Don't tell any of the people I'm going out for brunch with, but I'm still up at 2:30am. I have a good reason though, I've made some progress on my mocap assignment. I've written a lot of code since dinner. It all compiles, but I'm afraid to run it because run-time errors are a bitch to debug. Never try to debug those type of problems if you want to go to bed soon. You are better off just assuming it works and actually find out the next morning.

I'm going to chill out and relax for another half hour or so and then go to bed. I have to be up at 9:30am tomorrow. That my friends, is going to be painful.

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As the election in the US draws near, I've come to the conclusion that the only mainstream media organizations that have any clue as to what is really going are the comedy shows. With the exception of the White House news channel (Fox News), I think deep down inside every TV news channel wants to be fair and honest. The problem, however, is that they proceed to fill their schedules full of these spin-shows. Worse yet, they allow spin doctors to come on those shows and subject the US public to half-truths, deceptions, and outright lies. Worse still, it's the Republicans that seem to have perfected this strategy of spin.

The only shows that seem to have retained a sense of reason and intelligence are the comedy shows. Between The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, you probably have more fair and balanced reporting of the issues that the entire Fox News organization. Now you might be saying, "But Erwin, those shows obviously lean towards the left". Are they actually supporting the liberal point of view? I would counter that in pointing out the inaccuracies, missteps, and doctoring of truths from the current US administration, it only seems that they favour the left.

This week, add another show to the list of those trying to cut through the political crap that gets served up by the major networks. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog visited spin alley after one of the presidential debates. As expected, Triumph was at his classic best. Click here for the Quicktime video.

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I've spent nearly six hours tonight trying to figure out how get the next part of my motion capture assignment done. Before tonight, I was hoping to make some progress on the assignment and write some more code. In the six hours, I managed to discover the problem is a lot harder to solve than I realized. I didn't write a single line of new code. I actually haven't written any new code since Tuesday. That worries me. I did however, sketch out a plan that partially solves the assignment. Howeve, if I completely did all the things in my plan, I won't get full marks. Actually, I'd be happy with that right now.

Well, I better go to bed so I can waste my entire Friday on this assignment. Oh by the way, if anyone has a clue as to how to smoothly blend together two motion capture clips, please let me know (and tell me in a way that a four-year old can understand).

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I've got a lot to do still before I go to bed, which in all honesty, I won't get to, but here's a short bit of rambling at the keyboard at his hour.

I made Hamburger Helper for dinner today. People start giving me sympathy when I mention that's what I'm eating. Hey, I actually like the stuff. And it gives me lunch for the next few days. For about $8, I get one dinner and several lunches until Saturday. It's a good thing.

I let some random guy borrow my pen is class today. He showed up like a month into class. I don't think he's even registered. He's a bit odd. He's got really long hair that he kinda loosely braids into a single weave. Every class, he brings an old plastic Zeller's bag that contains a stack of loose leaf paper. He takes sheets out and writes out messy notes with a Bic pen. Anyways, his pen ran out today and like the nice guy I am (by the way, women love bad boys), I offered him the one I wasn't using. He took it and then like five minutes later, he put the pen up to his mouth. I couldn't see if he made tongue or lips contact, but still, what the hell dude! I let you borrow my pen so you could write the notes and now you're going fellate my pen?

At the end of class, he gave me my pen back and I took it like it was a log of feces. I shoved it back into my bag with the plan of dipping it into rubbing alcohol later. I can tell you one thing though, all the weird things this guys does... the plastic bag full of paper, the long braided hair, and the need to blow my pen... it all points towards him being an outright genius. Isn't it always the case? The weirder the habits, the smarter the person is.

I swear if someone said to me, "Erwin, if you promise to pick your nose in public and put the boogers in a jar, your IQ will go up 80 points", I'd seriously consider it. Well, maybe I'd go halfway... for an increase of 40 IQ points I'd spit wherever and whenever I desired.

I need to get some rest.

