Dave Kellam

I forgot to mention that I saw The Count of Monte Cristo at some point last week. What a horrible movie. Maybe that’s a bit too harsh, the acting was pretty good and the scenery/costumes were great, but the script, wow. Clichés, clichés, more clichés and a lot of cheese thrown in for good measure. It all seemed contrived and just plain bad. And what genius of a casting director put Luis Guzmán in it? Yes, Luis Guzmán in a period French movie, makes sense to me too.

Just read an interesting article over at Canoe. The author talks about converting all his CD’s to mp3 and setting up linux servers, etc. It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. My computer is my stereo, so most of the stuff I listen to is in mp3 format anyway. For that reason, I tend not to listen to CD’s that I buy unless I put them on to the harddrive.

It’s reading week and I’m actually doing reading, go figure. I just finished reading the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one of the many required books in my English class. At this point, I’ve started all of them but haven’t finished three or four of the books, so that’s one of the tasks for the week. As far as the Bell Jar goes, I enjoyed it and probably would have more so if I had been a woman. It’s in a similar vein to Catcher in the Rye, one of my favourite reads. The remainder of the evening beckons, I’m off.

I’m back home in Brockville for a few days. It’s really kind of weird, my parents are at work and my brothers are at school, so the house is empty save the dog and cat. The cat doesn’t want you near her (I don’t care that much, i’m allergic to it anyway) and the dog is not used to people being home, seeming a little bit attention deprived. There’s that overall detached feeling as well; my room isn’t really my room anymore, all my stuff is at school, it doesn’t have that personal feeling. Maybe it will allow me to get some work done. Maybe not.

There’s an interesting article in the boom! section of The Toronto Star (feb 12) written by Christopher Hutsul. It was about the current generation of twenty-year olds, with our designs on a higher education and upper class living. He talks about a generation which was told that they should aspire to achieve greatness and look down upon menial labour. A basic argument, ending in the realization that we’re probably going to have to attain the zen of gruntwork to be happy later in life. At any rate, I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it’s not available online. Update: I scanned the article.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if something is a bad omen or just bad luck. The situation: me, standing in the freshly cleaned kitchen deciding that a slice of bread with peanut butter on it would make a good snack. What happens: finish buttering the slice, put the peanut butter away, put the kinfe in the sink, pick up slice, drop slice (peanut butter side down onto table). End result: stare at the table with disbelief, pick slice up off table, eat it anyway.

An interesting article that offers a good argument for porting OS X to the Intel architecture. My favourite line would have to be, “[It] would be like Disney selling porno movies in Thailand.”

I put a quick-fix photo section tonight. It’s not all that slick, but it’s somewhat functional. I’ll get something better up later.

Another redesign of the daily section. I found the old one was too dark and not condusive to easy reading. Thus, it’s plain and simple. I’m not planning on taking my computer home for the break, so I’m not really sure if i’ll get the photo and projects sections up during the next week, unless I feel rather ambitious tonight.

Beyond that, i’ve been doing a bunch of cleaning today. We’d all been in some sort of work mode, so things haven’t been cleaned in awhile. Most of the dishes hadn’t been cleaned in at least a week, so that’s been the biggest task. Andrew and Shawn both took off without really thinking about cleaning any of the upstairs. It’ll all end up working out in the end.

Spring break time as some would like to call it or reading week for others. Nothing really exciting for me this time around, just some relaxing and visiting old friends. There’s a driving appointment as well; Ontario and their damned graduated licensing program. I have one more phase left to go on my license which i’ve been putting off for awhile; one last road test and that’s it. Stupid shit, the real reason the government does it is so they can get more money out of us.