The Personal Diary of Dr. Autobus Rodriguez P. Fruitloop-Mango-Charabanc-Escobar

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:02:42 GMT

Dear Journal, school is hard work!

I already have a three or four hour modern algebra assignment, a three or four hour lab for CSC 305 and a take home quiz from the same class (even though the latter is pretty trivial). I've only had two days of classes -- how can that happen?

I'm getting a little fictioned out these days, from the reading, so I was thinking of checking out some more non-fiction in the near future to get my emotional strength up for gripping narrative. It was with this in mind during a conversation with Stef that I stumbled on what is potentially the greatest idea ever:

I am going to read both Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not A Christian" and Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity" and write a review comparing their respective arguments. Some might consider it unfair comparing the arguments of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers with those of a sensationalist political writer who may very well have trouble getting dressed in the morning without assistance, but I think that's what makes the idea all the more entertaining.

DISCUSS.

Insomnia, now in refreshing Spearmint flavour.

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:03:06 GMT

On occasion I have been known to get the inexplicable feeling that I am losing my mind. I actually thought I had lost my mind this one time, but after a couple of weeks I came out of it and was okay.

There is a screaming homeless man outside my apartment who has been there for some time, and by some time, I don't mean a few hours -- more like a few weeks. He seems to end every single sentence with "URRRGH SHUT THE FUCK UP UUURGH!" as if it were punctuation. I'm starting to get an inkling suspicion that he is using that phrase as some kind of yogic substitute for breathing, to enable him to scream for longer periods of time without taking in any oxygen. I've clocked him at as much as twelve hours of uninterrupted screaming before.

I'm still not really sure what it is he's screaming at. For a while I thought there was maybe someone else with him, but I never hear any voices, and I'm pretty sure most people would not stick around when someone was screaming at them for twelve straight hours. Then I thought maybe he was screaming at cars, because I think I heard him say something about trying to sleep. My current theory is that, because he seems to hang out across from a church, perhaps he is screaming at God... maybe because he has been condemned to a life of constant screaming, although that's starting to sound suspiciously circular.

Maybe the reason is much more sinister. For example, it could be that if he doesn't keep the church perpetually intimidated, it will rise from its foundations and just start gobbling up bystanders with wanton ferocity. He could come from an ancient order of monks who are dedicated to keeping uppity real estate in check.

Anyway, my real point is that I think someday soon I am probably going to totally lose it, and I only hope that I can apply myself with the same work ethic as our local crazy. Sure, maybe he doesn't really know what he's screaming at or what day it is or what his name is, but he's still out there, screaming, day in and day out, rain or shine. When society drives me to spend my life drinking on a street corner, I could be a jovial hobo offering to tell jokes for spare quarters, but we all know those people are selling out. I want to be the kind of hobo who makes people feel embarrassed for owning cars and houses and socks without holes in them. I want people to think, "Sure, I guess I spent nine hours at the office today, but that guy has been out there for three days straight screaming obscenities at a tree and all he has to show for it is a couple of rusty cans and half a dead dog." Maybe I'd even stop sometimes to give the appearance that I was listening attentively to the half a dog, and then I would nod slyly as if it had made a cunning point. Sometimes I would pretend to be totally rational and ask people what time it was, and then I would look down suspiciously, realize that I had feet, and just go into a blind panic and scream until I passed out.

I don't really have a point to this story. I think I sort of got carried away thinking about all the awesome things I can do once I realize that everything in the world is terrifying and my only refuge is at the bottom of a bottle of industrial solvent. The leisure activities of the modern hobo are virtually limitless...

Can you think of any?

Frog disease

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:32:52 GMT

It appears that when my parents returned from France, my father brought me back some horrible French plague which is, as we speak, turning my insides into goo.

To anyone who comes to check up on me: if you find my body naught but a writhing mass of buboes, please burn it and spread my ashes over the ocean.

An experiment was performed in which I want half an hour of my life back, you dicks

Tue, 29 May 2007 01:06:03 GMT

You really think I would have learned my lesson by now, but the problem with 'experimental' music is not just that it's outright terrible; it's that it takes so long to gauge its quality that you find yourself listening for twenty or thirty minutes, waiting for something to happen, before you realize that you are out of luck.

