1 September 2000
- I haven’t run on a sleep deficit like this since university.
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Archive for September, 2000
2 September 2000
- I slept most of the day. I feel almost, but not entirely, better.
- I read another good chunk of Kitchen Confidential; it’s a great book, interesting and different, but the poor editing is sometimes really distracting. In one chapter in particular, I found a half dozen grammatical errors and what I believe to be a typo.
- Zach reported that he found copies of The Puzzle Palace at a local bookstore. I’m not telling which one, not until I go clean them out of the last three copies.
- Cat toilet training phase 3 completed. We’re entering the home stretch. I will never have to buy or scoop cat litter again. Despite this incredible financial, olefactory, and labour savings, some of my friends still don’t understand why I’m doing it. I think they tend to forget that the cat gets his own toilet. And before you ask, no, I probably won’t teach Simon to flush, at least not right away. See one of several explanations of why not.
- This really made my day. Someone who knows how I feel.
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3 September 2000
- Boy, after those Mister Perfect comments, you’d think he’d update his activity log more often.
- It’s a beautiful day, and I’m going to go frolic in it.
- I want to have Despair’s children. They make my kind of posters.
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4 September 2000
- So, it looks like Simon might have re-contracted ringworm.
- That makes today Disinfect the House Again Day, and you can just imagine how much I am fucking around this time. At the moment, I’m waiting for my scrap of carpet to dry, so I can see if a 1:9 bleach solution will discolour it. If not, every single surface in this apartment is getting it, after which every inch of the carpets will be shampooed and vacuumed. All of my clothes that weren’t in a closed closet, all of the bedding, blankets, futon cover, you name it, into the wash, extra bleach.
Zero fucking around.
- Hopefully the vet won’t put up a fight when I ask for oral medication. This topical shit just isn’t getting it done. Argh.
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5 September 2000
- No! My beautiful, clean bathroom! That cat has got to stop trying to cover his poop! When will the madness end?
- I had a sucky dream about going off to high school.
- I didn’t get nearly as much cleaning done as I would have liked; after about 3 hours I went over to shaver’s to eat bagels and play a brief (!) game of Titan.
- More cleaning tonight. It’s not every day you get to use a spray bottle of bleach.
- The shoe man just called, and they’ll be sending a sizing kit out today so that I can order a pair of The Shoes.
- I’ve started to drink coffee occasionally, now that I know how to use the Coffee Infrastructure that we have in the office. It’s so easy to make really delicious coffee, but I don’t want to fall into the caffeine trap. Moderation, sweet moderation.
- Jonathan bought some Roboboxers to replace the ones that Mike and Graydon had found in their apartment. A lifetime (or at least 15 minutes) of fun!
- August was the first month in the last 19 that I was air-travel-free! The streak will have to end at one, though, since I’ll be at the UIUC career fair on Tuesday.
- In preparation for that, I bought some Asshole Luggage today. You know, the luggage that is technically carry-on sized, but takes up all of the space in the overhead bin? Oh yes. I have become what I hate the most.
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6 September 2000
- Someone needs to write a script to make updating my activity log easier. I nominate Harold.
- I made, and then cancelled, plans to go to Denver for the weekend. The schedules of the people I’d be visiting just didn’t match up with mine, and besides, another friend will be in Montréal this weekend. Go team.
- The weirdest thing written on the whiteboard so far.
- I spent most of today hacking the Freedom client. I feel so productive.
- Ate dinner at Red Thai with Zach, Deb, Erik, and George. Went to Zach’s and watched taped episodes of NewsRadio for two hours.
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7 September 2000
- More client hacking
- Chatted with bcrl briefly about spending a weekend prototyping a new version control system
- Ate dinner at Bangkok Blue with shaver. Service is definitely improving.
- At Bangkok Blue they have this great placemat that is sponsored by Boomerang (do they have those in the states?) adult beverages. It shows a bunch of hand signs and what they mean, such as “one boomerang”, “two boomerangs”, “dance with me”, etc. This one is the best.
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8 September 2000
- More client hacking
- Had lunch with the client team at Amelio’s in honour of a departing intern. Damn, they make great pizza. Their white 5-cheese is to die for.
- Ate dinner at Red Thai again, this time with Mike, Tyla, Zach, Denise, Deb, Blizzard and Ryan. Good fun all around.
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9 September 2000
- I had a small frenzy of house cleaning
- My landlord put another coat of finish on the front balcony. He made noise about replacing it next spring, but it’ll last the winter, at least.
- Dinner was at Deb’s tonight; she prepared a fiesta of taco goodness, accompanied by some fine guac-that-is-not-guac.
- Went to Zach’s to engage in some brief Perfect Dark followed by some movie watching. I saw Pushing Tin for the fourth time, though the first time that I’ve ever seen the first 20 minutes. The previous three viewings had been in hotel rooms in the states, where seeing the movie for the third time was actually preferable to the other crap on TV.
