As you all know, every year we at insanecats designate one impressive individual from the world as our insanecats person of the year. Well, okay, no, we don't do this every year. But starting this year we're going to. Until I forget next year. Anyway, without further ado....our person of the year this year is....

CATSPAW!

Q: Catspaw, could you tell us a little bit about winning this award?
A: Thank you Catspaw! Well, I'm so totally hyped. I have to tell you that this comes as a huge surprise to me. There's no way that I expected to win this very prestigious award and I'm very honoured by this recognition of my accomplishments.

Q: Is there anyone you'd like to thank?
A: Oh, absolutely! First of all, I want to thank all the insanecatsers for reading my website all the time like obsessive addicts. I'd also like to thank the folks who helped me line my website headers with crystal meth in order to turn all my readers into obsessive addicts. And lastly I'd like to thank all the morons of the world who provided me with unlimited amounts to complain about. Without all of you, there is no way I could have won this award.

Q: Where do you plan to go from here?
A: Well, good question. First I'll probably go to the kitchen and get a glass of coke. Then I'll grab a book, jump into bed, and read myself to sleep. Then in the morning I'll probably get up and panic about the fact that there's only two days of holidays left and then it's back to being busy and stressed. And maybe I'll eat breakfast.

Q: Some people have accused you recently of being insane. In light of your recent accomplishment of having won this award, what do you have to say to these critics?
A: They're obviously very narrow-minded and have declared simple things like talking to oneself and giving oneself accomplishment awarsd to be the basis for insanity. This type of low tolerance for unusual behaviour is exactly the same sort of problem that delayed the scientific revolution. I'm not insane; I'm just sanity-impaired.

Q: We have time for just one more question: what's your opinion of the orange you're eating?
A: It sucks. It's filled with seeds, not sweet, and the skin is all wrinkled.

Wow, impressive words by our beloved recipient of this award. We should all feel truly humbled by the greatness of her presence and worship every word that she types for us to read. Starting....now!!

Gupliosh.

Piracy. Now there's an interesting topic we haven't really touched on here in the great wide world of insanecats rants. So while I wait another two and a half hours for my RotK download to finish, let's talk about that.

The battle of online piracy is one of struggling between an economic system that relies on the fact that reproduction of goods or services is something that takes time and resources, versus a community that has discovered that there are realms in which reproduction can happen at absolutely zero cost.

I believe it to be chance that this battle is happening on the playing field of music and movies. If instead of digital formats, we had invented food replicators, the exact same battle would be taking place about food. Farmers and grocery stores and everyone involved in food production would be complaining that the replicators were stealing "potential money" from them, just as artists are doing the same.

As an aside, there's something fundamentally interesting in the concept of reaching ideals in a given industry: almost always the ideal goal of a career is destroy one's own career, and the career of everyone else in the field. For example, the ideal goal of doctors is to get the human body into such a great condition with such great medicine, public information etc., freely available...that no one *needs* doctors anymore. The ideal goal of politicians is to get the world and every community in it, to a state where there are no political or governmental problems whatsoever, and no one *needs* politicians anymore. The ideal goal of nuclear scientist is to understand nuclear physics and its potential applications enough that we don't *need* nuclear scientists anymore. Almost every career, if infinitely successful, ultimately destroys itself.

So it's interesting that the music and movie industries have suddenly been given an amazing push forward in the success of their field: the ability to have their work distribute a lot more quickly, but this sudden jump towards the ideal goal of their industry is also being recognized as what it is for any industry that gets closer to its ideal goal: a step closer to the death of that industry.

What happens from here? Well, unfortunately I don't have high hopes. The way in which internet piracy is dealt with is going to form a precedent which other industries are going to point to when they start becoming highly successful and fear death. We were fortunate that the first case of this is happening with an industry that doesn't control life and death, but because governments are currently passing laws to put the industry in the right -- rather than reforming the economic system or searching for alternative balances between the service providers and those who pay for them -- we might be in for a bumpy road when ways are found to clone food, energy, or other life-or-death goods and services free of charge. Because they'll only have to point at what happened with music online and say: why should you allow free replication of what our industry provides? How is it any different from online piracy?

And it won't be. I'm Catspaw, and this is 60 minutes. [tick tick tick tick tick]

And so, just as a few weeks ago I sat at my desk moderately stunned by the very idea that my break could possibly starting...so too do I now sit stunned at the fact that it is over.

New stacks of lined papers are being placed in my binders, as pens are being sorted into those which work and those which I toss into a drawer where they will drive me crazy throughout the year as I keep opening it, and trying to use them. Throwing them out would make life too easy.

My alarm is set. I have work in the morning and then class at 2. The coffee machine is set to help me wake up early and I've found the key to my bike so that I can ride to campus. It feels late though it's only 6:30 pm.

Videogames get placed back on the shelf, the beanbag chair gets moved from the center of the living room to up against one of the walls. Books get put away in boxes, there'll be no time to read them for a while now.

Movies are put into their proper cases and set aside, and the loud CDs that only a mind on holidays could tolerate are replaced by songs I can listen to on repeat for hours on end while struggling over homework.

There are only four times of the year when I don't like being an undergrad: before exams, and the night before a term starts. Within a week this Catsy will disappear and be replaced by the Catspaw who is obsessive about her school work and dedicated to it 100%.

But tonight, during the last few deep breaths of absolute freedom before the months of stress ahead, I regret that these hours aren't longer. Fun is a scope much too large to be fully enjoyed in such little time.

Class has started. And so quickly have I fallen into its academic snares and found myself lost in that world, unable to concieve of anything else I'd rather be doing. Even just glancing at my entry from a mere two days ago, I chuckle and think "I was just being lazy".

First was Computational Complexity and Computability which on here I will refer to as "Comp Comp & Comp" or sometimes "CC&C" if I'm feeling particularly brief. While sitting in the class, waiting for the previous prof to clean up her scattered papers (a physics prof, from the look of the work on the board), my mind drifts until suddenly she makes eye contact with me and drops her jaw slightly. "I saw you on TVO last week", she says, and I laugh. It's amazing how many people watched that thing. Even the guy who gave Nart, Graeme and I pasta at Robarts Library yesterday said that he had seen it. She leaves and I glance around the room to see if I know anyone: Henry and Clarence are in the distance, though I don't know either very well, and there's one of Greg's new tuesday-group people, who is in a project other than mine. No one worth running to sit beside, but people I can pester eventually nonetheless.

