November 22, 2000 — Because it's not worth it

After I finished my journal entries for Monday and Tuesday, I ended up staying awake until 7:00AM answering email and, toward the end, talking to Gillian, who was awake and six hours further into the day a long way from here. The Internet stopped working and cut me off midway through the conversation, forcing me to bed.

There's nothing less satisfying than four hours of sleep. Too long to be a nap, but without the benefits of much in the way of REM sleep -- I just end up feeling grumpy and stupid.

Speaking of stupid, all I had today was a physics quiz to prepare for, so I prepared on the walk over and in the class. I hadn't gone to the lectures so I thought I might be in trouble. As it turns out, I wasn't. I didn't get perfect, though, because I wrote down an equation properly but punched it into my calculator without squaring my value for time. But other than that it went alright.

For those wishing to live vicariously: a monkey notices a box of bananas sitting on the back of a flat-bed truck. He hops into the cab and takes the wheel. Once he reaches an acceleration of 3.0 metres per second squared, the box begins to slip. What is the coefficient of friction between the box and the flat-bed truck?

And this is university. On the other end of the spectrum, however, we've calculus, which offered this question on the test:

Find all the points on the curve (x² + y²)² = 8(x² - y²) where the tangent line is horizontal.

Trust me when I tell you that this is pretty difficult. I left it blank. And trust me when I tell you that my mark wasn't so great. But I passed. Barely.

Anyways. Little else happened. Nathan and Justin visited to borrow a large number of Johnston's magazines, and I went book shopping at 11:50PM. We couldn't do that in Richmond.

I love having weekends that are this epic. The initial version of the Bran Van 3000 site is looking like it ought to be online late this week or early next week.

I'm going to order the new printing of antigreg stickers this weekend, and I'm probably going to get pins as well. I'll almost certainly make little or no money doing this, but still. It'll be fun. More fun than reading this journal, I promise. Although I grant that that's not saying much.