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10 September 2000
- It is not.
- It is not!
- I spent today thinking about ways that CVS could be better. I also bought groceries. I did not buy furniture, though I did make a list of furniture that I want, and in what order.
- I need to find a butcher near my home. On the bright side, I found an SAQ just a few blocks away. It closes at 17h00 on Sundays. Sad.
- The best line in this entire book: “It could have been called How to Shop for and Throw Together the Trashiest Food on Your Supermarket Shelves into a Low-Fat, Low-Sodium, and Low-Sugar Imitation of High-Fat Junk Food.” The author wasn’t very impressed with this other book about low-fat food, I gather.
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11 September 2000
- More client hacking. I whacked our inter-thread communication layer pretty hard, now I need to go test it.
- Dinner at Bangkok Blue with shaver. Speed is getting better each and every time; this time, he sat us and took our order in one 30-second motion, and already knew most of what we were going to have. Soon we’ll just have to call ahead for “the usual” and show up 10 minutes later.
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12 September 2000
- I was so tired when I got home that I left my keys in the door. My neighbours left them in my mailbox for me sometime this morning. I need more sleep, I never do stuff like that.
- Departed for UIUC; the trip was relatively uneventful, modulo the delays that I’ve come to expect.
- We ate at a steakhouse in Urbana, and had one of those great visitors-from-Canada experiences.
- When ID was presented for an adult beverage, Meredith explained that her ID was in French, but that the birthdate is in the lower left.
him: Oh, you guys are from France!? us: No, Montréal... Québec. h: Canada? u: Yep, Canada. h: Wow! You guys came all the way from Canada. Don't you speak like four versions of French up there... u: No, not really, just one... something of a dialect, really, just a different accent. h: Because I thought, you know, when you guys were liberated from the French 15 years ago...
\
- The hotel had a sign that said that one must be born on or before this day in 1980 in order to purchase adult beverages. Somebody needs to buy a calculator.
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13 September 2000
- The career fair went well, talked to a lot of good people, including an old friend from high school (I had no idea that he was at UIUC).
- The pilot never showed up to fly the plane from Chicago to Urbana, so there was no plane to take us the other way.
- He sucks.
- American Airlines put us in a van and drove us the two and a half hours to Chicago.
- There were no agents to meet us when we arrived.
- There were no flights left to anywhere near Montréal.
- There were no hotel vouchers.
- We had to try 5 hotels before we found one with rooms available, after reaching a helpful agent in Texas who told us to find anything and be reimbursed.
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14 September 2000
- The flight left Chicago 90 minutes late this morning. We could have slept in, those pig fuckers.
- In case there was any lingering doubt, I’m never flying American again. Not that I was thrilled to do so this time, but they’re pretty much the only people with flights to Urbana.
- I am so tired. Give me a nap.
- I ordered new shoes today, which should arrive around the middle of next week. Never before have I been so excited about footwear.
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15 September 2000
- Damn, what 14 hours of uninterrupted sleep won’t do for you. I can almost feel the potential productivity.
- Much client hacking; the threadsafe message passing stuff is done, and I moved on to porting some of the more complicated dialogs.
- Homeworld: Cataclysm–in homes now.
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16 September 2000
- It was mighty brisk out today, so I made the first fire of the season. Now I remember why I got this apartment.
- Saw The Way of the Gun with Mike and George. James Caan and the bodyguard guys were great. Extremely fucked up.
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19 September 2000
- I cannot for the life of me remember what I did on the 19th. I probably worked on the route selection dialog, and maybe I did some stuff for the beta. I did not get enough sleep.
- Dinner at Mike and Tyla’s. Tyla made a stunning baked chicken stuffed with lemons…
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17 September 2000
- I spent most of the day playing Cataclysm. At first I was disappointed with myself for not getting any work done, but then I realized that it was probably for the best that I get it all out of my system early. I only have one mission left.
- Managed to find one last copy of The Puzzle Palace hidden away on the shelves of Indigo. Bliss.
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18 September 2000
- I’m in the process of beating (savagely) our Linux dialog infrastructure. Technically, I could have made the new dialogs work with the old setup, but I would have had to resign afterwords. It’s the principle of the thing.
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20 September 2000
- I received my shoes today! They’re stunningly comfortable.
- With the hockey season about to get truly under way, I’m thinking about buying a big TV. As much as I usually avoid Future Shop, they’ll match any advertised price, they’ll haggle, and they’ll let me do 6 or 12 month financing. I’m tempted.
- My mom likes it when I use phrases like “pig fucker” in my activity log.
- Thought du jour: It is hard to fold fitted sheets for any meaningful definition of the word “fold”. Especially after they’ve sat in the dryer for four days.
