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Holidays

Posted on December 27, 2006 | Filed Under Family, Vacation, Drama

Hope everyone had a good Christmas…

We spent a couple days over in Victoria to spend Christmas with my family. It was really nice to see everyone and spend time with some of Jeremy’s relatives too, although there was so many people there we were exiled to sleep in the camper. It was cosy enough but not very comfortable…Jeremy managed to beat both me and my brother at every game we played.

The days in Victoria werent as relaxing as they should have been with Jeremy and I still recovering from a very bad Friday night. I had my first ever panic attack and hopefully my last. Theres no way to really describe that experience but if you type in panic attack into wikipedia and read the symptoms you will see that it was not a fun time. A couple hours in the hospital and a lot of sleep later and Im feeling better.

Jeremy and I both realized this morning as the alarm was going off that we should have taken this week off. Oh well, three days to work and then another long weekend to look forward to.

Thankfully work is very slow today so I can sit here and daydream about our trip to Europe that we are planning for April. We are going to do a 20 day trip to a bunch of countries- Belgium, France, Spain, Austria, Italy… Its gonna be so great!

 

~L

Live From Austin

Posted on October 12, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out, Vacation, Drama

The flight down was long. I arrived at YVR an hour and a half early, only to have my flight delayed by an hour due to thunderstorms in Dallas. Fortunately, my connecting flight to Austin was also moved an hour, otherwise i would have missed it. I made the connection OK thanks to this light rail system they have at the airport. I’m more worried about my connecting flight home; I probably have 15 minutes or less to go between gates.

On the long flight, i wrote a C program to solve “medium” sudoku puzzles using heuristic scanning and counting — which made the flight seem a little shorter. “Hard” puzzles, according to Wikipedia, requires bifurcation/guess-and-check. I digress…

The Coastal and Rocky moutains were amazing from above; it’s the first time i’ve been over them. The air above was so clear it was shaded blackish-blue instead of whiteish-blue that we’re used to. Would have been able to see Great Salt Lake too if not for cloud cover. Approaching Dallas, there was this neat diffusion/defraction effect around the shadow of the airplane which looked like a circular rainbow. Laura was bugging me to take the camera, and now i wish i had for that stuff =).

Austin itself seems fairly “normal”. By that, i mean it looks a lot like Victoria but in a hot climate where lots of people speak Spanish. There’s lots of old “heritage” buildings, brick crosswalks and roads, and slummy-but-nice suburbs that remind me of Langford. It’s really, really, humid here. The temperature outside the hotel has been hovering around 25C. At night, you can see the moonlight towers clearly in the distance from my hotel room. They give off this lime-green-ish light, which makes them look very UFO like.

The most noticeable thing, IMHO, about Austin is that the water tastes and smells like mud (which i can taste in the food). It’s probably due to the Colorado river being the main source (either that, or it’s aquifer water; i’m not certain, but both could result in heavy mineralization).

The opening Keynote talk was this crazy physicist guy that showed the crowd how to measure the speed of light. If you can imagine a crazy scientist, this guy is that archetype. He has this strange quirk: he’d randomly pause to complain that he’d run out of chocolate milk (when he wasn’t busy running around the room). As for the content, it was really interesting — especially since it has absolutely no relevance to the conference itself.

As for the reason i’m here (my talk)… i’m not happy with how it went, especially since the events leading up to it were rough.

For dinner the night before, i had a “fancy” steak with a big glass of red wine. The steak was good, but the wine was a big mistake — it hit me like a brick, probably from being tired from the long trip. I spent the next few hours trying desperately to sober up without resorting to caffiene (which keeps me up all night, regardless of offsetting alcohol consumption). I was up until 3AM CDT going over the slides and had to wake up at 6:30AM. Ugh.

After getting up and registering, I had to run to a store a few blocks away to buy a cheap watch so i could time myself. I then spent an hour before lunch talking-out the slides in my room, which made my voice hoarse. Fortunately that cleared before i had to give the actual talk, but it just added to the overall stress.

45 minutes before the talk, the room was free so i started hooking up the laptop to the projector. No matter what I did, i couldn’t get Linux/Xorg to work with the dammed projector! It would show my desktop colors, but it was totally garbage and you couldn’t read anything. I had expected this, so i said to myself “no problem! i’ve got the PDF on my fancy new laser-pointer-USB-key here, i’ll just boot into windows!” Windows worked fine with the projector, but i had neglected to install Acrobat Reader. Furthermore, the wireless card refused to associate with the access point in the same room. Argh! I ended up having to borrow the chairperson’s macbook (chairperson = person from the ASF that introduces me and, i think, rates the talk). The PDF loaded fine,but then we notice there’s only a DVI port on the macbook! Fortunately, Gozer (ActiveState mod_perl guy) had a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and i was able to talk.

The talk went too fast; I wasn’t feeling nervous, but I didn’t manage the pace very well (skipped over too much detail when I didn’t need to). There was fairly low attendance; I counted about 25 people at the start, but only 2 people left during the talk (including one developer that I was hoping would ask questions at the end). Overall, i feel that i did a substandard job. All of the other talks that i’ve been to were definitely better content-wise, but there’s been at least one other speaker down at my level. Anyway, i’m not letting it get me down too much… i know now that i need more practice and need to dedicate more time to the process of creating a talk.

