The day I've been anxiously waiting for has arrived: the day where I'd found out my GRE results.

Every morning I'd rush to the mailbox and apprehensively glance inside, simultaneously hoping and not hoping to find that envelope marked "GRE" on the cover.

.....Okay, okay, that's a bit of a lie. I'd actually rush to the mailbox in hopes that I'd find my amazon package of Joss Whedon's graphic novels. The GRE envelope was a bit of an afterthought. But it was a daily afterthought and that has to count for something!

So how did it go? So kind of you to ask.

80s across the board. Percentile, that is. Math, writing, and heck, even that damn antonym section. No grade was fabulous. No grade was horrible. A distinctly uneventful GRE result, if I've ever seen one. I might as well find a sign that says "bland" and duct tape it to my forehead. No, duct tape is too interesting. Scotch tape.

"Let's look at this next student. Hmm...she has great rec letters, and hmm, a steady grade increase, lots of experience and .... oh, wait. Nevermind. Look at her GRE scores. She's distinctly bland. Put her in the 'okay but boring' pile."

I read my GRE scores once, twice (to make sure I hadn't missed any fine print), then tossed the whole thing aside, never to glance at it again.

That was my first standardized test ever and, if I'm lucky, my last. My opinion of the GREs seems to be remarkably similar to its opinion of me: yawn.

The night before last, I had a mild fever and the chills/dreams/tiredness that come with it. Last night, however, it was a lot worse. This may have something to do with the fact that I walked to and from campus yesterday in the freezing cold.

Last night was a fun cross between being too way hot while having chills, and having the world's most bizarre dreams ever every time my body fell asleep.

What is it about fevers that makes your brain all wonky while you sleep? Any ideas?

So remember way back in September when I mentioned a google recruiting event?

And remember how I said that I wasn't going to go because "Google is perhaps the one temptation that I couldn't stay away from"?

And remember how you guys urged me to go and check it out anyway?

This is your fault.

I went to the recruiting event and I gave them my resume. I went to the interviews in Toronto. And then I went to the interviews at the Googleplex. And then this week I received an e-mail from Google, thereby destroying all my years of grad school aspiration in one swift e-mail.

They want to hire me. And I'm going to accept.

Crazy, isn't it? When this year ends, instead leaving to go play grad student buttmonkey, I'm leaving to go work at the happiest place on earth.

I have to admit that I'm a little stunned.

This may take several months to really kick in. And that's probably for the best, because I imagine that it'd be damn hard to focus on school work otherwise.

Wow... Google... Wow...

Today was pretty stuffed with weird events, but the weirdest by far happened a few blocks from my house, on the walk home.

Someone shouted from behind me. "Excuse me? Excuse me?"

It was a quiet residential street, so I turned around. A woman was coming out of her house, carrying under her arm a full sized carpet, neatly rolled up into a heavy-looking bright red roll.

"I think you dropped this." She said.

"Sorry?", I asked, meaning huh?.

"Oh, were you not the one who dropped this?"

"N....no......."

"Oh", she smiled, "sorry, my mistake. Do you want it?"

"No thanks?"

"Okay. Well, if you see whoever dropped it, let them know it's here." She pulled the carpet fully out of her house and dropped it on the curb of the road with a thump.

I kept walking.

Why does the strange stuff always happen to me?

"OMG, it's running!", I exclaimed, as the solution to the hanoi problem was printed on my screen. "We wrote the code and then the compiler and then compiled it and now it's running!"

"Yes.", said my teammates, not sharing in my utter enthusiasm.

"It's not like we just wrote code. We wrote what makes it run! That's so cool! Look! There's the human readable code, and there's the program running! We made it run. We're omnipotent! We can do anything! I feel like a god."

"I'm gonna go get a pita", said one teammate, "you want anything?"

I'm so alone.

Remember last month how my team made a brochure to try to get other teams to choose our code?

Remember how it was saturated with buzzwords and a lack of any real content?

Well, it worked beautifully and we ended up being the number one choice by other teams. Not because our code was amazing (though it was), but because people are shallow and like pretty advertising.

So how do we one-up ourselves for the next phase of our project?

A completely content-free commercial to get teams to choose us yet again. (Note: it may be buggy in some browsers -- I don't want to hear about it, just pretend what you think it'd look like)

The part that gets me laughing is the black-and-white trees blowing in the wind. Any commercial about code that has black-and-white trees blowing in the wind is full of crap. And that's why I love it.

