I forget how I stumbled upon this but I've been listening to Paul Anka's new release Rock Swings. It's quite an enjoyable series of tracks from the legendary Canadian crooner. Anka has done fourteen covers of some of the most well-known songs in popular culture. He managed to put his own smooth and laid back signature on these songs making them versions you no doubt have never heard before. The complete track list is as follows:

Eye of the Tiger - Survivor
Jump - Van Halen
Everybody Hurts - REM
Wonderwall - Oasis
Blackhole Sun - Soundgarden
It's My Life - Bon Jovi
It's a Sin - Pet Shop Boys
True - Spandau Ballet
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
Hello - Lionel Richie
Eyes Without a Face - Billy Idol
Lovecats - The Cure
The Way You Make Me Feel- Michael Jackson
Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton

My own favourites include his renditions of Everybody Hurts and It's a Sin. An odd choice is Smells Like Teen Spirit but Anka manages to pull it off without sounding awkward. Why don't you listen for yourself?

Smells Like Teen Spirit - Paul Anka (3.7 Mb mp3)

If you like the track, I encourage you check out his CD on Amazon.ca.

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I'm too tired tonight to post something coherent, so I'll just show you this image from a recent episode of the Family Guy. In Petarded, Peter finds out he's technically mentally challenged after taking an IQ test.

Actually, you can make your own chart. Just go to this web site. I made my own. You can too!

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So where was I about this paper I talking about? Oh yeah, so I did a course-based Master's degree which meant I didn't have to write a thesis or do any research. I can tell you right now that fact saved me a whole bunch of trouble. Sure Matt C from SJC once said my degree "wasn't a real one" but he's an arrogant prick and I'm not the only one to think that. Whoops, did I write that? I hope Google doesn't crawl my blog.

Anyways, because of the course-based nature of my degree, I never expected to get an academic paper published or even written. In the academic world, published papers are the means by which researchers measure how big their dicks are among themselves. Academically speaking, it was never my intention to participate in such an event.

As I began to read more and more papers, I thought it'd be pretty cool if by some chance I'd write a paper and get it saved to the ACM Digital Library. At least for my own interests, the ACM Digital Library represented the most influential body of archived papers, proceedings, and journals.

In my last semester at school, I took a project course dealing with physical user-interfaces. It dealt with devices like force-feedback joysticks, stuff that you physically touch to interact with computers or electronic devices. I completed a project with two other people. The prof thought that our work was good enough to possibly be presented in a mid-level conference scheduled for October in Italy.

I helped co-author a paper based on our work and we sent it in. We got back the reviewers comments just about two weeks ago. It was my first time having to go through stuff like this where faceless people pick apart your work. Unfortunately, our paper wasn't fully accepted so we won't be presenting it formally, but we were accepted as a poster session. I say poopy to that.

Anyways, I believe our paper will still be archived in the ACM Digital Library since it will be part of the conference. Yay! Hey, if you're in Trento, Italy on Thursday, October 6, 2005, be sure to check out The Seventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI’05)!

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Blogger fixed their post counters. This is my 1038th post. Over the three years, some have been better than others but the important thing is I'm out there everyday, gettin' it done. What that is, I'm still not sure.

Some of you may have read my post about the man date. Along the same lines comes an article about the "man hug". It's informative and thought-provoking. While I rarely hug other men, I'm partial to the "half-and-half" or the "hip-hop" but "the bear" isn't to my liking. Wow, just think about a man date where there's some man hugging going on.

You know, there was something else I wanted to blog. It was something I've been meaning to write down for the last couple of days. Now I can't remember it. Hmmm... I'm sure if it's important I'll remember it again. Oh wait, now I recall. It was about that academic paper I co-authored for a conference. Now, that I thought about it, I'm too tired to go into details. I'll write about it again some time later this week.

I'll end with some video game news. The use of zombies in games has been a popular concept. The use of such enemies is attractive since who doesn't love being freaked out by the living dead? The whole wanting to eat your brains thing is pretty cool too. Now comes a game that turns the whole concept in the other direction. In Stubbs the Zombie (A Rebel Without a Pulse), you play the game through the eyes of Stubbs... a zombie. Your goal is to turn as many humans as you can into zombies. Available to you are some pretty cool zombie powers including the ability to smash through doors to get at your human brains. Because the game is set in the 50s, there's a unique classic feel to it. From the decor right down to the Mr. Sandman soundtrack it's something you'd see in small town America. Take a gander at the videos on the web site.

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