Y2kk Update: What a waste of a week... or weeks actually, considering I was sick for an entire week the week before, just grasping and gagging on my own Grapes of Wrath of a throat, as I forced and frollicked and yanked my way through a bloody hell mid-term, a test, and a couple of goddam assignments that were due... Of course in the end, it was just business as usual for me. I got up in the morning, gurgled and gagged, then set off for hours upon hours of goddam jacking off at school until I could finally go home to do nothing. Regardless of whether I was sick or not with the fever, my routine just never changes...

But there was one damn routine that did change, and I didn't particularly like it... You see, it's Reading Week for me right now. It has been for the past week or so, but one thing's been bothering me... because, umm?... is it me, or am I actually going to school more often during my goddam vacation than I goddam do during bloody hell regular weeks when school is on?... Take Tuesday for example. I was at school from 10 in the morning to 11 at night, doing some stupid ass assignment that I wasn't smart enough to do at my own at home. And goddammit, I don't even think my project worked by the time I electronically submitted it. All that work for nothing, because it's not like I sure as hell learned anything or any crap like that...

But the only event from the past few weeks that seems to still stick out in my mind, was what happened at school when I went on last Sunday for all goddam things... You see, I don't mind working hard when I have to (not that I ever work hard, mind you...). I just have a problem with going to school all day long when I goddam know I'll have absolutely nothing to do... Sunday was simply a waste of my time. There's no doot aboot it. But I had no choice in the matter. I had to go, and stay there all night, otherwise the rest of my group would think I was a quiter... which I am, but still... I knew going in that I was just going to sit there, and pretend like I could contribute to my networking group's project or some crap like that. But in reality? My genius of a programming partner finished our rear end of the program almost a couple weeks ago... when he bloody hell wrote the whole project on a Saturday morning when he was bored, for crying out loud... And as for the other side? I kept asking if they needed help, and even demanded that they send me what they had done so far so that I could try making it work myself. But either they never received my e-mails, or they simply didn't like me, because they never, ever goddam responded to any single damn request that I ever goddam made. I was trying to be nice, and trying to be useful for once, by openly offering my free services to any of them to use (too bad none of them were girls...). But none of them cared... and in a sense, I understood why. If I was doing their side of the project, I would've became so damn obsessed with finishing it myself that it would've been an insult to let anyone finish it for me. But then again, I'm not them, and I was expecting them to be a little bit more open minded than I would've been... oy, how that came back to bite me in the ass...

Now don't get me wrong. Two members of this group that I had to work with were fine, outstanding guys, and probably would've become my friends under any other circumstances, if only we weren't forced to work together... and you see, for the first three hours of me just sitting around, pretending to help by answering all their questions (that could've been answered in a twelfth of a time by just asking my own genius partner instead of me) - for those few hours of pretense, me and the gang just got along swell. But eventually, I couldn't handle the feeling of being useless anymore. I couldn't handle just sitting on my ass, playing around with programming problems that I knew wouldn't even be a problem if it was my partner, not me, that was helping the cause. And since we needed a one page Readme file (yes, just a one page readme) to accompany our program, I volunteered to write it for the group, since I obviously didn't have anything meaningful to do... In the meantime, the two members of the other group that I still think respect me, continued on their merry programming way, while that one last member of their group just pretended to do something useful, by just staring at his own code that he wrote months before... He obviously wasn't helping the cause. But I obviously didn't snark or snap at him, because who was I to talk?...

Well, it didn't take me long to write a one page report of course, but I knew it wasn't as great as the Tale of Two Cities or a Buffy comic book or any crap like that... It was just a simple draft using simple terms and vague specifics - I admit all that. I wasn't the one who was writing the project, so all I could do was ask and interrogate the others as to what they wrote, why they wrote it, and what problems came up in the programming. I took what they said, shortened it by a hell of a lot, and wrote it all in, hoping to fit it all into one stupid ass, one page report. And like I said, I obviously knew that I hadn't written gold or any goldmember genius crap or anything like that. And I admit, I've never written a decent formal report in all my life, come to think of it... otherwise I wouldn't have gotten all those 60s and goddam 70s in my writing assignments in first and second bloody hell years... but still... I guess a bit of the old me is still in a bit of the old... umm... me... because although I knew I was going to have to bite my tongue when I asked the other group to proofread my work, considering my past experiences with snobbish English criticism (hell, I even hated my sister for years... and still do... after she proofread my woeful formal English essay in Grade 10...) - even knowing all that, I still never really foresaw what was going to happen...

