01 October 2000
- And a very happy October to you too!
- Tried to get un-sick. Drank 3 litres of orange juice. Slept a lot, and took a bath.
Comments off
Archive for October, 2000
02 October 2000
- Monday. Hmm. Sleepy. Still sick.
- Reserved a car for the drive to Syracuse. Realized, in a moment of slight panic and then incredible relief that the concert is tomorrow, not Wednesday night. Good, really, because my Thursday is packed with meetings and I know that the work that needs to be done this week is going to increase exponentially as the week rolls on.
- Tried to get the new Tinderboxes on the network, but ran into some disturbing wiring problems. Too bad to list here.
- Realized that the Bonsai db hadn’t been fixed since we’ve moved the CVS root. In retrospect, I should have just pointed all of the checkins’ cvsroot bits at the other entry, but repopulating it from scratch seemed easier at the time.
- Left early (17h20, even) to visit the kitchen supply store with the gang before it closed. Quick dinner at Santropol (for excruciatingly long values of quick) and then to Zach’s for a viewing of Spinal Tap. Hilarious.
Comments off
03 October 2000
- Zach, Deb, George, and I had a contest to see who would arrive first (the theory being that Morning People are Productive People, or something). The first person to arrive would buy enough donuts for everyone, and the last person to arrive would reimburse that person. I won. Thanks to the wonders of wireless email, I was already too busy to buy donuts before I walked in the door.
- Fixed a heinous bug in the squid-gzip code. A really dumb bug, it was a one-liner that was lost in the disk crash (sigh).
- Picked up the rental car and drove to Syracuse, sans shaver. That poop monkey was too busy or sick or something, so he skipped the concert. It made me sad.
- The drive took about 4.5 hours, and I arrived about 17h30. Blizzard, Shona, and I had a delicious dinner at the local thai palace.
- Chris and I zipped over to the Landmark Theatre after dinner to witness an evening with The Tragically Hip. It was nice being able to see them in a smaller (~4000 person?) venue; they’re so incredibly popular in Canada that they’re selling out arenas like the Air Canada Centre on back-to-back nights. It’s not the same kind of show. It’ll be interesting to compare it with their show at the Molson Centre coming up in December.
- Does anyone really believe that Gordon Downie stopped doing drugs?
Comments off
04 October 2000
- Snuck out of the Blizzards’ house around 05h20 for the drive back to Montréal. I made it back in about 4 hours, which is pretty fine time, if I do say so myself. I’m tired, though, and I have a ton of work to do.
- I still have a couple of outstanding Freedom client bugs, but I’m going to try to delegate them, because I have zero bandwidth left.
- Spent another half hour chasing down a stupid bug in the squid-gzip code. Basically, I lost 3 very tiny but important patches when my IBM desktop drive consumed itself a month ago.
- I just can’t shake this damn cough. Mike told me to go home twice today, but I have too much stuff to do.
- More prep for the client beta and source release. A pretty fair whack of my day was spent talking about and writing down the steps that are left to get our client out the door.
- Tracked down a stupid bug in a Tinderbox admin script. That script can’t possibly work out-of-the-box at Mozilla. Why didn’t they check the fix back into the tree? Hmm?
- Brought a new Tinderbox online to build the non-client parts of our network. Next in line is the Windows client Tinderbox, which should be such incredible fun.
- Hmm, Paul just, in a roundabout fashion, asked me to turn down my music. Shouldn’t he be at home by now? He has, like, a family and stuff.
- The left ’shift’ and ‘control’ keys on my laptop are starting to feel really mushy. Or maybe it’s my pinky.
Comments off
05 October 2000
- Worked on stuff related to the source release. Dum dum dum.
- Ate some yummy pasta at Mike and Tyla’s with George. Retired to the TV room to bathe in the glow of the altar to capitalism, complete with Crazy Taxi and Perfect Dark. This bowl of lukewarm tapioca reprsents my brain, I offer it in humble sacrifice.
Comments off
06 October 2000
- Ah, a very, very hectic week comes to an end.
- Mike decided a little bit ago that I was going home to rest and get better, whether I liked it or not. We went to one last meeting, and I’ll go home eventually.
- I have a lot of cleaning to do. Guests are coming to town this weekend and my living room and bedroom are rather apocalyptic. I should head to Canadian Tire and get some additional sleeping surfaces tomorrow, too.
- I just had a horrible realization.
I have spent so little time at home that I just noticed that I have “wet” (though you’ll quickly realize how untrue that choice of word is) clothes in the washing machine from before I left for Boston.
- I don’t like what I see in the cat’s ears. I’m going to have to take that bastard to the vet this weekend. Possibly not until Tuesday, though, on account of the guests and the holiday.
Comments off
08 October 2000
- Slept until about 10h30, then did some much-needed desk cleaning.
