Older blog entries for zab (starting at number 13)

I just composed a nice lengthy diary entry. It talked about many fabulous things like my fun times playing computer games, shaver's new fantastic apartment, yet another installment of Globe Rules, and even some nice open sourcey projecty updatey things.

But Navigator cored on me.

I hate Netscape Navigator. I hate Netscape Navigator.

I think I'll spend this evening aiming positive hacking vibes in blizzard's direction.

Well, I'm mostly moved now. My apartment is super neat. One of these days I'll get the pictures of it off of Phil's camera and maybe share them. I have an enormous shopping list, at the top of which is couch.

I managed to make it Ottawa over the weekend for some brief partying. I hung out with my good TPG friends, it was good clean fun. Phil, the evil one, introduced me to Home World. Added to shopping list: Uber-Sexy video card and gi-normous monitor. I tried poutine again and wasn't too impressed, again. Maybe its an acquired tastes, like coffee (yuck) and beer (ew). I'm basically doomed.

I arrived back on Sunday night to find that Montreal had been buried in a few feet of snow. I so have Federico beat on the Ice Planet Hoth scale. I didn't grow up in the stuff, so I thought it was great fun. I even manged to catch a ride from a truck driver that was zipping around town in his pick-up pretending to be a taxi.

I'm tempted to write up a rant on coding style, but what would be the point? StudlyCapsAreEvil (extra points for half the characters being redundant and expressed in the source tree), but everyone knows that. #ifdefs hurt, but thats no surprise either. Yet people continue to use them. Baby steps.

Lots of neat people are in town for some linux show as well. Last night we went to dinner at a yummy supposedly-malaysian restaurant. I was very happy with their curry, but Mang kept saying that their Malaysian dishes were a little off. The others braved some exotic desert while I stayed with cheesecake. My cheesecake was nummy, Phil's exotic desert came with a sausage. No, we're not sure either.

Welp, I'm officially no longer employed by Red Hat. It was fun.

Time to pack up all my stuff and move, again. Hopefully the next entry will find me glowing about how painless the move was. Uh-Huh.

Off I go.

We saw The Matrix on an IMAX screen. It was big, and the audio was especially nice. I had meant to bring a camera to the event so that we could have pictures of us all being silly, but I forgot. Someone else remembered, but by the time they had given me a camera I had realized that I don' t like carrying a camera around. So there.

Yesterday we had a package delivered to our door. Someone sent us the fuel tank from a 1947 Jeep. Neat.

I've been reading all sorts of interesting things about wireless ethernet. I'm excited.

I'm sure other things are worth mentioning, but I can't be bothered to remember what they might be.

I manged to get to work at an unreasonably early hour this morning. Which meant that the streetcar and subway were packed.

every woman who walks by is every woman you'll never have
beautiful, quick and poisonous as mercury

kept running through my head. It was scary.

Ben and I went to dinner at Southern Accent last night. Happily spicy food and strong drinks (including the Voodootini). We didn't understand why it was empty until the waiter explained that it was Oscar night. Oh. That would explain the other restaurants that were closed but had private parties with big TVs.

I arrived at work to find e-mail from Steph who is indeed still alive. Good, good.

I played around a bit with glade this weekend and was not terribly impressed. I'm not smart enough to put up with GUI design work. It sure would be Neato if it were integreated with a usable IDE, though.

Being sick really sucks.

Romeo Must Die and Erin Brockovich didn't suck.

Much Music is near the theatre where we saw R.M.D.. Either N-Sync or the Backstreet Boys were there (who cares which) so the entire block was filled with scary teenagers. That sucked.

<blizzard> Was that your ass or your face?

I'm still not sure what to make of that. Blizzard sucks.

Our Giganet stuff appeared. I hope Ben does cool things with it. Ben doesn't suck.

Lesson #1: I can't read movie schedules.

I thought that Romeo Must Die was playing at the Paramount last night. It wasn't, but we'll get to that.

It all started innocently enough. We wanted to have some food with friends and see a fun movie. We had a nice dinner on College and headed to the theatre. We had some time before the movie so we headed over to Sugar Mountain.

Lesson #2: Even after 20-someodd years, eating bags of sugar does bad things to your body.

So keep in mind that from this point on we were constantly popping Reeses Pieces and Jelly Bellys and such.

We were prepared. We had food in us (some with more alcohol than others), and candy. We were ready to see Jet Li kick some ass. But what's this? It isn't playing at 7:45 as we thought. No, its playing at 9:30.

Lesson #3: Buy tickets ahead of time

Ok, so we have a good hour to kill. The Boys decided to go to the Playdium and play video games for an hour. Tyla preferred to hang out in Chapters for a while and then retire.

Lesson #4: Quit while you're ahead. Do like Tyla. Tyla smart.

We had fun at the Playdium, though its no Metreon. blizzard got to use skid marks on a raceway to spell his initials, I showed some Storm Troopers where they could put thir silly cod pieces, and shaver polished his sniping skills. Oh, and it was loud in there. We all came out with headaches. Remember the candy? So we're now on various levels of sugar highs, with headaches, off to see Jet Li kick some ass.