The two kind members of the other group were too busy programming to read that little non-Y2kk Update of mine, so only that one group member left over, who wasn't doing anything useful, decided to come around. But the thing was, I knew right off the bat that he was absolutely the last person in the entire group that I'd want checking my work. Because if I do recall, I was pissed off at this guy the first week of the assignment, because I could tell from the way that he was pushing me around (to finish my side of the project as soon as possible), that he was the kind of annoying guy who would do anything for a 100% in the assignment, no matter how cruel he had to be to get it... But even remembering that, I still never saw it coming. I still never saw what the hell was going to happen when he took up bloody hell arms (without registration, I might add... nevermind...) to read what I had just goddam wrote... and I mean, at first it seemed all good. He went through half of my written report, just recommending a few new words here and a few changed words there. No biggie, right?... but it was only a matter of time until he just stopped at a sentence, a mere one line thing that read sort of something like this: "we had problems with blah blah blah, as the program failed on us at blah blah blah"... minus the blah, blah, blahs of course... I think...

The thing is, he didn't understand the word, "as" in that context. And although I had trouble admitting it at that time, I agreed that "as" was perhaps not the right word to write into a formal document, since it's barely informal English, let alone formal... So I offered to change the sentence, although you could tell from the way I was cringing my lips, that I personally thought nothing was wrong with the sentence... But just when I was about to take the keyboard back in hand and simply split the sentence into two, this annoying guy just stopped me dead in my tracks, and pretty much slapped the keyboard back into his hands. Because you see... he wouldn't let me change the sentence. He wanted me to explain it to him... And, umm... okay... So what else could I do but try to explain what I was trying to say in that sentence?... but obviously, that didn't bode too well for me. I mean, how the hell could I explain English properly? I tried and tried to just say something about what I meant, but even I admit that I sounded like a complete dunce of an idiot, no matter how I tried to reprise and rephrase what I meant. Eventually, I guess I lost my temper, with both him and myself, and just shrugged my shoulders, claiming, "It's English! I can't explain it! Let me just change it then! It's easy!"... which definitely should've been the temporary solution to the problem, right? Change the sentence until he understood it, instead of having to recite the goddam Oxford dictionary rules that he literally seemed to have memorized in his head...

Well, I guess I don't think up IBM solutions very well then, because the damn bastard wouldn't give back the goddam keyboard. As if he was not only grating me, but goddam grading me on what I goddam wrote or some crap like that, he just kept the keyboard for himself, like a five year old on steroids... and just kept on staring single mindedly at that one goddam sentence, refusing to let me change it until I somehow explained what it meant to him. But I fucking didn't know how to explain it, so I didn't know what to do... Eventually, I practically demanded to him to just skip that one damn sentence and move onto the rest of the assignment, and eventually, my incessant badgering moved him past the period point. But as soon as he got to the next sentence, what the hell did he do? He took one damn look at the new sentence, and in a repeat of goddam history, said he couldn't understand what the hell I meant and demanded that I explain what I wrote to him... I mean, what the fuck? He had literally wasted almost half an hour, just scrutinizing every single damn word in the goddam sentence beforehand. And now he was going to fucking do it again?... but I tried to keep my temper in check anyhew. I tried my best to explain the sentence, and this time, I actually thought I did it alright. He nodded his head, signifying that he now knew what I meant, but instead of letting me finally change the sentence at hand, he rather just sat there, and stared blankly at the damn monitor, simply because he didn't like the fucking verb I used in the goddam sentence... I mean, what the fuck? Let me fucking change the sentence then! Let me fucking delete the fucking words he doesn't like then! But he wouldn't let me! Literally another fifteen minutes passed ever so goddam slowly, before I finally forced him to read the next sentence, and what do you know? For the third fucking time in a row, he said he didn't understand the sentence, and demanded that I explain it to him...

I mean, seriously... What the fuck? Does this goddam fuck even know goddam English? His accent certainly doesn't make it sound like he does...

