On the Cusp

First day back at University after Reading break. Why is it that we humans take marked occasions, like special days, so start new and positive routines, or just to say we're going to start positive routines, when any time is just as good as the next. New Year's is the perfect Example. Why is January 1st any better of a time to start that healthy-eating regimen than March 7th? Today, though, I was and am on the cusp of two of said self-bettering regimens:

1) Riding my bike to University. Today was the day I was going to start - the sky was even on my side - I woke up to blue skies and sun coming through my window, which is very rare at this time of year in my city. I had literally pulled my bike out of the garage onto the driveway when I noticed the ridiculous amount of fresh frost on the driveway, and the ice still left on my street from last week's snowfall. So I decided to forgo the bike, for a day. Tomorrow we shall see if my, and my bike's, fate is different. I did get exercise on my way to school, though. Asshole bus driver let 7-8 people off the bus, but refused to let anyone on. Walked ~ >1km up the road to the university, and was late for class.

2) Doing my course readings. Sure, I didn't do any for today - and truth be told I haven't properly done any assigned readings on time this whole semester (but I know I'm not alone!). I don't even have the texts for today's classes, so I was ruled out from doing those readings from the get-go, but tomorrow is different. I have a chance to actually do my reading for my Indigenous Studies class. It would be a first. Come to think of it, if what I'm saying is that I'm on the cusp of starting to properly do my course readings, then I would need to also do my reading for Philosophy class - which is a given that it isn't going to happen... but I guess some is better than nothing at all.

So, tomorrow we shall see: Do I bike to school? Have I read the article on the Metis for my morning class? Only time will tell....

Reading Week Wrap-Up

Reading Break is officially over, so I thought I'd follow up on the to-do list I created for my week 'off ':

-Trip to China Beach: Didn't happen. Snow, and extra work shifts got in the way. Did however do the 10k lake trail today with Jordan.

-Family IMAX movie night: Harry Potter 7: Part 1: done. Thursday eve.

-Filling of my first ever cavity, and possible root canal: done. no root canal, instead the extraction of my upper left wisdom tooth.

-Work: 3 times: worked 4 times. Would have worked 5 times except for the snow.

-Sleep: much: done and done.

-Walk up Mountain: at least once: accomplished.

-Buy glowsticks. Do light-painting photography: sadly, not done. It's on my long-term to-do list.

-Finish 3D Labyrinth Worm in Blender. Rig: Procrastinated this. No rigging done, but make a render I'm almost happy with. Just a few modifications to the UV diffuse map needed.

-Do my 2009 taxes: Didn't happen. Somehow can't get myself to complete them, even though it would mean a few hundred bucks in my pocket in returns.

Hugging

So just recently here in town a boss was sued by two teenage girls, sisters 19 and 13, for sexual harassment, and they won - to the tune of $10,000. The charge: frequent and prolonged hugging.

The girls worked at one of these Minimelts carts in a very touristy part of town in the summer of 2008. The boss, a dude, frequently insisted on hugging the girls to "dispell negative energy" - predictably enough, the same boss didn't similarly hug any of the male employees.

I have no sympathy for the boss - in terms of his actions. If you have a 13 yr old and 19 yr old girl as employees obviously there are limits, and someone in a management position should understand that physical contact should remain at a minimum, unless it's reciprocally welcomed or initiated. In this case it often wasn't - if the girls refused to hug him, he'd just stand there with his arms outreached and a pouty face. In a word: creepy. I imagine there's some significant lack of social skills, if not some mild mental illness in this guy. If I were these girls' Dad, and heard of this early enough, I would have paid the boss a visit to give him some physical attention of my own..

But is hugging someone really worth $10,000? Part of me knows the charge could have been a lot higher - but it still seems steep, especially if you take into account that the guy is just a Minimelts manager for god's sake, and probably doesn't make much over minimum wage himself. On the other hand, he needed more than a strong slap on the wrist. Maybe what irks me is that the province's Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the man's actions were 'sexual harassment' - further perpetuating our culture's perception of male sexuality as deviant - and further perpetuated the president in court.

