Your son has been busy. I have what some may call "exams" coming up. I've also noticed some weirdness with my compy. Start Menu stopped functioning...menus and the address bar stopped working in IE, and my computer was generally slow. I did a virus scan and found I had a virus. This particular one would stick itself onto any EXEs and eat up your memory. My first virus scan removed the virus itself. I did a subsequent virus scan, which scanned EVERY exe file that I have on my computer. Turns out that little virus spawned itself into a total of 1,197 other viruses on my computer. After that was said and done with, deleted and corrected, my computer feels faster, smoother and it even looks  younger. So with my old laptop new again, I return to study and the permanent bedroom I call the Library.

So I haven't made any posts in the past few days. Lots of late nights camping in the library, sleeping in the dark corners. I'm surprised they're not charging me rent. I was hanging out with my friend the other day, and we were talking about the Windows XP themes and how little you could really change them. He once showed me this program where you can convert your entire start menu into the Mac OS program bar, with all the fade-ins, and growing icons. It was pretty sweet, but alas, programmed in OpenGL. Unless you have a nifty little graphics card, running something in OpenGL is painfully slow. Also, the resources it eats up. Oh the poor little resources. So I had an idea:  "You know, if you made an active desktop, you could probably make your own thing with Flash, and it would be way  faster than OpenGL." He laughed, agreed then looked at me and said "You're probably going to do that now, aren't you?".  I laughed in acknowledgement. So I started...

It's 4:48am, and I've just now finally finished my essay. I haven't slept in 48 hours. This is incredible. I've reached a whole new level of subconsciousness. Everything is a daze. I've actually pulled off sleeping in the library earlier this week - so that's an interesting achievement. I've fixed the menu on my site so it works properly in Firefox. It took a lot of extra coding, and a lot more figuring out. I hate cross-browser support. One browser knows immediately knew what I'm trying to do, and building my site is so fast for it. And then - I test my site in another browser, and I run into horrible problems.

How did we get to today? Something must have happened. I think it happened sometime around 11:59pm. The world shifted into another day.  Today is another beautiful autumn day. just gorgeous. I was walking down the streets of downtown, and seeing people walking into the stores and just having a nice brisk stroll. I was so envious. They don't have essays to work on. They have no homework. They work 9-5, 5 days a week, and that's it. 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. When there's 168 hours in a week, that amounts to only about 24% of the week spent working. That's less than a quarter of your time! Assuming, of course, you don't sleep. I can't wait till I'm done school. I want to get a job, work, make money, start my life. I want to be able to walk down streets on Sunday and enjoy life, and pay bills and taxes. All the photographs are peeling, and the colors turn to gray, he stayed in his room with memories for days, he faced an undertow of future's laid to wa...

It's funny... finalizing things on one part of my life. I wrote my last exam months ago - but the Graduation ceremony is finally here. I've since become quite comfortable and aware of the fact that my university life is done with, and has been over for about 3 months now. What's weird is having to go and order grad caps, gowns and tickets, and having to enter in my student ID and, for the first time in 4 years, I actually forgot what it is. I even had to pull out my wallet and give it a look. How soon we forget. My graduation is on November 13th, and I will get my degree. Honours Bachelor of Science, with a Double Major in Physics and Philosophy, Minor in Math. With all that, it doesn't quite sum up the past 4 years here (especially all the games I've coded, websites I've built & rebuilt along the way...which are ultimately what has contributed most to my getting my current job.) Last night I installed Linux on my friend's computer. I like Linux - when y...

So much time has passed since my last entry, and so much has happened. Frosh week came and went, and was an absolute blast. It had it's ups and downs of course, but was always amazingly fun. I met a lot of the froshies - some were pretty cool and interesting people. One key moment was giving a campus tour. I completely diverged from the route and gave what I considered a more relevant tour. I took them to the best places for coffee, pizza, best places to focus, secret spots. We were gone for longer than we were supposed to, and I was worried people would be annoyed - but they gave me a round of applause and were still talking about the places I took them long after we'd returned. So that was cool. After frosh week classes started. I really like a lot of my classes. I'm a little daunted by the number of essays, and written work, as well as the required reading but so far I've been keeping up. This weekend I may just try and pull ahead a little, so I won't fall behind...

I didn't quite do so much yesterday (Sunday). I went out with my dad for some coffee at one point, but that was pretty much it. I spent the rest of the day loafing. And boy did I loaf. In the evening I worked on a site with my brother. It was in the final touches phase, and we all we had to do is tell people to visit it. That was what we thought...until a crazy mishap occurred, and the entire site got corrupt, and we had to make the entire thing again from scratch. But not only that, but we had a 6 hour deadline to do it, because thinking the website was done, we had already told people to visit it. And being that my brother lives in Nashville, and is on central time, and had to go to bed at around 11:30 (his time) that meant that I had to do the all of the work. So from 9:30 till about 1:30am, I rebuilt the site to where it was where we had it. Then I crashed and slept until 11 the next day, which is today.

Today, I hung out with my dear sweet grandmother, whom I haven't seen in about 10 years, because she lives in another country and doesn't get much chance to visit. She's a really dear and sweet lady. Very happy, very funny lady, who doesn't mind going up escalators but is very scared to go down them. I have no idea why. The other day, I took out the ladder and climbed up to the top of the roof of our house to check out the scenery of Vancouver. You can see the whole city from the rooftop. When I came down I joked that she should climb the ladder and check it out. She said ok, and went to the ladder, and climbed the first two steps. I went and held the ladder steady, thinking she was going to come back down. Then before I knew it, she went up two more steps, then three more, then all the way up. She didn't climb on to the roof, but she did climb to the top of the ladder, which is 10 feet tall. It blew me away. I mean, she's 82 years old, but the heart of a 10 yea...

Amazing, isn't it? I've restarted this weblog, and already I'm four days behind in my posting. To do a quick catch up, on Monday we drove back to Nashville. 7 hour drive, but a trip which took about 10 hours because we took our good sweet time and stopped a lot. We played some silly old road trip games that are supposed to be hard if you're a kid, but since none of us were kids, the games kept going on and on. We played Ghost, which is a game where one person stars off by saying one letter. Then the next person has to say a letter, one which follows normal English rules in spelling a word. It goes around until someone spells a word. The person who spells a word gets a G, then H, then O...it goes on until they get GHOST and they lose. That's a shitty explanation, but it's sorta like: Person1- A, Person2- P, Person 3- Uh...P, Person1-L, Person 2- Damn! Fine, E. And then Person2 gets a G. The word has to be over four letters, and if you pick a letter that can't...

After a couple of years of not updating, I've decided to bring this site back. So here it is, A Day in the Life, the Alishah Novin weblog. Many of you know me for having websites usually covered with flash intros, jpgs, gifs, and fancy JavaScript. As I explained when I first made this website back in 2003, this site will not be like that. It will be much more simple. Text. Nothing else. In fact, some of the old site will be updated just a little bit more to even remove some old features, which went against the idea of keeping this site simple. I have even changed the layout somewhat. Neat huh? I like to think so. Now, let me get to the actual journal entry. So where am I right now, and what I doing? Well this summer, as some of you may already know, I came to Tennessee to help out my brother. We're building websites, and doing some other geeky computer stuff. To make up for that though, we're also doing some tough guy stuff, like some hard core masonry in his back yard: we...