I was so damn tempted to just try to throw some shit into his face, mocking the fact that he's from China and that his "perfect" English skills were only perfect for goddam Chinglish... but I knew I couldn't say such a thing. Not just because it would've been damn cruel and racist of me to do so (even though I'm Chinese myself), but because a) I know tons of immigrants who got way higher marks than me in our formal English writing class, and b) this guy got five fucking interviews for co-op this term already, probably thanks to some stunning cover letters or some crap like that... And what did I have to shovel and show, besides goddam fluff and snow? Absolutely nothing. So I kept my mouth shut, and tried to bite my tongue yet again, yet subtly insult him at the same damn time... In my most non-courteous, courteous voice, I simply stated to him, that it was obvious that he didn't like my entire writing style. I reiterated that it's only a one page report, and that if he really dislikes my writing that much, then he should be the one to write it. It only took me half an hour to write the entire Miller draft, afterall... But instead of caring about what I goddam just said, he just ignored me completely, started staring at the goddam screen again, pretended to be some goddam George Orwell critic or some crap like that, and complained that every single goddam word and sentence I wrote was goddam wrong, yet again... I mean, goddammit and fucknabbit! How do I rid myself of this shit?... I realized that I definitely had a problem when taking criticism about my English. I've known that I've had such goddam low esteem when it comes to this sort of writing shit since bloody hell elementary school... But did I really deserve this? I just withstood an entire goddam hour of goddam unhelpful and pure cynical, satanical criticism over just three goddam sentences that I wrote in a goddam formal report... And as this one stupid ass guy kept thinking outloud to himself about that goddam third sentence he was just aimlessly staring at, I slowly crept up and asked one of the other members of his group to come along, just so I could finally break the ice with a second opinion... so we started off yet again, all the way at the top, way above any of the sentences that the first guy refused to bypass with a passing grade...

Now, I instantly knew as soon as this second guy starting staring at my first sentence like a Gremlin of a zombie, that perhaps it was I that was at fault here, not the guy I goddam wanted to bash in the forehead with a steel chair... I mean, if two people (albeit two international students...) couldn't understand what I wrote, then my Chinese TA sure as hell wouldn't either... So I accepted defeat and asked the two guys how I should change the sentence. I no longer felt angry - just remorse and guilt over letting my childish, selfish self get the better of me, by actually thinking that my English was alright... But before I could even humbly apologize, guess what the fuck happened? While my new proof-reader was changing the sentence to suit his own likes, guess what the fuck happened?...

The stupid ass first guy just started staring blankly at the second guy's sentence... and said it was all wrong... went back to mine with the undo button... said it was all wrong... and instead of fucking recommending how to change the fucking damn thing, he just fucking sat there, and fucking stared at this goddam first sentence... the same goddam sentence that the first time he checked, if memory doth serve me well, sounded perfectly fucking fine to him the first fucking time he read it... And because this second guy had just been shot down too, he just started staring at the goddam screen too, and now I had two fucking frogs, sitting on their fucking logs, just fucking scrutinizing every fucking word I wrote with their goddam forkish tongues, without ever again suggesting a way to goddam fix the goddam sentence!... I mean, that was it! That was fucking it! Don't just sit there! Fucking do something!... I had it with being fucking watched like a goddam ghoul of a goldish in a bowl, with my own goddam writing being torn apart as if I had just wrote a horrible Mandy Moore script or some shit like that... I just called it quits then and there, and said to the first guy, that I obviously can't fix the damn written report, not only because he wouldn't let me, but because whatever I write, he says he doesn't understand! I told him that it was now his turn to write it, no buts about it. No doot aboot it. I mean, just the other week, he was complaining to me that only his partners were doing all the work, and that he was just sitting around for the project... Well, now here's his chance to finally be useful, since I obviously wasn't, no matter how hard I tried to be.

I was just trying to be useful, that's all... guess that hope went up in smoke and daggers, not like I expected anything less...

But you know what was the most offensive thing he said to me?... He actually had the fucking nerve to fucking say to my face, that was this was third year of U of T engineering. Ether I get in gear, or get the hell out... I mean, he actually fucking had the nerve to say to my face and my ass, that I was half assing my way through university!...

... oh wait... damn, he got me there...

