I’ve retired this blog and returned to my old one. WordPress, while great, isn’t for me. If you read the old one, you know where it is.

Bye.

What is the meaning of this hand gesture you ask? Perhaps it is a representation of the fertile playground that is ambiguity, where our imagination frolics like a happy child in an unseen prison– one made manifest by the severe limitations of our flawed consciousness. Perhaps the open end to our left represents an escape, and consequently the as-of-yet unmet potential of humankind.

Or I could be making some sort of comment about how small your dick is, I’m not really sure.

If your boss ever says to you the words “workstation maintenance” you run. Run like the wind.

Yesterday I started my co-op work term at a company that shall remain nameless (not that I’d complain about them here if I had a problem anyway… I’m not stupid) as a “System/Network Administrator”. Granted, my actual job is not as impressive as that sounds, but I think I’m going to like it pretty well. I’m learning from the student that worked here the previous term right now, but in a week he goes back to school and then the only IT people for this particular location are me and a career techie who floats back and forth between this location and another one. So the techie (whom henceforth I dub “Valerie”) won’t be here about half the time and I’ll be the only on-location tech support person at the complex … Clearly I’ll be contacting Valerie a lot. My responsibilities include routine stuff like changing the backup tapes in the servers, less routine stuff like dashing off to the rescue when something breaks and (hopefully) fixing it, as well as some projects and stuff.

This week, the project is to run through the workstation maintenance checklist on every desktop machine at the company.

This is about as much fun as it sounds. Or as I said to someone earlier, “More fun than a barrel of monkeys… provided that those monkeys are dead and your job is to count and catalogue each and every one of the malignant tumours that dispatched them to their cylindrical grave.”

Luckily, I don’t think we have to do this very often, and it’ll be over soon. If I ever have to update windows for someone else again after this it will be too soon.

On a lighter note, they have the coolest device ever at this place. It’s a machine that cuts designs out of metal with a freaking laser. I don’t know what would happen if I were left alone with this thing, but I can only imagine it would go something like this:

Andrew (not actual boss’s name): Hey, uh… Ryan? Did you by any chance cut the words “Ryan rules” into that steel sheet with the laser?

Me: Nope.

Andrew: Are you sure? The evidence is pretty compelling.

Me: I think it must have been someone else.

Andrew: Then why is your face still frozen in an expression of child-like glee and wonder, as if you just achieved everything you’ve ever desired?

Me: Hm. I don’t know. The vending machine gave me a free chocolate bar today.

Andrew: Look, I didn’t want it to come to this, but not only do I have security camera footage of you writing this message, I’ve also got footage of you placing an action figure in the enclosure, shouting “no mister Bond I expect you to die” and laughing maniacally for about 10 minutes straight.

Me: You know, I think I left Bob’s computer logged into administrator. I’ll be right back.

The Tech Don is having this little contest where I can get a chance to win a sah-weet $3000 laptop by doing various things such as subscribing to their RSS feed and adding a link to them on my site. So… behold! The Tech Don is now present in my links section by some work of magic.

Here’s the contest

But of course, YOU don’t need a laptop. Nope. No reason you should enter that contest at all. You should just step aside and let someone else win it. And by someone else I mean me.

Okay, so ever since I decided to make this blog more about writing interesting/humorous things rather than just rambling about my life, I’ve basically doomed myself to vicious stampedes of writer’s block. The way I see it, there’s only one way to break out of this. That’s right. Some meaningless Ryan-babble.

So… what’s happening in my life. Well, let me do a brief sweep of my living space. In front of me is a computer. No surprises there. How about directly to my left. Oh yeah, the 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar. It was a Christmas gift, which is really nice, because now whenever some girl sees it I can just shrug and go “It was a gift. I didn’t wanna be rude.” Okay, little bit more to the left, my bed… My closet. The suitcase I still haven’t unpacked from Christmas time… Oh, there’s my roommate, whom we’ll call Zhan. He’s from China and he lived in Canada for about a year before coming to Waterloo. His English is alright, and apparently he really likes basketball. You now know as much about him as I do.

Behind me is, erm, Fred’s old desk (I’m not going to tell you his real name, which is a shame, because it’s probably the coolest one I’ve ever heard in my life)… currently dominated entirely by my loose worksheets (all of which I need to throw out), except for a small corner on which “Zhan” has modestly placed a small book. “Fred” used to share this room with us, but he had a stomach ulcer and wisely opted to take the term off. After he moved out, my mess spread, much like a plague, into his former living space. You can literally see the silhouette of an out-stretched arm –one made entirely out of junk– reaching from my desk to Fred’s, grasping it with a deadly, messy coil. My own desk, much like the eye of a storm, is actually fairly tidy and well-organized. Funny that.

Woah, that’s so weird. I have an entry idea now.

How to Write a Holy Book in 6 Easy Steps

So, you’ve got yourself a religion. You saw some miracles, had some fun, but now your saviour’s kicked it, some men wearing skirts are trying to kill you, and suddenly it occurs to you that someone should probably write all that God stuff down. Don’t panic. With this guide, writing a bible has never been easier! Just follow these simple steps and before you know it, you’ll have yourself a text that will be revered for generations.

