Rob Ewaschuk's Blog Rob Ewaschuk

/life/Google: Level Four!

Yay! I indeed got a second "phone-screen." The fellow slept in, and thus was late. This was fine with me -- it sort of counterbalanced my repeated trouble with converting time zones.

The second screen was quite broad -- DNS, TCP/IP, sort algorithms with constrained RAM, sockets, SSH, etc. There was one bit where I wish I had been quicker to notice a really slick solution, but in general it went very well, and I think I picked up all of his hints basically immediately.

Sue-the-HR-person just called to let me know that they'd like to fly me down to California. Two trips to the US in the next month, after a five-year moratorium.

The tentative schedule is the weekend of January 7th-8th-9th, but we'll see.

That's pretty exciting.

Continuing on the unrelated-photo theme.

New Albums from the Gallery

/life/Google: Level Three?

I was much more relaxed for the second level. I avoided talking about the interview all morning, which helped my nerves. I SNAFUed the time-zone conversion, and made an ass of myself by suggesting that the call was late, but it ended up not being too big of a deal. The HR people seem sincerely friendly. I guess that's their job, so it's hard to know, but it seems so.

I have soft confirmation that I "passed" and there will be further interviewing, but I'll wait until I get more firm confirmation.

The fellow that was interviewing me described the position that I was being interviewed for -- which I didn't actually know details of up 'til then -- and then asked me to write the merge() function in a merge sort. He used this as a platform for discussing testing, debugging, robustness, runtime, etc. Initially, I made a small error, but caught it when he asked if I thought it was correct. In retrospect, there are no major details that I feel I missed, though I never actually tested the solution I wrote.

The work sounds interesting; different in style from what I've done, but fun and interesting and engaging.

Also, snow is pretty.

/life/Google: Level Two

So I beat the first boss in the Google Game. He asked some nitty gritty tech questions, which I felt like I was bombing at the time, but in retrospect I think I did fairly well.

He thought they had no junior spots in Dublin, and was asking about going to the US. I pushed for a senior spot, which is what I actually applied to (only because there were no junior spots), but that would be a rather large stretch of my qualifications.

He called back a little later, and it turns out they do have junior spots. With that as retrospective, the discussion had gone fairly well.

Probably the most interesting thing was that they definitely dug the UW math degree.

Tomorrow I meet the level two end-boss, a techy who's going to "grill" me for 45 minutes. I'm looking forward to it, though it's always a grueling experience to have someone finding the edges of your knowledge; if they do it right, you'll get nearly as much wrong as right, which makes it hard to judge how you've done. That last time I faced a similar situation, it was for a job I didn't want, so it'll be rather more stressful this time.

Clare gets here tonight! Yay!

Also, flowers are pretty.

/life/Google Discussion

I got a job interview with Google! Yay! Please click here to see the logo that I would have attached to this entry to continue the image-run, but don't have permission to use. Instead, I've put in one of my favourite photos from Finland.

The interview is actually a "discussion," which I rather like. I presume that means it's the first stage in a multi-stage process. I'm looking forward to it, though.

That's all I'll say, because I imagine they may read my blog at some point, (Hi Google!) and anything further would seem (or be) manipulative.

In other news, a random person emailed me to say she liked my photos, and recommend a book in the same vein as Culture Jam. That's neat.

I got my Tetanus/Diphtheria/Polio vaccinations updated. Clare and Julia both got vaccinations in the last two days, too. Weird. (This is mostly blogged so in 10 years I can google/wayback to find out when they were updated.)

Work is good -- the end is in sight, so it's busy. Going to Toronto for the weekend. Ottawa is slippery. I've fallen once a day, never badly. Food time.

/life/Hot Eighty-nine Nine

I was annoyed by their long-running, manipulative "$25,000 Fugitive" radio contest. But their music was often okay.

I was vexed when they lied on the air about their non-involvement in a website that "leaked" clues for that contest, while it shared the IP address of their website. But their selection, though repetitive, was still passable.

I was frustrated by another, similar radio contest, involving a "shopping spree", so I eased up on my listening.

I was mildly disenchanted when they told me that their target market was 18-24 year old females. But still, there were some songs I liked. Although they weren't changing much.

But I am utterly floored by their latest stunt: "Breast Christmas Ever". I don't even know where to begin. When I heard the first bit of the ad, I assumed it was a fundraiser for breast cancer. But no, no, they're giving away a breast augmentation to "that A-cup" in your life who "needs" it.

"Hot 89-9 will turn one woman's chest into the one she's always dreamed of... but could not afford - a world class breast enhancement - due to the generous contribution of Ottawa's own Doctor Lloyd Van Wyck....
[I]n 89 words or less, tell us why you, your best friend, co-worker, or even family member deserves the gift that keeps on giving, and tell us why they are the most deserving of the 'Breast Christmas Ever.' It'll be a "NOT SO SILENT NIGHT" if you're the lucky winner."

The female D.J. remarked that the "augmentation" could be any kind you want, be it an "enhancement" or a "reduction." At least she's trying, but I think she doesn't know what augmentation means.

I hovered through the CRTC website, but I don't think this is a place for government intervention. Complaints directly to Hot 89.9 seem warranted, though.

I don't think breast augmentations should be banned. I don't think radios should be overly regulated in terms of their contests. But the advertising, the contest, the whole thing, will generate vastly more misery and self-consciousness than it will ever repair. This kind of violent pursuit of beauty is unhealthy and that a radio station would reinforce it so directly surprises me. People who are seek to live comfortably, happily and confidently in their natural bodies have that effort undermined by something like this, and for that reason, I think Hot 89.9 should take this contest off the air.

I've stopped listening.

/stuff/Blackspot Sneakers

So I've been trying to slog through the introduction of what I imagine is a grad-level philosophy book with a fascinating title (Order Without Rules - Critical Theory and the Logic of Conversation by David Bogen). I gave up for now, as it makes lots of references to concepts, people and writings that I don't know, and I just finished Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, which is rather dry reading as well.

Hence, last night I picked up Culture Jam, by Kalle Lasn, which I bought at the same time as the philosophy book several years ago. The few pages I read were exciting, though they still ignored the "why" of the situation described, about our path towards a fully marketed world.

Today, I got my Blackspot Sneakers. They were laced funny so I spent some time figuring out the essence of shoe-lacing. After having a satisfactory lacing on one shoe I put it on and started composing this entry. I decided it wasn't right to comment on the shoes until I had laced both and worn them a bit.

Hence: My first reaction is one of satisfaction. The shoes fit, which is good because there's no returns possible. They are comfortable enough -- in a shoe store, looking for a running shoe, they would pass muster but I'd probably try on others.

I'm no expert in these matters, but the materials and stitching seem to be of extremely high quality. The shoe feels very solid. One gets the vague impression that these shoes are built with what would survive of 80 year techniques and materials under modern health, safety, environmental and labour practices.

Oh, and the point: with each pair of shoes, you get a share in the company. This is a nice gesture, though for me I buy them simply because they're what I want, made how I want, not because of fierce alignment with a movement. At the bottom of the letter is a signature. I saw the distinctive name, and struggled to place it, until I looked at the spine of the brutally unfolded book beside my bed: Kalle Lasn

/life/A day of protestations

I like protests. Obviously I think they're an important part of democracy, but my enjoyment of them is not particularly intellectual; I just like them. They're big fun parties. They have a sense of unity that you don't get very often in our society.

I took a half-day off, and headed downtown at about 1pm. On my way, I stopped at home, picked up an extra sweater, and dropped of some unnecessaries. My camera battery was charged, and off I went.

As I got into downtown, it was pretty empty. I came up Rideau, and hit a barricade lined with cops. Basically the whole Rideau Center was blocked off to traffic, though I think pedestrians could go inside. I went around the building, and after asking a few people with placards, ended up near the main throng of protests as they were nearly at parliament hill.

I've read enough horror stories about people suddenly being arrested that I'm pretty tentative about joining these marches. But it seemed to be pretty calm and peaceful and fun, so I started walking alongside, snapping photos as I went. There were certainly lots of clever (and not-so-clever) posters and banners, but you can check out the gallery yourself.

The march hung around the Hill for a while, then headed off towards the barricades. There was a fellow on top of a truck with very long hair who seemed to think he was a rapper. He rapped. He also said "we" were going over the barricades. He was right; without much difficulty, the first layer of barricades were crossed. It was fairly clear that this had been expected; the second layer was a criss-cross mesh of fencing, rather than the single layer that had just been trampled. And it had bubble-heads behind it.

The protesters were about 99.9% peaceful. Apparently the front-line cops had both gasoline and paint thrown at them, which I find reprehensible. And, according to some young teenage girls -- who insisted they were the peaceful kind of protester -- a couple guys tried to hop the real barricade, resulting in pepper spray and billy club action.

There were dozens of messages in the posters, banners clothes, stickers, costumes and graffiti: anti-war, anti-missile-defence, comparisons of Bush with Hitler, and the like. A very prominent theme was a demand to arrest or try Bush for war crimes. Many people seemed to take that very seriously, which is interesting.

Once darkness settled, there was a candle-light vigil on parliament hill. After that, a few small fires were lit, and a couple of American flags were burned. By the time I got back to the fence, it had been reduced to one layer, and the bubble-heads were gone, replaced by some Toronto cops. There was a mother, chastising the cops that it had been 12 minutes since they said the fence would be opened in 10, but the mood was still friendly.

