Ntuple Indemnity

I have yet to compile a definitive list of Nick’s Greatest Examination Moments, but discussing the 1999 TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley in the short-answer section of the History of Technology final is up there with the best of them. Pity it was only worth 6%.

Heads up, readers, because here comes one of those rare posts that drops all intelligent analysis in favour of linking to things that are relevant to no one but myself. This is the closest your favourite Café Canadien will ever get to what one typically expects of a blog; any closer, and I might get some on me. Think of this as a way of restoring the local signal-noise equilibrium in the negative direction for a change, given last week’s sudden explosion of thoughtful debate at Points of Information.

I swear I’m not stalking people I knew in junior high, but they keep popping up all over this little hole in the luminiferous cyber-ether they call the Internet. Most of these appearances are in the form of blogs; there’s Néha Datta, who inexplicably uses the handle “ironparrot”, a remarkable convergence of time and space that I discussed back in July. At some point, I should ask her about it. There’s Lev Hellebust (Bratishenko?), the other guy who attempted Tolstoy in the fifth grade besides yours truly. I’m not sure if he legitimately made it through War and Peace, because I sure didn’t. What he did legitimately make it to was Yale. There’s Jess Harvey, an aspiring film actress and damn good singer who is listed on IMDb, though her profile there lacks a corresponding photograph of her button nose. Then there’s Sri Gupta, who can probably be best described to my U of A readership as Anand Sharma minus the politics and the lanky cousin, and plus an obsession with gluing googly eyes to cottonballs. He ran for and lost the position of Vice President of my junior high’s student council the same year I ran for President under the furniture slogan “Nobody Beats the Nick” and was soundly trounced. It must be clarified that said council was a pretty boring affair anyway, given how it never engaged in decidedly fun activities for all ages like separating powers and abolishing attendance requirements.

There are more, but let us save them for another post, another day.

The most interesting find, however, was what I turned up at the site for the As Prime Minister Awards, an essay contest of sorts about student visions for Canada that I inconveniently forgot to enter last year, however much of a novelty it would be for a computer engineering student to be recognized in such a capacity. Here is a video of semi-finalist Josh Kertzer, who beat me out for the Y-chromosome half of the high school valedictory in my graduating year; he mentioned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in his address, which made everything okay. It gets better. A fellow semi-finalist at the competition was UADS debater and outgoing Dance Club co-director Anastasia Kulpa, whom I assume speaks excellent French despite never having heard her. But lest that be the limit of the CUSID crossover, here is none other than Saskatchewan muppet Erin Weir, also known as the reason why Wascana is the only place in the country where I would even for a moment consider voting NDP. Make sure you watch his interview all the way to the end. Also there is CUSID VP Atlantic Patrick LeGay, with whom I am not personally acquainted, but hopefully will be by the end of the year given that we are on the same executive.

Mr. Kertzer, if you ever read this, do yourself a favour and join the Queen’s Debating Union. Then I can lump you in with these other hacks.

And now for something completely different. Congratulations are due to Ben Milder, founder of The Tolkien Trail and its messageboard Entmoot, at which I am still a co-administrator whenever I feel like it. Unlike the authors of certain blogs you are reading, he was accepted into nine colleges including Harvard, Yale and Princeton. It’s a bit scary to think that I have been acquainted with this guy since he was about thirteen, and he’s one of those rare types that did not suddenly stop being a genius.

That was a lot of links, Mr. Peabody.

Ardalambion has been given a run for its money as my favourite website pertaining to linguistics. The challenger is the Speech Accent Archive, a repository of over three hundred samples of both first- and second-language English speakers reading the same paragraph, complete with phonetic transcriptions and pattern analysis. Until about the age of ten I had a bad habit of lazily tackling the ‘th’ sound with a ‘d’ or ‘f’, but only now am I properly aware that this is a generalization known as an “interdental fricative change”. Discover this and other fun facts while listening to a heck of a lot of people speak.

Whenever something really amazing happens on 1 April, it is best to err on the side of scepticism, but this appears to be as true as apple pie, or however the mangled vernacular goes: the first screenshots from the recently-announced GameCube sequel to Paper Mario. This one is my favourite.

One would think there would be more worth mentioning today, but alas, there is not. Either there is a severe dearth of April Fool’s spirit on the Web this year, or everybody stopped being clever and/or funny. I suspect both.

First things first: Yes, I have seen Cold Mountain, Master and Commander, The Last Samurai and Lost In Translation, as opposed to a month and a half ago. What I did not do over the past month was post the hundred-strong Thailand/Singapore photo album. That will come; patience, little sparrows.

There are a number of reasons why I have decided to resume writing for this site, despite my firm insistence that it was a basic CSS layout experiment from its conception and is intended to be nothing more. The first is that at least three people have requested it offhand in the past three weeks. These people are commonly known as “geeks”, but I appreciate their readership regardless. Of course, if they would make themselves known by way of comments and annotations in response to the decidedly non-controversial things I say here, that would encourage the proliferation of this content.

The second is that the 2004-2005 University of Alberta elections for the Students’ Union Executive and the Undergraduate Board of Governors Representative are underway, and time willing, I intend to fortify this castle in the digital sky with parapets of insightful commentary and moats of extended metaphors. For the time being, this SU Webboard forum will suffice.

The Oscars are also quickly on their way, though this is one of those years where I am not terribly upset with the nomination shortlists. Some recapitulation of the state of film in 2003 is long overdue, but may finally come given that I have caught up on a lot of what I intended to see, and plan to ring in the new year by making this coming weekend’s The Passion of the Christ the first release of 2004 I bother attending.

Stay tuned, as I have all afternoon to kill, and will write like the wind – a wind with a pen. Or keyboard.

It has occurred to me that this website looks terrible for those with ClearType turned off, which is pretty much everybody but me, since Georgia (sans anti-aliasing) isn’t the most high-resolution typeface on the planet. But I guess you could say when I was slapping the stylesheet together one fateful day last summer, I had Georgia on my mind.