I look forward to hearing in the news of a class-action lawsuit against the 'free hugs' guy.

MTV

I don't watch a lot of TV these days beyond my regular shows, and since I don't live in the USA, and, you know, I'm not 18 or obsessed with celebrity culture, I've barely had any exposure to MTV. but tonight, thanks to my TV-tuner (which I admittedly hardly use), I decided to tune in to the quazi-music station for about an hour. So far I haven't seen a single music video.

I'm only 27, but there's no better way, I assure you, to make you feel old and out-of-touch, than by watching MTV. The first show during my watching-span: '5 Gays, 1 Girl'. Basically, it's a round-table 'The View', but with more (and very) vulgar discussion, no studio audience, and the people aren't household names. What gets me about this show is not the topics of discussion, which often falls back to talks about gay sexual experiences, fellatio, etc., but what's underlying and observable is the fact that these non-celebrities have gotten a following, and people actually care about their discussion, and 'follow' the individuals. From what I gather, there's not really a fixed 5 'gays' on the show - or maybe there is, but they either rotate participants, with the exception of 'the girl', or they've gone through about ten guys over time. The most notable thing, again, is the fact that somehow these people have gained some level of socially-constructed importance, and there's obviously some twitter-esque fan-following, even though there's nothing especially remarkable about them, and the show isn't even that glitzy. Apparently all you need these days to gain a youth fan following is a spot on a station widely watched by young people, and some sense of trendiness - which in this case is achieved by the fact that the guys are all gay.

Next up: MTV Cribs. Longer running than 5 Gays, 1 Girl, and I even occasionally watched it as a teenager, back when, you know, it actually featured the houses of celebrities. Or maybe I'm just out of touch, and don't know who the people are, but what's evident is that the quality of the celebrities, and homes, have fallen drastically. These 'celebrities' often live in rather normal, not-extravagant homes - but even more evident: many don't bother much anymore to clean their homes before the show is filmed. One chick had bottles of makeup and clothes everywhere - and not nicely, and another guy had stuff lying on the floor, and paintings and shoe boxes against walls. I don't expect 'famous' people to live in fantasy-land, but isn't the point of watching these shows to admire how much greater the lives/homes are of people at the peak of capitalist success?

Heaven forbid I stay tuned for MTV's "reality" shows...

Sitting in Limbo

For too long it's easy to sit in limbo - with great ideas - that do just that: sit.

For well over a year I've had ideas for great creative pursuits, but somehow they've all been put on hold with life, school, work - but mostly procrastination, and being comfortable with how things are - now. Suppose that we're programmed to resist change - even if said change would be an improvement, because with change comes inherent risk, and if things aren't so bad now, even if they're not great, it's often easier to stick with what already is.

Fortunately, in some way or another, one finds the emotional/motivational fortitude to get off their ass and actually make a change of routine. Hopefully I'm on that path, creatively, starting this week.

Gas Station & Snow.

Got off the bus last night, walked across the road to wait for my next bus, and, since it was around -4 degrees outside last night and the snow was blowing around, I joined a couple of young, potentially dickish-looking guys sitting inside the bus stop. They were two ~19-yr-olds, and by the looks of them and their body language, I couldn't tell if they'd be friendly, or in that tring-too-hard-too-hard-to-be-Alpha, young-guy phase.

A couple of minutes later, across the street, a car tried to pull into the gas station - but it couldn't make it in with the ice and the slight slope up from the street. A Good Samaritan would run across the street and offer to help give the car a push - especially after the female passenger got out and tried pushing the car unsuccessfully. Part of me considered going over and helping, and part of me, conditioned to not get involved with the affairs of strangers, wasn't fully convinced yet - but before I had made up my mind - these two young guys jumped up, ran across the road - and only then did I feel like a total douche for not responding positively as quickly as them.

Phone.

I had always thought that I was fairly independent from my phone. Even though it always comes with me, I'm not attached to it. It's not a 'smart-phone' (rather, a 'dumb-phone'), so I don't do much with it other than talk and text, but the other day, when I was without it for a little over 12 hours, I was at a loss.