The hardest thing for me about the protests is that I wasn't entirely sure why I was there; I certainly don't like Bush's policies, but he's not my president. I decided I was there to keep the pressure on him, and make sure the world continues to know that his policies are not popular.

I was happy with what I saw. Having a helicopter hovering just over a crowd, with three-layer fencing and cops in full riot gear is oppressive; this is what was going on as the motorcade went by. It makes you feel like rebelling. It made me angry. The snipers on the rooftops also made me angry, though in retrospect I'm not completely sure they were snipers.

The police seemed effective at defusing situations, holding the right lines, inventing lines to let go of so the protesters could have their rebelliousness sated. To the extent that this was a grand manipulation, it's distressing; both "sides" are getting more and more refined in their strategieis, tactics, and roles that when the day comes when people really protest something, as they did in Seattle, it will be fearsome indeed.

/life/Welcoming Foreign Dignitaries

I haven't seen the skies so clear since three years, two months and 19 days ago. It was immediately noticeable, though it wouldn't have been if it wasn't such a clear morning.

I'm heading off to downtown to see what all the ruckus is about. Certainly sounds like everything should be peaceful and happy. I'm not very interested in getting arrested, so I probably will stay away from anything really exciting.

/photos/New Photos, New Software!

I ported the gallery software from perl (ick!) to PHP, and made some changes along the way. You should now be able to get a decent view of things just from the new (much larger) "thumbnails" view. Hover your mouse over an image to get the first part of its caption.

I may introduce an even smaller version for people on even slower connections, but that'll come later.

One of the bugs right now is that the gallery list doesn't show you accurate information about the order of the galleries. The newest ones are Distortia 2, Great Great Great Grandfather, Dad's Birthday Party, Craig Cardiff Show, Convocation Weekend, A Bit Of Ottawa.

These aren't all captioned, but I'll get to it soon.

Also, I've password-protected the galleries that have various family in them that might not be happy to be posted on the internet. The login name is "ewaschuk", and if you read my blog, I'm happy to give you the password. (If I grew up on Oak Street, the password would be "oak".)

Secret clues! Right in line with the movie I saw tonight. I'll give you a hint: it's the first Nicholas Cage movie I've seen in cinemas since Snake Eyes.

/tech/MobileNote

So I'm working on my very own mobile application. It's a simple package to write short notes - grocery lists, musicians or authors I hear about and want to look into, etc. My Nokia 3100 lets me attached notes to people, and to dates, but there's no way for me to just write down a simple note. Until now. (Actually, there might have been before...I didn't really look, since I needed a project to learn about J2ME anyway.)

Yes, that's right folks, you can install your very own copy of MobileNote v0.2.0! Just point your Java-capable phone's web browser (your phone does have a web browser and Java, right?) to http://rob.infinitepigeons.org/mob/MobileNote.jad, and let the internet do its magic. Then tell me all the ways it went wrong.

It's totally pre-release, don't trust it for anything. There's a synchronize feature that lets you upload your notes, but currently that's pretty much only for my use. It'll be all fixed up RSN, though.

I'd also dig suggestions for names. "MobileNote" is the working title. "MobiNote" is next in line.

/extrospect/Predictions

That's the sound of my election prediction career being rather shortlived.

Conversation Julia Ewaschuk at 2004-11-02 21:07:
(21:07:51) Julia Ewaschuk: so, do you still think kerry's going to win?
(21:08:00) Rob Ewaschuk: yup.
(21:08:07) Julia Ewaschuk: sweet.
(21:08:10) Rob Ewaschuk: confident as an ewaschuk who's wrong.
(21:08:11) Rob Ewaschuk: :-)
(21:08:28) Julia Ewaschuk: excellent.

Yeah.

/extrospect/US Election Predictions

Just for fun, so on Wednesday people can point and laugh at my confident wrongness: I predict that Kerry will win.

Moreover, I predict that he will win with sufficient decisiveness that the ensuing legal battles will be only interesting to people like me who read too much about the American elections.

That's all.

/life/Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

I wrote a new short story: Nemo Me Impune Lacessit. It's been brewing in my head for a while, but some discussion about the new bin Laden tape made me want to write it down.

It follows on with the characters from Trees, Rain, and Intuition.

Comments welcome.

/photos/Remember When I Used to Post Photos?

Okay, the photos from my Europe Cycling Trip are up, partially captioned and stuff. Unfortunately, the memory card half-died on us, and most of the photos recovered are from after Steve and I had split, so I don't know much about them.

There's also photos from when I got back to Canada and stayed in Waterloo, then went to Edmonton to visit Julia and Denny and others, Saskatoon to visit some people and walk down memory lane, back to Edmonton (thanks for the ride, Davin!), and then moved to Ottawa. Enjoy.

/extrospect/Kerry's Ten Commandments

In last night's debate, Kerry said:

I was taught -- I went to a church school and I was taught that the two greatest commandments are: Love the Lord, your God, with all your mind, your body and your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. And frankly, I think we have a lot more loving of our neighbor to do in this country and on this planet.

Unfortunately for him, loving your neighbour as yourself is not one of the ten commandments.

(Hey look, original punditry! I noticed this all by myself!)

Correction: Err..see the comments. Apparently this wasn't a ten-commandments reference, but a two-commandments reference. Boy is my face red.

/extrospect/Dubya and Roe v. Wade

Ten days ago, I hit rock bottom. I wrote, in a blog entry, that "I also bought socks."

It doesn't get much worse than that.

After a decanight of soul-searching, I've decided to join the fray of political observers. I'm paying quite close attention to the American election, as well as observing the genesis of stories from the blog-sphere into mainstream media.

Here's the latest tidbit. In the second presidential debate, Dubya was answering a question about what kind of supreme court judge he would appoint. He talked about the Dred Scott case, a very old, overturned, pro-slavery judgement. I thought it was just a "talking point" about him not being racist or something, but Americans seemed to find the reference extremely strange.

It turns out that, allegedly, Dred Scott is an oblique reference to the famous Roe v. Wade, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of a woman's right to have an abortion (I don't know the details well.) Supposedly Bush raised it not to say that he wouldn't appoint a judge that would have backed the Dred decision, which is obvious, but rather that he wouldn't appoint a judge that would back Roe v. Wade.

Interesting subtleties. Not sure if I buy it, but it's a pretty good explanation. You can dig for yourself. If you google for "Dred Scott Roe v. Wade" you'll find some recent article discussing Bush's Dred reference, as well as many older links where the religious right equates Roe v. Wade with Scott Dred.

/life/Running Shoes and Bike Helmets

So Tuesday night I bought running shoes. I threw out my last pair of New Balances on June 18th as I left Finland. They were thoroughly falling apart, having lasted through 18 months of abuse. I bought a new pair of 894's for $80, which seemed to be a fairly good price.

I also bought socks, which is good because I've only had sandals, and I only have a few dark pairs of socks, so they were getting a lot of use.

Okay, not "a few pairs"...two.

I had another piano lesson Wednesday night. It was good. I can tap simple-but-different rhythms with my hands. I'm scamming a keyboard to learn on for free until January, so that's good.

Thursday morning I went for a run. I don't own a stopwatch, but it was somewhere between 5km and 6km, I think. I stopped near the end for a breather, but hopefully tomorrow I can do the whole thing.

Today I learned the word anthropocentric, after trying to make it up as "anthrocentric."

I went and saw Shark's Tale tonight. It was cute and packed full of detailed humour. Worth seeing, particularly if one's offspring constrain one's movie choices. I also ate at Montana's for the first time. In retrospect it sorta reminds me of "Tchotchke's" from Office Space. The veggie burger was alright, though.

I'm trying to do my taxes, but I don't know if I owe for CPP and EI on the money I made in Finland and the UK, and they're on strike so they can't tell me.

I took my touring bike in for a bit of a tuneup. They un-bent the frame from my little accident in Germany. I also got a new headset, and I need a new bearing on my rear cassette, since it's making a funny noise. And my rear wheel is almost true. And I bought a new helmet, 'cause I lost my helmet a few days ago. And I brought in my crappy bike to have its bottom bracket replaced so the pedal doesn't fall off on me again. $170 so far, or so.

And today I found $160 in my PC bank account that I thought was empty. That woulda come in handy a month ago. *sigh* Oh well, free money.

That's my life. I'm boring now. Sorry folks.

/life/Itchy Feet Scratched

Jeff was a mild-mannered Chinese immigrant who came hear to do a year at U of T in 1996. He gained his Chinese citizenship 3 years ago.

Albert graduated from CS at UW in 1991. He seemed to be something of an archetype of a UW grad, though I can't put my finger on exactly how. He's currently between jobs, and was evasive about the last place that he worked, though I gathered that it was a failed or failing startup.

We discussed various aspects of world politics. Jeff explained to me in some detail the "Cultural Revolution" in China in the '60s, a historical event that I knew of, but not about. It was good to have that filled in.

Jeff had posted in the ott.rides newsgroup offering a return-only ride to Ottawa. When various family members, immediate and extended, had concerns about getting a ride this way, though mostly half-joking.

My weekend was most excellent. My cousin got married, and it was a great ceremony and reception and next-morning brunch. I think it was the best wedding I've been at.

