Tagged with homework …

Nov 29 2010
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school, sports, 中国

spike and celebratory dance

And my last week of my first semester back at school begins. It kind of began last Thursday since that was when I had a week before I left. Now I’m down to just a few days. And all that’s left is a group presentation and the handing in of finished assignments. (My other blog‘s front page is filled with posts about libraries using Twitter right now. It’s for a blogging assignment.)

Watching the Grey Cup yesterday was interesting. It was at Ken’s apartment (Ken is my roommate Marlis’ boyfriend) and most of the spectators seemed more interested in their NFL fantasy teams. And there was such complaining about CFL rules! I wish I had the knowledge of our game to be able to defend our rouges that “just reward failure” and our lack of a fair catch rule, but I don’t. So I sat quietly watching the game. I couldn’t really tell if it was a good game or a bad game, but it was a close one so I stayed with it. And enjoyed that dramatic play at the end when Durant evaded the sack then threw a pick.

I leave for 中国 on a Thursday which can’t come soon enough.

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Nov 20 2010
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comics, games, school, vancouver, whining, writing, 中国

i guess it’s saturday today?

I think I left the house yesterday. Yes I did. I bought some groceries. And the day before, I’d been to school and off visiting libraries for homework purposes and then to Kerry’s for board- and party- gaming. We played Settlers and the endgame got bogged down as it sometimes does. I skipped out on Dominion because I was recuperating from Settlers, where I’d made the classic mistake of jumping to a lead too soon and not being able to close it out before getting ganged upon. Selah. I’d been pretty lucky in my early resources.

The rest of the weekend’s been homework. I’m almost done the actual Subject Headings part of the last assignment for one of my classes (leaving the essay about the experience still to go). I’m giving a selection of my comics collection subject headings to describe what they’re about. I’m not breaking down the series like DMZ or Transmetropolitan into specific volumes and giving them each their own headings. It still got kind of out of hand (I have a lot of fun making lead-in terms). So far I’ve done it all in a text document without any layout type stuff so I don’t have a clue how big it would be on paper and that’s probably for the best.

I woke up to snow, which made it a good day to stay inside and work. It’s fine when the snow is on the mountains and I can see it up there when the clouds are high enough, but I’m not a big fan of it being here in my part of town. I came to Vancouver for rain and being able to bike to school all winter without ice spikes on my tires. Three days before I bike again.

One of the things I’m looking forward to about China (beyond just being with Holly and eating baked goods and watching movies Holly needs to see and not having assignments that need doing and being a somewhat useful dishwasher for the woman I love) is getting some writing work done. I’ve been terrible about it this semester. I know that so much of it has to be just sitting down and making the time to do it. Holly’ll be working when I’m there, so I’ll be filling my time with working too. I did this when I went to visit Nanjing in 2008, all spending my mornings writing while Holly was working. I got a lot done. Hopefully I can repeat myself, at least effort-wise.

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Nov 12 2010
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music, school, vancouver, winnipeg

went to a show, had a good time

The Dan Mangan show last night was pretty good, but my favourite part was The Burning Hell. They were awesome. Ukulele, cello and assorted electronics with songs about death. They were exactly my cup of tea. The kind of people Steve would make sure I went to their show if they were coming through town. They’re going to be in Winnipeg at the Park Theatre on November 19, 2010. If you’re there, I’d give them a listen.

I felt like Mangan and his band were out of sync most of the time, but maybe I was just let down a bit from the awesomeness beforehand. And the fact that I knew all the songs that everybody knew. Afterwards Marlis was wondering if the girl running down to the front from the seats was a plant, because she sure opened the floodgates for all the kids to rush to the front.

Today I biked to school for a meeting then biked home and finished the big website homework assignment that had been eating up my time. Tonight I relax, then tomorrow I get seriously to work on the next one, which isn’t a website. Not that this was a useless assignment. My CSS is better now, and it was a good excuse to try using Vim, which went well.

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Oct 31 2010
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school, sports, travel, 中国

eating crappy chocolate

I’ve been casually working along this weekend. Not finishing anything but making sure I don’t have anything that hasn’t been looked at. Right now my weirdest assignment (a web presentation) is staying weird because of my topic. It’s not going to be very academic I don’t think, even though it’s referring to a lot of sort-of academic work. The problem is that it’s a static webpage presentation, which isn’t how anyone would present this kind of information these days. It reminds me of the project we did for Benedetti’s New Media class years ago.

I’ve really been loving this baseball postseason. The Giants are such a scrapheap team with great pitching. The Rangers are this anonymous team plus Cliff Lee. It’s just a good story all around. Supposedly it’s been terrible for the TV ratings, but fuck TV ratings. I just like baseball. And this has been way better than just seeing the Yankees and Phillies again (sorry Doc).

