Blessed by the Potato

Grad students really shouldn’t be classified by graduating year class, it’s just not fair. Sure, for undergrads and high school students, those are reasonable, attainable guidelines and classifications for the vast majority of students (there are exceptions, of course). People know when they’re going to be done, and that at that point their lives will change rather significantly. But for grad students, a graduating year is nebulous. A rough guideline at best, but more practically a goal to work towards, with the full understanding that delays are a fact of life. Even then, the work you do after grad school is often not all that different from what you do during grad school, it might just require a change of scenery. So I find it odd that the first question out of anyone’s mouth when I say I’m working on my PhD is “when will you be done?” I look through sites like Facebook and see people with these classifications beside their name, and wonder how many of those are not just hopeful, but wildly delusional? I know that when I’m forced to put something in that box, it’s not much more than a stab in the dark. I might, if I’m lucky, get the year right, but I really doubt the month/term will be spot-on. Of course, it was so with my own MSc: I started in 2003 and would have expected to graduate as part of the class of ’04, possibly slip into ’05 if my expectations for being above-average fell short; little did I know that it wouldn’t be until halfway through ’06 that I’d finally see my thesis printed & bound. Even scholarship applications and the like require that information, and they really should know better. They asked when you started, they can do the math. In fact, it might be quite interesting and informative to gather up all the OGS applications over the years and contact the students to find out when they actually did graduate, or how their estimate has changed over time if they’re still in grad school….

I’ve had my computers set for the longest time to notify me of any Windoze Updates, but not to download or install them until I give the okay. Today I had two computers mysteriously reset on me when I was away at seminars, and I couldn’t figure it out. I think I know now: Windoze just popped up with that annoying “resetting in 4 minutes…” countdown after it does an automatic update….

What the hell?! I hate that “feature” that resets your computer no matter what you’re in the middle of after an automatic update (or worse yet, automatically resets it after 4 minutes if you step away, no matter what unsaved work you may have open). But more importantly, how in the hell did automatic updates get turned back on on my computers? And how is it that there’s an update that requires a reset now when I saw a news story that said MS was skipping Patch Tuesday for March?? I’m a little bit afraid now: has a trojan/virus finally managed to masquerade as Windoze Update and distribute itself to everyone at the operating system level? Did the patch from last month override my Windoze Update settings without telling me, and now it’s grabbing the patches I specifically ignored before?

There’s this house on my walk to work that’s always seemed to have… issues… with their garbage collection. Usually, there’s a lot of left-over, odd pieces of trash on their lawn, and it looks like the raccoons quite often get a chance to pick through their garbage. Today, there’s a ripped-open bag in the middle of their lawn that’s been there for almost a week now. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to see why, exactly, they do so poorly with a task so simple as putting your trash out for someone else to take away. As I was walking up the street, I saw a girl come out of the ground floor unit, put her trash on the curb, and go inside. Just a few seconds after she got in, the guy in the second floor unit came out and hurled a bag of trash off of his balcony out in the general direction of the street (it landed on the lawn before the sidewalk, and remains there today). This was in the morning too, which gave the animals lots of time to pick through it before collection the next day.

Now that the snow has melted, that block is just disgusting. There’s a vast swath of debris stretching half a block now laid bare by the thaw. That block is made worse today because sometime last night somebody had an egg fight or something: two dozen eggs are thrown all up and down the street and lawns along that block.

