30/11/00-well my cough's coming back, but i'm sleeping a lot hoping to fend it off. of course i'm a case job anyways, so i don't think sleep's gonna help me much...get a load of this...

i had volunteered a few months ago to be a specimen for the psychology department (i get paid 10$ for it). so they call me tuesday to ask me if i could come in this week to be tested. so i went last night. here's how it went...

the supposed experiment was on spatial abilities...first they put me in front of a computer and had me go through those puzzles where they give you two pictures and then pick out the differences. so i had did about 20 of them. then she had me fill out some questionnaire rating my interest in doing the puzzles and how i thought i did. then i did some more of those puzzles. then she had me do a word search. so the fourth part of the experiment is related to al hirschfield, the characturist for the new york times. he subliminally puts his daughter's name "nina" in his pictures. the next thing i had to do was, they put me on the computer again and then showed me some hirschfield drawings and i had to find the ninas. of course i knew what i was looking for since i'd seen them before...so i get done with them and she's got another questionnaire for me to fill out, but she "ran out of copies," so she has to make more and tells me that if i want to do more of those nina puzzles i can, or just read one of the magazines or something, just don't leave the room...she leaves the room, i read a magazine, she comes back, i finish the questionnaire and i'm done. so after, she takes the questionnaire and asks me what i think the hypothesis of the experiment was...of course i hadn't much more clue other than something having to do with spatial abilities...

no, the experiment had to do with autonomy supported feedback, meaning that after i was done with each puzzle, got a tone telling me that if i wanted to continue i could or if i wanted to stop i could. it was supposed to make me want to keep continuing because i wanted to, not because i felt i had to...basically the end result of the hypothesis was that when she left the room to "make copies," i was supposed to continue working on the nina puzzles because i wanted to by my own choice...but no, i sat there and read the magazine. i failed a fuckin psychology test!

i think that's definite proof that i'm a case job. but it was only 40 min and i got my 10$ so i went home proud that i truly am a nutcase.

that was the most interesting thing about my day, other than handing in my essay on john stuart mill's views on paternalism, which is now up on the literary site. i'm listening to various tracks off the incubus album now, i might have to get it, it sounds really good. i didn't like pardon me at first, but its not bad now when i think about it, i liked the bass/guitar on stellar, so i figured i'll listen to more stuff and its pretty good. a lot of bands that are coming around now that actually have a history but are finally hitting it big. its like there's a huge swamp of music out there that we think are one hit wonders created by labels, but in fact have been out there for quite a few years, bands like 3 doors down, incubus, papa roach...

tonight is this big holiday dinner at bmh. i still can't get all excited about christmas and whatnot, but i really haven't had to contend with religious difference much here yet. i mean i'm not best friends with any jewish kids, but i know a few that i'm friendly with now, so i can talk to them so that's cool. there's a ski trip from jan 12-14 that i think i'm gonna go to. 170$ includes busses, lift tix, and fully equipped luxury condos. should be a good time. of course i can't be sick. i'm getting again like i said. and of course tonight's curling, so hopefully i'll get out and go since i've missed the past 2 weeks...anyways, time to shower for this dinner :P

28/11/00-to anyone who's here, welcome to the smalrus web site v.5.0. its been about 5 days straight through the making, but its all here, and obviously, if you went to the old site, you've seen that i've redirected you. all the old files are still there, but why bother? here's how today went...went to economics but we had a sub prof, and he was ridiculously boring. went and submitted an insurance claim from september since its 200$ i could now stand to have, and i was lucky i found the receipt to be able to submit it. after that, picked up more halls cough drops since i'm beginning to get my cold again. and then finished up work on this site before uploading it all.

i was going to mention this yesterday, but i forgot. today starts assassins. basically we get a person's name on a piece of paper. we then have to use water guns and hit that person. then we get that person's piece of paper and move to kill the next target. and so forth and so forth. the winner with the most kills gets a 2-4 of molson export, and thus becomes everybody's friend. i don't expect to win, but i think i can pull off my first kill at dinner tonight. i just gotta watch my own back at the same time. i don't know who's out to get me. tonight i'm working on my john stuart mill essay on state interference in personal liberty. 6 page essay due tomorrow. i think i've got a half page so far. no fear though. tis me and i'll get it all done in time and well. for now, it's time for dinner...and time to make my first hit....