Saw lots of extended- and extended-extended-family. I think we outnumbered the groom's side about 2:1, 2.5:1. Good stuff. Also saw some family on my mom's side. That was nice; I haven't seen that aunt-and-uncle in over a year.

Next weekend I think I'm going to Montreal (briefly) and then hiking or biking. The weekend after that is something else, then after that it's my dad's birthday party in Orillia, then after that it's my Convocation in Waterloo.

Oh, my other good story is that in Scarborough (or "Scarberia" as some call it) there were these four identical Mustang convertibles driving around the parking lot of the Famous Players where Jeff was to pick me up. My guess was that they were gang-related, though that might be stereotyping of me. Though the guy beside me (Waiting for a ride to Kingston) seemed to agree.

So, in summary: wedding, ride home. Good. Traveled. Good. Saw family. Good.

/life/Twenty Days in One Town

This past weekend I was very edgy. I still haven't had a paycheque, so I'm short on cash, and so I couldn't afford to catch a bus ticket out of town. But if I could have, I would have.

It took me a while to put my finger on it all, but it eventually occurred to me that the last time I had been in the same town for this long was a long, long time ago. It certainly wasn't August, and it wasn't cycling, and it wasn't June. It might have been May, but if it wasn't May it wasn't April or March or February either, I don't think.

So I'm all settled in, and I've shocked myself out of my nomadic lifestyle. I'm slipping back into work slowly but surely.

Ottawa's good. The family I'm living with is interesting, and generally pleasant to live with. They're certainly not treating me like an outsider, which I appreciate; it makes me feel more comfortable in their house. Conversely I have to watch a bit how tightly I get involved in their family affairs.

My social life here isn't as good as I was expecting/hoping. It's not intolerable, and once I have some money it'll feel a bit less constrained I think. Saturday night I left the house at 23:00 just to get out, and went to the market. I think it was the Heart and Crown that I ended up in, had a couple pints, invited myself to sit with some interesting-looking people, and had a reasonably good conversation and evening. But other than the first week, I haven't been out enough. So I've been doing geeky things a fair bit. Got my phone talking to my computer, and my camera, too. Got my computer working reasonably well. Done a bunch of work on the server (though I still haven't properly fixed the blog, which is lame of me.)

I took my touring bike in for a tuneup. They said they thought the frame might be bent slightly where the rear wheel goes in, presumably due to the accident outside of Luebeck. They still remember me from two years ago when I bought the bike there, which is nice.

This weekend I'm doing a bunch of traveling, going to Orillia and Toronto and who-knows-where-else for a wedding and various related visits.

The family I live with has two parents and three daughters. The eldest has moved out, the youngest is about to, and the middle one moved out and came back. She's curious about my cooking, which is neat; for allergenic reasons, the household has had a somewhat limited diet I guess. So I made some random eggplant-stuff last night, and she seemed to like it.

Haven't been carrying my camera. My CD burner, despite dreams to the contrary, is completely fried, and so I can't backup my photos, which makes me nervous. That's silly, though.

And now it's time for me to go home and make something to eat.

/life/The Grand Vacation Ends

I've been on vacation officially since June 16th. 83 days. Possibly the longest vacation I'll ever have.

Tomorrow I start work. I'm much looking forward to it. I went in last week to visit, and it was a good visit.

My housing arrangement proceeds well. I have to do a big shop still, and I'm not sure when I'm going to do that. The family reminds me somewhat of some of my relatives (in a good way.) It's a pretty intimate situation -- in many ways I'm just a member of the household, which is weird when the rest of the household is a family, but so far so good.

Had a great weekend of socializing, biking, unpacking, and some electronic housecleaning. My computer is officially troubled, though concievably saveable, I'm simply not all that motivated to put much time into it. I'm using one of the household machines a fair bit to do things like write blog entries.

Last night I biked home at like 01:30 along empty Riverside drive. 27kph average with a few traffic lights.

They warn you about "reverse culture shock," which I think I've avoided using a carefully turmoiled transition period, though occasionally things stand out or seem funny, where I notice that the Finnish version would seem normal. I guess this is mostly the sheer choice of foods, and other things. This wasn't helped by the gigantic new Loblaws grocery store here, where I had a hard time finding simple fluorinated toothpaste.

Expect less blogging as my life gets less interesting. Or perhaps more uninteresting blogs (hint: they're in the "life" section. :-)

/life/Arrived in Ottawa

Real life beings.

Last night I went to Failte (which I now know how to pronounce..thank you Ireland!) with a bunch of mathsoc people. It was fun and good to see them again. I have a good time with them. I also saw Ian and Joy again, which was good.

Today my dad picked me up in his giant new Ford Expedition. We picked up my stuff from storage and off we went. My mattress had to be strapped to the roof, since I have way too much stuff and it was badly packed.

I figured in unpacking I'd find lots of stuff to junk since I just spent a year living out of slightly more than two suitcases, but that didn't come to pass. Some junk is definitely going, but lots of it I use when it's there. And there's lots of books and stuff. I'm going to try to get rid of some clothes, books, school-paraphenalia, and such.

So, here I am. I have a lot of focus for the next four months; since my parents have moved from Saskatchewan to Ontario, I've got to transfer my bank, licence, health insurance, etc., to Ontario, and since I'm no longer covered by my parents' house & health insurance I have to look into that stuff. I also need to organize the next stage of my life and find out what that will bring.

But for now, it's time to sleep in a real bed. I kinda have a home again. It's a weird feeling. It's been a long time since I've slept on my own pillow.

Oh yeah. I found my computer. It was in storage, in a box. I don't think it works though -- I haven't even plugged it in, and I'm still not sure that I'm going to.

/life/Lost: One Computer

Responds to name "Napoleon". Sorely missed, contains secret government documents. If found, please contact rob@infinitepigeons.org.

(I can't figure out who took my computer after Christmas. It doesn't seem to be Josh or Ian. Maybe it's in storage, but I don't remember seeing it there.)

So I'm in Waterloo now, once again. I just realized my schedule is messed up and I can't move to Ottawa on Thursday as I intended...it'll have to be Friday, which means running into long weekend traffic due to Labour Day in Canada. We'll see how that goes.

I have $2 left to spend if I am to make my first month's rent without using my credit card. We'll see how that goes too..I'm thinkin' it's not so likely as I was hoping.

The rest of my visit to Edmonton was most enjoyable. Rented movies, caught up with yet-another friend from high school, went to the world famous (?) West Edmonton Mall, etc. Good stuff.

/life/Catching up with Canada

So I'm in Saskatoon, the closest place I have to a home right now I guess. My parents have moved away here, but there's still no shortage of places for me to crash. I've caught up with friends from high school, gone for a couple walks down by the river, bought some things, eaten at Subway twice, visited CompuSmart, and generally enjoyed myself in a place I know well.

To back up a bit, my bikeride to Orillia went well. It was 195km. Around the 160km mark I had my only sense of "uh-oh" but I just took a rest, drank some water, and kept on trucking. A bunch of my chestal muscles were sore, but it worked out okay. I helped paint my parents new place, and generally get the place ready for the truck that didn't arrive when it was supposed to. Caught a bus to KW because I'm stupid and didn't bring stuff with me for my trip to Edmonton, then at 5am the next morning I caught a bus, then a shuttle, then an airplane.

I couldn't remember my airline, but it turned out a girl in the shuttle was on the same flight as me, so we hung out in line and stuff. I fully applied my feminine wiles, and scored myself a ride from the airport into town -- a $13 (=~8EUR) shuttle-ride. I followed my sister's overly-detailed directions and found her lab. It was a fun-filled place of research and smartness. After sitting around the table with a bunch of PhDs talking about enzyme-this and cell-culture-that, I have a better sense of how non-geeks feel when there're too many geeks in the room talking about linux-this and megahertz-that.

Edmonton was alright. Very shopping-oriented. In a cloying sort of way, I had rides everywhere. I'm so used to taking out a map, finding a bus, walking, and generally being independent that all the car-time was a bit draining.

Monopoly is fun. Played Monopoly with my sister and her upstanding gentleman and an old friend of mine from high school and it was good. It's sorta a family tradition.

Saw The Manchurian Candidate. Three word review: It was okay.

Scored a ride with aforementioned old friend to Saskatoon, got in at 5am totally zonked. Since then I've seen many people from various places, and arranged a ride to Calgary, from which it'll be a relatively short-and-cheap bus-ride to Edmonton. Hopefully I'll catch up with a couple more friends in Edmonton, and maybe I'll go hiking with my sister and others.

That's where it's at. A fun recap: since landing in Canada, I have visited people in: Kitchener/Waterloo, Ottawa, Toronto, Alliston, Orillia, Edmonton and Saskatoon.

/life/Some Thoughts On Canada (and other updates)

I've been home for two weeks now. A few things are noticeable; some I expected, some I didn't, some are beyond my expectations.

First, the friendliness of your "average" Canadian is astounding. I'm thinking mostly about the little interactions like buying groceries or a donut. These are very simple, flat interactions in Finland. Here they certainly can be, but there's a measure of sincerity to them. As Andrew put it, it's almost like you're part of a community or something.

Second, the fatness of your "average" Canadian is similarly astounding. There are some very very large people here. It's an unfortunate thing for us to have to deal with.