It's funny how attached one becomes to having a cell phone after it becomes an integrated part of one's normal and routine way of communicating. I got my first phone for a birthday - my 22nd - back in the summer of 2005. (My God, have I really had a phone for 5.5 years?!).. Since, I've gone through 2 phones (on my third now), I eventually learned to text (learning how to 'T9' only in 2008), and as of just a month ago I switched to a post-paid plan for the first time.

But what really marks my dependence on the little gadget is how now, most of my communication runs through it, and depends on it. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? Both my personal and work lives run through it - and, even though I live at my parents', who have a land-line, I now and for the past couple of years, refer all people and businesses to my cell. Should I ever lose my phone, I'd be at a loss, and would have to resort to pleas on Facebook to get peoples' numbers back. Heaven forbid.

Working two hours a day

It's reading week, and I just got asked last night to fill in at work for the two days of the week I don't already work. That equates to working every day this week, but for only 10 hours in total. So much for my reading week, and plans to go out to China Beach - which can hardly be squeezed in before work starts at 2:20. Boo-urns. Working just two hours a day really tends to mess up plans like that. Need the money, though- desperately. Ain't that the truth.

Sundays.

Nothing productive ever gets done on Sundays - except in the cases when something is due or needs to be done for Monday morning: then work might begin at 6 or 7pm.

Since school is off for the week, today was one of the more typical Sundays: full of not-much, except me successfully crossing one of the items off my list from yesterday's post. Today I walked up the mountain for the first time in over a year. Actually did better than I thought - much better, considering I've done dick-all for exercise in the past year and a half. Despite starting off walking way too fast (which I always do), I actually found that once I slowed down I felt as though I probably could have walked to the top without stopping. Maybe later in the week I'll have to see if I was right. (=

Something I should have added to the list of things to do during reading week: See Movies, on General Mills. Using coupons cut out from Oatmeal Crisp boxes to see The King's Speech tonight.

Reading week, a'hoy!

Not much to say today other than I'm glad for the start of reading week.

Tentative plans for the week, in no particular order:

-Trip to China Beach
-Family IMAX movie night: Harry Potter 7: Part 1
-Filling of my first ever cavity, and possible root canal.
-Work: 3 times
-Sleep: much
-Walk up Mountain: at least once.
-Buy glowsticks. Do light-painting photography.
-Finish 3D Labyrinth Worm in Blender. Rig.
-Do my 2009 taxes

Buzzzzzzzzzzzz

There's a lot of talk in education about using 'alternative' forms of education to reach students. Today we tried such an activity.

In my Indigenous Education class, we went on an introspective nature walk, where we were asked to walk silently (something very difficult for my cohort to do) for about 5 minutes, while we reached one of the more wild and unvisited parts of campus. We were encouraged, as we walked, to find 'centeredness' - to become closer to nature.

Something I observed while walking with my peers is that many of them, as observed by their body language and later comments, weren't able to get the most out of the experience. The common theme: most people weren't able to shut off, for just five minutes, the jibber-jabber and the little social games going on in their heads.

There were comments about feeling awkward walking across campus, in a group, completely silently (feeling self-conscious about being seen by others walking silently in a class-sized group), people were bobbing around like they wanted to talk, but were having to actively restrain themselves, and some were playing games of shuffling themselves in the walking group in order that they were near the people in the group they wanted to be near.

It must be said: most people think, if you ask them, that they are in control of their mind and emotions. If you can't turn those, which are really just the mind, off for five minutes, even or especially in a provocative social setting, is it you who is in control of your mind, or is it your mind that is in control of you? If your mind is just a tool, and isn't you, and therefore all that buzzzzzzzz of ultimately useless mental thought that goes on inside our heads every second of the day isn't us, but is a product of the incessant mind, than what does 'I' really mean? If 'I' have a mind, and 'it' thinks, than perhaps there are two 'me's': the jabbering mind (which often thinks that it is me), and the owner of that mind.

9 and Younger

funny how you can find little tidbits of knowledge that's actually useful in school.