The prof arrives (Borodin) and stands in the front of the class where he tells us immediately that this class is too hard and that's why the term after us they're splitting it into two terms worth of classes instead. (That's always so nice to hear.) Then he proclaims that many students have declared this to be the hardest course in the entire calendar. I am silently cursing both flaps and my father under my breath, who both reassured me that this was a "great" course. The prof then explains that there will be three assignments, three tests, and an exam. This will be a lot of work, and most people will find it hard. Despite these words of doom, he seems like a nice enough guy. Though he did say that he won't be reading the newsgroup, nor will guarentee that he will answer e-mails from students. I think I've been spoiled up until now.

Class ends and I run over to my POL108 class which is continuing from last term. Some people whisper to each other and point upon my arrival. Graeme arrives, carrying the bag of our prof (not my boss, the other one) who apparently got her wisdom teeth out a few hours ago. He hands me her bag, says "you're on drool duty" and leaves. I set up the powerpoint slides for her, in a little awe that she's teaching under this condition, and take my seat. After an hour of typical class, break rolls around. Two people stop to talk to me about the documentary, then I meet someone who I've been talking to on the citizenlab/pol108 irc channel for some time now, then more people stop abuot the documentary, and class starts up again.

The second half of class is the same as the first, though I go rescue the prof when she hits the Windows "menu" button on the keyboard, and infront of a class of 1200 students, can't move onto the next powerpoint slide. After class I stay behind to make sure she doesn't die ("It's started to hurt now, let me tell you", says she) and more people chat with me about the documentary, including someone I knew from elementary school. Once everyone leaves, I walk her to her car and head home.

But the day doesn't end there. I saw my 324 prof from last term, Penn, and we grinned upon seeing each other. He asked if I was taking CSC401 yet, and -- having no idea what 401 *was* -- explained that no, I was taking undergrad slowly and so was sort of only in 2.5th year at the moment. "Why take it slowly? All the good stuff is in grad school," he grinned. Prof Stein (from POL108) had just finished telling me that it was so smart of me to take it slowly. Anyway, we waved bye, and headed off.

I got to see a few more people who I know on campus, and then hit the streetcar and the way home. Waiting for me was my daily half-dozen e-mail messages from Greg explaining things that have broken on the GForge system. I find it amusing -- to say the least -- that my project course involving GForge doesn't start until Thursday, but I've already played with it enough between the start of holidays and now that I've got a great sense of how much it sucks and why. I feel like I could write a report on why it's sucky right now. I suppose this background knowledge'll help when being a "team lead" and all that.

He connects to MSN, we work on trying to smash GForge into a state where he'll be able to use it the next day (tonight) in one of his classes.
Greg: What are you going to give them as their first tasks on thursday?
So it begins.

And to end the night my father and I have a long discussion about whether or not genetic algorithms are suited to solve logic problems, despite the fact that their worst case is equal to the worst case of brute force. I decide it's going to have to wait until I can think coherently again in the morning.

Today I have a tutorial from 12-1, then Operating Systems (I have no idea who is teaching this course -- it'll be a surprise!) from 2-3, then meeting with Greg at 3, and then Nart and I have a class from 6-8. I'll probably try to get some work done at the lab inbetween the meeting and the class. Busy day, busy life. Just the way I like it.

In the time-honoured tradition of undergrads around the globe, it's midnight and I just put a slice of leftover pizza in the microwave. The only difference is that I'm eating the pizza slice because I was still hungry after the sushi, and of course the pizza was homemade from after classes yesterday. But at least for these few minutes I can feel like a typical undergrad. :)

For now, cleaning up the place, since Mud's going to be home this afternoon and somehow despite keeping the apartment clean for the entire holidays, I've managed to turn it back into a (minor) disaster in just 48 short hours of becoming a student again. I should have taken photos.

I have lots of work that needs doing before I head into campus tomorrow: I need to learn enough about current computer prices to talk to someone about it at length and seem like an expert, I need to glance over Java which I haven't touched since first year so that I know about it enough to prove to someone that I know it "very well", I need to fix this goddamn bug in this code I'm working on before it drives me insane, I have a dozen people to e-mail, and I should probably start on some of the stuff I have to do before Thursday, since I would really really like to be able to take some time tomorrow to go into the lab and get some stuff done there: Iran, psiphon, rhizome...lots to work on.

I'll write more tomorrow. Right now I'm gonna go read for a bit. Someone told me it'd be "good for me". (OTOH, Lao says that quitting school and playing videogames while drinking coke all day would be "good for me". This doesn't make me trust people's advice any less....if nothing else, it makes me want to listen to people's advice more if their advice means reading and playing videogames. Cool! Any other bits of advice, anyone?)

When I was in my last year of elementary school, I burned a $20.

My classmates shrieked and jumped all over each other, begging for me to reconsider and simply give them the $20 instead. And they all watched in horror as the flames consumed the entire bill, leaving nothing but ash and a few remains.

Twenty dollars was a big deal at that age. I certainly didn't have $20 to just throw away. If I recall correctly, my parents were giving me something like $12/month in allowance, and that was the only cash I had (except for a newspaper route which quickly died).

I had two reasons to burn a perfectly good $20.

1) I wanted to watch everyone squirm. $20 had the same great value to me as it did to the rest of them. I wanted to see shrieking and yelling and dumbfonded stares. I was treated to all of these.

2) It occurred to me that I was never going to spend this $20. I would die with this $20 sitting in the bank somewhere, its value reduced to next to nothing. Why was I so sure of this? Because at no time in my life was I going to have less than $20 to my name: I saved every penny that I got at birthdays, and I was completely convinced that throughout my entire life I would have at least $20 sitting in the bank. I was probably right: I probably will. Therefore that $20 will never be spent.

And even if it is going to spent, I thought, there will come a time when $20 doesn't mean life or death to me anymore. I would one day be making money that would make the $20 seem trivial. So why not spend this money now, watching everyone scream, instead of either never spending it, or spending it when it means nothing.

Yesterday I put a $20 in the token machine and it got jammed. The TTC worker handed me a number to call if I wanted to get my money back. It was my own fault: the bill was in bad shape, no wonder it jammed. So once I paid my $2.25 and walked into the subway station, I threw away the sheet of paper with the number on it. My fault, and not worth $20 of effort.

I'm not sure what these two stories have to do with each other, but I'm certain there's some lesson to be learned.

If you're reading this and I was supposed to do something for you today -- send you e-mail, fix some code, call you, or something like that -- you're just gonna have to wait in line along with everyone else. Because my schedule suddenly exploded.

Woke up before my already-early set alarm to get to work on the many things I had to do. This has to be fixed, that has to be fixed. By 10:30 am, I already felt like I'd put in a full day of work, and most days I hadn't even woken up by 10:30 am. Grabbed some food, and ran out the door (forgetting my wallet and having to turn around and come back). Halfway to campus the streetcar broke down and I had to walk in the bitterist cold that Toronto has to offer, for almost half an hour. I nearly hailed a cab about a dozen times, but instead stopped in at a Second Cup and got the world's largest coffee to try to keep me warm -- though it did nothing but burn my tongue and turn my misery into bitterness.

