April 2005 Archives

Werk had this thing at Dooly's for a couple of hours. A "release party" or something. We played a little pool, threw some darts, and ate some junkfood. It petered out pretty quickly, and everyone went their own way. I was all set to do nothing more, but R suggested we go see "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" at Kings College. It was a pretty good film, but lacked plot, and was a little slow at times. Good movie, though. And a good translation of the book as well. All of Ebert's points were valid -- the film was a little twee.

Tonight I've got one of those customers from hell (no, not that customer). He had a problem on his end with a RADIUS server, and we agreed over the phone that he'd need his RADIUS expert to come in and look at the problem. However, now he's emailed the powers-that-be and is demanding a refund because *we* couldn't make it work. (sigh) I wish I could record phone conversations. He's quoting some kind of sales agreement, and blaming his configuration problems on us. Like there's anything I can do for him.

This isn't the first time this has happened -- that a customer has done something or acted a certain way over the phone, then turned 180 degrees when talking to the Sales team.

Had a bit of a problem with my rss feed after moving my blog from one folder to another. Also worried I've wrecked some links on other people's websites (although I'm kind of kidding myself, thinking that other people read this blog -- heh). I found an interim solution to the rss feed by running a little cron job which copies the existing .xml file from one folder to another every half hour. The updates may not appear to by synchronous, but I'm sure no one even reads, let alone checks every half hour. I'll notice the difference since I'm subscribed to both feeds through BlogLines but that's just me.

So this post is sort of a little test to see if my new template takes care of the time offsets in my posts, and if my cron job updates both feeds.

Finally got to see "Kung Fu Hustle" last night. We almost missed it, waiting for Elbie at werk. Something about a crashing hard drive on a mail server kept him busy until just about 10pm. Luckily, we were standing by, ready to speed him off to Conestoga and catch the late show. Earlier, we ate at the Jane Bond, where I had the most garlicy caesar salad, ever. Now, I'm a big fan of garlic ... a really big fan. But this salad hurt. I've never been hurt by a salad before, and it's not a pleasant feeling. I think I can still taste it now.

Film was ... oh, how do I say this? Awesome. It was cartoony, fun, exciting, engrossing. I was still laughing about the cobras 20 minutes after the fact. It was all good. I have to admit, though, that I was a little worried at some points in the film -- that it would follow my expectations, and fall into some of the same routines I've seen in other films. The beginning of the film was surprisingly violent, immediately establishing itself as a non-kids film, despite what the trailers, or reviewers might say. I was concerned it wasn't going to lighten up any. At one point, the film seemed a little over-the-top cartoony, and like "The Mask", a pedestrian translation of the neat and extremely violent comic book, it wouldn't be able to pull back from the brink of Bugs Bunny-esque madness -- but it did. I was nervous that "Kung Fu Hustle" was going to pull punches (pun somewhat intended), and resort to only campy situations, and mediocre laughs. But, pull away the humour and the zany special effects, and you had a great and reasonably serious Kung Fu fable film, just like we've been seeing for years. This one's just much more fun -- especially fun when it came to all the film and pop-culture references: KFH poked fun at other martial artists, like Jackie Chan, Let Li, and even Stephen Chow; it managed to mix "Gangs of New York," "Spiderman," "The Matrix," and "Gone With the Wind" together; it even made fun of "Shaolin Soccer," when the main character, Sing (Stephen Chow) steps on a soccer ball and yells, "No more soccer!"

I'm going to see this film again. At my earliest convenience.

I'm sitting in a surprisingly empty Second Cup at the corner of University and Philip in Waterloo. The Americano I'm drinking is hot and strong, unlike myself this morning. I've got some serious chills from the weather, but I hear it's supposed to look a bit better later this week. Two blonde university chicks (who look like sisters) stand watch over the counter, not that I can see them where I'm sitting -- I'm near the back, right beside the door. There are big comfy-looking wing chairs here but I'm not sure I could type in them.

I had a look at my activity log last night while posting, and it confirmed my fears about my site -- I'm being bombarded with comment spammers. Ever since I fixed the comment posting on my site, I've been flooded with "texas holdem" and "penis enlargement" comments. There have been so many, I'm beginning to think there's a whole lot of poker players out there with small penises.

