Blog: Articles from April 2005

I did my taxes for 2004 yesterday, first time ever doing so (with the help of my dad). Thanks to the Ontario Sales Tax Credit, I get a refund. This also didn’t apply to me … I‘m too young. The form wasn’t that hard to fill out, because most of the form did not apply to me.

That wasn’t too helpful for my mathematics skills, which will be tested soon in a May 11 math contest at our university. My math teachers badgered me into going, but I don’t think I’ll regret it.

As you might notice (or not) I’ve added a Random Poll feature that I will be adding functionality to in the near future. IE users at 800x600 will probably see the Features column wrap awkwardly to the next line. This is a problem in the styles (width of the Poll box) but I‘m too lazy to edit the markup now, so you’ll just have to live with it until later.

Doctor Who is coming along quite nicely. Although I think the character personalities are still somewhat quirky, they are believable. Tonight was the third episode, I still prefer the second because it was more space-orientated, but this episode was kind of cool.

I‘ve been feeling rather under the weather for the past few days, it’s just a cold though. And I discovered a great new webcomic, Irregular Webcomic!. It’s absolutely brilliant, I strongly advise you read it regularly, especially the Death-themed ones. It’s insane and humorous, and perfect combination!

Interesting day, overall. I had an interview for Student Trustee, which is essentially the student representative who goes to the Board Trustee meetings. It was … awkward. I learned that the questions included with the application were for preparation only, and that I wasn’t actually supposed to fill them out. I’m understandably nervous about what sort of impression I made. Either way, I think I will be happy with the outcome: if I get the position, then it is a great opportunity. If I do not, then it will be a great relief anyway.

I woke up today, intent on changing my address from a Hotmail one to a Gmail one. I also found out that MSN 7.0 was out of beta, and Microsoft is heralding it as its “New Messenger.” Although I did not download MSN 7 while it was in beta, now that it is the official version I think it is prudent to download it. I haven’t explored half the features, but we’ll see how they stack up:

The version has marked advantages over 6.2. Overall, it is quite a lot more graphical: your display picture (which can be dynamic/animated now) is displayed by your username, and thumbnails of your contacts’ display pictures can be displayed on your contact list. You can “wink” or “nudge” someone, and use a handwriting feature to send someone a handwriten message. The emoticons are also organized nicely and you can have animated emoticons.

However, MSN 7 does not address a lot of the issues that I found wrong with MSN 6.2. Namely PNG support! Why is it that Microsoft insists on ignoring the existence of PNGs? I tried uploading some lovely nomicons to MSN 6.2 but they would not display because they were PNGs. Hoping the problem had been corrected in this version, I tried again. Lo and behold, MSN did not display them. So I converted the 75 images into GIFs. Unfortunately, this addresses my other problem with MSN: you cannot modify the default emoticons! I don’t want “” to represent that inane MSN emoticon of a grinning head. I would want to delete that smilie, or at least change its shortcut.

MSN 7.0 is worth the download. But it isn’t much of an improvement, so much as an addition of new features while keeping the less satisfactory ones intact… .

I watched the CBC’s premiere of the BBC’s new Doctor Who series last night. Sadly, I’ve never had the opportunity to see any of the previous series, but I do think this one is … okay. I haven’t really seen a lot of British television before, so it was a little surprising. But overall I did like the storyline, if the episode itself wasn’t that great. The teaser for next week does look interesting, so I’ll be watching that.

Hmm … well, I got to borrow hair spray from my principal today. Indeed, that was first. I made a propaganda poster for history class, and because I used chalk my history teacher suggested I spray it with hair spray to prevent smudging. Thus, I borrowed someone’s hairspray (and the poster didn’t smudge!).