It's that time of year again! The time of year when Catsy pulls out the giant volumes of course descriptions and the webpages of department schedules, and chooses her fate for the next year. Fortunately, this year I have fewer selections than any other previous year, and basically just have to take the courses required of me. But it does leave a liiiiittle wiggle room. And therein lies the choices.

The big overdramatic graphs are drawn and I have little debates with myself about whether easy grades or learning experiences are more important.

But despite the act of elaborate selection, I already know what I'm going to pick. It's a gut feeling that happens immediately with courses. They sort of jump out at you a little and you can picture yourself sitting in the back of the class, listening to the topic being discussed on the front board. You can imagine staying up late slaving away over one of the assignments, and the idea that you would be tired and very well caffeinated, but ridiculously productive and likely griping about how stupid the content is and how you wish you could instead be on a beach sipping drinks out of coconuts, has a twisted sort of appeal for you.

Unfortunately, these gut feelings are often what lead to my terms that are more packed than any mere mortal could handle. Fortunately, that doesn't include me.

For those of you who care, here's what my final year of undergrad will look like :

Fall:

Software Engineering (TR2,T3)
Computers & Society (MTW3)
Children's Literature (MWF2) or Perspectives in Sexual Diversity (T6-9) or Technology & War (TWR12)

Winter:

Compilers (T2,R1-3)
Web programming (MWF3)
Databases (T6-9)
Natural Language Computing (W6-9)

Interesting things to note:

• Two evening classes in a row during the winter term. Ewie. But my schedule doesn't allow for any flexibility about this.
• I have two classes at the same time (Tuesdays at 3 pm) in the fall. This, again, is totally ewie. I've never done an overlap before. But unless I can get Software Engineering waived (I don't think I'll even bother trying), I have no choice. I can already tell that this is gonna hurt at some point during exam season.
• Look at my options for third course of the fall term! They're so cool!!! They all make me so excited. I have no idea how I'm going to be able to pick just one.... I get all hyped just thinking about any one of them. Yay! I wonder who I can convince to let me drop some of the CS courses and take more of the other stuff instead... ;)
• After a fall of fun, the winter term is going to seem soooooooo stale. (And I wonder what that says about my choice of CS as a degree...)

I woke up when my fan stopped turning. Blinked twice and realized that my clock was off too. The power was out for only about five minutes, but by the time that it had returned, I was wide awake. It was 6 am.

I went online and complained to a few people in the UK (and a few up late on the west coast here) about how unfair it was that I was awake at this hour. After receiving the sympathy that I craved, I got out of bed and decided to make the best of it.

Half an hour later, my oven beeped and I had a dozen muffins ready. Some lovely recipe with cinnamon and oats and coconut milk and orange juice. Made myself a pot of tea to go along with this luxurious breakfast.

Brought the whole thing upstairs on a little tray and went out on to my deck where the sun was rising behind the CN Tower. It was already warm outside but far from too warm.

Sat. Ate. Dozed.

Monday mornings are legendary for being an appalling time --- especially after a long weekend. But as 6 am turned to 7 am on this Monday morning, I found myself to be quite content. Maybe the secret to happiness is 6 am powerouts. Or maybe the secret is muffins.

So the rumours are true. I'll be disappearing for a little while this month into the depths of Kyrgyzstan with a team of trained squirrel monks in search of the holy giant acorn that was lost millions of years ago.

"Don't worry, it's the safe -stan", I told my parents on the phone. I didn't mention the trained squirrel monks. They wouldn't understand. I also didn't mention the fact that we may be traveling into Kazakhstan (which isn't "the safe -stan" as much as Kyrgyz) while I'm there. They don't know that I built a pair of Mario blocks for myself that potentially contain fire flower power, a raccoon-tail leaf, or even a giant-making mushroom (unless they contain a coin, in which case I'm screwed --- *shakes fist*). I also didn't mention the fact that when I was last at their house, I raided their freezer and stole every piece of food that I suspected could survive the ninety minute subway trip back to my house. We work on a need-to-know basis.

Anyway, my point for mentioning this is twofold:

1. I probably won't be blogging in much detail while I'm there. That doesn't mean I'm dead. Unless my blog entry title is "I'm dead" and the body of the entry says, "Bad news. I'm dead." In which case I'm a ghost. And if you say anything bad about me, I'll hear and haunt you forever.
2. What the hell do people do when they go on trips where the flight (including stops) is going to last 34 hours in each direction?? My laptop will last a few hours, then my iPod a few more, and then what?? I need entertainment suggestions pronto!

If it so happens that its decided that my experiences there will be blogged or podcasted or videocasted or spellcasted then I'll post a link later, but I'm not leaving for another little bit yet. I still have lots to do. Like learn how to speak the language of the squirrels.

...I am alive, though far away. :)

Let's see...what vagued up stories can I share?

I had a bunch of trouble at the Toronto airport in terms of them letting me on to the plane. Surprise, surprise, right? They were unsure that I'd be granted a visa in Kyrgyzstan due to the "unusual" stamps in my passport, such as those from Guatemala, Panama and Afghanistan. It took about five minutes before I clued in and said, "wha? Uh, there's no Afghanistan stamp in there." Apparently the Chiapas stamp looks a lot like the Afghanistan stamp. I was allowed to board the plane after that was cleared up. Sheesh!

On route I made friends with a group of guys from Iraq, Russia and India. We were quite the mix. All of us were traveling independently and somehow started talking during one of the security checkpoints. On the flight to Russia, each of them had an awesome life story to tell. I felt like the boring one in the group.

Moscow is pretty much the city that I was expecting. In other words, the Moscow from the movies. However there are far fewer James Bond villains wandering around than I expected. I suspect that they're all in hiding, brewing some evil plan. It probably involves lasers.