I heard about a study on CBC that found click through rates on spam were at about 8%, making it a successful way of advertising (this was email spam, as opposed to what's hitting my site). This just depresses me -- that there are idiots out there who are clicking on these things when they come into their mail boxes. Oh, yeah, I click on all those Alienware and ThinkGeek and PCDJ emails I get ... but those are SUBSCRIBED mails -- SOLICITED BY ME!

I kind of wish these guys would just leave me alone. Over the weekend, I got hit with over 100 pings and comments. Luckily, most of them were denied by some of the awesome tools I put in place. I want to thank the nice folks at www.jayallen.org for the free tool.

(There's a weird instrumental jazz version of a SmashMouth song playing in here. I almost didn't recognize it.)

The cat's going back to the vet on Wednesday. Got to get her some more antibiotics. Her eye's gotten all crusty again, and she's decided to simply deal with it, instead of grooming herself. The only time her eye gets cleaned is when I grab her and clean it with a tissue, or when Athena grooms her. It's kind of funny ... normally, when the cats groom each other, it's a pretext for fighting. But at least they're getting clean.

Might try to see "Kung Fu Hustle" tonight. R's going swimming, so she'll miss it, but she's counting on me liking it enough to watch twice. She knows me too well.

There's a bunch of people at Cafe 1842 tonight. I'm sitting quietly at a table along the wall, with my back to the stairs up to the Barley Works. I'm drinking a Double Americano Numi Desert Lime tea with honey (or something). I've got a bit of a sore throat this evening, and I've had enough coffee today. I took a suggestion from the server here. I haven't seen her in a while, so my theory on the turn-over at this place appears to have some weight behind it. She seems to be doing evening shifts.

The tea smells like that chemical lime you find in that green margarita salt you buy at Homesense -- not good. It tastes a little like a bad throat drop, but that's kind of what I was looking for (aside from the "bad" part), so it'll do.

The nameless karaoke lounge next door has some bad tunes emanating from it. Sounds like tribal trashcan banging, which might be nice on its own, but I know there's some inane melody associated with it, not to mention some drunken, discordant singing as well.

No, the tea's more like expired Neo-Citron ... yeah, with that green margarita salt in it. Mmmn, *weak* expired Neo-Citron.

Some trendy couples passing through here tonight. Couples, mostly -- few single people. There's only myself, some ugly loner guy watching TV, and a brainy-looking blonde with a Vaio. She's in my usual spot, in the corner, and she's got a bright track light shining down on her. Glad I'm sitting in the dark over here. In the mornings, the track lights are turned off.

There's this really noisy chick in an orange turtleneck a couple of seats away from me. She's monologuing on about some kind of social work she's doing with refugee kids from 3rd world countries. She's talking a lot of empty words at her poor friend who seems resigned to listen to this endless flood of culture issues, name dropping, and what sounds conspicuously like university-grade sociology terms.

A couple of loud jocks and a scrawny jockette breezed through on their way to the karaoke place -- no wait, they've turned around and grabbed a Scrabble board. Uh oh, they're going to be playing Scrabble.

Anyway...

Weekend was good, except for the, uh, several inches of snow.... Friday we partied at Starlight with a big crowd of friends. After last call, six of us headed to Mel's for an early (early) breakfast. We then went home and slept for about 3 hours, then woke up and (for some inexplicable reason) drove to Conestoga Mall to stand in line for 2 hours, in the hopes of buying a rain barrel for $20. Yes, we actually did this. I wasn't hungover, but I was sleepy enough not to dress properly for the 3C weather, spitting rain, and high winds. Seriously, the lineup snaked all the way through the Zellers side of the mall's parking lot and went out on to the street, all the way up to the car dealership on Davenport. After we got the barrel, we seriously pondered why went through all the trouble. We went to 1842 for breakfast number 2, then home to sleep.

That's kind of what the weekend was like, rainy, snowy, not a lot going on. Did some cleaning, reading, watching of TV, etc. We even tried to get out to see "Kung Fu Hustle," but the only theatre showing it had a damaged print. We'll try to get out to see it this week -- sounds like an awesome film.

(geez, that woman is still monologuing -- something about bombs and Canada and shit.... a hypothetical situation of some kind, about what Canadian refugees would do in a time of war, etc, etc.)

