01 December 2000
- Happy December
- The next batch of furniture arrived; I finally have a coffee table, some living room chairs, a dining room table and chairs, and a nightstand. More and more like a real, livable space every day.
Comments off
Archive for December, 2000
02 December 2000
- Everyone came over for brunch this morning, making good use of furniture. Keep it up, I’m interested in a high ROI on this furniture.
- George, Zach, and I went off to La Cordeé to purchase winter clothing supplies. And dice.
- Hockey Night in Canada. Poor Colorado received their ass in a nice, gift-wrapped package. 6-1 loss to New Jersey. As if you care.
Comments off
06 December 2000
- A cold day at work; the huge external windows aren’t doing much good for the temperature in my office.
- More hash table hacking; I was going to make `for id in (expr)’ expressions valid for hashes (in the inner expression), but that turned out to be a lot of work, or at least requiring a lot more understanding of the codegen engine. I might still do it, but I don’t really feel like doing it right now.
Comments off
07 December 2000
- Mike, Tyla, and I have a date with The Tragically Hip this evening at 20h00 at the Molson Centre.
- CANOLA: CANada Oil, Low Acid. True story.
- The Hip put on an excellent show, though notably absent was Nautical Disaster.
- I can’t believe what I just saw; someone outside with no hat and no scarf riding a bicycle. It’s -20° out, -31° with wind chill! Darwinism in action.
Comments off
08 December 2000
- The internet is so slow today. It’s almost like someone thinks that I should be working.
- Salon has a terrific review of the D&D movie. That is to say, the review is terrific; the movie is, apparently, not.
Comments off
09 December 2000
- Today was mostly a waste. George and I did go to the hardware store, where I purchased life-essential items such as a shovel and felt.
- For some reason I was incredibly tired today; I fell asleep on George’s floor, and never really recovered.
- We had a small dinner at Lezvos, after which we were going to go to Nico’s wine and cheese party, but I didn’t feel well. I took some Gravol (apparently also useful in the treatment of radiation sickness), and went home to sleep for 12 hours.
Comments off
10 December 2000
- The sleep really helped. I feel mostly better.
- Went shopping with George for brunch items, after which we cooked at his house. Mike, Tyla, Jack, and Zach came over, and we ate blueberry pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs. Mm.
- Tried to go downtown to buy a suit, but it was total chaos. Thousands of crap heads from the suburbs were protesting the “Une île, une ville” nonsense. In addition to making the streets untraversable, they dumped their stupid wooden signs all over the inside of the mall, making those untraversable as well. Pig fuckers.
- Thus thwarted, I went home to wax the table. Not just a candidate for a clever euphemism, I really waxed the unfinished coffee table.
- Mike and Tyla cooked dinner for the gang, lamb chops and ginger-glazed baked root vegetables. Mm, I like food.
- I’m surprised that Joe even bothers pretending that he has an activity log. It’s not like he ever updates it.
Comments off
11 December 2000
- Seen in cvs 1.10.8:
/* XXX - XXX - MAJOR HACK - DO NOT SHIP - this needs to be !pipeout, but we don't know that here yet */
Great.
- Hurray, snow is really coming down. Not the inch-an-hour that I’d quietly hoped for, but Environment Canada predicts 15-25cm by tomorrow afternoon.
Comments off
12 December 2000
- It snowed quite a lot last night, probably about 20cm. Yay!
- I was taken by a midmorning fancy, and went out and spent too much on a suit. Oh well. It’s really nice.
- I’m tempted to take the afternoon off to go tobogganing, but I have too much to do. I’d go after work, but it’ll be dark, and I have no real desire to break my neck on the mountain.
- Booked my holiday travel. Sigh, what a pain in the butt. They can come visit me next year.
- My activity log comes up for some really odd search engine queries. Maybe I should move it again. I should certainly amalgamate the old entries and split the lot into months.
Comments off
13 December 2000
- Mr Cranky Pants brought me my skates from Ottawa, much to my excitement. Troy’s been bugging me to come play with the other Zero-Knowledge hockey folks, so I think I’ll look into that.
- 3 new episodes of Junkyard Wars air tonight, so we’ll pile over to Mike and Tyla’s to watch them build windmills, missile launchers, and mobile bridge machines. Awesome!
- We’re supposed to get another 6cm of snow tonight, and it’s already started. Montreal’s director of snow removal thinks that he’ll have the last of the 32cm that fell between the 11th and 12th cleaned up by Sunday.
- Worked from home today, and decided that they don’t pay me nearly enough to do the extensive CVS hacking that is desired. I’ll bodge a workaround, instead.
Comments off
14 December 2000
- Happy birthday Zab!
- Ordered pizza and watched movies at Zach’s to celebrate. We were going to eat at Chao Phraya, but he didn’t really feel like spending 3 hours at a restaurant. Fair enough.
- We talked mang into coming to the Zero-Knowledge holiday party, so he’ll be in town this weekend. Yippee!
Comments off
15 December 2000
- Picked up my suit and got my hairs cut, which along with the company meeting took a pretty substantial part of my day. Snuck in a couple of other meetings just to make sure that I didn’t accidentally write any code.
- George and I cooked trout, broccoli, and potatoes for dinner. Cheap, delicious, quick. It was pretty savage the way we bloated ourselves with food, actually.
- I’d forgotten how much I love to skate; Troy and I hit the puck around for a few hours while I found my skating legs. I haven’t really skated since February or March, but it came back pretty fast. We’re going to try to round up enough people for a game on Wednesday before everyone scatters for the holidays.
Comments off
16 December 2000
- Freezing rain. Ugh.
