Well, I guess I owe you all an apology...

Sorry people but this monster is from Star Wars-Return of the Jedi
You loser

Apparently I was mistaken in this post. The monster pictured there is apparently featured in some obscure 80's sci fi movie called Return of the Jedi. Have any of you heard of, or seen this movie? Apparently some people call it a "classic" or something.

Holy crap, I've been sitting on a track for a decade, wtf!



Please don't mind the video portion of the video. The real point is the audio. Basically, it is a little known fact that I, back in high school, used to create a large number of tracks on a program called Impulse Tracker. In fact, I "released" over 70 tracks from 1994 to 1997. Then after graduating high school, all of a sudden I couldn't make music any more. Jesse is a internationally famous rapper, and I got nothing but the memories.

Oh, and this crazy track that nobody heard. Well, to be honest, nobody heard any of my old tracks. When I say "released" what I really mean is "finished enough that I upload it to a local BBS where like maybe 10 people download it." That is to say, my distribution was approximately nil.

Oh, if only I'd been born a few years later. I could have done stuff like this! Anyway, enjoy the track. It is called Mercy on Mr. X, but I have absolutely no recollection as to why I called it that. I stopped working on it almost exactly ten years ago.

Heh, it is a measure of.. something.. that this track was originally 166kb, and the video that I rendered to upload to youtube was over 40 megabytes. Anybody remember 14.4 modem? Yeah, it was about one megabyte per 15 minutes back then.

... but sometimes I stumble on something that makes me go OMGWTFBBQ?!

Hey, I think I like chopin!

Check out these awesome reasons why!





Mostly this is just a reminder to myself to get more Chopin. Woo!

Is this REAL?

I'd heard of streets lined with Sakura, but I always figured that it was an exaggeration!



The weather is just fine, but the scenery is incredible.



Are other cities so beautiful like Vancouver?

Wow, a whirlwind tour of not enough Vancouver. audrawilliams and littlegirltoast came to visit and we all hung out with coldconfusion for a few days. Definitely not enough to get a flavour of the city, I'm afraid. For example Jesse and Jeska and I only went on one bus, once- definitely not enough to get a feel for how awesome public transit is. I guess that's not really a tourist-y concern. But also missing were the space museum, granville island, and like a hundred other bits of awesome.

What we DID manage to do is....

First a coffee shop in Kitsilano that I mentioned before called Higher Grounds that really reminds me of my favourite coffee shop in Halifax - the Blowers Street Paperchase.

From there, we headed to the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre, home of the SO AWESOME Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge. Screw Capilano, Lynn Canyon is where it is at. Friends of Jeska and I, take note- the LCEC is located on Peters street, just past the intersection of Peters and Henderson. Of course we got some pictures of Jessica and I at that most auspicious location. We'll post them soon.

Anyway, as for Lynn Canyon- wow! Talk about dramatic landscape! I only got two photos, but check it-

We got to an outcropping, with very clear, very deep water just past it, and a canyon beyond which you could just barely see another waterfall, if you leaned out a bit.

Here's Jesse, trying to get the same shot, just moments before a giant tentacled monster reached up from the depths, snatching him away to his certain doom.

After we rescued Jesse, we went back home and all walked over to the Memphis Blues BBQ House on Broadway and Granville- directly next door to my old restaurant Cru. They were absolutely packed, so we decided on takeout. No problem. Much pulled pork, beans and old timey soda pop was consumed, and good times were had. Jesse tried some of my asian cock sauce which I love so much. I think we both put a bit too much on our fries.

Finally, the highlight of the weekend: Organix. Several readers may already know that I spun at Organix this past Friday. Man, did it EVER go well. I practiced a bunch, had a ton of new tracks, and my best friend to impress. Everything went so well I wish I had recorded it.

On Saturday, I finally got to have another wish come true, and take a bunch of friends to the Vancouver Aquarium. I want to write some more, about how much fun we had there, and maybe a bit about how jessica and I are trying to solve Riven together, but its time to go to work.

So instead I will wish you all a happy zombi Jesu day, and LOOK HOW CUTE JESKA IS!!!!!!

Wow! I just played through Myst (realMyst to be precise) for the first time in over a decade, and it really really ages well. When realMyst came out in 2000, it was widely criticized for being unwieldy and slow to the point of being broken. Well, amazing what 8 years of Moore's law will do for you. On my 2 year old lappy- very much NOT a gaming computer at all, it runs blisteringly well at full resolution, at the highest texture detail level.

And you know something, even after all these years... it still looks pretty damn good. OK, so it doesn't have HDR lighting bloom or whatever, but the textures look pretty sweet.

