Dave Kellam

Last week was reading week, I was in Kingston for most of it pretending to read. I managed to get a chunk of reading and work done, but didn’t feel like I accomplished much. I was planning on getting more programming done on my 499 project than I did, but it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a pretty good feel for the game-logic. I needed some relaxation time, these next couple of weeks are probably going to be on the hellish side.

I went down to Missassauga towards the end of the week and stayed with Alanah for a couple of days. Did a detour down to Burlington and visited with most of my relatives, who I hadn’t seen in two or three years. I picked up a couple of cheap cds while I was down there, including: The Darkness – Permission to Land, The Darkness – Christmas Time (Don’t let the Bells End), Mars Volta – De-Loused in the Comatorium and Nas – Illmatic. I can also recommend the movie Formula 51 if you want a really oddball mix of comedy, including Samuel L. Jackson wearing a kilt for no reason. I also saw Underworld, which is a shite Matrix rip-off with some vampires and werewolves.

On the newspaper side of things, it was a fun night last night. We took over the journal house to do a parody issue, which should go over well tomorrow. I ended up getting home around 7 in the morning, there was just a bunch of a nitpicky stuff that held us up. That said, it looks a lit more convincing than other years (yea official templates).

I’m impressed that this sentence was published:

This suggests that without human evolutionary pressure, the singing dog lost its ability to read human minds.

That’s how the article ends. That’s all reporters do to spin stories though, take a quote out of context and run with it.

Here’s an article on the the design and implementation of the TiVo remote control. I find it amusing because this was essentially the project I had to do for my human-computer interaction class last year. We were essentially told to redesign television — to come up with some sort of system, be it redesign remote, settop box, whatever.

My group came up with a remote that had a little screen on it, kind of like a pda, that could receive data about whatever channel you were on or channel that you’d like to be on. It was essentially taking one of the preview type channels and putting it onto the remote, so you could continue watching your show and browse at the same time. The biggest problem would have been cost. The other thing that we came up with was a page button, something all remotes should have, so you can page your remote when you lose it.

I was about to click away from this relatively boring article about the US debt being over $7 trillion dollars when I notice the ad on the page. The ad is for some sort of credit card/debt reduction thing. It’s too bad there wasn’t an option in the selection box that said “sluggish economy, security and defense.” I guess it’s irony or comedy or whatever you want to call it. Regardless, it amused me. Oh, the US debt is also at $7 trillion, that’s a lot of money. Now, it’s all imaginary money, but it’s still a lot.