28/11/00-good lord man, i'm workin my ass off on this new site. i now have an stats monitor on this site to see how many people are actually registering unique hits here...as i've assumed, my numbers are small. we're talking two people other than myself to check up on the site, and my guess is they're jon and andrew. highly indicative how much everyone else back home cares, but what the hell, i mean who'm i making this site for, me or them?

i've got about 5 more album reviews to write for the reviews page before i unveil the site. about 90% of the site has changed, although there's only about 30% new content. i'm psyched to unveil though cause i always bust my balls working on a complete site upgrade, and the last one i did was when i went to frames in jan '00. i think that one was unveiled on new years day, but it was a gradual process of uploading, particularly with the 56k. with high speed, uploading is nothing now and i can do it all at once, plus i can redirect the page for the time being. anyways...

today's canadian elections and its still looking like the liberals have won the majority and jean chretien will be prime minister for yet a third term. luckily canada has an easy checkmark, handcounted ballot that's impossible to fuckup. basically the country is divided up by location and population into ridings. obviously, the cities have more ridings since there's more people in the cities, then lets say, in the yukon territory, where there's maybe 3 ridings. each riding elects a representative to a seat in parliament. the leader of the party with the most seats in parliament becomes the prime minister. so technically no one wins the race for prime minister, they win their riding and become it as the majority party leader. anyways, there's a girl from my floor that's running in our riding for the national democratic party. but its pretty unlikely that she'll win because the seat will either go to the liberal candidate or bloc quebecois candidate.but of course, only in canada will you find candidates running for the marijuana party, the socialist party, and the communist party...

in the riding i'm living in, Westmount-Ville Marie, a girl on my floor, Willy Blomme was running for MP for the national democratic party. it was pretty obvious that she wouldn't win since the liberals and the bloc quebecois and the progressive conservatives are bigger here in the montreal region, but she actually came in fourth place for this riding with 1968 votes or 5.3% of the votes in this riding. not too bad for a 19 year old running in a national election, eh?

we're finally getting to the good stuff in comparative politics but now we've got a bit over a week left before finals start. that's gonna suck, but i've got 5 finals spread out over 12 days...of course i've got 2 the first day, but...hopefully i'll get some studying done so i can do well on those things. it'd also be nice if the recycle bins got brought back to the lobby cause i've got like 2 weeks of newspapers and coke cans that i'd like to get rid of, but i've got no giant bin to empty it into. tomorrow's a busy day though. i've got an essay to write on John Stuart's assessment of paternalism for political theory. it'll probably be up on the new site when its done and i'm less stressed. of course i havent started writing it yet and its due wednesday...i'll get it done though, i always do...but thursday, i'm reluctantly giving up my laptop to jared so that he can use powerpoint to give a presentation he created on the evolution of the mind. i looked at it (hey, if its being stored on my computer, i should have the right...) and its rather interesting, but i don't know enough about that kind of stuff so...but he'll have my computer for a good part of the day, and then hopefully i'll get it back later, even though i won't have to worry about any more essays or anything...once this mill paper is done, that's all the homework til finals on dec 7. of course i think economics is dec 7 and i hate that class. hopefully the macroeconomics class next semester will be a little better. after all the only reason i'm taking this course is to fulfill prereqs for if i want to take polisci:economics classes. like i said, this year is entirely structured around my major. space time and matter was my other math/science course, my economics was a humanities course i believe, along with my logic course, and the two polisci courses fulfilled my social sciences requirement. next semester will be the same, only instead of space, time, and matter, i'll have a music history course and a religious studies course. but...by the time the year is done, i'll have 12 out of my 36 credits necessary for my major, and will have the economics prereqs for some 3-400 level polisci:economics courses if need be. so i'm doing ok, all i gotta do now is pass...and go to bed...

25/11/00-its been a lot of work and still in the making, but the new smalrus website v.5.0 is about to go up, hopefully by the end of the month, but definitely before break. one of the biggest new features is an image map instead of frames, since i've now got a program do it. all the xoom links will be redone to nbci, and the biggest thing is that the page can be accessed by going to http://members.nbci.com/Smalrus and you wont have to go to smalrus.htm. all of the old sites will be there as they were, the only thing is, the new files will have the .html extension, so anything new on the site will be .html instead of .htm

since the last time, i've handed in a logic assignment and gave a presentation on john stuart mill's harm principle, which basically talks about how the state shouldn't interfere with the actions of someone unless those actions will cause harm on another. meaning like, if a person wants to smoke pot, the state shouldnt interfere. if the actions of the potsmoker cause harm to someone else, then the state has the right to interfere for the harmed person's protection. the state shouldn't have the right to protect a person from harming themselves, the only way man becomes more diverse is by human experience. mill was one of the first radically liberalists, placing most of the liberty with the individual rather than the state.

last night was our floor progression. basically everyone put in $7 and they bought alcohol and all 36 of us on the floor played drinking games. i think the goal was to play 3 hrs of games, but after an hour and a half of vodka shots, jello shots, and vodka limbo, it started to fall apart. but it was really fun, everyone was all in a good mood and shit, loud music in the halls, dancing...i mean for fucks sake, i think last night was the most social sarah and i have been towards each other since the beginning of october...definitely positive. we didnt go out afterwards cause all the vodka in the drinks started to hit, but we were just chillin around, turned on the webcam in my room and there were actually people in my room for once...just ask nikhil ;) it was a blast, pretty successful. dave, omar, zaid, and i almost went out but somehow i lost myself on the other end of the hall, so i was chillin with the party down there. fun night, and i half apologized to rishona, but i was so out of it that i just said i'd tell her the rest later...we started to watch fight club on jareds dvd, but my dvd was scratched and we were about all passing out, so that was kinda it for the night. tonight i think i'm going out to dinner with meg, the girl i was talking to online over the summer and tomorrow i dunno what i'm gonna do. i got an essay due wed, but i dunno how thats gonna go or anything...maybe i'll do some work and go to the gym or something...