Stopped at the UofT bookstore, picked up a few supplies, and waltzed into work only about four hours later than I wanted to be there. Of course, when I arrived Graeme was speaking into a microphone that made his voice sound squeaky and those around were all giggling. Okay, so it's not so bad. I sit down, fix a bug that's been nagging at me for a while, improve some of my scripts, chat with Nart, and get more e-mails from people who need more things done.

Then comes the cool e-mail. It's from Prof Gries ("'Sir'?! [Catspaw], my name is Paul!") wanting to know if I can help out at a class tomorrow for students in first year, second term CS, who still don't understand some of the concepts from first term CS. Alright, yeah! I'm totally into that, count me in.

<jayne> you're a busy person cats. working, studying, teaching.

Pah, I can handle it! Teach tomorrow, then in the evening install Debian on this OpenBSD box, then at night fix up pyre's GForge and install my GForge (while taking notes on the new version). Sunday morning is for relaxing with friends, Sunday noonish I promised my brother I'd hang out with him, Sunday afternoon I read the three chapters in three books I'm behind on for class, Sunday evening I fix whatever problems have come up on pyre during the weekend, Sunday night I do all the things I was supposed to do on Friday, Monday morning, wake up early in time for the open source conference meeting I have to attend at 9:30. See? I've got it all under control.

Right, well, the box I'm admining went down at 11:30 pm, so since I have to wake up early to fix it, I should head to bed. I think I'm going to have to start drinking more caffeine.

There's something to be said for waking up late on a Sunday morning to classical music playing from your kitchen as the smell of coffee drifts in, and shortly thereafter having friends come over where you discuss life and philosophy and everything over breakfast. Lots of ideas to toss up the air, lots of things to discuss, the philosophers during the enlightenment had it right: discuss ideas with others while sitting around Left Bank with friends.

Sure, I may have had a billion other things I was supposed to be doing, but that's under the assumption that solving immediate responsibilities is more important than investing time in contemplating life, and thus preparing for responsibilities of the future. Am I just looking for a way to justify having spent hours discussing politics, education, technology, open source, aetheism, generation gaps, job markets, child labour, and fLufFy's pants? Well, yes. But how much more productive would reading this intro chapter in my book for the Operating Systems class have been? How much actually? I'm putting your money (never gamble with your own money) on "not much". (But if we win, I'm keeping all the profits.)

Anyway, amidst this discussion -- somewhere between why I think the GForge UI design loosely resembles the current state of my attic, and how CPwr thinks non-free open software is like being a vegetarian but eating fish -- the topic of "trying new things" came up. And after my coffee-induced rant, fLufFy told me that my rant should be the subject of my next insanecats post. And though I enjoy lying to her for my own amusement (haha! Those aren't diamonds! They're pieces of broken glass! That's why your hands bleed after you play with them!), I decided to be true to my word. Here's how this rant goes:

Throughout recent [1] years, there has been a highlighted importance placed on academic success. If you disagree with me, just go back in your head to being in Grade 5, getting a C in geography, and having your parents telling you how disappointed they are. Go back to being in Grade 11 English class when you get a paper back and are told it's the best in the class, and how it feels like all your problems just disappear because there's something you were the best at. Children all feel this pressure. Your academic grades are a direct reflection of your aptitude as a human being. It wasn't until I hit undergrad that I began to figure out that grades are damn close to arbitrary, and depend on several variables that impact the number far more significantly than your actual skill with the subject area. I'd been playing the academics game for years quite successfully, never aware that there was a game that I was playing. Anyway, my point is: academic competence is being increasingly viewed as a measure of one's worth.

[1]: I can't quantify "recent years" because I know little about society's views on education between 1900 and 1985. But I assure you that in the 1800s and prior (way back until ancient mesopotamia), academics were a luxury and though having an education was a sign of prestige, one's successes with them weren't measured outside of the immediate academic structure.

And one thing that every child learns early on (at least, the ones who become our A and B students learn very early on) is that learning curves are unacceptable faults. If it takes you three weeks to learn what it took the other students two weeks to learn, even if you share the same knowledge by the end, you are a lesser human being. The end result isn't all that's important, it's how fast you can learn it.

Different children adopt different strategies to deal with this situation. I have some friends who are extremely bright, but they need a longer amount of time for things to "soak in" before they get it, and they call themselves stupid. They get good grades by the final exam, but watch the kids who could figure out the answers instantly, and beat up on themselves over it. Other kids respond by forcing themselves to become an expert on everything. I have one friend in particular who ensured that he was always a stepo ahead of the textbook so that by the time we got to that unit, he already knew everything about it. Not because he learned faster than everyone else, but because he just coordinated his time to be a week ahead. Personally, I survived by learning how to feign expertise extremely well.

The most common strategy however, and one that everyone used to some degree or another, was finding a niche, and refusing to stray from it. "I know lots about number systems, so I'm going to write this history essay on the history of babylonian base-6 number schemes." If you don't have to learn new things, then you don't have to expose your weakness in that area, and you're rewarded for it. This is reinforced time and time again by academically rewarding those who obtain specialties rather than becoming jack-of-all-trades. Even in university, you get better marks by taking courses you already know lots about, rather than things you know nothing about. I'd love to learn an asian language, but fear taking a course in it, because I know I wouldn't do very well.

What we've developed is a society that dislikes newbies, in any sense of the word. Everyone has to start somewhere, but we have lots of respect for those who are great at something, and very little respect for those who are trying something new and starting on the bottom of the learning curve. People even go so far as to feel ashamed at being a newbie. Who hasn't ever tried to learn something in the comfort of their own home *because* no one is there to see them when they screw up?

For the "information age", this is a pretty stupid viewpoint for us to take. We want well-rounded, interdisciplinary citizens, but we discourage them from trying new things. I think we technocrats are particularly guilty of this: scoffing at those who don't know something, and prancing around in our elitism. I'm still extremely young in the grand scheme of things, and I already feel stupid when there are things that I don't know. Of course I don't know everything. But I don't feel comfortable with this concept: I should be perfect at everything right away.

Insanecats challenge:
1) Find something you know absolutely nothing about, but always wanted to. Admit in public that you know nothing about it.
2) Learn about it. Get a book, ask an expert, whatever it takes. Screw up. Make a fool of yourself. Climb the learning curve and w00t while you do it.
3) Find someone trying to climb a learning curve that you're on the top of, and help them up. Important: ensure they feel good about themselves for making this effort.
4) Become Catspaw's loyal servant for life.

