My presence on the web has now been consolidated to: scottstoddard.net

See you there!

Blah!

Anyway, I'm watching the generally mind-numbingly-boring morning tv programming and all of a sudden they cut in with a shot of a guy standing outside union station with some kind of a gun pointed upwards through the head of a young woman he is holding. Hmmm...excitement on tv. So anyway, this goes on for about forty minutes and then an ETF sniper puts one in his head. Hostage is unharmed - physically anyway - and traffic is destined to be ruined for the remainder of the day.

My issue here is twofold. First, I entirely support the police in the decision they made. I don't think they even should have waited that long. The message should be, "Threaten the life of someone else, and we *will* shoot you." I was moderately disappointed to see the police chief immediately hold a conference and basically say that "the officer took action by himself to resolve the situation"; however this is not unexpected in Toronto's police world. Stick him out there so if the powers that be determine he made a mistake, he can hang for it by himself.

What I was most disappointed with was the media coverage. I would have expected that at this point in the evolution of television news, reporters would honestly know more about the way the emergency services work. The body is tarped and lying on the sidewalk; two ambulances are brought in, one for the hostage, and one for the hostage taker. But they don't rush the hostage taker into an ambulance and off to the hospital. Ann Rohmer is on CityTV talking about not knowing the condition of the suspect (even though he's under a tarp), but she's sure they'll get him off to the hospital shortly. WTF? I mean, honestly.

Here's a primer: there is only one thing that (legally) prevents paramedics from taking a person to a hospital (short of them being in a mental state to, and refusing) - obvious death. What is the only potential cause of obvious death caused by a bullet that was only fired 2 minutes previous. Brain matter. Generally lots of it and usually all over the place. It's just physics; an entrance wound from a rifle is generally small, but the exit (what used to be the back of his head) will be substantial.

Anyway, that's enough for today. The world is less one person that we didn't need anyway.

Today I emerged 'screen'. (If you don't know what I mean by emerged, take some time to learn about Gentoo Linux, it's well worth the experience and you'll probably find yourself dedicating your processor cycles to it.) Anyway, screen is this great little utility that basically multiplexes your console; so in one console window you can run many applications through the use of different shells. Further, when programs have been started by screen and the terminal is logged-out or killed, the processes are not destroyed but instead continue to run! Just what I always wanted. I'm telling you, if I knew about this when I was asking for GI Joe toys for Christmas, well, let's just say things woulda been different.

So now I can be running several apps at home and I can kill (or detach) the terminal and go to school, ssh in, and resume my programs.

Honestly you know, I would love to say that Linux is the OS that everyone should use (and I hope that some day that comes true) but the reason that geeks love it so much is that it was designed by geeks...for geeks. Consequently everytime a feature comes into my mind, it's already been implemented by someone.

Anyway, off to finish cleaning my house...

I've come to the conclusion that J9 needs a punching bag - you know one of those ones that you had as a kid and they have sand in the bottom so they stand back up again after you beat the hell out of them. Then I'm gonna put a sign on it that says Mike Sample.

You see, he's a student in the computer science department at school. A group of us have been working to improve the Bishop's Computer Science website. What you see at that link is the current one - it's almost done (trust me, it's eons better than the one that was there). It's only missing a few graphics, most notably a main title graphic right on the first page you see. Mike is responsible for designing this (and all the other graphics) graphic - or at least he was.

So a couple of weeks ago I meet with the faculty to discuss some changes that they would like and in the process of implementing one of them, we remove something that Mike designed. Now Mike is the kind of person that if you modify or remove something he's done, he gets all pouty (from my experience anyway). So the next day I sent him an email and asked for the title graphic - we already had an early version up that the faculty loved and we just needed some colours modified. He sent back an email to our development list stating that he would not have time to contribute to this project over the summer. Okay fine, he's busy, I can understand that.

I follow with another email requesting that he send me the source Photoshop file and I can make the modifications to it. Later, a response back saying that he refuses to provide the source file and reiterating that he doesn't have time so he won't do the work. That all made me mad enough because he's the only one of us with any creative graphical talent, but the events of the past couple days really have me irked.

I get an email from another computer science student that Mike is looking for a list of things that the Student's website needs to have done as he has some time to work on it. He had apparently received lists from others, but not from me. My comments, while colourful (and somewhat creative if I do say so myself), honed-in on the notion that if he has any time available it should be spent working on the website that the professors, the people responsible for his degree want done. I don't understand how he just doesn't get that. I have no time for his petty, ego-stroking concept of ownership of everthing he touches. Blah!

