Blog: Articles from May 2006

What…is this?

What is…this?

(Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen Battlestar Galatica’s season finale yet, don’t read this.)

“One year later.”

One year later?!

I realise that I haven’t made many blog posts about Galatica, but that’s been because I have just been so overwhelmed after each episode that I didn’t want to blog. (Or I was lazy, take your pick). But this was the season 2 finale, and…wow. I must say, I did not see that coming.

Wow. I didn’t want Baltar to become president any more than the next person, but I honestly started to yell at the TV when Roslin, Tigh, and Dualla fixed the election! As much as I don’t want Baltar to win, what they did was wrong.

But then…they skipped to one year later! And my reaction was, what is this?! Because that’s not what I expected at all—maybe from a soap opera, but not from Galatica! I think I‘m still in shock.

And then the cliffhanger. Wow. What happened to Brother Cavil’s reprieve?! And Starbuck…all the crew split up….

Now I have to wait until October.

Anyone with a time machine, please stand up.

My computer is starting to overheat and automatically shut down—again. I had this problem last year, and thought it was gone.

Recently I installed a temperature monitor as part of an attempt at undervolting my laptop. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the Intel Celeron is a gutted piece of hardware junk, that’s not possible. So my battery life remains short (which is fine, I can live with that), and my CPU continues to run hot. Apparently I can’t live with that.

The temperature monitor occasionally gets up to 42°C (it starts off around 30°C, and typically hovers around 35° to 40°). But for some strange reason, it will spontaneously shut down on me even though it is below 42°! (This is the part that bugs me—sometimes it won’t shutdown, but at other times it has apparently decided it has overheated and does. If a computer fails, it should at least fail consistently! <_< ). I’m not doing all that much when it overheats either—nothing at all resource-intensive. It’s annoying.

Alas, I don’t know what I‘m going to do. I cannot afford a better computer. I could take it in, but I’ve done that before and I foresee the unfortunate and harrying situation in which they send it in for “repairs”. This leaves me without a computer for two to three weeks, during which time they don’t find anything wrong with it and I have to pay (or worse, they do find something wrong with it, “fix” it under warranty, and then when I get it back it isn’t actually fixed). I’ve complained to CompuSmart about this before, and I feel bad complaining so much, even though I am the customer.

If the problem doesn’t go away after school is over, though, I think I might have no other recourse but to send it in. Right now I’ve got a fan running beside me to cool off the computer (did I mention that I have a cooling mat beneath it, but it still overheats?!), however, I consider this situation untenable (not to mention noisy).

Tonight I went to see The DaVinci Code in theatres. Spoilers are ahead. If you don’t want to be spoiled, go play elsewhere. If you’re ready for my totally biased and inaccurate ravings, please pull up a chair and scroll down.

Yes, I mean you.

Keep on scrolling. Nothing to see here.

Good. All scrolled out yet? No? Okay, scroll for a bit more. Get that scrollin‘ urge out of your system.

Ready? Excellent. Well, I’ve already read the book, but I won’t discuss the details that were different (mostly because I don’t notice those things ). The beginning is noticeably different, however.

Overall the movie was okay; it wasn’t a bomb, but it wasn’t anything special either. I enjoyed the very end, the last scene. It’s quite potent and a fitting way to conclude. The middle was where it started to drag. I think that this movie will actually be better to watch at home, where I can pause and go get a cup of tea or something without missing any of the information.

The camera angles were weird. Although they were fine for parts of the movie, at times I felt that they didn’t work well.

The acting was, again, okay. Tom Hanks (Langdon) and Audrey Tautou (Sophie) were not as bad as some critics have claimed. I think that Hanks was trying a bit too hard; he seemed unsure of how to portray Langdon’s eloquent multi-fold revelations to Sophie. Tautou, whom I’ve never seen before, acquitted herself well. I think that she’s probably resembled her character more than any of the other actors in action and characterisation. On the flip side, Jean Reno (Fache) was a surprise! I did not imagine Fache to either look or act like that at all, but in the end, he was one of the three best actors in the movie! The other two were Jean-Yves Berteloot (Remy) and Ian McKellen (Teabing), who provided the exciting, flamboyant ingredient that Hanks and Tautou lacked.

