On the south side of the Bahen building are three elevators: Sleepy, Softy and Laggy. The names are my own, but they suit the elevators well.

Sleepy is the elevator on the right. It sometimes takes afternoons off where it sits on a floor and refuses to move. It's rare that you enter Sleepy anymore, and much more likely that you'll see it hanging around the 7th or 8th floor for hours on end.

Softy is the elevator in the middle. It had padding put on all its walls about a month ago, but no one has taken the padding off. Why hasn't anyone bothered to take the padding off? Doesn't anyone care about Softy?

Laggy is the elevator on the left. It works perfectly except for its doors on the ground floor. For some reason, when Laggy opens its doors on the main floor, it takes about five times longer than usual. So you have to stand around for three or four seconds while the doors very, very slowly open. What's up with that?

Sleepy, Softy and Laggy. The happy elevators in the happy Bahen building.

Mud has recently taken to cooking nummy foodstuffs for us to eat. I'm all up for that! When you cross my undergrad instincts which cause me to eat anything that I can get my hands on, with very tasty food, you get a happy Catspaw. There's only one downside to Mud making me all this great food...

...and that's that I have also been feeling an inclination towards cooking recently. So now there's two of us making tons of food for each other. Then add to the equation hanging out in restaurants with friends, and you end up with this:

"Uggggggghhhhhh," I groaned, rolling over onto my side. "I'm going to explode. I'm like a goddamn puppy who will eat himself to death if you let him. So much good food....so much pain..."

On the plus side, I've had more delicious food this weekend than I've probably had all month. Yay the trend of cooking nummy foodstuffs! I approve. (Between the groans of pain.)

I spent a bit of time this evening glancing at what the next two years of courses I'm taking are going to be. I've been pretty good at predicting what my terms are going to be like in advance (whether or not this is a self-fulfilling prophecy I can't argue, however), and looking at these courses, it's fairly obvious what they'll be like.

4th year first term
Pros: Really sweet schedule. Classes MWF from 10-4. Tuesdays and Thursdays off. I've never had a day off before, nevermind two days off. Means I'll get to spend some of that time doing citizenlab work. And will, naturally, fill the remaining time with those millions of activities I seem to accumulate in my to-do pile.
Cons: It's a term of nothing but mathy-courses. Ugh! I've seen 4 am television more exciting than this drab poor excuse for a term of courses. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to convince myself to get out of bed in the morning.

4th year second term
Pros:Fridays off (yay!) and slightly more interesting content than the fall term.
Cons:Three night courses, and I have a really bad habit of skipping those. I'm also probably going to be taking two courses (stats & data structures) with my brother and the other 2nd year students. Ugh. I suppose it'll be good for putting my ego in its place.

5th year first term
Pros: After a relatively boring 4th year, this term will have interesting content again. Yay! I'll finally be able to take some of those courses I've been eyeing since opening the undergrad handbook back in grade 13.
Cons: This term will be hard. Many of the courses are noted as being some of the heaviest workloads. So I'll be busting my ass just to keep my head above the water. Another con is that everyone I know will have graduated already. :(

5th year second term
Pros: Easy street.
Cons: I call this term "the term of courses I could be teaching right now". Ironic that my last term in undergrad contains the courses that I know the most about, isn't it? By then I'll probably have developed a [worse] attitude problem, and give the profs a harder time than they deserve. I apologize in advance to these poor profs out there. Don't take it personally; I'll just be bitter.

And then I'm out! Done! Finished! 3rd year was the year I started to really enjoy undergrad. 4th will be the year I'm ready to finish up. And 5th is going to seriously feel like I'm dragging this out waaaaay too long. I've gotta find something to keep me motivated. If I don't, my grad school enthusiasm'll be on the line.

"Here's a dozen free donuts. Share them with your co-workers," said the Tim Hortons manager last Thursday. I'd come in to the Tim Hortons for a coffee and when the debit machine next to me broke, noticed that they had the wires plugged in wrong, and then when it still didn't work, explained (as someone else had explained to me earlier that month) that sometimes the default number gets screwed up and you have to re-input it. The next thing I know, I'm biking to work with a box of donuts.

The next day, I was explaining JSPs to my father and another prof overheard and volunteered to buy me a coffee in exchange for giving him a demo of them. Caffeine being my one true weakness, of course I agreed. Then on the bike home yesterday, I stopped to help a stranded taxi driver and once CAA arrived, he offered to give my bike and I a free trip home (which I didn't accept, but could have). And then later in the evening, a friend of mine asked if I could read his report in exchange for coffee and donuts.

If this keeps up, I'm quitting undergrad and living off of free token goods. When was the last time a Calculus class ever involved free donuts?

