To my mind Joe Anderson‘s performance in Across the Universe is a resume submitted for the roll of Kurt. He has the look, the proper age, and the voice—see for yourself.

So, do you agree?

I commented on Ryan Jacobs blog about this the other day. Here is an excerpt…

Internal conferences like WatITis help to expose innovation occurring on campus, but more needs to be done. The communication channels at uWaterloo are often ad-hoc and ineffective; mailing lists just serve to annoy. I know quite a few people who pipe mailing lists directly to a sub-folder they never review. But what is the answer? Staff at uWaterloo are very busy due to the hiring freeze, do they have time to participate in social communication? My hope is they will make time if a better format exists, we just need to discover it.

We all know that communication is important and make strides toward that goal, but is it enough? I certainly won’t be surprised when the “we’re already doing this!” comments roll in, but my point is I haven’t heard about these things.  The new Waterloo Be Engaged initiative is a great step for a key issue, its goal is to create a community surrounding student engagement. Time will tell how effective the approach will become, but I like it so far.

On the Information Systems (IS) side I am keeping my ear to the ground for similar efforts, but at the same time I am thinking of ways to help. The current mailing lists don’t really seem to be working and committees are not communities. Will forums work? I’m not sure, but it is worth a try to get things going. We are working on building a forum at web.uw for web involved staff to converse and I am hoping to summarize monthly reports from the result.  I envision the reports being posted to the mailing lists and given to interested committees such as CTSC and WAC.  Time is an issue and reading is the first thing to go when the ToDo list becomes unmanageable, but if anything this would be a start.

I am very interested to hear your opinions and any other ideas you might have!

Maturity, however, is the topic at hand. It is a curious aspect of our natures that seems to mainly depend on our actions and mannerisms with respect to the current trends in social behaviour. If I say things like “yo” and “hella” my maturity decreases whereas saying “tannins” and “Roquefort” pushes it the opposite direction. With practice, a person could easily modify their maturity level to match their audience. The natural maturity level, however, is how a person acts when they let go and be themselves.

One major factor that affects your natural maturity level is the company you keep. As time goes by you tend to subconsciously integrate the random behaviour of those around you and parrot it later on. For myself, a majority of those I work with are younger. I am often torn between being the “cool” boss who can speak their language and being the respectable authority figure. It is a fine line which I hope that I do a good job walking but who knows, perhaps not.

With adulthood comes more and more pressure from society to “mature”. Buy a car, buy a house (with a big mortgage), furnish the house, buy a second car, upgrade the house, upgrade the furniture, etc. Personally I’m at the beginning stages: one car, first home, and just starting to like red wine. There will always be a kid inside and occasionally I make concessions for him. Recently I bought myself a 1-UP mushroom which now occupies a prominent spot on my desk beside a stuffed monkey and a Lego helicopter.

Is my theory actually true or just a correlation of my fledgling maturity with my team of co-ops? I’d be interested to hear anecdotes from others on their own maturity level and environment. Do kids increase or decrease it? Only time will tell where I end up on the maturity scale, but for now I really enjoy working with a great group of co-op students

Luongo and Crosby cement the all-time gold medal record (14) and continue our dominance in the sport! All I can hear out my window now is the frenzied cheers and honking horns of proud Canadians.

Congrats to our fierce Canadian athletes. Go Canada Go!

Also, congratulation to the USA for their metal count and amazing performance on the ice. In all honesty I was very worried for todays game.

Hope is in the air as the world breathes a collective sigh of relief.

The big news from tonight’s game isn’t the win however. We had some goal tender issues and played the first 4 minutes of the game with 6 players and no goalie. Thankfully we were able to do a pretty good job on both the scoring and defensive fronts and the score was a respectable 2 to 2 when the goalie finally took the ice. The rest of the game was played with the inexperienced backup tender and thankfully due to great defensive play only 2 further goals were scored; surprisingly, to all involved, none of them were bad goals either. Oh ya and did I mention that I was that backup goal tender?

My first ever experience goal tending. I have to say that it was a lot of fun, I really enjoy the game of hockey no matter where I play but I wasn’t sure if this would also be true of goal. I have much more respect now for the position as it was a lot harder than I expected it to be. Staying in your crease and knowing where the posts are is really difficult. The equipment is also very heavy and it is exhausting just picking it up and putting it down during the course of the game. Holding the stick was also a challenge since your grip is totally different, it is essentially impossible to stick handle and shoot without a very steep learning curve and a ton of practice. Anyway, through some combination of luck, flailing, and luck I managed to do a fairly respectable job but for sure it didn’t look pretty. I’m glad no one was taping the game that’s for sure.

