A Year of Nuthin'

That's right. A whole year since my last update and I can only count my existence through the passing of several seasons' worth of shows. I've taken and failed a few more university courses, and I'm heading into the endgame for the real final final exams which will determine whether I get that diploma I paid for or not.

Really, I still feel I owe Google a percentage of my tuition fees.

Apathy mixed in with deep, churning fear is mostly my state of mind. Not that I care, but it could be a neurological thing.

If anyone is out there and you're bored enough to read this, head out and watch V for Vendetta if you haven't. It's worth watching.

I'll update this more often as I head to my exams with various thoughts on the world and the people that try to ruin it.

The Education Industry

So it's been almost a month since I updated.

Usually, one would excuse oneself from such dereliction by citing a busy real life, poor health, or even something as mundane as a broken PC/connection.

I on the other hand had absolutely, positively nothing to do for the last month. Other than university stuff of course. I had nothing but free time, most of which I spent feeling guilty for having such free time and striking myself mentally for wanting to do things that are fun.

So what did I do instead? Nothing. I learned that Ellen Degeneres had a talk show, that Tony Danza (poor guy needs a month-long vacation too) has one as well. I learned that my local sci-fi station ran out of Season 7 or 8 Stargate SG-1 episodes and rotated back to Season 6.

That's all. I'm 23, in university and the only thing of note in my life was that I just recently read About a Boy by Nick Hornby. You know, that Hugh Grant movie a while back.

Really, I should blame myself and only myself for this crippling apathy. But being a product of the modern age I intend to find another thing to blame.

I blame education. Not the personal kind of learning, no that's important beyond all reach of cynicism and vitriol all of us jaded sons of bitches on the net can reach. I mean the whole industry of learning. No, that's not right. I mean the industry of 'teaching'. Four years now that I've been in university. I can only name two classes where I was actually taught things; first year Calculus and first year English.

I came, the professor taught, I learned.

All the classes since then I have NOT learned a single thing that I did not learn through the aid of Google. I kid you not. All the courses I've taken since were merely taken to provide a repository of search words so that I may Google it later. Or, if you're lucky enough, read about it in the textbook you bought for 100 bucks. I say 'if you're lucky enough' because there are quite a few classes out there that have expensive texts that have little to no relevance to your topic at hand.

Must be my fault right? I must be enrolled in fancy artsy-fartsy courses and I'm just suffering from existential bullspit. Nope. Something practical actually, computer science. Software Engineering to be exact.

How can a profession, while not a real accredited 'engineering' profession, require so little actual presence in a class to learn? Or understand fully. I tell you now, I get it. I get design, I get the importance of documentation and especially testing, and I get the need for teamwork. Teach me something that is... something else.

Software Engineering is about design, pure and simple. No matter the code, no matter the machines, no matter the dumbass bosses and clients, it's about designing good and appropriate software. Instead of being challenged I feel like I'm in high school all over again, just shuffling through assignment after assignment. It doesn't matter the actual specifics of a project, or how well it's designed, in the end code is a bit like the written language. You can't assign a grade to it. Sure you can look for this and that, especially if this and that was the point of an assignment, but in the end I'm telling you all it's not working.

It doesn't stick. All my fellow students and I are learning is how to jump (not when to jump) through hoops created by teaching assistants and professors.

This entire teaching industry, this post-secondary education, it can't be all like this can it? I sure as hell hope the med students (whom I regard with the utmost respect, fascination and not the least bit of seething fear) don't get away with the stuff compsci students pull.

I guess I'm just not engaged. I couldn't care less about java servlets or CVS repositories. Really. How is this specific crap helping me be a software engineer? I'm not creating it with a team, I'm writing it in isolation. It's not teaching me anything that I can apply elsewhere, to another project in another language. All I'm going to learn are specifics of this implementation.

What real post-secondary education needs to provide to those of us who don't really dwell on the details is a more comprehensive overview. I know that's a contradiction, or damn close to one, but it's the truth. Material Engineers should learn every nut and bolt, med students should learn what the blue vein does, and english majors should continue to find out just what one can do with all that free time.

You don't create software engineers to be programmers. It's not ego or some sense of superiority there, it's just a lot of wasted effort. If all I wanted was to be a programmer, there are far, far, far easier paths for me to have become one.

