9 March 2007, early morning
Shima bought me an Optimus Prime action figure yesterday. She was in a good mood since she got the Committee of Adjustments job she wanted. I’m always asking her for action figures, and I’m only half joking when I do so. This one is more of a model that a full blown figure. I might leave it at work. My desk has no personality.
7 March 2007, evening time
Teksavvy is awesome. I am downloading via BitTorrent again, and it feels wonderful. The web is as snappy as it was under Rogers Extreme, so all is well in the world. Besides that, the fact that when I call their office a real person answers the phone, and when I email them I get an email back from a real person, is a big plus. I switched away from Rogers because for the second time since I started using them they started throttling my service. I ask you, what’s the point of paying for 5MBS connections to the net if you can’t use them to download huge ass torrent files? I’m not even some chronic downloader, I just want to grab Lost once in a while. Is that so bad? Teksavvy is the new hotness.
Comment [9]
5 March 2007, early morning
I came back from lunch at Yasi’s place to find Shima hard at work making Banana Bread. She was letting her aggression out on some far too ripe bananas. (She was mad at me for not taking out the recycling, buying nails I was supposed to buy, and for generally being a lazy-ass.) When I first met Shima she was almost proud about the fact she couldn’t cook. More so, she would make no attempt whatsoever to try and cook, she was so convinced she couldn’t do it. I’m sure she regrets not trying sooner: she may have ate better while away at Waterloo. Her Banana Bread turned out pretty good; certainly an excellent first attempt at the dish. She and I made Ghaimeh Polo for dinner, which also turned out quite well. Cooking for 1 is a chore, and though ultimately satisfying, usually not worth all the effort. Cooking for 2 is infinitely more enjoyable.
2 March 2007, late morning
I had told Dave a week or two ago that he should get a USB 2.0 enclosure for a hard drive, since they are cheaper and a bit faster than Firewire enclosures. It turns out I was only half right. Firewire 400, despite being a bit slower than USB 2.0 in theory, out performs it on the Mac by a healthy margin. (This is also true on the PC apparently.) For external storage, Firewire is still the way to go. I had always assumed USB 2.0 was faster, hence its popularity. I should have known better: popularity rarely correlates to not being stank.
Comment [1] Technology
2 March 2007, early morning
Yesterday night snow, rain, and ice of biblical proportions rained down upon us here in Toronto. Today the ground is wet, but you’d never know how crap the weather was yesterday. I was all excited about having a snow day. I should have known better.
1 March 2007, early morning
Being the scrawniest of all my friends, every single time I’ve had to move I really end up doing the least work. I’ll warn my friend Dave or Mezan that a box is heavy, and they’ll look at me like I’m an idiot and lug it away. (That’s when I have boxes, I have a bad habit of not packing properly.) I think yesterday was some sort of karmic readjustment: I helped my friend Steph move last night.
I arrived at 8:00 at Steph’s new place — I was part of the B Team, the A Team had shuttled her stuff from North York to the City. Steph, who is moving into a 400 sq foot apartment, had three cars and a vans worth of stuff. And as I soon found out, that was just the first round of stuff. Her apartment in North York still wasn’t empty. Moving this first batch of stuff wasn’t so bad, there were a lot of us helping out. However, not wanting to monopolize all of her friends’ time, she sent Jeff, Jessica, and Michelle home, leaving me and Monica to move the last wave of stuff — Monica who is skinny like me.
Moving the second wave was a battle, made worse by our forgetting to bring the dolly uptown. We parked her van diagonally in something that probably wasn’t a parking spot, turned on the flashes, and began several trips up and down the building with boxes of stuff. What’s crazy, is that we filled up a vans worth of stuff, and her apartment still wasn’t empty.
We sucked Shima into helping us unload this second wave. With the dolly and a shopping card we found in her building, it wasn’t too much trouble. It was at this point I left for the night. Steph and Monica went to get dinner. It was midnight.
I wouldn’t call the night fun, but I can say it was an experience.
Gangstarr White Dude: Hey, where’s the strip club?
Me: Which one?
GWD: I don’t know.
Me: Well to get to Club Paradise head West on Bloor.
GWD: No, fuck that place.
