TBT #17: Return to Randomness

I thought I posted this last night, but apparently it did not post! Perhaps because I was kind of half-drunk at the time and also eating a sandwich made with at least eight different kinds of meat. It was really good. The sandwich, I mean — not the update. The update sucked. And now it’s lost to the world, so I have to try and remember what it was about. I hope I can do it. There was a lot of different things in that update!

They were, and hopefully still are, the Best Things Ever for November 19, 2004.

I hate Academia

So guys, I know I might sound like a broken record here, but university sucks. It does. It’s time we stop trying to sugarcoat this whole school thing. Higher education in the arts is a useless institution that serves to annoy the student far more than it does to educate them. I don’t think I’ve really been challenged by a course since FYP, at least as far as knowledge goes. All of my Dalhousie courses have been dull, uninspiring and damn near soul-sucking wastes of time.

And you know what the problem is? It boils down to economics. All across Canada now, students graduate high school at 17. Ignoring the fact that this is absolutely too early for anybody to make a choice that will have staggering effects on not only their post-adolesence but their whole damn life, this graduation-at-17 thing means that a number of university students are still minors when they start classes. If that’s not enough, too many of these kids have never had a job. They have no source of income aside from their parents.

The end result in all of this is that parents are still heavily involved in their kids lives when their kids go off to university. They’re the ones footing the bill and in some cases they’re still legally responsible for their kids.

Universities like money. They’re not at fault for this. Dalhousie has something like the second highest tuition in Canada. It’s easy to see why, what with our myriad of windowless granite buildings that probably cost a bundle! Regardless of the reason for the high tuition, Dalhousie obviously wants to get students into the university — which they do by accepting pretty much anyone who can operate a touchtone phone — and, once the students are enrolled, keep them there. If they didn’t, the money would stop rolling in and there’d be no more funding for redesigning the website to make it less functional and putting up giant anti-smoking banners all over campus.

So how do you keep a bunch of kids — and their parents’ money — in university? You coddle them. You coddle them like sheep. You make sure that their university classes are just like high school classes. So you take attendance, you hold one-to-one interviews with the students, you make sure to answer each and every one of their moronic questions. Independent learning — which, I’m told, was supposed to be what university was really about — is far too dangerous these days. Because if little Rupert fails all his courses, the school won’t get his money anymore!

So why am I in school? I don’t know. It seems like the thing to do, I guess.

Novel Ideas

I made it to 17,345 before I completely ran out of steam. I don’t know if I’ll get past that mark in the 10 days left in this month. Even if I don’t, I’m proud that I managed to get what I did. I’ve never written anything this long before — most of my writing, you may have noticed, ends up being 1,000-word vignettes about, well, love — so getting something substantial at least started feels nice.

Even if I don’t finish by the 30th, I will finish. I think. Maybe. I am pretty busy the next couple of months, what with exams and then Christmas and then New Years and then my traditional winter hibernation period!

As I’ve gotten a couple of “What’s with the robots?”-type questions recently, here is another excerpt which will explain it!

“Dan,”€ she said,€œ”You know what’s happening tonight. You know she’s coming back tonight.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Why should I feel anything?”

She sighed and leaned against the wall.

“You shouldn’t. You know you shouldn’t. But I think you do. And I think you will. You can’t just gloss over this like it’s nothing.”

“But it SHOULD be nothing.”

“But it’s not nothing. Not to you.”

“Look,” I said, hand touching her arm, “It’s okay. I’m not even going out tonight. I’m just going to write about robots.”

She started to speak, and then stopped. She moved close and hugged me.

“I hope it’s a good story about robots,”€ she said quietly into my shoulder.

See? It’s not ABOUT robots! It’s about writing about robots! And also, robots themselves. But only a little.

I sold out

So I got an iBook this past week. After years and years of saying I’d never both with Macs, I gave it and bought one. I spent a damn year using a terribly slow Mac with OS9 at the newspaper I worked at for a year, and it nearly destroyed me and turned me off of Macs forever. Or so I thought. I simply could not resist the lure of a laptop that weighs under five pounds, gets over five hours of battery life and runs essentially everything a PC does.

I’ve got to tell you, this is a very very nice machine. I feel like I could drop it off a balcony — if I, you know, had a balcony — and it would still work. Compared to my desktop replacement Dell that weighed eight pounds and sometimes smelled like cinnamon sticks, this is a huge step up.

Nerdy list of cool software for Macs

Warning: Nerdy stuff ahead. Skip over it if you don’t care! There’s music after it!

• Firefox G4-optimized build. Safari (The default web browser for Macs) is pretty cool and all, but I found myself missing Firefox, which I use exclusively on PCs becuase it is great. The Firefox that Mozilla offers runs a bit slow — and the scrolling is awful — but this build made specifically for Macs runs like a dream. And with a simple configuration tweak, scrolling is nice again!
• Adium. The MSN Messenger that Microsoft offers for OS X is woefully out-of-date and really ugly. Adium is a gorgeous looking third-party client that not only works great for MSN, but also connects to ICQ, AIM and some other messaging places. And file transfer works! And the dock icon is a duck and when I get a message, the duck flaps its wings!
• iEatBrainz. This program was clearly conceived by a genius. Once I added all of my mp3s to my iTunes library, I realized that a good 200 of them didn’t have ID3 tags. This program will take those mp3s, match the actual audio to their server database and tag your mp3s for you. Yes, occasionally it doesn’t work — and it chokes on live tracks — but I’d say I had a 90% success rate and that’s AWESOME. I’m in nerd heaven!
• Expose. This thing comes with the OS but man is it great. When I get bored I just mash the F9 key again and again because the effect is so cool! I had my iBook at the library the other day and this girl commented on how pretty it was. She was all “I wish I had one” and I was like “Yeah, it’s great.” In retrospect I probably should have hit on this girl or something because, really, how often do you get an opening like THAT?

Easy/Lucky/Free

My readers may be aware that I’m something of a Conor Oberst fan. Yes, he’s often a whiny, self-righteous and probably drugged out punk kid, but his band Bright Eyes is undoubtedly one of my favourite bands right now. Their last album, Lifted was a brilliant piece of lyrical mastery that got me through my first year of university. Since then, Oberst hasn’t been doing a whole lot musically. There was a split EP with Neva Divona, which was really really great, plus a track on the MoveOn.org album that just worked oh so well.

So it kind of took me by surprise when Oberst announced he would be releasing two albums this January. According to this article, Oberst will release “I’m Wide Awake, it’s Morning” — a more acoustic, countryish album — and “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn” — a more traditional Bright Eyes album, in the same vein as “Lifted” — on January 25, 2005.

As if this wasn’t cool enough, “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn” has already been leaked to the internet, a full three months before release. And, not surprisingly, it’s fucking good.

See you next week!
Matt