The "tea" is mostly gone. I'm kind of surprised I kept drinking it. Throat isn't feeling much better, but now my stomach hurts. Think I need to go home and drink some expired Neo-Citron.

This was pretty cool. Thought it might be something useful for those who need a bunch of names really fast. Reminds me of the "Porn Star Naming Convention" of taking your middle name and the street you live on.

Drinking coffee. Reading Google News. Sitting in 1842. Corner table. Trying to think of something to write.

I was out in the garden this morning, planting some wildflowers, and using the Garden Hound (read: Garden Weasel) to till the ground after throwing seeds on it. That's my contribution to the garden for this week. I bought the Garden Hound to turn compost occasionally, and to take the place of a regular tiller, which I definitely don't need. I'm starting to collect a lot of different gardening tools, and am in need of a place to put them. I want to buy a shed, but I keep thinking that even if I finish the garage, and make it livable, I'll still be storing shit in there. So I'm thinking of buying one of those plastic cabinets for gardening tools, so I can at least keep the garage a little organized. I don't think I can afford a shed right now, and it seems a little unnecessary for my needs.

I'm going to buy some more of that cement caulking and see if I can finish sealing the walls in the garage. Once that's done, I'm going to paint them with a waterproofing primer, and get that out of the way before I get into the floor-leveling thing. I'm beginning to question my cement skills since I filled that hole in the sidewalk. The patch is still not fully cured, and there's a tire track and a dog's footprint in it now. At least the next door kids haven't put their hands in it. I don't think that stuff's good for skin. Heh, part of me was being paranoid about having the kids poke at the cement patch, and I was keeping an eye on it while it was drying. Granted, I did spend a long time making it smooth, and it was like trying to spread chewed gum with a trowel. But I really didn't mind all that much -- in fact, it's something I would have done as a kid. So I was only keeping half an eye on the patch.

The cafe was almost empty when I got here, but now it's filling up and people are starting to set themselves around the perimeter. It's as if everyone's afraid of sitting in the middle -- like the sharks will get them, or something. I'm beginning to think they rotate the staff around here like crazy. Either that, or they have an enormous pool of staff to work from. Of the two women working here this morning, I recognize one, and I've only seen her here twice before in the past couple of weeks. My guess is that they have some of the bar and restaurant staff work here for the occasional shift, and since they're University aged, they probably get some degree of turn-over. I keep forgetting this place is attached to the Huether and the Barley Works (and that unnamed karaoke place next door).

Werk's really busy, and I've got a ton of things to do since the release. All these customers are coming out of the woodwork, all in a hurry to upgrade, for whatever reasons. There's a lot of docs changes that need to be done, and there's a few of post-release bugs being found. Hopefully I can get to everything that needs to be done this week, but I always feel like I'm slipping behind. It's high time for some beers on a patio. Too bad the weather's gotten cold again.

Dig this schway webcam I picked up from Tiger Direct. Saw it in the catalogue, and it was super cheap (like $30).

Takes nice enough pictures, and it's much smaller than carrying around a digital camera. Also, I wouldn't be sad to have this lost/destroyed/stolen. It's more for the novelty than anything else, but handy to have if I ever need a webcam.

Got my coffee finally. They were pretty busy here, since about half of the people ordered breakfast, instead of just coffee. I asked them to switch my Americano to an Espresso.

Cafe 1842 is bustling this morning. I was standing in line for longer than I expected. But the same cheery hospitality met me when I finally got my turn (I'm still waiting for my coffee, BTW). Weather is nice, and I was going to bike to werk, but I figured it's going to rain today, and I wanted to get in a little blogging beforehand. So no bike for me.

I picked up a neat book from Home Despot last night, while buying some cement to fix the patchy sidewalk in front of my drive way. I wanted something that would help coach me on finishing my garage, but there's nothing specific that I could find that covered it. The garage is kind of like a basement, with cinderblock walls, and a concrete floor. It's also kind of like an attic, since it's got exposed rafters, and a loft (of sorts -- certainly nothing that you could actually live in). So this book was perfect. It was Black and Decker's book on how to finish your attic or basement. So, it's got everything. Looks like a big job (*yikes*). The first thing I need to do is finish the floor. Going to have to clean it thoroughly, then apply some leveling compound to help prevent water from getting in during the winter. I was thinking of putting some kind of sill in at the front, and replacing the fold-up door with something similar to carriage house doors (the major door companies don't seem to make these). Once that's done, it's waterproof and frame the walls, then the roof, etc. I'd still like to put a skylight in, and the book also covers this. But first things first. Get the floor done.