About a week ago I was contacted by someone who wanted to invite me to a meeting where they were going to discuss an agenda for a future meeting where they were hoping they would be able to discuss a direction to go in.

I laughed aloud at these layers of meeting indirection. He didn't. "Come on," I tried to explain the joke to him, "it's going to be a bunch of people gathered around who just want to hear their own voice, have an excuse to meet people they consider to be famous, and try to increase their own fame a little. Waste. Of. Time." Apparently my explanation didn't improve the situation.

You know the people who I'm talking about though. The ones who do nothing but mingle. It's their job and hobby. Talking with people about who they're going to be talking to next week, and who they talked to last week, and who they can hook them up with who knows someone from an other conference, who they could get together with and form a committee to discuss who else they want on their next committee.

Why is it that these people keep getting money to do what they're doing? They're not doing anything! A Zoolander quote fits best here: "Am I the only one who notices this!? I feel like I'm taking friggin' crazy pills or something!"

I'm so torn about that type of meeting. Part of me wants to attend, because by attendance alone you get cred. And part of me loathes those meetings so much that I feel like I'd rather try to shove my clothing down my throat in hopes of choking and being sent to the hospital, rather than having to stay and listen to everyone introduce themselves to everyone else and talk about mission statements , and new paradigms, and using technology buzzwords when they have no idea what they mean.

"You know what NGOs need? XSLT processing. That could help them promote e-democracy."

AAAAAAHHHHH! You don't know what you're saying! Stop wasting my air! ARGH!

Whew. I needed to get that out.

As soon as I saw her on stage, I cringed.

It's amazing how quickly you become eight years old again: absolutely terrified that you'll be called to the board to do long division or conjugate "avoir", and inevitably yelled at for your incompetence. I only had to glance at her and I was once again staying late after school and forced to write lines on the blackboard. (Yeah, I was once that kid.)

When Slogs and I had gone to see a play last night, I hadn't expected my old Grade 4 teacher to be standing on stage. Nor did I expect that I would be spending the full two hours of my evening watching her, instead of whatever acting was going on around her.

I could feel her hand gripping my wrist. I could hear her voice telling me that I seemed to be under the false impression that I was somehow special. I could see my friends crying as she stood over their desks, and explained loudly to the class what they had done wrong (what was wrong with them). Failure was due to stupidity or laziness, we were taught in her class.

And then something happened last night.

At one point in the play, she put on this tin foil crown. A cheesy, cheap crown that had been made out of crumpled aluminium foil. And as soon as it was on her head, something changed. I was no longer eight years old. I was a confident undergrad who was doing very well for herself.

And she was an elementary school teacher, still in the exact same place, but leaving behind a legacy of nothing more than students who hated and feared her. She didn't change anyone's life for the better. She could never feel pride for her students, because she hadn't helped to nurture us. How empty the teaching job must feel to her, I thought, to not have made that difference.

And there she stood, in a stupid tin foil crown, doing a slightly less polished job than everyone else on stage. She looked old and unhappy. She would probably be retiring in five or ten years.

As the play ended and she entered the lobby where we stood, not greeted by some of the crowds that the other cast members were greeted by, I wondered how many students had come back to her over the years to thank her. To say "miss, you helped me become who I am today". "Miss, it's really good to see you." "Miss, you made all the difference." Probably none. I briefly considered going over to say hi...but then took Slogs' arm and we walked out of the theatre. I wasn't about to be the first.

So I get this e-mail the other day:

I'm the Article Coordinator for CrossTalk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering. CrossTalk will be dedicating our January 2005 issue to Open Systems and Open Source Software and I am currently looking for authors interested in writing on the topic. The idea behind this issue is to address what developers, managers, and acquirers need to know about open source software and systems. Specifically, I am interested in receiving an article that will talk about the fundamental issues with open source software and I am hoping that you will be the one that will be able to write it for us.

I have three things to say about this e-mail. Each one amusing me more than the last.

1) The last sentence of that paragraph should say: "Specifically, I am interested in publishing the article that you already wrote. Could you paraphrase yourself and submit that to us?"

2) Gah! I'm being typecast as She Who Writes Negative Things About Open Source. Damnit, I like open source, damnit. Argh!

3) Heeheehee. "Journal of Defense Software Engineering". Let's all think about this for a few moments. The journal for software engineering for the group that is big on information hiding wants an issue about Open Source. I should exchange doing the article for some massive weapons. Hmmm.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to do it. I have nothing new to say (exhausted my knowledge of the topic already), no particular pressing need for another publication credit, and I feel kinda twitchy about contributing to anything US-military based. OTOH, could another line on ye ol' CV really hurt...?