I invite experimental bands to have some common courtesy and instead of titling your albums after random excerpts from Baudelaire, just stick with something along the lines of "Basically Just Godspeed You Black Emperor!" or better yet, "Boring and Borderline Unlistenable."

Accordingly, album reviews should be shortened from mouthfuls like "Resembling Milton apropos of his furied temerity, the titular track descends gleaming from the firmament on the wings of angels as a whirlwind jazz guitar progression segues into the lonesome and wistful tones of a distant French horn, echoing half-formed notions of a lost golden age laid waste by the ravages of time" to "nothing happens for about twelve minutes and then it ends."

Truth be told, experimental bands, I'm a busy man, and I simply can't spend an entire hour of my time first listening to your terrible albums and then complaining about them on the internet. If you could release your albums with more accurate labelling or, alternately, not release them at all, I think we would all lead more fulfilling lives with more time for critical activities such as napping, we would be much happier, and as a result there would probably be less war.

Sincerely,
Chris

Scholarly Pursuits

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:31:33 GMT

School is done for the semester! I'm doing a compressed 'quackulus' course in the spring, but other than that I am finished until fall.

Yesterday was my final exam of the semester: discrete math. It appears to have been a case of saving the worst for last. I finished everything except for four questions in the first hour and a half of the exam, then spent the last hour and a half tearing my hair out over those four questions.

The ones that really got to me were the recurrence relations, not because they were difficult, per se, more that I didn't actually remember the hundred million formulae we needed to know to solve them (the course is light on theory for some reason, which bugs me). I ended up having to figure out a pattern for the series by eyeballing them, writing down an equation, then working back to the formulae we were supposed to know to get the equation in the first place.

I've got my marks back so far from linear algebra, calculus, data structures and computer science, which were A, A, A+ and A respectively, so I'm hoping this course doesn't wreck my average.

A milestone in human achievment

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:07:02 GMT

With my Comp 212 midterm this morning, I have officially become the first person ever (to my knowledge) to include a component labelled 'existential crisis' in a circuit diagram.

Hopefully my glib responses and lack of knowledge on Alan Turing's favorite ice cream flavour have not doomed me to failure.

Money in the bank

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:17:36 GMT

Clarica finally sent me the cheque from my education fund that I so desperately require to live while I am in school!

The first orders of business are to pay off my credit card debt and pick up a not-ancient graphics card for my computron, rendering it a veritable powerhouse of polygonal processing. Let's just say that, after the installation of this new card, I would be unsurprised if my computer began repeatedly screaming "OH YEAH!" while performing in advertisements for Slim Jims and climbing into the ring to put the hurt on Bret "The Hitman" Hart (this professional wrestling reference brought to you by 1995).

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:22:11 GMT

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

I'm really enjoying this book of Feynman lectures. The fact that it's transcribed lecture material gives it a fast-paced, flowing style: he goes off on tangents about the philosophy of science and discusses the relation of physics to other disciplines. Everything is littered with miscellaneous information and opinion. It's also very accessible to non-physics students, as it was intended to be an introductory course. Anyone should be able to grasp the basic lecture material, and none of the math is beyond first year calculus and vector algebra.

If anyone wants a copy, I've got the whole thing in PDF on my computron, so just get me a CD and I will burn it for you (it's a little too large to be sent conveniently over the internet).

UVic, maybe?

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:50:27 GMT

I guess I'm going to UVic next year, maybe?

My application has been approved, but I'm not entirely sure whether or not I should start enrolling in stuff. I was sort of hoping to stay another year at Camosun, mostly because of the math department, but it looks like they may be cancelling all or part of university transfer computer science, in which case going to Camosun would mean adding another semester to the time it takes to get my degree.

I may still see if I can take a couple of courses with Dr. Dan and go to UVic at the same time. Who knows?