There are lots of flags. The food choice is phenomenal. The University Plaza in KW has Indian, Persian, Mediteranean, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Jamaican, Italian, American, Egyptian, Pitas, Subs and Paninis, and probably a few I forgot. The basic food store had four or five different types of peanut butter. And oh, sweet frozen orange juice concentrate, how I've missed you.

Prices are nice, though this isn't as big of a deal as I was expecting; it's mostly just eating out that's really noticeable.

People drive far without thinking much about it.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to set a new personal distance record; Orillia appears to be about 200km from here, but my sister's place is halfway so I can give up if I want. I'm going to help my parents move in, them I'm off for a trip to Edmonton to visit some family and friends, then back to KW to move my stuff to Ottawa, then we're done.

I haven't caught up with as many people as I wanted...dunno why. I seem to have been lazy about it. And finals got in the way.

Oh yeah. I passed my course and so I'm all done. You can tell how anticlimactic it was by the fact that I almost forgot to mention it.

In other news, I finally took the plunge and switch web servers for this blog and the rest of my site. There're still tons of problems to work out, and sadly some of them will end up sitting until I'm settled in Ottawa. But the blog seems to be working acceptably, and that's the important part.

/life/All Done And Healthy

Sorry for the absence; I've been studying. It was probably the most intensely I've ever studied. The exam went alright, but not well enough that I dare celebrate before hearing the final word from the prof.

Last weekend I made a quick trip to Toronto to catch up with some friends from last fall in Finland. I also picked up my luggage that I shipped to my sister's place, with the help of Andrew and his parents' car. Now my whole life is pretty much in Waterloo, which is good. Except that it needs to be in Ottawa, but it's easier to move from one place to Ottawa than from several.

The trip in Toronto was really fun, if slightly surreal -- When you wake up in a hostel with an American and a German that you only knew while in Europe, it's hard to grasp that you're in boring old Toronto.

Boring it wasn't, though. Saturday gave us the Chinatown Festival with Kung-fu and various interesting foods, and Sunday gave us the beach (south of Scarborough, I guess) and a Taste of Danforth with Greek food galore. Something there gave me an upset stomach. Jerks.

My trip to Ottawa was generally successful. I found a couple of places that aren't in a rush to rent out, so I could put housing in the back of my mind while I studied. By coincidence, and old friend from elementary school and high school was there, and it was good to see him again. He's headed off with EWB to some poor country to help out soon.

I still haven't decided on a place, and now that my exam is done I'm going to go looking again, but the prices feel high to me. We'll see what I can find.

Since I'm about to lose UW's Health Services, I decided to do one last checkup while the lineups are short. No new demons plaguing me. Getting bloodwork done shortly to check that all the little guys floating around me are doin' there stuff. I haven't eaten in 12 hours, and apparently I haven't drank enough water either, 'cause I'm dehydrated and have a headache. I'm looking forward to gorging myself on Tim Horton's donuts when I'm done.

Blog should get more attention now...the incredibly competent people who operate this server claim they're going to recover everything, but I have my doubts. Anyway, a faithful (?) reader sent me an archive of most/all stories, so it's just a matter of putting all the features like comments back up. Easy peasy, right?

From here, I'm going to hang out in KW for a few more days working on random things, and then I'm going to help my parents move into their new place. After that I'm heading to Edmonton to visit my sister, and then back to Ontario to move myself to Ottawa.

/meta/Recovering

Well, I got some of it back. It ain't nearly as good as it looks...I only have the 10 or so most recent entries, plus older emails (Thank's Tony!) which is enough to make it superficially back, but all of the entries from Finland are gone, basically. All comments are gone, too, even recent ones.

Everything should come back online slowly as I take study breaks.

/meta/Blog Lost!

As you've probably noticed, my blog disappeared.

I don't know why. My guess is a security breach, especially after hopping through so many dodgy internet cafes. I got complacent I guess.

For now, if you know what a cache is, and know how to search it, I'd appreciate any cached copies you may have lying around, especially very old ones (I have most from the last two months I think). (Hint: Search for "A Bug's Life")

I'll try to restore things to some semblance of sanity soon, but I lost a lot of other stuff too so it may take a while.

I'm in Waterloo. It is good.

/travel/cycling/Joint Trouble In Amsterdam

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

So, this evening Steve and I pulled into Amsterdam. I was cycling only with my left leg for the last 25km. Earlier this afternoon, after deciding (wrongly!) to push my knees a little bit farther than I had in the past, there was a very sudden shooting pain. Apparently this was accompanied by a sound that Steve thought was a branch breaking, but I don't remember that. So my right knee is okay for walking, but if I step too hard it hurts. And it's not at all okay for cycling. We've got a hostel in Amsterdam tonight, but this may end up being the end of the road for me. Probably not; hopefully tomorrow everything's okay, and I can just take it easy a bit, but right now my hopes are a bit low, though my spirits are fine. Steve and I have been doing well, though. His ankles are getting better slowly and a bit erratically. From Luebeck we did 80km or so to Hamburg. The first place we tried was full up, but they made a suggestion for us. This turned out to be in/on Reeperbahn, which is Hamburg's "Red Light District". Suffice to say it was an interesting walk to and from the hotel. Cheap, though, and plenty clean and stuff. From there, we caught a train to Muenster and caught up with Tessa, another friend from my time in Oulu. It was nice, but fairly brief. The next day we hit Holland, and then we had today. My trip-meter rolled over at 1000km, but I'm somewhere around 1150km right now. Not too shabby if it does end here, but lots more I'd like to see. Steve and I are taking notes about every day (especially after I lost our notes after the Rockies last year -- in my defense, they were on a napkin, and thus easily confused for garbage) so I'll probably write several more little stories when I have internet access and the notes beside me. We also watched the final of the Eurocup '04 football match - Greece 1, Portugal 0. Pretty surprising. So yeah. Stuff is okay , but a bit up in the air right now. Gotta go find some grub...this internet cafe is hugely hot.

/books/Ishmael

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

Daniel Quinn's Ishmael is good. As a piece of writing, it's mediocre; it feels like he wanted to wrap a philosophical treatise in a story, but the wrapping was too thin.

The book is about a student, the author, and a teacher. The teacher represents someone who has learned and understood our culture from the outside, from reading, but not from being raised in it. The teacher is embodied in a gorilla, intelligent and communicative through some means that we are supposed to suspend our disbelief about. It, like Lila, spends some time examining native north American culture, though primarily a subset of the "Leavers", roughly what we consider the hunter-gatherers and primitive peoples. It spends much time tackling the nature of "Takers", roughly the western cultures, though including India and generally those who have turned to agriculture. It examines what would be called our "consumerist" nature, though it avoids such po-mo terminology. (Po-mo is my favourite non-word.) The book uses clever analogies with the creation of flying machines and interesting re-interpretations of our creation folklore (both biblical and scientific) to construct a fresh philosophical framework for thinking about environmental, cultural and social problems. It is not a be-all-end-all, and I was very disappointed that the book spent so little time on the analogs to Bernoulli's principles -- laws about all living things that govern whether or not our systems will "fly". The end of the manifesto is cultish, and the end of the story is cliche, but the arguments and discussion in the book are insightful and sound. Only a few relatively small points irked me, one of which was discussions of overpopulation which I think were inadequate. After you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read this.

/travel/cycling/Ferries and Dikes in Holland; Rain rain rain in Belgium

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

Its been a while. Internet access is surprisingly hard to come by around here. Im in Brussels on a very strange keyboard layout (AZERTY) so youll have to excuse my mistakes. Im slowly getting used to it, but it doesnt help that the keycaps are inaccurate too. First and foremost, my knees are doing just fine. Weve been doing much easier days in general...Our longest since Amsterdam was 105km, but the rest have been less than 80km, I think. Taking it gently, and theres been pretty minimal pain. Weve been cycling for eight straight days, and we havent had a room since Amsterdam. After Amsterdam, we wandered through the lowlands of Holland, through Gouda (yes, the cheese), and eventually into Belgium to Hoegaarden (yes, the beer). We cycled along canals, passed windmills, over and on dikes, and eventually reached Belgium, where it immediately started to rain. Its been raining every few hours since then. When we got to Hoegaarden, it was about 21:30. We had no place to stay, and the hostel we had expected to find in the previous larger town no longer existed. We asked at the first pub we saw open, and it turned out that there was a big festival in the town that weekend, just for us! The local youth group showed us a place where we could camp, on space owned by the local church. We set up tent, then went back to join the festivities. It was a really fun night, and the Belgians that we met were very friendly and helpful; one even tried to set us up with a place to stay in Brussels, but that connection ultimately failed. The food has been excellent, but Atkins would be saddened by our carb-rich diet; bakeries have become our standard fare to avoid eating out so much. Weve also had Frites (essentially french fries, but with a bit more TLC than the McDonalds variety) several times, though the last time we bought them I had the presence of mind to ask what kind of oil they were fried in. "Grease" came the reply with a touch of pride...No more frites for me. Theyre terribly unhealthy anyway. Brussels is both beautiful and pricey; it reminds me a bit of Stockholm for that. The cycling has been mostly enjoyable, though the lack of a warm room and decent shower was getting annoying -- in Hoegaarden we scrubbed down with cold tap water in a rundown washroom they said we could use. Fun fun fun. Not sure where from here...Time will tell. We booked the hostel (two-bed room, so its essentially a hotel) for tonight as well, and both Steve and I have much internetting to catch up on. The Hoegaarden Brewery tour had some Irishy music at the end...it ,ade ,e ho,esick for Great Big Sea. Oh yeah...If anyone knows of a place for me to live September to January in Ottawa, preferably in the West of Gloucester or Downtown, please let me know... Miss home, miss yall, but having a good time to be sure. Hopefully Ill be able to update a bit more often from here on out.

