kick ass

Scored my first hockey goal last night. Woot! Our team still lost 12-4, but it was a fun game.

I'm starting to write up my thesis now, and one of the hardest parts of it has been learning the proper writing style. In Mathematical writing, you don't use any personal terms, like: "We investigated the effect of..." or "Our derivation leads us to believe..." It's taking a lot of getting used to... I guess I implicitly like to think of the work I do as being mine, but it's not to be written that way.

Going to throw Fedora Core 3 on my desktop this weekend (dual boot config). I just finished doing a fresh install of XP (after upgrading the RAM too) and MY GOD... it runs so much smoother now. I've heard about Windows installs having a 6-8 month half-life, but didn't think it would be that much of a difference in performance. I don't doubt that the extra memory helps, but there's so much less crap running on it now it's great. Plus, my desktop is no longer sending out malicious attacks. I installed a firewall a little while ago, and it was insane reading the logs it produced. There was some nasty sh*t on that thing.

surfs up

what i believe but can't prove

The Edge has an interesting article. In it they ask 100 scientists/academics what they believe but can't prove. Many of the responses surprised me... especially those put forth by some of the non-science contributors. If you have an hour or two to kill, I highly recommend reading it.

What do I believe but can't prove? Lots. But that's mostly a reflection of my proving abilities. For the sake of putting something concrete down here, I'll go with the following:
I believe in a flip-side to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics (2ndLOT) which is, loosely speaking, organized systems become more disorganized as time goes on. Many people on this planet ascribe this flip-side to the existence of a God. Depending on how you define God, I may agree with that. In the interest of clarity, I'll define this flip-side as being a law of nature... just like the 2nd law. Why do I believe this law exists? Life is the single greatest contradiction to the 2ndLOT. Biological molecules organizing to produce a highly organized structure, when they should be randomly dispersed into a homogenous mixture? To me this points to there being something else at work. The inorganic realm also displays contradictions to the 2ndLOT, albeit not as blatantly as in the biological realm.

a good hockey night

Granted, it started well... Canada kicking ass 6-1. I gotta agree with Crosby's comments that they dominated the tournament. Aside from the end of the 1st period when it was 2-1 against Russia, the opposition never looked like it had a chance.

Managed to follow up that game with my best goalie performance of the season. We lost 7-0, but it was only 2-0 after the first period, and it was a solid effort by our whole team.

I also think I've come to terms with the NHL season being over. The junior's were exciting to watch, and the world championships are only 4 months away. Less hockey, but still damn exciting to watch.