I have just heard tonight that I will be in apartment 21 for the summer. This is good for a couple reasons. It is only one flight up from here so it will be easier to move. It is a good apartment and I have known the people who have lived there for the past couple of years - and I know it was well cared for. It is on the ground floor so my brother won't get to complain about lugging his crap up a couple flights of stairs - something I am all too familiar with. Plus I am pretty sure that they are the apartments that have had recent renovations as far as bathrooms and kitchens go.

I also don't think that the current residents are staying for next year, so this is likely the apartment that I will be living in for the fall as well. That is my assumptions anyway - and my brother isn't moving in until then. For the summer it looks like I will be living by myself. Good times.

In the middle of a quite successful Geekbeer/SoundByte/Art's Party.

We actually had our subs and a floor monitor and everything was set up well. People were starting to show up and the mood was right. We had someone performing on the guitar for us and then BAM! - power outage. And it stayed out. (I believe it lasted 3 hours). So we took down the gear and stored everything away. So at this point it is only shortly after 7pm and so we planned to see a movie: Hellboy. It was a good little movie. Anyone who likes action movies with bizarre stories... this is one for you.

J.D., the lead character from Scrubs (a very funny medical comedy on NBC), is played by an actor named Zach Braff. Apparently, Zach is also a bit of a writer and director as he has a movie coming out from Fox Searchlight called Garden State. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, but it isn't coming out in theatres until the end of July. You can see the trailer from the Apple trailers catalogue. It is a romantic comedy with a dramatic flair. It will be unusual to see this actor not wearing blue scrubs and maintaining a running monologue of his life. That being said... I haven't seen the movie. I ran across this movie this morning and I thought I would share with everyone.

It is finally over. Not that it doesn't happen each and every term. Even if you stay relatively on top of things over the course of the term, things will always come up to attack you in the night while you aren't watching at the end of the classes. This term was no different and I might even be heard to claim that this was a more brutal Hell Week than ever, but thinking back to Algos and Software Engineering last summer, I'm not 100% on that. In any case, I survived. I still have exams, but those barely count. Although I also have a huge assignment for code optimization and need to finish the Community Outreach report (and web site)

In case anyone was curious, I am home this weekend - enjoying the relaxation of being finished classes, spending time with my family for Easter. I'd like to wish everyone a happy Easter and good luck on exams to everyone who has them.

I know that is it has been a while, but I finally have a new poll up - not that it is something people flock here for.

Did anyone watch this when they were kids? I did. And while I was doing a routine sweep of IMDB I discovered that they have DVDs of the first four seasons. Seasons 1 and 2 are out already and seasons 3 and 4 will be out on April 27th.

I think it would be cool if they brought out more of the old TV shows on DVD, I know that I would likely buy them. The benefits are that the kids who watched them are starting to enter into the work world and a lot of them are buying DVDs of TV shows... so why not prey on their nostalgia and crank out some re-mastered classics. Astroboy? Get Smart? Maybe it's just me... :)

Oh what a shitty day. I spent the entire day in bed trying not to be sick. The irony is that if I were to get sick then it would remove the 'problem' from my system and I would likely have felt better. But I have a serious dislike of throwing up so I played it safe - albeit uncomfortable - all day. There was a brief period of time where I considered that it might be the flu, but other than the passing nausea and 'hot flashes' I had none of the other usual symptoms of the flu. Granted I don't get sick very often, but if I think back to the flu I had in grade 6... I recall being quite ill - headache, fever, congestion, etc (I'm sure that you all are familiar at least a little bit) and none of that was present. So I have ruled it to be food poisoning. However I'm not 100% what might have caused it - I'm leaning towards the pizza I ordered last night, but I have ordered from them recently and it was fine. I'm also kind of disappointed that I have half a pizza that I'm going to have to toss because I can't rule that out as the cause.

Fortunately I do feel a fair bit better now - indicating again that it isn't the flu. Hopefully by tomorrow morning, all systems will be ago. Thanks for caring.

Finally - after years of anticipation, I have finally seen Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith's newest movie. And it was good. It was different from Kevin's other movies, but it was really good to see that he has more up his sleeve than 'Snooch to the Nooch'. Ben Affleck - say what you will - was really good and you are sure to enjoy Liv Tyler's character. An excellent, emotional story, acted well and directed very well - this is what awaits you when you go and see Jersey Girl.

Well... I have finished my code optimization exam. Despite the professor saying that it would be vicious, it was quite manageable thanks to the fact that I was prepared. More prepared than I have been for any other exam I have written. No that isn't true... I studied more than any other exam... but there have been some easy exams that I have been well prepared for without studying. If that makes any sense to you then I applaud you.

However, the kicker is that I still have to finish the assignment and that is a real burden. I'll take the exam any day. It will get done though and then I only have two exams. And another group project. Damn... going to be a busy day week.

Just to let all of you aggregating news freaks out there know that I am going to try and get an RSS feed up and running this weekend. I put this off before, but now that I have fallen victim to the convenience of a News Aggregator I see the value of it. :P Once ready, I will be syndicating to torch.cs.dal.ca/~bate/rhuvok.rss

OK... procrastination is a real boon on my website. I now have my RSS feed being generated every hour on the hour. It just grabs the last twenty posts so hopefully it suits everyone. And unless something untoward happens, it is valid RSS 2.0 - thanks mike.

