Last night (Sunday night), I had a very strange dream... and it felt so real too.  It is also evidence that I've been watching too much CSI: Miami.  (And sorry for breaking "The epic summary of 2W"; it will return.)

So I was sleeping in my bed, as usual... and then I got shot in the neck.  Multiple times - but it wasn't bad enough to prevent me from whipping out a phone to call 911 in which I clearly told the operator I was shot multiple times in the neck and that I needed police right away (an ambulance didn't occur to me at the time).  The operator said help was on the way, and then became silent - which is weird, because 911 operators are trained to stay on the line until help arrives.  In my case, the operator would be trying to keep me awake.  But anyways, I'm lying there.  And then my breathing gets more laboured and shallower...

What seems like eons later, three people show up in my room.  I only remember two of them: Lt. Horatio Caine and Dr. Alexx Woods, two characters from the hit show CSI: Miami.  The doctor asked me if I could move, and I barely croaked out "It feels like I'm paralyzed".  Then she (the doctor) said, "I've seen this many times before, he's beyond help."  Then she's getting ready to do whatever she does on dead bodies and Horatio's getting ready to do his one-liner, and I'm still lying there.  Then someone's singing something about Antarctica (which I thought was weird) but then everything faded to white...

And then I woke up.  It turns out that I had a feeling of pins and needles all over by sleeping awkwardly, the door to my room was opened by someone, and the blinds were opened (I sleep with them closed to keep some of the ambient light out).  So I guess that accounts for the feeling of being paralyzed, the three people coming in, and the fading to white.  And the choice of characters definitely came from watching CSI: Miami.  Really weird.  Since I woke up at like 8am, I just went back to sleep.

According to a dream interpreter I randomly Googled,

Death is an everyday part of life. So dreams often use it to illustrate leaving something behind, such as childhood or a relationship. [...] Death is also something we sometimes create into a frightening spectre. It is something we all face. So some dreams in which we actually die, are a means of experimenting with meeting death. If we do not do this, if we are frightened of death and have not worked out a relationship with it, then we will not live fully and daringly. But in our dream life, death usually holds in it the promise of change or regeneration-rebirth is some way.

So maybe that's what it means... who knows what the subconscience can conjure up.

I know dreams are very personal things, but have you had any strange dreams lately?  Any close brushes?

Working and going to school in a densely-populated region like downtown Toronto inevitably means seeing people from all walks of life from lots of different places.  All walks of life including smokers.  Now don't get me wrong, people who smoke could be really nice people (I don't know a lot of smokers).  But it's the things some do that really annoy me.  Especially at Union Station.

The first of these is smoking just outside the door.  It's now socially unacceptable and illegal to smoke inside a public building, places of work, and most private buildings in the downtown core.  Pretty soon, it might become illegal to smoke inside cars carrying kids under 16 years of age.  Where does that leave people to have a smoke?  Outside buildings.  But where outside?  Just outside the door.  Maybe it's cold, maybe it's windy, maybe the people I've seen are just lazy - I don't know.  But people who smoke just outside buildings annoy me because the smoke lingers because of the covered enclosure just outside most doors, and people decide to exhale just as I'm passing by.  At Union Station, people smoke in the area between the subway station and the concourse area - after all, it is outside.  But again, they are just outside the doors that say "no smoking within 9 feet of door".  This sign is visible on both doors leading to the subway and to the concourse.  This leads me to the next point, which is...

Smoking under a "no smoking sign".  Smoking on GO Transit property is prohibited, but people seem to forget at the bus terminal downtown.  There are bright yellow signs saying "no smoking on platforms" with a really big cigarette that's crossed out.  But on more than one occasion, I've seen people smoking in lines waiting to board buses.  Once I even saw a person smoking right under the sign!  It's not like there aren't designated areas for smoking at the terminal, but the total disregard of those signs is unacceptable to me.

The last point that really annoys me is smokers' apparent right to litter.  On countless occasions I've witnessed people just chucking their cigarette butts on the ground when they've finished.  Sometimes just outside buildings, or waiting in line at the bus terminal, or out the window of their cars.  This makes the entrances to buildings, sidewalks and roads really dirty - so dirty that it's become commonplace.  I fail to see how these people think they can do this, while littering is an offence under provincial by-laws.

So what can be done to reduce these occurrences?  Without appearing like your grade 1 teacher telling you to clean up, not much I suppose.  There could be more enforcement by police officers, but there, admittedly, are more serious crimes to address in this city.  Perhaps these individuals simply need to be educated about the consequences of their actions.

What do you think should be done?

Part 5 of this 7-part series is about animals.

//edit - Wow, never expected to be featured.  This is pretty cool.

For those of you unfamiliar with the bus terminal at Union Station (which is pretty much most of you, I would imagine), it's a strip of land one block long with 6 bus boarding platforms.  There are two designated smoking areas on each side of the terminal building (which isn't very big), complete with a sign (that allows smoking), benches, and a specialized disposal bin for cigarettes.

If this wasn't clear before, the sight of multiple cigarette butts on the ground doesn't make the surrounding environment very attractive.  I would think that people who live, work, play, and go to school in a city would take pride in its appearance, seeing as they go through that area on a consistent basis.

And lastly, I'm not on a mad rant here.  I just thought this merits a little bit of discussion, seeing as no one talks about it here.  To quote someone,

"I think judging someone on the Internet when you haven't met face-to-face is unfair, especially since when I write, it's just text.  So people just make up in their head the tone in which I speak.  Or my body language.  So these people probably imagine me typing stuff with furrowed brows, angrily pounding my fists on the keyboard, and then going outside and beating people up and stealing cars because they picture me as being such a jerk, but I'm actually quite pleasant in person."

