Here is a fine view of Ciudad de Mexico from my hotel window:
The building up front, housing the corporate headquarters of several multinational companies, is aptly named by the locals: they call it the “washing machine”.
I am used to seeing architecture like this in vintage futuristic shooter games, like Duke Nukem.
This, really, is just a test, to see if WordPress works on my freshly updated Xperia X10 phone, letting me post to my blog.
OK, it works. Android 2.1 is nice, well, much nicer than 1.6. At least now I can Skype or use Acrobat to view PDFs.
One thing I need to figure out is how to stop this blessed thing from replacing every word it doesn’t recognize with a silly guess (WordPress=Sorceress?)
The other day, my wife and I visited a restaurant in Gatineau. We were not disappointed; the quality and selection of “Le Buffet des Continents” was quite excellent.
But then, there was this fine piece of socialist realist art greeting us upon entering the establishment:
It won’t prevent us from going back, though.
I am 47 years old, but up until last week, I never ever painted a room. I knew more about how paints behave on spacecraft surfaces than on drywall.
Well, this is no longer true. I just finished the walls, window, door, and floor in our small bedroom:
Yes, I am proud of my handiwork. Our cats appear to be satisfied, too:
But no, I am not planning to give up my day job.
Caught on a Web cam, two very worried kitties in my wife’s room, listening intently as workmen were demolishing an old furnace in the basement:
The other three cats were in hiding.
So here I am, posting to my blog from my new smartphone. Neat. I suppose it was time for me to join others and acquire my very own 21st century toy… I have to confess though, the touch screen is nice but it’s much easier to type on a real keyboard…
As of today, our marriage with Ildiko can legally drink and vote. Well, at least in some jurisdictions, insofar as the drinking part is concerned. Here in Ontario, our marriage could now be employed in a liquor store, but it’d have to wait another year before it is actually allowed to buy the products sold there.
I went for a walk last morning and it gave me time to think. About this here blog of mine. Notably, about the fact that this is my first new entry in ten days, probably a record since I began this habit some eight years ago.
Of course eight years ago, I was not using blogging software. I was originally just adding content to a static HTML page. Eventually, I wrote some home-brew server-side code that allowed users to access a specific day. Which is how the software organized entries, by day that is. So I felt compelled to put something in every day, even if it was nothing more than just the comment, “another boring day”. (Not boring to me mind you, but to people reading my entries.) But then, two years ago I decided to join others in the 21st century and set up WordPress. (It was perhaps around this time that my resistance finally broke down and I began to accept the word “blog” as part of my vocabulary.) One side effect of this change was that I no longer added a new entry every day… but then, there were days when I added more than one. Even so, I blogged less. Was it because of the change in software?
Or perhaps I just have less to say? How many original (or, well, not too unoriginal) thoughts can be stored in an average human brain? How soon before we start repeating ourselves, griping about the same issues over and over again? Perhaps I am blogging less because I already said everything I needed to say?
Or maybe it’s something else altogether. Maybe it’s not the blogging software per se, but the fact that it allowed me to configure my Facebook account to pick up my blog entries and post them there. Suddenly, people actually responded to what I had to say. They actually commented. What on Earth?
You see, blogs (and I mean real, personal blogs, not news media outlets that call themselves blogs) are the ultimate write-only media. You write about things that matter to you, not about things that matter to others. You yell at the world, not expecting the world to yell (or, for that matter, whisper) back.
So perhaps I just became shy because suddenly the world talked back. Suddenly, I had to pay attention to what I wrote because there was a reaction. Usually a friendly one, but even so… I had to explain my thoughts. Heaven forbid, I sometimes had to revise them because somebody convinced me that I was mistaken. When you yell at the world, you’re not expecting the world to explain to you why you are wrong.
Maybe I’ll just establish a secret blog site. One that is not linked to Facebook or anything else, the URL of which only I know. (Who needs pesky readers?) Then, I’ll happily yell at the world again secure in the knowledge that nobody pays any attention whatsoever…
Well, almost 23,000. Mostly JavaScript and PHP, also HTML and SQL. This is a project I’ve been working on all summer. Lots more to do, but at least one deliverable is complete, and I can finally spend a little bit of time doing something else. Plenty of other things I’ve been putting off while I was on this programming binge.
I’m back from a week-long trip to Hungary, visiting my Mom, relatives, and friends. Apart from the fact that the second half of my trip was made unnecessarily unpleasant by some cold bug I picked up on the flight from here to there, it was fun. But, it’s good to be home, even though, it seems, I came home in the middle of a heat wave. Yesterday, the heat almost killed me when I was looking for my car at Montreal airport (cars have the nasty habit of moving about when you leave them in large, public lots) while hauling my 60-pound suitcase. Today, it’s going to be even warmer. (No, we’re told, it’s not global warming… it’s the same El Niño weather that brought an unusually cold spring to parts of Europe.) I better check to see if our A/C still works after its winter hibernation.
The Perimeter Institute turned into a major construction zone. But, it’s still fun to be here. And useful… I work very well with people over the Internet and the telephone, but some difficult issues are better discussed face-to-face.
It’s just been a little over eleven months since my uncle Jóska died… and now it’s one of my aunt’s turn, aunt Zsóka (as a child, I called her Zsóka néni) died in her sleep this morning in Budapest.
I have Zsóka néni to thank for many things, most notably for improving my English. I was around 16 at the time, and I was complaining to her that despite my best efforts, my English is still not anywhere near where I think it ought to be. Her advice: go read a book or two. And don’t use a dictionary, figure it out yourself.
The first ever book I read in English was a gift from her: The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins. It took a year or so, and several false starts before I was able to get to the end. But my next book took only a few months; the next, just a few weeks; and after that, I was reading English almost as well as I was reading Hungarian.