I just found out that it could take up to 6 months to get a 'new' original of my birth certificate. So my current state with regards to getting a proper legal driver's license in Quebec: limbo. So right now I have a valid license - an Ontario one - that is good until next April. Only problem is...that according to Quebec law you have to exchange your license and get a Quebec one within 6 weeks of moving to this province. So now I'm living illegally, I'm only doing it because the government is forcing me to. The worst part is though, that I don't have valid stickers are my license plate. It officially expired in April. I can't get Quebec plates because I don't have a Quebec license. I can't get Ontario stickers because I don't have an address in Ontario anymore. Sucks.

On the state of my current jobs...I must be very lucky, I get to live in North Hatley for the summer instead of going to the Big Smoke and I have two summer jobs. But that's not enough to define real luck. Both jobs guarantee me at least 20 hours a week (more if I want) - the research position has a set salary and for that I'm expected to work 20-25 hours a week (more if I choose). But what's even better - I get to choose my own hours for both jobs!!! That means that if I don't feel like working I just don't have to. If I want to work from 3-7am, no problem. Life could not be better (well, let's not discuss the fact that I'm not earning a real-world salary). Plus I have time to take courses during the summer. Yeah, like I wanna trade this in anytime soon...
Current Music: Michael Nyman - Good song, ask me, terrific piano.

It was an interesting experience to see the ducks in the winter time. But since they were here, it was decided that we would feed them - cracked corn seemed to be a favourite. So they would waddle their way up from the pond to the back of the house, half-sunk into the snow, and eat until not a niblet could be found.

Anyway, as we came into spring, one pair stayed with me always coming back to my pond in the evenings even though their friends had all returned to the lake. I figured that there was probably going to be a family forthcoming, be we've never had success with that before. There are a lot of racoons around here, and I've just always figured that the racoons would find and eat the eggs. Apparently not this time. The only problem is, I only saw them just the one time, I can't seem to find them again. I don't know how far they could have gone as the babies were clearly too small to wander far, and certainly too young to fly.

When I see them again I'll try to get and post pictures...

On a separate note, Petter and I made significant progress on our research project this weekend. Lots of new code has been added. The only problem is that we've added lots of new code since the last time we were able to compile and test. I'm not just talking about a small lots either, I'm talking about big lots. This was a constraint of the section that we're writing - we couldn't really test in small chunks. So, we started solving compile-time errors and spent and hour and a half on that. We called it a night. Our brains were mush. More later...

For the longest time I had no idea why this happened. I prophesized that it had something to do with the fact that we are usually deep in some conversation when we're in the car together and that my attention simply drifted. However, this does not happen when I'm in the car with anyone else.

Fast forward here to today. I am sitting here in my house with Petter working on our summer research project. At one point, I had to write some code to test out something on the computer that I'm sitting in front of (there are two separate pcs on my main work table) and Petter was watching me key it in. I was making mistake after mistake and in several cases I 'forgot' what the syntax of the language that I was using was.

That's not normal for me...I mean I tutor all kinds of people in computer science, I'm a lab demonstrator, and I'm easily one of the highest 'ranked' programmers at my school (no tootin' going on here...). So here's my explanation for these little anomalies: I think that I do not perform well when I feel that I am being watched by someone whom I deem to be superior to me with regards to the specific action in question.

My father is the best driver I know - far better than me. And Petter is without question the most skilled programmer that I know. Hmmm...so how does one get over this?

I realize that this tactic hurts the wrong people (it only really hurts the local franchisee, but I know that pressure would eventually be pressed up the chain if enough people came on board). I mean, really, the oil companies are posting record profits! How can anyone possibly justify this? For you Americans that may read this, I did all the conversions and this works out to about $3/gallon and from talking to a few of you I know that the US average right now is about $2/gallon and that's up about $0.40 from a few months ago.

My stepfather sent out an email yesterday that has been floating around the net for years - most people have received it at one time or another - that email that suggests that everyone should get together and boycott by not buying gas on a certain day. I mean, in principle, it's a great idea. And the pressure on the oil companies with action like that would be extreme. The devil is, however, in the details. And the detail of this is no small chore. You would somehow have to convince everyone in Canada not to buy gas on a certain day. Now, obviously not everyone would adhere, but you only need a majority. I would like to know why the newsmedia would not get involved in promoting something like this? Could it possibly be because the oil companies are somehow tied into a vast amount of their advertising. No, it couldn't possibly be that.

Anyway, I'm on board - just tell me the day.

Well, off to write a guestbook application in PERL. You'll likely see it appear on my website this afternoon...

Yay! I got my digital camera working in Linux. That leaves my scanner (hp 4470c) as the only periperal I have left that is not working in Linux (and won't for some time as there isn't currently a linux driver available for this scanner).

More later...
Current Music: Linkin Park - In The End

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