The latest: from my adolescence psychology class. Kids age 9 and younger need discipline. They're at a stage of moral development when they need to see consequences of their actions - via direct consequences of their own actions, or consequences of their peers' actions, in order to behave well in the classroom.

In the past few weeks I've struggled with the balance of trying to create a 'fun' after school camp, vs maintaining the discipline and orderliness of the students' normal classroom. It's tough.

The conclusion I've come to, with the help of my class, is that I do in fact need to exert some formal social discipline early - nip it in the butt - before my classes get out of hand. keeping control and interest in a small class of 12 or 16 is easy, but once the class size gets up to 20+, my current highest is 25, things can get out of control easily if there's no perceivable discipline by the under-10-yr-olds.

Debbie-Downer

I must admit that the biggest thing that annoys me about myself is that I tend to always bring to the table, as points of discussion or personal observation, things that are negative.

Heck, I even started off this blog post by talking about something that annoys me about myself! (oh, irony) -- though, I don't think I'm a fundamentally negative person. I'm generally in a good mood, I easily laugh at things - even when bad things happen to me, like when I hit every red light on the way down a long straight street, and I was even happy as a baby.

So why then do I do this - during moments of awkward conversational silence, the only things I can come up with to say are complaints. ARGH!!

I've heard of a peronal challenge that I ought to try: the 5-day positivity challenge. how it works: if ever you catch yourself thinking of, or beginning to dwell on, something less than positive, you must cut that thread of mental gibber-gabber off within 30 seconds. A great idea, except how does one NOT think of the giant, pink elephant? .. guess that comes down to one's technique of personal, mental distraction/diversion.

Proselytization

Late again. Oh well. In these incidences the clock magically rolls back to 11:59PM, as if I was never late. =)

...

There's someone in my cohort who I think is going to have some major issues once she gets into the classroom as a teacher.

Schools, especially high schools and post-secondary institutions, are and should be a place that allow active and due consideration about discussed issues - especially social and moral issues - on both the part of students, and educators. Often, especially in grade 11 and 12 classes, students should be given avenues to express their opinions, and be given a multitude of information from every available and relevant perspective by which to discuss and form their own educated perspectives and conclusions. Students should be encouraged to consider and discuss these types of issues and personally reflect and intelligently discuss/debate their findings. It is by this process that one becomes an educated and even enlightened adult and member of society; this is one of the most basic and overarching goals of education.

What happens, though, in the case of my cohort-ee, when, as she's very very set in her ways, she feels the need to proselytize, constantly, her beliefs - usually political - to everyone around her?

I have a major beef with proselytization. It doesn't belong in schools. We have a duty as teachers, to our students, their parents, and the community at large, to not indoctrinate our students with our own beliefs. Showcasing our own political persuasion actually isn't allowed in public schools, nor is proselytizing our religious beliefs. If we are truly to educate students, shouldn't we provide for them the opportunity to openly and without persuasion consider all aspects of political, social and moral issues?

But it's bigger than teachers, students, and the school system. I disagree with proselytization fundamentally. There is a place for discourse and debate, but in the end, especially in matters of each others' opinions and perspectives, we all ought have enough respect for others' rational ability to come to a well-founded conclusion about a matter, if they're well informed, even if their conclusions grossly mis-align with our own conclusions about the same matter in the end.

But, unfortunately, some are so gripped by the ego - they identify their perspective with themselves, as an egoic mental form, and therefore feel a deep need to make others have the same perception as they do. Their egos feed, very temporarily, on the satisfaction of having others agree with the perspective that they have mentally attached with themselves - thereby enhancing their own sense of self worth, if only briefly, when people agree with them.

Masculine Energy in the Classroom.

Just woke up from a nap: 8:30pm - 1am.

Sleep schedule = fucked.

Not the only negative consequence, I'm late for Monday the 14th's Blog. As per usual I'm time-shifting the post-time here to pretend I'm not late, and carrying forward.

Today it's Valentine's Day, but believe it or not I'm not going to talk about that now. It wasn't the most prevalent thing on my mind.