(I thought I'd sneak the last one in there because, well, you never know. The other bits sounded like such great pieces of advice, maybe you'd think I was on a roll of great advice and just listen to whatever I told you to do.)

As for me, I'm learning CVS. It's about fucking time.

There are few things that I'd consider myself to be an "expert" at. I suspect that this is due to the fact that I enjoy surrounding myself with people who are experts at things that I want to improve, and thus in most fields there's always someone better than me in my immediate vicinity. However, along with breaking moos, social engineering, and driving Mud insane by fiddling with inanimate objects while she's trying to talk with me, I consider googleating to be one of my specialties.

I am not the target audience for this book. It's a book meant for an average google user, and not someone who -- on perhaps far too many occasions -- has called herself a googleator. I pride myself at being able to find weird little tidbits of information on Google (especially about people.......we typically call that "stalking" outside of a Googleator context), spend much of my time working with Google, and have probably used every single one of their features at least a dozen times for one reason or another, have found things in google that no one else seems to have documented (inurl:iran), etc. Google and me, we're tight buddies. Google just doesn't know it yet. I'm like the person who leaves Google little "someone likes you" post-it notes on its locker and then it gets all freaked out and suspects it's actually Jimmy who is trying to stalk it, and it has him arrested. .... I forgot what I was talking about.

Oh yes, this book.

Despite not being a member of the target audience for this book, I feel that I have sufficient background knowledge of google's potential for smart users, that I can evaluate the usefulness of the "100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools" that this book offers.

The first 35 "Tips & Tools" I entitle: "A clear description of what google says that it offers if you search through the 'About Us' pages". Sure, if you've never clicked on the little "Images" tab while searching google, the fact that you can search images might come as a surprise to you. However I suspect that 90% of google's users already knew about all 35 of these "Tips & Tools". Now this is okay! The book isn't subtitled "100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools that you never knew about!!!!1!!" ('1' included). But how useful is it to most readers? I suspect next to none.

The next five "Tips & Tools" seem to be very arbitrarily chosen webpages that have something to do with Google. Yes, you can simplify long google URLs by using tinyurl.com, but that isn't really Google-specific. Interesting, perhaps, to people who didn't know that you could search Google by e-mail....but with web browsing capabilities available everywhere where e-mail capabilities are, this third-party website doesn't seem quite as cool as the book makes it out to be.

Then there are nine "Tips & Tools" (bringing us to 49) about cool screen-scraping Google tools. Of course, this goes directly against Google's Fair Use policy (I'm looking down in shame now), and so the book has to tell you that you should never use any of them. And the fact that this warning counts as a "Tip" feels kind of cheap to me.

The next two sections of "Tips & Tools" (50-85) contain third-party programs that use the Google API, and instructions on how you can build programs to use the Google API. This API is extremely restrictive, and I've found it extremely sub-useful. So it seems a shame that over a third of the book is dedicated towards this topic. If you want to follow Google's rules, you can use their restrictive API. If you want to get things done, screen-scraping all the way!

There are then seven Google games listed, including google whacking, google art, the google mirror, and the no-search prank. Though I'd already played with all of these many times, I enjoyed seeing them in print where the rest of the world could find out about them until they become stupid fads that will probably ultimately insane. ...Or at least more insane.

The very end of the book contains a section about how to up your ratings on Google. Here's some advice: maybe your content shouldn't suck so much, and then people might link to it. I still don't understand why people who have content that obviously only three people in the world would find interesting, are shocked when they're not on the front page of google for a general searchterm like "happy".

So I really didn't get very much out of this book (except for something to do while my streetcar got delayed for an hour), however for those of you who aren't Googleators and have great ambitions to one day become Google-gurus, this book isn't bad to give you a nice start. You'll know how to use wildcards, quotes, ands/ors/nots, inurl:/site:/etc, news, illegally screenscrape, and look words up in the dictionary.

Unfortunately, despite being published within the year, this book is already out of date for Google features (no google calculator?!), reaffirming my belief that documentation about a system that is frequently in motion must take place using media that has the potentially to be equally fluid. Put it up on a webpage somewhere, or volunteer to come to my house and add new chapters every few months.

Just wait until I review "Green Eggs and Ham"...

Now that so many of you are using the RSS feed, I suppose that I should be using slightly more meaningful headlines to give you an idea of whether or not you want to bother reading a particular entry. At least, that's what I'd do if I weren't me. But I am me, and I think that every single damn one of these entries is not only worth reading, but worth engraving in stone. So there, nyah! You can just cry over my irrelevant titles (yes, I'm looking at you, anonymous "fan"-mailer), because if you want headlines, just pick up a newspaper. This ain't that.

Whew, now that we got that whiny dude out of the way...

The dust has finally settled as a week and a half of classes has ended, and I think I have a full enough grasp on what the rest of the term is going to be like. So let's look at my analysis, shall we? First, what my schedule'll be like.

	M	T	W	R	F
0900-1000
1000-1100
1100-1200				Oper Sys (T)
1200-0100		POL108 (T)		@Work	@Work
0100-0200
0200-0300	C, C & C	Oper Sys	C, C & C	Oper Sys	C, C & C(T)
0300-0400	POL108	@Work		@Work	@Work
0400-0500
0500-0600	Hart House
0600-0700				49x (Project course)
0700-0800
0800-0900

There you have it. Note how I cleared out mornings completely? We call this learning. Seriously, I think I should be awarded my BSc right now on the spot for being clever enough to figure out the fact that I simply don't have the motivation to get up early enough for morning classes. Instead, this way, I wake up at 9 am naturally, make myself breakfast and some coffee, read some e-mail, check out the news, chat with some IMers, and leisurely stroll into campus.

This is, of course, a lie. I'll probably start waking up with just enough time to panic that I'll be late and arrive in class just as the prof starts talking, but be wearing only one shoe, and out of breath. But let me live in my delusions of leisure for at least a little while, okay?!

Anyway, aside from the morning bit, this schedule puts me at 13 hours of work every week (with room for growing or shrinking). Quite frankly I'm horribly jealous of Nart who gets to be there all day, since I'd get a lot more done if I didn't have to spend the first hour of every day I arrive figuring out what sort of things I've missed while I was gone.  By I'm already putting "Warning: Slow Vehicle" stickers all over this damn degree, I'm not sure I could slow it down much further and still have time to do grad school, take over the world, etc. and retire by the age of 23.

"How are your profs and classes looking this term? Lots of bad ones for you to complain about? Lots of horrible classes to make flash videos in?"

