October 19, 2000 — Cinnamic acid and the meaning of life

Andrew visited yesterday and we went to the Cannes Advertising Festival. And it's a good thing, too, since I need all the excuses I can get to keep me away from ICQ. I don't want to relapse.

Yesterday also marked the first time that I'd seen that "Rant" commercial for that beer company, and the first time I'd seen those "Wassup" commercials (also for a beer company, I guess). I'd say that my new knowledge of television would make "Scary Movie" a lot funnier for me, but I really doubt that that's the case.

Someone from Western University, who we'll call Matt McKeough for the sake of argument, changed the slogan to, "When the camera's on the clock, greg's hand is on his cock." This reminded me that I really need to work on lighting my room better so I can have the camera on me while I sleep. I still want to be one of "those people" who have their entire life online. Y'know, just 'cause.

Yesterday I stared at lines of cinnamic acid for three-point-five hours. The entire chemistry lab seemed to have an underlying theme of drug use, as we had to make lines of white powder and then test it for purity by checking the melting point. Interesting. The funny part is, I'm pretty sure this technique could actually be used on cocaine -- if it were pure, it should have a single, sharp melting point, but were it "cut" (or whatever the kids are calling the addition of rat poison to drugs these days), it would have a melting point that spanned a much wider range of values. So while pure cocaine would melt at 98 degrees celsius, an impure version thereof would start melting far below that temperature. Wannabe drug dealers take note.

The air's getting dry and my hands are starting to bleed, and with this being the first winter of anti-greg, I should probably explain this. For some reason the skin on my hands gets really dry in the winter to the point of cracking and bleeding when I type. Isn't that pleasant? I'll have to buy some hand cream. It won't make my hands better, but it'll prevent me from breaking my record of having them bleed from nine separate splits in the skin. That was quite a night of Internet fun, back in my IRC days.

There's not much else to say. Matt's visiting tonight. Gillian's leaving for Europe in a few days. I think I'll go to Jonovision tonight. Mayhem ensues.