Dave Kellam

I basically spent the last couple of days doing nothing. Now I have a couple of weeks off from school, time that I can use to get caught up on some reading and whatnot. I came home last night but I’m apt to only stay for about a week. I left my computer in Kingston, so it’s not likely that I’ll have the site totally redesigned in the next few days. I brought my camera home, so maybe I’ll have some pictures to show. I have another site or two to rework as well once I get back to Kingston.

It’s kind of odd being home, I feel detached from the whole christmas/holiday thing after spending the last couple weeks in a bubble. I’ve got a couple of days to figure out what I’m doing as far as gifts go, maybe I’ll do some shopping this afternoon. I’m allergic to my cat, it makes me sneeze.

Wheeeee, exams are done and it’s time to get stupid. I finished my computer architecture exam a bit on the early side and came home. Just as I started typing this the doorbell rang and there was a delivery man with a digital camera for me, great timing. I ended up going with the Kodak DX3215, it’s a little bit low on the megapixel side but it should suit me mine for my needs. I never used to get 8×10’s developed with my film camera anyway. I purchased it from Henry’s, they had the cheapest prices around, better by $60 canadian. They had pretty fast shipping too. Time to play and then get stupid.

Instead of studying this afternoon, I decided to create the about section. That chewed up a couple hours of study time, now to get down to it. One left; computer architecture. I’m not too worried about it, i’m doing relatively well in the class.

I was going to watch a movie last night with some friends but ended up falling asleep instead. Just before it started I came downstairs, presumably to check the email or something and ended up being drawn to my bed. I proceeded to sleep for about fourteen hours, guess I was worn out from studying and the exam and whatnot. I had my Intro to Business exam yesterday, it went alright; I put an answer down for every question but there was some stuff I didn’t know.

I’ve been mulling over getting a digital camera recently. For one it will give me more material to work with for the website, as well as opening up the possibility of some photo archives. I enjoy taking pictures but I don’t have a good quality camera and find that I generally tend to be too lazy to go pick up film and get it developed. The quality of digital camera’s has become a lot better over the recent years and you can also take digital photos to a photoshop to get developed (or upload them to a website and get hardcopies delivered). Now I just have to find the funding for such an endeavor; I believe that I still have a bond in my parents safety deposit box that my grandfather left me. Years ago when it matured I used a portion of the interest to buy a cd player that had treated me very well over the years.

Of course I’m very hard at work studying and have little time to do anything else (*cough, cough*) but I have come accross a few goodies: the new spider-man trailer and a little flash game called incriminati. The flash game involves hiding things from your parents; relatively simple but somewhat challenging. The spider-man trailer is interesting, it shows that the movie has the potential to be pretty good or pretty bad.

Wow, this little flash thing is pretty impressive [via davezilla].

I didn’t really sleep all that well last night, i think my brain was too active from studying. All in all, i’ve been up for quite a long time today combined with the very little sleep, which makes me feel rather tired. The stats exam this morning fried my brain and sent me into a vegetative state for a large portion of the afternoon. Of course I probably needed some downtime.

I jump started my brain a short while ago by going out and seeing Waking Life. It’s been out for awhile, but in a town this size it takes awhile to get some of the more artsy films. I watched it with one of my housemates and we were both totally blown away. First off, it’s atypical in that it uses rotoscoping; a technique of animation overlaying film. Of course there are the people who’ll say that rotoscoping is nothing new and a number of the concepts in the movie are introductory collegiate philosphies. There’s a lot more there; lots of layers and levels that are integrated and applicable in that scene yet convey self-references to the film as whole.

Overall, I thought it was a great movie that opens your mind up a bit. It’s probably the first time since Memento that I’ve walked out of a threatre with my brain still very much active. I didn’t end up with that feeling of drooling pacfication suffered at the hands of a movie surgeon who opened up my skull and went to town with an egg-beater. I’d recommend seeing it.

Wow, stats sure are mindnumbing. I spent the afternoon going over old exams and I’ll probably be spending the evening doing that as well. At least I feel a little bit more confident, although I still don’t think i’m apt to do very well.

Two of my housemates are putting together a ‘feast’ of sorts; duck, sweet potato, pepppers, triffle and so on. I think they’re planning on eating sometime around eight, I told a couple friends that I’d meet them again at seven to continue studying. We’ll see how things work out for me.

I came across some information regarding ad-blocking. I imagine that it works, although I don’t really have any plans to block ads. The only thing I did do was go to doubleclick and opt out of their cookie tracking. Although all that really does is create targeted advertising. I figure that the information would be pretty useful if you were on a low bandwidth connection, as the ads would really bog down loading time. I’m on a cable connection and realize that the ad revenue from impressions is what keeps a lot of these websites afloat. I find it easy enough to just ignore them.