Virial Theorem

I’m leaving for Ottawa in about 20 minutes and I’m nervous. And it’s not because I believe I’ll mess up at the Music competition or for any everyday reason one might expect. It’s hard to describe but I think it’s because this is the second time in my entire life that I’ll be gone on an overnight field trip and I vaguely remember feeling the same way the last time I left.

This is really weird since I haven’t been all that close with my family in past year or so. I suppose it’s just a psychological thing. I’m still a child and every child craves his parents.

Yahoo News >> Study: Flowers Losing Smell: Spring’s bloom may not smell so sweet anymore, as pollutants from power plants and automobiles destroy flowers’ aromas, a new study suggests.

This is really sad. It seems that the more we embrace and delve into technology, the more we lose nature.

Recently, I’ve realized that I have almost completely eliminated reading for pleasure from my life. In fact aside from Cujo by Stephen King, the last book I read completely was in March of 2007. That’s slightly more than a year of very little reading. That is a really scary thought.

I recently attempted to re-spark my apparently lost love of reading but it ended in total failure. I attempted all sorts of books; fiction, non-fiction, biographies and historical fiction and yet none of these books stuck. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy them (because I did); it’s just that I was unable to read them all the way through. If I had the time, I could probably read a book all the way through. But once I put a book down, I have trouble picking it up again no matter how much I want to.

I used to be an avid reader of all kinds of books. In grade 6 and 7 I was part of my school’s book club and in grade 7 I won an award. I remember in grade 8 somebody in my class commented that if I was seen without a book, something was wrong. And that wasn’t an exaggeration. I used to read in class, while walking down the hallway, in the washrooms, and during car rides. Sometimes I would give up sleeping in favour of reading. Now I’m here, three years later, rarely picking up a novel.

I’m really bored today so I figured that I might as well post.

I’ve recently come to a shocking conclusion. Ready for it? The internet is boring. This attributes to my boredom, which is the reason I’m posting. So perhaps the internet being boring is not a bad thing after all.

I think I started getting bored of the internet when the whole Web 2.0 idea started (or became dominant). Social websites are completely lost on me. The basic level of interaction that had previously existed on the internet has now been taken to such an extreme level that it’s become overwhelming.

I originally tried to be a part of the social scene; but it’s just not happening. I joined last.fm, twitter, wakoopa, digg, and a whole bunch of sites that just didn’t stick. I no longer use last.fm, I do not interact in wakoopa and I do not bury or digg anything on digg.com. I’m just there for news. Twitter is the only service that I continue to use, but I only follow three people, all of whom I know in real life (two of whom never tweet).

Also, I don’t think a blog is a social website. The level of interaction is most blogs (Virial Theorem included), is the level that originally existed on the internet; a simple relationship between the author and the viewer.

I honestly can’t wait until Web 2.0 dies a quick, painful death.

And now you don’t.

I find it incredibly aggravating when I’m forced to sit through a presentation and all you’re doing is reading word for word from a presentation slide or from a piece of paper. Not only is the monotone shit insanely boring for me, it is also pathetically embarrassing for you. The least you can do is make the presentation semi-bearable. This is rather easily achieved by acting like a human being. You don’t read off a piece of paper when you’re having a conversation do you? It’s the exact same thing; you’re having a conversation with the class about a topic you fucking researched. It really isn’t that hard.

I fail, epically.

It’s been about a month since I started my foray into Java and things are going at a slow, yet fairly steady pace. However, programming is all about common sense. And although I realized it a long time ago, today was the day that it really hit me how little common sense I have.

We had to make a program the would prompt the user to enter 5 integers and then print out the lowest of them. Fairly easy stuff right? Well this is what Luke came up with:

int number = c.readInt ();
int minimum = number;

for (int i = 1; i < 5; i++)
{
minimum = Math.min (minimum, number);
number = c.readInt ();
}
c.print (minimum);

THIS, is what I came up with:

int num1 = c.readInt ();
int num2 = c.readInt ();
int num3 = c.readInt ();
int num4 = c.readInt ();
int num5 = c.readInt ();

int first = Math.min (num1, num2);
int second = Math.min (num3, num4);
int third = Math.min (first, second);

c.print (Math.min (third, num5));

Like I said, fail.

For some reason, I hate snow days. They tend to bug the crap out of me. Today especially because I was really looking forward to school, I love the second semester (and today we were supposed to have two hours of computer info).

I think the reason they annoy me is because of how insanely boring the day suddenly becomes. There is absolutely nothing to do. I haven’t planned anything for that day and the fact that I’m getting tired of the internet doesn’t help my boredom at all. So I’ve been home almost the entire day doing absolutely nothing.

I no longer have the imagination of a kid and the little remnants of that imagination no longer amuse me. I’ve found that the older I get the harder it is for me to entertain myself. I suspect this pattern will continue until my late twenties. That is when I will begin to find better ways to spend my time. My parents for example find it incredibly easy to entertain themselves; they’ll watch TV, and if there’s nothing on, they’ll read a book, and if they don’t have one, they are more than happy to simply lie down and talk or even take a nap. As of right now, I couldn’t possibly do that, but chances are that by the time I’m their age, I too will be like them.

When I see myself in pictures or videos, the person staring back at me is a stranger. I don’t recognize that person as being Bassam because, to be honest, he isn’t.

When my parents bring out baby (or toddler) pictures, my brother tends to get excited, asking question after question about the pictures. I however, don’t have the same reaction. In fact, I’m rather sullen about the entire affair. I have no emotional attachment to the person, nor do I care for him. He’s merely a ghost.

I’m a different person after the song finishes than I was four minutes prior. Every little experience changes who I am and what I can become. The person four minutes ago doesn’t matter. The person now, does.