Rosio Pavoris

I spent some money today.

I bought the Lucìa y el sexo DVD, because apparently I hadn’t seen that yet. It isn’t really that awesome, but I can see why a bunch of 11th-graders would hail it as the greatest movie ever, and why Stijnen would get some complaints for picking it the be shown in school.
Of course, it didn’t help the subtitles don’t work and the only dub available was French. My French is only marginally better than my Spanish, which, admittedly, isn’t all that horrible, but still.
Anyway, it was only like 9 €.

Also bought The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch (on DVD), which was pretty entertaining, in a not-trying-too-hard kind of way. 35-year-old Eric Idle playing side by side 58-year-old Eric Idle is pretty interesting to see, too.
Also, the Beatles are far to litigious about things.

Finally, I bought Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain, but because the Fnac’s English-language selection has been made of fail recently, it’s the Dutch translation, Kapelaan van de Duivel.
Haven’t started in it yet, but I’m guessing I’ll get about halfway through before the Dutch annoys me into giving it to my mother instead.

Fascinating stuff, what?

Actually, that hobgoblin is an ogre. I’ll forgive him, though, for Richard Dawkins is a secksy, secksy man.

(I know I linked to The Root of All Evil?, which this is a clip from, on Google Video earlier, but that was also almost two hours long. This essentially sums up his position without showing any of the fundies yelling at him. And it’s since been deleted, anyway.)

I know the kids were hankerin’ for some memery.

How You Life Your Life

You are honest and direct. You tell it like it is. You’re laid back and chill, but sometimes you care too much about what others think. You prefer a variety of friends and tend to change friends quickly. You tend to dream big, but you worry that your dreams aren’t attainable.

Your 1920’s Name is:

Orvil Madison

You Should Rule Jupiter

Huge and hot, Jupiter is a quickly turning planet with short days and intense gravity. You are perfect to rule Jupiter, because you are both dominant and kind. You have great strength and confidence, but you never abuse your power. You are always right. Even if you make mistakes, you compensate for them… before anyone knows it. Headstrong and ambitious, you always have a goal in mind. You are optimistic and believe thing things will always work out.

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you’re the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

Alright, that’s enough of that. Did you know Jupiter has about 1/80th the mass required to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions and turn into a star?

Mmhm. I need to write a manifesto, at some point.

Seeing as how I’ve now mentioned both TSO and BSO, I guess I might as well explain how that works.
Correct me if I’m wrong about anything, Corbarhan.

Essentially, after elementary school, kids pick their direction, choosing between BSO, TSO, KSO, or ASO.

KSO (Kunst-Secundair Onderwijs, Art Secondary Education) is a special case. For all intents and purposes, absolutely nobody does this. Parents who let their kids pick this might as well just kill them immediately and save them the effort of starving to death later in life.

BSO (Beroepssecundair Onderwijs, or Vocational Secundary Education) is essentially the lowest. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I assume that at some point, kids pick a simple profession (like, uh, careperson for the elderly, or kindergarten person type) and get classes specifically to prepare for that.
In theory, none of these people go on to higher education, but I guess there’s an optional seventh year that lets them prepare for a hogeschool specifically. I honestly cannot imagine people who got along in BSO would be able to get through a real university.
Most of them wouldn’t be able to afford it, anyway. Lower class. D:

TSO (Technisch Secundair Onderwijs, Technical Secundary Education) is a more general, but still very practical education. This department produces almost all blue collar workers in Flanders. Again, I’m not too sure about the details, because these groups tend to be in separate schools entirely.
Most of these people don’t go on to higher education, but a not-insignificant number of them get into hogescholen, apparently.

ASO (Algemeen Secundair Onderwijs, General Secundary Education) is what most people do. This is what I did (along with almost everyone I know, obviously), so I know more about this. >.>
In the first year (the equivalent of 7th grade, I guess), kids pick between Latijn (Latin) and Moderne (Modern; I still don’t know what’s supposed to be modern here), and as they progress through the years, their options diversify.

