King  Gary 

I’m also still waiting for my report card from school. Some of my friends have received theirs already, and I’m still awaiting mine. Not that it matters anymore, though, since June 30th was the last day UW could have retracted my offer of admission, if they ever intended on doing so for some reason!

Update: I JUST received my report card right now. Opening it now. My friend, David, got my name on his report card for one of his comments from his teacher, so maybe his name will appear in mine? Goes to show how competent our teachers are with computers.

Update: Reading report card now. It looks like I’m still me; no one else’s name appears in my comments besides me. Also, I’m a bit surprised by some of my marks. First of all, some of them don’t look like what my teachers told me would be my final mark (for those courses which did not have a final exam). Secondly, in one of my courses, geometry, it doesn’t look like my exam affected the mark at all. I knew what my mark was before I did the final exam, and I know I did pretty badly on the exam, yet my mark is the same as what it was before I did the exam. That’s good news for me, then, I guess!

It must’ve been my (tasteful) AIF (the supplementary form) that secured my spot at UW!

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I just noticed that my schedule at UW has been updated in Quest, and I can see half of the courses I’ll be taking next year. The other half are elective courses, which are to be chosen by me sometime in the next few weeks. (Which is one of the things that I love about my program; I have a lot more electives than, say, someone in engineering - most of them have none.)

The courses that have been set so far are all the mathematics and computer science courses. I’m not a big fan of mathematics, as many know, and so just by looking at my schedule filled with only mathematics and computer science courses bums me out a bit. But, of course, there’s that shining light ahead: my electives. I’ll be sure to choose some sociology courses, or something interesting that will help to balance out my schedule as much as possible.

I also notice that all of the courses on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are math courses, and all of the courses on Tuesday and Thursday are computer science. I was hoping for a bit of diversity, as in both mathematics and computer science mixed for each day, but I guess that’s not going to happen.

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I’ve now chosen my 3 roommates who will be living with me for at least the first term of school when I’m at the University of Waterloo, this September. My choice for where to live at UW was either to be by myself in a residence like Village 1, or to live with one or more persons like in a suite in Mackenzie King Village. I prefer the suite-style residences, as you really get to interact and know people better, and, well, it’s a suite, so it’s similar to an apartment. My 3 roommates are Geoff, Kyle, and Josh. So far, I’ve only communicated with them via MSN, but it seems as though we’ll mix well together. Geoff and Josh are both in computer engineering, while Kyle is in mathematical physics. I’m in computer science. We’re all also taking co-op (stream 4, so our schedules fit.) Hopefully we can meet face-to-face sometime in the near future, before school starts in September! Student Life 101 will probably be the best time to do this. This will definitely be a year that I look forward to!

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I hate CDs. I hate copy protection software. I hate being forced to purchase an entire album of songs from an artist when I only like one of their songs. That’s the great thing about how things are now. I can finally buy just one song, such as from iTunes. I don’t even want to imagine how much money I’ve spent in total at the iTunes Music Store, as it becomes much more addicting when: 1) You can just click one button to buy a single song, and 2) Each purchase is only $0.99 CAD (but it really adds up quickly). This is indeed a great, “new” (since April 2003) way to sell music. Some say that artists don’t make as much money because only one song is purchased instead of the usual album, but in my case, I’ve spent a lot of money purchasing new albums of new artists that I would never have purchased if I never listened to at least one of their songs in its entirety, first.

Some examples of artists whom I’ve purchased albums from:

• Keane
• The Raconteurs
• The Futureheads
• Of Montreal
• The Strokes
• The Mars Volta

Bands that I love, but would never have discovered without first listening to one of their songs completely, first:

• Death Cab for Cutie
• The Postal Service
• Stars
• Joshua Radin

I’ve probably spent hundreds of dollars on music over the last few years now, but on music that I more thoroughly enjoy because they really appeal to me, rather than mainstream music that plays on the local radio every day. My music library is also much more diverse, and so I get a much wider breadth of genre and styles of music. I have, on average, 1.5 songs for every artist, so I definitely have a lot artists with only one song in my library. I love it like that, and wouldn’t have it any other way.

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I was chatting with my friend David on MSN yesterday, and I was walking him through installing some free software. I sent him the link in MSN, but he kept on complaining that he never received it. I sent him a screenshot of my conversation window to prove that I really did send the message, and he sent me a screenshot back to prove that he never received it. All of our other messages were sent fine, except for messages that contained that one link.

It turns out that Microsoft has been censoring certain phrases, specifically “download.php”, “gallery.php”, and “profile.php”. The URL that I sent to David contained “download.php”. If you do a quick search on Google for this string in the URL, you will quickly see that the grand majority of these URLs are completely harmless and are usually for free software. The reason that Microsoft is censoring these phrases, is:

According to communications director of MSN Sweden, Jessica Börjel, this is being done to protect users against exploits and worms spreading through the MSN Messenger service.

This censor is easily worked around with redirection services, though, and it often causes more problems than it solves since neither user in the conversation is notified that this phrase is blocked. Also, it’s interesting to note that Microsoft isn’t blocking download.asp and gallery.asp phrases, even though they have the potential to do the same amount of damage as malicious download.php and gallery.php scripts. (The programming language, ASP, used in .asp files is Microsoft’s technology, for those who don’t know.)

Oh, what headaches Microsoft causes, especially when I’ve lived in the Mac world for so long.

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