I'm so glad you all care about me so much. ;) It's too early to say for most classes. But fear not! Even if every single one of my classes were to become the best hours of my life, I'd still have enough to complain about what with the damn streetcar, crazies talking to me, CS department that is rapidly drifting towards creating plumbers instead of doctors, Things That Piss Me Off, etc etc etc. There is no shortage of rants in this little head.

So there you have it: my term. Now go do something with your own lives! You do have your own lives, don't you?

...this isn't my planet. I'm from a planet where humans can survive walking outside for ten minutes without turning into a gigantic ice cube! Gah! Who designed this weather?! Who do I blame?! Who can I go up to and smack with a large mallet and say, "Bad weather designer! We *whap* don't *whap* make it *whap* this *whap* cold *whap*!".

A few days ago it was pretty funny. "Haha, have you been outside? Boy is it cold out! Yep! Better put on all your clothes at the same time, because it's chiiiillly! That cold really just bites your face doesn't it?".

But now....now making jokes about the weather is kind of like making jokes about the volcano that erupted ontop of your family and killed everyone you loved, as well as incinerated your winning lottery ticket, and left you trapped on a little island with burning hot lava on all sides of you, and nothing but rock and fire monsters on your island. It's just not funny to make jokes about that. Unless you're Lao or Cecil; I bet they could both make some sort of amusing remarks about that.

Anyway my point --- and (to be cliche for a few seconds here) I do have one --- is that it's freakin' cold outside.

The weather today says "A few flurries. Low unknown High -20C (-32C with windchill)."

.......Low unknown?!?! And the warmest point we'll get in all of today is going to feel like -32C?! How am I supposed to walk between Bahen and the Munk Centre half a dozen times today when it's that cold out?

I also don't like this "Low unknown" comment because I know what the low is: it's absolute zero. If they don't know that, then there's a great chance we're stuck in some weird alternate dimension where it just keeps getting colder and colder until the human race dies as a species because people can't survive in these temperatures. People without blankets and coffee, I mean.

So, as a result, I'm going to do the only smart thing. I'm staying at home this morning, saying "screw that 11 am tutorial", working from home, and only going into class for 2. That will at least reduce the number of trips I have to make between north and south campus.

As for surviving going home this evening after all my classes? I could use one of those island-bound fire monsters right about then....

"Why did you become interested in computers?", asked the reporter from Computer World earlier today. I spilled off the usual answer that simply rolls off my tongue now: interested in them at a young age, exposed to programming early, online virtual collaborative environments, didn't take a class in them until University, yadeeyadeeyadah.

They always look disappointed, reporters, when that's my answer. "C'mon, give the real reason", Graeme chuckled at me. Damn you, my look said back at him. I appended the father-answer. And the journalist smiled, nodded, and wrote something down.

Next time I'm inventing a better reason. Something that's dramatic enough to suit my style.

"On the night of the Accident -- as I have been instructed to call it, when I am permitted to speak of it at all -- I was not more than a young child: ordinary in every way. As the storm outside raged, our house was suddenly struck by lightning and brought to life was a computer that sat in our basement. Enraged by the disruption of its peaceful inanimate slumber, the computer killed my whole family before my young eyes and then turned its wrath upon me. As I cowered before it, I offered to the computer my humble services for life, as a token of my gratitude if it would only do me the honours of sparing my life. Touched by my sincere offer, the computer accepted the bargain, and I have existed in slavery ever since. But not slavery of mind -- for since the day that the computer, my master, killed my family...I have, in the greatest of secrecy, been learning the subtle arts of the computer such that one day I might rise up and destroy it, avenging my family's demise."

"Uh huh?", the media dude would say, taking a few notes and doing that oh-I'm-so-interested nod.

"However more recently there has been an unforseen complication in my plan. For you see the computer has at its disposal many great powers. And now that I am becoming increasingly wisened in its craft, my ambitions are quickly growing and have now surpassed my original goal of vengence to an entirely new goal of magnitude far greater than I could have predicted. After killing my master, I will steal its soul and combine our two powers to form the greatest force that the world has ever seen. And then I shall destroy this planet, and all insignificant life upon it, as I reign eternally supreme."

"Mmmhmm", the media guy would say, scribbling down a few more words. "Okay, and now tell me: what's it like being a female in computer science?"

GAAARGH!

When my parents moved back to Toronto (after hanging out in Silicon Valley for a few years (during which I was born (which I find highly appropriate (I like brackets!))) (I feel like I'm programming in Scheme)) they decided a great place to raise their kid (and I guess they would have known I had a little sibling on the way then) would be the quaint neighbourhood at Yonge and Finch.

You never think of the place you're growing up as being weird while you grow up there. However now that I've made the downtown core, UofT campus, and the Queen and Dundas areas my home, taking that subway ride up to Yonge and Finch is an extremely odd experience.

Every time I head up to visit my parents, I run into at least half a dozen people who I once knew and then managed to lose contact with (and usually for a reason). "OMG, hi [Catspaw], is that you?! OMG you look so different! How are you?! Where are you now?! It's been so long!" People who are excited about seeing you like to add exclamation marks to the end of everything, even if it's a question. In fact, if you turn out their pockets, often you can find dozens of exclamation marks hiding there. And even if you don't find them, chances are they'll be frowning at you for having turned out their pockets, and then you won't have to deal with them being excited to see you anymore.

But aside from running into all these people, I don't like how everything has changed since I left home. Most of the buildings have been torn down and replaced by new buildings. The parks have been turned into parking lots, and the parking lots have been turned into parks. Worst of all is my own old house: as soon as my parents lost their children to university, they decided to change the backyard, the rec room, my room (ahhh! where'd you put all my books?! (note: I'm not excited to see you. That's not why I put the exclamation mark at the end of my question mark. It's because I was exclaiming the question. I thought I'd just clear that up)), etc. You can't just change things! Don't they know anything? Things left behind in the past are supposed to be static and unchanging until I return to them. Sheesh, get these people a copy of the Catspaw Manual.

Anyway, today (yes, on a Sunday) I'm meeting my GForge group up at Yonge and Finch. Apparently they all live around there. This, to me, is freakin' weird. That intersection is like a boat anchor (<a boat="...">) that I can't get away from.

I think I lost my point somewhere in the brackets above. If anyone finds it, please let me know. I'm gonna go make lunch.

4 am: I'm up because I can't sleep because I can't stop coughing, and even in the few restful moments between coughs, my throat hurts too much to relax.

So I go looking in the bucket of drugs (yes that's right: "bucket of drugs") that I took to Guatemala with me for anything that contains the word "drowsy" on it. There's some Neo Citrin probably older than me, and "Tylenol for headaches" that lists "drowsiness" under side effects. Well, this isn't really a technical "headache" so much as it is my throat trying to forcefully claw its way out into the world. But I'll take what I can get.