I think Latin is the first one to split, in the second year, into Latin and Latin-Greek. Eventually it splits up into Latin-Mathematics, Latin-Sciences, and Latin-Modern Languages as well. The toughest of that is arguably Latin-Mathematics, which I did. Latin-Greek is actually the most difficult until the third grade (being the fifth and the sixth year, or eleventh and twelfth grade equivalents; the six years are divided into three grades of two years each for ease of standardisation of the curricula), but mathematics starts picking up somewhat later on. Greek still tends to be the smallest group. Our year had four people in the end, I think (compared to average class sizes of 20-25 or so).
The Latin directions are supposed to produce the intellectuals of the society, I guess, but most of them end up being merely average. Some Mensa lady told me the average IQ in Latin is 120, which might actually be possible. Pretty much all of these students go on to higher education, most often universities.

Moderne is what most people do, I guess. Eventually it splits into tons of things, like Menswetenschappen (Humane Sciences, but it’s a lot less interesting than that sounds) at the very bottom, through things like Economy-Modern Languages, to Mathematics-Sciences at the top. There are about a dozen options, usually, though individual schools sometimes add some. Ours had a Mathematics-Sciences with six hours of Mathematics per week, and one with eight.
Most of these people go on the higher education, obviously. Not sure how they’re divided between hogescholen and universities, but I’d guess more of them end up in hogescholen than universities, relative to the Latin students.

Classes depend on the option picked, obviously. There are some overlaps, but not as many as you’d think. Different options might share some classes, but on the whole, the people in their own option are the ones they have classes with.
Switching option paths becomes more difficult every year, and might be entirely impossible without starting over, which is interesting. The Central Exam Commission is supposed to help out with that (among other things).

I graduated in Latin-Mathematics (for the Central Exam Commission, which is a different story entirely, though I did also take that option while I was still in school), and so did Coren, I thought. I’m pretty sure I never knew what Barbara ended up doing, and I can’t remember what Quhan did.
So yeah. Essentially the most difficult path, now forced in with the lowest. Not the first time.

I don’t like being made into a spectacle.

Today, for Maatschappelijke en Ethische Vorming, everyone had to introduce themselves, talking for five minutes and taking questions, and whatnot, which was definitely worth staying the two last hours of an extremely long day for, especially considering I had four or five hours of sleep last night.
Anyway, with at least one of my “classmates” actually coming from BSO ^(trans), the average intelligence level is probably even lower than it was in the other group. People actually gasped when I explained I’d been a Latin-Mathematics student, having had both Latin and eight hours of mathematics per week. They also seemed to think I was kidding when I said the mathematics schedule for Applied Computer Science is retardedly simple.

But yeah. Eventually we got to the bit where I told them I’d been a Japanology student for two years as well, and the teacher type person asked me to write a few words on the blackboard in Japanese. Everyone ooh’d and ah’d, and didn’t believe I wasn’t making shit up. All I wrote was 日本語. It’s not that complex. Also had to explain about kanji and kana, and the basics of grammar, and whatnot.

All in all, it felt a lot like being forced to go around to the other classes in kindergarten to show them the stuff I drew, because clearly I was a child prodigy.

Well, I was, but I don’t like being treated as a curiosity.

(Also, people need to stop recognising my last name if they don’t know my dad. The next person to ask me if I’m Vincent’s son gets punched in the nuts.)

What with the old one not having a functional alarm thing anymore and the light being broken and things. I was just going to get a pocketwatch, but apparently my mom decided I needed a new phone.
This one. The camera thing is actually capable of higher resolutions than my webcam, and it deals with shitty lighting better. Pity there isn’t really an obvious way to get the pictures onto a computer.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Rise of Nations isn’t a very good game. Even if it didn’t crash all the time, it’d be a pretty mediocre RTS. Even AoE1 is better.
Pity, because it seemed to have potential. If it’d have five times as many techs and aimed for week-long games rather than hour-long ones, it would’ve been pretty nifty.

