Greg and Kat's blog

As some of you know, my landlord in the new place is a nice older Chinese woman. She speaks about 20 words of English, and she’s a little wonky on top of that. So, while she’s quite pleasant, communicatig is a bit of an issue. She has been in Hong Kong for the last little while. I think she’s back in the next week or two.

I was just sitting here thinking that I can look forward to more 20 minute conversations that boil down to “garbage day is Tuesday.” She always circles the point and repeats herself. That conversation would end up something like “you can put your garbage in that can, and they have to be taken out Monday, but I’ll do that, so you should just put your garbage in that can, because its taken away on Tuesday, but don’t worry because I’ll take them out on Monday night.”

Then it hit me.

My landlord is Miss Swan!

I recently StumbledUpon a video that captivated me for some reason: Where the Hell is Matt?

I know this is the second dancing video I have posted. Maybe it’s a theme? Anyway, it strikes me that there’s something very right with the world because this guy exists.

In the second video (the one at the other end of that link), there is a clip of him dancing on the Kjeragbolten (which probably means something in some language). There is apparently a 1km drop from that rock before you hit anything (and I don’t think it really matters what you hit at that point—it could be a million nerf balls and you’d probably still die). I’m not exactly afraid of heights, but you wouldn’t get me on there if I was wearing a climbing harness tied to a bulldozer. But that isn’t true of everybody. There are many Kjeragbolten images on Flickr.

The CSSS had a games night last night. Not having much else to do, I went up to hang out for a while. Besides seconding one of the rooms in the lab so we could play Gran Tourismo on the projector, the games part was relatively uneventful.

But, there is an active group of first-year students. Here’s a quiz for everybody in the audience who has been in residence in first year (as many of them are): first year students + any excuse of a party = ???

That’s right! “Sloppy drunk.”

All of them disppeared and went back to res, drank too hard and too fast, and somehow managed to make it back to the ASB. Keep in mind that most of them are in my CMPT 120 class.

There’s something about watching your students yak into garbage cans that can really make your evening. Watching them draw on the passed-out one (and perhaps having some influence on the process) was just icing on the cake.

Just before I left, one of them came-to. He had purged most of the alcohol from his stomach and was in reasonably good shape. He looked at me, worried that I might hold something against him, and asked if I knew his name. I answered “no,” just to expedite the conversation. I thought about “no, [firstname],” but decided he was sober enough to catch that.

There are two interesting assumptions in this kid’s worry: (1) that I have some kind of individual control over his marks, and (2) that I would think a first-year student hurling the better part of a mickey of cheap booze is a horrible thing. Both assumptions are false and amuse me for different reasons.

Curse you, Food Network!

So, I’m sitting here, thinking about going to bed. There’s some thing about a clam chowder cookoff on the food network. Now, I want chowder!

It’s hardly a late-night thing: I don’t think I could head out into Vancouver at 12:30 and find clam chowder. I’d settle for seafood chowder, but I don’t think that’s the issue. Maybe I can find some tomorrow.

Where does one go for a good chowder in the city?

So, I spent the last hour drunk-driving.

No, wait… that requires some explaination.

I bought a Playstation 2 last week. And a steering wheel (open-box, half-price), and Gran Tourismo 4. I like racing games, and I figure Kat isn’t around to fight over the TV. I was right: I’m having fun with it.

I decided I felt like a rum and coke tonight, so I made one. Then I decided that it wasn’t strong enough, so I stiffened it up a little. Then I finished it and stood up.

Then I thought, “I wonder what driving drunk is like”. GT4 is, after all, a pretty good simulation.

Long story short, drunk driving is a bad idea. Even virtually. Races that I should have won handily took 2–3 tries to win; there was a lot more slamming into stuff.

Stay safe out there, kids. Also, stay in school.

Yarrr, it again be time for talk like a pirate day! If ye be unschooled in the ways of the pirate, watch ye a video of instructions.

Harr harr, this be fun! If only I could teach the scurvy dogs in such a way.

People, such as myself, who have spent approximately 1000 hours talking in front of a room of people start to think they know the score. I figured I had dealt with enough weird questions that I couldn’t be suprized by anything short of this.

But today, 30 seconds into my 470 lecture:

Me: “HTML… web… computers… ”
Some girl: “Excuse me, isn’t this native studies 100?”
Me: “No.”
Girl: “Did it change rooms?”
Me: “Nope, we’ve been here all semester.”
Girl: “Today’s Thursday, right?”
Me: “Buh… Monday.”
Girl: “Oh, okay.” Leaves.

If she had said “Tuesday”, I could have moved on with my life, but Thursday? That’s three days off. The best explaination I have: She did a lot of drugs last Wednesday and just came-to this morning. She didn’t really seem like the heavy-drug-use sort, though.

PS: Yes, 1000 hours is my approximate lifetime total lecturing. If you didn’t click on the link to YouTube above, you should.