I just don’t really understand people’s weird garbage issues. Like we’ve had all kinds of weird crap thrown into our parking lot. Beer bottles, of course. Tonnes of beer bottles. I mean, I still don’t really understand beer bottles: they’re reusable/recyclable, you can get money for them, and they’re dangerous when broken, so why go around throwing them like idiots? Of course, drinking the beer in the bottles makes people idiots, so they throw them anyway. I don’t understand it, but at least it’s not hugely unexpected or weird. No, we’ve also had all kinds of weird things in our parking lot: a pumpkin smashed… in December. Food, and not take-out food from people just walking through, either. Like dip or something from one of our neighbours’ kitchens. A while ago, there was a smashed inkjet printer there, which is just kind of wrong. The other stuff I could maybe see a really stupid/negligent neighbour maybe out on their balcony with a bottle of beer and a bowl of dip, and then deciding to chuck the dip over the fence when they’re half done just because they’re too lazy to bring it inside to throw out. But a printer? There is no possible scenario where someone is hurling a printer over a fence to save any effort. That’s just malicious, spiteful littering. Since it was over the fence, they couldn’t have even really seen it smash into little bits, which is about all the entertainment value in throwing a printer that I can see. Today, there were socks. Wayfare decided that enough was enough: we had been good-natured about some of the weird ass shit showing up in our lot, but chucking socks is just too strange: they’re not gross enough to be spiteful, but not hard enough to throw away properly to be lazy. It’s just retarded. So she threw them back over the fence. By lunchtime, another, different sock had materialized on the deck.

I really hope these kids go home to live with their parents for the summer.

London, for being a relatively medium-sized city, has a relatively decent bus system. If you want to go to a lot of places on major streets then you can do pretty well for yourself. While there are a few blind spots in the coverage, and some strange route choices, for the most part they even come often enough to be useful. And once they arrive, they’re pretty quick to get to where they’re going! However, I just can’t figure out a lot of the weird burst scheduling they do. For example, today we were at the hospital waiting for the bus to come to take us up to campus. One of my office mates said “oh, it’ll be nice and fast, the #6 comes every 5 minutes or so” and I said “well, it averages out to every 5 minutes, but we usually get 2 every 10.” And that’s actually the way the London Transit system works. In the summer, when there are fewer busses running due to the lack of students, there are two busses running down Richmond (or to put it in a way that’s more relevant, two busses that would take me from my old apartment to work). They each ran on 20-minute intervals outside of rush hour, and of course, they always came back-to-back, rather than being one every 10 minutes.

So there we are in the bus shelter, and 15 minutes after I made my quip about it averaging out with two busses every ten minutes, sure enough, three busses show up. Not just any three busses, but two #6’s and a #13 (which does a very similar route to the #6). Now, during rush hour that makes a bit of sense: when you can see that there’s another bus right there, you don’t try to kamikaze the doors of the already-full bus. But at the same time, the masses of people at the bus stops wouldn’t form quite so much if a bus actually came every 5 minutes instead of getting swarms of them every 15-20.

It got worse as the day went on, though. After seminars were over, it was time to head back to the hospital from campus. On campus there’s a spot in front of the Natural Sciences building where the busses stop for a bit to “get back on schedule” or let the drivers get a coffee and a break, etc. So in front of Natural Sciences are 4 idling busses: 3 #10’s and an “out of service” one. There were a bunch of people queuing up for the #6, which was nowhere in sight. Then, the driver for the “out of service” bus came back from break and started flipping, oh so slowly, through the route signs, keeping us in suspense. So, what did he reactivate his bus as? Not a #6, which a bunch of people were waiting for, and not a #2, which just had two busses come through but didn’t actually have any sitting right there at the moment. No, he came back into service as a fourth #10. That was just ridiculous. Then, a bit later, two #6’s came through, and within 3 stops we had completely filled the first one.

I hate the way he yells randomly. I hate the way he thinks saying things louder make them funny. I hate his penchant for male nudity. I hate his terrible, forced acting style. I even hate his awkward, lanky stance.

But I loved Stranger Than Fiction. In it, he played a mostly straight character: a mildly bumbling, obsessive-compulsive IRS agent… who hears voices. Specifically, one voice narrating his life. Aside from the odd bit of yelling at the sky, his usual shtick was happily absent.

The movie itself was actually really well done: surprisingly in many aspects. The pacing was very good and even, which is a bit surprising since as a comedy/romance/drama coming in at two hours there was undoubtedly pressure to cut it down to one and a half. The writing was also quite good, a welcome surprise since quite often movies about authors have rather terrible narration. With this one though, I think if you closed your eyes and listened to some of the narration, you could easily see it working quite well in a novel. Even the effects were well done, somewhat unusual for a film that really didn’t even need them in the first place.