- Took Justin and Jamie to Bens for lunch, after which we swung over to Audiotronic to pick up Mike’s DVD player and my speakers for the computer room.
- I didn’t remember to get a component video cable (practically the entire point of the new-DVD excercise), so we dashed out again, 15 minutes before every store in Montreal closes, and found one with at least a minute to spare.
- Ate Thanksgiving dinner at Mike and Tyla’s with their families and Adam. Even the ten of us had a hard time making any sort of real dent in the enormous amount of terribly delicious food.
Comments off
09 October 2000
- Slept in until around noon, then ate brunch with Zach, Justin, and Jamie at Shed. They were faster than usual, as I think we escaped in under 90 minutes. Yummy food, though.
- Justin and Jamie left to go shopping, I returned to the apartment to read and hack, not feeling terribly well.
- The three of us plus Mike helped George move his bed into his apartment, and then zipped back to Mike’s to try to make a dent in the 6-point-something pounds of turkey that remain.
- Austin Powers on the big TV. Hold me.
Comments off
10 October 2000
- Still haven’t rid myself of this chest cold, though it’s turned more into chest congestion than constant coughing.
- Had a really strange dream which involved the high-level explanation of cryptography from shared secrets through the Brands patents, and also a lot of killing. I would teach a little, slay some people, teach a little, destroy monsters and throw them into bottomless pits…
- Worked from bed most of the day, but realized around 20h00 that I really needed intranet access.
- Had a lot to do, so I just stayed.
Comments off
11 October 2000
- Last meeting was at 14h00, so I finally made it home and to sleep around 16h00.
Comments off
12 October 2000
- 17 hours later, I woke up totally unsure of what time or day it is.
- A pretty sane day; got a lot of stuff done and left the office by 18h30. Had dinner with Zach’s at Cafe Republic (pretty good, despite the name which had me envisioning Columbian drug lords at shadowy tables in the back).
- Indulged ourselves in Perfect Dark for a couple of hours, then I went home for some more sleep.
Comments off
13 October 2000
- Woke up later than I wanted to. Made a haircut appointment. I’m hooked on Tonic.
- Lots to do today, must hurry to work.
- A person probably wishing to remain anonymous today said, “Bob is an asshole. I mean, he is French, but once he got to SecretCompany, it went out of control.” [emphasis added]
- Had a delicious (as always) dinner at Lezvos with Zach, Steph, Mike, Tyla, Adam, Deb, and Oliver. Once you get past the jab about the Greek wine tasting like pine sol (that someone has to make each and every time), an uneventful dinner.
- Oliver, Zach, Steph, and I finally made it over to the Jello bar for a couple of martinis afterwards. The music there was, unfortunately, a total disaster so we left relatively early. The week had taken its toll on me, so I went home afterwards around 23h30, but apparently the rest of them were out until 6 o’clock. They’re totally insane. I wonder where they went that was so much fun… I should remember to ask.
Comments off
14 October 2000
- Woke up around 11. Not so bad, I guess, but I really have to start working towards getting up earlier.
- Did some shopping and housecleaning; there’s still a huge pile of laundry that’ll have to be dealt with at some point. I don’t feel like it right now.
- Played Baldur’s Gate 2 for a bit, then made some dinner and headed over to Mike’s to watch Toronto get routed by Ottawa. sigh.
- For some insane reason we watched Braveheart after the hockey game. Took a cab home around 02h30. Insanity! Fantastic movie, though. Totally the opposite of the crappy “less-is-more” style of Gladiator.
Comments off
15 October 2000
- Woke up around 11h30, which is remarkable given when I went to bed.
- More cleaning, more BG2, you see where this is going.
- Met up with George, Mike, and Tyla at the north gate of Chinatown to take a look around the various Chinese groceries. I finally found a beautiful handmade wok, which I’ll return to purchase later in the week. There were a couple of large groceries which seemed to carry most everything but fresh fish, though there was some diversity of dried and otherwise-preserved fish. Some of it looked truly repellant, to be honest.
- Consumed a horrific amount of food at a packed Chinese restaurant, and paid something like $15 each for the privilege. Wild!
- Went to see Get Carter at Paramount (we wanted to see The Contender but the timing was pretty bad). It had some good scenes, but the story didn’t make a ton of sense (what was with that scene at the end in the parking garage, for example?), and one of the characters in particular was annoyingly overblown.
Comments off
17 October 2000
- Ate dinner with George and Zach, then made it home by the incredibly reasonable hour of 20h00.
- Did laundry and played BG2; read some of my book. Booorrrrring.
Comments off
18 October 2000
- Home at the wildly reasonable hour of 18h15. Almost like a real human!