I wanted to learn that eye-opening, deeply insightful stuff about this (probably poorly) chosen future profession of mine. I had one class like that, taught by one of Canada's first computer scientists. He gave you perspective, insight, and applicable information. While it's nice that now I know how TCP/IP works it's gonna get filed into the back of my head, archived between the phone number of the one really hot girl that liked me in high school and my repository for important days in the calendar - meaning utterly inaccessible and forgotten.

That's why I write things down. That's why I learned to read. Don't teach me how to approach this, teach me how to grapple things LIKE this. That's how I can code. I can apply all that design knowledge and whatnot and take it with me to any new or old programming language. Specifics are things we deal with later. They are important, because the big picture is made up of details. But they are less important than the whole.

Great, I can do stuff in XML and SQL. Why haven't you gone into further detail into how relational databases work? Or how to respond appropriately to other types of databases. Or the theory behind that. All my courses, my classes are just shavings off icebergs of incredible mass. I feel inadequate with the tens of thousands of dollars worth of education I've apparently accumulated.

So what can change? Nothing. Universities need a bit of practicality sprinkled on their mass-produced automatons lest no one hires 'em when they're done. But they're lesser products for it.

Cell, Cell, Cell!

Da News: Cell chips with everything

Wow, helluva undertaking there. IBM, Sony, and Toshiba all pooling their resources together and manage to pretty much upset the entire chip industry. But who cares? This is all about gaming.

I for one can't complain overmuch if my games run smoother with more of everything that's already here. I can only hope that one day, this'll be widespread enough that I might be able to afford an Athlon 64 PC. You know, just when all the stores are throwing them out. By then, all I'd really need is taxi fare. Or multiple bus tickets.

In any case, cool news and I hope that Microsoft slows down their Xbox 2 plans (damn them to hell! Barely a year from now, it'll come out, meaning less than a year since I got my Xbox. Curses!) to incorporate this tech as best they can. Hell, what MS does best is look at an existing product, absorb it into the Microsoft-Hive-Mind and churn out a bloated if workable product.

The damned Xbox 2 might be doing your taxes when it comes out.

Fare Thee Well Enterprise

Well, I can't say I didn't see that coming. In case you haven't heard (and otherwise don't care), the latest frankensteinian Star Trek series, Enterprise, was cancelled. Apparently it wasn't living up to UPN's standards, and you know how they are about quality.

I must admit, I looked forward to Enterprise when it debuted. It had that catchy rock song for the commercials then they changed it to the Rod Stewart song. Bah. The opening credits rock, not the lame moving planets or gases in nebula from Uranus or whatever, it showed the history of human exploration and it was pretty cool. Except for Rod Stewart's song (which is catchy in its own right) they were doing something pretty new with the show.

It had potential.

Hell, Star Trek Voyager had potential.

But I'm not that big a Star Trek fan, I can barely tell Klingons apart from the Cylons. I know one has that cool Knight Rider effect for their eyes and that they're sometimes human (that's the New Battlestar Galactica). The other one apparently has crinkly foreheads, don't bathe or brush their teeth, and are warriors of the barbarian persuasion.

I agree with my fellow geeks' assessment that the Star Trek series needs to lay fallow for a few years. Get some new guys in there, stop with the lame attempts at multiculturalism, and tell a damn story. Babylon 5 managed to get it right. Firefly was doing it well before it got axed. (By UPN's less forgiving counterparts in FOX... sheesh, those guys cancelled Family Guy which they're bringing back - huzzah - and now Firefly's turning into a movie. Good call, Fox execs... not!) And Battlestar Galactica is doing it right from the start.

I was absolutely stunned when I first saw the new BSG two-parter pilot a while back (I've since seen the entire first season up to Ep 13) and I'm still in awe. If Berman and Braga would at least try to rip off something other than other Star Trek shows (and not managing to mangle while they're ripping) then they should set their sights on this juicy show. When was the last time you could actually feel for someone in a show with a sci-fi setting? (Oh noes! Our Quantum-Flux tachyon inducing monomolecular thinggy!!! Who the frell cares?)

