phik

I just recalled that on the plane back from Boston, I was thinking “I just realized that I haven’t eaten peas in a very long time.”

The peas were pretty good, actually. They were a very nice shade of green, and weren’t too squishy, like most frozen airline peas.

I spent twelve hours with Alex yesterday doing so, but I am finally working in Canada legally. All praise our awesome lawyer.

We had an interesting conversation in the taxi on the way to the airport in San Francisco, during which we came to the conclusion that one can never have enough pants. Alex pointed out that one can really never have enough garlic bread either.

Pants are just like garlic bread.

telephone: beep beep

phil: Hmm, it’s the Government of Canada calling.

mang: Hello, this is Mike Ang.

pause

mang: I think you have the wrong number.

pause

mang: No, this is not the French Embassy.

I’ve received word that uzi is annoyed because I didn’t mention that he made the aforementioned garlic bread.

Well I am annoyed that he left my Ottawa desk a mess. So there.

Fucking Navigator froze while I was editing my diary entry. Sigh.

mang and I went shopping for some skates yesterday, and let me tell you, Canadian Tire doesn’t have a clue about inventory. We eventually found suitable skates at Foster’s (no, not Australian for beer). I then proceeded to lose my phone. Sigh.

As for work, well, I spent most of my afternoon hunting for an apartment. I have three pretty good leads, one of which is directly across the street from Loblaw’s. Following today’s bout of searching, I’m going to make some time to hack on the ext2 b-tree code.

Sigh. slashdot 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.

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.

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.

Yay, Raph applied my diary editing patches.

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.