But then instead of volunteering to do the job himself, you know what really pissed me off? After his whole glamourous, glorious speech of working hard and putting all your effort into the final product (a speech that made me feel like crap, I might add), instead of goddam offering to write the one page goddam report himself, you know what he did?... He literally said that he wanted the best mark we could get in this assignment, and because he wanted "the best" to do the written report then, he told me to tell my own partner that it was now up to him to write the written report and submit the project... Now honestly, up to that point, I was once again rethinking my morals on my laurels, believing myself to be evil and corrupt and selfish and a braggart and crap like that, for thinking myself smarter than this guy and old school stuff like that... I was still genuinely sorry that I was about to snap at him, that I was going to make snide, racist remarks, and all that kind of crap. And I was still feeling demoralized after stooping to the level where I couldn't even goddam take criticism over a stupid one page written report... But honestly, this guy really made me feel a lot better about myself, you know? Here he was, the great crowd pleaser, the Great Caesar, forcing all the work of the goddam project on just one man, all so that he could reap the benefits. He wanted a 100% in the project, and knew that I couldn't do it. And he knew he couldn't do it either, despite how morally on high he made himself seem as he was literally scrutinizing every single fucking word I wrote... So what does he do? He heaps all the work on someone else, as if he was the boss. As if he was in charge... And he orders me to tell my partner that he's now stuck with the work that I myself promised to do. What an asshole.

... but since the rest of his group did agree that the person who wrote the programming algorithms should be the one to write about them, I hesitantly "volunteered" to be the one to tell my partner that the rest of the group sadly but surely mutinied against me... because they only seemed to be in it for the marks... and besides, I didn't want any of them to twist the story in their favour when they told the genius of the group that his workload was just increased. That was my job... And to think? Yes, I know that I wasn't in it for the experience, but I do know that I was actually in it for the people... Serves me right, I guess... should've learned my experience from The Apprentice...

... and, well...

I did apologize by the time I left (which was after another two or three hours of doing nothing). I said "sorry for everything" to the proof-reading guys, and naturally, instead of accepting my apology, that first fucking guy just made a face and sort of brushed me off... he did say, "it's alright" at least. But his face gave away that either he was just really surprised that I was man enough to admit I was wrong, or that he thought I was a fucking pussy for saying sorry... either way, it just hurt me more that he didn't take any of the blame... I probably wouldn't even be feeling bad right now about my Sunday off at school, if only I just fucking felt like he had accepted my apology. But when it comes to forgiveness, the world is a cruel, unforgiving kind of place... the only way to earn back respect, is to... well?... earn it back, through hard work, loyalty, bribes, dedication crap, blackmail, and time... and forgetfulness, might I add...

Too bad I'm useless.

... useless, useless...

Goddammit, Powell.

What an asshole.

And what a waste of a week.

ATI: Well, the 4.2 Catalyst drivers were released last week, with speed improvements for a few games like Unreal Tournament 2004. But since I can't find the direct link to the download site, I'd figure you can just visit Firingsquad's review of the new drivers. They're bound to have the link, and some pretty nifty info about them at: http://firingsquad.com/hardware/catalyst_4.2/.

PowerVR: Well... I can't find the link anymore... guess I should've posted it last week. But it seems that PowerVR is back in the game, as specs were leaked for the new PowerVR Series 5 or something like that. I can't remember what the specs were, but they were decent at least. I'll make sure to keep myself posted if this turns out to be a fake or not, or just vapourware like everyone's favourite Glaze3d...

Y2kk Update: Alrighty then... I have absolutely nothing to say, and essentially no time to say it. So why the hell am I here? It's the start of mid-term season, and the climax of flu season, not to mention the birth of bird flu season... So what gives? I don't really know... I have a ton of group homework to do, which requires that I actually do the work at home while conferencing with my groups... which probably means I can't be writing utterly useless Mike-Crow-soft crap in the background, but still... I don't know. It's just something about me now. Like I said, I really have nothing to say this week, even less so than all the prior weeks that I've had absolutely nothing to say, and yet?... and yet... I just feel so damn guilty when I don't update my download site. I feel like I'm missing something, a part of myself - a part of my history perhaps, when I don't... I guess that pretty much confirms it then. I am married to my own goddam websites... which pretty much explains why my love life is the way that it is...