Today in class we started off by watching a few videos form edutopia.org. Great. One of the videos showed man, who started teaching later in life and at first hated it, came into his own and found a career he loved by starting an all-boys math program at his middle school. The teacher used things like mild competition and time constraints for time (using a hockey-style scoreboard as a countdown-clock) management

The class was asked for comments, and to my surprise there was some negative feedback about this teacher's approach.

I have a beef with the way schools have been run for the past, oh, 20-30 years. Feminization. Call me a believer in nature over nurture, but boys and girls are different - fundamentally. We learn differently, and respond to different stimuli for motivation. back in the 60's/70's, girls weren't doing as well as boys in areas like math and science, and so many initiatives began to change this, and they were successful. As far as I know, girls now equal or exceed boys in all areas of high school. Not only that, but the amount of boys dropping out has skyrocketed. In some places, even in Canada, about 50% of boys drops out of high school because they just don't see the point.

Classrooms have become a place where masculine energy has been demonized, and it began with the elimination of competition. Competition is seen as a dirty word by many educators, including my special needs teacher in this particular class, but I say that competition, especially in an all-boys class, can foster a huge amount of positive energy unmatched by currently suggested methods of instruction and classroom management.

Themes inlcuding honesty, bravery, achievement, competition, setting one's 'personal best', responsibility, taking 'right action', loyalty, comradery, mentorship, stillness, consideration, and directed/deliberate action, are tools we shouldn't shy away from cultivating and harnessing, with masculine energy, to energize and help educate boys in the classroom.

Facebook Friends.

A while back I came to the conclusion that there are two types of people who have a ~LOT~ of facebook friends. We're talking in the 500-600+ range.

Type #1: Legitimately popular, and well liked. This type of person gets along with just about everyone, is seen as attractive by most (in personality, and likely looks), and thus he/she often gets friend requests from other people after only one meeting.

Type #2: Ego, ego, ego. Self-defence. Padding. These people have a feeling of self-lack, and they fill this void by accumulating- in this case the accumulated something is facebook friends. They're the type of person who tends to be quite reserved and standoffish, and often feels the need to throw in some out-of-place comment about something that artificially raises their value during conversation, often something they've just bought. These people aren't trying to be .. searching for word... derived, but they lack an inherent feeling of self-worth, and therefore make themselves feel better by accumulating forms.

Shoe Prices

Today I bought my first pair of shoes in about exactly one year.

In fact, I bought two pair. I always wait for the Buy-One, Get-One-50%-Off Sale, then buy two pairs, and put one pair on hold until the first runs out, which is usually about 6 or so months.

Today was no different: went to the mall, saw that the store - Sport Mart - had a BOGO sale, and found the pair for me. But there was something unexpected: There were NO pairs of shoes that I could find that were over $100! Have shoe prices actually gone down?!

Actually, there are one of two scenarios: a) shoe prices actually have gone down, or b) Sport Mart, who did in the past used to sell higher end shoes, made the decision in the last year to not stock or sell higher end models from Nike, Adidas, etc in their stores.

In either case, it's a sign of the times. Stores need loans to buy inventory, and buying inventory they haven't sold yet is risky if it isn't guaranteed that consumers will snap up the products in a timely manner. If I was Sport Mart, heck, I wouldn't buy Nike's $160 shoes either, especially if trends were showing that less people were buying them, which has probably been the case in the last couple of years.

In any case, I still managed to fork out for two $90-pairs of shoes - the second pair for $45. Not too shabby.

Essays.

Last semester, for my final exam in my 'Multiliteracies across the Curriculum', we had to write three essays in 80 minutes - today, in 'Philosophy of Education' class, we had to write four in the same 80 minutes for the midterm.

When I was little, I never learned to properly hold a pencil. It hasn't been a huge problem - I hold it fairly well. Hell, I'm an above-average drawer. But since I'm an educator, and, you know, it's not the 1970's, can't we move on to computers already? When I was young I watched The Jetsons, and imagined a world where everything would be done for us: we'd all get around in flying cars and we would be moved around on land by conveyor belts. But we're still using pencils. True, we haven't moved beyond the pencil - yet. There still nothing cheaper and as easy - but honestly, in today's education system, we ought to allow alternatives - in the form of the medium we allow students to transfer knowledge in - even in regulated exams, whether that be orally, using computers, or written-in-pen essays. I can type faster than I can write, and so can most of the emerging generation.