/travel/And Ireland is Good

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

After a bit of relaxed futsing about to collect the necessities, Clare and I went for a trip to southwest Ireland. With a (heavy) tent on our back and some money in our pockets, we headed off with a vague outline of a plan. We headed to Galway, one of the more major centers in Ireland. We had Chinese food in a little restaurant (warning: take-away menus cheaper than sit-down menus!). A table of four drunken Irish ladies antagonized each other nearby; the situation was tense, and they probably should have been kicked out. That night, we hit a local bar that had quite good music and a fun crowd. From there, we bussed to Ballyvaughn, the start of the Burren Way. The first day we walked about 15km to Fanore, slightly off the Burren Way. This path took us passed ruined churches and hundreds of stone walls. The sheer amount of human labour -- much of it apparently labour forced on the Irish by the British during famine to earn food -- required to build these walls is amazing, and the skill with which many of them are assembled is also amazing. Building these stone walls is refered to in John Raulston Saul's On Equilibrium as a highly intuitive activity, and I see why. We stayed in a B&B there, and as it turned out we had a whole small guest house to ourselves. 'Twas lovely indeed. The next day we walked towards Doolin, a "Mecca" of music according to some bit of tourist info. We had a lunch break atop a rather old (c. 3000BC, perhaps) stone-aged tomb, past a barbed-wire fence and a stone wall. There were cows in the same field, but they were a good distance away. This was the land of my childhood reading, where the Famous Five or the Secret Seven would get into some kind of adventure. (I guess that was actually England, but this captured the feel very well; there was a sense that this place was unexplored, at least in any formal way.) In the end, the path turned to a road and the scenery got less interesting, and so we hitched a ride to our destination for the day, Doolin. A French couple picked us up, and were friendly and helpful..my French came in handy, though between my French and English, Clare's English, Irish (that part of Ireland is still at least partially Irish-speaking) and Spanish, and my smattering of German, we were pretty well-assured of being able to communicate. Again we got a B&B, slightly less upscale (read: more reasonable) and slightly cheapter. The town was a long narrow strip along the sea, with a couple of pubs. We ate in one, listened to some music (live, of course) and then walked to another that had slightly better music, and called it a night. The next day we had the adventure of having 15EUR after paying for our B&B. We left our bags there, arranging to pick them up later that day, not knowing quite how we were going to deal with the cashflow issue. Doolin has no ATM. The nearest one was apparently 12km away, though rumour had it there was also one in Lisdoonvarna (ooooh..Lisdoonvarna), a few miles away. One of the three (!) hostels in this tiny tourist town also acted as the bus station. The somewhat unhelpful reception-worker gave us a curt answer about why we couldn't buy bus tickets on Visa. At this time, it just so happened than a man from Pennsylvania walked in, asking if there was an ATM. I pounced on him, politely demanding a life to the nearest ATM, we he obliged. He and his wife were friendly, and dropped us off in a little shop in Lisdoonvarna, whose shiny little ATM was adorned with an "Out of Order" sign. But they did Cashback. So we bought a couple of lovely sandwiches and some dainties to hit their 10EUR minimum, and got our precious cash. From there, we caught a bus to the unmissible Cliffs of Moher. I coaxed clare into lying down and crawling towards the edge of the precipice. She made it most of the way...looking straight down at a hundred meter drop was..well..impressive. The leashless dog that came up behind us at this point was frightening. It seemed all too probable that he would push us over the end, or lick us until we leapt of our own accord. We used our return ticket to take us back to Doolin, which is en route to Lisdoonvarna. By happy fluke, it dropped us near our B&B, and I had the brainwaave of trying to run and get our bags and catch the bus again at the hostel. I sprinted off, and Clare serendipitously stalled the bus driver due to her state of confusion about the plan while I sprinted, got the bags, returned the key and sprinted back. We smoothly caught the bus back to Galway, then to Dublin. The whole drip was originally planned to be longer, but Clare picked up a pretty bad fever, hence her slightly slow and delerious explanation of the plan to the bus driver. She's better now, though. Tonight I'm much looking forward to seeing Farenheit 9/11. Food in Ireland is much better than Finland. It's nice to have real meals with real vegetables and stuff again -- proper home-cooked meals, like I would never make for myself. And Quorn is good. Not sure what's in store for this week, except that I leave here Thursday night. Steve's enjoying his cycling on his own, or so he claims. So all is well. I hope I find a place to live in Ottawa without too much trouble -- that's my only big stress right now.

/travel/*Pow* And suddently you're in Dublin...

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

Europe is neat. Drop a few Euro, and the keyboard go back to normal, they start speaking a language you understand (most of the time), and they drive on the left. So I'm in Dublin. I decided to shorten my cycling and extend my time in Dublin for reasons obvious to those who know and guessable to those who don't. Besides the obvious, cycling also doesn't really leave one feeling like one's had a nice relaxed vacation, so I figured I'd take the opportunity. This is the third (Stockholm, Amsterdam) major city that I've been in more than once, and I think it's a sign I need to start traveling outside of safe happy northern Europe. But for now it's a welcome change; civilization is nice. I spent about 150EUR (250CAD) to restore my wardrobe since I threw out many ratty clothes in Finland and cycled with only one set of "civvies" which consist of a rather grubby pair of shorts and a rather stretched tshirt. The end tally of the cycling was something just over 1500km, 24 days start to finish, one accident, one minor injury, more concentrated time with a single individual than I've ever experienced since I was in the fetal position for around nine months, and a general sense of success. The flight over was relatively uneventful, but getting my bike packed up was not the painless process that the Aer Lingus customer service representative lead me to believe it to be -- It was, however, the moderately annoying process I've grown to expect it to be. In a couple days, once it's settled in a bit more, I'll probably write down some more general thoughts about the different countries, but for now I'm going to wallow in the luxury of having both shorts *and* trousers (the Irish dialect is settling in already) close at hand.

/travel/cycling/Sweden and Copenhagen

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Gotta be quick...paying internet access by the minutes. Currently in Copenhagen. Did about 300km in Sweden, leaving from Výÿrnamo where i got dropped off, cycling down to Malmýÿ, and then catching a train across the giant bridge to Copenhagen. Along the way, I got four ticks, and thus sampled the Swedish medical system. It was effective and fairly quick, and cost me about 30CAD to see a nurse. that should be covered under insurance, but I'll have to take care of it later. I also lost my map, on which I was keeping a journal. I dedcided to backtrack to the gas station where I thought I had left it. After 8km of backtracking, iI stopped to stanck on a can of beans. About halfway through, a car honked at me. About 3 minutes later, it started to hail. Big hail, about 6 or 7mm in diameter. Lunder and thightening, too. it was the first time i've been hailed on while cycling. The weather has been pretty shitty all around, though my last day of cycling in Sweden was truly gorgeous, with nice views and a tailwind most of the time, and quaint little backroads that let me see the countryside proeprly. The night before that I stopped in a little campground and stayed in a room there -- most of the campgrounds have a couple hostel-style rooms where you can stay. It was quite pleasant, and the Swedes were very helpful and friendly. I went to a local pub for some pizza for dinner, and ended up chatting with the bartender there for a while; she was a very friendly swedish girl, and we watched the first half of the Denmark vs. Sweden Eurocup match. Heading out tomorrow, south towards Germany. Steve got here fine. Saw a castle today, pretty good. Copenhagen is expensive. Bumýÿed into a guy from PEI today. Strange, but friendly fellow. Gotta jet. Sorry for the lack of proofreading.

/travel/cycling/Luebeck is only an accident away!