Needless to say, a few years later when I came to Canada, near fluency in the English language was a tremendous asset. Instead of washing dishes or selling hamburgers, my first job in this country involved writing C-language driver code for a government client. Thanks in large part to Zsóka néni.
Who is no longer with us. She was 77, the oldest of four siblings; now only two of them remain, my mother and my aunt Edina. I hope both of them will remain with us, in good health and in good spirits, for many more years, never mind years, how about decades, to come.
I bought this at our favorite Portuguese bakery the other day:
In case it’s not obviously visible from the picture, it’s a sliced loaf of bread… sliced lengthwise, that is.
No, I did not ask for it to be sliced lengthwise. I’d have preferred it to be sliced the conventional way, but unfortunately, I was late to the bakery, and this was the last loaf of their uniquely tasty nine-grain bread that day. So I bought it, and they were kind enough to sell it to me at a discount.
The explanation? “New employee,” I was told. Now why do I have the feeling that this new employee will not be employed at that place very long?
Then again, it could have been worse. She could have sliced it horizontally.
Today I turned this
into this:
I am almost beginning to believe that I am actually good at this handyman stuff.
I was a very brave person today… I peed in a toilet that I just finished installing.
So far, no sign of leaks below.
I’m most pleased with myself tonight. Maybe I have an aptitude for the experimental side of physics, too, as it appears that I was able to repair successfully my subfloor around the leaky toilet. I took some pictures:
Next task is to finish the floor and put the new toilet in. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not… I’m rather tired, so I might skip a day. But then again, I seem to be on a roll…
There are certain areas of life where decades of computer expertise are quite useless, and even a reasonably thorough knowledge of theoretical physics is only of marginal use. Replacing the rotted subfloor around a leaky toilet is one such area.
Yet this is what I am presently engaged in. So far so good… using some rather evil, foul-sounding power tools, I managed to cut out much of a square hole around the drainpipe, I’m only having trouble with some corners where the power tools don’t reach. Unfortunately, I found out that the subfloor in this bathroom is actually an inch thick, as opposed to the standard, 5/8″ board that I already bought… oh well, it wasn’t a big expense anyway, and perhaps I can use that board for some other purpose later on.
For now, it’s back to Home Depot to get a piece of inch-thick wood and also some advice on cutting out those nasty corners. Maybe they can suggest a method that would be slightly more efficient than the hammer-and-chisel approach which I attempted, with some limited success.
While I’m at it, I shall also inquire as to whether it is possible for them to cut my boards to shape to fit around the drainpipe, so that I wouldn’t have to attempt such precision cutting using my fairly limited skills and perhaps less-than-adequate set of tools. Not to mention that I value my fingers, and prefer to have all ten of them in the right place and in full working order after I’m done with all this…
But for now, it’s rest time. I have this nasty tensor algebra program to tackle, but no matter how difficult it is, I sweat a lot less doing it than when I’m cutting a subfloor with a circular saw.
I realized that I haven’t written anything in this blog for a whole week.
Back in the old days, when I was yet to convince myself to go with the times and start using the word “blog”, and I was still using my homebrew solution instead of real blogging software, I used to write something every day. I felt compelled to do so, given that I called my blog a “Day Book”. (Not an original idea, I borrowed it from Jerry Pournelle.)
But the blogging software I presently use doesn’t ask me to write something every day. So I’ve gotten sloppy. Or perhaps I have nothing meaningful to say.
Or maybe it is Facebook’s fault… I’m still debating with myself if it was the right thing to do, but I linked this blog to Facebook, so everything I write here shows up there, too. (Translation for those who read this on Facebook: everything you read, right here, right now, was originally posted “over there”, on my blog site.) I don’t know why it should intimidate me, but it does. Maybe it’s the idea that on Facebook, people actually read (sometimes) what I write, which is an odd sensation… I am used to writing in my blog with the near certain knowledge that nobody will read it, so I felt free to speak my mind.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing too much tensor algebra in recent days, all part of a devious plan to procrastinate, because once I stop doing that, I’ll have to start to think seriously about what I am going to do with a small bathroom downstairs that is in a severe need of repair…
My wife and I have been married 17 years today. Yes, I can certainly take a few, or make that many, more years like these.
I discovered this last year completely by accident, when I went for a late evening walk… imagine a park, usually dark at night, illuminated by a myriad of faint lanterns hanging from the trees and whatnot. It was a magical experience, made even more so that it was completely unexpected… I did not know about the Lumiere Festival at the time.
This year, I took my wife along. We went a little earlier. Perhaps that was a mistake… perhaps the crowds just got bigger since last year. But crowds are one thing. It’s another thing altogether that just about every second (!), I was blinded by someone’s camera flash. Now I will not go on about the pointless stupidity of using a camera flash when you’re trying to photograph faint lanterns in the dark, as I got past that some forty years ago, at the age of six or thereabouts, when I was watching an ice skating event on television, complete with spectators using camera flashes high up in the seating area, perhaps hundreds of feet away from the competitors they were trying to photograph.
No, it’s the inconsiderateness that bugged me. The blasted flashes made it impossible to enjoy the sights… every time I stared at a faint lantern, trying to discern its shape (and some of them were quite beautiful and elaborate) some idiot flashed his camera in my face. At one point, I could stand it no more, and yelled back at the dark, in the direction of the multicolored swirl that was still on my retina, telling the unseen photographer that he is ruining it for everyone with the stupid flashes. In retrospect, I realize that I sounded just like Victor Meldrew from the British comedy, One Foot in the Grave. So much for the promise I made to myself years ago about not joining the club of grumpy old men prematurely!