(Oh, and I'd like to officially apologize to everyone who knows where the music is from. I took something beautiful and made it into crap. I'm sorry.)

At 7:30 am, before the sun had risen above the buildings, while it was still dark on my street, I locked my door and headed on the trek towards campus.

Armed with five layers on top and two on the bottom, plus double mitts, a headband, a hood, and a neck warmer, the -12 C (-20 with windchill) morning didn't seem so bad. (Though I really need to buy a pair of boots that can fill the gap between my running shoes and my hiking-a-freezing-mountain boots.)

So I'm walking along -- well, "rolling" may be a more accurate term, given all the clothing I wore (I may have gone a little overboard) -- and "Welcome to the Jungle" comes onto my iPod. Not really a winter tune, sure, but I haven't figured out how to press buttons on my iPod when I'm wearing two pairs of mittens.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that I'm walking along this side street and a CBC minivan pulls up beside me. There's two people inside, a guy and girl, and the girl in the back opens the big minivan door.

"Hey", the guy says. "We're heading east to Yonge. If you're headed that way, want a ride?"

Now, albeit a quiet street, I'm not the only one walking on it. And they're not offering anyone else a ride.

"I'm okay, thanks", I shook my head, refusing half because I was actually enjoying my walk, and half because I found it weird that a CBC minivan was asking if I wanted a lift. (Well, the minivan wasn't asking me. The people inside were asking. But you know what I meant, smartass.)

"You sure? Where you headed?", the girl asked.

"I'm sure, no worries. Thanks."

They shrugged, closed the door, and drove off, not stopping to ask anyone else if they wanted a lift.

I think the CBC is trying to kill me. Now I just have to figure out why...

I've been playing around with Google Analytics recently which has been handily gathering stats on everyone who visits insanecats and then reporting these stats to the nearest evil political and/or commercial interests.

Besides discovering that Google is cool (no news), I also discovered where you are all connecting from. (Note that some of these are very, very likely bots of some kind, and not actual readers.)

In the past 7 days, I've had non-RSS hits from the following locations (in order of frequency):

Toronto, Downsview, Amherst, Calgary, Vancouver, Vienna, Edmonton, Swansea, Sackville, Los Angeles, Mountain View, London, Ottawa, Ann Arbor, Saint Louis, Bogart, Delhi, Dartmouth, Burnaby, Dallas, Paris, Long Branch, Dayton, Shreveport, York, Madison, Grimsby, South Orange, Vancouver, Lancaster, Austin, Essendon, London, Duluth, Slough, Montreal, Denver, Jalapa Enríquez, Birmingham, Alhambra, Plano, Mimico, Orange, Waterloo, Phillipsburg, Don Mills, Charlesbourg, Milpitas, Cañazas, Phillips, Forest Hill, Brooklyn, Bangalore, Bellaire, Hicksville, Monterey Park, Chattanooga, Raleigh, Willowdale, Washington, Torrennn, Philippine, Ann Arbor, Richmond Hill, Chicago, Santiago, San Mateo, Le Moyne, Halifax, Downey, Ajax, Irving, Canberra, Bothell, La Paz, Toms River, Sofia, Saint Louis, Buenos Aires, Kingston, Johnson, Minneapolis, Pearland, Saint-Guillaume-d'Upton, Sandridge, Eastview, Indianapolis, Mdina, Kuala Lumpur, Laprairie, Lake Havasu City, Eikot, Los Angeles, Torparbacken, Fayetteville, Istanbul, Kalamazoo, Mérida

Pretty cool, neh? Can you spot yourself on that list? (No, you're not from Kalamazoo.)

So I'm in the middle of writing an essay for one of my classes about...well...the abstract says:

As more and more countries adopt internet filtering practices, many private corporations now provide products and services which are used for internet censorship purposes. This paper examines whether or not these external companies should be held accountable for the human rights violations caused by their product/service. Several different types of corporations will be examined --- private ISPs, filtering companies, router companies, and web service providers --- and the discussion will combine several case studies with an analysis of the potential for accountability in both the censoring countries as well as the corporations' democratic homes.

About a quarter of the way in to the paper, I said the brilliant quote seen in the subject of today's entry: "accountability is hard!"

Who woulda thunk?!

