The real fright
31 October 2006 - 23:49.
Y'know what's really scary? How much fat is in many meats.
I went grocery shopping tonight (since I don't have kids to parade around) and because I'm trying to get into better shape for rowing, I'm paying a lot more attention to the labels of the things I buy. Did you know that Save-On-Foods has nutritional information on many of their packaged meats? Like breakfast sausage? Have you ever read the labels to see exactly how many calories and how much fat are in those things? A single all-beef breakfast sausage has 43% of my recommended daily allowance of fat. Keep walking around the meat department, and keep reading. Never before in my life have I seen such a valid argument for being a vegetarian. I think I need to be Vegan for a while, because eating healthy is really tough these days.
All Hallows Eve
31 October 2006 - 16:01.
BOO!!! Did I scare you?
Or, if you prefer Happy Samhain, and the best for a New Year.
For myself, I admit to being tempted to dressing up and going door-to-door, just because I can. I think there would be merit in being the oldest trick-or-treater on the block.
Good and Bad
30 October 2006 - 10:27.
The good part about the weekend? I got to go over to Victoria to race at the Head of the Gorge. It's a beautiful waterway that stretches a few kilometers up from Victoria's inner harbour, and the course includes the dreaded Tillicum Narrows, where the waterway comes down to about 45 ft wide. This may seem like a lot, but consider... the currents there flow very fast, since it's tidal water. And it's also on a bend in the waterway, so the eddies are something fierce. I don't remember the last time there was a race that did NOT involve some boat running themselves up onto the rocks, to varying degrees of damage (I've heard rumours that there's a small fleet of boats sitting on the bottom at this point in the water). The other good part? We made it through the narrows without crashing.
The bad news? Before we hit the Narrows, we hit a dock. And ended up shearing off the port arm of my rigger.
Unfortunately, our double became a very heavy single, since I couldn't row. So all I could do was try to hold the balance, and Artos (being the champion and competitor that he is) took us the last 3.5 Km up the course, including through the Narrows, so that we could at least get a time. And we did! (although I don't know yet what it was). Someone got some video of us going under the bridge, with me waving the broken piece of rigger around like a war-club. If I can find that video, or some other pics, I'll be sure to post them. It's pretty funny, although it wasn't so much at the time. And I doubt that Artos is laughing yet.
Border Fun
24 October 2006 - 12:59.
I really fucking hate US border guards. With a passion.
(Disclaimer: Generally, it's just the DHS folks I have trouble with. My mom is a US citizen. By best friend in the rowing world lives in Seattle. I know a large number of Americans through work, and they're all wonderful people. But I abhor DHS agents. I understand that they're doing a job, and that it's an important one - who knows how many Canadian dog-sleds, packed with explosives, would make it across the world's longest undefended border without their presence. But they take themselves far too seriously. Get a sense of humour people. Really. Canadian border guards will at least smile at you most times.)
So I go through the border at Peace Arch this morning in my car. Keep in mind here, I have a) my passport, b) a relatively clean yuppie-mobile, and c) an American E2 visa. For the uninitiated, this is just a small step short of a green card - it allows me to live and work (and pay taxes) in the US. All my paperwork is in order, and I have a clean criminal record (I wouldn't have gotten the E2 otherwise). For ethnic profiling, I'm about as WASP-ish as WASP gets.
When I hit the actual guard post, I was 3rd in line in my lane. I look over, and there's an empty lane. No one is coming, so I scoot over - no point idling more than needed, right? The nice DHS man with an attitude asks me the mandatory questions - where I live, where I'm going, and why - while he pulls up my info on his terminal.
He then proceeds to stand there holding my passport in his left hand, with his right hand on the butt of his gun, while he gives me shit about changing lanes. "Don't change lanes" he said. "We'll tell you when to change lanes." There was more to it, but this was the opener.
