Dave Kellam

I went down to health services and got a flu shot today, now the top of my arm is kind of sore. I have a computer architecture assignment due later this week that I’m trying to work on right now. It involves converting a program from Java into assembly language. It’s loads of fun.

I went home over the weekend. For the most part I avoided doing homework, favouring sleep and vegitating instead. I did get my laundry done and some grocery shopping done, so it was a halfways productive.

Nethack, a text based dungeon game. I haven’t really played it much, but apparently it’s pretty popular.

I watched Shrek in the afternoon yesterday and was pretty surprised. I think i was expecting a movie more like toy story, then again with mike myers and eddie murphy I probably shouldn’t have been. I ended up getting a free pass to Life as a House last night during a meeting, so I went and saw it. It’s being touted as an oscar contender, I think it’s debatable. The movie was pretty good, but it tried a bit too hard to be American Beauty. The acting was pretty good overall, although i’m not too sure about hayden christiansen. I haven’t seen anything else he’s been in, so there’s nothing to compare it to. His character is the overdone goth-druggie-marilyn manson cliche that makes you want to beat the script writers over the head for including in the movie.

Went to a Rheostatics show last night at one of the campus pubs. The bar happens to be in the same building that we have press-nite in every sunday, although it isn’t usually open on sunday nights. I was impressed by the show, very chill atmosphere. The opening act was Kevin Hearn, the keyboardist for the barenaked ladies. harland williams was there with the band too, he sung a couple songs wearing a bright orange sponge wig. A bunch of the guys from the band were wandering in and out of the pressnite during the afternoon.

I was playing around with some settings on my computer earlier today, group policy stuff. Never actually made any real changes though. I also decided to procrastinate by rearranging my bookmarks. I rebooted the computer tonite and it decided to be funny and delete 90% of my bookmarks. I guess they’re actually favourites and not bookmarks. I can’t really see any pattern in the ones that were deleted and the ones that weren’t. Oh well, more procrastination trying to repopulate them.

In an unrealted note, i think i may have been infected with some derivative of the nimda virus early in the morning while i was in bed. Outlook was open and checking every five minutes, with the preview pane open. There was an executable or some script embedded inside the html of a junk email. It executed and sent a bunch of people an email from me. If you received some of my gibberish, i apologize. Beyond that, I can’t really find any traces of it ever being on my system. I’ve done at least five scans today with updated virus definition files and they all came up clean. Not the easiest one to figure out.

The hellish month is almost over. It’s been pretty pathetic in terms of keeping this site updated, but I have managed to finish all the school work I needed to get finished. A midterm tomorrow and a test wednesday and then I should be free for a little while.

On friday night I got crested by golden words. It’s basically an initiation after you’ve shown a significant contribution to the paper. The end result is a crest to sew onto my jacket. It was fun, albeit tiring. Basically, a bunch of running around doing bizarre scavenger hunts and getting dirty. After the midterms this week, I hope to maybe get a redesign down, get conform started up again, a project started up with my housemates, as well as anything else I deem necessary. In the time being, I must get back to my studying of computer architecture.

It’s coming to and end. One essay, one midterm done. Assignment and optional report, almost done. A test and a midterm next week and then I should have a little break before more things are due. Well, maybe a week without any school work that I’m required to have marked. Maybe a chance to redesign. Or maybe time to do some graphics or a font or something. Who knows.

I’m in the early stages of writing an essay, the first one i’ve had to do in a couple years. I’ve chosen a topic based on the heart of darkness. Maybe I’ll post it when I’ve finished, maybe I won’t. It depends whether or not I actually like what I’ve written. Beyond that, there’s a statistics midterm and a programming assignment due this week. I have to teach myself how to write using assembler code. It’s a bit different if you’re used to programming in higher level languages.

Check out the last couple days of boondocks, starting with the strip from the 17th. Aaron McGruder has balls made of solid platinum to write stuff like that these days. I think the last couple strips are hilarious, a great statement regarding some of the excessive american flag waving that’s going on. So far, the editorial policy of the paper I write for has been strictly hands off. No anthrax jokes, no terroists jokes. It’s really a shame, one of the ways humanity copes with disaster is through humour. If people become oversaturated with patriotic images, they’ll start to lose the original meaning. The same way that people have become desensitized towards violence on television, they will become less aware of what their country’s core symbols represent.

Here’s a list of the first 100 fibonacci numbers. Why would you want to know these? It’s hard to say. There’s also this page with a lot of links to various mathematical things involving factorization and finding really large prime numbers.

I windows xp, if you put a picture called folder.jpg inside a folder, it will use it for the thumbnail view of that folder. It’s good to display the album cover of various cds that you’ve put on the harddrive. It’s also a good way to waste time when you should be studying.

Every street is dark
And folding out mysteriously
Where lies the chance we take to be
Always working
Reaching out for a hand that we
can’t see
Everybody’s got a hold on hope
It’s the last thing that’s holding me

– Hold on Hope (Guided by Voices)

It’s a damn good song, actually the album it came from is great. The next couple of weeks are going to be a whole shitload of work; midterms, tests, essays and assignments.
My birthday was a week ago and was pretty uneventful. Now, I’m 20 years old. I feel no change but the number has a very different ring to it.