Howdy!

Far too much to talk about to cover all I’ve missed, so, I’m going to jump right in!

I either need to get phone calls from MORE people, or LESS people.

If you’re reading this, you likely know how I find it strangely entertaining to try and “mess” with people who’re on the phone. Well, I had a really great “messing with” with my girlfriend, Erin.

She called me, and we talked for a bit, then her mom needed the phone, so she called me back a few minutes later, I picked up and heard “hello” and I was off like a shot. It went something like this:

“Hellllo?” (with some crazy ass accent) “Hi, can I speak to Matthew?” (obviously, Erin playing along) “Oh, yeah, he’s in the back” (mock shouting by me) “hey, what can I do for you?” (even worse fake accent then before) “Oh, wait,” I say, “You’re looking for mather? Just a second” More fake shouting Then “I” pick up “Hello?” She responds: “Hi, I’m julie from the UW psychology department, I’m wondering if you’d like to take part in our study on multitasking, you’ll be required to come in for one session for about 45 minutes” I think, “wow, Erin’s stepped up her game, she doesn’t usually respond in kind like that” Then, I think, “OH FUCK!!!”

As it turns out, this woman on the phone, on closer inspection, doesn’t sound like Erin. In fact, this woman on the phone is NOT ERIN. It’s a woman, from the UW psych department.

Fuck.

My only hope is that she either believed it all (extremely, extremely unlikely) or, she’s required to keep this confidential because it relates to a psycology study (YES!!!)

However, I still mocked forign accents for a good two minutes in a multicultural environment, AND I was holding conversations with myself, putting myself in a business environment on what was clearly a home number.

There have been many attemps to define what “embarassment” is; I submit that the definition of embarassment is making voices in the phone when a member of the staff of the university you go to is on the other end. It seems to cover it quite nicely.

Digital Camera Deals

It was actually faster to put it here then to bookmark it.

I’m kinda-sorta-maybe in the market for a digital camera, so if anyone sees a great deal I’d like to hear about it (looking at melissa)

You know, like many of you out there, I get a lot of spam, and I mean a LOT. Right now, in my spam email folder, I have 24 spam emails, and I cleaned them out two days ago!

I don’t really mind the spam itself, most of it gets cleared out into the special folder automatically. What I DO mind is what the spam’s about. Every single piece of spam I receive is about penis enlargement. I feel pretty good about the Sergeant, but how many pieces of email does it take to kinda shake your confidence a bit? Just ONCE I’d like to get an offer to have hot sex with two lesbians, or buy some swamp land in Florida, or buy some cheapo stolen products.

But no, I get email about enlarging my penis.

How does that even happen?? I mean, I’m certain I didn’t put in my email to any penis pump conglomerate, so it must’ve been sold by someone. If they sold it though, why did they sell it ONLY to the penis enlargement companies?? Besides, wouldn’t it make good marketing sense to send me penis enlargement information AND porn? The idea being I’d be able to enjoy the latter more if I worked on the former?

I just don’t understand it…

But, if you see someone open up their spam folder, only to make a nervous glance at their crotch before confidently deleting the spam, you’ll know that’s me. If you’re feeling very kind, you could come over, pat me on the shoulder, and tell me it’s all OK. And if you’re a hot lesbian couple, you can always send me some emails.

Well, summer’s officially arrived for all of us students, personally I can’t believe it’s really here. I don’t imagine I’ll see all that much of all that many people. I’ll be working in St. Thomas after July 18th (can’t start until after my birthday, and after safety training) so that means I’ll be looking forward to a commute of about an hour and a half each way. So my day’s going to look something like this:

5:30 - wake up 5:31 - curse the world 7:00 - get in car for drive to work 8:45 - Arrive at work 9:00 - start work 5:00 - Leave work 6:30 - get home and eat dinner 10:00 - Go to bed

Real wild summer…. but the money’s good, so it’s worth it (I’m still going to be broke, since I’m going to uni next September though)

Erin (in case I haven’t mentioned her, she’s my girlfriend of six months) will be working at this camp near her. She’s there from noon on Saturday until noon on Sunday, then she gets her mandatory 24 hours off (the gov’t makes them give this to her). I think her job’s ripping her off (they’re charging her something like $70 a WEEK for room and board….. and she’ll be sleeping in the same room as the kids!). So, it’ll be difficult to be able to see her too much, but I’ll do my best, going up Saturday and staying till Saturday night (I doubt she’ll be in any condition to drive to Stratford after being run ragged by kids all week).

Jordan will be working at the Waterloo District School Board again, I don’t know what he’ll be doing there (it’s not the same job as last year, I’m told), so he’ll probably be 9-5 M-F like me.

Andrew’s got a job at a factory ‘round here. I don’t know any of the specifics (I don’t even know what shift he’s got) and he’ll be working at the library like normal. I don’t think I’ll be seeing too much of Andrew this summer for some reason…

And…. that’s everyone I can think of right now… Or at least the only ones I can think of that I know what they’ll be doing for most of their summer…

The latest release of Bittorrent has once again shocked and amazed all. The way Bittorrent has traditionally worked is that you, as the content creator, would create a “.torrent” file, which you would then distribute, you’d then set up a tracker (or configure your tracker to accept people using that new .torrent file) and then you would set up a “seed” so that everyone has a place to download the whole file. As of 2 days ago, cross out step two. That’s right, Bittorrent’s latest Beta supports trackerless downloading!! So, even if someone takes down a tracker (as high traffic, power failures, and legal troubles seem to do fairly often) the torrent will continue to operate well. It’ll be using a similar concept to what most other modern filesharing programs do by having everyone in on the file keeping track of everyone else. Glad that the overhead for this great protocol is being lightened even more. I’m sure this new ability will be rapidly embraced by all the dedicated users of this system.

Read it for yourself here

That’s right boys and girls, I got an RSS reader. For those who don’t know, many sites nowadays put up “RSS feeds”, which, basically, is a page that’s hosted on a website in a special format that a special reader can access. The reader can then determine whether or not there’s any new content on the website in question (Most RSS feeds actually include the new item itself). I chose FeedDemon to supply me with all my news needs. There’re a LOT of RSS feeds that are available by default, enough to keep any newsie supplied. You can even sort all your feeds into sections that make sense (so, for example, you don’t have the plane crash beside the lawyer jokes. You can have a humor and a news section). I really need to take some time to cull out ones that I don’t want/need. It’s pretty cool to have all this information from around the net at my fingertips.

I got this reader about 2 weeks ago. I haven’t used it since. The program’s layout is crap. I’d want it to be laid out like Windows Explorer is, with each news “section” as a sperate folder. Instead, it hides them all in a dropdown box that gives no indication of whether or not there’re any new stories in them, so you have to MANUALLY go through each section to check for new updates. This wouldn’t be so bad except in your default configuration you’ve go something like 12 sections (that’s after I’d cut out about 3 completely). If there was a folder type view then there could be an indicator beside it so that, at a glance, you could see if there was anything new in there (think the folder view Hotmail uses). I found it to be a large pain. Maybe I’ll try again with another program, but for me the RSS reader didn’t make my life faster or easier.