- Bought a bunch of groceries for the first time in a month, with the intent of making some deviled chicken breasts. I think my oven’s pilot light is out (the evidence being when I turn on the oven, the room fills with gas), so that didn’t happen. I am totally unable to find a manual for the oven, so I’ll probably have to call a plumber. I’ll try to wrestle it away from the wall this weekend and see if there’s a plate with instructions for re-lighting. Suck-o.
- Made salad, pasta, and fruit instead. Nummy.
- More laundry, more BG2, more book.
Comments off
19 October 2000
- My taxes were due 3 days ago. I should really do something about that. Luckily I’ve already paid, I just need to file.
- The cleaning staff (I can only assume) “cleaned” my desk, which I think consisted of taking the papers that I was last looking at and stacking them all up on top of each other, then pushing my mouse, phone, and everything else to the back of the desk. What the hell?
- I think my cat is sharing his litter box with the other neighbourhood cats when I go to work. He lets them all in the back door, they poop in the litter box, and go home. Either that, or my cat eats his weight in food every day.
- Facilities finally fixed the heat in our office; it turns out that we weren’t lying all along, the radiator was broken. Go figure, eh?
- One of my teeth really hurts, but only when I move my head, and it’s deep in the gums. I wonder if something Really Bad has happened to the root of that tooth. I’ll find out soon, I think, as I have an appointment with Dr. Hébert at 11h00 tomorrow.
- Zach put a sign up that said basically “If you have a question, you should really send me email instead of interrupting”. Someone sent him an email that read “can i drop by for a sec?”. Incredible. At least most of the company has started to respect the sign on our office that insists that we don’t even care if the building is on fire, we’ll find out eventually.
- Bought veggies and made stirfry with Mike, chatted with he and Tyla a bit over bourbon, and retired upstairs to bask in the glow of the altar to mass media while we tried in vain to find a hockey game.
Comments off
20 October 2000
- Jesus, it feels like one of my teeth is trying to run free (but again, only in response to head motion. Poking, prodding, chewing are painless). Thank god I’m seeing a dental surgeon in 10 hours. It’s probably my fucking wisdom teeth, exactly what I need right now.
- It turns out that my sinuses are pushing down on the roots of my teeth. The X-ray tells a tale. I’m going back on Thursday for a cleaning and to plan my wisdom teeth extraction, since they’re starting to push up against my molars on at least one side. sigh.
Comments off
21 October 2000
- Having determined that there’s no way that I’m going to re-light my stove until the gas from the attempted cooking clears out, I wrangled the stove away from the wall and shut the gas off. It’s clear that nobody has ever cleaned the stove, so before I turn everything back on it’s getting some serious all-anal pre-teen spray-cleaner action.
- Janice invited everyone over to her house for a birthday dinner, where she delivered a delicious seafood creole. I no longer have any doubts as to where Michael got his cooking ability.
- By the time I got home, the gas had nicely dispersed. Rejoice.
Comments off
22 October 2000
- I won’t offend everyone by saying that I feel old.
- My sisters made the fatal mistake of sending me electronic greetings, which made me realize that I hadn’t had their email addresses until now. Time for me to start filling their young impressionable minds with electronic propaganda.
“Hey bro, I hope you have the best birthday without me! I know it just will not be the same, sorry.”
Ahh, she’s so 14.
- Someone in my family recently got over diabetes. I didn’t think that sort of thing happened. I think I’m going to send a big jug of Quebec maple syrup in celebration.
- I need to go clean the stove, and a bunch of us are going to head to Chinatown to prepare for this evening’s festivities involving George teaching everyone to make sushi.
- Bought an SB Live yesterday, and its outputs are, as far as I can tell, as confusing as possible. No matter what crazy combinations of “this should work” and “this can’t possibly be right”, I never get anything out of the diagnostics program other than “front left”.
Maybe I can find a PDF of the sblive docs online, else I’m going to return it. What a disaster.
- The sushi was a raging success, though the fish seemed expensive, even for stuff that they’re willing to let us eat raw. I’ll look at a couple other fish stores and see; perhaps fish is just expensive here.
- After some 2 hours of preparing and eating, we settled in for some 2.25 hours of Perfect Dark. Sigh. Then I went out and ate again.
- The taxi driver, after me dropped me off, asked me to hang around in his cab for a couple of minutes and do him a favour. Apparently, one of their drivers has gone “renegade” and is “poaching” large airport fares with the aid of a rogue dispatcher, so he asked me to use his cell phone and set up a pickup somewhere for the next morning. I wonder if they found out who he was. I wonder if they had him killed.
- The cabbie offered to knock 55 cents off of my fare for my time. I guess my time is only worth $8/hr.
Comments off
23 October 2000
- We released the source code to our Linux Freedom client today, so naturally that occupied much of my day. Good stuff.
Comments off
24 October 2000
- Did some source release hoo ha. Wrote some docs and some web pages.