(sigh) Still waiting for that coffee.

Here are those pictures I mentioned. I need to do something about that garage, and those heart-shaped shutters have to go this year.

It's a beautiful day today, and I'm sitting out on the deck in the shade, drinking a cup of coffee. R's soaking up the sun in one of those fold-up camping chairs we picked up in Algonquin last year. One of the cats is outside on a leash -- China's been surprisingly adventurous today. She's much less afraid than she usually is.

I took some nice pictures of the yard today, and I'll see if I can get them online in a little while. I'm working from the Netbook Pro today, so no image editing software or standard-sized USB port (note to self - if there's a compact flash to memory stick adapter, I should look into it).

Went to Starlight last night --this is getting to be part of the weekly routine, it seems. Slightly different crowd than is usually there. The hipsters are disappearing, and are being replaced with jocks, fratboys, and loud, annoying chix. Three of the latter pushed past me in the bar lineup, and elbowed me in the ribs, trying to clear some space for themselves. Then one of them started bitching at me for getting served before she did. What can I say? I'm a regular now -- also, I was here first....

Did some minor blog modifications last night. I thought it might be neater to keep the blog in a subfolder, instead of leaving it integrated as part of the main site. The benefits of this are that everything's nicely modular, like the Missinglinks page, and it might get treated like a separate blog on some of the ping sites. It was pretty easy to do, since MovableType allows you to export entries and import them at the click of a button (and the creation of an import/ folder in the mt/ directory, but I digress...).

Also fixed a problem with not being able to post comments on the Missinglinks page. Someone emailed me and pointed it out. Apparently, in my zeal to stop comment spamming on MT, I added a blank entry to my banned IP list, effectively banning everyone. It took me a little while to figure this out, and I spent many minutes perusing the MT scripts to figure out where this "You are not allowed to post comments" error message was coming from. So that's fixed now. And here I was wondering why I wasn't getting spammed for the past month.

Finally got my replacement Blackberry from werk. It's a schway 7280 colour model, with unlmited data for the first couple of months. Wanted to see if I could blog from it.

If you can read this, then, yes, I can blog from it.

I spent about an hour and a half yesterday on the phone with Rogers tech support. Apparently, the rep who sent us this machine mistook it for a Treo, and set us up with the wrong plan. It too 3 tech/account reps to get this thing activated. Thanks to Thomas, the Quebecois guy, for actually knowing what he was talking about. A most helpful support rep.

I'm sitting in a Starbucks on Yonge St., drinking a doppio espresso, whatever that means. I was feeling a little hungry, so I got some kind of pecan tart, something which I regret buying, not because it wasn't any good, but because it was way too swuh-swuh-sweet. I managed to devour half of it, but I can't come anywhere near finishing it.

I'm kind of stuck here until the highways clear up a bit -- I dropped off some servers at a customer 's site and spent some time with them pretty much just looking at the servers and talking about what we did to configure them. It was a late dropoff, so now I can either spend the next 2-3 hours in traffic, or I can spend 2 hours wandering around here, and about an hour on the roads. I *did* spend a lot of time with the customer talking about the servers and what they needed to deploy them (they've got a new intern who's going to be dedicated to our software maintenance, so I gave him the rundown on what was going on), so I *might* be able to expense some dinner while I wait for the traffic to subside. I'm not very hungry at this point, due to the sugar bomb that hit me. But I might be a little hungry later -- maybe grab a veggie burger at Licks, or perhaps I can get to that place at Gerrard and Logan. Unfortunately, I forgot where I was headed today, and I'm up near St. Clair station. So, driving around downtowm T.O. is probably off the list.

There's a lot of stylin' people outside the window. I keep forgetting how fashionable these metro-people are. Of course, there's a whole lot of unstylish people around too (I'm one of them), but that makes the other ones seem that much more stylish. Remind me to get better dressed when I head up here for a visit.