"Under-Representation"

So - it's come up in articles I've read and online videos I've watched in the last few days - not to mention at school. Somehow there's become an assertion in liberal circles that under-representation equals discrimination. Two big words - but they aren't just fluffy academic meanderings; rather, they have very real-world consequences.

One such example is at University - there aren't enough women in math and engineering. Somehow this has been attributed to some form of discrimination, and therefore money - large amounts of money - have been set aside by many parties to give to women to enter into these faculties for free: free tuition. One of my computer science profs stood in front of his large class and proclaimed that any woman in Computer science that pays tuition is an idiot: there are so many sources of funding out there, reserved specifically (and not) for women, that, given the current female population of these faculties, any woman would virtually be guaranteed thousands of free dollars per year.

The same goes with Wikipedia. This is related of course - because it has to do with computers - but only some small percentage of people who contribute to Wikipedia are women, and liberal / feminist circles would have you believe this is due directly to discrimination.

I guess what makes me more right-wing, since returning home from my time in 'the bible belt' of Alberta, is that I believe more highly in the personal responsibility of people, and the choices they make, than liberals. I recognize this on a very regular basis - at school during discussions, and in the media. Liberals and feminists, in their argument, always try their best to ignore, or play down, the role of choice that comes into play when they see a statistic they don't like. The 'wage gap' is a great example. What - women on average earn less than men?! - DISCRIMINATION! .. ugh. Never in their literature will you ever see them give due consideration to the choices people make that may negatively affect their life-outcomes, especially when said people are part of a group that they've deemed to be victimized.

Look, one of the best traits about humans is that we're social creatures who have the ability to make choices both personal and relative to others. Sometimes we're stupid and act like sheep, and sometimes we make moves to better ourselves - sometimes at the detriment of others. The underlying aspect of all this is choice - and we're all responsible for those we make.

Teachers.

Last night it was the Birthday celebration of a fellow future-teacher. Growing up, I always thought of teachers as un-human automatons, devoid of real lives, purpose, personality - well, devoid of all human nature, really.

Socializing with future teachers last night at the pub, most of whom were shitfaced, while discussing the personal collections of, and awesomeness of, their sex-toys - in intimate detail, definitely changed all that. I will never think of my teachers growing up in the same light.

Comfort Zone

Just got home from work, and it's time to reflect.

10 years ago if you had told me that I would be an elementary school after-school camp leader, I would have laughed at you. I was basically afraid of kids. Not kids themselves, but interacting with them - or, rather not knowing how to interact with them from an older-person perspective.

Flash forward to now- I just got home from talking in front of a group of 20 kids in grades 4 and 5, and I feel like I could do anything right now. That's saying something, coming from an introvert who often suffers from social anxiety.

I think the most valuable thing anyone can do for themselves is to push themselves outside of their comfort zone as frequently as possible. For me, teaching younger kids still is a bit out there - middle school right now is quite in my comfort zone, but I haven't full developed a sense of self-awareness that lets me be 100% at my best with elementary students. So, what better to do than put myself smack in front of them?

We humans are creature of habit - and we're programed to feel good around the familiar. Thanks, evolution. This trait kept us safe back in cave-man days - but these days we really don't have that much to worry about - especially from groups of kids in suburban Canada. Yet, those fright-or-flight emotions still kick up when ever we feel a threat, even socially, like when a group of people rejects us. Back in the day, if you got rejected by your tribe of cave-people, you were as good as dead. Outdated survival programming. The result is that most of us usually choose in favor of conserving energy (another adopted preferred behavior - thanks, evolution. Again.) and we end up sitting in front of the TV or computer most of the time, or going to our usual spots - any activity that feels safe, normal, and comfortable.

But in this day and age, especially where I live, there's really nothing to be frightened of. As a result, you really ought to try and get out and try as much that pushes you out of your comfort zone, especially socially, that you can.

That's my thought of the day.

Essay.