The people of BSG go through a near genocide. I mean a real brutal eradication of the human species, brought on by, unsurprisingly enough, robot sex. I tell ya, that Space Pope was right. (If you know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry for you too.) This is what we wanted Babylon 5 to mature into. Screw the guys who want their old shows for nostalgia sakes - it's done. I won't be the first to say this, and I hope I won't be the last, but the old show is a crappy pantomime of Star Wars with campy acting but good writing (at least, as far as background material is concerned) compared to this incarnation.

Betrayal. Lust. Anger. Hatred. Mistrust. Ego. The new Battlestar Galactica is not your older Battlestar Galactica. In its creation you do not suddenly lose your older, more personally cherished version. So let the rest of us who couldn't stand the original, or didn't even bother watching it, enjoy this.

What did Scott Bakula go through? I can't even recall the first two seasons of Enterprise, though there were some story elements in there for sure. Then there was that oh-so-clever "terrorist-attack" on Florida by the guys who got kicked out by bouncers from a Star Wars cantina.

Which brings my rambling to Star Wars. CBC up here in Canada was nice enough to air the latest version of what George Lucas envisioned Star Wars to be. I've never actually sat down and saw them all in order before, but they were aired a week apart and hell, it was free. Three things stand out for me, and beware of SPOILERS! because here I go: First, he added rings to the lame explosions of various Big Things; Second, I recall Harrison Ford shooting first but it seems now that he's shooting at almost the same time - was cooler before; Third, adding Hayden Christiansen instead of the balding Irish dude at the last part of Return of the Jedi.

There are possibly many other things that I've missed, but hey, limited attention span here. There is no doubt that the best movie in that original trilogy was the one that Lucas had (as I was told) aid in directing the film. Now, he's certainly rich enough to do whatever the hell he wishes and God knows you don't need money to be able to do that. It just helps in being able to get away with it.

As a sci-fi institution, Star Wars is mildly cooler than Star Trek because of two things: Lightsabres and Darth Vader. Hayden does alright as a human teen, but if he turns petulant instead of evil in Revenge of the Sith, he'll do something that won't be correctable decades along the line. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and will watch Episode 3 with an open mind and an open jaw for popcorn injections. See, unlike BSG, the older ones are actually better liked by old and new alike.

The new movies look better, that's only natural. The acting is a bit clearer, and certainly the swordsmanship displays are more fully fleshed out. But it lacks something, it lacks the primality with which gripped millions of viewers when they first saw Star Wars.

And one thing destroyed it and has been the problem of many tightly-knit sci-fi shows. Tie-ins.

I don't mean commercial products, I mean the quaint little connections between the stories. Fanboy service, in other words. I like Brent Spiner, even when he did Dude, Where's My Car?, but what he did on Enterprise (while a great perfomance and something new from him) was just that. It plagues every science fiction show more than others because the fanbase isn't that diverse. Someone who watches Farscape will undoubtedly watch Stargate SG-1 if nothing more connects the two other than the fact that in order to be able to watch Farscape you need the sci-fi network/channel/service and you'll get many other shows along with your Farscape.

The Phantom Menace tried doing this and failed. Now, the original trilogy is still fresh in my mind but I recall Obi-wan saying that he trained right under Yoda and took Anakin in against the wishes of the Jedi council. That certainly what ended up happening after Liam Neeson's character died but there was a direct reference there. Self-referencing that stuff when you're recreating that point in time is essential since that's the point of the film. But they added R2D2 and C3PO in there for some reason. I know the original Star Wars was based on the tale of two servants, but this was a needless tie-in that caused problems of its own.

Serious sci-fi should steer clear of this. Stargate, as much as I love it, isn't all that serious even when it is. They can get away with putting Ben Browder and Claudia Black in Season 9 (really though, yay) because SG-1 is a funny show that doesn't take itself too seriously. They explore myths, have fun with them, shoot and blow things up, have fun with that, and if there's time, do some nice drama. It's not addressing the light and dark sides inherent in all beings, not preaching the wonders of science and the ability to unite everyone under its miracles, nor is it trying to talk about humanity's hubris.

In short, for the next Star Trek show NOT to suck it must have the following: a good, solid cast founded not for their attractiveness nor their "name" but their capabilities as actors (they've been good about this, but I still can't tell the chief engineer and the security guy apart); a good, solid story and viewpoint THAT HASN'T BEEN DONE YET (spaceships and spacestations are gone, try something NEW); and set in a time and place that has yet to be covered by what is considered 'canon' by Star Trek fans.

