Tales From the Milk Drinker

Hello hello. I decided to start blogging again at the request of my beautiful and multi talented girlfriend Amber. Good call sweety. I sort of feel like ranting on about her for a few pages now but I think that might spoil the spirit of the blog - to talk more about pointless things.

Today it's storming "like a bastard" outside. The snow is coming down and the wind is blowing it round. Our driveway has some bare spots and some spots where the snow is up to your hip. Well maybe not your hip. But my hip. And I'm almost 5' 6". They have not plowed our road yet and this prompts me to the rant I am about to begin.

It could be my imagination but I think when it used to storm snow plows used to wander the street of summerside continually looking for freshly shoveled driveways to fill in. Now this winter I have been in Summerside for about 3 spectacular storms and it seems that they now only plow when it's all over and done with, thereby making more stingy and cost effective use of plow driver's time and valuable diesel fuel. Perhaps the price of oil had something to do with this or perhaps the city now feels that environmentally it's irresponsible to spend fuel cleaning up a storm before it's over and done. I would think that this now method is probably unpopular with the plow driving community as I would assume less hours = less pay.

I almost think that a decent effort should be made to keep the roads open. I can certainly appreciate that to anyone with a sick family member in the house (and I mean genuinely sick with a threatening problem, not a runny nose) an unplowed road can spell insecurity as it blocks off the logical route to the hospital. I suppose some folks who don't plan ahead well could also be stuck with no way to get to a pharmacy if they had important prescriptions which needed to be filled.

One of the nicest ideas I've heard of is the club which opperates in the HRM. I forget their name but it's basically a gathering of folks who drive oversized four wheel drive trucks who offer their services to those in need during extreme weather. For example a health care worker (like a nurse or a doctor) who needs to get to the hospital for their shift can phone the club for a ride during a storm and a team of a few vehicle opperators will do their best to get them there in their jeeps/large trucks. What a nice idea.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I miss my four wheel drive. Don't tell the sexy sunfire. It'ld hurt it's feelings.

This post is dedicated to my fellow engineer in training Dan the Man Schaef Daddy.

I have two ideas for businesses/inventions that I think would make some pretty good cash or at least a few laughs.

The first is a Hourier service. Notice that it's Courier with the C changed to a H so it's pronounced like Hurrier. The purpose of my Hourier service would be a perfect mirror image of a Courier company like Purolator with the only difference being that the Hourier would try to deliver packages at such a speed that it would endanger the lives of the senders, recievers, and the general public. The Hourier would drive at break neck speeds and stop for no cross walk nor school bus. Also while on foot between the vehicle and the recipient the Hourier would run like the wind and flip out at anyone who got in his way - "Holy #$$# get out of my way!"

The second idea is a High Speed Electric Bus. I'm not talking about wires inside your vidjo games, I mean the kind of bus that drives little old ladies to the superstore (afterall, they may not like those potatoes but gosh darn it they keep buying them, don't they?). The bus would be like a regular bus except perhaps more sleek in appearance. It would be powered by large electric motors and would travel at slightly higher than normal speeds. It's trademark difference however would be that it would accelerate at insane rates, causing wiplash to the driver and passengers. Also, mowing down of pedestrians would not be encouraged but not frowned upon either. Any time someone met their demise at the bumper of the HSEB company management would merely explain that people should be happy because we all have to work together to fight global warming. Come on guys, it's cereal.

So what do you think are these ideas great or what?

I made a very important decision yesterday - I'm not applying for any PhD programs for next year.

This might come as a surprise to some readers as I've always been known for my enjoying school and my success in it. But this is a decision I've made with conviction.

The reasons are as follows:

1) My heart (or "gut" if that helps your visualization) is telling me not to.

I'm not saying I wouldn't apply for some in coming years, nor am I saying I will. I just have had a very strong feeling that whatever I do next year is not going to be start working on a PhD.

At this point I'ld invite your comments and criticisms. I have many other points to ramble on about this but for once I don't feel like making a long post full of horrible spelling mistakes.

This is a big week for getting stuff done for Sambo. Tomorrow at 12:30 I write my final exam for air pollution control and then I have my exam in Combustion on Friday. In between I need to polish off my air pollution project (a research funding proposal) and then Saturday is my powerlifting meet in St. Thomas.

I'm maintaining a positive "can do" attitude about it all because it should be very doable. A key factor will be staying well rested and stress free, so I'll probably lay low most of the week. On thursday and friday this week I layed down for 10 minutes after lunch and ended up sleeping for 4 hours each time - I guess I was more tired than I had realized.

I'm starting to think about leaving Ontario in the early April 20's, maybe about the 24th? My time between the end of exams and leaving should be filled with dicking around. My room mate Tim's parents are coming to visit him from New Zealand and I volunteered to take us all to Niagra Falls to see a famous piece of Canadian geography. If it's nice enough out we can probably ride The Maid of The Mist.