Checked the blog log this morning. It's something I do occasionally to keep an eye on comment spammers. Funny thing though, it also shows me what people are searching for on my site. Typically, it's something to do with this one posting on Red vs Blue or this other single posting I did on Habbo Hotel. Occasionally, I get something pretty weird and/or funny. Here's what showed up this morning:

• Search: query for 'long toenails'
  
• Search: query for 'long toenails'
  
• Search: query for 'initiation'
  
• Search: query for 'spanking'
  
• Search: query for 'RvB'
  
• Search: query for 'redvsblue'
  
• Search: query for 'Grif'
  
• Search: query for 'Halo'
  
• Search: query for 'RVS'
  
• Search: query for 'RVB'
  
• Search: query for 'Tex'
  
• Search: query for 'Caboose'
  

It's cold this morning. Sunny, but cold. I'm noticing it more because I didn't put on a coat before leaving the house. Just that hoodie with the orange stripe along the arm. I figured I'd just get in my car, and that would be it. But it's pretty cold. Also, I shaved my head the other day, so even when the cat walks by, I feel a breeze on my head.

1842 is quiet today, and the sun's coming in through the east window, making it nice and toasty in here. My double Americano is in a smaller vessel today, and it's strong and hot. It's in one of those big ceramic mugs that weighs about 5 pounds when it's empty, but no complaints this morning. There's only maybe 6 other people in here. A casual business couple is sitting quietly at one of the center tables, talking quietly about problems with work ... with their respective relationships. They are not seeing each other, but they seem fascinated by each other. That's apparent.

I get a new water softener tomorrow. Plumber-guy is coming in at 8, and he may not be finished before I have to drive to Toronto to drop off some servers. I probably won't be able to leave KW until after noon, meaning I either go get dinner in Toronto, or else I have to deal with rush-hour traffic on my way out of town. Maybe I'll head over to that awesome buddhist restaurant at Gerrard and Logan: Simon's Vegetarian Wok. Mmmn. They made the best beancurd rolls.

I asked the bartender at Abstract to make me a Cuba Libra, and she said "Sorry, but I don't have any bitters." Taken aback, I asked her what her recipe was. Here it is (I've fudged the measurements a little, because she never gave me any). I'm not sure you'll find it anywhere else, under any other name, but if you find it, drop me a note.

So called "Cuba Libra"

• 1/2oz. Rum


• 1/2oz. Gin


• Coke to fill


• 1/4oz. Bitters


• 2oz. Lime Juice


• Garnish with Lime

Can't find a single copy of Win98 French or any other language, save English. Don't know what those QA guys do around here, but the place is a mess. I think I found a half-eaten sandwich among the different test machines.

Turns out the Dev guys figured the problem without my help. So all my searching and ghosting isn't really necessary. Maybe I'll go find a patio and start drinking a little early. Maybe my own patio (huzzah!).

I know, what's a cute guy such as myself doing in a place like this on a day like today? Gettin the hell outta here, is what.

It's a beautiful Sunday noon, and I'm sitting in the shade at 1842. I'm sharing the table with a grotesquely large Americano served in a bowl with a handle on it. I'm pretty sure an average human would die trying to drink it all. That much coffee would reach toxic levels in the bloodstream. Actually, after testing the waters (so to speak), it turns out that this Americano, in a cup which I could comfortably plunge both fists into (without the steaming hot liquid in it, of course), is mostly water, with perhaps only one shot of espresso. None the less, coffee is coffee.

There's a couple of "baby families" here today -- somewhat of a rarity. Of course, both have strollers, and of course, both strollers are choking the aisles between the tables, forcing the wait staff to navigate the room like ordinance removal specialists in a Bosnian minefield. (sigh) One of the children is now screaming uncontrollably, but at least the mother has the good sense to remove the baby from the area). Unfortunately, now she's brought the child to within mere feet from my table, and she and the child are engaged in an embarrassing "calm the baby" dance.

I got a morning page today; one of our servers went offline, and our office manager (who is always at work) wasn't able to get her accounting done. I needed to go into the office anyway, so I helped out, then took my car to the GTO station at King and Northfield for a $3 wash. Now I'm just chilling at the coffee shop, wondering what to do next on this fine sunny day.

