Sunday 29/08/2004
Its been a long time since I updated this. I wasn't even sure if I my account would still be valid. In the meantime... I've been to Canada, experienced the worst Canada can throw at me..
Canada:
I arrived at Halifax International, Nova Scotia, on 3rd February 2004, after an exhausting two step journey that took me via New Jersey/EWR. My host for my months stay was my ex-girlfriend, Nicole. As I came out of the baggage area to meet her, she began laughing incredulously at me. Why? I was wearing a light summer, blouson style coat. The ambient air temperature outside was -22°C. Yes, thats minus twenty two degrees celcius.
The airbus dropped us off outside the Lord Nelson Hotel, and I got a month long buspass from Shoppers Drugmart, then, back on another bus to her flat. Only one problem was...
23 minutes to wait till the bus.
In the freezing cold!
You don't appreciate cold until you've stood in -22°C in Canada for 23 minutes. Thankfully the bus arrived after only 20 minutes. Aieeee.... The cold!
The bus ride might have been more interesting had I been able to see anything. It was gone 9pm local time, and pitch black. I was exhausted, and felt every single jolt of that "Metrotransit" bus.
Thankfully her flat was only 45 minutes away by bus.
Day 2, I was forced to part with $175CAD for a proper winters coat, made by Helly Hansen
Im glad of the coat. It snowed. In fact, it more than snowed. Apparently it was the worst snowstorm in the recorded history of the province. 95cm of snow in the first 24hrs, a further 45cm of snow the following day. Its official, I never want to see snow again in my life.
Well, those are the highlights of my trip, theres more, but, advogato isn't really the place for them. I might post the full diary on my livejournal.
Power Failures Suck:
A powerfailure occured just at the right time... Or the wrong time.. The main disk in my Mandrake based fileserver is deader than the dodo. Still, an excuse to buy a larger disk. What does rankle though, was the loss of the work that I hadn't backed up. Especially my sendsms project.
Windows SP2 Sucks:
Yes, I have a windows machine. My laptop runs XP Home. :SHAME:. Installed SP2 on it, and everything died. My network printers were deactivated, and XP wouldnt let me reactivate them, I had to reinstall them.. My WIFI LAN needs a "repair" at every reboot... Perhaps I should just install a *nix on the laptop.