This is one of those things that if I don’t promise everybody that I’ll do it, it’ll never got done. Not that I acutally have anything against chicken nugget night, of course, but having been inspired by CBC Radio’s As It Happens and bolstered further by Take Home Chef, I have decided that:

I WILL EAT MONKFISH

before the summer is through. Possibly grilled, with creamed cabbage, and a soft-shelled crab appetizer. But we’ll see what I come up with when the time comes.

Sometimes I surprise myself at the ammount of stuff I learned in the YD classroom that stuck with me. I still cover my horn, keep three seconds of space on the highway, glance left-center-right, ground view, and even do a little circle check once in a while. Anybody who drives with me very often (especially my sister) also knows that I love my running commentary.

I often talk to other drivers. I admit it. In particular I tell them how stupid they’re being by doing certain things and what they should have done. It really annoys me when people don’t stop at stop signs (I don’t care if you stopped behind me at the stop sign, you have to stop yourself too!) or pass when they shouldn’t.

I can be nice too though. Just last week I was cheering for a guy in a little red car up ahead for going the speed limit on the Foster Thurston. Everybody speeds on that road despite it being nothing but blind hills and sharp curves. And if somebody lets me turn left at that intersection in front of the fire station, I’ll probably propose. Seriously.

Oh Prom, I remember you. This time it was for my sister, though. All dressed up fancy like I don’t think she’s ever been her whole life. Tomorrow’s the big day with the graduation ceremony and then my family is, after more than twenty years, officially done with the regular school system. Sure there’s university for both her and me still, but that doesn’t really count since my mom doesn’t get to volunteer in the library.

If I were more of a sentimental guy I might say something uplifting, deep, or meaningful. Instead I’ll stick with what I put in my grad write up back in the day: Pukka pukka pukka pukka squeetily boink!

I used to be able to identify at least 12 and possibly as many as 20 constellations in the sky. When people would ask me where something was or what a particular star was supposed to be a part of, they’d often get annoyed and say that the whole idea was a pretty big stretch.

Pretty much everybody can spot the big dipper, though not many say it really does look like a bear’s behind. Cassiopeia is even worse… since when does a ‘W’ look like a queen? Don’t even get me started on Triangulum.

A big part of the problem is light pollution. Even in small town New Brunswick I have a hard time seeing some of the less major constellations, and you pretty much have to drive clear into nowhere to see something like the Milky Way. Probably just as important, though, is a bit of imagination. Draco and Cygnus are easy. Orion maybe not so much.

What brought all this on? Well today, in a seemingly unrelated enterprise at work today, I was plotting my standard deviation to see if I had any hope of converging a few iterations down the line. Up pops the graph and I immediately saw something jump out at me. But then again, with a standard deviation like 140, I had been having a pretty long day. Anyway, mouse over to see what I saw.

I never thought it’d happen but I just read a book from Oprah’s Book Club. I feel like I’m supposed to have cried and become a better person. So to make up for it I went and watched South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

I was vaguely reminded of Les Miserables through most of the second half. I thought they might have been spoofing it, but generally spoofs are more obvious and, well, of things people would know. I don’t know that the majority of South Park fans are big on their French revolutionary musical theatre. Nonetheless, I could swear that at the moment all the children go stand next to Terrance and Phillip at that end, they played a little snippet of Little People. I noticed because I despise that song.

And on an almost entirely unrelated note, I need an identification on a song—artist, title, and mp3, ideally. Googling it won’t, despite my sister’s belief to the contrary, work. I’ve tried. And if you do happen to find it that way, I’d like like to know the particular search terms involved as well. Here goes:

… or something to that effect.

The big news around here lately (and I mean big because no fewer than three people mentioned it to me independently within six hours) is that Google Earth has updated their maps of my town. After virtually cruising around for a while, I came to one conclusion:

We have a lot of trees around here.

Want proof? That’s an overhead shot of my neighbourhood above. Ten points if you guess which house is mine. But that’s not even the worst of it.

	This is my elementary school (I’m surprised we didn’t lose more kids),
	this is my high school (and yes this is a different patch of woods, and neither of these schools is on the edge of town),
	This is part of the road to work,
	and I don’t know what this is but apparently I drive around it everytime I go to Meghan’s house.

Today I even had to help some guy get his balloons out of a tree.

I discovered while doing a little casual reading on fourier transforms (because who doesn’t love analyzing a good spectra on a Friday afternoon?) that I’m not an equations kind of guy. Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to use equations and come up with equations to calculate things, but when reading through a mathetmatical textbook like this one I find myself just skipping over the equations to read the text.

Also, this guy needs to learn, that a sentence does not always need, three commas.

There are visual learners and auditory learners. I think there are equation learners and word learners. I’m a word learner. Maybe there’s a better term for it. I can look at an equation and see nothing at all, but then as soon as there’s a sentence attached to it, I’m good to go.

I did have a nice little epiphany somewhere in chapter 3 about how we’re actually using fourier transforms. The light comes in all at once and by performing the transform you can pick out what frequencies there are. Nice. It’s like playing a cord on the piano and being able to hear what individual notes make it up.

And did you know there’s a 300 level math course at McGill on colouring? I bet the first thing they do is provide a formulaic definition for “colouring” and take all the fun out of it.

I always thought it was a bit odd that in order to walk into the Royal Victoria Hospital, I’d invariably have to walk through a gaggle of stinky people and their cloud of smoke. It’s bugged me so much that I came very close to filing a real complaint. Well no more! I got a lovely email from the VP Administration at McGill. As of today,

“Smoking is prohibited within a radius of nine metres (30 feet) outside any door leading to a health or social services institution, to a postsecondary educational institution, or to a facility where activities for minors are provided.”

Hopefully they’ll also enforce this around campus (as they promise) so I won’t go through the same thing at the entrance to the Rutherford building. Especially that one particular guy who shall remain unidentified. He bugs me.

It doesn’t cover all of campus, though. Some areas are still smokable, including,

“Green spaces on either side of the main pathway leading from the Roddick Gates entrance (including the football field, “beach,” and surrounding areas).”

This brings up a very, I think, important question… Since when does McGill have a beach on the lower field? What am I missing here?