What the fuck Dirty Harry?!? Are you so damned insecure that you have to find something to bitch about with everybody that you can't bust or cause grief for? Get the fuck off my back asshole. I've done nothing, I've been impeccably polite, and I don't deserve your grief. My documentation shows that I've already jumped through whatever hoops your government can throw at me.
Piss off. You suck, asshole.
Moving Violations
23 October 2006 - 08:46.
Y'know, I understand putting one's trust in technology. To a degree, I even understand being a slave to it (a bond that I'm trying to break myself). But
this is absolutely fuckin' ridiculous. Do these people not have the capacity to use 2 brain cells at the same time?
Rabid
22 October 2006 - 16:32.
If you're a hockey-mad Canadian (or reasonable facsimile) you'll get this. If not, skip it. You'll probably just think we're whacked.
Matt and I were at the Giant's game last night, and in typical fashion, this one guy nearby decides to start a wave. Problem? He's wearing a Red Wings jersey. In Vancouver.
Ummm..... no. Not a good idea.
Vancouver hockey fans are a vicious bunch. Keep in mind, during the Giant's season opener, after they rang the score up to 9-0, the crowd started chanting "We want 10! We want 10!". So when Mr. Wave stands up wearing a non-Vancouver jersey, what do you think happens? A group of folks start their own chant... "Red Wings suck! Red Wings suck!". Not surprisingly, this got picked up, and at one point there must have been about 75-100 people in our little corner chanting along.
Mr. Wave got the hint... he took off his Red Wings jersey. But he never did get a good wave started.
Stromy Weather
20 October 2006 - 16:37.
Donna had an entry recently about enjoying the fall season, and the pros and cons of it. And while I agree with many of the items she listed as good about fall, I have my own preferences. We got a taste of it last night.
Autumn to me is mostly about the storms. The colours are magnificent as well (more on this in a moment), but in my mind, nothing quite surpasses the sheer awesome power of a good fall or winter storm. Being on the coast as we are, and living downtown as I do we're prone to some real strong blasts of wind. Yesterday's 50 kph/ 30 mph winds were, to me, the smallest taste of what is yet to come in the next few months. One of the things I eally enjoy is going into Stanley Park during a severe windstorm, and just standing among the trees while they threaten to come down around me. Better still if it's raining too.
I feel as if I've been missing out on the other big attraction to autumn... the colours. I grew up in Montreal, and I remember taking trips to the Eastern Townships to see the colours of the hills. There are a lot of evergreens here, but not in Quebec. The hills around Mt. Sutton in October are breathtaking.
The problem though is that we haven't had much of a fall yet. It's only in the last week that things have started to turn fall-ish, so many trees are still very green, like this one in Stanley park
But wait! There's more!
What the???
18 October 2006 - 20:53.
Alright... so I had one of the drives on my server fail on me yesterday afternoon. Fortunately (for the geeky among you) I have my server set up with hardware RAID. For the non-geeky among you this means I'm paranoid.
I'm disturbed however by the fact that I'm not 100% sure why the server is now up and running. The last time I tried to boot with the new hard drive (after I restored the RAID array, of course) the server essentially laughed at me and said 'no'. This time however it came back up, although I have to admit I'm not completely positive why it happened.
Oh well, be that as it may, I now have a fresh backup (yes, I keep half-way regular backups) and a working server. I'm happy with this for now. I'll leave it for a couple days and see if it goes down again. If it does, my apologies. And that would also be the time when I start looking at an outsourced solution. But for now, I'm happy to have my own little piece of fluff sitting under my office desk.
Sensing Trends in 3D
16 October 2006 - 08:58.
I notice that I'm tending lately towards coming up with entries in the morning, shortly after I get to work. Maybe this is because I'm getting bored with my job. I still adore playing with computers - I'm a geek... what can I say? - but my current place of employment is becoming stale. Time for a new challenge, methinks. So if any of you happen to know of a high-end team lead tech job, a sysadmin position, or an infrastructure architect job, let me know. I build scalable, extensible, modular systems, among other things. If you have something serious, let me know and I'l forward a full resume.
