Sudden EMP shockwave?

I don't seem to be having much luck with electronic devices lately. My digital camera has recently been showing signs of being useless lately (fresh batteries usually take more than one picture) and more importantly, my cell phone isn't working. The inside display no longer shows anything, just a black screen. It would cost ~$100 to ship and repair it, and about ~$180 to buy a new rogers phone. I've still got 6 months left on my Rogers contract, so I'm going to try to get a phone off of eBay for less than $60 that will be able to last me the rest of my contract and however long I'll need a Pay as you Go phone after my contract is up. Thank god my DS and Zen are still in tip-top shape (knock on wood).

I've been sick as of last Tuesday night. I had a nasty headacke the first two days, and the usual congestion, but the thing that's really annoying me about this cold is the nagging cough. Most of the time it's a really dry cough so it really hurts my throat after a while. By the way, I recommend Halls over Fisherman's Friend by a long shot. It looks like I'm on the road to recovery though. I'm glad to get this year's cold over with, but that logic may be along the same vein as taking a bomb on an airplane because the odds of there being TWO bombs on the same plane is so drastically small.

Andrew and I (aka Smith and Wesson, he was Agent Smith and I was a cowboy, get it?) did alright in the tournament, but we caught an unfortunate break. We placed fourth out of ten in the pre-ranking games, so that got us started off in the quarter-finals in the knockout tournament (four teams had to compete to get in the quarter-finals). We beat the first team pretty easily, and in the semi-finals we held a two-point lead for most of the game. Unfortunately, they caught up on a couple of good hands and wound up beating us 10-9. I picked up the nine of hearts to give myself the Jack and nine of trump and some black kings. It wasn't a very good hand, but since I was the dealer I was more worried about being stuck and having to call one of my really weak black suits. The team that wound up winning was the one that was ranked tenth in the ranking, so good on them.

I was too lazy to update the euchre site this week since there were only a handful of new scores, I was hard up for a strategy article, and I didn't have any pictures of the tournament. This wekend, the club is holding a euchre tournament at the Warrior Weekends event (about time WW got back to us), and of course we'll be having an end-of-term club tournament at the last meeting in three weeks, so that's a pretty tourny-filled month for the club. I'm not sure if I'll be able to participate in the WW tuornament since I should be the one keeping score for the night. Such is the life of a club executive!

Looks like Guitar Hero 2 is currently carrying a 99% ranking. That $90 is looking like a pretty good investment for my Christmas holiday. Maybe (pimping DS) + (Guitar Hero 2) + (Buying Wii at presumed price drop in 2008) = success. It's not even a matter of having the money; I definitely do. It's a matter of not having the time for so many games.

Congratulations to John and Julie who have been together for a year now.

I looked at my notes and I've skipped four Linguistics classes that deal with the midterm on Thursday. Meh. I'm really not taking school seriously at all anymore. I have a crypto midterm in two hours that I'm very unprepared for. I don't know much about any of the signature schemes, or attacks on any of them, or any algorithms dealing with some attacks. My only hope is that the midterm is strictly easy number theory and hopefully an algorithm that is somewhere in my accessible memory. Looks like it's only worth 20%, but I suppose a bigger concern is that I'm even less prepared for the 50% final exam.

I don't know what to do for reading week this year. This is the first year that math students actually get a full week off, so I feel like maybe I should treasure it. Andrew is going on a ski trip and John and Julie are going to Las Vegas. My dad will have a condo in Florida again, but I feel like the trip is wasted unless I go with someone. My big plan was to have a girlfriend by now so that by mid-February we'd be in a position where we could go on a trip together and let our winter love blossom in the warmth of the Florida sun.

It was my mom's birthday on Sunday. I ordered a bunch of CDs and a Sudoku book for her. She went to the casino with some people (she only goes about once a year no gambling problem), and she wound up winning $1000! She was playing video poker as always, held the Jack of Spades, and wound up getting a royal flush! Good birthday gift, eh?

I really should find a second day a week to set aside time to make a post. Trying to sum up all the meaningless events of a week makes for too large of a post. Besides, as someone who checks for blog updates many times a day, I can understand that sometimes you people out on the interweb need something to keep yuo entertained throughout the week.

Listening to... Closed Captioned - Fugazi
Link of the moment... Honestly? Not entirely impressed with this either. Super Mario World was better...