Day 1 down. It hasn’t been too bad so far, but I can see us spending a shitload of time working on this project. The subject matter is reasonably interesting (to me, anyway). I think I have a pretty good group, though they’ve made the mistake of putting Evan and I together. It’s already gotten pretty silly; there was a comparison of our IT systems to the millenium falcon, and now we’re hypothesizing that there’s a wookie and a droid in the back rooms of our data centre fixing things with blowtorches and space wrenches.

You had to be there.

Right, I’m off to another MBA session in the Ontario hinterlands* tomorrow morning. I’m sure I’ll be leaving comments here letting you all know how well/badly it’s going. Maybe I’ll just post the running total on my bar tab and let you guess what that means.

*Scarborough/Markham

Last night we watched Playing By Heart (imdb | rotten tomatoes), something that I think was only on my Zip list for the novelty of seeing Jon Stewart act but that was sent to me anyway because I’m being quite stubborn in holding out for season 2 of Arrested Development. It had a few clever little moments, but was pretty formulaic. One notable thing: even when dressed and acting like a complete freak, even when sporting hair curlers and a dental appliance, Angelina Jolie is still just ridiculously hot.

It was inevitable, really: Leia’sMetalBikini.com.

[via]

So I had another new experience today: the urine sample. That was fun. I had to get bloodwork done and I guess they threw in the pee for free. Once again my deep veins thwarted them, and they had to draw the blood from the back of my hand, which means next week my hand will look like a rotten orange. Hip hip.

.:.
St. FX was ranked this year’s top Canadian “primarily undergraduate” university by Macleans, which is hilarious to anyone who’s ever spent time there or even passed through Antigonish. It’s also funny to Bruce MacKinnon, it would seem.

.:.
The Canadiens managed to steal a point last night after being down 2, tying it up with less than 4 minutes to go before losing in the shootout. Say what you want about the shootout, but it’s friggin’ exciting. And I have to admit, seeing Sidney Crosby score the winning goal on the final shot against the team he loved growing up…it made me smile, even though it put my team in the L column.

.:.
One of the nice things about working for a bank is that I get Remembrance Day off. Gonna try to get a whole bunch of errands and little nagging things taken care of before I leave Sunday morning. But it’s nice that the only responsibility I have today is to be quiet for a few minutes and think about how unbelievably lucky I am.

Arrested Development is on hold again. Why? Why do they keep messing with the funniest show on television?

.:.

Keira Knightley was on the Daily Show last night. I nearly wet myself.

.:.

Speaking of funny shows, The Office (US version) just keeps getting better.

.:.

I’m very much digging the new Ladytron disc Witching Hour. Go find it.

Ugh. It might snow tonight. I *hate* the first snow sighting of the year.

.:.

Canadiens won again Tuesday night. They play the Penguins tonight on TSN.

.:.

Right now it feels like I have a long weekend, but really I don’t. I have to head up to the training centre on Sunday for a 10:00 start, so today feels like Friday and Saturday will feel like Sunday. Ptoo.

The two events Ticketmaster saw fit to headline in this week’s “don’t miss it” email: Bon Jovi and Fifty Cent.

It’s impressive how bad they are at this.

After years of crunching data, [two MIT PhD grads] have devised a computer program that listens to a song, then predicts how humans will react to it. As much as I don’t want it to be true, of course it is.

But is it becoming a self-perpetuating phenomenon? If record companies are releasing songs according to this software, and we all know that for the most part people will listen to what’s popular rather than what’s necessarily “good” (by which I mean it should show actual musical ability and hopefully some degree of innovation), so will customers react well to the MIT-predicted music simply because it was predicted (and therefore popularized)?