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The teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is now out. Them kids are gettin’ older.

I took my mother out for dinner tonight. We usually go a few days before Mother’s Day because the service is crap that day and it’s too busy. This year my mom got two dinners because my sister took her out earlier in the week. She’s at Disneyland for a few days, they had to go beforehand.

Anyways, after dinner, I’m waiting at the bus stop along Broadway near Heather. As the 99B is just pulling up, I see this flash of a hippy silhouette out of the corner of my eye. I only know one guy who has a hippy silhouette and it’s Greg Williams. As this blur raced by me, it grabbed my arm and I saw it was indeed Greg Williams.

“Oh sorry man!”

“Greg, come home with me!”

“I can’t man!”

Greg never stopped his running as he sprinted to catch a bus behind mine. I didn’t have time to ponder what just happened as I needed to board my own bus. I bet he had a good lunch today.

You know what I had for dinner tonight? Baked paneer tikka prathawrap with dhal curry. It was damn tasty. Probably one of the best meals I’ve had in a while. Next week is shaping up to be a culinary delight as well at SJC. Sunday night is fish and chips. Monday, they’re having tacos. Let me repeat that… they’re having tacos on Monday. Sweet. Wednesday, it’s BBQ chicken with spicy wedge fries. For dessert, it’s choice of novelty ice cream.

No time for a detailed post tonight. I have a job interview tomorrow to prepare for. This one will be quite thorough and long. This company will not leave a single stone unturned. Guessx which company it is?

In the meantime, I invite you to view the trailer from Will Ferrell’s new movie, Kicking & Screaming. Ferrell will be hosting SNL May 14th, so mark it on your calendar.

UPDATE: I’m not exactly certain, but I think the issue has been resolved now.

If you want to experience bureaucracy, you should try enrolling in a large university. There are a million different little tasks you have to take care of to graduate from UBC. Even though I meticulously completed every single one of those tasks, I had a strange feeling that I’d encounter a hiccup because of the large bureaucracy machine at UBC.

Well, I was right. Just before I was scheduled to head downtown today, I received an e-mail from my academic supervisor. The contents of the e-mail raised immediate concern. According to my supervisor, the grades for the last two classes I took had not been submitted yet and without those grades, I wouldn’t be able to graduate until November, a seven month delay. I was told to get in touch with the instructors of those two classes and have them submit those grades immediately.

So I did not hesitate to call both those instructors immediately. Both were not in their offices, but I left a detailed message explaining my situation. As an additional measure, I also e-mailed both of them. Having no other way of contacting them, I decided I could steal away for a couple hours downtown.

While I was downtown, I checked my voicemail and one of my instructors had already replied. She had indeed submitted my marks yesterday. To her credit, she even double-checked with one of the departmental assistants. My mark had been entered into the computer yesterday and from their end of the computer system, they could see it.

When I returned home shortly before 5pm, I checked my e-mail and the other instructor had replied as well. He submitted my mark on Friday or possibly even Thursday, but regardless, he told me he physically handed in a sheet of marks to the departmental office staff for entry into the system.

At least to me, I can’t see where anyone did anything wrong. Both my instructors submitted my marks prior to today. One instructor even confirmed it shows up on the system, the only system is used to check student grades. Hell, I just checked my grades on-line and even I can see both of them. The record is complete.

So, the question remains, why am I teetering on the edge of a delayed graduation? Because this is what happens when a huge, complex series of events have to occur for even just a single student to graduate. It’s almost amusing to think that something that is completely out of my control might cause me to not graduate in May.

I am hoping that in the morning, everything will have cleared up, but the cynical part of me won’t be surprised if the fun has just started.

There’s an interesting article over at the Dose web site. It promises to get readers all caught up on the Star Wars lore so they can understand the next movie that’s coming out. This might be useful for some of my readers… erm, Sarah Kidd… I’m looking in your direction.

Please note, this is the farthest extent of media I’ll be showing from Sith. This blog remains a spoiler-free zone.

I’m too tired to post anything coherent or entertaining. Instead, here’s a tiny picture of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. If you ask me, and most people do, that dude don’t look 42.

At 11:59pm on Saturday night, my U-Pass will expire and I will have to join the unfortunate ranks of people who have to pay for transit each time they use it.

Of course, the year I graduate will be the first time that the U-Pass will be offered to students in the summer. Last year, we had to pay for transit during the summer months. This year, many of my friends still in grad school lined up this week to get their summer U-Pass.

If I really wanted to make the most use of my U-Pass tomorrow, I guess I could take the Skytrain way out to Surrey. That would mean, however, that I’d be out in Surrey. I think instead I’ll take the bus out to Safeway and buy some groceries. In the evening, I’ll use it again to go out for dinner. I wonder if I’ll be able to catch the bus home before midnight strikes and my U-Pass turns into a pumpkin. Maybe I’ll buy some bus tickets just in case.

I bet most of you have an e-mail account. If you do, you probably use an e-mail client like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, or Mac Mail. I use something called Pine to access my primary e-mail account. Pine was the first e-mail client I was introduced to way back in 1994. I still like it for its simplicity and security. It’s virtually impossible to get a virus from an e-mail while using Pine. Oh sure, other e-mail clients have fancier features, but I like my Pine.

The one thing I don’t like about my e-mail account is the fact that my inbox contains nearly 1000 messages. I’m horrible at filing away messages into folders. Even though I have and use folders for school, TA stuff, and job related messages, my inbox is still pushing a grand. I keep a lot of e-mails because I always think I’ll need to them in the future, but I rarely figure out in what context.

For some reason, I feel a bit of shame when the inbox goes over 1000 messages. When that happens, without fail, I go and force myself to find a few messages to delete to bring it in under 1000.

Now that school is over, I want to go through my inbox and really do some housecleaning. Make new folders, delete messages from the penis pill companies, and just generally organize things.

I’m curious, how many e-mails do you have in your inbox?

About fifteen minutes ago, I was wondering what the hell I was going to write for a blog entry. I’m guessing writing a blog is a lot like feeding your kids… some days, you just don’t have the energy to do it. Then I stumbled upon a web site for a new game called Area 51. It turns out that David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson did some voice work for said game. Interesting.

Further research produced a somewhat bizarre interview of the two that was conducted by a gaming web site. Though the interviewer was present, he barely gets a question in and exerts a lot of effort to get them to talk about the game itself. What did they talk about instead? Here’s just a small snippet:

MM: It’s this Japanese gentleman who has a woman kind of make a fulcrum of her body-I use that word to make it sort of scientific-and he sits on her and he spins around.

DD: He spins around her?

MM: He spins around with his member

DD: Inside?

MM: In place. It’s one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Frightening, somewhat. And he’s hairless.

DD: How does he maintain the flat spin?

MM: Rigid stomach muscles.

DD: So he does it himself? That’s why it’s impressive.

MM: He dropped the Six-Minute Abs for the

DD: It’s the Helicopter Diet or something.

MM: It’s crazy. Just go online, Google “helicopter f***, hairless.”