I am more matrix than you think I am

Rapture abounds! I don't know about you, but no earthquake shook my house, no purge-o officials came knocking on my door, and certainly I wasn't judged before a panel of lawyers in starched suits. That is, unless the people preaching this world end mean 6pm, Hawaii time. In which case, I think I have about two hours left. Perfect. Oh yeah, and apologies for the late post.

***Originally, the following was meant to be at the end of the post, but I decided to increase readership by putting it at the beginning.***

My exchange student replied to my email I sent him recently, and so I decided to finally try and find him on Facebook. Typed in the email he sent me, but Fb doesn't allow you to search by email. Typed in his name, but obviously too common (100 bajillion+ results). So I took about 2 hours finding any decent location filter for Fb friend searches, and dumped "Toronto, Ontario" in there. No luck. All variations of John/Jon/Jonathan/Johnathan/ol' Jono etc. Still no luck. Not giving up yet, though. Try his relatives... no mom, too many dads, and one sister avec unique name. Pretty anti-creeper profile, and I can't see her friends at all. Also, I don't want to friend her until after I've actually met her or something (so as to not appear creep-like. Obviously.)

Fb has a "find friends by email feature", so I quickly added him onto my contacts on my school email, and tried to import that. "facebook is not able to import your contacts from this server". Okay, let's try gmail, because it's also surprisingly not listed as one of the "premier" mail sites. Add as contact, import. Negative, same response. Try again with Yahoo! account. Add contact, this time go directly to Yahoo! list on facebook. Friend of my dad's imported, nothing else. Rack brains and think again.

"Ridley College" in search box, maybe I can find him from the school's facebook page. No luck, although it has a lot of likes, I can't see who those people are. Okay, let's try some built-in search filters. Facebook does have some, but only if you're clever and determined to spend 2 hours finding them. They only allow you to choose location, education, and workplace, so I tried "Toronto, Ontario", as well as "Ridley College" under education, but that didn't give me anything. So I looked at the groups and some random Ridley group popped up. I knew it was from the school, so a quick "View Members" and command-F "jo" showed up negative. Damn.

Other dodgy-looking (wow!) groups were tried, before I finally just accepted the "Bishop Ridley College" that kept popping up. Okes must state categorically whether their school has a BISHOP(S) in front of its name dammit!! Example: Bishops Diocesan College, or just "DC" as the cool cats call it. Honestly, who...? Do we think we're some kind of skate brand? Really...

[Talking of Bishops, I just saw the best (de)motivational poster ever, made by an acquaintance. You are credited, Davi, except that I find your choice of pointy finger disturbing.

]
***Back to the internet hunt now.

Anyways, this still didn't lead me to his profile. Frustration! My mum said I should give up and just ask him to friend me (as there are only 7 like-named people on Facebook) but I was more, ah, relentless. Or maybe resilient is a better word, actually. So I look at the search results, and one of them is a link through to the college website, to a house-master's report. So I check this out, and this leads me to the info that ol' Jono took part in some inter-house event and listed his team-mates beside him. Type in the slavic-sounding names, and eventually struck gold on an unrecurring Asian-sounding (no, in fact it was most definitely Asian) name. Command-F, "jo" is enough, and I'm on his profile. Send friend request, check out his interests etc. Seems like a cool guy!

Anyways, for those of you who actually read this blog for the daily updates, dinner is served:

ModelUN is quite the intense discursive style. It's also overly democratic, and as there are a lot of intricate inner workings, I won't get into it here... Suffice to say that my team has been assigned to represent Eqypt. The topic is "Internet Access and its limitations" or something along those lines. oops ;)

Hmm, today's fencing did not go well. In fact, it went so badly that it kind of ruined the rest of my day. But I pulled through and for those of you eagerly awaiting science notes, I managed to get some done and will be working on more tomorrow. I'll sell what I've got which should be everything.

Talking of linking things, Guy also has(d) a blog which he kept very up to date up until the end of the climbing season, some 3 months ago. I've urged him to get it started again (a bit difficult considering he's not doing any climbing right now) but this is it. Might as well do some advertising if he does some in return...