So I went running this evening with fLufFy.

When I was a kid, I used to be able to do the running thing with no problem, placing top 10 in the 8 km for Toronto.

Now when I run, it looks a whole lot less like the graceful regality of a young cheetah and a whole lot more like a loafish monkey whose hair has been set fire, flailing her limbs wildly as she awkwardly kinda falls forward in a ridiculous motion that can only be considered "running" by the most liberal of standards.

Upon our return to the thankfully non-moving place I call home, it occurred to me that this ten minute jaunt didn't kill me and may come in handy the next time that I'm attacked by a demon in the shadows. Cuz, you know, my running would certainly scare it away.

On the other hand, the last four years of sitting on my ass in front of a computer terminal hasn't resulted in any immediate demon-caused deaths. So maybe this whole exercise idea is overrated. Perhaps both solutions merit further investigation.

I still firmly believe that people who run for fun are friggin' loonies, but I may give it another shot or two. Perhaps this running thing will kill me, but perhaps the entire purpose of my life is to serve as a warning and example to others.

You hear that, kids? Settle down and go watch some TV.

LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA LALALALALALALALALA.
somethingsomethingsomething NANANANANANA
somethingsomethingkoo NANANANANA
somethingsomething afternoon NANANANANANA
somethingsomethingsomethingsomething
Choo choo choochoo chooo chooo chooo choo.
LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA LALALALALALALALALA CATSPAWMARI DAMACY!

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just ignore that brief outburst. But if you do, then you already understand. Who needs variety when you can listen to that song on repeat??!)

This afternoon I had my first class of the year. It's called "Computers and Society" but the name is wrong. It should be called "Things Catspaw Knows".

Course topics include:

• Internet censorship
• Open source feasibility
• Why there are so few women in computer science
• etc.

10% of the course grade is given to participation on the Citizen Lab web bulletin board. (Repeat to self: do not use root perms for evil, do not use root perms for evil...)

Best yet, the prof mentioned in the first lecture about a documentary called Hacktivista. "'Scuse me, sir, but do we get bonus points if we're in it?"

There are a bunch of guest lecturers coming in, including Barry Wellman (who calls me "Kat"), Ian Lancashire (who says I'm "delightfully interdisciplinary"), some people I was on the Open Source Conference board with, etc.

Ha! And participation counts for marks in this class. This is going to be an exercise in self restraint.

If this course were just slightly more tailored specifically to me, it would look like: "Today we're going to write a quiz on what Catspaw had for dinner last night. And remember...I'm grading on a curve."

You're playing Mario Kart. You're driving along in your little car. (You're not Wario, because I'm playing as Wario, but that's beyond the point of this conversation.)

No matter how great a driver you are -- no matter how fast you can make those crazy turns on that level where there are cliffs everywhere -- it always feels just slightly safer to be driving while surrounded by a little ring of shells. If you fall behind, you can use them to get ahead. If you're in front, they can protect you from others trying to usurp the lead.

A good programming team is like having a little ring of Mario Kart shells around you.

A certain prof of mine once said that undergrad is a place to find your allies who you'll need later in life.

The difficulty, of course, is that I'm not willing to take big risks on New People when my grades are on the line. If it's not for grades, I'm perfectly happy to be handed a group of misfits so that I can filter through them for their respective expertise and polish the jems in the group. But when it comes to my grades, I'm very, very cautious.

As I glance out at the classroom filled with 408 students I don't recognize, and my team confidently announces that we'd prefer to be a team of 3 students than 4, I can't help but wonder who in the sea of faces I'm losing the opportunity to meet.

Taking risks has served me so well in the past, but this isn't a term for experimenting. This is grad-school-submission term. And I'm taking the safe route with an awesome pre-screened team. My apologies to the rest of the grade curve.

I just finished watching Advent Children (thanks Cecil!). If you've played FF7, it's an absolutely awesome film and you should get your hands on a copy before you even finish reading this entry. Go on. Go get it. I can wait.

...But even if you haven't played FF7 (I'm sure there must be some valid reason for not playing it ... I just can't think of any right now) the graphics are astounding and can be enjoyed by anyone with eyes.

Actors who aren't real people shouldn't look that real.

As Penny Arcade put it, the movie should come with the following warning label:

This film contains scenes that may be totally fucking awesome. Your favorite characters may be rendered in extreme detail as they take part in mind-blowing battles set in familiar locales. Futuristic scabbard/motorcycles might be depicted in a way that makes them appear sweet.

Our campus is hosting a Google recruitment event in a few weeks. Normally these recruitment events are just a good excuse to get free pizza while you pretend that you don't have plans to head straight for grad school. But for some reason this particular one, Google's, is causing me to twitch.

The reason for the twitchiness is obvious: it's Google.