It is a testament to that game that I find it easy and entertaining after all these years. Two days ago I couldn't have told you what any of the puzzles were in Myst, much less how to solve them. But Myst's ages are so consistent -- they each have their own 'logic' and because I spent weeks (months?) back in 1995 figuring out how in the heck these worlds worked, I think that the necessary neural pathways have already been formed in my brain.

I think that this is much like a university education. I bet you don't still remember all the formulas that you needed to use on your physics final in first year -- but that wasn't the point of learning them. The point of learning them is that now you have those patterns hacked into your memory. When it comes time to figure out how to do a similar problem, your unconscious mind will clue in, and you'll be able to figure it out with ease.

When I played that game in 1995, as I mentioned it took weeks to figure out each part. I would go over to Jesse's house and we would puzzle over each of the ages. It was, as I recall, really hard! I just played it again now, and the puzzles (which I really don't remember) seem so obvious. I just played through in a day -- maybe 4 or 6 hours total gameplay.

Anyway, seeing how well Myst aged, I'm itching for some more -- I've got Riven in the pipeline. I never played Riven for more than about an hour one time on somebody's ZOMGWTFBBQ amazing Pentium II 250 laptop on a plane in 1999, so the puzzles will be brand new, and hopefully challenging. I don't want to use any walkthroughs. It's really hard not to nowadays, isn't it?

In the Globe and Mail last week or perhaps two weeks ago, I first read about Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair article "Women Aren't Funny" and I wasn't sure what I thought, but I was skimming and passed on to more interesting things. I didn't give it another thought until a few days ago when this video popped up on VideoSift, and I got into a lengthy discussion with Jeska about it. Finally, I read through other peoples' comments on VS and came up with this position piece on the article.

I'm interested to know what you all think. Here's what I wrote:

I'm not sure what I think about this whole thing, but I would like to make the observation that the study that was run in Stanford, the so-called "scientific basis" for this entire brouhaha had an exceptionally small sample size. With only 10 male and 10 female test subjects, even pronounced differences in reaction to humour can only indicate the need for further study.

In other words, this experiment however rigorously conducted, is almost useless because it had far too small a sample group.

As for the rest... it is very difficult to say. Hitchens is a very smart individual, but taste in humour is so very very subjective -- I may find Monty Python hilarious, but somebody else may find it meh.

Attempts to objectively quantify female's success in humour are bound to fail. Even if it is true that female stand up comedians are fewer than men, it is simple to think of a dozen possible reasons for that other than "Women aren't funny." 50 years ago, there were NO women in politics, you could have just as easily said then that "Women are poor at policy decisions." The truth is that there were lots of other factors in play, and I don't think many people would disagree that sexism was a very real factor.

Having said all that against his thesis, I have to admit that I'm not willing to just dismiss it as flat sexism the way that several other commenters have. Granted, he does not endear himself to me with terms like "bull-dyke lesbian", but as I pointed out, comedy is so hard to quantify, it may turn out that women really aren't as funny as men. If it turns out that this is the case, I expect several things will be true:

- The gender difference will turn out to be about as significant as the gender differences in say math ability or pain tolerance threshold, which is to say very slight.
- Any exaggeration of this innate difference in ability will be yet another sign of the sexism of modern society.

Furthermore, no matter how much society changes, I expect that Hitchens will never find women funny. Just as my hypothetical person will probably never "get" Monty Python, there is one thing you can never argue, and that is taste.

It is amazing how much things seem to have shrunk since moving to Vancouver. One's concept of how close things are is amazingly elastic. When we moved here, we noted that the nearest 24 hour shoppers is quite a bit further than it was from our place in Halifax. By looking on google earth, I see that it is 0.6km distant here, and only 0.4km distant in Halifax. Decent right?

OK, the thing is, we went to Shoppers last night and Jessica and I were both ASTONISHED to realise that somehow we thought of that as being an inconvenient distance away.

The only answer is that the distance of things has shrunk dramatically. I expect that upon returning to Halifax it is going to seem SO SMALL.

From our apartment in Vancouver, just about everything of interest is within about a 5km radius. Oh, except stanley park is more like 6, but still.

That is pretty much the entire peninsula of Halifax. From my parents' place, it is more like 2km to anything and everything. 5km from my parents' place is like the Bayer's Lake Industrial Park, which seems SO distant. To get to a place like that from here you need to go to Richmond, which is more like 11km.

Meh, I guess this is a long convoluted way of saying that it's bigger here, and a little trepidation about how little Halifax is likely to seem upon returning.

