Blog: Articles from February 2008

As previously mentioned, Neil Gaiman and Harper Collins have put the entire text of American Gods online. You can read it for free here.

I own a copy of American Gods, of course, so it’s redundant for me. Nevertheless, it’s extremely cool because, hey, let’s face it: it’s free stuff. And it exposes more people to Neil Gaiman and one of his wonderful novels.

So, as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation says, Share and Enjoy!™

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Mr. Gradgrind, Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

Sorry Mr. Gradgrind, but I refuse to believe in a universe based entirely on fact. The universe can’t be based only on fact and science. If it were, why would we have emotions? Why would we feel terrible half the time and ecstatic the other? Why put ourselves through so much pain and trauma? If the universe were based on fact, we wouldn’t need this. We could be moist robots going about with logic and reason. But we aren‘t. And to me, that means that there’s something out there logic and reason cannot explain. Our emotions are our ways of navigating that which we can’t quantify. And that’s magic.

I had an awesome day today. I fixed a problem with VSNS Lemon’s new code, which I celebrated by playing the Hallelujah Chorus. Then Ms. Sukalo called, and we agreed to meet at 2:30 at Starbucks, as she’s in town this week. At 2:00, Carly logged onto MSN. She’s also a former student of Ms. Sukalo, so I thought it would be cool if she came along, and I invited her. So we both went to Starbucks and had a great visit with Sooks.

Then I picked Cortney up from Kakabeka and we went back to my house, where we cooked dinner. My dad was out of town again until tonight, so I cooked dinner for the second time ever from scratch. I did the same diced chicken type dish. It was good to have some help though. After dinner, Cortney and I watched the first disc of nip/tuck; she ended up lending me the entire season.

Too often I feel lonely over my lack of a real social life. It’s too easy to become withdrawn, especially when one doesn’t do things with friends often enough. Days like these that remind me of how great my friends are … these are days worth blogging about, so I can remember them years from now.

It’s scary, sometimes. My peers and I are growing up. Our parents aren’t driving us to each other’s houses anymore; we‘re driving ourselves around. While preparing dinner with Cortney, I realized this experience was one of the most adult things I’ve done since I turned 18, because my relationships with my friends are changing. No longer fuelled by the day-to-day interaction of high school, our friendships endure because of what we hold in common and new types of interaction, like making dinner together.

Now if I can survive this weekend from Hell, then there’s hope for the future after all!

Here’s a cereal aside for you today regarding advertising.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials for “Diamond Shreddies”, which are apparently just like regular Shreddies, only they‘re diamond-shaped. For those of you familiar with Shreddies but not this commercial, I’ll give you a moment to visualize the difference.

Got it? Yeah, they‘re exactly the same. This commercial is very clever, because it’s one of those “it’s so dumb it has to be a joke” jokes; the true joke is on the poor sod who does think there’s a difference.

This morning I absently looked up at the TV while a Mini-Wheats commercial was on. That jingle is just annoying. And really, whose idea was it to try to sell me cereal by having an anthropomorphic weaved wheat guy dance and sing about how tasty he is? I don’t know about you, but I’m like Arthur Dent—I don’t fancy eating something that talks back to me. Well, that’s marketing for you.

I got my first camera (first digital camera too) on Boxing Day of 2005. It was actually the first time I ever went to a store early to try and get a deal—it was on sale at CompuSmart. They were only letting a few people into the store at a time. I snagged my camera; I also got a free printer with mail-in rebate. (I almost forgot to send in the rebate, but that’s another story. The printer is an Epson Stylus CX3810, and it works wonderfully. Best free electronic device I‘ve ever gotten.)

After two years, my Fujifilm FinePix A350 is old. It’s 5.2 megapixels, which is respectable, and it still works. The only major problem is that the shutter doesn’t fully open when you turn it on—you have to turn it off and on until it extends completely on the third or fifth or tenth try. This is only a minor inconvenience, but it’s a good excuse to upgrade.

I haven’t been intentionally shopping for a digital camera, as I planned to take my time. However, I saw one for sale in a Future Shop flyer. Very tempting. A web search turned up a few more possibilities. After consulting with my friends Neil and Nicola, both of whom know more about photography than I do, I decided that the camera on sale would work best for me. A couple of clicks later, and I had ordered a FujiFilm A900 for under $200. Nine megapixels, 4x optical zoom, sweet sized LCD screen with lots of nifty options. If that wasn’t good enough, Future Shop was giving away free 2 GB SD memory cards with every online camera purchase. I can now take 897 photos at a time.

So hopefully I’ll put up some more photos from time to time. Once I redesign my site I want to work on integrating my Flickr page into it.

This is mostly for my dad, who has been bugging me about how I‘m doing in school but doesn’t understand that I feel more comfortable writing about such matters in front of several million strangers instead of actually talking out loud about it to a parent. Curse you, modern society!

I have one more day to go, and then we‘ve got Reading Week. It’s our version of “spring break” for universities. I don’t have anything special planned. I just want to enjoy the time off. I’ll read, work on my own stuff, try not to think about school … And work, of course. Work has been very hectic this month. I’ve had a lot of extra shifts added to my calendar as the month progressed, special event type shifts which can be stressful because of their unusual times and the amount of preparation we have to do (like cleaning, moving tables, etc.). I hope March calms down.

When it comes to school, this is midterm season. I only have three classes in which I have midterms, however. My sociology midterm is this week; it’s online, so I can do it anytime from today until Saturday night. The catch is that you only get 60 minutes once you log in, and you can’t log in twice. So first I will study, then I’ll do the test … I did well on the last midterm, so this one should go okay too. My calculus midterm is March 3. In discrete math we’ve got four midterms because the professor broke up each midterm into two different tests. I like this system better, since it means you have to study less for each test. So my next test is March 7.