So, uh. If anyone wants to buy a slightly used copy of Rise of Nations Gold Edition, let me know.

Seeing as how most people have started with college now or are otherwise too busy to spend a lot of time online, and I’m not entirely sure how many people still read the various blogs, and I’m not sure how many people actually use RSS feeds, I’m going to explain how to quickly set that up for the people who are interested.
If this doesn’t include you, feel free to ignore it.

RSS, of course, being an easy way to keep track of periodically updated content, such as blogs or newsfeeds. I won’t go into how it actually works, because that’s not even all that interesting. It’s a pretty simple XML-based protocol.

Anyway. First, get an RSS client. There are a lot of them out there, and most e-mail clients also double as RSS clients.
I personally use Thunderbird, which is pretty reliable and open source. Their download link detects language and OS, I’m pretty sure, but just in case, here is their download page. It’s primarily an email client, but whatever.

Install and run. I can’t remember if it shows you a wizard of some sort when you first run it, but if it doesn’t, go File → New → Account.
In that wizard, select RSS News & Blogs (and note how it also supports newsgroups, if that interests you) and name it whatever you want and finish the wizard. Then, click on that account in the top left window thing and click Manage Subscriptions to add RSS feeds to it.

Figuring out what a given blog’s RSS feed is shouldn’t be too hard. Most of them have a link to it somewhere on the main page, and Firefox automatically tries to detect them so that you can add them as a dynamic bookmark.
If you’re using Firefox, you can add it as such a bookmark by clicking on the RSS symbol in the address bar and then rightclicking on that bookmark and selecting Properties to see the location (actually, that’s usually the Atom feed, which is essentially the same thing), but that’s a roundabout way of doing it. Just find the link and copy/paste it into the subscription manager.

For WordPress blogs, this will generally be the blog URL with ?feed=rss2 added to the end (with the $_GET[feed] variable being set to rss2, from PHP’s point of view). For example, for my blog, that would be http://cairnarvon.rotahall.org/?feed=rss2. You can click that to see what the feed looks like. A lot of XML, which your client will parse for you.
For Livejournal (if you don’t want to use your friends page), that’s [url]/data/rss (http://cairnarvon.livejournal.com/data/rss). The problem there is that Thunderbird can’t log into Livejournal, so you’ll only be getting public posts, not friends-only ones. But that’s what the friends page is for anyway.
For ExpressionEngine (which is what Skatje uses, for some reason), it’s [url]/index.php/weblog/rss_2.0/ (http://skatje.com/index.php/weblog/rss_2.0/). (The difference between RSS 1 and RSS 2 isn’t something you should be concerned about, BTW.)
For, uh, whatever software Scienceblogs uses, it’s [url]/index.xml (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml).
And so on.

When you add a feed, Thunderbird should automatically attempt to retrieve the posts in the queue for you (if it doesn’t, go File → Get New Messages for → whatever you named your account). The WordPress queue defaults to being ten posts long, so you should see the ten most recent messages.
The practical upshot of this, BTW, is that if a given blog updates more than ten times between times that you check it, you will miss messages. In general, people who update that often tend to have longer queues, though.

Another way to avoid this is just to leave Thunderbird open. It doesn’t minimize to the system tray, which is annoying, but whatever.
When it’s running, it will periodically check for new messages. By default, this is once every 100 minutes. You can change this by going to your account settings by clicking on the account name (not a folder name) and going to “View setting for this account”. Should be pretty straightforward. You also probably want to check “Check for new articles at startup”.

So yeah. Once you have that just open Thunderbird from time to time, and check only the blogs that update. It saves a lot of time. To comment on the posts, you’ll still need to go through your browser.
Incidentally, it also deals with podcasts, seeing as how those are just RSS feeds with an MP3 attached.

