I spent last night eating pizza with friends, reverse engineering filtering software, giggling at Jon Stewart, watching blogs, websites, TV, talking on Moos, irl, iChat, MSN, and sighing as the election results came in. I went to bed at 5 am, disgusted at the world.

Bush being President again is not the scary part.

He's just one little person. One stupid little person who couldn't cross the street on his own if you gave him an instruction manual and a three day tutorial. He's not the scary part of all of this.

The scary part is that most voters supported him.

The difference today between Bush and any other nutjob is that Bush has the backing of a nation. When he makes a decision, he does so with the authority to represent an entire country.

He's not the one who scares me. The voters do.

I spent the night last night at my parents' place, which has ten million channels on the TV. It should be noted that they didn't have ten million channels when I was living there. But that's another rant for another day. (You know what else is a rant waiting to happen? Pine nuts. Why the hell are pine nuts so expensive? What's up with that? Someone explain this to me.)

Anyway, I was flipping between old episodes of the Simpsons, South Park, Buffy, Ellen, Six Feet Under, another Simpsons, Will & Grace, and Digimon (when you have ten million channels, all of these are on simultaneously) and wondering how I ever lived without multitasking between eight shows simultaneously.

"Dialog's getting a little slow *click* Not enough action *click* Humour dropping *click* Seen this one *click* Remember what happens next *click* This character bores me *click*" Round and round I go, letting each show entertain me for 10-15 seconds before moving on to the next.

This should be contrasted with the experience of watching TV at my house, which gets 5 channels: "OMG! Look! There's something on TV which isn't hockey or the weather! It's....it's a car commercial! Let's all sit and watch! A car commercial! OoooOOOOoooo. Wow....don't pay until 2005. Now that's a good deal!"

The more channels I have access to, the more I suffer from entertainment inflation. And it's not just with TV.

Right now I'm sitting at my parents' cottage, absolutely thrilled that I have internet connectivity. Sure, I have to sneak into the bedroom and unplug their phone to call up Huntsville's Bell Sympatico number. And yes, it is the world's slowest connection (it actually uses carrier pigeons that have bits strapped onto their ankles, rather than any sort of electronic signal --- they don't have electricity in Huntsville yet). But wow! Connectivity! It feels so cool to be wired to the rest of humanity from a cottage. Bleedin' edge of technology, baby.

At home, I'm pissed off when it takes me more than an hour to download the multi-terabyte US criminal database. "What the hell?! C'mon! You think I got all day to wait for this stuff?! 10 megs a second? Ugh! That's so lame. I'm bored. This sucks. I think I'm gonna go watch some car commercials or something."

The more we have, the more we want. Entertainment inflation.

The only way to stop entertainment inflation from overtaking the world is to remove all the causes of the inflation. Take away people's high speed connections and kazillions of channels and all that fun stuff.

...and give it all to me. You do want to save the world, don't you?

There's a farside cartoon in which a cavedude is watching a bird fly overhead. He begins flapping his arms as hard as he can, but is unable to fly like the bird. So he grabs a twig, creates a bow and arrow, kills the bird, and walks away.

Sometimes comics explain a whole hell of a lot about humanity...

PS: I want some llama cheesecake.

A statistics-inclined lawyer, a techy-inclined peace-and-conflict major, a law-inclined techy guy and a chix0r are in a room. It sounds like the start of a really bad joke. Or how I spent my Friday.

Here's how many hours I spent in meetings this week:

Monday: 4 hours
Tuesday: 3 hours
Wednesday: 5 hours
Thursday: 1 hour
Friday: 6 hours

Total time in meetings: 19 hours

Here's how many hours I spent in class this week:

Monday: 2 hours
Tuesday: 0 hours
Wednesday: 2 hours
Thursday: 0 hours
Friday: 0 hours

Total time in class: 4 hours

Yeeeeeeah...I'm a student.....suuuure.....