Last night I completed a group essay for one of my education classes, and it was one of the most different approaches I'd ever been involved with in writing an essay. And it was all by accident.

I got paired up with two girls to write an 8-10 page essay on assessment. I, being the habitual procrastinator, didn't get to even starting it - a response/analysis of a case study - until much later than my group-mates, and as a result they basically wrote 9 pages without me, in rough draft, fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.

In some cases this would be disastrous for me. I might have had surly group members, who, at this point, would have written me a scathing email about my lack of participation and input - and I was in fact worried that this was going to be the case. Fortunately, it wasn't, and it ended up being to our group's advantage. The other two members of my group had completed a rough draft, but I found that, after reading the draft, I still had quite of bit of material that I could add - a few key points were missing, and there were quite a few language-related problems. But more importantly, being the third-in-line at the essay gave me an opportunity to act as the group's 'fresh pair of eyes' - something most essay writers don't bother getting or don't have time for.

It ended up that the three of us were equal contributors to our group essay - but in an unconventional way. The essay only really needed two writers, but having formed a group of three to complete the assignment, and purely by accident, we formed a group that worked so much better than if we had all tried to write the essay cooperatively at the same time.

Hackintosh = win.

Today I dedicated my day to turning my desktop PC into a fully functioning Macintosh, and succeeded.

-major nerd award-

The big problem is that Mac OS X is only meant to run on macs - so getting it to work with other PCs - that require other drivers, is a huge headache. I've tried lots and lots of times on different systems, even my current one, to no avail, but then the other day I read it was possible with my motherboard, and after a few hours of feeling my way around in the dark, I've done it. OS 10.6.6 .. All that's left to get working is wireless, so right now I'm plugged in.

Yes, I'm a huge computer geek. But you know what, you're reading my blog.

Knowing.

Last summer I had the pleasure of living with a Christian.

We didn't talk a lot after the first 2 weeks of my 3-month stay at the house, but one of our most notable, heated conversations, during which I'm pretty sure he decided that he didn't fancy talking to me much anymore, was when I told him exactly how I felt about religion, and faith.

Christians will often say that they "know" that God exists. .. over the years, when they've said something to this end to me, like when my roommate did that day, I've learned to retort:

To know something is a very different thing than to be certain of that thing. Nobody really knows that there is a God, but a lot of people are certain. The difference: knowing is universal. A logical and observable process must be able to be critically observed by objective parties. Certainty, however, is a subjective experience. It's an emotion - emotions are merely electrical signals and the body's release of chemicals.

Bill Maher puts it best: "Faith is the willful suspension of logic and critical thinking."

So, our roommate-relationship was pretty well ruined. It probably didn't help that I piped in about hearing voices in one's head is a sign of mental illness, but I don't regret saying it. Someone has to talk some sense into people.

He did have his revenge, though. During our semi-regular and brief falsetto-polite conversations for the next few weeks, he'd often insert references to me having "faith" in my life, of course in place of where I'd actually have applied logic. - a backhanded compliment.

The Next Day... Chipotlaway

So I had a conversation a week or so ago, give or take a week, with I don't remember who, and the less-than-half-believed conclusion that we came up with was that it's not really the next day until you get a legitimate sleep, and it's light out the next morning.

So you see, though it's 4AM on the 5th, technically I'm not late for my post on the 4th.

And I'm sticking with it.

In other news, as of this morning, I'm swearing off sugar-free, chocolate-covered peanuts for good. I'm reminded of the episode of South Park when Cartman reveals that he, and millions of others, continue to eat chipotle even though it causes anal bleeding, and resulting stains in underwear. (which you could fix with Chipotlaway cleaning spray) They put up with this side effect of the food because, well, chipotle is just so good.

Well, sugar-free chocolate covered peanuts aren't much better - in terms of resulting medical side effects - actually causing me to lose a night's sleep and miss classes the next morning.

Done with them.

The Beaver.

Today in assessment class, I just about lost it. My professor, an elderly man in his mid-70's, was showing his how to structure unit plans to incorporate and plan out the completion of measurable outcomes that correlate with bloom's taxonomy. Interesting, and very applicable stuff, actually. So he was preparing to go through a demo of this - and the topic he picked just happened to be the beaver.