It was an awfully long movie. The problem, like I mentioned above, was that there’s so much information to cover, history and backstory and stuff like that. There were a few moments when I was sitting in the theatre and feeling a bit restless. In a way, it was riveting, but it could use a pause button.

Also, I succumbed to the evil corporate influence and bought the illustrated edition of Angels and Demons afterward. It was 25% off; I happened to have enough money on hand and it was right there in Shoppers Drug Mart, and it would ensure a pleasurable reading material for the long weekend.

I recommend that you see the movie, if only so that we can make Dan Brown enough money that he can retire in peace instead of making more movies. You’ll probably enjoy yourself if you keep in mind that a) Hollywood is greedy, 2) It’s fiction, and c) If you don’t do it, then you will be out of the loop. So go do it because it’s what the cool people are doing. You want to be cool, right?

Two more weeks until the Galactica season finale! (Just thought I’d throw that out there.)

I‘m helping out with the backstage portion of my school’s production of The Outsiders. Today after school, we needed to paint a set of stairs grey as a piece of the set. The tech department had graciously attached a railing to the stairs (which are just white pieces of wood), and then deposited them on the stage. We planned to carry it into the drama room, which is relatively adjacent to the stage (separated only by a hallway) and paint in there. Easy, right?

Wrong. There’s a ladder up to the lighting booth in between the stage proper and the door on stage right that leads to the hallway. As a result, the stairs were too wide to fit through either gap around the ladder, and we had to carry them down the steps at the front of the stage, across the entire length of the gym, into the main hallway, up another set of steps into the cafeteria, and then across the entire cafeteria to another set of doors.

This is where we encountered our biggest problem—apparently the stairs wouldn’t fit through those doors either. We even tried to jam it through using brute force, but no such luck. We did, however, manage to get it wedged between the door and the pole that goes between the two double doors.

We ended up having to remove the railing (without which the stairs were narrow enough to fit) and carry them into the drama room as two components. It was still quite an…interesting experience. But I‘m quite tired now, especially after having walked home.

Oh, and happy birthday to my friend Neil, who’s seventeen today!

I‘m pretty sure that my mom (unlike my dad) doesn’t read my blog. But my dad can probably tell her about this.

Yeah…I have 11 minutes to write this, so I shall take my time. It is Mother’s Day (still is for me, at least), and I shall take this time to publicly wish my mom a happy Mother’s Day. Because that’s what I do when I have a website and know how to use it. Observe:

*pulls a lever.*

Whoops—wrong lever!

Why do we even have that lever?

Yet I digress. My mom is a most wonderful person. She does so much for me, ranging from the mundane things that we often take for granted (like toast and tea), to the really spectacular stuff.

Thanks, mom!

/me goes off to try another lever.

Today I participated in the TD Canada Trust Math Competition at LU. I went last year too, although it was at the college then because of a strike at the university.

I don’t think I did too well at the individual portion. Part of the reason was that some of the questions involved stuff I simply haven’t learned yet. As for the team competition…I think we did reasonably well. Again, I felt a bit useless because I was on a team with two grade 12s (the grade above me) and I didn’t know half as much as they did. Plus, there was nothing on conic sections! That was my “thing”, since I had just finished learning it, whereas the grade 12s had forgotten it. Oh, there were sequences and series all right (another grade 11 subject that I haven’t learned), but no conics whatsoever!

So yeah…we did get down an answer for every question, but we used the horrendous method of guess-and-check for nearly every one, and our proofs were quite flimsy. The answers will be posted online sometime this weekend, so I’ll get a link up to them later.

Lunch was quite good. There was pasta, caesar salad, buns, and lots of little pieces of cakes and sundaes for dessert. I enjoyed it muchly. Oh, and I got a t-shirt.

