Snow is Cold

Not quite sure how I stumbled on this page but this dude has some serious beef :)

The title of his article is Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

Continuing with the movie theme, we went to see this film the other day. Actually I wanted to go see ‘The Longest Yard’, an Adam Sandler movie, but was outnumbered 2 to 1 :/ anyway I wanted to see this one too, so no worries.

We were pretty shocked to discover that on a Monday night the 10.10pm showing had sold out, but there were two more at 10.40 and 11, so we went for a beer then came back at 11 (see, big cities have stuff to do at reasonable times). Christian Bale was a legend, again, and the film was pretty wicked, I recommend you go see!

I’ve actually seen a whole bunch of movies recently, some good, some bad, and some just plain weird. Some good ones were:

• Sin City - awesome comic style film, if not a little gruesome at times, with loads of famous people in it
• Star Wars Episode III - just because it’s Star Wars, but actually a little rushed for the amount they have to fit into the film…
• Batman Begins - duh
• City of God - Can’t believe I didn’t see this film ’til now, very powerful
• Fulltime Killer - Hong Kong cinema at its best :)
• El Mariachi - a Rodriguez classic, predecessor of Desperado, and the film that made him famous

The bad:

• Paycheck - starts off good but is ruined by horrible direction, I actually got more angry with this film the longer it went on :)
• Kamikaze Taxi - don’t waste the 2 hours 50 minutes of your life on this, the case promises all action but instead you get this weird half Peruvian guy talking shit for half the movie
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - was expecting great things from this movie but the people behind Love Actually et al don’t make the conversion from romantic comedy to, well, any other genre happen

The weird:

• Y Tu Mama Tambien - Have wanted to see this movie for a while, eventually watched it last weekend, it was actually pretty cool but the sexual content of the movie is pretty, well, open…
• As Good As It Gets - ok I saw this before, and it’s also good, but I think it should go here :)

I’m sure there’s a couple others that I’m forgetting but I’ll have to add them another time (yay).

Loving this quote from Jack Nicholson in ‘As Good As It Gets’,

“Lady: ‘I loved your book, how is that you can write from a woman’s perspective *so* well??’
Jack: ‘Well that’s easy… I just think of a man, and then I take away logic, and accountability’”

Had me creasing up. That movie’s actually pretty strange, although he comes out with some genius lines in it :)

Last week I bought a basketball for $10 - under 5 pounds - having walked past the court down the road from my house many times. Also I’ve been watching the NBA finals on TV, which incidentally has reached game 7, the decider, on tonight at 8.30pm Eastern, between the San Antonio Spurs and the Detroit Pistons. Having knocked out my team, the Miami Heat, in the conference finals I’ve been rooting for Detroit to win, but I reckon with home advantage the Spurs could clinch it…

Anyway, I bought the ball last Sunday cuz we’d seen this big bucket of them on sale for a while in Sportchek (kinda like JJB) and I’d debated it every time. So this time there were only like a handful left in the bottom of the bin so I picked out the last one that was still fully pumped up (as we have no pump) and proudly purchased it.

The opportunity to play came by pretty quickly, me & Pete went down to play on Tuesday and ended up getting involved in a game with a couple Koreans, a Japanese and a Canadian. We weren’t expecting great things having sucked sooooooooo bad when we were just messing about but in the game situation it came together pretty well! Needless to say my team won both games of first to 11 ;)

It started pissing down with rain in the second game which made for some rather treacherous footing, and by that time we were nearly passing out anyway - it’s probably a good thing it started raining to cool us down… We passed by the liquor store (not off license) on the way home, soaking wet, and helped some Irish dude get his recycling deposit back on the shedload of cans he’d brought to the store (usually they only let you cash 16 at a time), then managed to persuade the cashier to sell us a 12 pack for $20 flat instead of $20.15, cuz that’s all I’d brought with me! Winner. Then we took said cans home and enjoyed in front of game 6 of the NBA finals :) see, we’re embracing the culture.

I’m enjoying watching the basketball, it’s nice to be able to watch it at a normal time rather than 4 in the morning… I’m still not keen on “football” or baseball though, they take forever.

