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the day got shorter by 2.68 microseconds. if that doesn't throw my schedule out of whack, i don't know what will.

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i just read the robotic nation article (http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm).. i agree with it mostly in that robots will take over most of the non-creative jobs in the economy, and that most people will be out of a job, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing.

with robots in the education sector, the cost of an education should drop dramatically, perhaps being entirely subsidized by government. with robots in agriculture, food will be dramatically cheaper. same goes for other basic necessities of life. in fact, i'm hoping that all the basic necessities will be provided free of charge to everybody. goodbye to homelessness and starvation.

the concept of money as we know it now will be outdated.. people will work not to earn money but because they want a challenge. i don't think money will be completely gone, and that people who work will still be given money, with which they can afford extra luxuries not available to others. so "poverty" will still exist, but again, "poor" people will be living at the level that low/medium-income people live today.

with unlimited education being free, people will be a lot smarter. research and development will increase dramatically, leading to even better robots and the whole cycle will accelerate. same goes for the artistic side of things - there will be a lot more people with a lot of spare time on their hands, and far more "art" will be created (whether what is created is actually art is up for debate).

i also hope that once that happens, we will focus our energies outward, to space travel. spaceships by the 24th century? i think it's definitely feasible. perhaps not warp drive, but i believe somebody will invent some kind of propulsion system that isn't as messy as the burning-fuel-for-thrust that we're using today.

ah.. after some more reading, this is very much what i had in mind.

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just got the new opera for linux. is cool. there's a wack of new features for newsfeeds and such that i don't really use anyway. the coolest new thing for me is gmail support. now i can ditch firefox.. w00t. although i'll still keep it around, because its good to have alternate browsers.

also, they fixed a bunch of issues with text rendering.. most pages look a lot better, although a couple look slightly worse. on the whole, i'm pretty happy with it :)

classes are good.. profs are good. most are better than expected. although i still can't stop falling asleep. i don't know why.. even when i get lots of sleep and am not tired at all before class, i start dozing during. i think i have chronic sleeposity or something.

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back at school today. went to my first (non)class (aka compilers, the course that i'm sitting in on). too bad it was at 8:30, or i might have been able to focus a bit better. thankfully the only 8:30s i have are this (non)class, so it's not so bad.

i did end up with a quasi-swiss-cheese schedule, overall. some of the breaks are big enough to go home and come back, but not big enough to do something useful while i'm there. i'm gonna be spending a lot of time at the university this term, which may not be a bad thing since given the home theater we now have set up, it's gonna be hard to get anything done at home anyway :)

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so there's a 2.2% chance of the earth being bonked by an asteroid in 2029. On Friday April 13th, no less. (oh, and 2029 adds up to 13, too). sweet.

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my current weather icon is:

right...

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i take that back. today would be a MUCH^(+INF) worse day to be moving.

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yeah.. back in waterloo. why is that every time i move back to albert street, i pick a bad day to move? going into 2A there was the blackout. going into 2B there was a snowstorm or something.. and now going into 3A the 401 (and subsequent roads) was covered in snow all the way from east toronto. took forever. stupid slow snow plows. (try saying that ten times fast).

on another note, i recently discovered that any time savings i may have accrued cutting through the park on the way to UW are now negated by the copious amounts of snow in said park. regardless, snow remains cool.

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going back to waterloo tomorrow. i wonder if i can handle the 20 degree rise in temperature.. :)

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so i was bored yesterday and didn't feel like programming on any of my currently active projects, so i tried to make a hello world boot disk. rather than just writing an app and tossing it into the disk, i had to write directly to the boot sector on the disk.

for some strange reason, this is easier in windows than in linux (at least so it appeared from the tutorial-thingy i was using). dos debug can do a lot of cool stuff. i, on the other hand, had to use the "as" assembler, which would only output ELF files, and then scrape out my machine code from those ELF files and stick them onto the boot sector using dd.

in the end, i got it to print out single characters without any problem, so i have an "H" boot disk.. but I couldn't get it to print out the whole "Hello world!" message. argh.

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