I downloaded a book of Richard Feynman lectures. I really enjoy his no-nonsense way of talking about physics. Instead of just feeding you the lies that help you to learn the basics, he includes qualifiers akin to "this isn't really how it works, but it's useful to picture it this way." I enjoy the novel approach of teaching to people who are not still struggling with the concept of tying their shoes without help.

Failed?

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:54:59 GMT

I failed a test today. I have never failed anything in the whole time I have been at college. In fact, before this week, I had never received a mark below 80% on anything, and only rarely have I received anything under 90%.

This is really going to hurt my course mark.

But zombie!

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:58:24 GMT

I missed a week of school when I was really sick last week.

I managed to get three hours of sleep last night, and tonight I am just going to have to stay up.

On the other hand, I'll get all my assignments handed in on time and all my tests written. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

P.S. Museum trip planned for tomorrow afternoon. Call Jables during regular daytime hours for details.

P.P.S. Grgghrhghrh

I am an internet futurist

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 05:51:54 GMT

Web 2.0 is providing us with the tools to build a true online community.

If you picked up a newspaper, you blindly accepted the news they wanted you to read. Now with Web 2.0 we make the newspaper with news we want to read. They had writers, reporters, printers and editors. We have tags, diggs, user ratings and social bookmarks. We are doing a lot of interesting things now that we are in control. According to Digg.com, what we are interested in now is "Pictures of Britney Spears attacking a car with an umbrella!," but this is only temporary in the vast sphere of transience called Web 2.0, so if you want to refresh the page in a couple of seconds, we are sure we will have found something else to be interested in by then.

Tag-clouds are art now. This is good, because we were getting awfully sick of this:

and we were thinking that maybe we would like to see more things like this:

That's right: words. Some of them are bigger than other ones, but the biggest one is Web, as in Web 2.0. Where is your art now, them? It looks like it got Web 2.0'd.

Where is your literature, them?

I know. It is stuck in the decaying libraries of yesteryear: its vast stacks of moulding books entombed silently in draughty old buildings. Meanwhile, we are freed from our earthly bodies to rise up, twirling and spinning in the boundless skies of the blogocyberdrome.

So what are we writing about, in our limitless, multidimensional, virtual cybertron of Web 2.0?

Mostly we are writing about Web 2.0 and how awesome it is. We are writing about things like social networking, Wikimedia and AJAX. We have never seen an AJAX, but our buddy Steve saw one once and he said it was beautiful, like a transdimensional nexus of innumerable motes of light accelerating infinitely through the unbounded expanse of the informational nexustron. We write about this stuff a lot. Sometimes we get so excited just thinking about the infinite virtual possibility functions of the human-future cyberinterface of the Web 2.0 that we have to go lie down for a bit before we can blog about it.

So what's next for us in the unending polygonal internetwork of tessellated cyberinformatic microdreams that spans the depths of the Web 2.0? Currently we are opening a second bag of Cheetos and hitting refresh on our browsers in the hopes that someone writes something that we can link to and possibly complain about. We were thinking of calling them a fag.

Uh...

WEB 2.0

Hatewinter

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:33:58 GMT

I am so exhausted. I was up at 6am for a jog, then off to my Computer Science 212 midterm, then half-finishing my Linear Algebra homework, then off to Discrete Math where I had an assignment returned which I had turned in a day late.

You see, I wasn't aware the assignment was due, so I spent four consecutive hours working on it the day after I was supposed to hand it in. After skipping several important classes to get it done, I slipped it under my professor's door with an apology for being a day late.

My mark on the assignment? Zero... because it was a day late. Of course, because of that I didn't get my Quackulus lab done, so I have to scramble to get it done tomorrow before it needs to be turned in.

Also, the weather is, as you may have noticed, not the best.

Friday is lab night at the Clab

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 08:23:20 GMT

That's right, my entire Friday night was spent doing a lab, which I turned in at 12:15 (fifteen minutes late).

Yes, I had a lab assigned which was due midnight on a Friday. It is now officially too late to do anything except for hang out and read. I think I picked the wrong field.

"Seriously, though, the world of computing hit its pinnacle with that demo game where monkeys threw bananas at each other, and since then it's all been downhill."

