laptop so that I could get a lot of work done while I was away.

Within about an hour, however, it became clear that I desperately needed an internet connection. I would start along one course assignment and then pause to go look something up on the net and then sigh when I realized that I was on my own.

I was able to get a whole lot of work done while I was there, but a lot of it took a whole heck of a lot longer than it should have simply because there was a lot of stuff I had to work out from first principles because I didn't have the internet at my fingertips.

When I got home this evening, I had 96 non-junk e-mail messages sitting in my Inbox. I may have missed the internet, but at least the internet missed me too. I feel kinda like this again.

If you do a search for iconix ooa in Google (no, you don't have to know what that is for this to be cool), scroll down a few queries and you'll notice that some of them have the phrase Object Oriented Analysis bolded in the caption. But wait a second, we didn't search for "Object Oriented Analysis"! We searched for "OOA".

That's right. They bold/expand acronyms for you. Awesometown!

There are some things which make me laugh every time, but seem to only make other people blink in confusion. Today's let's talk about mundane things blog entry is about one of these: replacing common patterns/sayings with words that don't fit. This one seems to only make me (and my father, whose sense of humour I inherited) laugh.

For example, there's a common saying in math 'n' stuff that goes:
The X of the Y is the Y of the X.

The sum of the integrals is the integral of the sum
The limit of the product is the product of the limits
The transpose of the inverse is the inverse of the transpose

...and hundreds more. And everyone does the same little sing-song when they say it.

It never ceases to amuse me when random shit is stuck in there instead. Especially when it makes no sense, because it sounds like you're almost saying something very deep, and then people have no idea whether they should take you seriously or not:

The moral of the story is the story of the moral.
The winner of the war is the war of the winner.
The scene of the crime is the crime of the scene.

Another good one is from many sources, but especially computer science:
X early, X often

Test early, test often.
Release early, release often.
Check-in early, check-in often.

...and so it goes. Apparently there was even a whole "Vote early, vote often" campaign in the US at some point.

You have to be careful with this one, because if you just insert a random verb, chances are high you'll come up with something that's actually a good piece of advice, like "shoot early, shoot often", or "invest early, invest often". But if you work really hard, you can still come up with choice verbs that cause the saying to make less sense the more you think about them, like:

Disintegrate early, disintegrate often.

Or, even better, insert random nouns, because then people think that you're trying to make them into verbs or something, and they start extracting meaning from it:

Coconut early, coconut often.
Mayor early, mayor often.
Basement early, basement often.

Hours of entertainment for the whole family! ...But only for me. Because I'm the only one who is amused by it.

Use Case: Catspaw completes assignment 1

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Actors

• Catspaw

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Robustness Analysis for use case Catspaw completes assignment 1

Basic Course

Catspaw uses her laptop to complete CSC407 assignment 1. The system calls use case Catspaw draws 9 million use case diagrams. Then the system calls the use case Catspaw writes 9 million use case diagram descriptions.

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Robustness Analysis for use case Catspaw draws 9 million use case diagrams.

Basic Course

Catspaw opens OmniGraffle and draws 9 million use case diagrams.

Alternate Course

1. Catspaw dies from exhaustion.

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Robustness Analysis for use case Catspaw writes 9 million use case diagram descriptions.

Basic Course

Catspaw opens SubEthaEdit and writes 9 million use case diagram descriptions.

Alternate Course

1. Catspaw dies more.

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Domain Model with Attributes

Catspaw is an object that represents everyone's favourite stickcat. She can either be dead or alive. Every Catspaw draws 9 million use case diagrams and writes 9 million descriptions. Each of these descriptions describes exactly one use case diagram. Descriptions contain a string of text. Use case diagrams contain a diagram file which points to a location on disk where a use case diagram is stored.

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Statistics

3 use cases.

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Whew, now that that rant is over...

Happy birthday to fLufFy and a happy belated birthday to Ender! Yay them!

So I'm in the grad printer room waiting for the printer queue to empty so that I can print my (well...Laurie's...) assignment. And while I'm sitting on the stapling table, dangling my legs over the edge, some grad student is photocopying a very large quantity of papers. It basically looks like he's photocopying a phone book or something. Maybe he downloaded the whole internet, printed it, and is now photocopying to make a backup incase he drops the pile of paper and has trouble putting the internet back together again. Anyway, the point is, we're both sitting and waiting.

He's giving me a weird look. But we both sit in silence while we wait. I grab a scrap piece of paper and fold it into a little paper boat. Then toss it into the recycling bin across the room and mentally congratulate myself on my aim.

"I saw you on TV", he finally says.

"Oh yeah?" This has become my standard answer. Except when profs say it to me. Then I just blush and mutter something quiet like "uh oh" as I secretly wonder which interview they saw and what I said that could be misinterpreted.

The grad student crosses his arms. "What gives you the right to tell governments what they can and can't censor?"

Ah. It's one of these guys. I've dealt with this type before, and I had to sit and wait for my printing job anyway, so I humoured him. "I don't think I have that right at all. However I think that citizens within that country have the right to know exactly what's going on. That's what we try to do. Figure out what's going on, and then educate the public about it."