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So tonight, I'm looking over the ads that I've let Google place on some of my web pages. I get money if someone clicks on them. Anyways, that's beside the point. I see a web site address on one of the ads, so I decide to go visit the site to see what kind of things they sell.

It turns out it's an on-line shop that sells swimwear. One of literally hundreds of on-line stores that sell the same thing. As a good web site owner, I decided to investigate the type of swimwear this store was selling. You know, to make sure they were offering quality merchandise, since their ad was gracing my web site.

At first, I saw some fine examples of gorgeous swimwear for women. Then I saw they had swimwear for men. And I'm not talking about surf shorts or board shorts. What I saw caused me to wish I had seen Speedos instead.

Beforeforewarned, the link I'm about to give might be possibly not work-safe depending on the openess of your work environment. If you work in a gay bar, it'll probably be alright.

Ok, the link is here. Have you ever seen anything like that before?

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I'm guessing most of you have read about it, if not seen it, but The Daily Show host, Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's Crossfire on Friday. That show is among the numerous political/spin/talking points cable TV shows that Stewart often finds humour in. If you watch Stewart's show at all, you can tell that underneath, he's actually quite displeased with those type of programs.

Well, Stewart used Friday's appearance to tell the hosts of Crossfire exactly what he thought of their show. While he was critical of the show in general, he saved his best stuff for Tucker Carlson, a right-wing, conservative Bush supporter. Among the many sparkling exchanges were these gems:

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.

STEWART: You need to go to one.

----

CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.

STEWART: No. No. I'm not going to be your monkey.

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CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans...

STEWART: You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

Reading transcripts is one thing, but if you watch the whole thing in video format, it's a lot more entertaining. Click here for the video (in Windows Media format, 37 Mb).

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It's been a while since I've been reminded of some of the dumb things about grad school. This weekend, it all came back to me. I started to look over some of the assignments that are due fairly soon. One of my assignments made me quite perturbed.

We've been in class for almost two months now. In the lectures, we've gone over specific theory and been given lots of equations. So the prof hands out our third assignment. It basically has nothing to do with what we've talked about in class. It's based on a single paper we were supposed to read and summarize. The prof talked about the paper maybe ten minutes and didn't go over any of the technical details in it. Meanwhile, I have a binder full of lecture notes that aren't applicable to the assignment. The assignment is worth almost 15% of the class mark. How do you make an assignment worth that much based on 1% of lecture material?

He wants us to recreate what the researchers did in the paper... in two weeks. Researchers sometimes spend months in collaboration with each other to come up with the results of a paper. More often that not, the work is based on the work of others. These papers are almost as technical as a complete thesis.

It would be half bad if the paper laid out what they did down to the minute details, so I could understand their techniques. However, the details are general. They throw out an equation here and there, but I have no idea how to fit that into real code.

It doesn't end there. The prof gave us some template code to get us started. When I looked at it this weekend, I was immediately confused. He's done something that I've never seen before. It's so non-standard. I get feeling it's not a "good practice" technique when it comes to writing code. Thinking maybe I was just dumb, I consulted a friend of mine, an NSERC holder in computer science. I told him how the prof wrote the code. He said he'd never heard of that before and he wasn't even sure how it working the way he did it.

So not only do I not know how to proceed for this assignment, my hands are tied by this template code, which is supposed to give the class a "head-start".

This is what I find frustrating about grad school. More often than not, profs give out assignments that are artificially difficult. Sometimes, you immediately understand what concept or theory is being investigated for the assignment, but there's all these artificial roadblocks in your way. For example, the data for the assignment is not in the ideal format, so you spend half the time formatting the data, when that's not the point of assignment. Or when you're given templates to work with, but they are so confusing, you lose focus of what the whole point of the assignment was. You wind up doing work (and lots of it), just so you can start the assignment in earnest.

Some people say grad school is hard, and they are partially right, because of all the BS that is involved. Bah, I'm all ornery now. And that is exactly why I'm going to fry up some bacon and eggs as soon as I hit the post button.

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