You can also use Thunderbird for e-mail, but I can’t really help you with setting that up. I use it for my KUL mail, which I set up using this tutorial (English here) provided by the KUL itself, which probably doesn’t apply to most other types of e-mail.
You should be using Gmail and running Google Talk anyway.

I actually have one, which is surprising, but was easy to accomplish, given circumstances. I guess that was the handy part of my convoluted academic record. At one point I’m going to write the whole thing out, but right now I can’t be bothered.
Anyway, I was thinking about this, because it turns out at this point, I’m still the only grandchild of the Tienen branch of the Crolla family (total of five grandchildren there; three more live or lived in Roeselare) who has one, and I’m also quite possibly the only person in the entire family who doesn’t want a car.

I’ve said this before, but I think it’s a good thing Belgium only allows driver’s licenses at 18 (17 in very rare cases) but has a legal drinking age of 16 (or less, still haven’t looked that up; I think it’s 14 for beer), rather than the situation in the US, which mostly is 15 or 16 for driver’s license, and 21 for drinking.
The main reason for this is that people can be familiar with alcohol before they’re familiar with driving, so they’ll be less likely to trust their ability to drive while drunk, as opposed to being so familiar with driving and underestimating alcohol to the point where they think they’re in total control of the situation.

I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t actually done any research on this, and it certainly doesn’t apply to everyone (and doesn’t take under-age drinking into account), but I’m sure it’s prevented an accident or two.

In related news, I renewed my train abonnement. I doubt abonnement is a real word in English, but it is in Dutch, French, German, and whatever language they speak in Switzerland, so meh.

I finished Tom Holt’s Earth, Air, Fire and Custard, which is the sequel to The Portable Door, earlier this week (Tom Holt being the guy who wrote, among other things, Snow White and the Seven Samurai, of course), which was decent.

The Fnac barely has any books of interest I haven’t read yet left, and the American Book Center appears to still be closed. I should read Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion (or anything else by him, really), but I’m not even sure where to start looking for that. The Fnac doesn’t have any of them, and I’d rather not order them online if I can avoid it.
(Speaking of Dawkins, he started a charity; ’bout time.)

If anyone has any other suggestions, literature-wise, do tell.

People shouldn’t make me walk around a lot when it’s hot out.

Anyway, I switched groups. I’m now in 3A (and my new schedule is here), which, if possible, is even more losarly than 7A. 7A also had a girl, which 3A doesn’t, but that doesn’t matter too much, as said girl very blatantly insisted on not being Maia.

So, I went to Introduction to Programming today, which was 3A’s second class, which apparently meant it was optional. Apparently teacher type person had given some exercises, and people only needed to show up if they needed help. I explained things and she gave me the exercises.
Writing stuff in pseudocode. I spent ten minutes coming up with four or five ways to do each one and then got bored and left.

“But which method is the most efficient?”
“The one where you stop jacking off to pseudocode and actually pick a fucking language.”

Mathematics, then, was their first class, but it wasn’t in a computer room, so it was different anyway. It was, in fact, 7th-grade mathematics. Drawing fucking lines on a Carthesian grid. Two-dimensional, of course.
Fucking retards.

Seriously, who the fuck says “This course is reasonably difficult, so we expect our students to have had at least three hours of math in high school”?

The KHL is an embarrassment to higher education.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have pants to take off.

… turns out to be pretty low.

Three people in my group of two dozen or so actually came from TSO (translated), and it’s pretty obvious both they and the KHL feel they should be able to actually get a Bachelor’s degree.

We had Mathematics today. To get a general idea about the group, the teacher person asked how many hours of maths each of us had had per week during the last year of our secondary education.
Having done Latin-Mathematics myself (and also having graduated as that, despite urgings from my parents to pick a lighter combination), I said 8. I would’ve guessed that would’ve been above average, but apparently it was considerably more above average than that, even. The average, in fact, was 3, with a significant number of people only having 2.
“No worries”, though, as the first year of (what is supposed to be college-level) Mathematics consists of less than what we saw in our 11th grade-equivalent.
Gah.