Yes, sunny. Sunny and warmish. The perfect day to do nothing at all, as long as it's done outside. We managed to get some more yard work done yesterday, and finally replaced the tacky white newel post from the front yard. We replaced it with an iron lamp hook (or shepherd's hook, or something), and put one of the solar lamps on it. Now we have a lamp in the front yard, without all the fuss and muss of hooking in an electrical cable. I think the house is the only one on the block with a lamp.

Many thanks to S+A for picking up a composter while they were at the dump yesterday (they're free, folks). Now we've got two, and we can start composting all that yard waste we (mostly R) cleaned up this week. As an aside, I think these would make some pretty cool dog houses, if you don't mind your dog smelling a little loamy.

The baby families left en masse, and now a cute punk/hippie/grunge couple has replaced them. That's nice. Much quieter.

Friday was pretty cewl. Clevermonkey and I went out with some friends and relived the past for a couple of hours. We started off at A's house, drinking vodka on the rocks (we need to get A to the liquor store, and perhaps to the grocery store too). We then walked over to the Starlight for a little while, but A's new squeeze, the delightful Fiona (and her friend), wanted to go over to Abstract. Well, we got the impression that they wanted to be alone, because we lost track of them as soon as we got inside, and CM and I spend the rest of the evening waxing poetic about the old days (since it was 80s night -- it's always 80s night at Abstract). Mostly we talked about Toronto and the different cool places to drink on Bloor, and on Queen. I drank Cuba Libras and he tossed back a bunch of G+Ts. Afterwards, we walked back to uptown Waterloo, and parted ways around 3:30am.

I remember back to the 90s at Call the Office in London -- they had a retro night on Sundays, called Raygun. A bunch of us used to fill the small club up. We'd hang out and dance to new wave stuff. The DJ borrowed my friend's 8 volume Rhino Records collection of "New Wave Hits of the 80s". Back then it was ironic to dance to 80s tunes. Now, I don't know what it is. Derivative, maybe.

(sigh, again). Just got another page. Looks like I have to get back into work and setup some kind of test environment for a critical bug that just came my way. So much for Sunday.

HUZZAH! Apparently not all the goldfish are dead! I could have sworn I saw one moving the other night, but didn't want to seem patronizing, so I was quietly optimistic about the state of the fish. Turns out two are still alive and kicking. The other two... well, lets just say the neighbourhood cats have full bellies tonight. Actually, I think R just scooped them up and threw them out.

We did a little more cleanup last night and filled a bunch of those enormous Canadian Tire paper leaf bags. We also took turns pulling them over our heads and making giant paper bag puppets. My neighbours are pretty convinced that we're both insane.

There's still a lot more to do in the back yard, but we're going to finish it up before anything can start growing on us. There's some idle discussion about replacing the trellises with something in wrought iron, or repainting deck, but nothing serious yet.

I've got a training session today for a vendor who keeps yelling at me. As is expected with these guys, they took our generous offer of free training, and changed it around to suit their ADHD needs. They removed a guy, added a guy, added another, then reduced the training to one day, then expanded what they wanted taught, then asked to be trained on something Idon't even train on. Now I've got no idea what I'm presenting, and have to squeeze in three different products into an afternoon session. I bet someone steals my training room too.

This is all on top of the existing high priority issue of configuring these 4 servers for the other guys. Apparently the IBM x346es don't like FreeBSD 4.x installed on them, even after a BIOS upgrade. These machines are so weird, I need a CD to change the hardware RAID on them. I can *never* lose this CD, or I'll never be able to change the HW RAID volumes. I may have to keep a CD in each machine, in case a drive ever fails....

Got a rare treat last night. Got to walk around my backyard and use the barbecue for the first time in a while. It's still beautiful, even with all the dead post-winter vegetation. Luckily, the snow from the weekend is gone and we're starting to get into a proper spring. R cleaned out the pond and raked up some detritus. The lazy, parasitic goldfish (plural) who killed 6 neons and devoured most of the aquarium plants over the winter got sent back outside, and are now quietly floating on their sides in what R thinks (hopes) is just a state of suspended animation. I reassured her that they're quite probably still alive, but promised to fish them out (pun intended) and give them a proper burial if they are dead.