My first of two English essays was due today. It was pretty easy, just a close reading of Sonnet 138. There’s one other, slightly longer essay due at the end of the term, but otherwise I just have to read enough that I can talk about our course material when I get to the final exam.

Rhetoric (online) is almost as easy as composition was! Actually, I’m getting better marks in this class than I did with composition—it’s the same professor, as the two courses rather go together. He’s a hard but fair marker, so when I say “better marks”, I mean one or two more marks. So I am doing very well in that class and have no worries about it.

So that’s how my schooling is going, Dad. Now all of you, stay tuned for a post later today about my shiny new camera.

Got your attention, didn’t I?

Neil Gaiman, one of the greatest authors of our era, is going to offer one of his books online for free to celebrate the seventh birthday of his blog. But that’s not the best part. We get to choose which book! Head on over to his blog and vote for the book you want to see online for free. Take his advice, though, and instead of voting necessarily for your favourite book, vote for the one you’d give to a friend. I just introduced a friend of mine to Neil Gaiman and lent her my copy of American Gods.

My dad was out of town on business for Monday and Tuesday night, which left me in charge of the household and my brother. In this situation, I had to do certain chores I’ve never done before—such as make supper from scratch!

That’s right. Although I’ve helped out in the kitchen before, I‘ve never cooked dinner from scratch without supervision before. I made diced chicken with pasta. I didn’t remember how to make a basil pesto sauce for the pasta, unfortunately; however, I added basil, curry, and soy sauce to the chicken, which spread to the pasta. But wait, there’s more! I also did laundry.

I guess since I’m 18 I should be learning this stuff—or I should already know it. I‘ve been lucky to have parents who have let me sustain such a sheltered existence. It’s not that I don’t like cooking—I enjoyed the experience—but I just haven’t had the time to cook often enough to get better at it. Hopefully that will change, although there’s a certain laziness factor to overcome first… .

In other news, I’ve got a super cool new chair. Now if only I could get up from it!

Last night I signed up for Twitter, an increasingly popular online service that allows users to send status messages from a variety of platforms—mobile, web, IM, etc. Big deal, you say. So what—who cares? The neat thing isn’t so much what Twitter does as how you can use Twitter elsewhere on the Internet.

For example, thanks to a Facebook application, I can update my Twitter status and have it show up on my Facebook profile page. Once I redesign my website (coming soon, I promise!) I’m going to add a status box to the front page, and it will draw the status from Twitter. So instead of updating Facebook and my site, all I have to do is update my Twitter status, and anything that draws my status from Twitter will change.

But wait, there’s more. Twitter is following the trend of moving the Web off the Web and onto phones. You can text Twitter from your phone. I’m online a lot, so of course it’s quite convenient to use the web interface. However, the real power from Twitter, in my opinion, is the fact that I can update it without access to a computer. This way if I get stuck somewhere and can’t get to the Internet, I can let other people know. Theoretically all I have to do is set up my phone with Twitter and then text. Theoretically…

Those of you who know TBayTel, my phone company and ISP, know that anything relying on TBayTel is a long shot at best. I had a terrible time trying to get Twitter to work with my cell phone. It apparently isn’t texting to short codes properly; the non-shortened number wasn’t working either. I was almost ready to give up. But wait, what’s this? TwitterMail to the rescue!

You see, my phone allows me to text message both phones and email addresses (I‘m not certain if this is standard with all SMS phones or if it’s a TBayTel thing; I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s standard). So I signed up for a TwitterMail address, which gives me a secret email address linked to my Twitter account. Any messages sent to this address get sent to Twitter as a status update. Now I send my text message to the TwitterMail address, not any sort of Twitter phone number, and voila! Status update complete.

Thank you, TBayTel, for being totally unhelpful. Thank you, Twitter and TwitterMail, for providing innovative services for free!

Canadians flying to the United States now require a passport. We don’t need one to cross the border by land yet, but that is in the works. So earlier this month, after over a year of procrastination, I finally applied for a passport.

The application process wasn’t that hard as far as government applications go. Passport Canada offers an online form that you can fill out and save, so you don’t have to complete it all in one go. Then you have to print off the form and send it in to them—the benefit of using the form, as opposed to simply getting an application and doing it by hand, is that the online form checks to make sure you have properly filled out all the required information.

You must identify yourself, of course, and provide proof of Canadian citizenship—in my case, my birth certificate, driver’s licence, and provincial health card sufficed. Then you need two references—someone who’s known you for at least two years—and a guarantor. A guarantor is basically someone who will co-sign your passport to verify that yes, you are the person you‘ve claimed to be. In my case I got one of my dad’s colleagues to do this. The guarantor signs the passport, puts down his or her own passport number to show that he or she has a valid passport (which is a requirement), and signs the photo to guarantee that it’s an accurate likeness of you.

Having filled out the form and gotten it guaranteed, I had to send it to the government. I could mail it in, or I could go in person to the local passport office and submit the application there. Due to the increased volume of passport applications, I wasn’t too optimistic about how quickly a mailed application would get processed, so I went in person. About fifteen minutes and $87 later, I had a receipt that said my passport would be mailed to me in a couple of weeks.

Sure enough, on January 22, I got a slip in the mailbox that said something along the lines of, “Hi, it’s Canada Post. We have a registered mail package for you, but no one answered the door. Please come pick it up at the post office.” Of course, I went to the wrong post office and ended up having to go all the way back across town to get to the right one. But at the end of my journey, I had a passport!

It’s shiny. It’s all official and lets me travel. I‘m not big on travelling, but I do have plans to travel in May (*crosses fingers*), so this will be useful.

And that’s how one applies for a Canadian passport, in case you have ever laid awake in bed at night, unable to sleep because you wondered How do Canadians apply for passports?. Now you know.