Older blog entries for phil (starting at number 14)

I don't think Mike was talking about Torment when he said "the career you save could be your own," but he easily could have been. Yes, I've gotten out of the mortuary. No, I've not done anything else this weekend.

As much as I love other people's children, I didn't really feel up to Montreal this weekend either. Instead, I went to Ikea and bought a futon and a bookshelf, thus making this my first night in my new apartment.

God, is it ever fucking cool.

Nice hardwood, more room than I realized (two bedrooms, two common rooms, who'd have guessed?), and yet with enough deficiencies to still make it humbling. The Elgin Street Diner is right out my front window, and n pubs and clubs are within two blocks. My liver may just never recover.

I'm with dria, I want to do as few work-related things as possible this weekend. I'm about to start a long term work project, and I need to concentrate on making my ulcer stop forming. I think that Planescape: Torment is an excellent example of such a diversion.

I'm not hungover, but by all reason and logic I should be, so I still blame shaver. I'm pretty stunned that he managed to get out of bed and to the airport in a bounded amount of time.

Cheers from the San Francisco International Airport.

For some reason, I get the best cab drivers:

him: So, where ya goin'?
me: Ottawa
him: Oh, you know, I've been to Vancouver.
me: Uh-huh
him: They have a lot of vinyl siding places up there, huh?

Yeah, Canada. the land of vinyl siding and bananas.

him: What time's your flight?
me: Ten 'til eleven.
him: So you work for Oracle, I guess?

At that point I gave up trying to predict what he was going to say next.

Sometimes (ok, maybe more often than not) I really hate California.

I finished dinner around 19:40 (at Maki, on Balboa near 37th in West SF). It took me a full 4 hours and 5 minutes to get to my hotel in San Mateo.

Unacceptable

For those of you who might ever conceivably eat at Maki, I give it a D+ for presentation, and an A for freshness. The rolls were all but impossible to eat, as they kept falling apart, but I ate what was probably the best tako that I've ever had. I'm almost willing to make another trip just for that.

While I waited for a taxi (that never came), hiding under an awning to escape the rain, three guys shuffled up in their plastic rain gear and baggy jeans.

"Um, sir, uh, do you think you could please buy us four Old English 40s?"

This, to a guy who sometimes gets carded in Canada. They must have been really desperate.

It took long enough, but it's nice to finally have mkp on board at Linuxcare. We look forward to many more interesting Danish discourses.

Look what I found outside my hotel yesterday? I'd like some ducks of my own, if I only had a nice big pond or something in my back yard (if, say, I had a back yard). If I didn't travel so much, maybe some ferrets instead. Or some cats! I miss my cats--we had five at home, which is no small undertaking. We're lucky that they got along as well as they did; I think cats store enough energy to reduce a leather couch to very tiny shards in less time than it takes for the hissing to travel across the house.

Does anyone want to give me an airplane?

Well, I'm back in San Francisco. Nice to see that the virtual workplace concept is being completely stomped on and obliterated.

On a more positive note, I had dinner with uzi, yosh, and tytso this evening. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, I guess, what with Ted stopping over on his way to Australia.

It's very late, and I'm very tired. Bed time.

Yay, Raph applied my diary editing patches. See? Free software is a Good Thing(tm).

I've secured the apartment right above a pub, which could be either a blessing or a curse. It's about as much as I would want to spend for a place in Ottawa, but it does have two bedrooms. I'm just glad to be finished moving--after almost six months in a hotel, you really begin to appreciate living at home.

This weekend is going to be pretty much solely devoted to Achtung hacking, since I haven't done much lately. It's high time for Joe and I to get some web pages together too, as it's an almost somewhat usable application. Don't forget, we're taking patches.

Spent a fun weekend in Toronto with shaver and his lovely wife Tyla (who seems to have made me mildly ill). zach, blizzard, lovely wife shona, willy, (and not ben because he's a dork) descended on Toronto for fun, profit, and watered-down drinks (not Mike's fault).

The penalty for not reading email for 2 days is high. 1100 and still digging.

My apartment hunt might be looking up again; I'm checking out a few places on Elgin street tonight, which a friend of a former tenant recommends pretty highly. If that doesn't pan out, maybe the place with the solarium will. I'm running out of time--March 1st is just a week away, and I'm back in San Francisco again starting Sunday.

Mild hacking was done on Achtung, and I did some poking around in buffer.c regarding "slightly soiled" pages, but no patches yet. I think I'll poke Ben and let him make up for his absence in Toronto by dealing with the mm side of my hacks.

God damn slashdot and the wankers that made Advogato unusable all day. Please, for the love of god, go play somewhere else.

This all-too-common failure to extend the courtesy of warning a site admin prompted me to waste some time hacking mod_antislash. Its functionality, mentioned in passing by someone who probably wishes to remain anonymous, is to create a document containing a variably-sized frameset, each of which contains a slashdot.org instance, for any page with a slashdot.org referer. It's worth mentioning that the intent is to discourage slashdot from linking to sites without first warning them (by making it return garbage instead of the intended content), and not a random DoS (also note that my employer, of course, had nothing to do with this).

Anyhoo, Ryan and I went to apply for our SINs (social insurance numbers, for the non-great-white-northans). The very nice woman who took our form simply copied down the information, basically verbatim, from the top onto the bottom. Talk about bureaucracy. I had to walk all the way down there for that?

In other news, the apartment hunt is not exactly going as planned. I have three or four unchecked leads, but I'm starting to think that I might have to settle for something short-term, and hunt more once the students all move out.

I postponed my appointment with the Rideau Canal this morning (which I hope will become a semi-daily activity) on account of having fallen on the stairs last night. Stupid Zak's and their wet stairs.

I was reminded of a somewhat amusing anecdote last night (over some delicious Thai food). Ryan, willy, Dave, and I were standing around in the lobby of the San Francisco Hilton, and were surrounded by various groups of people, one of which happened to be a few early-teen kids. We moved across the lobby and sat down at a table, the kids stood off to the side looking at us with a bit of hesitation, or perhaps constipation. Eventually they decided to just come over and ask us: apparantly, we look rather like a favourite band of theirs, the name of which turns up nothing interesting on google (which probably means that I just mis-heard them). It's too bad that Ryan informed them otherwise, or they might have bought us dinner. Maybe you had to be there.

Food of the day: havarti cheese planks