August 2008 Archives

With a weekend of use in, here is a short list of issues I have with the iPhone. It is possible I am a fool and just haven't figured out how to do these things yet. It took me two days to figure out how to rearrange apps, despite what should seem to be rather obvious process.

1. No copy and paste.

   For real. Go figure.

2. Inability to send a page I'm viewing in Safari to a friend.

   I could send page addresses on my blackberry via PIN, Email, MMS, and probably SMS.

3. Ditto for selected links

4. And contacts.

   I think even basic phones can do this.

5. Inability to check if a number from +8888 Who Called is saved.

   If you click on a number in a text using your blackberry, it will give you options to call, sms, mms, etc. If the number is saved in your phone, it will show the name instead.

6. Mail.

   This is a maybe. A big maybe. I might just not be good at using it. I'll get back to you.

A lot of these things seem simple, and basic. Ads for how good the iPhone is for work having been on tv recently. I don't see how they expect to compete with the business market if the phone can't do these basic things.

The sequel to Another Gay Movie is out, and the NYTimes did not like it. My favourite paragraph is one of the last:

What follows is a quest to see who can have the most sex and embody the most clichés. Every sad, flagrant stereotype gets a workout: drinking and drugging, promiscuity and primping, mincing and squealing, drag queens and porn stars. What ever happened to gay style and flair?

I forgot to mention, that seems like a pretty accurate portrayal of gay spring break if you ask me.

Movie Review Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild

In case you haven't seen the preview yet:

I drove far more than I would have liked today. I feel like I went through a whole tank of gas. My body is so sore. Thank goodness for car pool lanes at night when you don't want to think about driving.

I'm glad I got it all out of my system. I feel like I'm ready to go back to Toronto now, and get into school again. I was thinking about work. I feel like Rogers would be a cool place to work for.

I really, really like the new Natasha Bedingfield single Angel.

Sometimes I find myself feeling so conflicted. I completely understand personal freedom. I sometimes feel like I respect the idea of personal freedom more than any organized religion claims it does. The more I study economics, the more I slide farther and father toward what seems to be the right on a lot of things. I think people should be able to choose what they want. At the same time I feel like we should strive for something bigger. Something better.

I completely support the idea of our universal health care. I think it's great that we have it. I think the biggest issue with it is the fact that the only way to get better service is to pay more money. A leftist plan would raise taxes. A rightist plan would likely allow privatization so people could pay more for better service if they wanted to. You would argue the difference is a matter of coverage; the leftist one covers everyone. This is the same for anything like, say, universal post-secondary education. My disdain for certain Canadian political parties comes from their inability to accept that better service and coverage would require more money, or taxes (Hello, NDP).

So I come to the issue where I'm conflicted on how I feel things should work, and how they could actually work. I don't have a problem with a monetary exchange for sexual services. My issue comes from the fact I wish people didn't have to do it. Like, is it that hard for you to get laid that you have to do it? I know that some people are just really, really into the idea of the edge it adds to the situation. I'm fine with that. I just wish it didn't really add the edge.

I think there's a exponential function for how comfortable my bed is that takes how not sober I am as its variable.

When I spent time complaining that I needed a vacation, this wasn't what I had in mind. I can only take so much of doing nothing in Oakville before I start getting agitated. I am hoping to compensate by going downtown today to build my bookcase and put some books in it. An attempt to organize my apartment, a place that's not been properly organized for several months now.

It should come as no shock to my brother that they day my parents finally lose it and take the car they bought for us away from him, I will not fake sympathy for him, but will instead laugh and say I told you so.

I will also rejoice over the fact that he will be deprived of his main tool in being a complete jackass. Why do I need to be able to hear his car as he comes down the street from a block away? Why do I need to be able to have his sound system shake my room when it's outside? He's not in the car. The sound system is not banging. Well. Ok it is, but not in the sense he'd like to think it is. It's not good music. It's noise. I just don't understand why he can't make that connection. Maybe all the banging damaged his brain's functionality.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday venting about relationship issues to a good friend of mine. My biggest stumbling block was trying to explain what I was actually looking for. Things got tense when the word "arrogant" was dropped without a frame of reference.

Today, ignoring most of the world, I'm reading a book when I come across this.

Of course. He can't do this alone. You are perhaps the only person alive who could be what [he] needs most - a partner who loves him, is able to teach and guide him, and who is able to be his proper mate.

Three more fucking posts on Towleroad about John McCain not caring about faggots and I lose it and take it off my rss feed.