Also, Computer Systems was about as bad as the Computer Sciences classes we had in highschool, but because of his insistence on Dutch terms, it’s still next to impossible to follow. I managed to grasp that he meant “CPU” when he said “centrale verwerkingseenheid”, but it took forever to figure out “verwerkingsgeheugen” was actually the RAM.
When he doesn’t use completely Dutch terms, he still manages to screw up. “RAM-geheugen” indeed.

And I don’t see why I should.

This is my class schedule for this semester, if anyone’s interested.

More like International Don’t Ever Breed, You Fucking Retard Day.

Introduction to Programming and Business Information Systems.

Introduction to Programming is basic and quite frankly a waste of my time, though I can see why some people could maybe have a use for it. Why these people would go into Computer Sciences, I’m less sure.
Either way, it probably wouldn’t hurt to hire someone competent for it. She made three very basic mistakes that I noticed, and nobody corrected her on it, so apparently they didn’t know either. I can understand not knowing what modulo and remainder mean if you’re, say, a Language student, but in Computer Sciences?

Business Information Systems (the acronym for which is also BIS in Dutch, which apparently nobody noticed; they also have MIS, for Management) is a waste of everyone’s time. It’d be trite bullshit even if it wasn’t dumbed down to blacks and white so simplistic even a child could understand them and point out how they’re entirely useless in any real situation, and as it is, it’s an insult to our intelligence, and will probably turn out to be actively counterproductive later on.

The main problem, though, is that these people are so obviously less intelligent than I am.
I’m not being arrogant, this is just true. Verplancke, Vandewalle, Takeyama, Whatshisface, those were all people who were at least of above-average intelligence (as you’d expect in goddamn college teachers) and who I could respect both as teachers and as people. These KHL people, though, fail at life.

Oh, and something funny: the BIS teacher person was introducing herself and saying she had a Licentiate (essentially a Master’s) in Applied Economics, which, as a degree, is infinitely more valuable than “Applied Computer Sciences”. And even at age 39 she’s stuck being a low-level teacher in a worthless college banking on the fame of the KUL in the shittiest neighborhood of Leuven.
Way to inspire your students.

Oh, and tomorrow is Societal and Ethical Development (Maatschappelijke en Ethische Vorming), which I’ve been told is essentially a get-to-know-your-fellow-students kind of deal. “Woot”.

Yeah, I went to Leuven today.

The “small reception” was at 9:30. The KHL’s student coordinator and some other guy who I think might’ve been a principal of some sort dropped by and introduced themselves. Said something about responsibility but also being a student, handed out some papers (including more forms asking the same questions we were asked when we registered and a book list, which was handy), and told us the “administrative moment” was at 13:30 and the “big reception” was at 15:00. All of this took fifteen minutes, after which we were free to go.
The “administrative moment” consisted of two minutes of waiting in line (Crolla is a decent name to have if they’re sorting alphabetically), ten seconds of figuring out I didn’t need to hand in any other forms and whatnot, and five seconds of taking my picture and making my student ID, after which, again, I was free to go.
The “big reception” was essentially this one person saying she didn’t have anything to say but could be reached anyway. This took four minutes.

So yeah. Six fucking hours in Leuven for something that could’ve been handled in maybe ten minutes.

As for impressions of the people there, the staff strike me as coddling bureaucrats. My fellow students can only be described as “loathsome”.
You’d think Japanology would be the bottom of the proverbial barrel, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be very, very wrong. These people shouldn’t even be able to afford higher education, much less smell horribly within my personal space.

While I was waiting in Leuven, I ran into Leen in the Fnac. She gets more shallow and vapid every year. At one point the US and Canada came up, and she believes Canada is infinitely more harmful to the world than the US, because “they club seals”. I’m not even fucking kidding.
She also asked me if I believe in ghosts, alien abductions, and eskimos.

It seems the only reason I could think of is gone.