I feel a little bad about cheering for the Giants since I don’t have a problem with the Dodgers either. I cheer for them against most teams. My best-broken-in baseball hat is my Dodgers cap. And it’s supposed to be a Red Sox vs. Yankees style rivalry that I’m playing both sides of here. Whatever. I told my mom who was playing in the World Series and she immediately said she was cheering for San Francisco. She’s more a fan of the city than of the team.

Thirty-three days till 中国. And the cold wet uninsulated 四川 winter. And Holly. And being very happy.

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Oct 25 2010
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books, library, vancouver, writing

fallible machines

First: Tuesday October 26th is the day it’d be awesome if you bought Machine of Death on Amazon. I’ve got a story in it and it’d be wonderful to see this little indie book that could be a bestseller for a day. /endsalespitch

I love finishing assignments, as I can then waste like two days rewarding myself with pleasure reading, which is much more fun than the procrastination reading I’d been doing. Tomorrow I’ll be getting back to work on schoolish stuff.

This afternoon I went to a Librarians Without Borders meeting about developing a library in Kabul. It’s all very interesting and laudable, but it seems a bit over a student group’s head to help with. It’s funny because you want to “fail boldly” and such, but when face to face with a big issue it’s very much “I don’t actually have the capabilities to do anything about that right now.” I suppose you could make it your thing, just throw yourself into it and get to the point that you’d actually be useful, but I certainly don’t feel at that point already. Maybe after I left the meeting the speaker got into some more concrete stuff he wanted out of us. I’ll have to check the notes my co-secretary was taking.

I had to leave early because one of our profs had arranged a tour of an exhibition “Following A Line” at the Contemporary Art Gallery, which was downtown and entailed some busing. It was an interesting exhibition, multimedia and contemporary art-ish. The best part was one exhibit which had two slide projectors running and projecting gelled photos by Agatha Christie on opposite walls. Part of the thing about the piece was supposed to be that you can’t see both pictures at the same time, and how “these cliched images we’ve all seen before” are affected by being shot by Christie (“a notable racist”) and the colour added by the artist. The funny part (and what made it the best) was that the bulb on one of the projectors had burnt out, so as the curator explained about the images she was pointing at a blank wall, saying “Unfortunately today you can’t see these ones at all.” As the machines clacked on.

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Oct 23 2010
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books, library, school, vancouver, writing

forty days till i’m gone over the ocean

Today, after an entertaining couple of hours at the Writers Festival listening to David Mitchell and Katherine Govier talk about their historical novels set in Japan I went looking for shoes and then came home to pretend to work for several hours (and actually work for a couple).

The talk itself was great. Both of them read interesting bits of their novels, and David Mitchell found a continuity error in his. He was funny and halting and tossing in digressionary asides and was generally awesome. He seemed like he was genuinely thinking about the questions being asked, though he had a few funny bits that he’d brought out a few times. Katherine Govier was also interesting, and I think her book The Ghost Brush sounds really good.

I got David Mitchell to sign my copy of number9dream, and told him I felt bad for the copy being so new, since I’d read it as a library book then gone out to buy this one. So it didn’t have the feeling that I’d already read and loved it. He sort of missed the point but I didn’t want to be the fanboy overexplaining myself in the line. Though I was the youngest person in that line by a good 20 years so I was probably the only fanboy regardless.

Some days I don’t know about this whole library thing. Really, all I want to do is read books and tell Holly stories (and if both those things happened in far off lands I would not complain). I mean, seriously, filled with professional ambition I am not. And going to these events and listening to writers talk about their craft, I get very frustrated at myself for going to school to knock over the domino that allows me to maybe get a job some day. But whatever. I like the things I’m learning too. It’s not bad being back in school. It just seems so backwards somehow.

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Sep 28 2010
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school, whining, winnipeg

hours of consciousness haven’t killed me yet

Tonight, after getting up at 6 this morning, having 6 hours of class and a meeting and biking a pile of kilometres, I’ve given up on schoolwork and am listening to baseball instead. Tuesdays are kind of tiring.

It was kind of frustrating to my schedule that in class today we were given an assignment due next Tuesday that won’t be graded but needs to be done, and requires printed stuff. Frustrating because I’d worked ahead to have everything ready to go for the other stuff due next week, since I’ll be in Winnipeg on the weekend. But as it stands now, I’ll have to do some work on Sunday. And come to school on Monday to print it out. Bah.

And you may remember how I was doing some volunteer work (cutting and pasting html code). The people I was doing that for decided to make up for their lack of organization that meant I couldn’t upload my files, they’d give me a new batch of files to do that would be due in four days. Which is bullshit, as I did the stuff way in advance and it took a long time. As the problems were not my fault and I’m not getting paid for my time there, I’m not going to worry about it.

So those are my gripes. They aren’t overwhelming. Baseball (and the hope I might see Halladay and Lincecum meet in the playoffs) is good. And soon I’ll be chatting with Holly, so my (very long) day will be made more than good indeed.

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