This isn't Just Another Company for me. For me, this isn't even a Really Cool Place To Work. Google is the holy grail of all employment opportunities.

And that's why I'm staying far, far away from the recruitment event.

Google is perhaps the one temptation that I couldn't stay away from. If they held out their hand and said "join us", I'd drop academics in a second and wouldn't look back.

I know that one degree isn't going to be enough for everything I plan to accomplish in life. I know that. I don't have nearly enough pieces of paper yet to be even glancing in Google's direction. It's far too early for that.

"You're not good enough for them to take you, anyway", I keep reassuring myself, to prevent myself from visiting the info session webpage again and again. "You'd try and fail. So you're not only saving yourself from leaving academics, you're saving yourself from failure."

I need for the event to come and go so that I can stop torturing myself over this. My plan is to go to grad school. Google isn't in The Plan. So stop thinking about it and get back to looking at those GREs.

There's been a popular request from people asking for recipes ("you keep posting about eating all this good food") and such so I'm going to try posting recipes every Wednesday for a month. Most of you can ignore these entries. Those of you who are starving undergrads can feel free to take notes. These are all going to be easy-to-make tasty things which can be created on an undergrad budget, as an alternative to yet another night of pizza or kraft dinner.

Eggplant...thing. Serves 3-4.
(You can tell that I'm not a real chef because my creations don't have titles that make them sound fancy.)

Ingredients:

• half a head of garlic
• a large eggplant (there should be no soft spots if it's good)
• 2 cups of beansprouts
• 2 small yellow peppers
• handful of spring onions
• a small package of baby carrots
• a few teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil (you should have some of this anyway, to make popcorn. You do make popcorn by cooking it on a pan over your stove, don't you?)

Method: (it sounds more complicated than it is)

1. Preheat oven to 400.
2. Cut each clove of garlic in half. Peel almost all of the skin off, but leave the inner most layer or two of skin. Put these pieces of garlic together with a teaspoon of olive oil in an aluminum foil ball.
3. Cut the eggplant into 1/2 inch slices and remove the skin. Place the slices into a roasting pan (or cookie sheet, if you don't have a roasting pan) and add about 1/4 inch of water to the pan. Cover the whole pan with a large sheet of aluminum foil.
4. Put the garlic foil ball into the oven for 15 minutes.
5. After 15 minutes, add the pan of eggplant. Cook both for an additional 30 mins.
6. While that's roasting, cut the spring onions into pieces about 2 inches long at the green bit, and 0.5 inches long at the white bits.
7. Cut the yellow peppers into small slices like the kind you would find on a veggie tray.
8. Cook the baby carrots. This can be done via steaming (preferred), microwaving (in bowl covered with plastic wrap on high for 4 mins), or boiling (boil til soft).
9. Put 2 teaspoons of olive oil in a pan on the stove set to one-setting-less-than-high. Add the green onions and gently stir in the oil for 4 minutes.
10. Add the cut yellow peppers and all of the beansprouts to the onions. Cook for another 5 minutes.
11. Empty the contents of the pan onto three plates. Add the baby carrots.
12. Remove the eggplant and garlic from the oven. The eggplant should be soft and sweet and all the water should be evaporated. Place a few eggplant slices on each plate ontop of the pan contents.
13. For each clove of roasted garlic, squeeze the skin lightly so that the meat of the garlic falls out. It should be very soft. Place a few cloves on each plate amongst the veggies and eggplant.
14. Feeds 3 hungry people. Suggested dessert is homemade strawberry rhubarb pie. :)

Super tasty, super healthy and easy to do.
Warning: I won't be held accountable if you somehow develop food poisoning and die a horrible death. I didn't die, but then again, I drank Guatemalan water and didn't die. If you make it and come up with a better name, lemme know.

....fortunately, I have the cure for that! Another addictive puzzle game!

CPwr pointed me to StroQ, an addictive puzzle game available on an operating system near you.

The point of the game is to try to get the same colour of tiles along a single row by drawing one continuous line along the board. Each tile that the line touches flips colours when the puzzle is run.


Though it doesn't have the angry lions of Zookeeper, nor the crazy reflecting mirrors of Chromatron, I guarantee that StroQ will keep you up late at night if you let it. As dantekgeek said...

<dantekgeek> HEY SPAW
<dantekgeek> STROQ YOU!!

Yeah, well, stroq you too, buddy!

Ahem, anyway, give StroQ a try. Just download it and take a look. What's the worst thing that could happen?

In some boardroom somewhere, some top movie executives take their seat around a large wooden table. Starbucks coffees in hand, they settle down and face the Company President who is sitting at the head of the table.

President: "Gentlemen, we need an idea for the next thriller action movie."

Johnson: "What about a movie about a meteor hitting the earth?"