That's right, don't fall to the Dark Side of the fanboys' wishes to explore what they already know but branch out and leave the USS Enterprise behind. Forget exploring whole new worlds with dumbass aliens because unless you're willing to really give such forays some forethought (hello idiots, you wanna know why you're contracting alien diseases? Because you're transporting down in your pajamas) and a real reason to encounter that alien species other than you need an alien race for this week then forget about it. Work with what you already have, don't create new things just because.

And on that note, stop with the really lame tech-talk. Chief O'Brien was the last guy who could get away with it because he's got a nice accent. It stopped fascinating people a long time ago, if something complex needs to be done, then just have the engineer nod and say he'll get on it. Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica are infinitely better for not doing such things unless it was really called for (like the malfunction was an integral part of the story and it required scenes to do these things). They didn't use them like crutches.


Watch Battlestar Galactica with James Edward Olmos and you'll be a better sci-fi fan. Check local listings.


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Oh the Weather Outside is Frightful

Well, who saw that coming eh? Snow. In winter.

Shocking!

In Canada no less.

My fellow Canadians, especially Torontonians, please stop whining. There are three kinds of people in Toronto, as in every urban centre out there; longtime residents, newcomers, and visitors. For the longtimers, this isn't anything new. Quit yer bitchin'! It's supposed to snow in Canada, that's why they all think we live in igloos south of the border (for the geographically challenged, that's the US of A I'm referring to).

Sure, those broken water pipes are a damned disgrace, the sidewalks aren't even dirted much less salted, and the normally idiotic drivers of T.O. are even more dangerous than ever. But so what? That ain't new, is it? Complaining does nothing.

Actually, it does worse than nothing, it aggravates the rest of us. (I also understand that I'm complaining about complainers. Difference is, YOU came to this blog - for some reason - and I didn't shove this in your face. Your choice and your fault for coming to a poorly thought out blog site with even poorer topic choices.)

For the newcomers, welcome to your future winters. It snows in Canada. More in some places than others, but it snows. Surely, the embassy told you as much. You have a right to gripe, this is still new to you, but there's an expiration date on your griping rights. It ends after your third winter, that will give you varied enough experiences that whatever gets hurled at you in your fourth winter is old hat.

And you visitors... Come back in the summer. We have traffic jams, polluted beaches, fairly good looking women, and pretentious urbanites.

The Secret Lives of Computer Scientists

Do you ever wonder who computer programmers are? What they do? How their work can spread past their scope of interest?

They make all these fancy new gizmos be usable by ordinary folk. They're mocked and worshipped at the same time for their prowess and DnD collection, usually respectively. They also usually know the 2-times table by heart.

Has it occured to anyone just how dependent our society has become on these guys? I myself wouldn't have thought so four years ago, but four years ago I wasn't a compsci student.

Ya see, good software is software that is nearly invisible. It lets you do all sorts of things that you don't have to worry about its reliability or its capability, it just does as you say. It's a pure interface, at least that's the goal. For all the focus there is on hardware, all the bits and such, it's all the software that really matters.

The influence of a programmer is quite subtle on each individual, but programmers usually don't code things for just you (however special you are). They manage to affect the psyche of a group of people quite easily, each user starts to think just a little bit alike. It shapes their expectations, their thoughts, and it's one aspect that only a small part of a computer scientist's education addresses. Even then, most sniffle at graphical interface design as the frosting on the cake.

Software. Interfaces. Who the hell cares?

We navigate through this whirling tornado with nothing but our browsers, layers of software upon each other allowing communication. We're connected and insulated at the same time.

This isn't meant as some kind of alarmist "We're all going out of touch because of technology!" post. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Take that from a programming dude.

Perhaps if this rambling, barely coherent post accomplishes something, I hope it fosters an appreciation for all these things that work underneath it all.

I read the news today

Oh boy.

Well, it looks like I've joined the Blogging world. Finally decided that it was high-time the internet and all networks associated with it could no longer do with my, shall we say 'unique'?, opinions and ideas.

Plus, I'm bored. You know it's all about the boredom.

So stay tuned and avoid anything associated with Michael Moore. It's for your own good.