My ten hour stopover in the Moscow airport was brightened by the brilliant young daughter of the Syrian ambassador to North Korea. She was 9 years old and spoke excellent English (with an awesome accent). After answering the many questions that she had for me about life in Canada (her rapid-fire questions came with an insatiable curiosity), she proceeded to explain to me what life is like in both Syria and North Korea. I found myself totally humbled by this little girl's unusual and powerful mixture of innocence and experience.

Compared to the comfortable flight from Toronto to Moscow, the flight to Kyrgyzstan was a lot like being shoved into a glove compartment so tightly that you can't move, and then having some large guy come by every few minutes, yell at you in Russian, and then toss peanuts at you when you're unable to communicate a response. It was, uh, an experience. ;)

But now I'm here. w00t. Time to shake off that jetlag and get to work. As soon as I can open my eyes again...

There's a strange time warp that occurs when one is in a foreign place.

The days seem longer and time goes much slower, almost as if time has to slow down to give you a chance to process the vast amounts of new data that are arriving at every minute.

It's probably not unlike how time seems slower the first time you see a movie or during childhood. Movies distinctly "go faster" when you rewatch them, and when I was a kid summers seemed like an eternity, not like the short break that they are today. I used to think that this effect was due to age relativity (two months is much longer when it comprises 2% of your life than when it's only 0.5% or less), but now I think that it's a lot more related to the travel time warp. Everything is new when you're younger, so time "goes slower" for you to process it.

What makes the whole travel time warp even odder to experience is knowing that time is flowing at its normal pace for those you left behind. Your eternities are not theirs.

These are my thoughts at 4 am as jetlag keeps me awake...

A few years ago I wrote: "Similar to the way in which you'll never forget the day when your parents are brutally murdered, I will never ever forget drinking that one ounce of wheatgrass."

I truly and honestly believed that there was nothing I could put in my mouth that would be more disgusting than that wheatgrass shot. There's a reason why that entry is one of the insanecats classics.

But guess what? I've found something worse than wheatgrass!

I know. I didn't believe it either. It's called Koumiss and is the Kyrgyz national drink. It's made from "fermenting mare's milk in a horse-hide container". It's thick like a milkshake, brown, very chunky, and "can serve as both drink and food at the same time". I made the locals drink it first to prove that it wasn't a trick-the-foreigner gag.

Based on how it tasted to me, here's how I would imagine the recipe for Koumiss:

1. Milk a mare. Let the milk sit outside in the sun for a month until it gets chunky.
2. Mix in lots of horse hair so that every mouthful contains bits of hair.
3. Find a field where the grass is brittle and dry. Mow the grass, then pick up the bits and add it to the mixture.
4. Put the whole mixture into a blender and mix it until it becomes frothy. Use a low mixer setting so that you don't lose any of the chunkiness.
5. Pour it into a glass and serve it to Catspaw.

I drank 3/4s of the glass. You know, to be polite. When I go home, I plan on shaving my tongue to try to remove the lingering aftertaste of this national drink. If that doesn't work, I'll drink a bottle of Windex.

I will never look at horses in the same way again.

This is a joke I have amongst my colleagues in Kyrgyzstan. When they mention my name in the middle of a long Russian sentence, we all chuckle and say the above quote because that is how their sentence sounds to me.

I suspect that when I get home it's going to take me a bit to get back into the habit of speaking in complex sentences. I've been putting so much effort recently into limiting my vocabulary to simple words and phrases. Especially because whenever there is a misunderstanding of language, they feel bad because they're sorry that they can't understand and I feel bad because they're the ones struggling in another language whereas I know no Kyrgyz/Russian and am therefore contributing nothing to the language bridge.

However over the past few days I've finally picked up the rhythm of Russian. What I mean by this is that I can now distinguish word breaks. As soon as I could isolate one word from another, there were a few words that I could infer by context and by their relationship to English words. Which was really cool.

But the most interesting observation about language that I've made while here is that when both parties are forced to speak in very simple sentences, it forces both parties to only speak very simple thoughts, so when an actually complex thought is expressed and understood, both parties feel simultaneously proud and amused.

For example, the concept that needing the same key to unlock two locks to the same door is bad security. It is like having a computer ask for a password and then ask for the same password again for extra security. It's a rather complex thought in broken English, but all that was needed was the word "Password" and we both knew what was being discussed and laughed.

Technology metaphors help a lot in this regard. If the technical terms are known in the common language, it makes it easier to express more complicated thoughts. For example, I was trying to explain the difficulty that I was having in reading the Russian character set. "H is N and N is I." But my thoughts weren't coming across well. Then he said, "Ahh. Russian like rot13 for you." Perfectly said.

But there is nothing like spending two weeks in a country that speaks another language to make you feel stupid for how few languages you know. Fortunately, there's always patience, the OSX language translation dashboard, and overdramatic hand waving gestures. Unfortunately, these don't help me very much when I'm trying to give a lecture on computer security to a bunch of Kyrgyz NGOs.

Title says it all. I'll write more once the sleep catches up to me. And I'm finished enjoying everything that a weekend in Toronto has to offer. Yay!

Next month I'm joining the rest of civilization and buying a cell phone. I know, I know. "How could you possibly have lived this long without one?!" Having a laptop helps.

Anyway, I've had to spend a few hours this weekend browsing the various cellphone plans, reading the fine print, and trying to figure out how much each one is actually going to cost me and what I actually get from each one.

After calling each of the four major toronto providers and basically saying, "I'm trying to choose between you and the other guys. Impress me.", here are the packages that each felt was appropriate for "my lifestyle" (whatever that means):





I think that my research has declared Fido to be the winner with Telus in a close second. Has anyone in the Toronto area had any drastically different experiences that they'd like to share before I sell my soul away to the gods of cellphone companies?