In other news, I was out on Friday night and saw Open Season in 3D at the IMAX theatre. And I gotta say, the technology has come a long way from the blue-red offset that was popular for so long. Remember Jaws 3D? It blew goats. But this one didn't. In fairness, I haven't seen the original theatrical release of the movie, so I'm not sure what scenes may have been added/ tweaked to show off the 3D format - offhand, I can think of at least 2 such scenes - but what I saw was very effective. There was a true sense of depth to many of the scenes, which is apparently accomplished by varying the amount of lateral offset to the picture on screen. Certain scenes appeared to have 4 or 5 layers of depth to them, which was really cool to look at. verdict? Worth the money (at least the 3D version is), despite being a very short film.
Aversion Therapy
13 October 2006 - 08:51.
A short while ago, the City of Vancouver announced that they would be initiating something similar to New York's 'Broken Windows' approach. Part of this project, not in the release but gleaned from interviews conducted at the time, includes a crackdown on minor infractions such as jaywalking - Vancouver has a nasty sense of entitlement when it comes to pedestrians. All over the city, even the region, people will simply walk out into the street with an expectation that cars will stop for them. And the cars do stop in most cases, thereby exacerbating the problem. Those who don't stop are often treated to glares of the most vicious sort, even though it's the pedestrian who is the one in the wrong. I've come up with my own sort of aversion therapy to help the city address this problem. It should be pointed out that this method does not work in all parts of the city, especially those areas where people are too whacked out on crack to notice themselves, let alone anyone else. But try it on Robson Street... it works. My idea goes like this:
- Buy a motorcycle (sport bikes are better for this)
- Find an intersection that's a regular problem
- When you see someone about to cross the road in front of you on a red or amber light, rev your bike's engine to 8,000 RPM
- If they don't run out of your way, go to 10,000 RPM
- Pop the clutch
Trust me. They move. Quickly.
It's not that I'm trying to be mean or anything, but for fuck's sake people, if the little orange hand is up and is not flashing (or even if it is), why on God's green earth should I sit there at the intersection so you can meander across the road at a nice leisurely pace? All because you don't want to stand there for an extra 45 seconds while the lights cycle through? And it's not because you're in a hurry... if you were, you'd be moving a damn sight faster than you do. Is it because you feel that you own the road, and that cars or motorbikes are lower than you? Whatever the reason I can't fucking stand it, and I refuse to ignore it anymore.
</Rant>
Just a quick vent...
12 October 2006 - 17:14.
Yeah, I usually don't go on about work here, except when I bitch about having to travel to Seattle. But I need to vent for a moment here. Warning: this entry contains decidedly geeky issues. Consumption by non-geeks may lead to contamination. Proceed at your own risk. If you're already a geek, you'll probably get most of this, and can at least commiserate.
<Rant>So the company I work for manufactures tech stuff, and one of our business lines is JIT fulfillment. People order things on the web, then we build it and send it to them. The websites they use to do this are one floor down from where I'm sitting, in the comms room. <HeavyGeek> I've got a couple web servers plugged into a DS-3 fiber optic line, running 3.5 MB bursting to 4.5 MB. Combined traffic to all the websites we host (there's like 5 of them) to the outside world is somewhere on the order of 2.5 million hits per month. Load balancing is done through simple round-robin DNS. </HeavyGeek>
And now, the sales department are doing their jobs properly. And it looks like the way they're going, that within the next 2 months the traffic will double. Of course, I know that in the grander scheme of things 5 million hits a month is not really a big deal. I mean what does Google get? 100 million a day? We're small fish in that particular pond. But the part that pisses me off is that we need more bandwidth. We can't handle that kind of volume, along with our regular business requirements, on a mere 3.5 MB line, even if it IS full speed both ways. Logic says upgrade, right? I call the ISP, and the next step upgrade is to a 10.0 MB line. WooHoo!! Show me the speed!! Right? Wrong. Because the 'cost is currently prohibitive' it's nixed before it even gets out of the idea phase.
