I've been battling a particularly nasty document at work these last two weeks, and I'm afraid it's winning. Every day I work and work but seem to make hardly any progress, and every day I come home more and more drained. Ah, well, it's going to have to be essentially done by next Monday, for whatever quality of 'done' I can manage in that time, so at least it's not going to be hanging over me forever. And at least I got some laughs out of how outrageously bad the original document was. Some bitter, hollow, borderline-hysterical laughs.

At least I have Farscape Season 1 to keep me company. It's strange, I saw the first episode a few years back and was utterly bored by it at the time, but now I find I'm really enjoying it. Maybe it's just because work has melted my brain. Maybe I should be worried.

... In the meantime, though... On to the next episode!

What have I done today? I made pancakes. I totally failed to buy a used bike from the local bike recycling project. I spent far too much time browsing through a used book and video store. I started watching Ashes to Ashes season 2 at the behest of a coworker. I got some tasty take-out tempura from the Japanese restaurant down the road. I tinkered with the layout of my dreamwidth blog. I sketched a portrait of my current D&D character and posted it there.

In short, I accomplished nothing of any note. But I had more fun than usual in the process.

PS. I've been using Photobucket for image hosting, and while it's serviceable, I'm not exactly thrilled about it. Can anyone recommend a better alternative?

So it's been a while, eh? Things have been fairly crazy over here. First I lost my internet connection due to cable-chewing squirrels, then there was the week-long goodbye party good times for my little sister, and then there was... okay, and then there was a lot of video game playing and laziness. But still. I've got, like, 2/3 of a good excuse for not posting.

What else has been going on? I finally found myself a D&D group, for one thing, and they're not even people from work! They are all pretty great, although they seem to find the idea of a girl who plays D&D kind of strange. Which, in itself, is a bit strange to me. After all, the person who introduced me to D&D was female and about half the people I've played with on a regular basis have been female as well, at least if you count the many times I roped aforementioned little sister into playing silly little one-player campaigns. Anyway. I am playing a warforged sorcerer, who is basically a magical robot soldier who specializes in setting things on fire. The only downside to this character is that I can not seem to stop myself from doodling pictures of it during work. It's a magical robot! How can I resist?

What else... I watched a bunch of episodes of the TV show Mad Men over the weekend because it had been recommended to me, because it was available on watch.ctv.ca, and because I was playing my way through a grind-heavy RPG and wanted some distraction while I pummeled monsters. I have kind of mixed feelings about the show. I feel like its a well crafted show of consistently high quality, and I do appreciate how it avoids demonizing any of its characters, but it's not really a very pleasant show to watch, and what social commentary it contains seems either limited and obvious or nearly 50 years out of date. Though maybe I would have appreciated it more if my attention hadn't been split between the show and my game. Who knows.

Also, I am a bit mystified by Obama's choice not to release photos of detainee abuse. I mean, I can understand his other reversals on, say, the use of military tribunals. I don't agree, but I can understand. The photos, on the other hand... what can he possibly have to gain by not releasing them? The official line is that the photos would inflame anti-American sentiment, putting American troops in danger, etc. I guess I can't conclusively prove that that wouldn't happen. However, I can at least attest to the fact that not releasing the photos has significantly eroded my own personal trust of the current American government, and I find it hard to believe I'm the only one who feels that way. Those pictures must be really, truly, unbelievably heinous to be worth the damage that not releasing them is going to do to the current administration's reputation.

Just finished watching the latest episode of Lost. John Locke and Daniel Faraday may be among my favorite characters on that show, and I was delighted to see them given so much screen time, but even I must admit that the true star of that episode was Desmond's wardrobe.

In other news, I'm thinking I'll probably switch to using some sort of VOIP set-up once my contract with Rogers runs out. I'm tired of paying an arm and a leg for a service that, with a little effort, I can essentially get for free. Skype is the only VOIP provider I know of, and I haven't heard anything bad about them so far, so I imagine I'll probably go with them unless my research turns up a much better deal.

