A Few Quick Notes 86

-The weather was overcast and damp today. Fortunately, it was not as rainy as it was yesterday. If the sun comes out later this week I am sure it will be beautiful.

-I had my final presentation of the year today. Surprisingly, it went much better than I had expected.

In the several practice runs I went through last night I was having a very hard time keeping things to the correct amount of time as well as even getting the content to come across in a way with which I felt comfortable.

Before class I went through my notes and decided to leave a few things out and re-order a few points. So I was basically going up there without any practice.

For some reason as soon as I stood in front of the class I felt comfortable and things started to make sense to me, I knew how I would proceed. While it was not the world’s best presentation it was much better than what I had expected would happen.

-It seems that gas prices jumped by about 10-12 cents last night in Montreal. The intricacies of gas pricing still baffle me.

-It seems that yesterday’s fudge was left in the fridge for to long and now has become stuck to the bottom of the pan. Maybe I could leave it out for some period of time to encourage it to soften up a little, something that might make it easier to remove from the pan without breaking all of the nicely cut pieces. Something else about the fudge that I have noted is that it isn’t the best fudge I have had. Maybe when I will get back to St. John’s I will look for a fudge recipe that my mother used to use.

-As Friday is Good Friday Thomson House will be closed for the day (as well as Easter Monday). This is unfortunate as I was scheduled to work my usual Friday night shift. Fortunately, a last minute event was planned for Thursday night and I was able to get one of the two shifts. This should give me enough tip money to be able to afford to go the GSLIS end of term party for a few drinks on Saturday night. On the other hand, if I really wanted to save money and still spend time with my classmates, I could take the available shift and work the event on Saturday night.

-For some reason in the past few days I have had three different types of sausages. This is somewhat unusual for me as typically I don’t eat sausages all that frequently. Hopefully I will head back to my low frequency consumption pattern in the near future.

-While poking around Neil’s web footprint I saw for the first time a method to allow the quick dissemination of mathematical. Basically the proof, or whatever the person is doing, is captured by taking simple digital photos of a blackboard with workings and then posted online. This process gets around having to deal with cumbersome typesetting programs and awkward file formats. People are easily able to see most photos posted to a website, in some cases even free photo sharing services could be used. If text recognition programs become particularly advanced maybe it would be possible to translate these photos into more traditional formats.

-Today while on an unsuccessful mission to look at an apartment, I was able to finally stop in and check out Segal’s, a Portuguese grocery store on St. Laurent. This place is pretty incredible. Aside from the amazing deals and strange food, they actually had a stack of salt cod in the back of the store. I was pretty tempted to buy an entire salt cod just because of my Newfoundland connection. I wonder if this is the cod that involved in that foreign over-fishing problem?

-For the past week or so the pull of the trashy, easy to read novels has been very strong. During this period of time I have read two less than stellar novels and had to fight off reading a third. There is so much good stuff that I want to read, why do I keep coming back to the crap that I don’t even really enjoy?

-I should go and make some humus so that I have something tasty to eat as I continue to work this evening.