No, for real. My brother went m.i.a. in Punta Cana, after fighting with his wife, because he is a drunken fool. There's a good chance he got on a 9am flight home, which for his sake I hope he did. Otherwise he's dead drunk (or just dead) in his room from which no one can get into, or in jail.

I was absolutely destroyed by my stats final last night, which means baring some sort of miracle, I'm going to have to take it over again. Unfortunately, I can't enroll again until I fail officially. Never in my life have I ever been as eaten up and chewed up by a test as I was by this one. Not even in my micro course last year in which I was doing poorly during the year.

I went home and went to be at 9pm. I woke up this morning almost expecting the world to be over. Had I not had experienced a series of bizarre and unpleasant dreams over the course of the night, I probably would have thought the world was ending when I woke up this morning. It probably didn't help that right as I woke up I was having a dream I had some how slept until 8pm and was missing my macroeconomics final. Just perfect.

So, here's a list of things going on that are probably worse for those involved (myself included) than failing my stats class.

• My brother making the stupid decision to get married (no matter how much I like her)


• The ridiculous amount of debt I have from my camera, which had a malfunctioning lens (it's still away at Canon being dealt with)


• My parents trying to sell the house, again


• And possibly the fact that I really need to start buying new jeans (all of mine are ripping at the knees because I have a bad habit of steering with them).

To whom it may concern,

I'm currently writing this as an open letter on my blog because the bureaucracy at the university is such that I don't even know who this should be addressed to anymore. I'm incredibly frustrated with my experience with ECO227Y this summer. Do none of you care that statistics is a material heavy course, and that in deciding that as students we didn't need a TA put us at a huge disadvantage? I've been studying for longer than I can even remember now, and I feel like I've achieved nothing. I have no way of knowing whether or not what I'm studying is actually correct.

It doesn't help that it's impossible to get a hold of the professor. This seems to be a common problem with professors in the Department of Economics. They say, "Here's an email, it's how I want you to contact me." and never bother to respond to the emails. Or, when they do respond to the emails it's to say the tests you've asked about have already been posted. Forget that there are no solutions, and don't bother emailing back. The response will be a sorry, a thank you, and a mention the error has been corrected (It hasn't).

How about the fact that office hours before the final are listed for a building, but not a room number. Apparently they were only for a small group of people who had agreed to meet ahead of time outside the building before going to a prebooked room. Why is there no note of this? And why is there no way to do anything about this? How is it fair, that as students, we're expected to struggle through extremely sub par learning conditions and we still get shit from the administration when we fail? What ever happened to oversight?

I want to keep going, but I've calmed myself down, and since that's all I'm ever going to achieve with this university for this matter, I'm going to go back to bashing regression into my head.

Thanks for proving my mother right - I really should have stayed at UWaterloo.

Mike

I'm starting to build my after exam to-do list.

Tau paints. Gym membership. Apartment clean.

My sister is currently angry at me. I found her on my mom's laptop and kicked her off because I needed to print something. I may or may not have also mentioned that this "was the reason [my mom's] laptop is so screwed up." She wasn't happy. She thinks she gets blamed for anything. The fact that she is currently on my mom's laptop because her desktop doesn't work might be contributing to that.

Dear Professors,

I would just like to inform you that your duties regarding teaching a class are not over until the end of the final. Just because you switch over to a different prof halfway through the term does not mean you get to pull all of your stuff from the course website and stop answering emails. Especially if you are writing half of the final.

Separately, you should really learn to post the tests written by the class along with the solutions instead of just the solutions. Solutions are meaningless without the questions.

Thanks,
Mike

Let's say you were to hear a story about a boy. A cute boy. Really cute, because it's important. Ok maybe not super important, but it helps.

The boy in our story special. He moved a long way from home from his small town to the big city. Now you might be worried for our boy, but don't be. He's smart and funny and has a good friend in the big city to guide him through his transition period. He's going to the big school that he always wanted to. He's ready to conquer the world. Everything is perfect.

Along the way he meets new people and makes new friends. It would probably be appropriate to feel happy for our boy, since nobody wants to go through a change like that alone. But he's ready. Everything is perfect.

Only everything isn't perfect. Somewhere along the way our boy hits snags. He stumbles. People who were supposed to be his friends aren't. He finds out the hard way. He slips. Fighting ensues. A lot of it. He falls.

Suddenly our boy is without people who were important friends. It is safe to say that serious damage has been done to his emotional being. One would assume that you, dear reader, feel upset. One would assume that you, dear reader, feel bad for our boy. One would assume that you, dear reader, are rather unhappy with the people who did this.