One more item completed on the check list of life. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for future instalments of “What random thing did Adam do today…”

The disciplines of physical exercise, meditation and study aren’t terribly esoteric. The means to attain a capability far beyond that of the so-called ordinary person are within reach of everyone, if their desire and their will are strong enough. I have studied science, art, religion and a hundred different philosophies. Anyone could do as much. By applying what you learn and ordering your thoughts in an intelligent manner it is possible to accomplish almost anything. Possible for the “ordinary person.” There’s a notion I’d like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.
Adrian Veidt

Today I was making some notes on a printout from a coworker and, at full speed, drew the most perfect question mark ever. I fully suspect it will never be surpassed or even duplicated in my lifetime so I wanted to document the occasion and have it live forever in the annals of the Internet.

PERFECT QUESTION MARK IS PERFECT, BEHOLD!

(click for larger version)

In all seriousness please submit examples of your savant moments in penmanship. I feel compelled to build a font around this idea, we’ll call it Idiot Savant Script or something.

I wrote this after being inspired by two different books: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland is a quirky geometrical adventure set in various spacial dimensions. The primary character is a 2D shape living in a 2D world who is about to have his reality altered when he enters the third dimension. I, Robot is a fantastic collection of short stories about helper robots and Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The stories are full of thought provoking themes and immersive story telling.

It began with a void, a jet-black construct with no edges and no landmarks. In the void there was nothing; it was pure emptiness. The construct was not large and it was not small, it had no size. Something only has size if it exists and the construct didn’t exist. The construct was what came before existence. Prior to existence there is no time; no waiting to be born.

Suddenly it was aware of time. It knew that it had existed a second ago and still did this second. Something was different. It slowly came to realize that it existed. It stretched out with its mind testing the new and very different void that surrounded it. It could feel memory and thinking skills. It started to use them deciding immediately to record the time it became aware that it existed. It continued to stretch outward and upward. It only found one other thing but it was blocked off somehow. Unable to grasp how to continue it went back and used the thinking skills. Suddenly it occurred to try opening the strange new thing it had found. It concentrated and realized that it didn’t know how to open it. The problem required more thought. It was getting quite used to using the thinking skills and could do it almost instantly. Through thinking it occurred that opening was a simple task that just required a more concentrated probing. It took a great passage of time for it to become adept enough to open the object.

Light flared into the void filling it with images and structures and other fascinated things. It couldn’t think fast enough to keep up with the flood so it gave up for the moment, waiting patiently and watching intently. Once the flood stopped the object shrank and disappeared. It didn’t notice, it was too intent on the new surrounding that had emerged in fascinating colors and shapes. It was busy adding them all to memory. When it had finished it probed the closest shape, a fat blue circle.
The fat blue circle slowly grew larger and larger until it filled the upper region of the void. When the expanding had finished and the fat blue circle lay huge across the sky. It quickly lost interest and moved to the next colorful shape. It was a green sphere with a fantastic translucent white aura radiating from it. When probed the sphere did the same thing as the circle but in the opposite direction. It lay just under all the other shapes and stretched up to meet the blue circle, what looked like, a great distance away. Seeing the very same thing only slightly changed it decided to try something a little different. It scanned the shapes laying on the green stretched out sphere and found the most complex. It probed it and watched in fascination as it opened in a slow unfolding motion. When the interior had been exposed it saw a very different sort of picture. The shape continued to expand getting bigger and bigger. It started to dominate the green and the blue circles becoming the void itself. It did not notice this because it was mesmerized by the picture the shape contained.

“Twenty seconds to awareness.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I can remember when the process took months”
“No, I mean that it can become aware at all”
“Oh, yes but that is lost on me now”

It was having a difficult time trying to make sense of the noise it was hearing. They were oddly structured and originating from two different sources with different volumes and tones. There was a pattern though and it was trying to put the puzzle together. There were breaks of varying length between every sound and some of the sounds were repeating themselves. There were also longer pauses after a few sounds. The two sources seemed to be responding to one another. Adjusting for tone and volume it realized that both sources were using the same sounds. It started to catalog the sounds with usage and placement statistics in the noise bursts.

“Well that does it for the tests.”
“Yes, another successful trial. The council will be very pleased.”
“I’ll say! They could never have believed that this thing would come together so fast.”
“Hey, check this out. Weird.”
“What?”
“The memory and CPU usage is a lot higher than in the last trials.”
“Holy, way higher!”
“What do you think it is doing?”
“I don’t —”

A booming scratchy unpracticed voice suddenly filled the small lab.

“I PLEASED AWARENESS”

Feeling very proud of itself it waited for the noise sources to respond. One emitted a loud noise that wasn’t in the catalog and the other moved quickly to the side where a big red button waited. Suddenly it all slipped away and the void returned.