22/11/00-its been quite a while since i've actually had the chance to update. its also been quite a while since i've actually had a computer of my own. but yeah, my laptop finally came back fixed yesterday, after an 8 week plight of mishaps and laziness. i'm not exactly sure what was wrong with it since they didnt give a good description of what they did, other than it had something to do with the motherboard. hopefully this time, it will work for a long long time without breaking again (since its such a pain in the ass to not have your own computer).

a lots been going on since the last time i updated. and yet i can't even recount everything that's happened. well first of all, we've had a national election to which we still don't know the outcome after over two weeks. true, the electoral college has til december when they cast their votes for president, but it'd kinda be nice to know already. we're still pulling for gore up here, luckily the florida supreme court ruled in favor of counting recounted votes in the selected palm beach and broward counties. frankly, the whole voting system should be standardized in order to eliminate fuckups like the butterfly ballot, however teresa lepore should have read the law before designing a flawed ballot. i always thought the rest of the country used the levered booths like in south windsor, but apparently thats not the case. maybe after this election, they'll rethink that.

speaking of politics, the canadian elections are on monday and a girl on my floor, willy blomme, is running for some local office position for the national democratic party. jean chretien and the liberals still have a significant lead, however the Canadian Alliance has been picking up some big points and whether stockwell day is a cross between pat buchanan and george w or not, canadians are starting to warm up to him somewhat, particularly in the prairies. seeing as to how the canadian government is drastically different from the states, and they have different national issues to worry about, i don't really have any stance on who i'd like to see win. it'd probably be the liberals, however chretien said that if he was elected, he'd probably retire after 3 years. is there a point to run then? it should be interesting to see how it all plays out and its great that the dollar is now at 64 cents and dropping. they're predicting it may reach as low as 60 cents...which is even better than when we changed my money in august at 68 cents. mo money mo money.

school's been going okay. my best classes are the ones i do the least in. i've not gone to space time matter since september, but i got a 90 on the midterm. my polisci classes are also going well, which is good because they're rumored as the toughest graded departmentin the social sciences. the grading system is different here, with a 65-69 as a B-, but since those also tend to be around the class means, they scale letter grades differently. otherwise, virtually 3/4 of the student body would probably be flunking out. they mark hard, but adjust accordingly. so of course getting a 67 on my plato essay was actually pretty good. beat that, kevin brower at yale. :P

the social life still has it's ups and downs, particularly on the women front. i think i just need to be kept away from whiteboards when i'm drunk. i've made an ass out of myself with christine and rishona by writing something stupid on their whiteboards while i was drunk. they ought to lock up all the pens before i come home from the bars. its all been good though. went to the maple leafs-canadians game on saturday (think red sox-yankees rivalry), ended up having to buy tix from a scalper, but i got it 20$ less than face value. sellout game-23,000. of course we lost 6-1 and the leafs fans were going nuts, but it was a good time. so of course after losing 10 of the last 12 games, the canadians fired their general manager and coach. didn't help. they lost to florida 4-1 last night. after that, came home, had something to drink, and went to angels with tess, rishona, and nicole. pretty fun, although by the time i got there, i was piss drunk and could barely dance and kept second winding every 5 minutes for like a minute at a time. walked back home with tess and nicole, and thats when the whiteboard incident happened. hopefully i'll clear that up tonight.

my grandfather got me tickets for the dec 9 habs-ottawa senators game. when he said good seats, i thought rinkside, but instead they came and they're club seats. fuckin club seats! i get to sit in the box with guys with suits and get free concessions (save for the alcohol), and all that other good stuff. its my grandfather's mechanic's (for years) brother in-law, who's president of some hi-tech paper coating company (whatever coated paper is...i'm sure i'll find out when i meet him at the game). so i'll probably ask rishona to the game when i talk to her tonight (that is if i'm not completely fucked over already).

a kid on my floor in the music school has had a few gigs at this jazz nightclub, upstairs. its a nice place and i've seen his band. they're pretty good. of course i'm the only one on the floor representing molson 5 there, but it was still good music. this friday is our floor progression, so its more drinking games (i still can't drink beer, only mixed drinks) and then if we're not drunk enough when its done, the floor's probably going out afterwards. not much else going on except that i'm off to comparative politics now...politics...

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