I think it's really funny how many people have their birthday in the middle of November. To put it in perspective, one in seven people with birthdays in my iCal have their birthday between November 11th and November 20th. C'mon, that's hilarious.

Why do I think it's so funny? Subtract nine months from the middle of November. Why am I the only one laughing? This is great comedy! Too much information, yes, but damn funny.

Is everyone ready to hate the moment that they decided to read this entry? I hope you've got lots of free time today, because this may turn into the next Chromatron.

Clarence pointed me at Marathon -- a similarly puzzle solving game that involves cows! Calm yourself. Give it a try. The first one's easy. The first one is always easy. Oh, and the second isn't very hard. The third is still pretty damn easy... And then the next thing you know, you'll be on level 30 and unable to sleep. BAM!

Heh heh heh heh....

1:30 pm. It's the last warmish day of the year -- 12C with a bright sun overhead. I'm lying on the grass outside of the Bahen building (the main CS building at UofT) where my next class starts in half an hour.

Headphones plugged into my laptop play uncharacteristically soft music and I've turned off e-mail notifications for at least a few minutes. Finally -- finally!! -- some time to breathe. Soft grass below, sipping on a soy tazo chai latte, an arm draped over my eyes so that I don't have to squint at the sun, and occasionally waving back at people walking by.

Sometimes you have to schedule breaks. Sometimes when there's way too much to do, you have to actually schedule half an hour to lie on the grass and try to imagine how much Lake Ontario weighs (50,000 tons?).

In a few minutes class begins and I'll have to stand and then go back to my usual rush of trying to accomplish twelve lifetimes in the span of just one.

And in a few minutes, when I sit down and take notes while checking my e-mail and thinking about the evening's work ahead, I'll be jealous of the me of right now who is busy doing slightly less than nothing.

Guess what? I think that I'm finding my Dragon Army. Perhaps it is unjustly arrogant of me to make this analogy, and my wax wings may melt one day, but today is not that day. Tomorrow's not looking bad either.

There's been a dramatic change in my highly competitive academic spirit over the past two years. Somehow the second year student who viewed every success of her peers as an attack on her own goals has been replaced by a fourth year student who spent part of her afternoon teaching two members of the Dragon Army how to teach other students. What happened?

I knew that eventually this step would come -- I have to find my Alais and Petras and Shens -- I just had always expected it to happen at the grad school level. I suppose I should take comfort at the plan realizing itself faster than expected. It's a big world to conquer, and I'm not getting any younger.

If I had an army of clones, here are the things that I would have them do today...

• One would do my stats homework.
• Two would do my 465 homework.
• One would do my CBC interview this afternoon (Yes, G, MW).
• Three would work on the PyWebOff.
• One would write a paper on common internet filtering mechanisms.
• Two would close all bugs on Chestnut.
• Four would add XML to the Turtle processing cycle.
• Three would play with using Roweis' stuff on our Rep data.
• One would clean up Pyre.
• One would bake corn bread, roast a chicken, and make a pie.
• Two would port Proxyhunter to OSX/Cocoa.
• Five would create detailed specs for the map project.
• One would finish the Lain flash video.
• One would finish the Run Lola Run flash video.
• One would start a new flash video.
• Two would read through Trac's source code.
• One would finish reading Essential System Administration.
• One would rewrite insanecats.
• Two would clean up the attic.
• Two would look into how to run something cool on our 9 unused monitors.
• Three would discuss where we should do grad school.
• One would make a schedule of what the clones should do tomorrow.
• Two would finish all the odds-and-ends on our todo list.
• One would get some sleep -- we need it, bad.

Forty-four mes. That's all I'm asking for. It's not completely unreasonable. Instead, I have to do it all myself. Les sighs.

What would you do with your army of clones?