Well the news is I do have a job and it starts proper on Monday, I think. I’m doing web design for a startup company called assemblenow, and all going well I should do pretty well out of it!

That day I went to meet the guy, who was half an hour late having semi-forgotten he was supposed to be there at 12, then going to the wrong Starbucks (there’s just too many of them), and we had a chat about the company and his vision and the inner workings etc. for about an hour which was actually very interesting. Anyway he sent me through a job he had as a starter to see what I could come up with and both he and the owner of the restaurant were very happy with it so all good.

In fact the guy took me to the restaurant I made the site for for lunch yesterday, so I got free Indian buffet, sweet. Actually I was a little disappointed with it, it was no Polash :) and the guy had talked it up a lot, but it was cool to see it from inside and to meet the owner etc.
The only holdup has been the fact that the guy needs a proper sales force before he can start directing work to me, but he called this afternoon to give the good news that he’d found a lady to head up his sales team so all’s kicking off proper on Monday. There’s a list of clients waiting for sites to be built too so I should be plenty busy enough…

Will let y’all know how it goes as and when it happens…

I think I may have a job, but I’m not absolutely sure until tomorrow - going for a high class meeting at the local Starbucks :)

More to follow…

Ok not a real swap meet, but all the same, organised by the SWAP, er, organisation.
Cut to the chase already..

So last night I went with Daz (and later Pete) to the kind of meet & greet type event organised by BUNAC’s partner organisation in Canada. I was expecting there to be loads of people there actually but it was pretty quiet. Still we met a couple new peeps so it’s all good.
I fleeced myself for $5 on the way in cuz apparently I didn’t have to pay, but the guys on the desk said it was 5 bucks, bastards. I worked out that I would have to drink 20 beers and give no tips to make my money back :)

We decided to move on around 11.30ish but the queues were crazy at most places, or there was an R&B night which I didn’t think anyone was particularly up for, so instead we went to a place called Doolins, an Irish bar which is probably more Irish than any bar in Ireland but hey. They had a band playing such classics as “What do we do with the drunken sailor”, and lots of stripy wallpaper and memorabilia, you get the picture.

I think the place we went to after that was called Speakeasy, which was quite a cool place but there was no-one there! It looked kinda like a sports bar but they had big booth style seating at the back with highbacked leather seats, funky. Oh and a fish tank, if I remember correctly!

Unfortunately by the time we left the place it was chucking down with rain, and I was only wearing a t-shirt :/ but it wasn’t cold. In fact it’s been like this for pretty much the last two weeks - warm but wet! I attempted to run home and got absolutely soaked in the process…

Yuki was still up when I got back cuz she was feeling really poorly with flu like symptoms, although I think it was just a virus cuz she’s ok now it seems. Actually I had a funny turn in the week which meant I had to lie down for a few hours and was a bit feverish, so maybe it was the same thing. Either way I was up until around 4.30 trying to get her to eat something, fun. Crazy girl got up at 8 and went to school still too.

/me is tired…

Today I’ve been reading about content management systems (CMS) and happened to notice this gem on the homepage of TextDrive - a hosting company geared towards developers of open source projects.

I’m in two minds whether to spoil it by quoting it here, so I’ll let you take a look at the link and decide for yourselves - the text I’m referring to is the bottom paragraph. Maybe you won’t find it funny at all, but I thought it summed up a lot of the BS you see in everyday life perfectly.

Something very weird happened about half an hour ago - me & Pete, who had come to drop off a few clothes for work later, were stood in our living room looking at the map on the wall, minding our own business, when I hear the door open. We look round and this guy, a complete stranger, strolls in with a clipboard, says, “oh, I think I’ve got the wrong place”, and then, not waiting for a reply, and with both of us stood there speechless, walks straight back out!

This is obviously why you should lock your doors… :)

I am often taken aback by the innovation of some people on the web today. I have come across a few such sites in the past couple of days, the links if you’re interested are:

• www.cookie.pl
• www.agencynet.com (insane)
• www.shauninman.com (check the nav thing at the top)

and my original favourite - derbauer.de

The other day I was walking to the library (which is pretty much on the opposite side of downtown) and happened to look down an alleyway I was passing to see a big pile of empty drinking bottles on the floor. As I looked, a bottle suddenly flew out of one of the dumpsters into the pile, shortly followed by another..