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21 September 2000
- Hmm, I just did some quick math:
I want to buy 1.25 square meters (13.5 square feet) of television viewing surface
It comes in a package that takes up 1.4 cubic metres (50 cubit feet) of space
I hope they can get it up the stairs and around that corner
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22 September 2000
- Friday.
- Did some stuff at work.
- Went to Future Shop with George.
- Cooked dinner, went to sleep.
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23 September 2000
- Went TV hunting with shaver. I went into the store prepared to buy a KP53V80, but when the man started talking about 24 month purchase plans with tax up front and zero interest, shaver started talking about the time value of money, and the next thing I knew, I was buying a KP61HS10.
- Flew to Boston, met Federico and Marker at the airport.
- This looks nothing like Harold.
- Had dinner with Vlad, Ian, Chris, Ana, and someone whose name I cannot remember for all of the gold in Disneyland.
- Went back to the Rag with Vlad and Ian, where we watched Amadeus. Nat and Jacob showed up about halfway through. None of us remembered how long that movie was, and had no idea what we were getting outselves into. When the movie ended at 04h00, we were sleepy.
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24 September 2000
- Slept until some totally silly hour, 13h00 or 14h00.
- Played with the Dreamcast a bit, then went for lunch. Mmm, Mary Chung.
- On our way to lunch we saw a futon through the window. Since our plan was to purchase a futon after lunch, this was the sort of luck that I’m never a part of.
- Futon purchased, they said they’d deliver between 17h00 and 21h00. They later called to say that it was going to be 21h00. Then 21h30.
- Meanwhile, dinner at Nat’s was getting cold, and eventually they stopped waiting for us. It was good, but I bet it was even better hot.
- More Dreamcast. We are so lame. The Hunt For Red October was not lame.
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25 September 2000
- Joe finally returned from his weekend wedding trip, and so I saw him for the first time on day 3 of my trip.
- Ian, Vlad, Joe, and I totally didn’t feel like working, so we sat on their new futon and played with the Dreamcast for almost the entire day. Then we watched Blade, and the vegging was complete.
- Vlad and I went out to try The King and I, the Thai restaurant below their apartment. It was yummy, but my eyes were bigger than my tummy. Or my tummy was bigger than my tummy. Or something.
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26 September 2000
- Spent the first half of the day traveling back from Boston. jwz’s “a symphony of unexplained delays”.
- Did some more client hacking; my work on the client is just about wrapping up, and I’ll go back to my regularly scheduled activities within another day or two.
- Spent an hour moving my huge shelf from one side of the living room to the other. In the process, I learned that:
- My shelf is exactly the right height, within less than a millimetre
- Some combination of floor, ceiling, and shelf unevenness led me nearly to tears, as I didn’t think that I could get the shelf underneath the third and final embedded lamp.
There’s now room for the TV on the other side of the room. My Sony KP61HS10 will arrive Thursday.
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27 September 2000
- The shower at Ian, Vlad, and Joe’s place (hereafter and forever referred to as the Rag) is so awesome. I am totally not ready to use my shower anymore; it’s like comparing a fire hydrant to someone peeing on you in terms of water pressure.
- Deb, George, Zach, and I went to get our drivers licenses today. I am stunned by the following facts:
- The license to drive until 22 OCT 2002 cost me $104
- My birthdate is in no easily-recognizable form anywhere on this card
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28 September 2000
- I forget what I did at work today. Sent and read a lot of tool-related email, at any rate.
- Ate dinner with Adam, Mike, and Tyla at La Poisson Rouge. A very modern presentation of fish, and every bit as delicious as beautiful. I had a lobster sausage entree and a terrific whitefish with a very subtle taste of ginger and lemongrass. Mmm.
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29 September 2000
- More client hacking. I don’t have time for this anymore! Delegate! Delegate!
- More attempts at getting the new Tinderboxes onto the network.
- Went to get my Québec health card today. It’s so easy, though you have to bring your own photo (come on, it’s the year 2000, you can take my photo for me, like the SAAQ does). I had to fill out zero forms, and just sign my name once. Pouf.
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30 September 2000
- Still coughing. Really annoying.
- Woke up early-ish to visit Audiotronic with Mike. Some miscommunication and two hours later, we meet up for the first time and have lunch. I waited for him in Indigo and started reading The Diamond Age. Good so far.
- Mike started to feel really bad during brunch, so we did our best to hurry the TV-purchasing visit along.
- Met up with George a few blocks away and headed back to Mike’s to play some Rogue Spear. Mmmm, Rogue Spear.
- The three of us were a pretty sad sight: Mike curled up in his sleeping bag not wanting to eat anything, me with my phlegmy, hacking cough, and George blowing his nose every 2 minutes.
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