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

(Lest you're short on time and concerned by the title, there were no injuries, and we got there fine.) So I'm in Lýÿbeck. Yesterday, Steve and I were cycling through the evening on some very beautiful German roads. They were essentially single lane roads, but there were very few cars. We were cruising along quite quickly when I passed a roadsign that I thought indicated that we were headed for a town that we had already been through. Since the road was quite wide, I slammed on my brakes. I heard Steve yell "Woah!" from behind me, as he had chosen that moment to read the sign and didn't notice my rapid deceleration. I was also sort of turned to see what he was yelling about. So he hit my tire. Bit of a bump, but no injuries. Except...the bike. My back tire was unrideable. It wasn't bent much, but too much, especially with the extra weight of the gear. Neither Steve nor I knew how to true a tire, but he knew a bit and we worked it out, and after half an hour of fiddling, it seemed rideable. I rode on, but it bent more. If we took off the back brakes, the bike would still go, so I ran with it for about 5km. Towards the end of this, we flagged down one man to ask for a cell phone ("haben Sie ein handi?"), but he didn't. Then we hit a house with some people in the backyard, and asked to use their phone to call Johanna, our erstwhile destination for the evening. I called her, told her we weren't going to make it. Then he asked what was wrong, and once it was explained ("alle ist klýÿr" (?)) and sort of took over and loosened my break so it wasn't rubbing anymore. We piled all the weight on Steve's bike (..which was bad since Steve's ankles have been bothering him a bit...) and I rode with my weight as forward as it could be. Once we got to the next real town (Ahrenbýÿk), we tried and failed to find an open bikeshop -- unlikely at 20:45 in a small town -- and then decided to ride onwards to Lýÿbeck. In the end, we got here safe and sound. Spent a nice day around Lýÿbeck today, seeing their Holstentour (sp?) which is the old and very massive and impressive town gate, and going up a church tower. Tonight we're making a big lasagna meal with Johanna and her two roommates and Andrea (another girl I know from Finland) and her boyfriend. In other news, crossing the Danish-German border was no problem...there was essentially nothing there. Euros are great; I'm very glad to be done with the various Kroners and back to a currency that I know fairly intuitively. The weather and wind have been much better in Germany. One of our campgrounds was right by a military base, and we were woken up at 08:00 to a helicopter taking off. Lots of pizza, falafels, and veggie burgers. Lots of checking the maps and signs for me, and following his gut for Steve -- sometimes with conflicting results. We're getting along well, though, and the accident was a good test of how we dealt with more-than-arguing-about-directions stress. I have 800km under my belt since Peter dropped me off in Sweden, of which about 330km are since Copenhagen. Soon we're probably heading to Mýÿnster with a probable pause in Hamburg (which all the Germans say that we simply must see) and then probably up to Groningen and then along the coast for a while. I heard the news about the election results on a German radio station; obviously I didn't understand it all, but it I got the basics. Personally, I think the results could have been a lot worse. Anyway, having a blast, learning lots more German, getting some excellent, beautiful cycling done...but now it's time to make some lasagne. Happy Canada Day! (And you thought I forgot! Pah!)

/travel/finland/Wrapping Things Up

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

Argh. When I got my Visa card, they told me I needed to wait 6 months before I could get the credit limit upped from its current piddly 500CAD. I'm sure they mentioned it, but apparently it has to be "active" for 6 months. Now, I don't need my credit card every month. And if you let it sit for a month, your time gets reset. To add to the frustration, you can allegedly call collect to one of the Visa numbers. I don't know how to call collect from Finland, so I tried to use Canada Direct. It asked me for my long distance provider in Canada, which I don't have. So I pressed 0, and got a very curmudgeony woman who very quickly got frustrated and assumed I was stupid. It turns out you just have to pick Bell Canada, and then select a collect call. But then the Visa robot and the Collect Call robot just yell at each other. In other news, I got my biked tuned up at Pyýÿrýÿ Sauvola. Nothing quite so pleasant as a freshly tuned up bike. Got new racks, new treads, a toolkit, and some other miscellanies. They were friendly, helpful, and gave me a fairly decent "discount" without discussion. That seems to be the way in Finland, when you buy a bunch of stuff. They did a good job. I also closed my bank account today, and sent some money home to be spent on my upcoming cycling. It cost 16EUR to transfer the money in one week, and was otherwise quite painless. Nordea Pankki did much better than HSBC last year. Shipping my skis home would cost about 300EUR with Fedex. Can't ship them with the Posti since they're too long. Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet -- one option is to ask one of the Canadians here very nicely to courier them. I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was grand, largely because I haven't seen a movie in cinemas for a long time. It was only 5EUR; apparently Thursday is Cheap Night. I'm reading The Da Vinci Code. It's not so much good as it is addictive. There are still many errands to be run. I need to pack and ship some stuff, buy fuel for my campstove, etc. And I want to finish my project here, so I leave them with something useful.

/life/Landed and Studying

Thursday I woke up in Dublin.

Friday I woke up in Amsterdam.

Saturday and Sunday I woke up on the 10th Sideroad just north of Beeton.

Monday I woke up in Kitchener, a stone's throw from Waterloo.

The flight from Dublin to Amsterdam was uneventful. I don't even really remember it now. It was sad to leave Dublin behind..I had a good time there.

Amsterdam consisted of a bit of internetting, some eating and drinking, an evening with a Native American from San Francisco at the end of a European tour. I got fairly intoxicated on three pints due to my rather meager weight -- I lost a lot while cycling.

Amsterdam was hot. I left my bicycle in the Schiphol airport for 5 EUR.

The flight to Toronto got messed up a bit, and they switched planes at the last minute and so we were delayed like an hour. The clouds were positively beautiful. The seatmates were two Spanish girls who, about an hour before landing, pulled out a giant makeup kit and proceeded to do their makeup. They also put on perfume. I thought that was rude. They also had pointy shoes.

My bro-in-common-law picked me up and drove me to his-and-my-sister's place, and it was good. I like it there. I unpacked a bit, repacked a bit, doddled a bit trying to get my head into Canadian space, went out for dinner, and went to sleep. The next morning I got up at 06:00, hopped on my bike around 07:30, and cycled to Waterloo. I got here about 14:30. I was about 500m from my destination when I started feeling woozy from heat and a slight lack of fluids. Not wanting to faint in traffic, I hit the nearby Tim Horton's. Apple Fritter, how I have missed you.

Got to Andrew's just as his mother was dropping him off there from his weekend home. Good timing.

Had dinner with a bunch of 2nd-and-3rd-degree acquaintances. It was fun. Veggie burgers, salad, crappy frozen punch, grilled veggies. Nice summer meal.

I've started studying in earnest. Tomorrow I'm making a trip to Ottawa to pick out a place to stay at. I have four choices. Hopefully I'll catch up with Kathleen and Ajay. That'll be good. And Jill, if she's there.

Gotta go study. Sorry about the bad formatting -- I'll fix it soon.

/travel/finland/Nine Months of Loose Ends, and Midnight Sun

Tonight was my last night in Oulu. It's nearly 6am, and I'm still up, taking care of various things. Nine months lets you build up a lot of loose ends.

Tomorrow I'm leaving with Peter, a German who drove here. He's taking me into Sweden, where I'll start my bike trip. He had some people over, so I went to have something of a goodbye party. At 12:11, there was that characteristics sound when everybody knows that something interesting is going on, but nobody knows what. Eventually I clued in -- the window by the kitchen was casting shadows. The sun was still up. Oulu's been cloudy lately, so this was the first time I'd seen the Midnight Sun.

My work has wrapped up, but unfortunately my project hasn't. I hope it goes well after I leave.

Today (well, yesterday) I shipped one of my suitcases home, and then I'll send the other one home in a few hours. It's costing more than I expected, somewhere around 160EUR = 250CAD. Ouch.

From here, I'm going cycling. I'll start in Sweden, meet up with Steve in Copenhagen, and then we make our way to Paris. I'm still not sure who I'm visiting along the way, but I've made a couple of connections.

The whole departure from Oulu has been very subdued. Most of the people I was closest with are long gone. The last couple weeks have been spent focused on wrapping things up, particularly at work. "With not a bang, but a whisper," or something like that.

Times like these always give me a sense of sadness; it's hard for me to see the details of the good things in my future, and it's easy for me to see all the things I didn't do while I was here. The consequences of my course failure were very unfortunate, and meant that I didn't get as much out of my time in Europe as I might have. I'm sure I'll find upsides later on, but for now it seems like a pretty big consequence. Could have been worse, though.

I'm looking forward to get back to Canada. I'm not overly eager to leave, but I'm ready to leave. Everything seems to be in a fairly good balance, under the circumstances. I've had my time here, learned, grew, met more people from more cultures than I ever have, and on many occasions thoroughly enjoyed myself in ways or situations that I wouldn't in Canada, where I can be more picky about things.

So, that's where I'm at. Moving on. I'll try to post things as I cycle, but I make no guarantees. Of course, they won't be in the /travel/finland category, but the /travel/cycling category.

I've also been very bad with emailing lately. I'm sorry about that, but it had to take a backburner while I tried to get my project done. I look forward very much to seeing all the people that I haven't seen in a long time, and hope my lack of emails and phonecalls hasn't pissed anyone off too much. :-)

And so ends the last (?) entry from Finland.

/travel/cycling/Joint Trouble In Amsterdam

So, this evening Steve and I pulled into Amsterdam. I was cycling only with my left leg for the last 25km. Earlier this afternoon, after deciding (wrongly!) to push my knees a little bit farther than I had in the past, there was a very sudden shooting pain. Apparently this was accompanied by a sound that Steve thought was a branch breaking, but I don't remember that.

So my right knee is okay for walking, but if I step too hard it hurts. And it's not at all okay for cycling. We've got a hostel in Amsterdam tonight, but this may end up being the end of the road for me. Probably not; hopefully tomorrow everything's okay, and I can just take it easy a bit, but right now my hopes are a bit low, though my spirits are fine.

Steve and I have been doing well, though. His ankles are getting better slowly and a bit erratically. From Luebeck we did 80km or so to Hamburg. The first place we tried was full up, but they made a suggestion for us. This turned out to be in/on Reeperbahn, which is Hamburg's "Red Light District". Suffice to say it was an interesting walk to and from the hotel. Cheap, though, and plenty clean and stuff.

From there, we caught a train to Muenster and caught up with Tessa, another friend from my time in Oulu. It was nice, but fairly brief. The next day we hit Holland, and then we had today. My trip-meter rolled over at 1000km, but I'm somewhere around 1150km right now. Not too shabby if it does end here, but lots more I'd like to see.

