Dave Kellam

I’ve been mulling over getting a digital camera recently. For one it will give me more material to work with for the website, as well as opening up the possibility of some photo archives. I enjoy taking pictures but I don’t have a good quality camera and find that I generally tend to be too lazy to go pick up film and get it developed. The quality of digital camera’s has become a lot better over the recent years and you can also take digital photos to a photoshop to get developed (or upload them to a website and get hardcopies delivered). Now I just have to find the funding for such an endeavor; I believe that I still have a bond in my parents safety deposit box that my grandfather left me. Years ago when it matured I used a portion of the interest to buy a cd player that had treated me very well over the years.

Of course I’m very hard at work studying and have little time to do anything else (*cough, cough*) but I have come accross a few goodies: the new spider-man trailer and a little flash game called incriminati. The flash game involves hiding things from your parents; relatively simple but somewhat challenging. The spider-man trailer is interesting, it shows that the movie has the potential to be pretty good or pretty bad.

Wow, this little flash thing is pretty impressive [via davezilla].

I didn’t really sleep all that well last night, i think my brain was too active from studying. All in all, i’ve been up for quite a long time today combined with the very little sleep, which makes me feel rather tired. The stats exam this morning fried my brain and sent me into a vegetative state for a large portion of the afternoon. Of course I probably needed some downtime.

I jump started my brain a short while ago by going out and seeing Waking Life. It’s been out for awhile, but in a town this size it takes awhile to get some of the more artsy films. I watched it with one of my housemates and we were both totally blown away. First off, it’s atypical in that it uses rotoscoping; a technique of animation overlaying film. Of course there are the people who’ll say that rotoscoping is nothing new and a number of the concepts in the movie are introductory collegiate philosphies. There’s a lot more there; lots of layers and levels that are integrated and applicable in that scene yet convey self-references to the film as whole.

Overall, I thought it was a great movie that opens your mind up a bit. It’s probably the first time since Memento that I’ve walked out of a threatre with my brain still very much active. I didn’t end up with that feeling of drooling pacfication suffered at the hands of a movie surgeon who opened up my skull and went to town with an egg-beater. I’d recommend seeing it.

Wow, stats sure are mindnumbing. I spent the afternoon going over old exams and I’ll probably be spending the evening doing that as well. At least I feel a little bit more confident, although I still don’t think i’m apt to do very well.

Two of my housemates are putting together a ‘feast’ of sorts; duck, sweet potato, pepppers, triffle and so on. I think they’re planning on eating sometime around eight, I told a couple friends that I’d meet them again at seven to continue studying. We’ll see how things work out for me.

I came across some information regarding ad-blocking. I imagine that it works, although I don’t really have any plans to block ads. The only thing I did do was go to doubleclick and opt out of their cookie tracking. Although all that really does is create targeted advertising. I figure that the information would be pretty useful if you were on a low bandwidth connection, as the ads would really bog down loading time. I’m on a cable connection and realize that the ad revenue from impressions is what keeps a lot of these websites afloat. I find it easy enough to just ignore them.

A solid way to waste an afternoon is to begin playing Worms World Party. We set it up on two of the computers in the house, two guys in each room blowing each other up and yelling back and forth. Andrew and Shawn both have a politics exam tomorrow, my first exam isn’t until wednesday.

We were also playing worms during the wee hours of the morning and noticed the snow beginning to fall. It’s probably only the second time that it’s snowed for us this year, although it’s the first time that the snow has stayed on the ground. A good chunk of it melted today, anything that was in direct sunlight. Sometimes I enjoy snow, right now I could do without the cold weather.

I went out to the theatre with my housemates the other night and saw Ocean’s Eleven. It wasn’t really that great, although I don’t think the original was to begin with. It’s basically a combination of every other heist movie that you’ve seen in the last number of years. As far as Soderbergh goes, the movie was basically a combination of Traffic and Out of Sight (both of which were better movies).

Mmm, donairs are so good. It’s also probably the closest place near my house that you can get take out food from at all hours. So good and meaty with the unfortunate side-effect of indigestion. Although that may be attributed to overall crappy eating during exam time.

It’s the middle of exam season; no better time to redo everything. In an attempt to jump start my interest again, I’m reorganizing everything and giving it a fresh new look. Hopefully the organization will be more condusive to new content creation.

I don’t really know why I haven’t been updating. I could say that I’m too busy but that’s most likely complete bullshit. I spent a decent chunk of any given day poking around on the internet and finding interesting things, I just haven’t been writing any of it down. Well, the holiday season approaches and I only have three exams this time around, so I should be able to get it all going again.

The other sections will arrive as I complete them, I figured that I may as well get this one up first.