Exit · Sun

"In Democratic Transylvania, they Vote for Counts"

Well, second entry of the day straight from the student lounge of the university of winnipeg and courtesy of apple computer. Kelsey and I just went to a newspaper meeting. We're both writing stories for the paper now. Hers is on aboriginal midwives, mine is about this woman who's going to Rwanda. It's kind of scary, because I've never written an article for a newspaper before. And I have to interview this woman too. It's good that I'm getting involved with stuff though. Yay! Only 45 minutes of nothing to do left before class.

Sitting in programming, bored out of my skull. She can't seem to speak english clearly and doesn't really seem to have the greatest grasp on programming. The weather is so bad today. I had to bus to school and waiting for the bus to come outside on Portage avenue was terrible. It was so windy that the rain didn't just hit you, it sprayed you. I had my laptop with me too and I was so worried that it would get wet and broken. Thankfully, since I'm writing on it right now, it didn't. Hopefully it's not raining when I go home. I kind of want to go home between my classes, but there's this meeting I told someone I was going to. Urgh, commitments. Need sleep.....Badly. Sore throat beginning. Yuck.

Well, now I've had all my classes as well, so I'll briefly(following in Geoff's footsteps) review them. Psychology: Class is 50-something people. The prof is incredibly funny, the humour is almost seinfeldian. Will I actually learn anything from him? That remains to be seen. Philosophy: Not actually sure how many people in the class. I'll estimate 40. Not that it matters. The prof seems cool enough. Likes to wear a black dress shirt with a t-shirt undernearth. Was bright green on Tuesday, white on Thursday. He's humorous from time to time, and seems like a nice person. But come to think of it, there's something odd about him. Like a character on a tv series that seems very nice and subdued and everything but is in actuality a killer or something. Or just incredibly smart. Hmm... Calculus: Again, not sure of class size. Probably 40-50. The prof kind of scared me at first, he's really intense, but now that I've had 2 classes with him, I kind of like him. He's very verbose, writing everything(and I mean everything) on the board. He gives like 5 examples for everything. I really like it, he's incredibly verbose, and I love verbosity. He's also kind of strict, but that's cool with me, I think I fit better with the old-school learning style. None of this wishy-washy conceptual nonsense. I think I could do well in calculus. Although this guy came into our class today to tell us about free tutoring and how intro calculus has the highest drop-out and fail rate of any course in North America. Programming: Ewww..... This course is sad, very sad. First of all, the instructor is terrible. She was trying to demonstrate the program bluej to us. For those of you who know anything about programming using the bluej IDE, you'll feel my outrage. So she opens this program with various subclasses(ie circle, triangle, square) of a superclass called shape. She creates an object of the triangle class and a box with the object name appears in the white box at the bottom of the bluej window. She then tries to execute the changeColour() method of the object. She does so, and then expects the box with the object name to change colour. WTF? How....seriously, I am stunned. That's like expecting your code to change colour. It shows you really have no knowledge of how programming works. How could she think the box was actually the triangle? It doesn't look like a triangle, why would it change colour? How is she the head of the applied computer science department? Argh! The class is small though, like <20 people. The classroom is nice too. Film: Hmm...I had this class at the end of a very busy day. It's in a rather ugly room. Orange revolving chairs. Why oh designer why? The instructor is not so great. He has an annoying voice and seems very high-schoolish. We watched some silent films. I was surprised how good they were. It makes me want to watch Nosferatu, and then make a silent film of my own. But yeah, this class is cool because a whole bunch of my friends are in it, which makes it better. So, some general complaints about the university. The classrooms. Ick. Everything is so incredibly 60's. The classrooms I'm in are mostly like very spartan high school classrooms jam-packed with shoddy elementary school-like combined chair-and-desk travesties against ergonomics and aesthetics. I just finished watching the second season of the TV show Lost. Wow. It's amazing. I just want to find out more. So much is happening. Some of the developments are just insane. Third season starts soonish. I'm almost inspired to try writing something.

I started university on Tuesday. As of tonight, I've had all of my classes. Some have been good, some have been not so good, one was ridiculously bad. What I'm struck by about the university is how alone I feel. There are so many people, I just feel lost in the sea. And nobody's looking for me. Kind of a sad image. But it also takes away some pressure not knowing anyone. Still, I wish I had people to hang out with in my free time.
The university is an interesting place though. It's like a whole different world that I never knew existed. It'll take a bit to get used to how different things are. There's no regimented schedule like in high school. It's almost like summer all the time. Because it doesn't feel like school. Maybe at the end of the year it'll feel more like school, more like normality.
I had film tonight. I don't really like the instructor, but the silent movies we watched were kind of cool. It's interesting how good they can be, holding so much meaning, despite seeming superficially simplistic.

My Macbook arrived in the mail shortly after 8:00 this morning. I unpacked it, turned it on, set it up, and spent most of the day tinkering with it. I mostly love it. Integrated camera, remote for use with frontrow(media playing software)...OS X is a really nice operating system too. Things are so pretty. It runs fairly smooth too. The only downside is that it's fairly hot. My CPU runs at an average of about 65 degrees centigrade. I'm no expert in CPU temperature, but I'm pretty sure that's hot, and the bottom of the machine is fairly hot.

So after spending most of the day playing with it, I washed both my family's cars. I'm supposed to work 4 hours a day for my parents in exchange for car priveleges. It makes sense, so far this summer I've just been sitting around wasting time. It'll be better to be productive. I'm also looking at getting a job, possibly telemarketing. It would be really nice to have extra money. But we'll see what happens with that.