Comical as this was, if I were a newcomer to the city (well, newer than I am) I probably would have been wondering wtf? However I have learned since being here (through reading a lengthy article in one of the local rags and by observation) that there is a large micro-community (surely a contradiction in terms? Oh well) of homeless people who make a living from “binning”. These binners’ daily routine involves collecting as many recyclables as they can to redeem for cash at one of the recycling centres in the city (there’s a huge facility called “United We Can” on Hastings Street). You see, Canada has a rather different recycling approach to the UK - on every product you buy in a recyclable container (especially alcohol) you are almost invariably charged a form of deposit which is added to the asking price, but which you can get back by presenting the empty container to a suitable recycling centre.

So far I’ve made it twice to recycle some empty beer cans/bottles, but we have a pretty large stack of empty juice cartons (which you get 20¢ back on, compared with 10¢ for beer cans and bottles and 5¢ for soft drink cans and bottles) to take to the depot too. Actually it’s quite cool to get some money back for stuff you’ve already paid for, although we missed out on about $60 (omg I only just worked that out) worth of beer can deposits in Whistler cuz we ran out of time to take them to the liquor store (often you can only present 24 at a time). We’d constructed a sculpture out of empty beercans that flanked both sides of the fireplace and was about 5 cans high 15 across and 8 deep…. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Ah well I expect our landlord’s made off with that by now.

I’m actually quite a fan of the Canadian system, because not only does it encourage people to recycle more but it also presents an opportunity to homeless/jobless people to provide a useful service to the city. The homeless problem is pretty bad here, a lot more noticable than any English city. Many people are suffering from drug or alcohol addiction (there is also a huge problem with drugs here - everything is pretty much readily available and comparitively cheap, maybe around half the price of England), or some form of dementia.

I read a story before written by a reporter who had, in 10 minutes, passed one homeless guy jacking off in a doorway, and another defecating in the middle of the road. In the middle of the day. Nice. I’ve run into a couple of characters, apart from the guy we got to climb the tree in this post, there’s a woman who goes round asking for phone change, which seems normal enough for a while and she dresses presentably, but then she goes psycho and starts screaming abuse. Also there’s another guy who’s always wearing shorts with a similar tactic of begging nicely then going mental, throwing his head back and screaming to the heavens. I dunno, maybe they both got torrets or something :)

There is an area called skidrow on the edge of downtown running from the edge of Chinatown up main street, and I gather into the suburbs beyond. Cynthia was telling me that where she used to live there were dealers selling crack outside her house. Not the best environment for raising her (now 6 year old) daughter. Having said that I guess this is common in a lot of places - St. Pauls in Bristol and Moss Side (sp?) in Manchester must be pretty similar, not to mention LA, New York… Just I haven’t noticed so many crackheads wandering round a city centre before.

The area I was talking about has a decidedly sinister atmosphere about it, which is very out of keeping with the rest of downtown. It’s bizarre how fast the scenery can change in downtown Vancouver, for example you can walk one or two blocks South from Gastown (very touristy) and hit industrial decay and unsavoury characters (although I haven’t encountered any hassle from anybody, in contrast to the punks you find hanging out outside the newsagents in England). Similarly, you can walk a couple of blocks South off Robson street - a buzzing commercial centre of boutiques and restaurants - and hit quiet, leafy suburbia. It’s so strange. Anyway it’s not like I’ve seen people being mugged in the street or anything so it can’t be that bad, there were just LOADS of homeless people hanging around outside what I figured was some kind of shelter.

In fact now I think of it I was caught unawares one time whilst throwing some rubbish out at the back of our building because a guy was walking down the alley then suddenly comes up to me and says, “do you mind if I take a look through your bin?”, lol.

Right that’s enough essay for now, hope you’ve found it interesting!

I’ve modified a version of jixor’s bread crumb trail plugin to work with pretty links, as used on my recipes pages on this site.

You can get it here, please refer to the original page and the file itself for usage instructions.