Take ISPs for example. If a government orders their ISPs to block a topic, who should be accountable for that instance of internet censorship? Why, the government of course. But what if one ISP blocks two sites, and another blocks thousands and blocks anything even remotely related to that topic. Shouldn't the blocking-everything ISP be partially accountable? And why the hell is the government letting the ISPs decide, anyway? They're a company! Companies don't have to be accountable to anyone, whereas (some) governments are accountable to the public. But then it gets murky in oppressive regimes where no one is accountable to the public. And technically the ISPs are just obeying the laws forced upon them. No one should be telling them to break the law. It's not their fault that the laws are fuzzy and they don't know which sites to block, is it?

The deeper I get into international internet filtering politics, the murkier the waters get. Murkier and murkier. I don't think I can see my hand in front of my face anymore.

Okay, so we make the government responsible for providing a mechanism that the ISPs should be using to decide what gets filtered, like a blacklist or a list of strict guidelines. That way the government can't hide behind the ISPs like an accountability-chicken. But wait, we don't want them blocking anything! If we have enough power to "make" them provide this mechanism, wouldn't we just "make" them stop blocking altogether? So we can't even demurkify the waters. And this is before I get to the section where companies are aiding censorship in other countries. Ugh!

"Accountability is hard!"

This afternoon I was discussing with a friend the thrill of completing an essay that you know totally kicks ass. We both agreed that writing an awesome essay is something you can feel.

"Can you feel 'a job well done' in the same way when you write software?", he asked. It's a good question, and I gave it serious thought on my way to campus today. My conclusion is as follows...

You can "feel" when you write an awesome essay and you can "feel" when you write awesome software, but they're different feelings.

When you read through a completed essay, and the words flow like liquid brilliance, there are really three distinct feelings that occur. The first one, and perhaps the hardest to get right, is that one thought flows so naturally to the next that your reader doesn't even realize that they're reading. The act of reading completely disappears and it's more like you open their head and pour the ideas in.

The second one has to do with tugging on the emotions of the reader. This is where subtle exaggeration and hypothetical questions comes in. A strong conclusion is essential here. When your eyes linger on the last word, you should think "nice!".

And the third feeling is that the logic is tight. No argument is strawmanned. This is where all the "However"s and "But"s and "Furthermore"s and "Unfortunately"s come in. The case isn't built by presenting a series of "here's why I'm right" points, but by presenting one point, then showing why it may be wrong, then blowing that objection out of the water. When this is well done, the logic of the argument feels strong and the reader doesn't have a single "well what about..." left in their head.

When you've written an awesome essay, you experience all three of these feelings when you reread it. It flows, it tugs, and it's solid.

Writing kick ass software leaves you with a different set of emotions because the goals of software are different.

Software writing involves a lot of refocussing. You focus on a single method, and making it strong and correct, then pull way out and focus on the interaction of several methods, and how the information flows. This refocussing requires that you essentially ignore parts of the design but have them available for when you need to pull them to the front of your brain again. Anyone who has designed anything with complicated recursion should understand this, anyone who has been involved in a huge software project should understand it even more.

When you've written an awesome piece of software, you feel confident about every combination of pieces (including just a single piece) as being strong. It's like a fractal thing. There's a strong chunk of code and when you zoom in, there's more strong code. Hard, shiny surfaces all the way down. But there's also this feeling that the interactions between pieces are "clean". Explaining why "clean" is the feeling is about as hard as explaining how essays "flow". There's no clutter. There's purposefulness. The pieces fit together perfectly without any traction or cracks. Each line between pieces is strong like a thick rope but also removeable: the whole thing wouldn't fall apart if you were to cut that one. Minimizing ropes, thickening ropes, but not depending on any one rope. That's "clean".

Awesome software is "strong" and "clean".
Awesome essays "flow", "tug" and are "solid".

Just a bunch of hand-wavey touchy-feely crap, but when you get either of them really right, you know it.

I just finished reading the first chapter of my first Neil Gaiman book. I hit a section break, closed the novel, and grinned.

I remember the day when I put my first disc of Firefly into my DVD player and when I started watching the first scene. It was my first experience with a Jossverse. When the first scene ended, I hit pause on my DVD remote and grinned. I'd found something worth watching. I hit 'play' again and two years later I now own almost 70 DVDs of Jossverse (yikes, that's scary to count).

I'm not saying that Neil Gaiman is on the same level of brilliance as Joss Whedon --- to say so would be blasphemy! --- but there's a familiarity in this experience: I've had only a brief taste of something that I know that others obsess about, and I've enjoyed what little I've sampled. There will be lots more to come of what I've tried so far, and I look forward to all my future enjoyment.

The grin ends, the book is reopened, and soon many more chapters will be consumed like the first.