I’m listening to the Khaki Snack CD right now. It’s awesome. It’s called “Quantity n ot QUality” and it has a picture of Derek Burpee on the cover holding a beer and looking goofy. Their most popular song, as many of you probably already know, is about being dumped on Christmas Eve over ICQ.
True story, I was humming the song in my head just now and my buddy Nick messaged me and was like, “my girlfriend just dumped me over MSN” and I was like, OMG. How times have changed.
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The best thing about receiving mail from National Defence is that when you take it out in front of people you don’t know, you can pretend you are a spy.
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Remember the “Vandalay Industries” sign that used to be on my house? Looks like by moving, I saved myself $100. In the past few weeks, students have been receiving notices from the city saying that they will be fined if they don’t take down the signs on their houses. Lots of students are getting angry about this, saying that they’re being targeted. A buddy of mine said he didn’t mind the fact that they’re doing this, but he does mind that they’re basically saying, “you want property standards? FINE. We’ll fucking give you property standards, bitches, and you’ll fucking LIKE it.” (This is of course a paraphrase of the city’s original statement.)
Here is a pdf of the property standards bylaw for Kingston. While it’s completely legitimate to say that it’s necessary to enforce the bylaw for exteriors as well as interiors, I don’t like the way it’s being done. First of all, this news of is coming right on the heels of “Kill All Students” talk from various other departments of the city which shall not be named. There’s also the issue of the timeline:
For students (exteriors):
Notice of Infraction: sent after city inspectors go around the ghetto
Removal deadline: ~2 weeks later
Time to fix problem before incurring penalties: 2 weeks, at which point the signs have eaten 3 babies
For landlords (interiors & exteriors such as obvious structural problems):
Initial inspections: must be done by residents, requiring initiative, knowledge that they actually can do something about their terrible living conditions and in some cases also requiring the bravery to face their scary landlords
Fixing deadline: “a reasonable time period,” let’s say ~2 weeks. After the deadline, the tenant can contact the Property Standards office about the problem.
Contact by Property Standards Inspector to arrange a time for inspection: within 2 weeks
Formal inspection and sending of an official order to repair deficiencies: let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’ll be able to do both within a week or two.
Second fixing deadline: “within a prescribed time,” let’s say ~2 weeks again. If the problem is not fixed within those 2 weeks, the city will then commence Legal Action.
Time to fix problem before incurring penalties: 2 months, at which point the house has collapsed
I may be going a bit wild about the structural problems. I know there are many problems around the ghetto that can be seen just from checking the outside.
Further questions:
- Anyone know where I can get a copy of the “Signs” By-Law? They make a reference to it in the Journal but I can’t find it anywhere.
- Has anyone been contacted about problems that have nothing to do with signs?
- Have there been many non-students contacted about signs? Is this only in the vicinity of the ghetto?
- Is Harvey Rosen behind this, or is it the work of the dastardly Penguin?
Hilarious Quote:
“I just think there’s a homogenization of houses and that the city council doesn’t want the bohemian attitude that exists in the Ghetto.”
Far out, man.
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So I just checked my referrers and the top three search strings going to my site are “swamp,” “catfight” and “Adele Mercier.” Also, someone got to my site via biomotionlab.ca, which I am convinced means Prof. Troje checked his referrers, got to my site, found out I want to work for him and also that felitaurs frequently have sex on my blog.
:s
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The Dark Side of Matter with Ubi Wichoski
October 27, 2005 at 1:30 PM in Stirling D
The standard model of cosmology, also known as the big-bang model, is successful in accounting for the ordinary matter that makes up planets, dust, stars and everything else that is made of protons and neutrons (baryonic matter). However, there is extensive astrophysical evidence that most of the matter in the Universe is dark and non-baryonic. This dark matter is detected only by its gravitational pull as it does not emit nor absorb electromagnetic radiation. It is widely accepted that dark matter is made of elementary particles even though such a particle has yet to be discovered.
Dark matter is expected to exist in scales ranging from galactic to cosmological and therefore must exist in our own galaxy, where an ongoing experimental effort searches for it. In this talk, we will present an overview of the field and in particular discuss in detail the status of the PICASSO dark matter search experiment.
Refreshments will be available after the talk. Dr Wichoski is a short-listed applicant for the Tier II CRC in Particle Astrophysics.
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So here’s the conflict: I have a whole bunch of ideas that I want to write about, but I’m always worried that they’ll get stolen the instant I put them on the web. Then again, my ideas have probably already been thought of before, so they’re likely all over the web anyway. Especially since there are sites all over the place where people freely share their crazy ideas and don’t seem to have any problem with it.
There’s also the issue that, in the event that my death precedes the development of all these wonderful things and they in fact are original, my ideas will be lost to the other side, and I’m not too keen on that. Besides, if I don’t lay claim to these ideas, other people will also come up with them and then I’ll never be able to say that I was equally brilliant. The sonic vibrator, for example, comes to mind.
So here are some of my ideas. Good or bad, I like thinking about them.
- A targeted advertising scheme based on artificial neural networks. Upon googling, this seems to be a popular concept, which is lame.
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- A diagnostic program for predicting the success of an ad (using colour, layout, word association & demographic information)
- A robotic cinematographer that knows where to focus and how to compose a shot based on keyword input from a director and lighting/ sound queues (I think the biggest thing would be teaching it how to direct its attention, and to keep it from composing the same standard shot all the time. Teaching a computer to be creative would be totally cool.)
- A browser extension for image text recognition (for folks with visual impairments), and various other improvements to talking browsers.
- An iTunes extension that batch processes selected mp3s and labels them according to their beat rate, which would be useful for preparing songs to go into…
- …An mp3 player for runners that determines your running pace (the beat rate of your feet hitting the ground) and does either of two things:
- chooses songs from your playlist by matching the beat rate of the song to your running pace (to within about 10 bpm) and, if you change your pace drastically enough, fades into a new song, or
- allows you to choose your preferred running pace (interpreted as the beat rate of your songs), and if you diverge from the pace by too wide a margin, it beeps at you.
I don’t know about other runners, but I have a hard time regulating my breathing if I’m listening to a song with one pace and running with another. The player would judge your pace by using some sort of clever gyroscopic mechanism, or the same sort of thing that works with step counters. It could also be tied to a GPS locator; the GPS would judge your horizontal vector, and the vertical gyroscopy, steppy-countery thing would figure out the incline. This system could then periodically figure out how fast you’re going and how much energy you’re theoretically exherting, and tell you to speed up/ slow down.
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