Tonight I went out with Avila, Stellar, and Lena. We got Gelati at this place on Corydon, hung around eating it, went back to Stellar's for a little while, then went to the Tim Horton's by my and Avila's houses. Had a Boston Cream and a hot chocolate. It was good. We then sat in Stellar's car for a while, listening to music. And then me and Avila left, I talked with Avila for a bit by her backdoor, although her sisters interrupted from the window. Kind of amusing. And home I went.

This is set to be a pretty boring week I'm thinking. Both Avila and Yorke are going to be gone. But oh well, I'll just have to find some stuff to do.

I really like the clicking sound that this new keyboard makes. And it looks really different too. All the keys are seperated. They don't touch at all, they just kind of emerge from holes in plastic, but aren't smushed together like normal keys are. The screens very bright too, a good deal brighter than my CRT(Cathode Ray Tube,big and chunky as opposed to thin flat panel) monitor for my desktop.

There's really nothing to write about. And yet I want to write more, maybe just to hear the clicking of the keys. I do love the clicking :p. But I should really go to bed so I can get up tomorrow. I've watched the first 2 parts of a 3 part Law and Order episode and tomorrow is the last part, so I really want to see it. I should also make it a plan to get some kind of exercise tomorrow. And my battery is currently running, so it's time I bid you adieu.

I ordered my laptop last Monday. It came with a free iPod nano which arrived on Friday. I tracked it via the Fedex website the whole time. It was highly amusing being updated upon it's departure from China, arrival in Alaska, arrival in Tennessee, and finally its delivery at 8:00 on Friday morning. It's black and has my initials laser-engraved on the back. Love it. I now have 2 iPods. Crazy. But now I have to wait for the laptop to arrive. The laptop is a Macbook. It has a 2 gHz intel core duo processor, 1 GB ram, 100 GB SATA hard drive, superdrive(DVD+-rw,cd-rw), bluetooth and wifi, and a few other things I'm probably missing. Oh, and it's white. I've been carefully watching the order status page on the apple website, updating just about every minute. I even checked what time it was in China in order to estimate when it was most likely to be shipped. Then I found a thread on the apple messageboards with tons of people just like me who were wondering how long it took a macbook to ship. I really want it to ship today or tomorrow, because otherwise it probably won't make it here until next week, and I don't want to wait another weekend. Business days are the spawn of the devil. Oh well, I'm too used to the instant gratification of the internet.

About that song by Destroyer. I've kind of lost the sense of perfection. When I first heard it, I sensed the perfection. Now it seems farther off. I still like that beginning though.

Had people over to my house on Saturday night. It went well, I was feeling social for a change, which was awesome. Pizza, movie, walk. The movie was called "Closer". It was kind of good, about 4 kind of sleazy people who fell in and out of "love" many times. By the end it was like "you don't love me anymore?" BIG FUCKING SURPRISE! Silly people. Prompted some thoughts on whether love is in fact shallow. It all depends how you interpret it. It could be shallow in one sense and not in another. I very much like the epic notion of love, so I'm not about to condemn it as just shallow nonsense. Oh well, does it really matter what I decide? Life goes on. The walk was nice too, Wolseley at night is lovely. Which reminds me, I've started running as of late, because I'm so out of shape. I run at night, because I'd rather not have lots of people around. It's nice. Just a year ago I probably would've been too afraid.

I've been smoking some of this "herbal smoking blend" stuff lately. It's kind of good, but I'm really bad at rolling joints. I go out on the roof outside my brother's window and look at the stars while puffing away. My brother fixed my zippo too, which was really nice of him. I was tempted to light up a cigar, but decided against it, I didn't feel like stinking that night.

My brother got his wisdom teeth out today. He didn't go under general anaesthetic, because the dentist doesn't recommend that because of the risks. So instead, they loaded him up with anti-anxiety drugs and then used local anaesthetic to take the teeth out. He came home and I would've sworn he was drunk; giggling, stumbling around, refusing to sit still. It was then that I learned that dealing with an intoxicated family member is one of most unpleasant things I can think of. I don't want to see my family members intoxicated. And this was an intoxicated person who had to keep gauze in their mouth to keep it from bleeding too much. The freezing came out really fast, which meant, time for tylenol 3. I feel sorry for him though. Thankfully my wisdom teeth are straight, so I will most likely not have to get them pulled.

Right now my room is being redone. It has a slanted ceiling because it's on the top floor of the house, and the slanted part is painted "philadelphia cream" whereas the bottom part was a dark green. We painted the bottom part  the same as the top part, and all my furniture black. It's supposed to contrast. I'm looking forward to it being done. I'm also hopefully getting a new bed. Last time I was at Jysk though they didn't have the bed I'd wanted. Hopefully it's not lost and gone forever. So right now I'm living in my family's guest room. I have my computer down here and everything. I've also managed to make it a complete mess in the short time that I've been here.

I've started trying to learn some audio mixing beat making kind of stuff. Me and Yorke had planned a compilation kind of project long ago and I'd bailed on it, which was kind of jerkish of me, although I can't remember exactly how it happened. But hopefully we can give it another go, if I'm able to become proficient in writing drums in a sequencer. 

It's been hot here the past week or so. And there have been almost no mosquitoes. It's crazy, this is winnipeg. There should be mosquitoes everywhere. But thankfully, there are not.

It's kind of a boring life, but as I think I've mentioned many times before, it's moderate. I'm sure drama will return with the start of university in the fall. Or maybe it won't. Who knows.

I was sitting in a car in a safeway parking lot today waiting for a prescription to be filled, listening to music with the windows down. It was really nice, and provided a time for more philosophical introspection, as if I don't do enough of that already. And then suddenly the inside of the car looked a bit different, I'm not sure how, but it did. Weird. Nice time though.