Advogato blog for Ryan

14 Sep 2001

Fri, 14 Sep 2001 20:40:10 GMT

There's nothing that quite ends a week as a Friday of frustrating hacking, irritating morons in the street, contentious co-workers, fearful fools forwarding ridiculous e-mails after disasterous acts, and a 81 grandfather who had a heart attack because he thinks he's Peter Pan than that magical minute at 16:30 that makes one quote the impeccable, incredible phil:

"Hey! My code works and stuff!"

If it weren't for the general malaise sitting on my soul, I swing out for a raucous evening. As it is, I'll hope for a mild night with a few good books of Robert Frost.

27 Aug 2001

Mon, 27 Aug 2001 16:45:20 GMT

Bahstahn.

Things are well. The ferrets have joined me in the evil ole Ewe Ess of Ay and have an additional brother, Cobra Bob. While I was in Canada anyway I got a new tattoo started on my right forearm and will have it coloured in a month or something. Then the real fun will start.

One of my boys, Sven, has a chick pea sized growth on the inside of mouth. This is not good. He's going to the vet this week. Cobra Bob has some dag nasty teeth but he's a rescued ferret from a Bad Person and now he's getting lots of lovin', especially some rough lovin' from his next oldest sibling who is really keen on this whole pecking order thing. I've had to break up some serious shit kicking fights. Bob is a cuddler and it's cool to have a slack sunday evening with a ferret snoozing on my tummy.

Boston itself is kind of neat. Some cool parts of town and some amusing folks. Sadly, I haven't met too many people of the non-geek persuasion since I haven't been getting out enough. A few but not a lot. The fact that I've had people tell me I'm a scary individual makes me chortle. I can't wait to bring Pete into town.

Joe and Nat are both stark raving lunatics and make me laugh. I need to stop making small bets with Joe.

Ok. I should probably work now.

28 Jun 2001

Thu, 28 Jun 2001 14:03:53 GMT

Boston.

The low down on my move. I already typed three quarters of this up once and in greater detail. Mozilla crashed when I clicked "Post." Death to Mozilla today.

Friday, June 22 in Ottawa:

M. O. V. I. N. G. bullshit followed by lots of cleaning. Find out the original E.T.A. for my shipment of Monday or Tuesday is no longer correct. It's Thursday now. Bastards. Wondering whether I can crash at a friends or should by an air mattress when I get to Boston.

Saturday, June 23 in Ottawa:

Continued cleaning, followed by slacking, followed by irritation at waffling, indecisive friends, followed by heavy drinking of Golden Glow until three am. Retired to my lame ass old bed fearful of the hangover that was sure to kick in come morning/afternoon.

Sunday, June 24, in Ottawa:

At 6am, the superintendent of my building came by wanting to inspect the apartment. Still drunk, I turn very beligerent and tell him to get the fuck out of my home. He signs a piece of paper saying everything looks fine and that I should just leave the keys under the kitchen sink when I leave. Whatever. I go back to sleep after ingesting roughly a gallon of water and two Ibuprofen and a bunch of Cheerios. Shortly before noon, my pal Cory wakes me up by calling to see if I can stop the record store he works at later in the day to hang out. I promise to do so and then take a shower. After showering I throw out the old mattress and box spring followed by all the old linens, pillows, and other sundry items that remained in the apartment. Everytime I took something out to the dumpster the previous thing I'd taken, unless it was a bag of trash, was missing. There are some truly efficient dumpster divers in Ottawa. Those of you who are rabidly patriotic Canadians will smile and say something like, "Of course! They're Canadian!" while the rest of use just shake our heads at your "socialized medicine." More slacking, dinner, and then headed off to see Tomb Raider with Peter, Lee, and a pair of Lee's friends. It sucked. Then crashed at Peter's place.

Monday, June 25 begins in Ottawa:

Up at 8:00am to get ready to go to the airport. We sit around and watch the first half of the X-Men movie(because ours brains aren't working yet) before I actually get in the shower and leave. I accidentally leave my nearly empty keyring and razor at Pete's. Go me. Uneventful waiting and flight to Boston.

Monday, June 25 in Boston:

Leave the airport for the work. Drop my shit off at the new desk. My desk is in a corner, quite a ways from any one else and with no neighbours. I don't take this as a slight, but rather a compliment to my complete disregard for corporate policy and procedure governing how I should behave at work. I'm in the process of constructing a shower curtain doorway thingy and a roof. After that, the keg fridge! I then proceed to retrieve my copy of the apartment lease and the keys to said apartment. Goes without incident. Go to the apartment, turn the air conditioning back on because it's hot as hell out, and then head back to the office. Make a bunch of calls, pay a bunch of bills online and otherwise take care of random items. Pick up a shower curtain and a bath mat on the way home. Go out to dinner with Joe and then hang out with he and Jacob the Neurotic Little Monkey at a coffee shop. Go home and go to sleep. Fortunately my landlord left a foam mattress in the apartment for me to sleep on. Nice guy.

