I feel like I don’t what I’m feeling. Let’s stick to the facts.

Three months ago there was flooding and an explosion in the parking garage, and my apartment building has been evacuated as a result. I’ve been staying in a hotel since then, and will be here for at least another month. I’m not paying for it thankfully (otherwise I’d be sleeping on someone’s couch) but it isn’t home.

I had a bunch of people over last night. I was nervous about what we’d actually do, because hosting people always makes me quite apprehensive, worried whether people will have a good time, but I think it went well. We didn’t go for a swim despite suggestions along those lines, but opted instead for playing Cards Against Humanity and Taboo. Both brought by friends.

I’ve been trying to make an effort to build friendships with people I like when I can. It’s not an easy thing for me to do. And I always worry about doing too much or not enough, about saying the right thing, about being someone others want to be friends with in the first place. It may be silly but these are the things that go through my mind. Last night was a bit of an experiment in combining two sets of friends who haven’t met before. I’m happy they seemed to get along even if it started a bit awkwardly. I’m hoping that was in my imagination.

Meanwhile, I’m rowing now for the summer, with the same crew I finished last summer with. It’s been a rocky start. There is a lot of politics at the club, and there’s apparently some idea that we’re a “renegade” crew, despite the fact that it was the program coordinator last year that broke us off into “Steam 2″ without any oversight. So we did with that what we could, and I think did well despite that. So far, though, it hasn’t been great. The stress of writing a thesis is not helping, I’m sure.

There is a lot changing in my life right now. My living situation, being single, finishing my degree, looking for a new job soon, trying to build a comfortable social circle, trying to keep fit, trying to know what I want and what isn’t worth it. And all the stress that comes along with all of that.

My mind is like a heavy hand
Always making more of what really happened
A critical imagination
Always working over time

– Katie Herzig, Free My Mind

Now I’m down to 45 things.

I’m single for the first time in three years. Nobody else is, it seems. Not that I’m looking yet… but it weighs on me.

There are certain things I want in life and many of them seem so far away for myself but I see so many others have it so close.

I didn’t read any of the Canada Reads books this year.

I haven’t read anything in months. No books I wanted to, anyway.

I have 52 things to do before I finish my thesis. And then what?

Two packages are required: gtk-recordmydesktop and pavucontrol

In gtk-recordmydesktop, under advanced settings, set the audio device to “pulse” (instead of “DEFAULT”)

Once you start a recording, in pavucontrol there will be an entry saying something along the lines of “ALSA plug-in [recordmydesktop]: Also Capture from ….“. Set that to “Monitor of Built-in…” and the audio recorded will now be the same as your output audio, and not your microphone.

pavucontrol should remember this setting for the next time you use recordmydesktop…. maybe? But test that first with a short video of, say, a youtube clip to make sure, because recordmydesktop doesn’t give any indication of what audio it is recording.

This reeks of pedantism and is nothing but a “deliberate archaism” designed to make the user feel clever and superior. People will argue about this endlessly, but you can not change the fact that in English “data” is regularly used as a singular mass noun. Most style guides admit that this is acceptable usage.

It’s a lot like split infinitives, which people like to harp on about being incorrect, but only because everybody says they’re incorrect even though there are no authoritative sources that say so.

Nobody uses plural verbs with “agenda” anymore either. Never mind the countless other words whose usage in English doesn’t follow the rules of the language from which they originate. Why do the pedants insist on this one?

So naturally I thought, what would the equivalent colour for red called?

It turns HTML defines it as “maroon”. I might have gone with Burgundy, but according to Wikipedia, that has just a touch of blue (about 12.5%). I think navy red is a better option.

What about green? It turns out that full 100% green is actually rather neon, and HTML calls is “lime”. A more natural kind of green is actually what I might now call navy green, and so doesn’t need the navy.

Now since the 16 standard colors in HTML are just the primary colours and their navy shades, plus some greyscales, let’s just finish this mother off.

Navy yellow is called “olive”.

Navy cyan is called “teal” (although cyan itself is called “aqua”).

Navy magenta is called “purple” (and magenta is called “fuchsia”).

This post brought to you by HTML colour names and old-school <font> and <b> tags.

At one point this thought came into my head, that listening to CBC radio makes me a better person. It was something about the way it keeps me thinking, considering the stories people are telling, relating things back to my own life. Shows like WireTap and Definitely Not the Opera always reflect on something in my life. Aspects I might miss if I just listened to music or traffic for that 25 minute walk.

Unfortunately at the end of it I’m stuck at my desk, staring at my computer, brain shut down because I don’t want to be doing the work I’ve come here to do. Let’s just listen to CBC all day.

The video depicts what should be a GLOBAL CATASTROPHE the likes of which have never been seen before. Continents moving at hundreds of kilometres per second and slamming together. Good things the ocean water has no need to obey fluid dynamics, for one thing. (Notice how water materializes out of the Pacific coasts and just disappears from the Atlantic?) And there’s no way the two groups of partiers would happily end up on the same beach. There’d be a lot more than a couple cracked streets and some bouncing sand. That’s all I’m saying.

Then let’s say a few months down the line they’ve decided to change their strategy, having come up with a new idea about what will really get the best return, this time forecasting they’ll do even better based on the models they made before. So now they want more money to put into this new strategy.

Oh, but now they think they want to change strategies again, maybe even to something that’s actually opposite of what they were doing before in some ways. Let’s put more money into that!

All this while they’re so busy buying and selling and adjusting the models based on various hunches they have, they haven’t actually paid much attention to how much the portfolio is actually worth.

When you ask how the changes they’ve been making have impacted the portfolio, and whether anything they’ve done is actually getting to that 20% goal, they say they haven’t really paid much attention to it because they know the new models are going to be even better. Are you going to give them another million?

What to do, what to do…