- Went with Mike on a DVD shopping spree. We were really looking for Virtua Tennis for the Dreamcast, but none of three stores had it. One of three stores had controllers. One of three stores had extensions. Zero stores had component video cables.
Capitalism has fucking failed me. Bring on the commies, they get a try.
- We settled for a bag full of DVDs and went back to his place to watch The Usual Suspects with the commentary track. Good stuff.
- We also picked up Covert Ops, the next in the Rainbox Six/Rogue Spear series. We thought it was going to be a Rogue Spear add-on, but it turns out to be stand-alone. The whole first disc is (somewhat simplified but still nice) close quarters combat, field gear, psychology, chemical/biological agents, etc. training. We spent probably three hours reading about various field weaponry, the range and use of various sniper rifles, ammunition strengths and weaknesses, and the advantages of the three-shot burst, to name a few. We’re maybe 25% through the content, it’s pretty cute.
Comments off
25 October 2000
- Toyed with webtools today; fixed one of the Tinderboxes, now that its disk has been replaced; started installing the Windows client Tinderbox (boy is Windows 2000 ever an improvement); looked into rewriting Despot (probably a day of work, maybe Friday), which is desperately in need of it; wrote more web content and planned out my next few days.
- Had dinner at Zyng with Zach, George, and Mike, then went to hunt for movies we couldn’t find yesterday.
- Went back to Mike’s to watch some TV and eventually Repo Man. That movie is so fucked up I can barely begin to describe it. Pre-fucked for your viewing convenience. Incredible.
Comments off
26 October 2000
- I know that I did a whole bunch of stuff on Thursday, but two days later I’ve already blocked it from memory.
- Mike, George, Zach, Steph, and I went to see The Contender at Paramount. It was hardly the “political masterpiece” that I’d heard; very disappointing.
- Ate at Nickel’s, against most better judgement. We were really hungry, though, and my meal was actually pretty good. I still think it should be firebombed for its decor, however.
Comments off
27 October 2000
- Put some new source tars in NSA’s deployment queue. The Linux beta shipped today and apparently our letter to beta folks contained some gruesome grammatical errors. Do I have to do everything?
I know we’re encouraged to trust people to get their jobs done, but jesus: Is it too much to ask that you edit your content?
- Failed miserably at a Tinderbox hack, because the tangled mess of global variables are getting stepped on somewhere; god this webtool is a mess. Maybe it’s time to see whether Tinderbox2 is worth using yet.
- Went to Atwater with Mike, picked up a beautiful butterflied leg of lamb, some cheese, bread, wine, snacks. Mmm. We put the meat on the grill, where it was made hot, and then we cut it up into little pieces and ate it.
- We couldn’t find much on TV, but we did find Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, starring Shannon Tweed and Bill Maher. Wow.
Comments off
28 October 2000
- Somebody building the Freedom source code noticed a directory called “zknsa” and was mildly worried. I can’t wait until we get some really paranoid comments.
- Why does my favourite sweater have to be dry-clean-only?
- The new Barenaked Ladies album is really growing on me.
- Managed to do a load of laundry before George informed me that we’re finally starting our DnD campaign today; we all met at Zach’s to make characters.
- I decided not to join everyone at Queue de Cheval for Janice’s birthday, unfortunately. I would have loved to, but my food expenses have been totally out of control lately; the last thing that I need is a $50-before-wine dinner (even though it would have been fabulous food).
- Instead, I finally cleaned my stove, re-lit the pilots, and made cucumber salad and gnocci in a tomato sauce. Nummy.
- Joe thinks that my use of the phrase “all-anal pre-teen spray-cleaner action” is totally inappropriate.
Comments off
29 October 2000
- People didn’t finish dessert last night until 2:00, so I guess I’m glad that I didn’t go to Queue.
- George and I hit Canadian Tire and finally bought ourselves some microwaves. I forgot to measure my little microwave cubby in the kitchen beforehand, but as it turns out it fits perfectly.
- We made some pretty fine lamb curry at George’s. (“Hmm, I have no idea how spicy this red pepper is. Wow. I just added a lot. Sorry.”)
- After dinner we retired to Zach’s to play weird Japanese Dreamcast games with the Montreal-visiting mang. So much for getting work done.
Comments off
30 October 2000
- It’s weird when someone sends you a random email asking if they can pay a very reasonable consulting rate for small modifications to software that you wrote years ago. I think that it should happen more often.
That being said, I spent a couple of hours making those changes.
- I’m sure that I did something at work. Source-release related or Despot hacking or something. Whatever.
Comments off
31 October 2000
- Happy Halloween.
- More webtools hackery. The fun never stops, I tell you.
- Adam, George, Deb, Zach, and I ate a silly amount of noodles and then watched Jackie Chan’s Project A (aka “‘A’ gai waak”). It was, er, ok.
Comments off