President: "Meteors are always a good summer blockbuster, but I'm looking for something new. Something edgy. Something that the audience has never seen before."

Smith: "We could do a movie about a plane disaster."

President: "Hasn't there already been a movie about plane disasters?"

Smith: "What if it wasn't a normal plane disaster? What if it involved....terrorists?"

President: "Go on..."

Johnson: "We could have a plane disaster about terrorists trying to kill a witness to a crime scene."

President: "Hm. I'm liking this idea. But we still need an edge."

Johnson: "Children on board!"

Smith: "And a huge storm over the ocean!"

Johnson: "And a pilot who gets injured!"

President: "These are all gold ideas, but we need a catch. Something that will keep the audience on the edge of their seat."

David R Ellis: "What if..."

President: "Go on, David. Speak up. What's your idea?"

David R Ellis: "Well, what if....on the plane...with the terrorists....there were.............snakes?"

President: "SNAKES ON A PLANE?!"

Smith: "MY GOD! SNAKES ON A PLANE?!"

Johnson: "THAT'S TERRIFYING!! IT'S PERFECT, WOW!! SNAKES ON A PLANE!!"

President: "Gentlemen, this idea is going to make us rich. Very, very rich. If only we could think of a suitable title for the film..."

That's right. There is actually a Samuel L. Jackson movie coming out called "Snakes on a Plane" about terrorists who let a crate of killer snakes loose on a plane.

Let me repeat the plot, in case you missed it the first time: Snakes on a Plane.

They've done killer snakes before. They've done airplane thrillers before. But no one has ever done something as crazy as SNAKES ON A PLANE!!!!!!!!!

If this movie is as THRILLING as it sounds, there will no doubt be a whole slough of sequels to look forward to:

• Snakes on a boat
• Snakes on a bus
• Snakes on a bus that can't go below 50 mph
• Snakes on a train
• Sheep on a plane
• Snakes and the goblet of fire

Just THINK of all the exciting possibilities in store for the movie industry.

Snakes on a plane. Wow. Snakes...on a plane.

Paragraph from an essay I wrote in first year (on the mental imagery debate):

The relevant empirical phenomena (such as the observed phenomena that it takes longer to switch one's attention to objects which are more distant) must be inherent in the very nature of mental images in order for Kosslyn's observations to support his conclusion. If this phenomena is not required by the imagery mechanism, it holds no explanatory weight. Therefore, if it can be shown that it is unlikely that the observed phenomena are due to inherent properties of the image --- as opposed to properties which belong to the world which is being envisioned --- then the connection between Kosslyn's experiments and the conclusions he draws from them, would evaporate.

Commit message from a project in fifth year (compilers course):

Replaced function pointers (which are impossible in this language, as far as I can tell) with a simple calculator (which is not impossible, and therefore better :) ). See ticket #5.

Why does it feel like I'm getting stupider?

I made a brand new flash video (ooooOOOOooo aaaaaaahhhh!) for a brilliant movie idea that metac0m had.

Warning: don't watch this trailer if you're home alone at night. Although it's only for a fake movie, you may find it absolutely terrifying. Seriously.

Without further ado, the latest Catspaw creation.

I've started filling out grad school forms. For those of you who have never submitted grad school forms online, it involves pages and pages and pages of talking about yourself.

....kind of like this blog, but with fewer snakes on a plane. And, oh, also, it sucks. Otherwise, it's kinda like this blog.

I got past the part where they asked for my name, and my address, and where I was born, and what my phone number was, but then all seven schools' forms asked for the same thing that stumped me: a statement of purpose.

The statement of purpose is a "one- or two- page statement states your reasons for undertaking graduate work and explains your academic interests, including their relation to your undergraduate study and professional goals." Some forms point out the fact that this is a good opportunity to try to sell yourself.

For an experienced MW, I've been having a ridiculously difficult time with coming up with what I want to put in this section. I think that it's making me particularly twitchy because it's forcing me to admit, in paper form, that I have no idea why I'm doing graduate school.

So, because I like lists, I've started to make a list of all the things that I like about computer science.

And, because I'm a bitter soulless void of a human being, I've also made a (longer) list of all the things that I hate about computer science.

These lists have helped me come to the following three conclusions:

1. I like areas where I can complain about how people are currently doing things the wrong way, and talk about how much damage it's causing, rather than an area where everyone's making a positive impact.
2. Less math is better math.
3. Writing that your purpose is "eventual world domination" and that you plan on taking over the entire department by the time you're done grad school there, is probably not appropriate to write on a grad school app. Even if it's true. They'll figure it out on their own when it happens.

So I still haven't made much progress on the whole "statement of purpose" thing, but at least now I know some things that won't be in my statement of purpose. And once I have eliminated everything that doesn't belong there from the set of infinite possibilities, all that will remain will be the perfect statement of purpose. It's genius.