So I know that I'm fifteen years behind on this one, but I find this example very cool. The question is "how do two people find out if the other knows the password without revealing the password to each other?" (Apparently the example solution above was discovered in 1990.)

I also like this document (pdf) which discusses how to explain cryptographic systems to the general public. This interests me muchly and they do a fairly decent job in the examples they provide. Interesting and cool but informative.

Both are worth a read.

"I just can't figure out what's wrong with him. Unless... Computer: scan for any bioreadings along the infrared spectrum." "Signal detected." "Ah ha!"

With fLufFy and CPwr gone to Indonesia for the next little while, I've been catsitting Chelsea and watching TV with her at their place. Chelsea and I were watching Babylon 5 yesterday (somehow the series passed me by without ever watching any of the episodes) and I was chuckling at how the poor doctor had to keep giving the computer specific instructions to run tests in order to try to figure out what was going on with someone in the sick quarters.

A little while later Chelsea grew bored so we started flipping through the channels and went past an old episode of Star Trek where, similarly, a group was gathered at the sick bay and the doctor was saying that he'd never thought to check for [someChemical] or else he would have known that she was a [someSpecies].

"You know what they need?", I asked Chelsea, not feeling too insane about talking to a cat, since, like Mota, she looks up at you when you're talking. Also, it was a rhetorical question, so I didn't expect her to answer. "Unit tests. Medical unit tests."

Unit testing is basically writing tests to ensure that every unit of a program is working. For these medical unit tests, the computer checks unit by unit (part of the body by part of the body) and runs a standard set of tests to ensure that everything is functioning normally.

Since it tends to take 0.0001 seconds for the computer to run these tests manually on the shows, there's no reason why millions of these tests can't be done. And whenever some new "ooh, I should have thought of that!" anomaly comes along, you add it to the standard tests.

There. 99% of over-dramatic medical crises fixed. My work here is done.

Insanecats entries seem to be inversely proportional to my happiness. The crappier things are going, the more I have to rant about. Thus, though not good for you, this silence isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've also had too many other outlets for my thoughts recently. And yet no time for anything like a flash video.

Went to the KMDI BBQ yesterday. For the first half hour, I hid awkwardly in the corner, trying desperately to blend in with the wall. Then the room started filling with people I knew, or who knew me, and I went into "I'm an up and coming undergrad" mode (Mud's phrase), and was waltzed from group to group as people wanted to introduce me to others, ask how I'm doing, or just use me as someone they knew so that they didn't have to stand alone and feel awkward.

"This is [Catspaw]. She owns most of KMDI. I have trouble remembering she's just an undergrad", Barry Wellman said, introducing me to Brian C-S.

"Of course I know [Catspaw]", he grinned back. "I always seem to see her at these KMDI faculty events."

"[Catspaw] comes to the computer science faculty events too. She's kinda more of a prof than student.", a CS prof (G.P.) grinned.

"One in training", I chuckled in response. "Some day."

Dancing from group to group, saying hello to the profs I know, and the grad students from Jason's class that I lectured in. With enough time to eat some of the free food in the gaps.

"You are going to come to KMDI when you graduate aren't you? When's that? This year?", KMDI's director asked me.

"Two years from now.", I replied, not answering her first question on purpose. "I'm about to start four of five."

"Well, you're kind of like a member of KMDI now. You're our unofficial undergraduate rep. We'll make some title for you or something."

Life sometimes pwns [sic].

"Muuuud, blacky is sideways!", I whined into the phone when she picked up. "I don't know if he's dead or not. He's sideways though. What do I do?"

"Is he playing dead?", Mud asked. "They said he likes to play dead."

They means fLufFy and CPwr, whose house I'm looking after. CPwr was explaining to me how often the fish needed to be fed and fLufFy reminded him to tell me about the black fish. I raised an eyebrow.

"Oh yeah", CPwr explained, "the black fish sometimes pretends that he's dead. He just floats around upsidedown. Don't worry about it. He's fine."

Was this what they were warning about? "I don't know if he's just playing dead", I said into the phone. I knelt down so that I could meet the sideways-floating fish eye-to-eye. "He looks dead. I've been here for over two hours and he hasn't moved even one little bit. He's just...floating. Sideways. One eye pointed up, one eye pointed down."

The two other fish swam around energetically. I used the tank cleaner to sort of poke at the black floating one. He didn't move. "I think he's dead."

"Look, relax. Don't worry about it. Go home, you can check on him again later. They did say that he likes to play dead. He's probably pretending."

I crouched down slightly further. His big open dead eye stared back at me.

I thanked Mud and hung up the phone, but didn't move. His eye was watching me. The still eye of a maybe dead fish. How do you tell if a fish is dead -- a fish who likes to pretend to be dead?