Not coincidentally, my life often resembles a dramatic film more than an actual life story. (But shh, don't tell the cameras that I'm on to them.) My fall 2004 term is nearing its end with only three weeks of class remaining. I wonder what the final stretch will bring. It all depends what type of movie I'm currently stuck in the middle of. Here are some of the possibilities:

Cheesy feel-good sports hero movie - Disaster will strike in the most difficult of my classes and it will begin to look like everyone will fail. But at the last instant, the kid who is doing the worst in the class will rally everyone together and remind them that with teamwork we can beat this class. Then everyone will work together and when exams arrive everyone passes with 100%. The term ends with us cheering and tossing the hero-kid in the air. I might drop him.

Murder mystery - I get a test back and did extremely poorly. Later that day, mysterious circumstances call me away in the middle of a class and a few hours later the prof is found dead in his office with a stickcat drawn on his board. Now it's up to me to solve the mystery of who killed him...before the cops find me...

Sci-fi disaster flick - It turns out that there's a reason why my class has so many math problems to solve. They're using our collective minds to solve huge problems in a SETI-like distributed cognitive system which is going to be used to forge a tear in the space-time continuum and open up a gateway between this dimension and the next, to allow the invading armies a transport layer by which they can arrive and take us all over. The only way to prevent this disaster is to feed the system incorrect answers. Academic failure becomes the only way to save the world.

Based-on-a-true-story heartfelt biography - I break down crying on the Bahen steps, "I can't do it. I can't go on. It's all too big, there's too much work. I can't handle it all." "You have to", some respected second-party replies, "because we need you to. We need you to pass with flying colours so that you can go on to save the world. I believe in you. We all believe in you. You can do this." Armed with determination, I go on to achieve greatness in all things.

Anime - Along with my cool blue hair, I gain a pair of space-boots. One day while playing with my laptop, I transfer some of my consciousness onto the net and explore the boundaries between the brain and the mind. There may also be giant robots that I control. This would awe those who thought it impossible: "But she's just a kid!" When it ends, I transfer life-energy back to the Earth.

Poorly translated foreign film - In my Formalities Functions of Program Drawing class, I do incorrectly on a halting bunch and the mentor informs me that the ending trial is worth many great rewards. Then we dance and a song sings he of fierce radishes. Finally, I jump the trouble and fire rains onto the learn of learners who are not yet them.

Horror movie - I fail.

Comedy - I do really well.

Teen movie - After falling for this girl who didn't like him (actually, she did, she was only pretending that she didn't like him so that this other boy would hit on her instead of her friend, because she thought her friend had betrayed her trust earlier, when really it was someone else who did so), this guy decides that he's going to stay awake for 72 hours straight to finish an assignment but accidentally wanders into a classroom where he ...etc.

Black-and-white experimental film - The numbers on my problem set begin to bleed and everywhere I look I see digits that are counting down. Shadows begin to take shape, and through them I see a picture of myself who explains to me that only through unknowing the path that we travelled can we explore who we might become. A clown flips the pancakes in the room next door and a girl screams. Credits roll.

Epic adventure - After a catastrophic problem set, a prof agrees to give me bonus marks if I'm able to answer a difficult math problem within 24 hours. The answer is known by a prof on the other side of the world, but I don't have to travel alone. Coming with me is a girl who speaks all languages but is blind, a rich man with a horrible secret, a fellow comp sci student who is told to stay near, and two biology profs who need my help. Together, we will find the answer to this problem.

Yes, all of these are very real possibilities for what the future may hold. Grab your bag of popcorn, because the next three weeks are going to be intense.

Sorry 'bout the complete lack of posts. Just nothing really to talk about.
Some weeks are like that.

That's what this guy said. He was holding onto a cellphone and pissed off that he couldn't get reception inside of the elevator. That his conversation had been cut short when the doors closed. He was actually pissed off about this.

We went up a few more floors and he turned to me and asked, "What, is there some kind of disruptor in here or something?"

Unfortunately, he got off the elevator before I could get out a sarcastic reply. I wonder how often he suffers from these "disruptors" in elevators...