So it wasn’t a bad day; I wish I could have done better, but I did get the day off school and I think I acquitted myself as well as I could have. I’m tired now and feel burdened by all the stuff I have to do. None of it is marked “urgent”, so I don’t do it. I’m so lazy.

I did type this up, so I guess that’s today’s accomplishment.

I was all ready to have a nice, simple breakfast. One glass for Kool-aid, one bowl for cereal. Cereal goes in the bowl. Then I went to get some Kool-aid to fill up my glass so that I could take an infernal allergy-relief pill, and… BAM!

Apparently, my hand thought that the bowl was the glass, and I immersed my cereal in Kool-aid!

There wasn’t much I could do. It was, unfortunately, the last of the cereal. So I ate it. Gross. It felt like dunking my teeth in sugar, one of thing, and it tasted awful. Do not ever mix cereal and kool-aid.

Unless it’s All-Bran, and you’re testing it on William Shatner…

Wow. What an awesome movie. I was a bit sceptical at first, especially because the beginning is a bit confusing. But I got into it afterward—it probably helps that Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are two of my favourite actors. All around though it’s a great movie. There are just those moments when Batman saves the day and you’ve just got to yell out, “Yes!” so loud that the other people in the room think you’re crazy.

Apparently our Prime Minister eats babies.

Who’d have thunk it?

On a related subject, you think that Toronto would have better security on its computers. olleyes:

Gather round, children, and hear a story from me as I rot my teeth with lemonade, licorice, and Coke.

Tonight we had another Black Light performance, this time at Hillcrest High School. Initially we were going to perform in the afternoon too, but that one got cancelled, leaving only the night one. As soon as I got home from school, Wanda picked me up and we drove to Hillcrest, arriving at around 4:30. From there, I helped set things up. One caveat: Hillcrest has a monsterous amount of stairs! Being built on the hilly part of town, there’s several metres of steep steps up which we had to bring our equipment (and then back down later that night). We had a dolly—which wasn’t very helpful with all those stairs.

I helped set up, and then as more people began to arrive, we tried to get things organised. Natasha ordered TacoTime for us…but they screwed up the orders and hadn’t even started to cook the food by 5:30—and we were on at 7! We ordered pizza instead, and it was pretty good.

First we did a rap of “Where is the Love?” (the Black-Eyed Peas version, and probably one of the only “rap/pop” songs of today which I actually like), followed by “Pong”, which consisted of green pool noodles and a tennis ball. Then came the littler kids’ “Radio Play”, in which there’s a series of vignettes, one from each musical era—‘50s, ’60s, ’70s, etc. I had some sign parts in there and such.

After a brief intermission, we got set up for the older kids’ play, “Freak Show Circus”. I play Kyle, the bi-polar kid—the play itself is about mental illnesses among teenagers, especially bi-polar disorder, eating disorder, OCD, and depression. I had to walk a “tight-rope” as a circus representation of the inner war within myself.

The performance was excellent—Hillcrest’s stage is way better than the one at the college. I could actually see, too, because I wore a belaclava and I used two little sponge things in between the mask and belaclava. This allowed me to wear my glasses during the performance without squishing them into my face.

The technical side…not so much. Our stereo (actually the school’s on-site thingy) broke. Luckily, some of the voices—Cortney, Kate, Shawna, et al—went out on stage and encouraged some “audience participation” whilst we attempted to find a fix. There were some Brownies in the audience, and they came up and did the Chicken Dance and got “interviewed” and such. It was almost as if we had planned it.

We found a stereo to use, and the rest of the play went off okay. I won’t say “without a hitch”, because there was a lot of “hitch”-ing, but in the end no one caught on fire and no one is taking us to court (yet), so I think it turned out well.

Now I’m going to go to bed, because I am beat. Everyone was awesome, so thanks for another great time, guys (as if anyone from Black Light actually reads this ). Sleep now.