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After doing some random surfing, I came upon this quote from Tony Campolo. For those of you that don’t know of Tony, he’s a well-known Christian speaker who does talks all over the world. Actually, I saw him once in Moncton at a youth rally about 8 years ago.

Anyways, here is the quote which Tony has been known to say at churches and youth groups. Quite true, isn’t it? Especially when you put it into the context of where he says it.

“I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ’shit’ than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” - Tony Campolo

Another reason why I’ve put this quote here is that I will be considering another option to my possibilities of either graduate school or going out into the work force after graduation: missions. The past couple of large group meetings at ACF have dealt with missionaries from the Philippines and Kazakhstan who have told of their experiences. These speakers have been very interesting and I’ve started thinking about going on either a long or short term mission trip after leaving Acadia. I’m not sure where I would go. There are possibilities for India, China, Africa, and pretty much any other place in the world. Once again, I’ll keep you posted as to any new developments.

The past few days have been quite interesting here in Wolfville.

Saturday brought the first snow storm of the season as the Valley was under a heavy snowfall warning. I spent most of the afternoon in the library and then ventured down to Tim Horton’s for some hot chocolate amidst the storm. I also stopped at Shopper’s to pick up some candy canes, just to get in the Christmas mood with the help of the snow as well.

Waking up on Sunday revealed a power outage. Although we didn’t know about it at the time, 6 transformers and power lines in Halifax had fallen due to the storm and left 100,000 people without power. Through word-of-mouth, we heard that power wouldn’t be restored until Wednesday at the earliest and then it changed to no power until the end of the week.

With no power, it meant not having access to the internet, which also meant having no way of using my desktop or having any way to recharge my laptop battery. Therefore, not much work was accomplished on Sunday except for some Translators marking. Also, you don’t realize how fast the Sun sets unless you don’t have power as it was completely dark here at 5:30pm. After venturing down through campus and downtown, it was evident that everyone was out of power. The only light on downtown was the flickering OPEN sign at Joe’s. They were taking orders for pizzas and donairs with the help of their propane oven.

On Monday there was still no power and plans were in the mix to head into Halifax or Stellarton, where Julie’s parents live. I opted to ride out the storm and power outage which could show a hint of adventure while trying to stay warm for the next couple of days without power. As it turns out, a couple hours after Sean and Julie left for Stellarton, the power came back on. This prompted the thermostats to be cranked up to 20 degrees and my computers were quick to be turned on as well. It seemed like only a part of Wolfville had power, as much of the downtown area was still in the dark. While on MSN, it seems like everyone had vacated Wolfville and headed into NB or into Halifax. Many of these people left within hours of the power coming back on.

So now it’s back to classes again. Only 2 weeks left in the term!

The first few snowflakes started falling in Wolfville today, foreshadowing the approaching winter season! It’s hard to believe that it’s almost the middle of November with only 3 weeks left in the term.

I write my second Micro-Economics test tomorrow morning which I am feeling quite confident about. After that, the workload will still be quite massive as I have 3 projects to complete before the end of the term. All of the projects consist of a project report and presentation.

The projects include:

• Distributed Object Oriented Programming/Final Year Project - Design a component API for APEX.
• Data Communications - Discuss how Huffman codes can be used to compress messages where data packets can be sent to another machine, decompressed, and correctly read.
• Artificial Intelligence - Create and implement several scheduling algorithms for choosing a conflict-free schedule of courses taking into account each course and timeslot having an appropriate associated cost.

On top of these projects, I also have two more Translators assignments to mark before the end of term plus other assignments from all of my courses.

I doubt whether I’ll get a good night’s sleep until it’s exam time!