I didn't move.
He didn't move.
Neither of us blinked.
But only one of us was floating sideways at the top of our tank.

Only one of us was maybe dead.

No matter how brave and arrogant you see yourself as being, there's something about seeing a corpse that can entirely undo that. Even if it's just a tiny fish corpse.

"MUUUUUUUUD, theFishIsn'tMovingAndHe'sTotallyDeadAndImpaledOnAPlantHEEEELP!", I whined into the phone. It was a little after 8 am and poor Mud was still in bed. I kept glancing at the glaze-eyed fish.

"Do you need me to come over?" "Yeah."

Mud wins super points for getting out of bed and coming over in a matter of minutes to save me. Blacky was given a funeral at sea. I didn't watch.

And now he's gone to go find his father in the Sydney Harbour.

Between stealing their coffee and food, I was nearly doubled-over laughing at the irony of the workshop that these people were attending. "This week-long workshop will feature inspirational speakers and birds-of-a-feather sessions to help teach you how to increase your productivity".

Step one, I chuckled to myself, Don't go go a week-long workshop on productivity. Instead, go to your actual job and do something productive.

But since these people were foolish enough to think that going to productivity workshops would up their productivity, I decided that I wouldn't feel guilty if I stole their food and coffee. The workshop was taking place on the ground floor of Bahen, five floors down from where I work, and there was a large crowd gathered in the hallways to enjoy the complementary refreshments. Unfortunately, social engineering some free grub wasn't going to be so easy this time, as I had bright green hair and thus stood out like sore thumb among the crowds of suits and ties. For me, of course, that just made it a better challenge.

I walked into the middle of the group and started moving one of the large space dividers. "Excuse me, can someone help me move this a foot back or so?" Several business men who fancied themselves as strong heroes came over to help me push back the wall. I thanked them, thus establishing myself as one of the people helping out at the conference. I wouldn't have passed for an attendee, but a helpful volunteer? Maybe.

"How's the workshop going?", I asked one of the men who had helped me. He smiled and said he really liked the last talk, did I get to see it? "No, I've been busy upstairs, just came down during the break to move some of the space dividers, make sure everything is going okay. So you're enjoying it?" He started yammering about what the last speaker was discussing and I nodded, pretending to actually care.

"Excuse me", I said, interrupting him. "I'm just going to grab a coffee before the break is over, but I want to hear more about this." I started walking towards the coffee table. "So what does he suggest is a solution to these problems?"

The business dude continued to talk to me as we walked to the coffee table. I picked up a coffee and muffin and smiled at the guy behind the counter while asking the business dude more questions. The refreshments guy glanced at the man I was talking to, who had the conference thing around his neck, and must have figured I had the right to be there, and didn't say anything. I let the business dude finish his story, nodding lots. Then said I should head off to get ready for the next session (okay, now I was lying), and wished him well for the rest of the conference. He said thanks, and asked if I could tell the conference committee that they had organized a good workshop. I said I would.

Ten minutes later, I was upstairs with a free coffee and muffin.

They should have an International Workshop on getting free coffee. It would be much more productive than the one on Productivity.

Among other things this summer, one of the things that I've been working on has been some rough screenshots of what Helium might end up looking like. What I've found interesting about the very high-level design process, is that I kept needing to go lower and lower in order to make the design steps easier. And all of a sudden found myself hitting where those doing the low-level design (and working their way higher) were sitting.

My screenshots started as doodles on the whiteboard. These doodles were soon converted into paper format, to make them more permanent. But as we needed them changed more and more frequently, it became difficult to manage them in paper format, so I made some rough HTML pages.

But then I started finding it tiresome to create a similar top and sidebar for every page, so I wrote a quick hacky Python script to generate these automatically. But as the pages developed in complexity, simply generating a common top and sidebar wasn't enough: I needed more control over the pages. So I started writing some Python classes to represent projects that the mock user belonged to, so that I could just tweak the class objects in order to make site-wide changes easily.

Anyway, to make a long story short, this week I've found my hacky scripts inadequate again. What I really need are some User objects, and Project objects, and Membership objects, and Message objects and Conversations, and...well...basically exactly what we've been designing to represent the backend of Helium. I finally hit a point where I needed the backend to drive the frontend: and what I needed matched exactly with what we'd designed to build.

To me, this is cool. Means we're doing something right, at least.

If you haven't seen it already, Fahrenheit 9/11 is worth the time and money -- even at full blown movie theatre price (though had you been smart, you would have gone to see it yesterday for cheap[er] Tuesday prices).

Several times I caught myself saying "holy shit" at the footage they caught. When the theatre broke into applause, I wasn't the only one who was thinking to themselves "I am so glad that I live on this side of the border".

The film gets two w00ts: w00t w00t.