I know that all of you forgot, but today is Wednesday which means that it's time for another Catspaw "cheap 'n' easy recipe for the undergrad food snobs among you" day.

Since last time's recipe was vegetarian, I've been asked to include meat of some kind in today's recipe. Unfortunately, you can't replace the ground beef in this recipe with ground veggie beef because the consistency is wrong. I mean, you can try, but you'll end up with veggiebeef hash rather than veggiebeef patties. But you vegetarian types can still make the fries which I assure you are fan-friggin-tastic.

Mud/fLufFy/Ender's family burgers. Makes 4 large burgers, 6 small ones.

Ingredients:

• 400-500g ground beef. The leaner, the better.
• 1/3 cup rolled oats
• 1 egg
• dash salt, pepper
• Burger buns

Method:

• Mix all ingredients in a bowl.
• Form into 4 to 6 balls.
• Heat frying pan on medium-high heat.
• Place half the balls on the pan. Using an egglifter, flatten them a little into patties.
• Cook on one side til brown. Flip. Cook on the other side til brown.
• Place on burger buns. Enjoy. If you like your buns toasted, add them to the oven you're using to make fries (see below) for the last four minutes.

l33t fries. Makes a side for three hungry people.

Ingredients:

• Six potatoes the size of your whole fist. If potatoes are smaller, use more.
• 2 teaspoons sesame seeds
• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 3 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Method:

• Preheat oven to 425.
• Cut potatoes into small wedges. The smaller, the crispier; the thicker, the potatoier. You might want to try several sizes the first time, then decide which you prefer for next time.
• Mix all ingredients in a bowl.
• Place on a roasting pan or cookie sheet. I recommend placing on top of parchment paper, to save on cleanup. Put in oven.
• After 20 mins, remove from oven, gently rotate fries a bit, put back in oven for another 20-25 mins.
• Remove from oven. Enjoy!

I filled out 11 pages of forms this evening (yay me!) for some scholarship stuff, some GRE stuff, and some direct application stuff. I've found that the limits on some sections are completely bizarre.

Here are my favourite two examples:

#1:

If your undergraduate degree took longer than 4 years to complete, explain why.
___________________________________ (60 char limit)

I'm finding it very difficult to avoid the temptation to write:
Sometimes things just take me longer to complete than I expe

#2:

List all financial awards you received in the past four years based on academic or research excellence. Include the name and value of the award. Maximum: 4 pages.

Do people actually exist who require 4 pages to list out all their financial awards?!
....And if so, do they want to be my friend?

11 more pages down. Couple hundred more to go. Have I mentioned that this bites? Cuz this totally bites.

No, your blog title isn't funny!!!

So I did my first practice GRE test. It's a lot like doing the real GRE test, only it doesn't count, so you spend a lot more time rolling your eyes and a lot less time crying.

Once I finished the practice test, the automarker informed me that I was simultaneously a genius and the stupidest idiot that has ever taken the test since inanimate objects were disqualified from writing the test. And even then I only did slightly better than mold that grows on the base of toilets on those little plastic bump things that you're supposed to remove to wash.

So, first of all, It turns out that I'm a sentence completion genius! When given an incomplete sentence, and a list of possible words, it seems that I have an uncanny ability to ______ what word fits in the sentence. ( A-hibernate, B-chihuahua, C-guess, D-amalgamate ). I got perfect on this section. Perfect. That's right. I'm a perfect sentence completer. I think it's cuz I never eskimo a word that doesn't belong.

I did as expected in the math and essay sections. Pretty good in both, losing a few marks in each section due to stupid mistakes I should have caught. (Like not using enough adjectives. I think that the automarker counts them.)

But guess what? I'm an antonym failure! I got less than a third of the antonym section correct. They give you a word and then a bunch of potential opposites and you're supposed to pick the best one. It seems that I either disagree with their definition of "best", or that I have no idea what the word is that I'm supposed to find the opposite of. I started calling myself "antonomically challenged" but was told that that wasn't a suitable disability for applying for disability scholarships.

To find out if I'm the stupidest antonym-finder in the galaxy, I started quizzing some of the Citizen Labbers today with the questions I was asked.

• "What's the opposite of enervate? Is it recuperate, resurrect, renovate, gather or strengthen?"
• "What's the opposite of loquacious? Is it tranquil, skeptical, morose, taciturn or witty?"
• "What's the opposite of repine? Is it intensify, excuse, express joy, feel sure, or rush forward?"

I was happy to discover that no one faired dramatically better than I had! We're all failures! So either working at the Citizen Lab causes you to become antonomically challenged (can I get worker's comp for that?), or this whole GRE antonym section is ass. Ass, of course, being a perfectly valid word to use in that context in that sentence. I know. I'm a perfect sentence completioner.