Woohoo!! We saw it about a week ago, and as time ticks away towards the end of the NHL season, we're getting closer to the possible scenario where all six Canadian NHL teams will make it into the playoffs. That's frickin' AWESOME!

For years, The Simpsons have topped the ratings charts... perhaps only because they lacked the competition. BEHOLD THE SINGHSONS!!

An hour and a half past midnight (last night), I was dropping my highschool buddy Joe off at his mom's place off Georgia Street. Across the street from his mom's building was another building with a fountain in the front. It looked as if someone had put some dishwash soap in the fountain, so there was a chain of sud mountains. Then, a car pulled up and a bunch of people jumped out and started playing with the foam. The whole thing was kinda neat, and naturally, I had my camera for a video.

Don't you hate it when you have the urge to read a 600 year old book, but you don't have it handy? I know, me too! Well, Chadwyck-Healey's Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, which can also be accessed through SFU's Library, has electronic copies of the earliest published English books. Anyway, I randomly picked a couple books and browsed through them, but they're really of no interest to me. Of course, you might find them interesting.

Today, I am hogging four lab computers to do my work. Three of them are Sun machines running my simulations, one of them is a Windows PC where I'll be documenting and blogging. I would take more, but the distance to pedal my chair would be too long and tiring. Nevertheless, I already feel like a member of an elite national security faction... as if I were the brains behind the infiltration of an enemy plant.

Except that I have time to blog while doing it.

I saw the cutest thing, yesterday. I parked at SFU next to an older maroon BMW. The front right corner of the car was crumpled from a collision, and there were two band-aids at two places with sad faces drawn on the middle pad. I thought it was cute and creative, and deserved some emphathy.

A census bureau reports that by year 2050, the world's population will grow by 50%. In this article, they state that the rate of reproduction will slow down in spite of high fertility rates in underdeveloped places (such as in India and parts of Africa). Two reasons for this slow down are: women in North America and Europe are having less children, and AIDS is taking its toll on the world's population. The survey also indicates that "there are at least 100 million women in the world's developing countries who would like to space or limit their pregnancies but are not using contraception." So my question is: why not give them condoms? Make them free or charge them a bale of hay or a cow every year. This seems to be a rather simple solution to the spread of babies and the spread of AIDs (not that they should really be mentioned in one breath). It's not just that having babies will increase the human count on an already over-populated planet, but most of these people can't even afford to have kids, let alone five of them. Anyway, that's my two cents.

Before heading to school on Saturday, I watched all but the first 30 mins of Spellbound, an oscar-nominated documentary by Jeffrey Blitz of kids (ages 10 - 14) with their hearts set on winning the 1999 Scripp's Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. It was a good watch, and I was rather amazed at how diligently these kids studied to make it to the national competition of 249 spellers, and how much stress they must go through. The documentary follows 8 competitiors who make it to the "big show", and it's surprisingly fascinating and captivating.

One of the spellers' name is Harry Altman, and he's just about the most annoying kid you could imagine, but not in a mean-hearted way. Just about every review I've read has something interesting to say about him. Here's one of my favorite quotes: "Harry is an Uber-nerdy Jewish kid in New Jersey who, like many too-smart boys his age, thinks he's 1,000 percent funnier than he is." which is funny, because it echoed my thoughts as I watched Harry ask if the boom mic was edible and answer a question immitating a robot. To top off the documentary, Blitz also interviews some previous winners of the competition, including the first-ever Spelling Bee Champion (won in 1925). As I watched, I couldn't help but to try to test myself with some of the words given to the spellers to spell out. Anyway, it's worth a watch - although I wouldn't expect too much excitement or entertainment value out of it... it is, afterall, about spelling.

This reminds me of a Frasier episode where Fredrick (Frasier's son) won the National Spelling Bee and then had his title taken away accused of cheating. And they ended off the show with an implied spell-off in the alley between Fredrick and some other boy.

I've been working hard on my M.Eng. project these days trying to get my report submitted by the April 15th hard deadline. But I've been struggling quite a bit. I've upgraded to the newest Microsoft Word (picture), and I'm finding it hard to adjust to this version. I'm thinking it was a bad move, because I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to finish my report on time the way things are going. The autocorrect feature keeps "fixing" my words. I write "802.11 stations are grouped into basic service sets." and it corrects it to "Yo check it, 802.11 stationz are grouped into basic service sets, ya heard?" It's slowing me down so much.

To add to my previous post about the extra handle bar, here's a picture I took in China. It's a handicap urinal in the washroom of the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel in Shanghai. Never seen this anywhere else before.

As for the newly installed automatic toilet flusher, my last experience with it seemed to prove to me without a shadow of a doubt that they should have stayed with the manual lever. The darn thing flushed when I sat down after lining the seat with toilet paper, flushed three times while wiping, and flushed once I stood up after I was done, but before I could push the toilet paper off the seat into the bowl. Five flushes when only one well-timed flush would have done the job. I think the problem stems from the fact that the sensor points at the right shoulder of the s(h)itter, so as s/he bends forward for any reason (say, to read a newspaper or to wipe), the shoulder dips below the sensor's path.

Anyway, enough on that subject.