Forgot to say before that on the way home, after lying on the ground to take some night photos, we went to the 24 hour supermarket and played a bit of rugger with a cabbage until the security guard came over, then we tried to break into the locked cheese cabinet, but when we got to the checkout were told we could get cheese in a different section so legged it over there, then launched processed cheese slices at the cashier woman (fortunately she saw the funny side), then stole a huge reel of stickers that was lying around on the other side of the checkout and went on a mission plastering all the shop and car windows with these stickers all the way from the supermarket to my house and then a distance further on down the road too to hide our secret location, lol.

I received my first fan mail on Wednesday :)

“I just quickly listened to the silenced mix. Great track choice. Just what I
like most.
I’ll be looking forward on that day to hear you play.

– Koen De Jaeger”

Cool huh? I was on top of the world heheh. By the way, “that day” is September 30th, 2005 and the venue is ‘Silo’ - Leuven, Belgium, start saving.

EDIT: By the way, if you want to listen yourself you can get the file from audiotropik.com.

Last night me & Pete went to see Hybrid play at the Plaza club on Granville St. We met one of the guys and his entourage outside too without realising it :) the set was cool but a little disappointing, last time I saw them (at bedrock in London) they were awesome, but that night sasha, freq nasty and the dub pistols were also playing so it was kinda hard not to have a good time.. Digweed is playing on Sunday too but at $30 a ticket plus the associated drinking fees I don’t think I can justify the expenditure :’( if anyone wants to bail me out, my paypal address is…
Just kidding. Unless you **really** want to give me money of course - email for details ;)

After the gig finished last night we want wandering round the streets too and I got a few wicked photographs, will stick them on the web soon. None of the bush jumping capers of last time though.

Actually something of mention happened last weekend, we went out for lunch for Cynthia’s birthday! It was a wicked Japanese restaurant which was all you could eat, with possibly the best sushi I’ve ever eaten… Unfortunately the serving staff were rushed off their feet so they didn’t bring us all that we wanted.. Not that we’d have been able to eat it all if they had.

By the way I got rejected from a landscaping position I’d applied for yesterday as, “although I had good experience in other areas, they are only looking for people with direct landscaping experience at this time”…

What is it with these Canadians? They actually **expect** you to falsify a resume before you give it to them?? :)
I mean maybe landscaping is a *little* more demanding than bussing, but surely, how hard can it be..

Ok, so turns out free subdomain redirects SUCK ASS… so, on contemplation, and after some words of wisdom from Omar,

“Just register snowiscold.com and be done with it! You know it makes sense!”

I thought what the hell, the domain only costs peanuts (4.49479 of your English peanuts to be exact). Hence the proverbial bullet was bit and here we are.

[Anyone who's not interested in computing, switch off now]
Over the past few days I’ve been hacking around a bit with the WordPress source code, mostly because I’ve been trying to get various things working such as pages, AdWords and plugins such as the word count that’s in the sidebar.
As such, you may notice a few new things appearing about the place. Changing the internals is actually pretty easy, especially if you know PHP as there are lots of predefined function calls.
Knowing me I’m probably going to end up hacking apart what’s here already until I end up with something more original, given the number of sites that are running on the ‘kubrick’ theme…

Anyhoo, that’s it. If you’re bored then have a look around!

Last night I bid farewell to Tim, after he finally showed up at around 12.15am. I met up with Daz, Dunc, Matt Game, and some random Swiss guy who had made friends with them in the bar at the Cambie pub, scene of the original debauchery upon arrival in Canada. The atmosphere was somewhat more subdued than it was that time - Tim was going home, me & Daz are down here working (allegedly), Dunc is going on to a job in some remote location in BC interior - spending 5 months drilling rock cores and living with just 5 others in wooden huts in the middle of nowhere, and Matt.. Well who knows what he’s doing :) think he was/is on his way home soon having been living on a shoestring budget for as long as I’ve been aware.
It wasn’t that much of a party, but at least they were selling pitchers of Labatts for $9.75, bargain.
In other news I’ve been looking for some landscape gardening work, should be good if the weather’s nice, but we’ll see what happens, have to find something first! Picked up a little bit of IT work too, but not sure when that’s going to take place as the guy’s waiting on a developer (in India) to finish coding the platform, or something like that.
More as it happens….