But ay, there is always hope at the end of the stain glass rainbow, I dare do say... Now, obviously, there's little to no hope for me of ever finding love in my existence, of course. But still, there's hope for a little bit of poking fun at my own patheticness... Because there was a thing that my computer hardware partner told me on Monday that sure as hell got my attention... He started raving and ranting about people he simply can't stand in our third year classes, and after going through the usual volley of nerds this and suck ups that, guess who the hell he pinned his target silent scope on?... heh... I just knew right away whom we was talking about, when he starting complaining about the girl who always sits in the front row of every class, laughing her fake, hysterical ass off at every single joke the professor mutes and makes, no matter how goddam lame...

... ah, yes... that's my girl alright...

He asked me if I knew her. I couldn't help but grin in acknowledgment... He then proceeded on an even longer rant about just how annoying she was thanks to all the sucking up she does to the professors after literally every single goddam class... All I could do was nod to him thick and though it all, because I for one sure as hell knew how goddam annoying she could be... and probably always will be... but ay, there lies the rub. I almost wanted to warn him, that hating her goddam guts in the first place is indeed a dangerous, cruel intentions place to be. If she never bored into my head with all her goddam sucking up, to both me and the professors, I never would've started dreaming of her sucking down my goddam cock all those lonely nights... Of course, it's not like my computer hardware partner is anywhere as desperate as me. He has a fine job, and he has a fine girlfriend as we speak. But still... I'd be careful if I were him... somehow, the things we hate most (or at least, the people I hate most) always end up seeping into my goddam bowels... or my brains at least... goddammit, I must be sick...

And pretty much that's it. Monday was the only day that anything of any worth happened to me, and considering the above minuscule paragraphs pretty much summed it up?... yup, that's pretty bad... But I did get one more pleasant surprise that Monday. Because you see, I've been the self-proclaimed, over-righteous leader of my non-existent Computer Networking group for the past couple of weeks. Both of my partners had failed first term or some crap like that this year (although I definitely shouldn't sound callous about it, considering I know what it feels like to fail... and considering one of those partners of mine was one of my friends...), so essentially, my three man group was now down and wittled to one... if I even count as one, that is... So I pretty much spent the first two weeks of this four week project, all by my lonesome, doing what I do best by completely ignoring every other boring subject, just because I became obsessed with one goddam ghost of a gremlin problem I was having with my network programming... But the thing is, the TA decided to play foreigner nice with me, and brought in a new member into my lovely group of one. And the thing is, I was pretty much expecting a nobody to be joining into my group. I mean, who the hell two weeks into the assignment would be actually great at programming and yet still not be in a goddam existing group?... well, besides me that is...

And that's why I was so goddam shocked that I almost sucked my own cock.

I found out who my partner was on Monday... and quite frankly, spent the rest of the night stupidly bragging about him to all my friends... Because what do you know?... I don't know how. I don't know why. But somehow, literally the best damn programmer I've ever met in my goddam life, somehow got separated from his own group and got sentenced to being stuck with me in mine... I mean, this guy eats programming for breakfast, quite literally I might add. The first year of engineering, I tried making small talk with him, in the days before I realized that I was an academic idiot talking to geniuses who accepted no less than 100% in high school... And the thing was, even back in those days, before anyone else knew, I saw him reading networking books of the corporate level at least. I heard him talk about programming, as if ten thousand word database programs built from the bottom up were just simple, high school assignments to him. And quite honestly, I knew that unless he had a ton of extracurricular stuff to do, that he'd do the entire networking assignment for me, in a single day or so... regardless of whether I wanted him to or not...

And to be honest, I still don't know what I want.

On the one side, I'm thankful that I'm now essentially obsolete. I'm gracious that I'm now essentially as useless in this course as any other course I have... Anything I write or program will now become utterly useless in the end, as everything that I managed in two weeks, he reproduced on his own in less than an hour... So basically, I'm just coordinating stuff now. I'm trying to understand his code and talk about it to the other groups we have to work with... I'm now an ambassador. A liaison. One of those useless people that just have a title but no real purpose, kinda like the governor general of Canada (not that anyone knows who she is), but I digress... And I'm thankful because I have a ton of work to do this term, and I've been able to do most of it because my partner just wrote more code in half a day than I would've probably had done at the end of four weeks. He's given me my freedom back, simply because I now realize that working day and night on a program I've become obsessed with, is completely pointless if there's somebody out there who can get the job done worlds ahead of whenever you ever can...