I was up at Home Despot earlier, so I picked up some extra briquettes (figured I'd add a little more thermal mass to the system), and a raised second grill for the BBQ. I also finally got to try out the smoke box that Toxin gave me some years ago. Put some wet hickory in there, and burrowed it under the grill. Man, it was the smokiest veggie burger I ever had. Smelled like I was cooking around a campfire, and made me all nostalgic about camping again. As soon as the weather gets warmer, I want to head out to Algonquin again. Maybe sometime in May.

Note to self: Don't put the buns into the BBQ when it's smoking. Made the buns taste funny and kind of bitter.

I know, I know. Even I think that smoking a veggie burger seems kind of a waste of this little cast iron box. This was a dry run. I'll just have to invite some friends over, and get some steaks, sausages, and portabello mushrooms on there, and put this thing to some real use.

Had a trickle of water invade the furnace room the other night. Looks like I might have to do something about the water softener. Got a plumber coming to look at it, so I put it on bypass until then. Sounds like it might not be anything big -- they say if it's going to crack, it'll be around the top of the fiberglass tank. I didn't see anything, but then again, I don't know how old the machine is. I'm hoping not to have to replace the whole tank. Maybe a tax refund will offset the price a little.

This cake is a lot less sweet than I thought it would be. I got a little hungry, but I'm not going to finish it. Someone remind me next time that the caramel cake isn't very good. The Americano got a little cold while I was typing, so I'm gulping it down quickly. It's a little bitter around the sides and back of the tongue. It's not as good as I remember it, but I don't think I've ever had to choke back a bland caramel cake with it before.

Despite the heavy snowfall, the weekend wasn't totally a bust. Got to hang out with some friends on Friday night. K+D invited us for dinner, consisting of a delicious (and spicy) stir-fry, some satay tofu, a really tasty (and not too sweet) fruit and lettuce salad. We got to see their new house, and the improvements they made subsequent to moving in.

Saturday was a complete write-off due to the lousy weather, although I was able to get R out to see "Sin City". Neat film -- really stylized, and probably the entirely expected outcome of having a film directed by Miller, Rodriguez, and Tarantino. Think of it as if "From Dusk Till Dawn", "Kill Bill", "White Heat" and Bruce Willis all got rammed together in a car crusher, then had someone desaturate the final mess, and hand it off to Ralph Bakshi for some final touches of sexism and cartoonishness.

Yesterday, we picked up a DVD of the "Lone Gunmen" TV series. Pretty fun series -- too bad it didn't last. It's like Chris Carter suffered some kind of stigma when he tried to come up with anything after "X-Files".

R's been really sick this past week, and I've been trying to keep her comfortable. We've been trying to get at those outstanding chores, such as dishes and the never-ending pile of laundry. I'd like to get at some of the outside chores too, and maybe get the car fixed up for the summer. Looks like the rest of the week will be perfect for these things.

Grande latte at Starbucks this morning on the corner of King and Weber. I would have liked to go to 1842 today, since I appear to be a regular there now. But, Starbucks was on my way to werk, and I had to go to Canadian Tire to pick up some tie-down straps for later today. Four big IBM 2-U rackmount servers in my trunk. Gonna need those straps to keep everything from flying all over the place.

This place is like the McDonald's of the coffee shop world. Everything's the same, but far more cartoony: the granola chicks behind the counter; the Sarah Mclaughlin cd playing ("Sweet Surrender", of course); the trendy old people; the power office woman aggressively talking on her cellphone; the sensitive pony-tail guy; the faux-foreign drink names; even the bald guy with the goatee sitting in the corner, working on a miniscule laptop (oh, wait). Aww, I'm probably being mean. This place isn't any different from any of the coffee houses in San Francisco, or even Waterloo (although the coffee is arguably a little better).

All the wind yesterday brought out one massively sunny day today -- a little cooler too. Apparently, we're supposed to see some snow this weekend. (sigh).

Still feeling poor, despite having a little money in my accounts now. R's given me a "-1 sympathy" count, so I shouldn't really worry about it. I just looked at my balance, then subtracted all the stuff that needed to be done to the car and the house, and ... OK, I still had some left, but it was noticeably lower. Nowhere near the pre-house levels.

Got a loaner on a Blackberry yesterday. It's a big one: big, clear screen, with GPRS, and web accessible (for whatever reason). It's probably identical to the one I'll get as an eventual replacement for the one I dropped in the toilet. Ah, well, the silence was good while it lasted.