Last night we went out to eat at a Japanese/Korean restaurant at University Plaza. It was okay, at first I was really overwhelmed because nothing on the menu sounded eatable. I settled on chicken taryaki and rice which ended up being fairly normal but pricey. It was a neat experience to eat with sticks but next time I'll probably opt for something less international.

My study strategy has been what I'ld call short bursts. I study intensely for short intervals (20 minutes to a half hour) and then take a break. I believe I will retain a higher percentage of the material this way than through long multi hour study sessions. This week I'll also be big on napping as it keeps stress levels low and should preserve my energy for when I need it.

I'll leave you with this memory:

It was last summer when I visited Neil in Halifax and I didn't pick a day to go home yet. Sunday night rolled around and I was thinking it was time to hit the road soon when I realized - hey wait I don't have anywhere to be for days so why dont' we go back to Kart Bahn for another few laps. Neil agreed and it was a mighty good time, even if I did get a little lost on the drive back to his place. Wether you leave him an upper decker or not visiting Neil is always a fun time. Hahahaha. Beef Stew.

Hey guys. I thought I'ld post and share my thought for the day.

This is the marvelous week before my exams when I have no classes. I spend my 9-5 dabbling in my research and going over the material that will be on my tests. I feel pretty good about air pollution and combustion - I've been paying attention all term and these topics pop up in my research all the time so I think I've got a decent handle on what's happening.

In 12 days on April 14 I have my first powerlifting meet in nearly a year. It will be in St. Thomas Ontario down near London. This will be my first raw meet, meaning that I'm not going to use any supportive gear which would aid me in lifting more. For each event I normally wear some sort of piece of magical apparatus like a squat suit or a bench shit that adds support to my frame and allows me to lift more than I could in normal clothes. I thought this time around it'ld be fun to leave the support at home and see how I fair without it. It meant rearranging my goals a little but I'm happy to rise to the challenge.

Finishing the St. Thomas meet will be the real "icing on the cake" because at that point my 2 exams will also be over and done with. I'll basically have accomplished all my short term goals for the month. Tasks remaining will be to pack up and move back to PEI for the summer. I plan to drive to about Quebec city the first night and then go to Fredericton the next day where I'll visit some friends. I never realized until I left that I was always under guesstimating the number of people from Fredericton that I actually like. Make no mistake, it's a really small frigging number. But there are some real great people there.

There are some plans in the works for me and my room mate Timbo to head to Toronto for a little holiday of sorts on April 16th. I wanna go in the CN tower and possibly visit the mech eng department at the U of T where my cousin works. And after that maybe we'll do some fun touristy stuff that real normal people would find entertaining.

Somewhere in the middle of it all we've got to clean out appartment up for our moving out inspection. Seeing as how I'm a fairly lazy bugger when it comes to cleaning there's a GREAT chance Molly Maids will be getting a call from me. In other news I figured out how to do my income tax return and can finish it tonight. The only thing I might be getting wrong is my RRSP amount I'm allowed to contribute.

Well I should crack a book for a while and crank out some Air-Po-Co-Tro as I call it (Air Pollution Control for you non Sam-tech Savvy).

It was the fall of 2003. After spending the summer living in 8G^(-1) and working with Sheila (best co-worker ever) I was off to UNB to finish my degree. I was living with Roger Gillis and Jeff Malone on Dirty old Needham street.

We had ordered our internet connection from aliant (I think?) and being 3 technological tools at the time we couldn't figure out how to hook it up. A box came one day from Aliant claiming to have internet in it but the question was could this one box possibly contain enough internet for our whole appartment. We tried to install it and couldn't figure it out for the life of us. We could get internet on Roger's computer but couldn't get the router to talk to the computers in Jeff's room and my room.

We were in "Big Poppa" Abdel Elsaway's class, "Design Zero" when our prayers were answered. In walked a fellow student who looked like a pig, I shit you not a real honest to goodness pig. We explained our woa's to "Pig Man" (who we later found out was like 30 years old and that sort of creeped us out) and he agreed to come over and spread the box of internet around the appartment for us.

He came over one day after school and sat down at Roger's machine and checked a few settings and then declared "I'm going to have to ping your router." This sounded pretty scarey to me because I didn't know what the hell pinging was, or even a router for that matter. And remember, this guy looked like a fucking pig. The tone of his voice was serious enough that I knew he wasn't joking and to be honest I was getting pretty nervous. The expression on his face told me that whatever pinging my router was it was some serious shit.

It turned out it wasn't a big deal at all and he got our internet hooked up right away. I payed him 2o dollars for his troubles and gave him a drive home to the North Side. On the way there he confided in me that he finds big breasts disgusting. To be honest that sort of scarred me for life, I prefer to think of Pig Man as a very non-sexual creature. He went on to ask me how we had landed such a sweet appartment and did I know how he could get such a nice one? This also bugged me because I knew our place was so disgusting that if he liked it he must live in a really bad spot.

Later Jeff and I realized that Pig Man must obviously be into eating human babies. Nothing else could make him look so much like a pig.

There's some great story tellers in this world we live in but really could anyone make this shit up? Ask Jeff. Ask him! He'll confirm my story!

Like a damb pig.