“Psych”, which airs on the USA Network, is a show about a hyper-observant police consultant who uses his skill to pass himself off as a psychic. The gimmick gets tiring, but the interplay between the characters is sometimes amusing. Anyways, Susan and I were watching one of the latest episodes (“If You’re So Smart, Then Why Are You Dead?”) when I noticed the scenery looked eerily familiar.

Me: “Wow, that looks my high school.”

Me again: “That kinda looks like our library.”

Then this scene showed up, and I freaked out.

The Meitner School for gifted students in Santa Barbara? So. Not. That’s the lobby from David Thompson Secondary in Vancouver! That ugly mural of David Thompson the Explorer in the background is the clincher. Non-alumni viewers of this episode, please take note: this sure as hell wasn’t a private elite school - we were grungy public East Van all the way, baby.

I’m not sure all the scenes were shot there - I don’t remember wood-panelled sloped lecture halls - but they definitely shot in the counseling suite, outside the main doors, the library, the lobby, the teacher’s lounge (I think) and a few generic classrooms here and there. Anyways, any fellow classmates from my generation should check out this episode and ask yourself: What’s with the new blue paint scheme (remember the dingy mustard yellow)? When are they ever going to replace those weird geometric windows? What is that horrible new art next to the lobby stairs? And how much did DT get paid for this and what are they going to spend it on?

To the anonymous Simon Fraser University English 205 student who complained about my sister’s marking on RateMyProfessors.com: deal with it. If you got lousy marks from her, it’s because your essays were that lousy. You’re writing three thousand words in order to make a compelling argument, not just to fill a quota. You learned how to write five paragraph essays in English 12 for a reason. Did your paragraphs have an identifiable topic sentence? Were they at all related to the essay question? Did you have a semblance of an original thought in your head in response to that question before you started vomiting words onto the page? Did you even attempt to demonstrate that you did the course reading?

Or did you think that an essay without spelling errors was guaranteed to get you a B? Welcome to university. Swallow your pride and find my sister during her office hours and get some pointers on how to write, because you certainly didn’t learn how to do so in high school. Can’t understand her because you think she talks too fast? Then ask for remedial assistance elsewhere. Consider yourself a “very experienced English student”? Get over yourself: you’re taking a second year English course. Be glad I wasn’t your marker. And believe me, just because I’m a lowly CS grad doesn’t mean I’m not qualified to judge. Readers of your writing don’t need an English degree to see just how far below the bell curve you fell.

My sole interest in sports while at UBC was asking for my “recfac” fee back during the first week of school. Someone had the bright idea of funding the recreation centre by negative option billing: adding a “optional” fee to everyone’s tuition, and then obfuscating the fact that you could actually ask for that money back. Obviously I wasn’t very sports oriented then, and had little interest in varsity sports; and even then, I defy any Canadian reader (other than Leon) to name more than two university teams belonging to the CIS, the closest thing in Canada to the NCAA. We’d rather watch Hockey Night in Canada.

So you might understand how weird I still find the American enthusiasm for college sports.

Nonetheless, Susan and I went to Bayside Sports on Saturday to watch Georgia Tech (her alma mater) play at Clemson. I spent the last bar football outing talking to Karen, but this time was different. Surrounded by noisy Tech fans, fueled by an entire pitcher of beer, it wasn’t possible not to get caught up in the momentum. We watched a close game get very exciting in the last quarter with five touchdowns taking place in the last eight minutes. Then with less than thirty seconds left it was GT 21, CU 24 with Clemson setting up a field goal. Snap - and it was botched! The punter fell on the ball! Tech took possession, scored a touchdown with 11 seconds left on the clock! Bar went nuts! “Rambling wreck” chant at high volume!

I think in the end I’m still a hockey fan, but with the NHL lockout looming - well, I may have a backup sport to get interested in.

Since I graduated from David Thompson ten years ago this month, expect maudlin reminiscing about high school over the next few weeks. I expect commentary from anyone involved. (You know who you are.)

My mom’s kept around a lot of my papers from around that time which I asked to be shipped down when I moved to Seattle. When I finally started sifting through them lately, I came across the following gem: my Computer Science 12 grades, first time around (I took it in grade 10).

I’d totally forgotten about this. I’ve been trotting out my linear algebra grades in university as an example of my academic ineptitude, but I think this takes the cake. So what happened? Well, I didn’t quite “get” functions back then. I’d aced CS 11 the year before, and what little programming we’d done was accomplished in QuickBasic, without ever using functions - not that this wasn’t possible in QuickBasic, we just never got around to covering that subject. So when we were introduced to Turbo Pascal in CS 12, I just could not make that mental leap to the world of FUNCTION and PROCEDURE. Why on earth would people need to write code this way?

This sounds enormously stupid twelve years after the fact, but that really was the turning point in that course for me. After I got stuck on functions, I more or less gave up. We never even got close to using the object oriented features in Turbo Pascal so I don’t recall what else was covered. It couldn’t have been that much. (Bubble sorting?) I guess it didn’t help that I think I skipped more than half of the classes towards the second half of the year. There’s certainly no way I only missed zero and two days in the second and third terms like my report card says. We’d worked out a system where someone else would say “Here!” when Mr. Turley did roll call. I don’t think he noticed - or more likely, he just didn’t care; there were at least four of us gone each class, all of sitting consecutively in a row next to the printer right next to the teacher’s workstation.

Two years later I did take CS 12 again and more than made up for that glaring ‘P’ on my transcript. In between though, the curriculum hadn’t changed a single bit. (Thankfully, it was a different teacher.) So I ended studying for the AP exam on my own - and the AB level of CS tested some basic data structures, which involved this trivial middling concept called “pointers”. Yet another gigantic stumbling block for my addled brain to deal with. Why would anyone want to know the address of a variable when they already had a name for that variable? Why on earth would people need to write code this way?

Ever hear those programmers who claim they’ve been hacking on computers, ever since elementary school? And how it came naturally to them? Well, that sooo wasn’t me. It was uphill all the way, baby.