Bored!

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 06:56:55 GMT

I am bored! This is unusual!

I think I made a mistake when I started focussing on school so hard that I stopped hanging out with friends.

People Invent "Quantum Computer." No One Knows What It Does.

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:02:03 GMT

Supposedly, a Vancouver firm has built and successfully tested a quantum computer.

What is a quantum computer, you ask?

A quantum computer, in addition to all the bits and pieces of a normal computer, has these things called qbits, which, in a process that only physicists understand (and according mostly to the company's advertising), allow it to solve problems which belong to something called the 'complexity class' of 'non-deterministic polynomial time,' that is to say, problems that can be solved in some measure of time which is a polynomial of some input value (such as the number of items in a list), by what is called a 'non-deterministic Turing machine.'

The interesting thing about a non-deterministic Turing machine as I understand it is that, in theory, it has multiple responses for every possible instruction. This means that instead of taking only one action and existing one state, like a regular computron, it can exist in multiple simultaneous states, forming a tree of possible actions. Deterministic Turing machines can only verify possible solutions to NP class problems in polynomial time. Generating solutions would often take exponential time.

This is an interesting area of science, because a lot of problems that people would like to solve, like finding the path through a weighted graph which forms a Hamiltonian cycle with the lowest weight, cannot be solvable by today's computers, because they fall into this 'NP complete' category. You're just going to have to trust me on this one, but looking for the most efficient path in a graph with 100 nodes would take a number of trillions of years on a computer which could, say, compute 50,000,000 possibilities a second.

Breaking modern encryption would also be an NP complete problem, in most cases, this is why is it safe to buy things over the internets. Supposedly, quantum computers can solve these problems very quickly. If they really work, they ought to be able to break most common encryption in a relatively small number of steps.

I'm a little skeptical of the whole quantum computing thing, because this would be a revolution on the scale of... something really big, like the invention of bread. For certain problems, quantum computers should allow you to compute 2 to the N simultaneous solutions (where N is your number of qbits). So why is no one really talking about this? I get the feeling that either maybe it's not as good as they hoped, or just no one not in math or computing really understands exactly what all this crap means.

Update: Press releases appear sketchy, and there is not a lot of word on exactly which problems this thing can solve. It's still reasonably unclear how much of this is hype.

Alls you gotta do is stay up until 3am.

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 22:43:18 GMT

This is the second week in a row for which I have stayed up until 3am working on an assignment by the college's infamous 'Dr. Dan,' mathemagician extraordinaire.

Dan is widely known not only for being the best math prof ever, but also for his amazing use of catch-phrases, including "Alls you gotta do is [something complicated]." and "Just blur your eyes a little bit." If any mathematician could be made into a cartoon character, it would be Dan.

I have to do my UVic application sometime in the next week. I was thinking of maybe going into the math department instead of into the sciences.

CLAB UPDATE: We are still pretty much living out of boxes up in this piece. I have been too busy with school to respond to any emails or phone calls or etc. Hopefully this weekend I will have time to catch up on everything that has been lagging behind and maybe start to recover some kind of a life outside schoolwork. Maybe I will also be able to get some real sleep.

Where am I?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 02:21:04 GMT

I am still a bit sick, so I had a bit of a nap this afternoon and had my first experience of waking up thinking, "Where am I?" since we moved into the new place yesterday. I guess this morning I was just rested enough to know where I was. Evening naps are a mixed bag: sometimes you wake up feeling very refreshed and alert, other times you just feel all floaty and spacey for a few hours while your brain tries to figure out what time it's supposed to be.

Our place is still littered with boxes containing most of our things. This morning was a scramble to find the coffee maker in an attempt to have some delicious wakefulness. Only after the coffee was finished brewing did I realize that I had no idea where the mugs were, which prompted a second attempt at tearing through various boxes to find things. We've also had to throw away a lot of things the previous tenants left here, and clean the kitchen again, as it wasn't cleaned properly the first time. The oven is still disgusting and basically unusable, but at least the stove top, counters and sink are clean.

Maybe I should think about finding some dinner...

