Characters who annoy the hell out of me:

• kids in class whose only question is "will this be on the exam?"
• people who use those huge damned beach umbrellas and walk down the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to the rest of us trying to avoid having our eyes poked out - this goes double for the idiots who don't notice the rain stopped and triple for the short ones who aim the tips of their umbrellas squarely at my face and charge
• people who use the popular (and scarce) carrels in Koerner to sleep (possible exception when I do it)
• whoever decides that Plant Operations should use jack hammers and drive big trucks back and forth right outside my classroom

It wasn't until I wrote the date on some class notes yesterday that I realized its grim significance. I don't have cable, so I haven't been keeping up with the American news and their talking heads over-analyzing anything possibly terror-related. I was at a baseball game last year when they had a minute of silence to mark the occasion. This year I didn't hear anything.

I also don't have a cell phone anymore. I can't say that I've missed it. All that's changed is that people can't interrupt me. Neal Stephenson (quoting Knuth) said something similar about email. I miss the excitement a little, but I'm enjoying the peace and quiet. I finished Hey Nostradamus! in no time and I'm looking forward to Quicksilver.

Two weeks down and I'm still enjoying my classes. This must be a new record. And they're mostly math. I think taking it easy with fewer courses is the way to go. No sense in rushing back into things right away, my advisor said. Sage advice.

The Vancouver Sun has been giving away free newspapers on campus for the past two weeks, hyping its student subscription prices. Headline in today's driving section: Honda aims new Acura at younger drivers. You can imagine my amusement when I read a bit further down that they're talking about "buyers in the mid-40s age group, as opposed to the 53-and-up buyers who purchased the previous generation of the TL." Now when people talk about "younger drivers," I usually think of flashy 20-something guys talking on cell phones with annoying personalized ring tones.

On a mildly frustrating note, I submitted a trouble ticket to Telus ADSL technical support on Sunday or Monday about atrocious lag on my connection. It took ages to find the form on their web site, which, instead of providing any useful information, is completely designed for advertising service levels they don't even try to deliver. I didn't hear anything about it until Tuesday when I got an auto-reply with a ticket number, a FAQ about crap that doesn't apply, and a message to not reply to the auto-reply. Then today, I got a phone call from a nice but completely useless customer service rep saying that they're aware of the problem and that I should make sure I install all the patches from Windows Update. "Uh, I don't use Windows. I have a Mac laptop and a... Unix workstation." "OK. Do you use anti-virus software and is it up to date?" Yeah, yeah, and personal firewall software (which is sort of true, since OS X was intelligently designed to block everything by default). Check off your list. 4 or 5 days for someone to call me with platitudes? Bah. Back in my Internet service days, customers got an immediate auto-reply and a real answer (i.e. not just crap about "we're working on the problem, don't call us, we'll call you... maybe") usually in under an hour. But whatever, the UBC wireless+VPN setup is excellent.

P.S. It's been a whole year since I set up log.antiflux.org and people are still using it. Heartwarming.