After the talk, i went to a few more sessions, had a few beer at this social event, then went to bed early =). I woke up today feeling good and i’ve been able to enjoy some really good talks.

Tomorrow is pretty “light” on stuff I want to see, so I may attempt to book an earlier flight home (or, at least, go to the airport early). I hope to get a bit of tourist-ing done tonight and/or tomorrow.

I’ve rambled on for long enough, i think. I hope you enjoyed reading =).

New Laptop and Bellingham

Posted on May 22, 2006 | Filed Under Friends, Nerding Out, Vacation

Woo! On Thursday i finally got my new work laptop! Fortunately, it seems to be working just fine. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it working until just now.

On Thursday, I came down with what I think was a mild flu. At 2PM, I had to go home and spend 24 hours in that trance-like state that only dry-heaves and a fever seem to bring on :/. To pass the time, I got Windows XP going (it was pre-installed) and spent five-or-so hours repartitioning the hard-drive so i could install linux. Near the end of those five-or-so hours I realized that the Ubuntu 5.10 CD came with ntfsresize, which lets you resize those crafty NTFS volumes before resizing the partition. I shrunk the Windows XP partition from 55GB to just under 10GB, which should give me plenty of room for now. Windows continues to boot just fine from this new partition after a forced run of chkdsk (think ‘fsck’ for windows) to verify that everything’s OK. This is a big improvement over the last time that I attempted to do a dual-booting system with XP about 2 years ago; resizing NTFS volumes was basically impossible with FLOSS programs. To finish off, I tried installing Ubuntu 5.10, but various things didn’t seem to work, especially X.

On Friday I was on the upswing and decided to go to BJF after a bit of convincing by Luke. I left the laptop here and got a ride from Luke along with jen, Loranda (Luke’s sister), and Orlando (Loranda’s fiance). I wouldn’t have had any time or network connectivity anyway, it turns out. Overall, it was a great trip. Lots of juggling, some good shows (a renegade show on Friday night and the public show on Saturday), and lots of fun people to meet and hang out with. Sleeping in a rigged-together barn in the middle of a swamp is quite the experience ;). I think that maybe Luke cought whatever I had on Thursday, though; we had to leave a little early on Sunday because he wasn’t feeling well. Luke, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry if i got you sick, but you’re the one who dragged me with you :P. Either way, I’m really glad I went. I started doing 4-ball and won in a raffle these really neat micro-suede “G-Ballz” beanbag-style juggling balls — they’ve inspired me to try to learn a 5-ball pattern as soon as possible ;).

Got back home on Sunday at around 4 or 5-ish. Had some real food (after an “interesting” breakfast at the farm) and settled in. Made four CD coasters trying to burn the latest Ubuntu 6.x beta release, then decided that the whole stack of blanks I’ve got are total crap after realizing that i’ve never successfully burnt one with this new burner. I found a 12x CDRW disk and it burnt just fine. In the process, I found out that there’s a command-line cd burning program for windows (I forget the name just now, but it’s actually made by Microsoft). In the meantime, I found a really helpful page by someone who got Slackware installed on the Dell D620. Aparently, you have to actually “soft-patch” part of the video BIOS to get full 1440×900 resolution under X.

Anyway, got Ubuntu “Dapper Beta” installed, but X still didn’t work. Downloaded 300MB of updates from the APT repository while watching the first half Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with Laura. Followed the instructions on the afformentioned page, and voila: a Gnome desktop. Looks really nice with anti-aliased fonts and the widescreen ;). CPU auto-scaling works, but I haven’t tried an SMP kernel yet (it’s a dual-core CPU). Something keeps accessing the hard-drive all the time, which clicks every few seconds (maybe i need to mount everything ‘noatime’?). Sound works OK, but is crappy quality — speaking of which, i can’t find the speakers on this thing — and the PC speaker is so blaringly loud i’m sure the neighbours can hear it every time i try to use tab completion in bash :).

Anyway, i’m quite happy to have this thing up and working. This whole post is just an excuse to try out the keyboard. The verdict: it is fairly spacious compared to some i’ve tried. My wrists aren’t incredibly sore, but then again, that could be from not typing for 2 days. I’ll take the MS Natural Ergo 4000 over this any day.

Vacation detailed

Posted on March 28, 2006 | Filed Under Vacation

Well its now almost a week since we arrived home from our vacation and I still havent written anything. As usual, Im thinking and doing more than writing and reflecting. So, lets start farthest away with our trip to San Francisco.