I would write more now, but I have made an oath to get to bed by 9:00 tonight, and I have laundry I have to move along before that can happen. Also hair and teeth to brush. What an exciting life I do not lead! But being well rested tomorrow will be worth any lack of excitement tonight, I'm sure.

I will try to post my thoughts on Waltz With Bashir tomorrow. It is a difficult movie for me to get my head around, and I am feeling far too sleepy and content right now to try.

I just rewatched The Devil Wears Prada, mostly just to have something to occupy my attention while I was on hold for nearly two freakin' hours waiting to talk to someone at the DriveTest licensing office. My response to the movie a second time around was pretty much exactly the same as my reaction the first time I saw it, to whit:

• Meryl Streep is really, really good at what she does. I can't imagine the movie without her. Or rather, I can, but it's not anything like as entertaining or emotional.



• The movie seems perfectly calculated to make me feel bloated and hideous. Which is just how reading fashion magazines makes me feel, so I suppose that's a stylistic triumph of a sort.



• The main character's boyfriend really irritates me, and I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps it's because the movie sets up a love triangle of sorts (a commitment triangle?) in which the main character is forced to choose between the boyfriend and Meryl Streep's character, and I happen to find Meryl Streep's character infinitely more interesting than said boyfriend.


Unlike the first time I saw it, however, I spent much of my second viewing of The Devil Wears Prada wishing the TV show Damages was back on the air already. Where else am I going to get my fix of dysfunctional, professional female mentor/mentee relationships? Truly, they are in unforgivably short supply.

I think I'm actually starting to like the 1h20 commute. There's very little useful you can do while riding a bus and, therefore, very little you have to do. As a result, I spend most of my commuting time just reading or daydreaming, which is very satisfying in a relaxing, undemanding sort of way.

The commute seems to be especially good for reading popular science books. Although I like popular science books a great deal, under normal circumstances I find they're just too easy to get distracted from, what with videogames, internet, sketchpads, other people, &c all vying for my attention as well. However, on the commute there are no distractions, or at least very few. And because commute reading time comes in discrete, 1h20 packets of time, I'm less likely to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the length or density of these very serious books than I might if I had unlimited time to spend with them.

In news more or less completely unrelated, cockroaches may be the greatest diet aid known to man. You just have to watch one scurry across your kitchen floor, and your appetite simply vanishes. Or at least mine does. My Bahamian housemate, who's used to roaches at least 10x the size of ours, doesn't seem at all bothered.

So now I'm engaged in a cleaning frenzy of a sort, although it's difficult to work up much of a frenzy with only an hour or so of free time a night, if that. A slow motion cleaning frenzy, maybe. Anyhow, I'm throwing out all food that hasn't been securely sealed, wiping down the counters, mopping the floors, and maybe if I get really brave I'll even try to clean out that tricky area around and behind the appliances, which probably hasn't been touched by rag, mop, or human appendage since the building went up.

It's a good fight, no doubt, but it's hard not to be bitter when I know it's probably going to take up pretty much all of my free time for the rest of the week. And that it still probably won't have a noticeable effect. And that I have cartooning and school newspaper pseudo-work I should really be doing instead. And that I really, really want to watch the rest of Dexter. And the first episode of the new Torchwood, because I have no taste.

And now my alloted ~ hour of free time is up. Must sleep, so I can get up early tomorrow to retch at cockroaches and read about string theory.

I find it hard to believe I've only been working at IBM a week. It feels more like a month. It seems like the older I get, the more easily I fall into routines. Maybe I'm getting jaded.

Most of my time outside of work is taken up with chores and shopping and attending social events, but in the few scattered fragments of free time I've had I've managed to squeeze in the first couple episodes of the TV show Dexter. Honestly, I'm impressed. As a show with a serial killer for a main character, I'd expected it to be going for sheer shock value, but it's actually exceptionally nuanced and a good deal easier for me to stomach than a lot of the crime shows on TV, if only because the callous, stylish way it approaches violent death is meant to be creepy.