- I’m pretty stunned that we call this place “civilized,” when there’s no dry cleaning pickup on Sundays. I called at least 10 places, some of which helpfully suggested other places that don’t offer Sunday pickup. Even the ones which said in the phone book “DRY CLEANING 7 DAYS”. Also helpful to note that “ONE HOUR DRY CLEANING” only works before noon. Is it some magic dry cleaning machine that loses its mystical lord-of-the-dark powers and turns into a cabbage at the stroke of noon?
Sometimes, I really wonder why we put up with this Quebec shit.
- Ran some errands, though notably forgot to buy a belt to replace the black leather one that has started cracking. Perhaps tomorrow, although tomorrow is Sunday, which might mean that I have to throw a brick through a store window in order to get service.
- I also learned of an extra special awesome Quebec law the other day. I was in a Provigo with Mike, buying some dinner items, and I noticed for the first time a huge sign near the checkout counters that basically reads:
Please note! By law, we can serve you with a staff of no more than FOUR after 22h00!
Did I step into a direct-to-1800s-New-England time fucking machine without noticing? Thank god that the Gouvernement du Quebec took the time to ensure that I get shitty service when it might be convenient for me to shop. Clearly, what Quebec needs is more laws that limit the number of jobs available.
- I somehow got talked into going over to Zach’s in the freezing rain to play Shenmue. If I ever meet the designer of this game, I’m going to slug him. It’s incredibly beautiful, very richly textured, and highly detailed. And the pace of the game is so incredibly slow, mind-bendingly frustrating, and stupidly repetitive. They try to pretend that it’s ground-breaking, revolutionary gaming, when it’s really just a prettier version of “find item a: talk to person b; um, talk to person c; um, talk to person d; um, wait a day and then talk to persons e or f; um, wait a day then go back to person b; etc” Over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Comments off
17 December 2000
- Tonight’s the company holiday party, and a weather disaster is of course planned. Now it’s almost 10° out; I wanted to go skating, but mother nature had to take the beautiful, pristine, frozen pond and shit on it.
- Simon is starting to resign himself to the fact that I am going to cut his nails, even if I have to tie him in a pillowcase to do it. His epiphany is best for everyone.
- I tried to clear my mind and get some work done, but I ended up sitting in the living room reading unrelated text, instead.
Comments off
18 December 2000
- A day of recovery. The party was a lot of fun, and luckily nobody expects me in the office today.
- We ate at Soto, which has view that overlooks a parking lot, but rather high up. In the span of the three hours that we were there it went from 8° and pouring rain, to 0° and sleet, to -8° and blowing snow. Somewhat incredible.
- “Extra Semi-Sweet” Huh!?
Comments off
19 December 2000
- Don’t talk to me about Christmas.
- Furthermore, don’t shop at Provigo near Christmas. They weren’t just playing dorky music–that I could handle–but they were playing an album which could only be entitled Top 100 Jingle Bells Remixes or some such shit.
- Tuesday Night Hockey; made pepper steaks on Mike’s grill and watched BOS tie PHI.
Comments off
21 December 2000
- Bought new glasses today, for the first time in probably 5 years. The world looks so squished and weird compared to contact lenses.
- I’m leaving my beautiful city tomorrow, to spend 5 days in the Ohio Waste. Don’t get me started.
- I just learned that Our Lady Peace played in Montréal last week! Damn it. Nobody told me.
- I forgot to call my dentist to schedule my January wisdom tooth extraction sessions. Oops. He’s on vacation until after the new year.
- I’m going home, I have a lot of cleaning and packing to do before I leave.
Comments off
27 December 2000
- Spent 22 Dec through today in Ohio with my parents et al. I learned a fair bit about using my Blackberry on the airplane, though. Harold told me something that Nat learned: if you hold the unit up to the aircraft window, you can get signal, even at 33,000 feet!
Sometimes–every once in a while–technology really amazes me.
- My elation was shattered when one of my bags failed to turn up at the belt outside customs; I’m still rather full of disbelief–how could they have lost my bag on a flight with three people!?
- Mike and I exchanged some email while I flew, and upon learning that I was inbound, he and Tyla waited to have dinner. I took a quick shower and we met up at Thai Grille, then returned to their house to watch the Junkyard Wars finals.
Comments off
28 December 2000
- I received a very sheepish phone call from a very sheepish lady who sheepishly informed me that her husband picked up an extra bag at the customs belt.
I’m sure they’re very nice people, and this isn’t the sort of thing they normally do, and I refrained from mentioning this on the phone, but: is his brain made of tapioca? How do you grab an extra bag!? The flight was only an hour, it’s not like he checked in in Australia and a day later happened to be claiming his bags.
Oh well. On the bright side, Air Canada’s being awfully nice about it, and they said that if she can get it to Pearson (or presumably any airport), they’ll deliver it to me. She has to make another trip to the airport on Saturday anyways, so I told her it could wait until then.
- I did as much nothing today as possible.
Comments off
29 December 2000
- Up early, at Mike’s at 9 for breakfast, and then we watched the tape of Wednesday’s hockey game. At least my fears of Lemieux not being ready were banished 33 seconds in, though they spanked the Maple Leafs pretty hard.
- He’s the only person in NHL history to average 2 points per game over his career. Jesus!
- Bought a much-anticipated rice cooker that happens to double as a crude vegetable steamer. Mmm, rice.
Comments off
30 December 2000
- Cleaned up the kitchen, sat by the fire, read a bit, figured out why my DSL was hosed under Linux. Boring.
Comments off
31 December 2000
- Lots of snow, though I’m not quite sure how much. From up here it looks to be about 30cm, and still coming down.
- Time to go make sure that Chester has enough food and water; he’s probably a bit stir crazy.
Comments off