Step 1. Don’t worry too much about writing exactly what God/the prophet said. Yeah yeah, maybe he said “That is an abomination”, maybe he said “I’m not particularly fond of fruit salad.” I mean, he didn’t expect you to remember all that stuff did he? You’re pretty sure you know what he was trying to say anyway.

Step 2. Be cryptic. Nothing irritates people more than religious messages that are easy to understand. If any Joe Blow can get something out of it, what’s the point of reading in the first place? Don’t worry if some parts don’t even make sense. People will just assume that it doesn’t make sense because God is so much smarter than they are. After all, God created the universe. What have they done lately?

Step 3. Make it long. I mean really long. People should die of starvation if they try to read this thing cover to cover. The advantages of this are two-fold. First of all, it makes God’s message seem really complicated and, consequently, you seem really smart for knowing all that stuff. Second of all, in the event that you get caught doing what closed-minded people would call “unethical”, you can just tell them the bible said it was okay. If the book is long enough, most people won’t have time to read the whole thing. Even those that do won’t remember it all, so you can always just add stuff later and claim it was in there all along. To supplement this technique, add a bunch of lengthy inconsequential bits that no-one cares about, like “Sam begat Harry begat Kelly begat Copernicus” etc.

Step 4. Contradictions, contradictions, contradictions. This is really key. Whenever you say one thing, make sure to say the exact opposite somewhere else. That way, you and your followers have a diverse selection of morals for any given day in a handy multiple-choice format. For instance, let’s suppose you wrote that everyone should love their neighbor. But then Larry goes off on a vision quest or something and some loud, obnoxious guy that you can’t stand moves in next door! You might think you’d be pretty stuck. Luckily though, you also wrote that if your neighbor really annoys you, it is your moral obligation to beat him to death with a rusty hammer.

Contradictions are also a particularly effective way to make normally straight-forward messages cryptic. “Do not kill” isn’t quite ambiguous enough and may result in actual moral restrictions. But when coupled with “beat your neighbor to death with a rusty hammer” it becomes a real noodle-scratcher, and theologists will debate all kinds of crazy interpretations of it for centuries.

Step 5. Prophecies. Once you’ve basically finished your book, it might be a good idea to throw a prophecy or two into the mix. Caution: Your followers will actually expect these things to happen. So try to avoid using actual dates if possible.

Step 6. Have fun! Writing a book can at times be a trying experience, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it! Go a little crazy; make the bad guy shoot lightning bolts out of his eyes or give someone a funny hat for comic relief. The chances that your successors won’t go messing around with your work later are pretty slim anyway, so have a little fun while it lasts.

I have a phone here on campus. My very own phone. Local calling is free and I rejected the long distance plan, so as long as I don’t make any long distance calls (which I don’t), I pay no money. You would think that, because of this, Bell would not send me any bills. You would also think wrong.

Every month, I get a letter from Bell Canada whose sole purpose is to tell me that I do NOT have to pay them money. Well, that’s nice of them, isn’t it? In fact, I wish everyone would pay me this courtesy. I can hardly sleep some nights, tossing and turning over whether I should be paying the Toronto Sun, despite the fact that I’ve never actually purchased a newspaper. I thought it only fair that I should put the minds of Bell Canada at ease as well and send them this:

If anyone else would like to tell me that I don’t owe them any money, my email address is excitinglyboring@gmail.com

I’d break a bottle of wine on it to commemorate this occasion, but I still haven’t gotten all the glass out of my keyboard from the last time.

Welcome to my new blog! Pretty, isn’t it? The image above is just the default header, and I intend to replace it with something else, so enjoy the scenery while it lasts.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably migrated over from my previous blog. This one will be a lot like that one, except I’ll be breaking my rants up into smaller pieces, thus allowing me to update more frequently (I hope). I might also be adding a touch (just a touch!) more sophistication to my writing. (In other words I might use the word “fuck” slightly less often. But only slightly.)

Since my last dip in the Xanga pool, I have of course moved out into the wild and completed my first term at the University of Waterloo with a… well, satisfactory grade. I’ve also been employed as a “Residence Computer Consultant” here on campus.

Now, the job’s not as impressive as that makes it sound. Basically, I’m a low-level tech guy who goes around troubleshooting people’s connectivity issues with ResNet. I’d like to say I have hilarious tales of phone cables plugged into ethernet ports and the like, but all the users I’ve dealt with so far have been disappointingly rational. It’s as if you have to be at least a little intelligent to go to university or something.

Now, toward the beginning of the term, there was some tension between a small contingent of ducks and I when a particularly stubborn group contested my place in the animal hierarchy by blocking the pathway to my building and refusing to move (If you think losing a battle of wills to a human being sucks, try losing one to a source of debatably agreeable poultry). Luckily, the winter has driven those terrors out. No longer do they haunt me in the night, mocking what I fear is the fragile core of my exposed soul, their maniacal laughs piercing the cold air: “WAAAAAAHwahwahwahwah!”

Yes, all is much better now indeed. Much, much better. The rest of my adventures, if they can be called that, I’ll leave for another time. For now though, I bid thee adieu.