I find myself very much absorbed in trying to decide whether the various characters' actions are morally justified or not, much to the annoyance of cubicle-mate who rightly argues that that's not really the point of the show. But then, I'm currently finding morality in general very interesting right now. It often seems so arbitrary, even delusional, but at the same time so absolutely, vitally important.

When trying to decide on a base for my own personal moral philosophy, my first inclination is to go with a John-Stewart-Mill-style modified utilitarianism, but that only gives me the broadest of outlines to work from, really. Although utilitarianism's motto, "the greatest good for the greatest number of people", seems simple enough at first glance, it falls apart pretty quickly under closer scrutiny. Since there's no reliable way of calculating the value of one good relative to another, utilitarianism's supposedly infallible moral arithmetic often comes down to little more than an intuitive guessing game, no more rational than any other system of values.

Maybe it would be better to go with the gut on matters moral anyway. Just treat every individual with compassion and respect and try to cause as little harm as possible. It's an approach that has more relevance to most people's daily lives, and its harder to rationalize atrocities when following such straightforward moral guidelines. Still, on the larger political or international scale resources are more limited, and a more rigorous approach than just "be good to everybody" seems to be required.

Maybe it's foolish to think that there can be a single best answer to this kind of problem, but it seems equally foolish not to even try to find one.

I finished season 3 of Lost a couple of days ago, and am still working to wean myself off the obsession. I've long since given up expecting a coherent explanation of the Island's many mysteries, but the characters and conflicts still keep me glued to the screen.

While it's still fresh in my mind, a few observations about season 3:

( Spoiler free, but lengthy... )

And while I'm on the subject of TV... if anyone watches the show "Comedy Now!" pay attention to the studio audience next time you watch. I might be in it! A friend got free tickets to the filming of one of their episodes. Don't strain your eyes too hard though -- we ended up sitting pretty far in the back, but not quite far enough to get onto a raised platform. We could see the stage all right, but I doubt any panning camera would have picked us up clearly enough to be identified.

There may be some real truth to the joke aphorism "If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards." Or at least "If at first you don't succeed, try something you're actually good at instead." This Technical Communication program I'm enrolled in has just been one cheap ego-boost after another, and, shallow as it may be, I'm loving it.

Most recently, I managed to score the co-op position I've been craving from the program's first orientation session: technical writer for IBM's Toronto branch. Specifically I'll be documenting the upcoming new versions of IBM's C++ and Fortran compilers. And I am so, so psyched about it. From everything I've heard about IBM, it sounds like a sweet place to work, and my coworkers sound like really excellent people too. January can't come fast enough! (Except thant I'm looking forward to spending winter break with family and friends even more. The future is just far too full of wonderful things to anticipate.)

First I have to survive the rest of this term, though. Not that I'm terribly overburdened with work -- far from it -- but I am far too often overwhelmed by hedonistic distractions. Case in point: Lost. After successfully avoiding this oh-so-terribly addictive TV show for a year and a half and counting, I've finally fallen off the wagon again. I am now in the midst of devouring the third season at what would be record time for any reasonable person. (Being a distinctly unreasonable individual myself, my current record involves watching a full season of Buffy in a single 24 hour period, ending ~ 7 A.M., a feat I'm unlikely to repeat any time soon.) The main three characters have all become kind of boring, but Locke and Ben interest me enough to keep me watching indefinitely.

I picked up a DVD of 'The West Wing' episodes from the local movie rental place the other day. I'm not entirely sure why, although I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Wikipedia had Aaron Sorkin as one of their featured articles last week.

I don't remember finding this show nearly as ridiculously optimistic and idealistic back when it was first being broadcast. It's a little alarming how much it plays like pure fantasy wish-fulfillment right now.

I mean... A super-genius president with a heart of gold? Dedicated, selfless (well mostly selfless) staffers who ultimately only want what's best for the country? Maybe I'm still just suffering the after effects of reading Al Gore's 'The Assault of Reason,' which is liable to leave anyone with a rather dark opinion of modern American politics, but I'm finding it all awfully hard to swallow.