And you see, of course, that's also the problem... did my pessimism and negativity give it away?...

The only thing in school I feel proud of is programming, even though I know I absolutely suck at it compared to so many people in my school alone. Now, I wasn't getting very far in my network programming at all, but now that I have my genius of a partner, I have no real purpose at all to even bother. It's a two sided coin, or a double sided "trenchant" or Tremblant or Mt. Tremblant, or whatever kind of hell, as the girl I always talked about used to say... I mean, my partner is a good man. And definitely a much smarter man than I'll ever be. But I guess I'm just feeling real pathetic right now, because this must have been how the group members I had in high school must've felt like... Before Grade 12, all I cared about was my own mark. I would do entire assignments by myself, despite having a group to work with, and brag to all my friends afterwards how damn great I must be for handling all the work by myself... It didn't hit me until Grade 11, when I got marked down on a group assignment for doing all the work by myself, a project that was obviously done only by my own hand, that I started realizing - hey... maybe the point of a group assignment, is to do it as a group, isn't it? To learn how to handle a group, and for everyone to learn what it means to belong to something?... or some stupid crap thinking like that... But even after all those goddam meaningless epiphanies, I still never really cared about the people I ignored under my wing. Not really anyhew, although at least I tried to care... And now I guess I know what it feels like to be one of those people useless to the cause (hmm... that's something nice to call them...). Once again, I'll reiterate that I'm thankful, for having the time now to finish all the other bloody hell assignments that I have (not that I ever do much work, of course). But still, it just happens to bug me... that the one goddam assignment that was driving me completely bonkers to succeed and complete, is now the one damn assignment that I know that I'll never, ever have a chance to finish on my own... Now it's just unfinished business... now it's just unfinished history, lost in bloody hell translation or some crap wannabe movie like that...

But hey... I'm still thinking like my Grade 11 self, I suppose... No wonder I never grew out of updating this goddam webpage...

Y2kk Update: Wow... triple sow cow... or however the hell you're supposed to spell that twirly thing...

You know that I really don't have anything to say, when my top news story of the day is the fact, that for at least one goddam moment, my Nortel Stocks were actually up to $12 CDN yesterday afternoon. And considering I bought my hundred shares at just $1.69 a piece? I'm on my way to a brand spankin' new plasma screen, although that definitely won't happen for a while unless Nortel actually produces a damn product for once...

Just for the IvanFian impaired, the story goes like this: in high school (and also in the post modern day), I was an idiot. I said that Nortel stocks would never dip below $60... and they goddam dropped to below $50 by the time I handed in my goddam Nortel assignment... So I made a vow. I said that if Nortel stocks ever dropped below $2 a piece, I'd irrationally buy a hundred of them, and refuse to sell them until they reached the Nortel zenith of $120 each (or $60 if the stocks split, etc...)... And when the time came that Nortel actually dipped below the stunning $2 mark, I wasted my money on a promise that nobody expected me to keep (and nobody remembered that I said... considering I only said it as a joke at the time to people I don't even remember). Hell, I thought the company would go bankrupt or something, and that my $170 was going towards nothing but my pride... But now look what's happening! I'm already one fourth of the way to a decent plasma screen. And one tenth my way to keeping my promise... that is, if I ever decide to keep my promise and refuse to sell, even though I only need $6000 to get the television of my dreams...

... yeah... only $6000...

So why the hell don't I just get a fucking job?...

...

... and I guess that's really been the all-telling story as of late. Because you see, in case I never wrote about it on this website of mine, I did sign up for the PEY co-op program at the University of Toronto this year. I submitted my crap cover letters and my feigned resumes to a bunch of companies, hoping for a just a single interview back in return... But guess the fuck what? I got rejected from them all. Not a single damn company, no matter how desperate or small, chose me from their huge stock pile of goddam trash. Obviously, they only chose the best and brightest, indicated by the fact that the guys with 90s in courses are getting every damn job offer they could ever dream of wanting (and of course, the fact that they have corporate experience just makes the choice all the more sweeter)... And hell, even companies I never signed onto are getting into the act! Just this morning, I got an interview rejection from RIM, a company that I didn't even apply to! It's as if the cosmic karma of the goddam universe is poking its anal probish rear right into my ass, squirming inside and out of my goddam intestines the goddam fact, that pity the fool - I am a loser... with no job experience, with no academic intelligence, and with no goddam money for the goddam 53" plasma television screen that I goddam want...