A few people in the class smirked and giggled (it was late in the afternoon), and then, so did I.. and I was finding it hard to fight it. ... I pretty much lost it when he said, quite matter-of-factly:

"The beaver is actually quite disruptive.. it tends to wreak a lot of havoc actually.. and it's really quite useless, I mean, most people would agree that it doesn't taste very good. .. "

-- it was at this point that I lost it. Breathe, Colin, breathe. The best part was that, by all accounts, my prof had no idea why people were finding the lesson humorous. He was oblivious.

I have to admit that something I've realized about myself is that I'm probably not the most emotionally mature. I find it hard to not smile when something tickles my fancy - even when it's not appropriate to smile or laugh - but this is also likely in part because I tend to be a rather light-hearted and generally 'up' person, too, naturally - when I'm not in a downer environment. I was like this as a toddler.

One man's junk...

... if you thought this was going to be about genitalia, subtract 20 points.

Pressed for cash, I, the struggling student, recently decided to put a few of my things up for sale on usedeverywhere.com. One of the things I didn't think to put up - that had just been sitting, collecting dust for the last couple of years or so: my hamster cages. Of the items for sale I have listed, of which there are four, they were, to my amazement, the fastest selling by far - who knew! I only thought to put them up when I noticed one perched in the basement, not doing anyone any good there. I hadn't even considered putting it up for sale, since I had once been offered about 9 free hamstercages over freecycle when I first got my hamster, Booboo, back at University. I got the cages - which connected with a tube - for free, and sold them for $20. Not up there on the whole 'pay it forward' scale, I know, but hey - I'm impoverished.

In other news, I received my practicum confirmation today. Come april, I'm going to be an ICT teacher - sort of. Time to brush up on my Java/PHP!

The Day the Interweb Died.

Today, in Canada, the CRTC, our governing body of all things communication, implemented a law requiring that Canadians pay a surcharge for every Gig of Internet Bandwidth used above an allotted amount.

Bullocks.

Shaw currently, and for the past few years, has advertised a limit of 60GB per month download cap on its regular high speed service - the thing was, it wasn't very well enforced. Only excessive users - we're talking, in the hundreds of Gigabytes - would get threatening phone calls from Shaw - which wouldn't really amount to anything anyways.

The thing is - besides this only being a legislated way for ISPs to steal more of our money, and the fact that this law was unquestionably lobbied for by these ISPs themselves, don't they have the right to charge what they want for the product they're selling? I mean - why should their service have to be UNLIMITED. After all, cell phone companies [see: Satan] charge users by-the-minute, so why shouldn't internet companies be able to charge by the Gigabyte?

I can only really think of three arguments - but they're valid ones :

The government does have the right, in our system, to regulate prices so that the consumers, and the companies, are not getting shafted - in other words, to make things fairly fair and competitive. It's just, well, in this case they're (the government) using this exact authority - except to benefit, and line the pockets of, the ISPs, and likely themselves.

My second argument, which actually has precedent in countries including Estonia, France, Finland, Greece, and Spain, is that internet is a basic human right. I know in Finland at least, people who can't otherwise afford a computer are actually given one - and is set up in their home - and everyone recieves free (if I remember correctly) high speed internet. wowzers. So internet should be accessable by nature, and therefore not be subjected to pro-corporate laws like these.

Lastly, putting a bottleneck on the internet will damage the economy. Thousands if not millions of businesses - Canadian businesses - run in part or entirely on the internet. Some of these businesses rely solely on the use of high amounts of bandwidth - Netflix for example - or maybe joe-blow who creates a video-based website, or publishes music for sale on iTunes. Literally everyone who uses the internet, now, will be subjected to having to think more critically about their internet use, and as a result, businesses and services like these - not to mention online gaming services - will suffer.

Sure, it's only $2/month per extra gigabyte we use, which is still cheaper than going out and renting that movie you'd use the bandwidth for, but Shaw and Telus really, really don't need more of our money.