Dave Kellam

Well I appear to be done school now, at least the undergraduate portion of it. I have a take-home exam to drop off in the morning some time, but it’s done. It’s been a hectic semester, I’ve spent the last couple days decompressing. I still need to do a little bit more work on my final project, but it’s not too bad. I switched my degree from a Bachelor of Science to a Bachelor of Computing because the school pushed through some new program, and I qualified for it. Doesn’t mean too much other than a change in name; it’s an SSP as opposed to a major and I leave with the ability to get some sort of certification faster. It also just didn’t seem right taking a science degree without doing chemistry, biology or physics.

I’ve been a little bit bored with the website because I’m sick of the design and layout of it. I’m thinking about dumping the weblog off of the root directory and onto a sub directory. Maybe still have post excerpts and quicklinks on the main page and have it act as more of a portal. I want to get more of my writing up, maybe start a photoblog and scrap the gallery and get up some sort of downloads section. I’m also thinking about redoing it all in css, although I would probably be creating a world of pain for myself. Seal Club has been my first real foray into a complete css layout and I can safely say that i was a bit of a pain.

An item of note: I’ve taken to drinking beer out of cans. They allow you to drink faster and the keg cans do a pretty good job staying cold.

Procrastination what? Nothing like taking a personality test to avoid studying. This is the Myers-Briggs Personality Type test. My label is INTP, it seems to fit.

School is almost done. There are some things I want to do to this site; namely some reworking with CSS and getting more content up.

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)