Grab some juice, take two tylenol, start the kettle and make lemon tea. Mota's awake too, though she lets me know that it's my fault she's not sleeping by coming into my room, blinking her eyes sleepily, frowning at me, and then leaving again. Tea's ready.

My whole head also feels so dry I can hardly stand it. I feel like my eyeballs are going to start cracking and dust is going to come out of my ears. The tea doesn't moisten anything, and only hurts to drink with every swallow.

I need sleep. I'm exhausted. This tylenol's side effects had better kick in soon or I'm going to have to find more creative ways to pass out. *sigh* TV sucks at 4 am.

The age old question has finally been answered: does there exist a universe before 9 am? When my alarm went off at 7 am (well, 7:15...I gave myself 15 more minutes since I only fell asleep at 3:30), it seemed like the answer was yes. The last time I was up at this hour, I hadn't fallen asleep yet.

Barely able to walk, I stagger over to the kitchen and hit 'on' on the coffee pot. (Ten gazillion millimarks to Catspaw for thinking of setting up the coffee pot the night before.) There are already a handful of people awake on my messenger list: Slogs, Brin, Technically, BenCh, Lou, Michael, fLufFy, flaps, Lao, jayne, Hsuey, Jason. What the hell is wrong with you people? It's 7 am!

Grabbing my first (of many) cup of coffee, it's time to start the morning's work. Mail from Rogue, something about "sensorship" [sic], Floydy is talking about flash videos, I decide to reread both once I have more caffeine in my system. Graeme wants to know if Thursday at noon is good for all of us to take a photo for the cover of ComputerWorld Canada. If I say "no", can I just be left out of the photo? Mail from my CC&C partner asking when we can meet this week (what about Friday at midnight? I think I have a tiny sliver of available time then, for about thirteen seconds).

Fix a bit of coding, grab another cup of coffee, e-mail some people, read some e-mail, fix more code, update a website, read even more e-mail, more coffee.

Mornings suck.

"That's disgusting", I told flaps, only a few months ago. I couldn't understand how someone could let good quality coffee get cold, first of all. But then microwaving it later? It seemed so wrong! The lifecycle of a mug of a coffee is between the time that it is brewed and the time that it is cold. Then it is dead, and must be let to pass, with all the crying and the ceremonies and the "I'll never forget you!"s and the whole deal.

Back when I was little-Catsy, I worked at Second Cup (my store had a reputation of being the best-tipping Second Cup in the Canada -- seriously! --, so it was worth it). And you know what we did every half hour? Rotate the coffee. You know why? Because customers didn't want coffee that was older than half an hour: it was useless. We tossed it down the drain.

However despite all my arrogance and condescension, this morning when I woke up (after four hours of sleep; let's keep a running tally of this week's sleep, shall we? M 4 am - 8 am, T 3:30 am - 7:15 am, W 3:30 am - 7:30 am) there was a bit of sludge in the bottom of the coffee pot from yesterday. I glanced at it, with my blurry unfocused eyes, and put it in the microwave.

Dammit. All my carefully architected morals are disintegrating at the knees of the morning. My eye is on Saturday: if I can make it until then, I can sleep in until evening.

I'm starting to feel fluish again.

Wow, an informative title for an entry. I think my style is slipping. I expect my usual irrelevant headlines to return shortly after sleep is returned to normal (but alas, that is my second topic, not my first, so let us slip casually back to...)

Randoms. Sitting on the streetcar peacefully reading a novel Jason lent me ("you have to read this") and the guy standing beside my seat is watching me a little too closely; I figure he's probably reading the book over my shoulder, so I just start reading faster because I'm tired and cranky and nothing helps a bad mood like secretly making someone's life just a liiittle bit more difficult. Eventually there's a noise at the front of the streetcar, so I look up and he makes eye contact with me.

He gives me a toothy grin: "Hi!" I smile back that quick I'm smiling because society accepts it as a polite alternative to not talking back, and I don't feel like talking to you smile. My eyes return to my book, but my focus remains on the guy. "Nice hair," he continues, "very bright." He gets a smile from me again. (What a world we live in, when a smile can mean "Fuck off".) "Wasn't it purple before?"

Okay, now this random goes from annoyance to weirdo, which is a shame because I've had a good weirdo record over the last few weeks and I always hate breaking it. "Yeah," I nod, "it was." He nods in return and winks, "Thought so. I see you on here sometimes. Saw you on TV." Ahhhh, so that's what this is about. Okay, I can deal with that. "Ah, the documentary. Did you enjoy it?" He shakes his head, "Not really. You talked mostly about how technology can benefit activists, but not how the government uses technology to track our every move and put into large databases who we're friends with and what we eat for lunch."

The random here makes another transition: from weirdo to crazy weirdo. I see that my crazy weirdo magnet is still working. There are three options here for me now: ignore him, correct him, or humour him. What the hell, I'm in need for some good entertainment. "Of course we didn't talk about it. If we had, we wouldn't be alive today." His eyes go bright, as if he's finally found someone who understands him, and his smile gets bigger. "It's true, it's very true. You're a smart girl. I thought so watching the show. You have to be careful, they watch smart people closer. They're always watching my brother. He's a doctor."

"Actually, if you watch the third episode, when Graeme gets sick, it's because off camera earlier he started saying we should include stuff like this in the documentary. And then he gets sick. However, our editor was very clever and managed to stick in subliminal messages about this anyway. Anytime we say 'dude', it's really a code."

"What's it a code for?" ....Ah, shit. I hadn't thought that through yet. Panic; story disintegrating. Emergency evasive maneuvers. I put a finger to my lips, and gesture with my eyes at the person sitting next to me (who is fairly unaware that this conversation is taking place).

Mr. Crazy's eyes narrow as he watches the dude who's trying to find something in his bag, and eventually pulls out a cellphone. For the rest of the streetcar ride, my random is absolutely silent, watching the guy beside me. Even when I get off at my stop, he doesn't say anything, he just continues to watch the guy. Well, my work here is done.

Sleep update: I was done everything that needed doing at 1 am (6 hours sleep?! No way! This is going to rock!) but I'd had too much coffee throughout the day and couldn't fall asleep until 3. So I watched the start of Firefly. But now I've only had four hours again. Dammit...

Though being sick sucks, being sick and sounding like you're faking it because you've already spent the last week coughing up your lung and now there's nothing left to cough up, so you give these weak little wussy-coughs every so often...is worse.