Steve and I are taking notes about every day (especially after I lost our notes after the Rockies last year -- in my defense, they were on a napkin, and thus easily confused for garbage) so I'll probably write several more little stories when I have internet access and the notes beside me.

We also watched the final of the Eurocup '04 football match - Greece 1, Portugal 0. Pretty surprising.

So yeah. Stuff is okay , but a bit up in the air right now. Gotta go find some grub...this internet cafe is hugely hot.

/travel/finland/Wrapping Things Up

Argh. When I got my Visa card, they told me I needed to wait 6 months before I could get the credit limit upped from its current piddly 500CAD. I'm sure they mentioned it, but apparently it has to be "active" for 6 months. Now, I don't need my credit card every month. And if you let it sit for a month, your time gets reset.

To add to the frustration, you can allegedly call collect to one of the Visa numbers. I don't know how to call collect from Finland, so I tried to use Canada Direct. It asked me for my long distance provider in Canada, which I don't have. So I pressed 0, and got a very curmudgeony woman who very quickly got frustrated and assumed I was stupid. It turns out you just have to pick Bell Canada, and then select a collect call. But then the Visa robot and the Collect Call robot just yell at each other.

In other news, I got my biked tuned up at Pyörä Sauvola. Nothing quite so pleasant as a freshly tuned up bike. Got new racks, new treads, a toolkit, and some other miscellanies. They were friendly, helpful, and gave me a fairly decent "discount" without discussion. That seems to be the way in Finland, when you buy a bunch of stuff. They did a good job. I also closed my bank account today, and sent some money home to be spent on my upcoming cycling. It cost 16EUR to transfer the money in one week, and was otherwise quite painless. Nordea Pankki did much better than HSBC last year.

Shipping my skis home would cost about 300EUR with Fedex. Can't ship them with the Posti since they're too long. Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet -- one option is to ask one of the Canadians here very nicely to courier them.

I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was grand, largely because I haven't seen a movie in cinemas for a long time. It was only 5EUR; apparently Thursday is Cheap Night.

I'm reading The Da Vinci Code. It's not so much good as it is addictive.

There are still many errands to be run. I need to pack and ship some stuff, buy fuel for my campstove, etc. And I want to finish my project here, so I leave them with something useful.

/travel/*Pow* And suddently you're in Dublin...

Europe is neat. Drop a few Euro, and the keyboard go back to normal, they start speaking a language you understand (most of the time), and they drive on the left.

So I'm in Dublin. I decided to shorten my cycling and extend my time in Dublin for reasons obvious to those who know and guessable to those who don't. Besides the obvious, cycling also doesn't really leave one feeling like one's had a nice relaxed vacation, so I figured I'd take the opportunity.

This is the third (Stockholm, Amsterdam) major city that I've been in more than once, and I think it's a sign I need to start traveling outside of safe happy northern Europe. But for now it's a welcome change; civilization is nice. I spent about 150EUR (250CAD) to restore my wardrobe since I threw out many ratty clothes in Finland and cycled with only one set of "civvies" which consist of a rather grubby pair of shorts and a rather stretched tshirt.

The end tally of the cycling was something just over 1500km, 24 days start to finish, one accident, one minor injury, more concentrated time with a single individual than I've ever experienced since I was in the fetal position for around nine months, and a general sense of success.

The flight over was relatively uneventful, but getting my bike packed up was not the painless process that the Aer Lingus customer service representative lead me to believe it to be -- It was, however, the moderately annoying process I've grown to expect it to be.

In a couple days, once it's settled in a bit more, I'll probably write down some more general thoughts about the different countries, but for now I'm going to wallow in the luxury of having both shorts *and* trousers (the Irish dialect is settling in already) close at hand.

/travel/cycling/Lübeck is only an accident away!

(Lest you're short on time and concerned by the title, there were no injuries, and we got there fine.)

So I'm in Lübeck. Yesterday, Steve and I were cycling through the evening on some very beautiful German roads. They were essentially single lane roads, but there were very few cars. We were cruising along quite quickly when I passed a roadsign that I thought indicated that we were headed for a town that we had already been through. Since the road was quite wide, I slammed on my brakes. I heard Steve yell "Woah!" from behind me, as he had chosen that moment to read the sign and didn't notice my rapid deceleration. I was also sort of turned to see what he was yelling about. So he hit my tire. Bit of a bump, but no injuries.

Except...the bike.

My back tire was unrideable. It wasn't bent much, but too much, especially with the extra weight of the gear. Neither Steve nor I knew how to true a tire, but he knew a bit and we worked it out, and after half an hour of fiddling, it seemed rideable. I rode on, but it bent more. If we took off the back brakes, the bike would still go, so I ran with it for about 5km. Towards the end of this, we flagged down one man to ask for a cell phone ("haben Sie ein handi?"), but he didn't. Then we hit a house with some people in the backyard, and asked to use their phone to call Johanna, our erstwhile destination for the evening. I called her, told her we weren't going to make it. Then he asked what was wrong, and once it was explained ("alle ist klär" (?)) and sort of took over and loosened my break so it wasn't rubbing anymore.

We piled all the weight on Steve's bike (..which was bad since Steve's ankles have been bothering him a bit...) and I rode with my weight as forward as it could be. Once we got to the next real town (Ahrenbök), we tried and failed to find an open bikeshop -- unlikely at 20:45 in a small town -- and then decided to ride onwards to Lübeck.

In the end, we got here safe and sound. Spent a nice day around Lübeck today, seeing their Holstentour (sp?) which is the old and very massive and impressive town gate, and going up a church tower. Tonight we're making a big lasagna meal with Johanna and her two roommates and Andrea (another girl I know from Finland) and her boyfriend.

In other news, crossing the Danish-German border was no problem...there was essentially nothing there. Euros are great; I'm very glad to be done with the various Kroners and back to a currency that I know fairly intuitively.

The weather and wind have been much better in Germany. One of our campgrounds was right by a military base, and we were woken up at 08:00 to a helicopter taking off. Lots of pizza, falafels, and veggie burgers. Lots of checking the maps and signs for me, and following his gut for Steve -- sometimes with conflicting results. We're getting along well, though, and the accident was a good test of how we dealt with more-than-arguing-about-directions stress.

I have 800km under my belt since Peter dropped me off in Sweden, of which about 330km are since Copenhagen. Soon we're probably heading to Münster with a probable pause in Hamburg (which all the Germans say that we simply must see) and then probably up to Groningen and then along the coast for a while.

I heard the news about the election results on a German radio station; obviously I didn't understand it all, but it I got the basics. Personally, I think the results could have been a lot worse.

Anyway, having a blast, learning lots more German, getting some excellent, beautiful cycling done...but now it's time to make some lasagne.

Happy Canada Day! (And you thought I forgot! Pah!)

/meta/Partial Recovery

Well, I've got some of it back. Many old entries are there, minus links and other formatting, and anything that used to have a "Continued..." link is still gone.

There's still dwindling hope that my ISP will bother to recover the files that they lost, but that seems unlikely.

Comments and stuff will be back soon. The navigation system is there again, mostly. Once I think everything's back to normal I'll let you know and you can criticize appropriately.

/travel/cycling/Ferries and Dikes in Holland; Rain rain rain in Belgium

Its been a while. Internet access is surprisingly hard to come by around here. Im in Brussels on a very strange keyboard layout (AZERTY) so youll have to excuse my mistakes. Im slowly getting used to it, but it doesnt help that the keycaps are inaccurate too.

First and foremost, my knees are doing just fine. Weve been doing much easier days in general...Our longest since Amsterdam was 105km, but the rest have been less than 80km, I think. Taking it gently, and theres been pretty minimal pain. Weve been cycling for eight straight days, and we havent had a room since Amsterdam.

After Amsterdam, we wandered through the lowlands of Holland, through Gouda (yes, the cheese), and eventually into Belgium to Hoegaarden (yes, the beer). We cycled along canals, passed windmills, over and on dikes, and eventually reached Belgium, where it immediately started to rain. Its been raining every few hours since then.

When we got to Hoegaarden, it was about 21:30. We had no place to stay, and the hostel we had expected to find in the previous larger town no longer existed. We asked at the first pub we saw open, and it turned out that there was a big festival in the town that weekend, just for us! The local youth group showed us a place where we could camp, on space owned by the local church. We set up tent, then went back to join the festivities. It was a really fun night, and the Belgians that we met were very friendly and helpful; one even tried to set us up with a place to stay in Brussels, but that connection ultimately failed.

The food has been excellent, but Atkins would be saddened by our carb-rich diet; bakeries have become our standard fare to avoid eating out so much. Weve also had Frites (essentially french fries, but with a bit more TLC than the McDonalds variety) several times, though the last time we bought them I had the presence of mind to ask what kind of oil they were fried in. "Grease" came the reply with a touch of pride...No more frites for me. Theyre terribly unhealthy anyway.

Brussels is both beautiful and pricey; it reminds me a bit of Stockholm for that.

The cycling has been mostly enjoyable, though the lack of a warm room and decent shower was getting annoying -- in Hoegaarden we scrubbed down with cold tap water in a rundown washroom they said we could use. Fun fun fun.