I wrote my second exam of the term (HCI) this morning (April 22) and I just learned that it has been marked and grades submitted already. As I was leaving my exam - it was 2 hours and I left around the 1:35 mark, I saw the TA marking the other exams already. Some people might think that it was because the TAs go on strike tomorrow and the prof was trying to get as much as possible from him. When in fact the reason for the rush is that CHI 2004 is this weekend in Vienna, Austria and the prof from my HCI class and a few of her grad students (including the TA) are going to be flying out tomorrow and Saturday.

In other school related news... I am still working on this sodding code optimization assignment and I seriously want to throw it out the window. But I think I have one more thing that I want to do add to it and I am going to pass it in regardless... Aarrgh. Just Digital Media left as far as exams go and it is on Saturday - at 7pm of all times. I'll keep you in the loop.

I'm sitting here, minding my own code optimizing business and *BUZZZ* - damn it... and since I'm still in my sleep-wear I throw on some more appropriate pants and away I go to get the door. Who is it? Two guys that I totally don't recognize. So I immediately get into my defensive, WTF do you want mode. I open the door and they are both moving into Glengary bachelors next year and they want to see my apartment. Normally not a big deal, but my apartment is such a mess right now that even I don't like being here. But I take them down to show them anyway. And they like it despite the mess².

And that's all I really have to say about it... the story definitely isn't as interesting and unusual as I first thought when I sat down to write about it, but that is life.

I found this from Tim Bray at ongoing.

Instructions:

• Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23
• find the 5th sentence, and
• post its text along with these instructions.
• point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

From Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson:

"They graze the backs of his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body."

Sometimes saying goodbye is a good thing. Like saying goodbye to my last exam. Saying good bye to an assignment which just wouldn't go away. Damn that code optimization assignment really had me there for a while... I loathed it, but I did finally get into it and finished it (as much as I was going to anyway) and handed it in last night around 7:30.

However, seeing as how this is my fourth year at university, many of the people I started with are graduating and moving on. Some are staying in the area, some are leaving. Some I will see again, some I may never. I'm not much for emotional good byes... if someone means that much to me, then I will see them again. I don't attach to people very well so the other people, while I may not be 'sad' that I don't see them, they all hold a place in my heart. That being said, I want to wish Chris a great time in Ottawa this summer and anyone else who is going elsewhere, have fun too.

I am so done exams... now to finish Community Outreach. :/

Minus 4 eh? I don't think I much like that idea.

And yes, for the day after my last exam I am up pretty early - and I'm showered too. I am heading out for brunch, not at Shirreff Hall as usual, but to Cora's. If you haven't been, Cora's is a great place for brunch that is located just off Spring Garden road - behind the HMV. Their menu is pretty eclectic but they do make a good meal. They don't have all you can eat bacon, but that is something I can live with in small doses.

I'll have to figure out the bacon schedule for the summer at the cafeteria and hit that up every once in a while. Good times.

PHP 5 Release Candidate 2 was released today. Apparently PHP 5 has a pretty nice backward compatibility mode for PHP 4. It will let you run all of your old scripts without modification assuming that you haven't used any of the new reserved words for your identifiers. I can't wait until I get a chance to start coding in PHP 5, but as it is... other than putting in on my own servers, there aren't a lot of servers that I know which will adopt it right out of the gate.

I just found out today that there is a mod_lisp. That's right - an apache module which would allow you to write web applications in Common Lisp. I'm not exactly sure how long this product has been around, but I don't imagine that many people use it. It is a cool idea, but Lisp isn't a very popular language despite it being quite powerful. Of course if you talk to Tony, my code optimization professor he can go on a great lengths about its merits.

On another note, the first day of work yesterday went well and although I have been on the building tour a few times before, it is always fun to get paid to wander around the building. :)

Thinkgeek is offering free shipping until Friday!! However, a look at the fine print and one reads that it is only for the contiguous 48 states. Which sucks... because they have a couple new t-shirts and toys that I wouldn't mind laying my hands on and free shipping would certainly sweeten the deal. But just like with TigerDirect.ca I guess free shipping doesn't apply to us.

I'm sure that many of you are in the process of ending a school term. And for a lot of people that means moving. I am in the same boat again, but fortunately I am only moving up one floor this time. I could be getting into my new place as early as today, but it might be tomorrow or the weekend before I get the nod that I can start the long arduous process of hauling my crap upstairs. At first glance of my apartment you can tell that I definitely did the dishes and tidied a bit, but there is stuff starting to drift from its usual location in preparation for the move. I know however that there is another mess that is hidden underneath the mess that is visible and that is the one that I'm worried about. That is the stuff that I don't know what to do with.

I did manage to get a shelf unit to replace the one that I was borrowing from Chris until recently. I also got a couple of 80 litre storage bins that have tiny wheels on them. I'm not sure what exactly will go in them yet, but rest assured that something will go in there - and depending on what it is, I might be just as well off to seal them up and hurl them into the harbour. I will try to get pictures up sometime of the move process. We'll see what happens.

RSS feeds are getting pretty popular of late, and even I have jumped on that band wagon. However, whenever I load up my news aggregator I wait for it to check for and download updates. If I lefts the aggregator on - which I usually don't because it is addictive - the thing would do this every hour. Each time it would likely download the RSS file and compare it against the database that it maintains. I am subscribed to about 15 feeds I'd say, so that means that it is like me visiting these 15 sites once every hour. The problem that some experts are concerned with now is that the Internet might not be able to handle thousands and thousands of people downloading millions of feeds on a regular basis. There is an article about it at Wired News that does explain it better than I can.