Dave Kellam

Another day, another midterm; friday afternoon… stupid bastards. This one would be my data structures course — AVL trees, (2,4) trees, the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm and so on, fun stuff. This is a nice AVL tree simulator if you feel the need to learn. Onward with the simulators! Here’s a fun little one for the physics behind jumping on skis. And there’s Cygwin, which isn’t so much a simulator as a unix environment that runs under windows.

I’m starting to get sick of this minimalist pure text thing. It’s nice, but I need some change. Fuck words as the art itself. The question is, “Do you want to focus on the writing itself or the presentation of the writing?” Hmm… almost makes you think Jacob Nielsen has a point. However, humanity likes things that look pretty. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover? That’s bullshit, everyone does it.

I’m thinking about switching the website from blogger over to moveable type or greymatter. I have cgi/perl available on my account now, so I can play around with stuff like that. Anyone have a preference or suggestion either way?

You can download a registry file that will make google your default search engine. This is a good thing, the default msn searches aren’t all that great. And yes, I’m going to stick with IE for awhile, at least until mozilla hits 1.0.

Two midterms left to go for the week, then I can start finishing some of the things I have waiting around; website stuff (some different mp3’s, more written stuff, some photo galleries, a reviews section), a bunch of reading, St. Patrick’s Day.
“Uh… St. Patrick’s day isn’t something you have waiting in the wings.”

“Yeah, but it’s coming up and it’ll act as a catalyst for unwinding.”

“Gee, you make no sense.”

I’m tempted to make a wobblevision, although the warnings of certain death upon touching some of the wires inside the television deter me somewhat.

Three midterms on tap this week. I forsee myself not enjoying any of them.

I’ve taken to drinking coffee with just sugar. I used to put cream or milk in it, but ran out a month or two ago and started drinking the coffee without it.

If I get bored later tonight, I’ll probably put up some pictures from breakfast yesterday, some of them turned out pretty well. Back to teaching myself some more Haskell and learning the basics of Prolog.

Fortune Cookie, Message One: You are heading for a land of sunshine.
Fortune Cookie, Message Two: You are always welcome in any gathering.

I feel like I’ve accomplished more than usual today. I was up nice and early this morning to go for breakfast with a bunch of friends. At that point, the weather was beautiful but it has deteriorated since then. I proceeded to coop myself up in an office during the afternoon and hammer out the new design for golden words. It’s up and it looks a lot better. There’s still a fair bit of work to be done with the site, but nothing extremely pressing.

I also made a new splash for Simon either last night or thursday night, I can’t remember. I think the image is alright, go check it out.

I threw another template over top of the photo section, not entirely sure if I like it or not.

It was one of those nice boring days; the ones where you do some productive stuff but spend a large chunk of it vegitating. I attended a presentation by Bruce McDonald this afternoon. He’s a relatively notable Canadian director, responsible for Hard Core Logo amongst other movies. If you haven’t seen it, I’d deffintely recommend doing so. He showed his final year film presentation, and another short based on a Michael Ondaatje. He also talked about what he learned/didn’t learn in film school and fielded some questions.

Of course, I’m not a film student but my housemate is, so I just tagged along to the screening. His final project was way too long (something he admitted) and had a lot of gratuitous shots/scenes (those showoffy-hey-look-at-this-isn’t-it-cool kind of shots). I really enjoyed the second film. All in all, it was pretty interesting.

Bit of a pisser of a day yesterday; test in the morning and two interviews for positions that I didn’t get. The first interview was a followup to one of the ones I had on sunday. It came down to me and a guy I know, we were both equally qualified but they ended up giving it to him because he had a bit more experience with kids. It is kind of nice to know that it wasn’t something bad you said or did in the interview to not get the job, must not have been easy. The other interview was for golden words business manager. Once again, pretty equal footing and it didn’t work out. It is kind of good, it’ll mean a bit less work next year. I’ll go for staff writer, concentrate on that side of things and maybe make a run for ed next year.

I started out liking this article that points out that people shouldn’t feel they’re stupid because they can’t use a computer. But, he ended it off with the cd-drawer being a cup-holder joke. I want to punch the author in the mouth for regurgitating such a stale joke. The point it is, the analogy between plumbing and computers is good, the article is not.