Of all the fucking dimwitted, pencil-pushing, retarded, anal-retentive issues to get cheap about, they decide to have a broom up their collective asses on this one. And in 3 months time, when the customers start bitching because they can't ftp files to us, or their customers start bitching because there's too much latency on the line for them to surf, then I'll have that one email saved. The email that says 'no, you can't do it'. And I'm gonna laugh the most evil, maniacal laugh you've ever heard in your life. Satan himself will be scared. Then I think I'll go on a vacation, somewhere without internet access. Fuck 'em. </Rant>
Thanks. I feel better now.
Weekend Stuff
10 October 2006 - 18:51.
Happy day-after-turkey-day, folks. Recovered from the tryptophan hangover yet? For those of you from outside Canada, our Thanksgiving was yesterday.
Friday was a quiet night for me. I enjoyed having very little to do, and got to spend some quality time with my own thoughts. Saturday things picked up for me a bit, and the first of my hockey games with Matt. Upside to the regular seats? They're pretty good seats, and we're close enough to the ice that we can see the faces scrunched up against the glass when they check in the corners. Downside to those particular seats? The guy with the Giant's organization that sold them to me neglected to mention that they're in the middle of the section reserved for fans of the visiting team. Saving grace? I can whistle loud enough to hurt the ears of the people sitting 4 rows in front of me. Who happened to be fans of the visiting team. I think the whistle registers somewhere around 80 or 90 decibels. But ultimately, the G-men won. Again.
So yeah. Now I'm done with the dull blog entry. We now return to our regularly scheduled witticisms.
Restaurant Review #4,391 or something
09 October 2006 - 08:52.
Alright... here's the latest chapter in the ongoing dining adventures of Andrew and I. Today's victim? Samba Brazilian Restaurant.
As always, whenever Andrew and I get together, it's like we've been apart for maybe 3 or 4 days. This is the advantage to having been friends for 23 years - we have that type of familiarity where we can just pick up and keep going. This is a large part of the reason he's my oldest and dearest friend.
But of course this post is about food. So here's the deal... they have this all you can eat thing, and when you order it, you get this little card with 2 sides, one red and one green. So you go up to the buffet, load up on the cheap filling stuff like potato salad and a couple hot items. But the kicker here is that the practically of the meat is served to your table by people walking around with slabs of meat on a sword, which they carve or mete out right on to your plate.
There were lots of good things about this place, and very few bad things....
But wait! There's more!
Feeding the Addictions
06 October 2006 - 10:39.
No, I'm not smoking again (fuck you very much Mr. Monkey-off-my-back). What I am doing though is spending money that would be better served against debt reduction. Not that I'm about to be dragged into Debtor's Court or anything, but dropping a couple hundred bucks on major junior hockey tickets? It probably won't earn me the Nobel Prize for Economics. That's okay though... I good with it. At least the Vancouver Giants win their games consistently.
Other addictions? Endorphins and adrenaline. Now that I've got a couple rowing races under my belt again, I find myself craving the pain. And if you've never rowed before, trust me, races hurt. But it's a good pain. So what do I do? I go out and train more, and cause myself yet more pain. I find myself subconsciously lining up my single against quads and eights when I'm on the water, and feeling the jolt of adrenaline when I decide that I want to see if I can take them. Just so that I can feel the pain again.
Ok... I admit it. I'm weak. But what can I do? At least I'm having fun with it.
Missing Pieces
03 October 2006 - 12:16.
It's been an interesting weekend. My mom flew in this weekend and stayed with me for the past few days. She flew in on Friday morning, and left yesterday afternoon. We did some touristy stuff, she came to watch me at a rowing regatta, and we had sushi. None of this by itself is really remarkable. What
is remarkable about it is that I've only really known my mom for about 2 ½ years.
But wait! There's more!