The whole vacation was actually perfect I would say. Travelling wasnt even that stressful, flight was good, (and fast! only 2 hours), and getting around SF on transit was kinda easy. Train took us straight from airport to the last stop which was about 2 blocks from our hotel. We arrived Saturday Mar 18 just before noon I guess. We found our hotel, marvelled at its luxurious-ness, and then set out to find somewhere to eat and found this little mexican place on the docks. We spent Saturday walking around the neighborhood, along the water, found a drugstore and grocery store close-by. We had dinner at a brewpub called Gordon Biersch we found in our walkings nearby our hotel. (from then on for the trip all beer was called biersch, it was funny then)
Sunday we slept in a little (the bed was WAY too comfy) and picked up some picnic-makings at the grocery place and headed on the subway train/bus to go to Golden Gate Park. We had lunch there and walked pretty much the whole length of the park! A LONG WAY! Hours later, we arrive at the western end of the park and see the ocean. Had wine and bread at a little chalet restaurant there, sitting outside on some comfy lawn furniture, listening to the live jazz band play on the patio. Ahh it was nice. We arrive home exhausted, venture to a nice restaurant close by and have a late dinner.

Monday it was kinda cold and rainy. We had breakfast at Jamba Juice (now I get that SNL skit!) and then walked to the SF Museum of Modern Art. It was really awesome! I loved the Calder sculptures the best and Jeremy really liked a movie exhibit- a guy had filmed a barrel rolling down the streets of new york with a lense out each end and one in the middle and they showed it on three screens, so it looked like you were in a barrel rolling down the street. Pretty neat, but it made me nauseous if I watched it too long! During a freak five minute hail storm we ran to a nearby restaurant and proceeded to discover the WORST EVER Mexican restaurant in history. Seriously, it was bad. Bad service and bad food. awful. I think it was called Fresh Mex or something…Back to the MOMA for more art gazing, and then a walk through downtown once it stopped raining, and to union square and then walked home. Monday night we had dinner in our hotel room of Subway and wine. Fancy.

Tuesday we walked into town a bit, caught the cablecar to fishermans wharf. We spent a long time walking around there, had lunch at ghiradelli square, then more walking, we tried to get tickets to alcatraz but they were sold out so we got some for the next morning, and decided to do more walking. We walked up MANY MANY stairs to the Coit Tower, which was really cool, and had a great view, but it was overshadowed by the fun we had going back down. We found these wooden stairs that went down between peoples houses and gardens and there was wild parrots all over the place. It was really cool. Walk, walk, walk, home.

Tuesday night we went out for our super fancy dinner at bacar restaurant. Jeremy even wore his suit! Dinner was delicious! We spent a large amount of money on it but it was so worth it. and we managed to charm the waitress enough to sell us a bottle of wine to take with us. We each had a flight of wines with dinner and we bought our favorite white one! As I have been known to be a picky eater, I am quite proud of the fact that I actually tried lamb ribs as appetizer. Didnt like it all that much, but i tried it! I had the best pork chop that ive ever eaten in my life for dinner and Jeremy ate what i think was probably a 16 oz steak- it was big! Which was surprising, as usually fancy dinner places tend to have small portions. Not this place.

Wednesday morning (Mar 22) we got up WAY too early for vacation. 730am I think. We had our place packed up and we were checking out by 830am. Left suitcases at hotel and took cab back to the pier to go on the alcatraz tour by 915am. Spent a long time there, being a tourist, walking around with those little headset tour thing around your neck. It was quite neat to see it and be there, it felt pretty much like an archaeology site, with burned out ruins being taken over by plants and birds. After that, we had lunch on the pier at a little bakery, we were both kinda seasick, or tired, or just really hungry so soup in a breadbowl tasted really good. We took a trolley car back to the hotel and got our bags and took the train out to the airport. We arrived really early and just sat around, reading, napping until our flight and got home around 1130pm.

Ahh nice to be home! But whats with this tiny double bed?? I want that king size fluffy cloud of a bed thats magically made for you clean everyday! hehe.

We spent Thursday in a lazy daze and pretty much just snuggled with our cat, Jules and enjoyed being home.

I believe Jeremy is working on getting our pictures up on flickr so you might be able to see them soon

~L

And… We’re Back

Posted on March 23, 2006 | Filed Under Vacation

The trip went very well. We got home at 10:30 last night and went straight to bed. We’re sitting at home enjoying some brunch. Jules seems happy to see us.

I’m playng arond with Flickr, nd w’ll se hw tht wrks. (Dropping the last vowel is cool, apparently).

~j

SF here we come!

Posted on March 16, 2006 | Filed Under Day to day, Vacation

Well, it’s only two more sleeps until we fly away for five days. Im very excited to see San Francisco and to explore a city I’ve never been to before. It will be so nice to have a vacation as we havent had one since Hawaii July 2004.

We have friends to house and cat sit for us, so Jules wont be completely alone. She has been kind of clingy and meow-y since we brought out the suitcases, so I think she knows something is up.

Ive been working hard at work to get all the piles of paper dealt with before I leave. I actually worked late till 630 last night. I really hate coming home to a messy desk, or house for that matter. I always try to have the house all clean and tidy before I leave for a couple days. Its just so nice to come home and be able to relax right away. Thats why I was still doing dishes at 11pm last night.

I had a weird sleep with lots of dreams that made no sense. In part of it my name rhymed with a vegetable. I think it was Buchinni, like zuchinni? weird.

I guess there will be a little hiatus here until we get back next week. Hopefully we will have good things to say about our trip.

~L