Humph, I've written so much about this now but I really wanted to talk about the 8840 nintendo roms I downloaded, or the 464 snes roms, but it seems more like the subject for another post.

Similarly I wanted to cry about how much I miss the Blower's Street Paperchase, and talk about playing frisbee (at Douglas Park, 1.3 km away) with coldconfusion yesterday, and also some more talking about Jeska's dreads. And maybe even a bit about how much I hate hate hate hate hate doing desserts at my job, and how happy I am that they hired a pastry chef.

Another time though. For now.... LUNCH!

Watch out organix! Here comes.... DREADY JESKA!!!!


<3 <3 <3 <3

We started at 11 AM this morning. They are finally done now. 10+ hours later. They are SO CUTE!

Looking for a sambucca sorbet recipe, I stumbled on your journal. And I am absolutely drooling!! This type of food is so up my alley. Love the inventive flavours with food that looks so fantastically fresh. Right next to good ol' home cookin, a perfect roast meal that needs no presentation. The talent is knowing when to say when! Please let me know where you're cooking for a living. Sounds like you are British. I'm hoping for my sake (and my boyfriends/friends/family) that it is somewhere in London. Would love to give your restaurant a go. Thanks Janine

Thanks Janine! Unfortunately for you, I am almost as far away as you can get from London- I'm currently in Vancouver.

As for Sambuca sorbet, Grapefruit and Sambuca sorbet is one of my favourites. I'll use 3 cups grapefruit juice, 1 cup simple syrup and maybe 2 or 3 shots of sambuca. Yum.

Sheesh! I just tagged all of my posts for 2007. It is crazy to go back and read some of the crazy feature menus that we did at PG. I miss that place a lot.

I also crack myself up. Check out my funny. I'm hilarious.

Anyway, it was a nice retrospective. 2007 was a pretty damn good year.

It has recently come to my attention that "Canadian" may possibly be a code word for "black person" that racists use in Texas and other southern states. What??
National Post Story.

What kind of crazy, mixed up world is this?

---

Wow! What's with the backlash against XKCD??? I only very recently became aware that anybody didn't love XKCD, and I totally don't get it. r_lex writes:

I sometimes feel that anyone who professes to like XKCD secretly hates comics.

What? I love XKCD!

But then again, I'm a big fan of nerd humour. I've spent hours looking through the jokes on http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/ and I probably only get about half of the jokes. But then again, sometimes the fun is looking up the references on wikipedia and actually learning something.

So if r_lex was looking for an argument, then I guess I am that arguer - I .. oh wait, never mind- I do hate comic strips. I pretty much only like Calvin and Hobbes, Mutts, Pogo, The Far Side and XKCD. I don't even like Dinosaur Comics that much, even though several people have extolled its awesome to me. Foxtrot definitely has had some lulz in its day, but it just seems SO watered down- almost like it is commitee'd or focus grouped into blandness. I'm not totally convinced that Scott Adams isn't hilarious, but Dilbert has sucked out loud for over ten years now. I have even less positive to say about pretty much EVERY other contemporary, non-web comic strip that I can think of. Pogo, Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side are defunct, and XKCD is only internet, that I know of. So when it comes to comics in the newspaper these days, Mutts is it.

Honestly, I think I may have gotten comic strips out of my system early with an unhealthy childhood obsession with Garfield. I think that the newer permutations of Garfield are pretty awesome- some of the recent live re-enactments with bizarre music videos, and especially the whole "wouldn't it be crazy surreal if you couldn't see what Garfield was thinking" meme that came up a few years ago. Some of the "Garfield without Garfield" ones are absolute genius:

So dark. Jon transforms into this very depressed person who talks to his cat and is going mad slowly. Some of the examples are pretty disturbing.

As for web comics, there are a few others that interest me occasionally, one of which being Red Meat. I took it off my friends page recently though- just got tired of it. Another is Alien Loves Predator. I just recently read a few years worth and it has some totally LOL moments.

As I was typing I remembered another webcomic I read years ago, but I had forgotten the title. For ages, I kept meaning to try and figure out what it was. A quick tab change and clickitty-click.google.com and in less that 1 minute I determine that it is Scary Go Round. I definitely am going to have to read more of that now.

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mmmmmmmmmm..... I smell Nag Champa. Best. Incense. Ever. Chris brought it over for the party. So awesome. Thanks to everybody who came! Totally good times! Having friends over definitely helps with the "first winter away from home" blues.

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Five stupid days of Dine Out left. Thank god.

OK, Mom and Heather- you guys asked for better pics of the apartment, but it was always too messy... UNTIL NOW!