He "psh"s loudly and rolls his eyes. "Whatever. Sometimes censorship is necessary. Like to stop terrorists. And I'm sure you've got some gay anarchist theory about that too."

I considered making up a story about how homosexual anarchists relate to stopping terrorists without the use of censorship, but he got up and left, while his papers were still photocopying.

I took one breath. Two. Then grabbed a piece of paper, wrote "Sometimes censorship is necessary; sometimes freedom of speech is funnier" on it (I didn't have much time to think of something clever) and stuck it in the middle of his huuuge pile of papers that were photocopying where he'd never notice it.

Grabbed my print job, left the room. Somehow it made me feel better.

In a dream last night, I was finishing up the layout details of my PhD thesis. I decided to Justify the whole document rather than Left Align. Then I adjusted where one of the page breaks occurred between two sections. Then I hit print and let out a long sigh of relief.

Then I woke up and had to study for a stupid second year undergrad midterm that I don't even expect to do that well on. sigh.

Update: The day was made remarkably better by Mudsy making me coffee and doing my dishes and making my bed and cleaning the clothes off of my floor while I was off at the grocery store buying comfort food (two bananas, dessert almond tofu and a package of Super Nibs). Yay! No, she's not for sale.

For some strange inexplicable reason, both of my tutorials today were cancelled and then all of my meetings today were cancelled. This meant that I suddenly had a bonus day. I could use this day to catch up on everything and get ahead in life.....oooor I could use this day to relax a bit and just play around with random shit. I chose the latter. And this is what happened.

iPod Hack: Change the default graphics. The image to the right is someone else's iPod, but I thought I'd try the same trick with mine. Guess which theme my iPod has now. Hint: stickcat! Okay, that was a pretty lame hint, but I really don't think much of your intelligence. Anyway, I also changed some of the default iPod text. "No battery remains. Please connect iPod to power." now reads "Your battery pwns you. KO!" That sort of thing. I've also figured out how to change the battery recharging animation to something else. Now I just have to come up with a clever little replacement.

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Make your own mosaic. I grabbed a firefox picture and made the image on the right. (Click on it to see it in much more detail.) All of the smaller images were collected from a number of Google images searches in my attempt to represent some of the rich variety of information available on the net. No, none of the three hundred images were used with permission ;). I'm quite happy with the result, however. It really does look like the Firefox poster. I made it with MacOSaiX and a crazy assortment of search terms.

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Victory Lap logo. It seems like most of the students worth knowing at this university are ones who are doing their degree in five (or more years), rather than the four recommended years. For all of those, like me, who plan on doing a 5th year ("victory lap") next year, here's a logo that I think should exist on a UofT sweatshirt. Cuz, let's face it, there's a whole heck of a lot of us. (There probably needs to be varieties with 6, 7, 8, ..., in the background, too.)

There's something totally bizarre about dyeing your hair bubblegum pink, while watching DSOTR (the Wizard of Oz on mute with The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd, playing instead...if you haven't heard of this before, it's...well...try it), while idly doing some programming for an assignment due later that week, while eating a bowl of soybeans.

If it doesn't sound bizarre, you should try it. Throughout history, evenings of the world have seldom been weirder.

It's 11 pm on a Sunday night and I'm on campus. The topic of today's entry is a sentence that actually appears in our report. The phrase "we produced a large piece of paper by taping together several smaller pieces of paper" is also used. We find ourselves to be amusing.

There hits a point just past the twelfth hour of straight work when you either die, fall asleep, or hit a magic zen-like state when you produce pure gold as your fingertips tap dance across the keyboard. At least, it feels like pure gold at the time. Phrases like "Automatic Push-Based Syndication" start creeping their way from footnotes to body text to section titles. And suddenly the most important task in the world is to decide whether that line over there should be dotted or dashed. You arrange for dot versus dash committees and hold a bake sale to raise the money necessary to hold a vote.

Staff attrition streamlines information decay, indeed!

I have begun to fully comprehend the difference between "high work load" and "difficult work". I thought I knew, but I didn't. Now I know. 263, 318, 340, 407. None of my courses this term are very difficult. Our papers are graded using a checklist --- a checklist!! Blasphemy! --- and yet this means that it's very easy to do well on them if you're smart about it. But many of these courses involve writing 30 page reports on a bi-weekly basis. Many of them involve coordinating a team. Not difficult work, but a high work load.

And so, at 11 pm on a Sunday night, I'm on campus with one of my teams while we allow staff attrition to streamline information decay. And what was once a sentence that was funny because it had but a tenuous grasp on coherence, suddenly makes a great deal of sense. And that's something scary.

Today I set out to answer that lifelong question that has plagued humanity throughout the ages. Namely, how many cups of coffee does it take before Catsy goes crazy?

The answer appears to be....six. And by her eighth cup (within two hours), she begins to sing, get all jumpy, cry "WHY???" at the TV screen, and wheel around the apartment on her wheely chair instead of doing the work that she really, really needs to be doing.

....Yeah, so, sometimes you gotta get your kicks through the little things in life. Right now, coffee's doin' it for me.