Dave Kellam

At some point while I was dreaming last night, I decided that today would be the day I caught up on my sleep. Hence, not waking up until 2:30 and having to field a telephone call from my mother five minutes later. She didn’t believe me when I said that I’m normally up by noon on the weekend. At any rate, I should probably try to accomplish some school related tasks in what remains of the afternoon; on to my readings.

Fear of love. Fear of commitment. You want to reach out and take them in your arms. It would less challenging to ignore or to forget but that would make it too easy. Wouldn’t it? Yeah, right… the sleep thing.

I just got back from a By Divine Right show. It was awesome; they rock hard and put on a great performance. So much energy, so much. You can’t avoid jumping around and going nuts while they’re on stage. Try to find a copy of 5 bucks, it’s a great song. And now it’s the wee hours of Saturday and I should really get some sleep.

It sure would be nice if computer programs wrote themselves. You see someone walk up to a computer and say, “Hey, I need something to do such and such, make it.” And a couple minutes later the program spits out another program, which isn’t so much having the program write itself as having another program write it. At any rate, it’s not really possible; having a program that could write any other program would in essence solve the halting problem. Although some would claim it is solveable, that’s geeky computer/math humour for you.

I’ve just spent a bit of time reading google’s initial proposal. I’ve found it pretty interesting because we’ve just finished up a bunch of string theory stuff in my data structures course. One of my favourite bits:

[A] PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation.

They have a nice little linear time algorithm that they’re using. Those kind of statistics are pretty impressive considering that this paper was published a couple of years ago.

It was yet another uneventful morning; didn’t make my 8:30 class, but I did make it to the other two. Looks like we’re heading into graph theory in my data structures class, it looks like some pretty crazy shit. For our last assingment, we’re going to be given a data set representing a map of the London Underground and asked to write some functions to calculate the shortest route from point a to point b. They’re probably thinking, these kids keep asking for real-world examples, maybe if we give them one they’ll shut up and not bother asking us again. We’re doing graph theory in my logic class too, so it’s nice to start getting some overlap/correlation between courses.

Moveable Type 2.0 was released today, so I decided to migrate over. I’ve been wrestling with it for the better part of the night, thus avoiding my software specifications assingment. This was the first cgi/perl script I’ve tried to install, I think it went ok. I’ve learned a number things about scripting, chmod and so forth (here’s a good little resource concerning common cgi problems). The long and short of things is that I seem to have MT up and running ok, but it’s late, I have an assingment to finish and I should really get some sleep. I’ll probably mess around with the templates either tomorrow or the day after.

This has to be one of the more bizzare pieces of junk mail i’ve received. I have to admit that I can’t remember for the life of me what my dealings with the British Chamber of Commerce were. I can’t really figure out. Anyway, here’s a good response to the message.

My official position at the paper next year is Staff Writer, no more webmonkey for me. I’ve been told the eds are working on defining the positions better this year, so the staff writer’s actually have things to do, rather than just having a nifty title. Booga booga, I’ll probably still be involved with the website.

If I somehow become involved in politics remind me to make a push for the full pint. It’s reassuring to know that Great Britain has their priorities straight.

I posted a few more of the things I’ve written this year online.

I took the plastic off my window a couple days ago. I remember thinking — hey, it’s pretty nice outside, I should really let some fresh air in. I also remember checking out the weather network for the local report before bed and thinking — whee, decent weather… no more snow. I woke up to the sound of cars whizzing by outside on wet pavement and thought — oh well, rain is fine at least it’s not snowing. Of course it turned out that there was snow on the ground; that ugly wet slushy variety that turns the world into a huge cold and messy puddle. No fun, no fun at all.

So, other than class, I’ve stayed inside all day. It’s been one of those days when you feel that you’ve been productive and have accomplished a lot, but realize at some point that all you’ve actually been doing is procrastinating. It’s fine, provided every day isn’t like that.