Dave Kellam

The government has tabled legislation that would decriminalize minor possession. The artlice has another insteresting tidbit thrown in:

Cultivating and trafficking marijuana are major businesses in Canada, run by biker gangs and Asian organized crime. Marijuana is estimated to be the third largest agricultural crop in both Ontario and British Columbia.

You’d think if all these people are growing it and smoking it, you may as well legalize it. That would be a heck of a lot of tax dollars that you’d pull in from farmers and people buying. Besides, alcohol and tobacco are legal. Given the choice between dealing with someone who’s high and someone who’s drunk, i’d much rather be with the high person. You might here something somewhat intelligent come out of their mouths, they won’t be stumbling around (maybe they’ll be a little bit slower) and you wont have to deal with them vomiting or getting alcohol poisoning. At least decriminalization/legalization will bring some tourists in, SARS doesn’t seem to be doing much for it. Maybe all of the American’s planning on visiting places like Kingston, or Montreal are worried that they might end up at one of the two Toronto hospitals that cases are linked to.

As always, the plan to update more frequently is thwarted by the exact opposite behaviour. Work was busy for awhile, that was followed by an extra-long weekend that I spent enjoying the sun and trying to avoid sitting in front of the box.

I managed to get out and see The Matrix Reloaded. I’ve heard that pirated copies are floating around the internet, although I wouldn’t know where to start looking. You never know, having a copy might come in handy if you wanted to catch up on dialogue or story points that you may have missed (maybe what the architect had to say). I’ve read a fair number of comments about the movie, some negative, some positive. Lets say that I have both types as well. But I had that for the first one as well. I enjoyed it, and can’t wait for the next one. The To Be Continuted… was one of my complaints, but that’s not big… it just felt like half a movie. The next one will be here soon enough, it was nice to see a trailer after the credits, just to remind you that there will be more soon.

Saw Belvedere play at the Scherzo on Tuesday night. They were alright, fairly generic punk rock but they had a clean style. It was obvious that they had some label power behind them and were able to parlay that into better equipment and sound quality. The show was worth seeing, but i didn’t buy a cd.

Lastly, the article Computing’s Lost Allure is worth reading. Or at least worth skimming if you’re thinking about a future in computing. It really just reiterates a lot of the points that I have witnessed as someone caught in the middle. I like computing, I love knowing about computers and how they work. I’m not such a hot programmer. I tend to only get really motivated by assignments that I’m interested in and I never seem to have the motivation that it takes to start a program from scratch. It’s interesting being at the tail-end of a degree that has gone out of style, as the article indicates. I’m looking at grad school as a way to avoid facing an uncertain future, as well as looking at fields outside of business-style computer programming towards places that are looking for people with logic backgrounds. There’s awhile to figure it out still. I’m not too concerned. I know that I haven’t made a poor choice, computers aren’t going to disappear, the world is going to need people that know how they work.

I ended up being away at a conference this weekend for my summer job. Basically people from a bunch of different science/computer camps sharing ideas. I failed to mark the passing of this site’s third anniversary. Or sort of birthday. Three years since I started the weblog thing. Different domain, different layout, different content, different tools. Unfortunately, this is the only real permanent record of my past sites, I lost a lot of the early ones that I did back in high school, in the days of extremely long Geocities names and embedded midi music. I just realized that I’ve been maintaining a website since grade 9 (at least I think 9 and not 10) but still that’s 6 or 7 years, somewhere around a third of my life. That’s pretty wild.

I think that I’ll set about finding some of my old content and trying to post some of it in an archive or something. I could even use it as a portfolio. Well time to go out for a drink, then crash and burn, it’s been a long weekend. I didn’t get a chance to call my mother, it might be a bit late. Well happy mother’s day to my mother if she’s reading this and any other mother who may be reading it. I have trouble fathoming why.

Apparently Canada is giving away a bit much in the civil liberties department and the US would like to minimize that:

“Also, Canadian laws and regulations intended to protect Canadian citizens and landed immigrants from government intrusion sometimes limit the depth of investigations.”

Them laws n’ stuff’re gettin’ in the way of them laws that we’re a tryin’ a protect. That’s right cowboy, we don’t need any of those hooligans smokin’ their reefers and causin’ a ruckus. It’s past noon, lets grab us some beer and some guns and go out and defend our right to have those guns.

New Hampshire’s is a state in mourning today, upon the discovery that the beloved Old Man of the Mountain had in fact fallen off the mountain. The pile of rocks on the side of the mountain resembles the face of an old man, an image that has graced coins, license plates, and other state paraphernalia for many years. The pile of rocks has become an enduring symbol of something-or-other for the state.

“I’m absolutely devastated by this,” said Masterman. “It makes you wonder if God is unhappy with what is going on.”

I bet God is unhappy with what’s going on. So unhappy that he wanted to jab an icepick right through the hearts of the infidels and unfaithful. Unfortunately all these infidel types seem to be in hiding these days, so he figured that knocking over a pile of rocks in New Hampshire would suffice. Frankly, I expect more out of a state with the motto, “Live Free or Die“.

Some music to listen to:

Another Bad Day at the Office
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Teenage Fanclub

That’s it for now, I got distracted after I started searching for more music.

So much for updating regularly. I’ve been busy with this whole moving houses thing and haven’t spent a whole lot of time sitting in front of the box. The move went well for the most part, slightly smaller room, closer to campus though and closer to work for the summer. The landlord was angry that we were taking our time getting everything out of the house, he kept sending around a lackey to piss us off more.

Lackey: You’re going to vacuum right?
Us: Our power is cut off
Lackey: So how are you going to vacuum?
Us: We can’t, the power’s been cut off
Lackey: How are you going to vacuum? The sheet says you’re supposed to vacuum.
Us: Well the sheet also says to leave furniture we don’t want on the front lawn, you’re getting angry at us for that
Lackey: I’ll be back in 45 minutes.

And it went on and on like that. When you’re spending a couple days lugging shit up and down stairs, and you’re tired and irritable because you’ve just finished the exam season, the last thing you need is some stupid fat bitch annoying the hell out of you.

AHHHHHHHHHH. That’s three years of university. How did that happen? I’m starting to feel old now. And now it’s some drinkee drinkee. Starting with some tasty Guinness, followed by some not-so-tasty-but-oh-so-drunkee Olde English. It’s past noon, it’s never too early.

The formal definition of “NP-Complete” uses reductions, or transformations, of one problem to another. Suppose we want to solve a problem P and we already have an algorithm for another problem Q. Suppose we also have a function T that takes an input x for P and produces T(x), an input for Q such that the correct answer for P on x is yes if and only if the correct answer for Q on T(x) is yes. Then, by composing T and the algorithm for Q, we have an algorithm for P.

Simple. Right?

Four exams finished, one left. The last one is algorithms, it should be interesting… i have a fair bit of material to learn.