"Is it a cold or the flu?", someone asked me yesterday. I don't know. I don't spend my time spitting into some container so I can take it back to a lab and analyse it. I'm sick [1]. Period. Hopefully, whatever it is, it contains magic psychic powers that enable it to become more or less contagious depending on who I'm talking to. If you've talked to me in the last week, you should ask yourself: would Catsy find my misery amusing?

[1]: Stop laughing. You know what I meant.

Anyway, my rant for today (which has to be short -- I've got a billion things to do) is about the fucking recycling truck on our street. Every second week, the recycling truck drives by and picks up those little blue and green boxes, filled with happy recycling. So far so good, right?

Except that they only take one box of cans/glass/plastic and one box of paper. However the garbage truck, oh well, that takes as much as you want to leave out on your front lawn. Who came up with this stupid idea? We produce more recyclable goods than those two boxes every two weeks (especially with the couple downstairs adding their stuff to the same load), and then we either have to throw the rest of it in the garbage (which we've had to do) or keep it in our kitchen until the next recycling day (which we've done enough times that now we have a mountain of cardboard). Because if we put it out in a second blue or second green box, they just don't take it. Argh!

Goddamn recycling size regulations. What the hell am I supposed to do with Mt Cardboard?

Haven't had time to make a flash video in far too long. I can literally feel my creativity shrinking away, screaming and clawing in a last hopeless attempt to get some attention by the rest of my brain which is neglecting it in favour of more pressing tasks. Like cleaning out the dust between my tab and Q keys with a coffee stirstick.

Speaking of creativity...with red having faded to a light pink with blonde fringes, it's about time for me to switch hair colours. Choosing a colour is going to be a bit of a problem; when you've done yellow, green-blue, blue-purple, and red-pink, there's not a wide range of places that you can go. I'm refusing orange, can't get my hair to go white, and though black is in the plan eventually, it's too real-looking for right now. Two people have suggested silver independently, but good luck finding grey hair dye (usually people are trying to reduce that, not increase it). So I may just close my eyes, pick up a random jar of manic panic, and go with that.

Classes are going okay this term. Spending Op Sys with freyr in the backrow, vaguely listening (they're talking about threading and not saying anything I don't know) but mostly making designs for Rhizome, Psiphon, and other projects for work. The prof (who happens to share an office with Greg) is very nice so I don't want him to know that I'm not paying attention, and thus it's the old asking a relevant/intelligent question every few classes to show that you're interested game.

CC&C is all new content, and again, very nice prof (wow, I got lucky for the first term ever), but he has a bad habit of saying things like "the rest should be obvious" when -- based on the frightened faces around the room -- no one thinks this is obvious. There's a dude in my class who's trying to drive the rest of us insane (shutup and stop challenging the prof: he knows what you're doing and you're always wrong. Every of the dozen of objections you make every class turns out to be wrong) but I chewed him out lightly in tutorial yesterday, so life is good. Working on the problem set with Clarence every few days in room upstairs in Bahen and usually groups of profs show up to eat their lunch and gossip about various students and other faculty members with each other. I'm learning some good stuff. ;)

Pol sci is the same as last term, except I have more stalkers this term. "Is it true you work for the Citizen Lab?", a few people come down to ask me every break. I figure that Con Hall is only so big, so eventually I'm going to run out of people coming to talk to me from the class. "Look at you famous guys", said someone I recognized from my Pol sci class, yesterday as she walked by the photo-dude taking shots of G, Nart and I. And there's a dude who likes to try to talk to me every chance he gets, including going waaay out of his way on campus just to walk next to me to my next class. Even my brother has started to get requests from people who find out that he's related to me, about whether or not he can hook them up a job through me at the Citizen Lab. It's more than a little silly. Lots of them are willing to do volunteer work too, but we can't take them. Shame. I'm still tempted to put them all to work doing my homework, or my dishes, or cleaning my house, or something.

As for the project course? Well...it's group work. I've got a fairly good grasp on my team now: who's self-directed and who needs hand-holding, who understands the tech and who needs more learning time, who is going to be competition for the "lead" position, and who just wants a list of tasks to do. Feels like it's taking too long to start actually doing stuff though. But I'm impatient like that.

Today's activities include grocery shopping, homework, video games (mwahahaha! I don't care that I don't have the time to play them. You're not the boss of me!), and dinner with Jason, Yuka, Julia and Mud at the Sultan's Tent, with an attempt to make an appearance at Graeme's birthday party, but -- since he likes to send out invitations less than 48 hours in advance -- no guarentees. Yes, it's going to be a good day. Except for when Cecil blows up the world into tiny pieces. That part's gonna be a little painful.

Using lasers, hordes of trained ninjas, poisonous gas, and reruns of The Family Guy, I've managed to keep away from Friendster - that annoying friends-networking website that perched upon the world a year ago. When I read about Orkut however, my confidence disappeared like a last cookie on a plate when everyone else is looking at something over their shoulder that I just pointed at innocently.

For you see, Orkut's description contained one little word that Friendster didn't have as an ally: "Google". Orkut is owned, designed and maintained by Google, and thus I had to check it out. The only way to join Orkut is to have someone else who is already part of the currently-exclusive community add you. Fortunately for me, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone I knew was reeled in -- and Jason came through.

After getting the invite from Jason, the first thing that you have to do is setup your profile. I imported my photo (the insanecats icon on the top right of your screen), and set up a personal, business and relationship description about yourself. Personal was easy, business I found to have insufficient options to choose from so just chose UofT student who plans to graduate in a thousand years, and I skipped almost everything in relationship.

The next thing I did was browse the communities that already existed, and join a few of them. Programming (47 members), Python (141), Moo (6), Bloggers (337), and Toronto (26). There, now I feel sufficiently lame. Also joined Hackers (132) so I could comment on a post people were making about "why no chix0rs???". I read through the groups two or three times, decided that there were far too many computer-related groups I was a part of, glanced through the other sections but couldn't find anything worthy of adding to my list of communities.

Since then, a small handful of people have found me and added me -- all people I met once or twice, but don't know very well -- and 13 people posted responses to my post on the hacker group. Orkut is still pretty small, but it's growing rediculously fast, just in the last 12 hours that I've been a part of it.

My evaluation of Orkut: good idea (though stolen), will probably grow very popular once it leaves Beta and Google starts to mention it officially, but nothing particularly exciting. I'm almost bored of it already.

If anyone wants in, ask. Insanecatsers are Orkut-worthy by nature. Except you, you're just weird.

The scheduled productivity of the day -- consisting of primarily of much programming and some solving of math equations -- was abruptly interrupted by the sudden desire to do anything else. So with a dismissing wave to my homework, I decided to take the day off and wrote several pages of essay-rants instead. Feeling better, I treated myself to several episodes off my Firefly DVD.