Vancouver Apartment

I know that not all of you have had the chance to see Cloverfield yet, but I'm just dying to show you what the monster REALLY looks like!


WOAHZ0RS!!!!!!11!

_{idea taken from http://forpostdigg.blogspot.com/2008/01/cloverfield-monster.html}

Dine out is very trying. 9 days to go, but it feels like forever.


I printed one of these off for work, with little tear off numbers that we can ritually burn each night.

So I finally read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition from like 4 years ago, and I have to say what a really really good book.

I enjoyed Pattern Recognition on many levels, and really ought to try and organize my thoughts better before just blurting them up on my blog, so maybe I'll switch to more free form thoughts

I usually mostly like singularitarian sci fi, but a few years back discovered that Gibson's cyberpunk stuff is fun too. Not only because of his fantastic plots and iconic characters, but the supreme uber-coolitude of those stories. Then comes pattern recognition, which is more like a Serious Book. Now he has Serious Characters - at times you wonder if you're reading William Gibson or like a serious author like Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje or something. Oh God, he's become literature, I was thinking. But then the plot kicks in and it turns into a decently twisty thriller.

The first 50 or so pages took me almost a week to read because I kept falling asleep/getting bored. But once it gets started it really delivers. I especially liked the ending, I can't imagine a more satisfying conclusion, and it didn't seem at all like a deus ex machina- it fit perfectly in the story.

Meanwhile though, the character sketches continue to paint better and better pictures, that is to say they deeper and more richly imagined, realer if you will. The settings are described amazingly, and the narrative just draws you in. So what I'm left with is a Serious Book that actually entertains, and talks about the strangeness of our world in a way that seems quite relevant to me.

Remember in High School English, when they made you read a book and then analyse the crap out of it? And how much that sucks? How the metaphors and message and whatever in The Chrysalids is so patently obvious that to go on and on about them is just excruciating?

Its fun to discover a book that has something actually interesting and pertinent just under its skin. I think that Cayse from Pattern Recognition and Manfred Manx from Charles Stross' Accelerando would get along pretty well.

Come to think of it, they have a lot in common. They both are coolmakers, each successful enough to actually shape the culture around them.

I was about a third of the way through this book last Friday when I went to see Cloverfield. Watching Cloverfield while you're in the middle of reading a book which is largely influenced by, and includes a fictionalized account of the 9/11 attacks, while also suffering from insomnia makes for a very weird experience. The book is about many things - paranoia, sleep deprivation, panic attacks, uncertainty... it definitely affected me.

Pattern Recognition also has a STUNNING wikipedia page. When I finally put the book down, I wanted to talk with somebody right away. I wanted there to be a book club meeting in an hour where people discussed the book, its conclusions, its themes, etc etc etc. Lo and behold the wiki article carefully examines the layers and such in the book. Whew- there's more there than I had even realised.

So anyway, I've just shuffled this post around and am too tired to read through the whole thing to see if it scans, but I think I've said all I wanted to say about it for the moment. I'm going to cross post this to sf_with_bite and my own LJ, because I want to know if other people enjoyed Pattern Recognition as much as I did, especially anybody else who is into singularitarian writers like Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, etc.

Am I the only one who feels like this novel takes place about 15 minutes before stories like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Vernor Vinge or the first chapter of Accelerando, Lobsters by Charles Stross? Or probably Greg Egan's Distress, although I read that years ago and don't remember it well enough to be sure.

For those of you who don't already know, Dine Out Vancouver is a promotion which is currently in its 6th year now, and has participating restaurants offer a $35 prix fixe dinner menu for several weeks in January. It was originally conceived as a way to combat the slow times that traditionally plague restaurants in the dead of winter.

The result has been astonishing. DOV is now the busiest time of year, feared by service professionals and foodies alike.

I've already mentioned here that my current restaurant is several times busier than any place I've worked previously. Well tonight we turned every table in the dining room 3 times. I was blown away on Wednesday when we topped 400 covers, tonight we very well may have topped 500.

I need a drink. I'm too poor though. ;P

Ardmere

...

Not where, not when, not who -- but why?

Well, I've got a few ideas about where and maybe who and maybe even when.

A road in London City.

Maybe a monk named Enda?

1770.

I dunno... my google skills aren't strong enough. I bet somebody else will google it, and find me. So here's some misinformation to throw you off track. Blue Kidney Ecstasy Rampart Gelatin.

Mhah! Now try and figure it out.

Burning Day by Glenn Grant is a really really awesome story, that totally made me think of trmanning. I dunno something about a shit-talking cigarette smoking robot cop just made me think of you. He's badass and from the past and the future at the same time, just like you. Anyway, check it out.