But of course, that's not the worst of it all. Because right on cue, just the same as any other year, my god-awfully annoying business sister and mother are getting on my case yet again about not finding nemo and not finding a job. I mean, year in and year out, they say the same goddam things. And every time I fucking tell the truth to them, that "I know, I know..." all the bullshit they're telling me, they obviously just get mad at me and start talking to each other behind my back... and in front of my face, mind you...

I mean, this is the goddam kind of syndrome that I used to only get around friends that had fucking girlfriends in high school. I mean, you know that kind of bullshit braincase? Whenever a guy or girl gets a so-called loved one, in order to feel like they're selfless or spiritual or some crap like that, they feel it's their goddam right and goddam need to spread the joy to everyone else, and annoy every single goddam single guy or girl out there into getting a goddam fucking partner of their own... And the same goes for business people, because honestly, my sister was a hell of a lot easier to deal with when she was fired, unemployed, and constantly sobbing in her goddam bedroom. But all those years she thought she was it and all-that in Ivey Business School, and after she finally got her confidence back by getting a couple of jobs, she just can't help pulling off on me the god-awful "I have a loved one - you should have one too, so we can both be happy!" kind of shit on me... in terms of business, at least (only my mother still demands that I get a girlfriend these days... everyone else has given up on ol' Yoda me...)... year in, year out, that's all the mockingbird ever crows... although I will give my sister some credit, that at least she was softer and more gentle about all this crap this year around...

Obviously though, my mother and my sister have a point. I'm obviously not trying my blow job hardest to get a job, just like I'm obviously not trying my hardest to Microsft excel at university... and, well?... Duh. You don't need to be a business major to figure that out... I only do the crap I do out of necessity it seems, and my sister just can't get it in her head that unlike her, I don't want a fucking high class, social elite, fucking job. Not yet at least... It may be a necessity to her, as evident by the fact she was having nervous breakdowns by just getting fucking fired before she had even truly landed her job. And it's true, oh it's true - a job is necessary for me, considering I need 600 hrs of practical experience just to graduate from my goddam engineering university (not to mention the fact that my precious plasma screen is just $6000 CDN away...)... but still... every single goddam time she lectures me on how to do a cover letter, or how to con a resume, or how to phone in and suck up to the recruiters... She always fails to ever goddam acknowledge, that I'm obviously not listening to her like she's some sort of corporate goddess, like she thought everyone listened to her back in business school... Every year, she gets pissed that I simply don't care a rat's ass at what she has to say, and she flames me for it.

Well, news flash. I don't care. She never says anything new, so why should I care?... I will eventually get a job, because I have to get a job. And goddammit, I'm actually trying this year! Albeit not as goddam hard as they keep demanding out of trifle ol' me... And every single year, no matter what I do, as long as I don't get a goddam job, I have to go through the same damn lectures, with my mother and sister trying to prove to me that the only way to get a good job, is to be like them. To be so damn happy when you're writing your damn cover letters. To love with all your fraudulent heart the job you finally get. To wear it like a mantle. To snifle it like a smile. To stand on it like a pedestal. To represent it as who you are and how much you're worth.

To define who you are, what you were, and what you want to be.

And, well?... they may be right... I'm not saying they're wrong.

Hell, I'll even say they're right, at least in terms of the real world of the modern day... outside of IvanFian space time, that is...

But at least let me roll my eyes. You can only be lectured by the same damn lectures so many times until you goddam roll up the rims of your goddam eyes...

ATI: Well, I've obviously missed a few Catalyst releases over the months... Seems version 4.1 snuck up on me somewhere, and already Firingsquad has a review up about the latest drivers. Maybe you can find a link there too at at the review at: http://firingsquad.com/hardware/catalyst_4.1/.

ATI: Well, the end of January ain't normally associated with nostalgia, not even for no-name me. But still, Firingsquad has a nice little history lesson up about video cards this and their companies that. Go ahead and take a look at: http://www.firingsquad.com/features/window_in_time/.