--Jon Graham, "It's a Wonderful Live: Episode 1"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyto3AubZFw

Oh, and one more thing: this isn't meant to be a blanket statement on all individuals who make a choice to smoke.  I just wanted to highlight some things that people in general may not give a second thought.

So after reading the title, you're probably thinking one of three things:

1. Richard's finally gone off the deep end because of the 2W term
2. Richard's been playing too much Halo and has become a hardcore gamer
3. ?!?!?!!?!?!??!?!?!?!

Well I'm happy to tell you that it's a combination of all three... somewhat.  You see, there's this guy.  His name is Jon.  And he's 19.  And he makes the funniest Halo machinimas ever.

For the uninitiated, machinima is:

A collection of associated production techniques whereby computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rendered using real-time, interactive 3-D engines, such as those of games, instead of professional 3D animation software

Specifically, Jon makes use of the theater mode (which captures everything that happens during a game and saves it to the XBox hard drive for later viewing) to make his videos.  In addition to a few action figures from the game.  One of his series is titled "Arby 'n' the Chief", namesakes from the primary protagonists of Halo 3.  In this series, two action figures of these characters are used to act out the storyline that he writes.  Master Chief is portrayed as a stupid, inconsiderate, and foul-mouthed (not to mention horrible spelling and grammar) 12-year-old kid - in essence, a "noob", whereas The Arbiter is portrayed as a reasonable person who likes to talk a lot, but uses coherent sentence structure and all that good stuff we learned in English class.  The series thrives on the interactions between these two characters regarding commentary about various video games on the market (primarily Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4), the Halo 3 community, and just society in general - and this makes for some great comedy - crude, but effective.

The series started January 7 (coincidentally, the start of term), and now, the 11th episode is in production.  The series is actually a sequel to an original series (by the same guy) called "Master Chief Sucks at Halo", which establishes the character of Chief.  The videos have given me a really good reason to have a good laugh over the course of the term, mostly because of the dichotomy of the Arbiter and the Chief.  The Chief can really be quite stupid at times.  Also, the background music that's used in these videos is often to my liking.  You may have noticed on MSN or GTalk that I've started to listen to "Love Underground" by Robbers on High Street, or the "Super Smash Bros Brawl Main Theme".  You can thank Jon and ANTC episodes 3 and 6, respectively.

My personal favourite episode of the 10 produced so far is #6: "Brawl".  Here's the video for your viewing pleasure.  Note that this video contains "strong language" and "adult themes", and is not intended for younger audiences.

If you liked that, here are links to the other episodes:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: Recon
Episode 3: Attitude
Episode 4: Melee
Episode 5: Martyrdom
Episode 6: Brawl
Episode 7: Girls
Episode 8: Legendary
Episode 9: Newcomers
Episode 10: Cortana

I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I did.

The next part of this 6-part series is dedicated to the epic course that is AER201H1S - Engineering Design.

It's been quite a while since I've written something here - if I can subtract correctly, it's been about a 3-1/2 month blog-less streak, in which many things have occurred.  So you may be wondering why I haven't been writing regularly, like I did over the summer... or maybe you're wondering why I'm breaking the streak at this time, probably the busiest time of year for those at school.

One of the courses second-year engineering science students take in the winter term is "Engineering Design" - which is a pretty vague name for the course, because it could mean anything.  This is true because the course is defined differently every year.  In each year, the instructor sets three related projects in the form of a "Request for Proposals" (RFP) document.  Then students, in teams of three, design and build a robot to fulfill the objective stated in the RFP.  The entire process serves as a context for teaching the various aspects of engineering design.

This year, the project that was assigned to my team was a "Flashing Ball Test Machine" - basically, we're given a set of balls that flash light when a moderate shock is applied, and we have to design and build a machine that test for their functionality (i.e. do they light up when struck?).  Here's a short teaser video to show a component of our robot in action:

Want to see how it all works together?  Then I will extend an invitation to attend the Engineering Design Competition, where teams compete to have the robot that is most functional, i.e. performs all the tasks required in the RFP.  Here's a promotional poster created by the instructor for this event:

Here's a Google map to the building:

The Sandford Fleming building is the one labeled "University of Toronto" slightly northwest of the green arrow.  It's about a 5-minute walk from Queen's Park subway station or the College St. stop on the Spadina LRT.

As you can see, my public demonstration is this coming Monday from 1-6pm.  I don't know yet when my demonstration is scheduled, but it will likely be in the first half of the session.  Of course, I'll still be there for all of the five hours.  If you have an extended lunch break, I'd really appreciate a visit (if you're in the Toronto area, of course) so I can show you what I've been slaving over for the past four months... but if you can't make it that's okay too.  Also, I would strongly suggest that you attend the other sessions as well - all of the projects featured at the demonstration have innovative solutions to the problem presented in their respective RFPs, so it's definitely interesting to see what second-years can do.

I hope I'll see you there!

At U of T, we pay an ancillary fee for the use of ROSI (Repository of Student Information); basically Queen's QCard and Waterloo's Quest system (sorry if I've messed up the names).  Anyways, we pay $30 a year for this service, and it's "not available" during stated operating hours (weekdays 00:15 - 23:45).  They didn't even give a nice error message apologizing for their incompetence (okay, maybe that's a little harsh)  How ridiculous is this?  (now that's better)

Anyways, the 2W term is going okay... Mondays are now more horrible than ever because of the 5-hour design practical session (see below)

But the Tuesday afternoons off partially compensates for it... not really.  The best class is definitely Quantum... the prof is really goofy.

//edit Apparently ROSI was hacked into last night... but it's still the University's fault for not sealing all the loopholes and safeguarding against cyber-attacks...