You might wonder why anyone would be so cruel. Why would someone go out of their way to damage his friendships? Why would someone be so uncaring, unable to see the suffering our boy is going through? Why?

Now, you might be inclined to take what you've learnt here, go out into the world with this new knowledge and do something. Maybe one day you'll run into friends of the who did this and feel obliged to share what you know. Maybe one day you'll write your own scathing blog. Maybe one day you'll meet the people responsible and finally get to do something about it; if you're so inclined, of course.

Well, let me stop you here. I'd like to remind you that there are always two sides to the story. There are always facts that are fudged. Omissions that are too easy not to make.

What if you find out our boy wasn't as nice as it seemed he was. That'd be a big shocker, now wouldn't it? Let's say I tell you that our boy has a habit of lying. hey, let's be nice and just say fudging the truth. Let's say he doesn't respect other people's feelings. Let's say he has a bad habit of telling people everything they wanted to hear in their wildest dreams, getting "drunk" and then not remembering it. Yeah. Don't feel so bad any more, do you?

And now I'm going to say the blatantly obvious. Our boy isn't the protagonist, he's the antagonist. There are two sides to every story. And when there's hurt on one side, when there's pain on one side, when there's depression on one side, standard normal table will tell you: it's the mirror image on the other side.

I'm not one for following my horoscope much, but for the first time in a long time I read one th at actually struck me as helpful. It is kind of pathetic that I need a Tribute Magazine horoscope to keep me going right now, but I'm going to overlook that if it works.

Among other nice things, it told me to write more and to keep a journal. Good thing I already have this set up. I am angry. I am angry and I am frustrated. I was also hungry, but I had caffeine so I've suppressed my appetite for now. I quit my job. That was something that was a long time coming. Three other people quit at the same time I did. There are a few others who I know are going to quit. It's the same thing that's been happening at a lot of the Starbucks in the area, but I'll write about that later.

I cannot wait for school to be over. It is without a doubt the most stress I've ever been under. I bombed two midterms the other week. I'm sick and tired of these classes. I'm really glad I'm taking all computer science courses next year because, honestly, economics profs drive me nuts sometimes. If there is another profession that is more likely to bombard and then test your ability to recall mostly useless knowledge (never mind the semi-useful kind you can look up in a book, or Google, or Wikipedia, or anywhere else for that matter) I haven't heard of it. I would give an example but I seem to have misplaced the questions for my midterm out of rage. I'll look for them later.

I've spent a lot of time cleaning my apartment. I don't mean tidying. Tidying is the art of hiding your mess in places that are not easily visible. It's an art that was practiced a lot here over the last school year. I went in and destroyed the area under my sink. It was a disaster zone. I don't even understand how it could have got like that. I'm sure I'm at fault for not really looking. I scrubbed the whole thing down. Everything. There were layers of stuff that I couldn't even guess the contents of. There was also the largest pile of plastic bags I had found since I emptied out a whole drawer full earlier in the month. I don't know why they were in there. I hate plastic grocery bags.

There are a lot of other things going on right now, but I can't organize my thoughts enough yet for them to be of any use to me, never mind share them. I guess that's what this is for now. And maybe that's why my horoscope is right.

Ok. So there's something that's been bothering me for a while, and it's the way certain people have their relationships. I'm willing to admit that a small part of this is because I'm jealous, and a slightly larger part because I'm a hater and I'm jaded, but let's get real.

There was a guy I met through a friend while back. The kind of guy who photographs well and looks like he might not be just another statistic. Turns out he's doing well for himself to, given life's tendency to cause shit to happen in an attempt to make you that statistic. Then I find out he's getting married. To a much older guy. Don't get me wrong, for all of my well established beef with the way marriage is going in the world (thank you, my brother), I have a special place for stupid young gays who get married. Especially the trampy kind of sleep around with everyone and everything, and yet flaunt words like 'love', 'marriage' and 'husband' around like they're nothing.

Sure, the guy might not be a tramp, but the guy isn't the point. The point is I'm sick and tired with the way these relationships happen. I'm tired of having old muscleheads post pictures of the young twink that they're dating now. Look. I'm sorry. I don't know what you missed in your youth that makes you try and relive it. But just because you have a nice body, and money, doesn't mean you can have a real relationship with these kids. That's not the way it works. You're a skeeze and it bothers me. More importantly, I know it probably shouldn't and that really bothers me.

My friend Mike is gone to Japan for the next little bit. He promised me he would see my before he left and didn't, but I'll get over it because he's started a blog for while he's over there.