Dave Kellam

I didn’t feel much like updating this week; it’s been a lot of camp and chilling. I’m gonna head to the Vans Warped Tour in Toronto tomorrow, it should be a good time. I’m not as into the punk scene as i used to be, but i recognize some of the bands. Wheeee, long weekend!

A recently conducted survey has found that a majority of Americans believe Eminem is more truthful than President Bush.

Questions relating to trust were posed to 1,016 Americans, and 53 per cent of those found the rapper’s rhymes more credible and believable than Bush’s speeches.

Somehow it doesn’t surprise me. His lyrics are socially concious and on the mark, and his tracks have some pretty good beats. I find his voice to be annoying though and have trouble listening to his work for any extended length of time. The first hiphop album that I bought was Enter the 36 Chambers, so to me, hiphop will always sound like a bunch of angry black guys. That album is raw and classic, Eminem just doesn’t do it for me.

I would like to put forth a proposal that would see the site of the upcoming SARS relief concert incorporated as a city, making it one of the largest urban centres in Canada. By relatively current size estimates, the city that SARS built will probably end up somewhere around 10th in the country.

I found this crazy explanation of the activity I did with the kids this afternoon. Basically, we made bouncy balls with sodium silicate and ethanol; didnt go into that much background. That article has some choice instructions though:

Step 10: Wearing plastic gloves, place the polymer between the palms of your hands and gently rotate until a spherical ball that no longer crumbles is formed. BE PATIENT – discover a technique. Moisten the ball occasionally by holding it in a small stream of water from the faucet.

Step 11: Bounce your ball (squeeze it, stretch it, step on it – find out about it!). Observe and compare the properties of your ball to the properties of ethyl alcohol and sodium silicate.

Step 12: Compare your ball with those of the other members of the class. How many properties can you compare? (size, height of bounce, etc)

I’m either too immature to me teaching or spending a lot of time with high school kids has affected me. Forget that, somebody had to have had a sense of humour when they wrote that thing. I spent two or three hours making those bloody balls.

Liquid nitrogen is fun; flowers make a cool sound when they shatter, almost like glass. Bananas make a huge mess when they shatter and thaw, kind of like goo. And this chem lab has a pretty wicked setup, it’s a brand-new building. Each lab station has a flat-panel monitor and a computer and all sorts of crazy chemistry stuff.

I’ve been doing some general site maintennance stuff over the last week or two, trying to get things going again. I’m in the process of ditching the old photo section and starting up a new one using Gallery (which wasn’t playing nice and took me awhile to get installed). The old photo gallery started getting errors awhile ago but I didn’t bother fixing it. I’ve started putting things that I wrote this year up in the written section, it’s not that hard but it’s taking a bit longer than planned.

Lets see, I installed new stats software and you can see how people are getting to the site. I think that the cron job is set up properly and it should update twice a day (although it might only be doing it once). I also upgraded Moveable Type and added a button on the sidebar so people can donate hosting money. Not that I expect anyone to actually donate money, but dreamhost set it up so their donation buttons only get used for site hosting.

I’ve seen stuff like this before, similar sayings and such, but never wrote them down. Anyway, this time it’s from Larry Wall’s State of the Onion address.

We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing

It sums up a lot and applies well to the technology industry. Software development is pretty unrewarding, save the challenging yourself part. I could go off on a rant, but it’s the general feeling in any industry — nobody understands or appreciates what is involved.

We were doing some stuff with Paint Shop Pro today at camp, I sat there doing this picture. It was doing it on the projector after everyone else got started, a few of the kids noticed but the rest kept working on whatever image they were creating.

Omar emailed me this photo that he took of me at camp. I never saw him take it, so it was fun to find in my inbox. This is also my first attempt at using the uploading functionality built into Moveable Type and Kung-Log.

Let the masses rejoice, as parliament has voted to strike down an act that would have seen dwarf-tossing banned in Ontario.

No more wee little kids this week, we’re doing computer camp with the older kids. It’s fun, half way through the day and i haven’t had to yell at anyone or tell them what to do fifteen kabillion times. I also have access to a computer the whole time, that’s always fun.

Apparently, the Canadian government has decided to become a drug dealer.

Meanwhile, a packet of 30 seeds from the federal government will cost $20 and dried pot will cost $5 a gram.

According to the RCMP, the street price of the drug varies from $10 to $25 a gram, Cripps-Prawak said.

“We did not try to be competitive with the black market,” she said. “What we did try to do is establish a price which is reasonable, based on costs associated with the production and implementation of the program.”

The marijuana will come from an underground lab in Flin Flon, Man., where the government is growing the plant for research into its medicinal use.

The ‘underground’ lab part makes it sound pretty shifty, but it’s the truth… the lab is in an abandoned mine. And, “We did not try to be competitive with the black market,” that’s pure gold.

Estonian wife carriers have won the international wife-carrying championship for the sixth year in a row. The grand prize is the woman’s weight in beer, approximately 45 litres of ale.