Tuesday, June 26 in Boston:

Work. Get a burrito for dinner and run into Jacob and Joe on their way back from watching Tomb Raider. Go out with Jacob to be amused, entertained, and marginally frightened by his world view. Met Tom the Super Jew again. He's fun. Went home and went to sleep instead of drinking since I needed to get various things done fairly early in the morning.

Wednesday, June 27 in Boston:

Work. Called the movers to find out why I haven't heard from the driver yet. Get some calls back a few hours later. Seems like the driver has changed the delivery date to June 8 without bothering to mention it to anyone. He wants to deliver my stuff two weeks after pickup. A road distance of roughly 450 miles is going to take 14+ days to deliver. I am obviously not a happy camper. Have a 3:00pm to 6:00pm meeting. At 4:15pm I get a call from the driver of my shipment saying he's waiting at my place. "What the fuck?", that's not what they said 3 hours ago. I leave the meeting, head home in a too expensive, too slow, and sadly clueless taxi only to discover no truck. I do find the phone guy, who's there to re-punch my pairs into the patch panel in the basement. He does his shit and, HAPPINESS!, I have a working phone jack. Mover doesn't show so I check my messages. There's a message from the mover while I was in the taxi stating that he had meant to call another person who's shit he is delivering now. BASTARD! Back to work for the ass end of the meeting. Go out for dinner at the Diesel Cafe a few blocks from my place. Am amazed and pleased that I am not, apparently, living in super-straight-yuppie-ville. Half of Davis Square seems to be run by dykes. Good. Got some ice cream and then go home to call various people and tell them of my experiences in Boston to date.

Opinions to date:

The T isn't half bad.
The nearest grocery store is 2.5 miles away.
The Bostonian accent is awfully irritating.
Working in an office environment is kind of odd after not doing for nearly two years.
I can't find soy milk in a store. This is irritating.
I want my new/used bike sooner than next week.
Boston has a fair number of cute young women considering there's something like three quarters of a million students in the greater metro area when school is in session.
I really miss my bed.
I really, really miss my cooking gear.
I really, really, really miss my ferrets.
Canadians do actually seem to be nicer, friendlier people. Fucked up.

Word to the wise: Never, ever, ever use a national/international moving company, boys and girls.

6 Apr 2001

Fri, 6 Apr 2001 01:56:20 GMT

Mmmmmm... new tattoos.

Mmmmmm... new piercings.

Mmmmmm... pain.

8 Mar 2001

Thu, 8 Mar 2001 04:18:23 GMT

Canada sucks.

Full stop. Most specifically, Canada Post sucks. I have here, in my hand, a letter from one of my US financial institutions, postmarked 27 December 2000. It arrived in my mailbox today.

I met the postman as he delivered it. I looked at the postmark and then looked at him.

"Is there something wrong?", he asked. I passed over the letter so he could examine it more closely. He spies the postmark and says, "Oh, yeah. Fairly normal. We're backlogged months with incoming US mail."

"Months? It's been two. You can't be serious.", I exclaim.

"Oh, yeah," he says, "Those folk at the border and at the airport processing just don't give a damn."

"Oh, glad to know. Is it as bad with domestic mail?", I inquire, deciding that this is worth digging for some more info.

"Usually not so bad, but don't trust anything valuable to us. FedEx, Purolator, DHL, or just a bike courier for local stuff," he explains. "Most of the carriers are burnt out and careless. The sorting folks are even worse off."

"Shit!" I think, understanding why half my checks never make it to my landlord.

"Thanks for the letter. It's for taxes and I would have been fucked without. Definitely better late than never." Hell, it's pretty unlikely to be his fault that it took two months to get to me.

This is a drawback of a socialist government, right? The US postal system is the epitomy of efficiency and accuracy, right?

Wrong.

Mail from the same financial institution was returned last week. That mail was sent in November to a drop box IN THE SAME ZIP CODE that eventually forwards to me in Canada in a semi-monthly batch.

What scares me is it seems my employers email relays are just as sketchy. Go infrastructure. Their mail room folks kick ass though. And they can drink like fish too.

Other notes: Congratulations to graydon on his forthcoming marriage.

27 Feb 2001

Tue, 27 Feb 2001 19:47:23 GMT

Look! How I do mock you! Suffering is what you are!

You can't match my voodoo!

15 Jan 2001

Mon, 15 Jan 2001 17:13:21 GMT

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... Garlic bread!

11 Jan 2001

Thu, 11 Jan 2001 16:15:06 GMT

So. For all the "The Bay area of California is the BEST!" people out there I have but one thing to say:

Taxis and rental cars are not public transportation.

For a "metropolitan census area" that large, I can't believe that the BART and Caltrain are considered to be decent when you have to walk something like 12 blocks between the closest CalTrain and BART stations. And there's no connection to the airport. Yet. It's almost as bad as Dorval in Montreal. And most of the CalTrain stations have little to no transporation in the Pennisula towns to get to your final destination once you leave the train. It's a shambles.

Give me snowshoes any day. Better yet, let me move back to Hong Kong or London.

16 Dec 2000

Sat, 16 Dec 2000 02:23:05 GMT

My open source desktop can beat up your open source desktop!

10 Dec 2000

Sun, 10 Dec 2000 02:29:22 GMT

PHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONT!!!!