Dave Kellam

I can safely say that two consecutive days of writing my paper to the sounds of Underworld, will cause my brain to forever associate the Six-Day War with thudding techno beats.

First exam down, a few more things to go. I’m headin’ home in about 5 minutes to spend a day or two with the family. No posting tonight, thanks to the birthday party that john is having and his monopoly of the basement. In the meantime, check out Seal Club, a new collaborative effort by me, freeman and tavis. Read this interview with DeForest Kelley.

Taking the passion a little a bit too far:

Melissa Salzmann, who took her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.

It’s kind of funny to tell you the truth. I want to see vidcap footage.

To the assortment of copy editors that read my site:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

And to anyone else who wants to fight my mad writing skills; How grammatically sound are you?

Got up early this morning to finish off the poetry portion of a take-home Math & Poetry exam that was due at noon. It involved creating found poetry; I made a found Haiku from sentences on the back of a Sun Chips bag.

The post mail proceeded to inform me that Queen’s has accepted my application to teacher’s college for next year. I’m going to take it, which means that I’ll most likely be certified to teach high school around this time next year. Ooo, scary. That was a nice high point for the day.

I spent the afternoon wrestling with the camp computers and failing miserably. The router wasn’t behaving nicely and one of the computers has a messed up windows installation that fails to reinstall, making the data on it a pain to recover. Then a bunch of girls who are moving into the house next year showed up with their mothers to look at the shithole that I live in. I didn’t know about it and was the only one around. It was a waste of my precious internet browsing time.

Alanah’s been sick the last couple of days; her parents were going to come up and take her to the hospital. I went out around 10 to get some food and stuff, she stopped by in the half hour I was gone. Left a message saying there was a five hour wait at the hospital, so she was going home for a couple of days. Boo.

Now I’m watching The Butterfly Effect by myself. I had the urge to post.

An NYT article claiming to have a heretical view of file sharing, in other words disagreeing with the RIAA. I’ve known this for years; I’ve been downloading music since 1998, or maybe 1999, back when it use to bring my Pentium 90 to its knees.

The industry response, titled “Downloading Hurts Sales,” concludes: “If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?”

I remember learning, “Correlation does not causation make,” in a first year psychology class. Maybe the music sucked, maybe the economy was bad, hmm… think about it some more and then try to tell me that every album I’ve bought in the last 6 years hasn’t been influenced by mp3s or live shows.

Who: Grampa aka Crackmoney
When: Tonight (April 4th)
Where: The elegant Plaza Hotel

Bear witness to the first CD released on Bolderstone Records — Pop it up Son by Grampa. The website is pretty shaky right now, I was hoping to have a better site up by tonight, but school conspired against me. Go there and download some samples. There will be a cover to get in; you can also buy an album or mp3 cd.

To serve and protect, to serve and protect:

“Contrary to his normal habits, Teddy climbed inside a PC printer and was unable to get out because of his corpulence,” police in the northern city of Flensburg said in a statement, adding that they initially thought it was an April Fool’s joke

The cops are doing a bangup job in Germany. (article)

Hola, I’ve been staring at my computer a lot the last couple of days. It’s been pissing me off because a lot of that time has been spent staring at windows and learning the frustrating windows ce api calls. Here’s a screencap of a pocketpc being emulated on windows emulated on a mac. It’s also evidence that my project is semi-working. Whoooooo.

Buppa cha ba buppa cha ba:

He said that downloading a song or making files available in shared directories, like those on Kazaa, does not constitute copyright infringement under the current Canadian law.

Download away my friends, download away.

Apparently, Denmark has invaded Canada. And none other than Stockwell Day has taken up the cause of defending our great nation:

“The nation of Denmark has laid claim to Canadian territory. Its military, from its warship, hoisted its flag on our Arctic territory without permission, without warning, and without any fear of being stopped,” Mr. Day said on Friday.

“The government’s utter disarray is underlined by the fact that the scandal has led to the recall of our ambassador to Denmark, the very nation that is challenging our sovereignty,” Mr. Day said.

We must fear our Danish overlords! Canada’s response? We’re sending a warship, troops and helicopters up for patrols sometime in the summer.

A few excerpts from an essay by Norman Borlaug:

“Low-yield farming is only sustainable for people with high death rates”.

“Some of them say that modern food is not as healthy as yesterday’s, though science can find no lack of nutrients and, all over the world, the people eating modern crops are growing taller and living longer.”

I remember watching a Bullshit! episode about genetically engineered crops and Penn & Teller referring to Borlaug as the greatest man alive, that he had saved more than a billion lives. There was an article on slashdot today that says he just turned 90. He is responsible for the “Green Revolution” and won a noble prize in 1970.