Sick!

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 17:26:26 GMT

Yes, that's right: I am sick!

I have our apartment inspection today, and so much is not cleaned that must be cleaned, so I'm going to be spending the entire day sniffling and wiping things with various cleaners. Already the house is looking pretty bare, except for the enormous stack of boxes in the middle of the living room.

Additionally, I also have to do a whole bunch of math work this weekend, which I guess I will knock off this evening. Busy, busy busy...

Captain's log, Stardate 3.1415926535

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 23:42:23 GMT

These are the last days of the orbital research station, "C-lab."

It has been almost a month since a series of explosions rocked the ship with the force of at least several thousand ALs ('Arjen Lucassens:' our standard future unit of measurement for how much a thing is rocked). Most of our oxygen was vented into space, and we lost approximately half our crew to some particularly awesome guitar harmonies.

The station limps decrepitly along in a decaying, elliptical orbit, like an old man out in space who is made of metal and carrying several hundred passengers. Most of our remaining crew members have escaped in the pods, stripping the ship of its few functional components.

In this time of mourning, I invite all of you to take a moment of silence to remember the good times experienced at the C-lab -- drunken card games, Diplomacy, drunken movie nights, and all manner of camaraderie accomplished in the name of science.

As for myself, I will remain here on the station for the time being to salvage what little of our research can be saved. If I don't make it back to Earth, tell my wife that I have always loved science.

Doctor, it burns when I crusade.

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 23:37:19 GMT

The new Warcraft (a.k.a. Warcrack) thing, the Burning Crusade, came out last week. It's like a giant nerd party in the natural habitat of nerds (hereafter referred to as the Intertubes). Unfortunately, as much as I would like to waste a bunch of time playing videogames, I have about a hundred million labs to do this weekend, and I have to clean and pack so I can move in a week and a half.

Mike, Jenn, Nick and I went to Vista 18 last night, which was delightful. However, they played a lot of Jack Johnson, who I hate with the intense and fiery passion I reserve for people who are so neutral that I can't decide if I should hate them or not.

Then it came to me suddenly this morning: what if Jack Johnson is, in fact, not only the world's foremost speed-metal shredder, but also the world's foremost somnambulist? I mean, what if he is actually a really great musician, but has been sleepwalking since 1997? Maybe the record companies are just exploiting him for boring, adult contemporary music in the hopes that he doesn't wake up...

Because, when he does, he will ride into the middle of a meeting for recording industry bigwigs on the back of a majestic dragon, and explode their heads with his future guitar/laser gun. They all know it's coming. They know they will pay the price for their hubris. It is only a matter of time.

This is the sort of thing I think about when I wake up in the mornings.

Fuck your Myspace

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 01:20:29 GMT

Fuck you, Myspace, for your encoding that ruins everything. My once sparkly high-end sounds it's been chewed up by a dog.

Without benches, where will we sit?

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:33:11 GMT

Bad news, kids. It looks like I can't afford to go to 3 Inches of Blood (a.k.a. Benches of Blood) tonight. I could maybe afford the ticket, but I definitely couldn't afford to buy drinks and do the normal galavanting one associates with fun nights out after I dropped $30 on dinner yesterday and $15 on drinks at the show.

Since I'm not one for half measures, it looks like I'll be cracking open this bottle of red wine and doing homework tonight. That is, unless there are some other boring people out there who are not going to the show?

Feel free to drop me a line, anyone.

This will restore your faith in mankind

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:38:37 GMT

I feel better about the world just knowing that the following video happened:

Boozes

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 11:35:30 GMT

Regularly, I don't drink this much; however, tonight I brought I bottle of wine to a particular 'party,' which I figured everyone there would have a bit of, and no one else actually wanted any. If finishing an entire bottle of wine wasn't enough, Pema also kept passing me a forty of O.E. as the night wore on (keeping it real). I hope my liquor consumption was at least proportional to his enjoyment of his going away party. In that case, I would have some justification of sitting here while drinking water and trying to focus my eyes on words that I am typing.

Godspeed, Pema. You will be missed.