Now night has fallen and the many activities that I had planned for today in order to preserve even the semblance of sanity throughout the week ahead, remain incomplete. Yet where academic-stress once ruled supreme, apathy now reigns. The rants will be worth more one day than the homework will, anyway.

I said to Jason a few weeks ago that I'd love to get experience designing a course, and I know myself well enough that a good one for me to start with would be something extremely interdisciplinary (the word of my life). The idea that came to my bizarre little head would be a class on black boxes.

The concept of black boxes -- theoretical constructs with known input/output but unknown means of operation -- is something that penetrates several realms of academics. Psychology is all built on studying the ultimate black box -- the human mind -- where they may study only what outputs occur with which inputs, in an attempt to try to figure out what's happening inside. Warfare tactical studies have to do something similar: without knowing exactly what is being planned, but just observing how the enemy reacts to certain events, larger scale plots have to be discovered. Most of the political science work we do at the citizen lab -- trying to enumerate which countries are censoring what -- works by pinging websites at the black box of their filtering system and seeing what comes out. Some examples are better than others, but I can name a few dozen of them off the top of my head.

Does the study of all these things together have any real academic value? I don't suspect so, though it's possible that tactics that work for one group could be applied to another who hasn't considered that strategy. However does it make a great hand-wavey information-studies type of course? Absolutely!

Scoffing (great, just what the world needs, another stupid little-value course), suggestions (psychology isn't a real science! don't mention it!), and comments (I like cupcakes) welcome and requested.

Tim (as in NinjaTim, Agent Smith, etc.) and I were giggling a lot yesterday as I recounted the tale of pitiful efforts in class yesterday. I'm sitting waiting for class to start, and some guy I've never spoken to before comes over infront of me and smiles.

"Hi, I'm [soandso]", (I forget his name) says he.
"[Catspaw]". He holds out his hand and I shake it.
"Just wanted to come over and say hi..." he starts to say, but trails off because he has turned around 180 degrees and is walking in the opposite direction, leaving. He left. Just like that. That was the entire conversation.

freyr -- the guy who sits next to me in that class -- laughed. "I think he likes you."
"That was a shitty attempt at talking to me if he liked me."
"For a CS guy, it wasn't bad."
We both laughed. "Yeah, that's true. For a CS guy it wasn't bad."

There was another attempt at contact at my next class, by another guy who came over to say "nice hair" and then very rapidly ran out of things to say, panicked, kinda said "well, uh, I, uh, will, uh, just be uh, sitting over here...." and darted out.

Goddamnit it, can't I just sit in class in peace without nervous guys coming by in super lame attempts to try to start a conversation? If you have something of substance to say, by all means come and say hi. But if this is the most stressful experience of your life, you know what? You can skip it.

Then this morning the CSSU (computer science student union) sends out e-mail to every CS student, that talks about cheap salsa lessons for CS students, blahblahblah, anyway and it says halfway through:

> students to all Computer Science Students. This is a great way to spend
> some quality time with your girlfriend. If not, maybe you can learn some

I can't even think of how to roll my eyes at this, because the rolling requires too many levels. First of all, I very highly doubt that the CSSU is considering non-straight so in this e-mail (if they can't even specify both genders of partners properly) in which case it means that they are only talking to a subset of guys, but only guys nonetheless. That's great, way to rep your students.

Hair changed colour last night to green. Maybe I can have some quiet time cuz no one will recognize me. Heh.

"What book are you reading?", someone asked me today, pointing at the book that lay face up on my desk, very obviously displaying the title Practical Internet Groupware. "Mr. Toad And Friends Teach You The Numbers Up To 15", I replied without a pause. He raised an eyebrow at me, and proceeded to ask if he could borrow my notes from last class. *sigh* My best lines always go unappreciated.

It's 2 am and I'm making throwing stars out of five coffee stirsticks, rather than being receptive to my instinct for survival's pleas for sleep. I've been up doing homework since the damn sun rose, breaking for only one hour to sit in class (which my mind apparently found to be in inadequate vacation since I left it feeling even more tired). Tomorrow is class/work from 11 - 8, and then I promised several people I'd at least make an appearance at the CSSU meet afterwards, so it'll be another late night. And then a test the day after, which I haven't had the chance to start to study for yet, but I can't study that morning because I have to be around work for some guy doing his PhD thesis to interview the three of us. I hope he doesn't mind tired sarcasm.

"What did you learn in Guatemala?"
"That my stomach can handle Central American bacteria-ridden water better than any of the others on the trip could. I suspect it's all the coke and coffee. Builds up a resistance."

"Do you think that technology can solve all the problems of developing nations?"
"Absolutely. Give them a few routers, some network cables and a wireless keyboard, and all their problems will go away. Routers can be used as firewood, wireless keyboards can be eaten, and network cables can be used to strangle those who come by to oppress the people. Yes, if every man, woman and child had a wireless keyboard, there would be no hunger in the world. Plus, if you have enough routers, you can use them as bricks and build a house out of them; keeps natural disasters, like molten lava, out."

Thought of the day: what would happen if you bought every single penny of a particular country's currency, and then burned it all?

Alternate thought of the day: people say that our number system is base 10 because that's the number of fingers we have...but 11 different states can be expressed with ten fingers (including the no-fingers state)....what's up with that?!

...yet.

I made a horrible discovery this morning: if you drink enough coffee to stay alert, and take enough tylenol to avoid the "you're exhausted" headaches, you hardly need to sleep at all! And here I was, uselessly wasting away 7-8 hours every night when only 3-4 hours will suffice. Yay: efficiency up 25%, drinks for everyone! And by "drinks" I mean "coffee".

So I'm taking a holiday this reading week. This was a big decision for me, since I'm the person who likes to work weekends during the summer. I totally can't afford the time off, but I've had just a few too many people tell me that I'm going to crash, burn, and die, recently. Of course, the week after reading week I have a midterm Tuesday, problem set due Wednesday, another problem set due Thursday, and a midterm on Friday. And I'll be missing classes on Monday. But that just means that I have to start on some of that stuff now...during my new extra 4 hours of not being asleep every night!

But I'm happy with how everything's going. In the movie of my life, I'd be sitting in a large futuristic chair right about now, stroking my pet (a cat would be too predictable -- I'm going to go with an evil baby rhino), and laughing maniacally. I'd have underlings standing around, but I wouldn't tell them that everything was going exactly according to plan because they'd already know it (I'm not keeping any stupid underlings anywhere near me) and that's the sort of thing only a lame villain would say. And by the end, the audience would be cheering for me, anyway.