Not sure where from here...Time will tell. We booked the hostel (two-bed room, so its essentially a hotel) for tonight as well, and both Steve and I have much internetting to catch up on.

The Hoegaarden Brewery tour had some Irishy music at the end...it ,ade ,e ho,esick for Great Big Sea.

Oh yeah...If anyone knows of a place for me to live September to January in Ottawa, preferably in the West of Gloucester or Downtown, please let me know...

Miss home, miss yall, but having a good time to be sure. Hopefully Ill be able to update a bit more often from here on out.

/travel/cycling/Sweden and Copenhagen

Gotta be quick...paying internet access by the minutes.

Currently in Copenhagen. Did about 300km in Sweden, leaving from Värnamo where i got dropped off, cycling down to Malmö, and then catching a train across the giant bridge to Copenhagen.

Along the way, I got four ticks, and thus sampled the Swedish medical system. It was effective and fairly quick, and cost me about 30CAD to see a nurse. that should be covered under insurance, but I'll have to take care of it later.

I also lost my map, on which I was keeping a journal. I dedcided to backtrack to the gas station where I thought I had left it. After 8km of backtracking, iI stopped to stanck on a can of beans. About halfway through, a car honked at me. About 3 minutes later, it started to hail. Big hail, about 6 or 7mm in diameter. Lunder and thightening, too. it was the first time i've been hailed on while cycling. The weather has been pretty shitty all around, though my last day of cycling in Sweden was truly gorgeous, with nice views and a tailwind most of the time, and quaint little backroads that let me see the countryside proeprly.

The night before that I stopped in a little campground and stayed in a room there -- most of the campgrounds have a couple hostel-style rooms where you can stay. It was quite pleasant, and the Swedes were very helpful and friendly. I went to a local pub for some pizza for dinner, and ended up chatting with the bartender there for a while; she was a very friendly swedish girl, and we watched the first half of the Denmark vs. Sweden Eurocup match.

Heading out tomorrow, south towards Germany. Steve got here fine. Saw a castle today, pretty good. Copenhagen is expensive. Bumåed into a guy from PEI today. Strange, but friendly fellow.

Gotta jet. Sorry for the lack of proofreading.

/stuff/iRiver iFP 890t

I bought an iRiver iFP 890T MP3/WMA/OGG (i.e. "music") player. It's pretty small, takes one AA battery, does voice recordings and line-in recordings, has an FM radio, and acts as a USB storage device too. It was sent to Saskatoon, to be brought to me for my eurocycling trip. Hopefully it'll last me a few years. 180USD, from the manufacturer's website. Just in time, too, since my CD player is on its last legs.

/travel/cycling/To Kajaani and Back...almost.

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

This weekend I took Friday off and went for a little bike ride. The first day of the bikeride was 154km, and took myself and my coworker Janne to his brothers' godparents' summer cottage. The second day was about 107km and brought us to his parents' summer cottage. Today was supposed to be nearly 150km again. This morning it started to rain. Hard. We waited for it to abate, and then got going. It was some of the coldest, wettest, unpleasant cycling I've done. We made it the 50km to Vaala where we could catch a train or bus. But they were both going to be quite a while, so we decided to continue another 33km or so to Utajýÿrvi. We got there about a minute before the train, and caught a warm trainride home.

The first day was sunny, and I have scientific documented evidence that you can get a sunburn in Finland. And because of the funny thing that the sun does here, it seemed to burn heretofore untanned places. Today in the cold my burn turned slightly purple, then I got the orange spots that I get when I'm cold, then I turned darker purple, then I put on my jacket. (Or rather, the jacket that I borrowed from Janne's parents.)

My knees were quite worse for the wear. And for the first time, I finally understand people complaining about a sore buttocks. I also had sore hips, and a bit of cardiovascular trouble on the first day, when Janne was fresh -- he's in much better shape than I am.

The two couples with whom we stayed were both lovely. I made the crystalization that, to paint with a broad brush, Finns are not "friendly" (perhaps "outgoing" is a better word; the point is that they don't randomly start talking to people much), but they are certainly very nice. I've been aware of some kind of dichotomy there for a while, but I finally put my finger on it nicely. Both cottages were lovely, and I really enjoyed the sauna. It definitely helped my joints, though the sunburn stung a bit.

A word on saunas: Finnish saunas are hot and fairly dry. They're pronounced "sow'-nah." They're almost exclusively nude, and towels aren't very welcome -- there are little pads to sit on so the wood doesn't burn you. Blowing your skin to cool it off doesn't. (In fact, it was rather painful. My best guess is that between your mouth and your skin the extra moisture in your breath picks up more heat than the "dry" air and carries it to your skin.) They're generally wood-heated, and tougher people put more water on the rocks, which carries more heat in the air. They have sauna competitions here, too. And they're a major part of the culture; there was no question about whether we would want to sauna.

I learned lots of Finnish this weekend, too. If had done something like that every week or two for 9 months, I think I'd be quite capable in Finnish. I was asking Janne about the various place-name suffixes (-lýÿhti, -joki, -jýÿrvi, -niemi, -harju, -salo, which are bay, river, lake, peninsula (or smaller), ridge, and large forest respectively.) I also finally nailed the Finnish alphabet pronunciations (aah, beh, say, day, eh, aff, gay, hoe, etc.).

Finally, tucked away at the bottom so nobody notices: I'm officially flexitarian. I guess. I ate fish, anyway, and it was very tasty. Salmon and shrimp the first night in a yummy pie (pirakka), and pike and pickerel and something else caught on the lake behind the cottage on the second night. All of the definitions on the web for "flexitarian" are way more "flex" than I am, though, since I don't really anticipate eating meat again for a while.

Pictures and a map eventually, I hope.

/travel/finland/Sudden Craving

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

My kingdom for a Subway"! Sandwich!*

*Offer not valid on days ending in y.

/travel/finland/Profound Thoughts from a Weekend in Kuusamo

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

Last weekend I went to Kuusamo. Coincidentally, so did Paul, but we didn't bump into each other.

I left in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The town was quiet, and I got a few shots of empty Oulu. On the bus out of town, there was a little garden of tulips, nearing full bloom. The busride was uneventful and sleepy.

Kuusamo is a reasonably large town. Nearby is Ruka, a major skiing center in Finland. We were outside a town outside of Ruka, in a rented cabin. The cabin itself was simple, and its surroundings were fairly bland.

The highlight was two light hikes through the Finnish forest. It doesn't take too long to get deep enough in the hills ("mountains", they say) that you can't hear anything that doesn't belong. I wish I had taken more time to just stop and listen, since somtimes the sounds of cities drives me to distraction. We all stopped on one of the little walkways at one point. You could hear exactly three things, and nothing more -- running water from nearby rapids, a few birds chirping, and our own little rustles as we stood in silence.

The Finnish forest is an interesting place. Because of the climate and lighting, the trees are generally narrow and spindly. The evergreens have long bare trunks and fairly sparse needles, and the leaves on the deciduous trees are small, but plentiful.

The trails we were on took us over bogs, up and down hills, and through flat fields with trees. We saw only a few signs of fauna, though these included the largest ant hill I've ever seen. The trail was often rocky, but the forest around us wasn't. It's obvious when you say it that way that the forest is rocky too, but it's not obvious when you're walking along. The rocks are lying under the forest, almost never visible.

The bogs are fascinating. They seemed stagnant, but if you looked carefully you could see clearly that the water was in fact flowing through them, reasonably quickly. There are only a few inches of water above the soft, moss-like growth that runs deep beneath them. All of the lakes and ponds tucked in the mountains were clear and lifeless. The usual sets of circles rippling outward from fish or frogs were absent, as were the little trails from an insect's wake. We saw one water bug the whole time. There's little algae and few lily pads. Things seem to decay slowly -- some ponds had an unnatural number of trees at the bottom.

When I was walking, I was trying to figure out how I would explain the beauty of those forests. They aren't more untouched than National Parks in Canada, and by most characteristics they aren't the beautiful. But they are. And then I figured it out: The whole forest puts the cycles of death and life and the perpetuity of those cycles directly, unavoidably in front of you. The forest felt ageless, markless, unsusceptible to forest fires or other traumas; Finland is relatively immune to severe weather and natural disasters like earthquakes. One thousand years ago, and one thousand years from now, these forest are the same. You could see trees in every state of life, from pinecone to sappling to fullgrown to fresh-fallen to covered in moss to being just a long narrow imperfection in the ground, completely buried in other life, more often than not with sapplings growing on it. Trees that had fallen still clinging to the earth around their shallow root structure seemed to make good starting points for ant-hills. Other than the trodden path that we walked along, everything was soft and moist, layer upon layer of life, death, death, and decay.

The forest was constantly in all states of life and death. It was impossible to separate the obvious cycle in any reasonable way if you looked at the forest instead of the trees.

/travel/finland/Ethics Essays Posted

This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.

I wrote four essays for my practical ethics course.

Here they are:

1. SingerAndVeganism - "Extending Peter Singer's arguments towards Veganism, or letting it all fall down"

2. SingerAndTheEnvironment - "An emotional argument"

3. SingerAndAbortion - "An emotional argument[sic]" (Errr..that's a mistake -- I forgot to change the subtitle.)

4. PeterSingerOnWorldPoverty

Enjoy.