But what's this? The automated teller won't sell us tickets for the 9:30 showing? Maybe its too new, or unrated, or something. No. The counter informs us that the showing is in fact invite-only. Awesome. So we've now spent a good 2 hours of our lives waiting for a movie that we aren't going to see. But we didn't let these 14 or 15 things going wrong deter us, heavens no!

We bought three tickets to see Mission to Mars. Yes, thats right, the movie that everyone we've ever talked to said was awful. We got into the theatre 15 minutes before the show and it was empty. We had our own private screening!

Now, if you've been to the large Famous Players theatres you know that funny things are about to happen. Before each showing they have an employee (Player?) stand before the audience and give a little speech. So some poor schmuck had to give the speech to just the three of us.

Brad: Hi, I'm Brad, and welcome to famous players.
blizzard: There's only three of us, you really don't need to bother.
zab: Pull up a chair!
...
Brad: You know I once did this speach to a single person.
shaver: For what movie?
Brad: Reindeer Games.
Trio: [much laughter]
...
Brad: Ok guys, I have to give the speach now. ...... if you have any questions or comments that aren't retarded .....
Trio: [chortle]
Brad: .... please turn them off your cell phones and pagers so as not to disturb your two buddies there....
Trio: [guffaw]

At this point two more people came into the theatre!

NewPerson: How come no one else is here?
shaver: I think we're about to find out.

And you know what? The movie wasn't really all that horrible. It had its cheesy spots, but plenty of nice ones as well. Trying to fall asleep while coming down from a sugar high was much worse.

I turned off my brain this weekend, due to excessive relocation stress. I dug up the gnebula code and decided I should whip up a neat glade interface for it and release it. We'll see if that actually happens.

I finally got around to seeing Good Will Hunting. Not surprisingly, it was great. How can you go wrong with Gus Van Sant involved? (Hint: I grew up in Portland and really like the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Cider House Rules also made me happy, but it didn't have Ben Affleck. Nothing's perfect.

The Blizzards (and Laura) hosted an amazing Indian dinner last night. Yum. My coat still has a pleasent spicy aroma to it.

Sleep deprivation is no good at all. The upstairs neighbors called last night at 4am to tell us that the boiler was making strange noises. Until then we had been happily sleeping right through it. The noises weren't strange, they were scary. I was convinced they were filming another installment of Hellraiser in our basement.

But, of course, nothing was really wrong. It was just beeing creepy. I didn't need to get back to sleep anyway, honest.

I got to the office on Friday and found that some friends were going to be visiting Montreal over the weekend. It was quickly decided that I was going to have to join them in looking for an apartment. An hour later we had train tickets and hotel reservations.

We had the good sense to travel VIA1. We wandered past the frightening march-break-fueled lines and into the Panorama lounge. After a half hour of leather-couched goodness we were let onto the train. We got one of the seating arrangements that sits four people around a fold-able table. The table proved to be quite handy for games of travel scrabble. I was only able to win a game after the bottomless booze had disarmed Jen and Tyla. I still can't believe she was able to play aioli after a few glasses of wine.

Saturday was a mad scramble to find housing. We grabbed the Gazette and started sifting through the rental section. We applied the usual filters. Apartments must be in downtown near transit, the office(s), and restaurants. Existing appliances are welcome and heating is essential. Would you believe they advertise apartments without heating in Montreal? I guess Yeti have to live somewhere. We started making phone calls and managed to schedule a few walkthroughs that afternoon. While the boys were messing about with maps and newspapers and such, the girls had the good sense to have a quick nap. If only we had a camera; the cutesy quotient was through the roof.

The first apartment we walked through wasn't bad at all. It had a nice terrace and had been well painted by the previous tenants. The second place we saw was just amazing. On the fourth floor of a townhouse it had exposed brick walls, a nice open ceiling with rafters, nicely redone hardwood, and a terrace and roof-top patio shared with the neighbor. Its located between St. Denis and St Laurant near Prince Arthur which makes it a good fifteen minute walk from both offices. Quick inspection of the neighborhood found a nice Thai place within crawling distance. That settled it. There was neither sealing nor delivering, but signing took place.

After a successful afternoon of apartment hunting we needed dinner. We met Adam at Queue de Cheval. Our waiter, Jacques (honest), was a pleasant mix of efficiency and outright silliness. The food was great; the sauce that surrounded the spring rolls had a healthy bite to it and the garlic roasted mashed potatoes were butterlicious. Predictably, I had the salmon. I can't help that I grew up on the Wilamette.

So yes, most of you have probably figured it out. All this time spent in Montreal is not by accident. I've accepted the Dream Job from Zero Knowledge Systems and start on April first. I'm going to miss the red hat crew terribly, but I have to go kick some internet-privacy ass.

I'm typing this on the the train back to Toronto. Completing our four-seater this time is our new actress friend who recommended some fabulous furniture shops in Montreal. We just finished the chocolate mousse deserts that punctuated the pasta salad and mass quantities of meat. We're somewhere in southern Ontario passing through a recently snow-dusted countryside under a blue sky. I'm going to take a nap.

Life is good.