Me: House of Nottingham is left when you get to Bloor.
GWD: Yeah, that’s the one
— In front of Lansdowne Station
27 February 2007, early morning
Battlestar Galactica split their second season in half. I finally bought the two DVD sets that make up the second season, after waiting a year or so for them to make a combined box set. I finally watched all of Season 2.0 over the weekend, and started into Season 2.5. Battlestar Galactica is pretty dark as far as sci-fi goes. Season 2.0 was clearly a bit more bleak than the first season, but the mid season finale, where they find the Pegasus, was something else. The show has entered a whole new realm of fucked up. Battlestar is easily the best show on TV. I think the only people who could doubt that are people that haven’t seen the show.
Comment [6] Television
When I’m weak, you’re tellin’ me that I’m strong.
When I’m right, you’re tellin’ me that I’m wrong
But I know, now I understand, now I see,
I see your wicked plan. I’m a Junglist!
— Junglist by Tribe Of Issachar
21 February 2007, lunch time
Someone searched for phrase “How do you pronounce Shima” and ended up at my site. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t learn much from the post they landed on. Maybe this post will show up next time. You pronounce Shima as follows: She-mah.
21 February 2007, early morning
Shima and I attended the Nathan Phillips Square redesign competition last night. We watched short presentations from each of the 4 finalists. I thought all the finalists were quite good. Any of the designs being implemented would be a big improvement to the space, which is already pretty well used and loved. In particular, I thought the design by Plant Architects, and the one from Rogers Marvel, were particularly good. I’m hoping one of these two teams wins. Marvel’s plan looks simple and uninteresting till you start to hear them talk about what they’ve done and how they’ve changed things. There is a lot in their plan you don’t notice till they point it out. (A nice touch is that they’ve stripped away parts of the walk-way to show off key parts of the square.) Plant’s has a lot of good ideas for utilizing the walkways, and turning pockets of the square into more intimate spaces. I’m looking forward to seeing who wins. I hope the city actually goes through with this plan. I think Nathan Phillips Square is pretty nice as it is, except it’s borders are so ugly: all these plans fix that and then some.
More coverage of the event from: BlogTO, Torontoist, Spacing, and the Toronto Star.
20 February 2007, early morning
Today while reading about auto_ptr’s — a topic for another day — I saw the function declaration/definition ~auto_ptr() throw() { delete ptr; }. I thought to myself, “What the hell is that throw() all about?” C++ can be a strange and esoteric language. Keywords get reused often, and mean different things depending on their context. Clearly this had something to do with exceptions, but what? After looking in my giant tome of C++ knowledge I had an answer. In C++ you can be explicit about what exceptions a function may throw. You do this by listing the exceptions within the parentheses following the throw keyword, which you include after the functions name. I have very vague memories of this being discussed in CS 246, though I can’t be certain it was. Anyway, I took CS 246 a bajillion years ago. throw() corresponds to a guarantee the function throws no exceptions. If you don’t include the throw keyword when declaring a function, then the function can throw any exceptions. In Java this is actually required behaviour: if your function throws an exception, you must list the exceptions thrown using the throws keyword. I haven’t had to program in Java in ages.
17 February 2007, lunch time
Babel is the latest film from the pair Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga. I liked this film a lot, even more then their previous films together — 21 grams and Amores Perros, both of which are excellent. The movie follows 3 stories, loosely connected: one set in Tokyo, one in rural Morocco, and one in San Diego and Mexico. It’s a solid film. The shots are all beautiful, the acting top notch, and the story is well done. I liked the Japanese story line the best. It’s so intense. They all are really. You need to watch this film.
Comment [1]
15 February 2007, evening time
Hossein is part of a generation of idiot savants who have the audacity to refer to themselves as human rights activists, while sipping on five dollar latte’s and attending bogus conferences in the proverbial West. These quasi-intellectual talking heads have no scholarly understanding of human rights discourse, and an even poorer understanding of their own country’s history. — Samira Mohyeddin (of Banu fame.)
I follow the news on Iran much more closely than I ever did before, mostly because of Shima. I used to read hoder.com to get some insight on Iran because I foolishly thought — like many bloggers I suspect — that Hossein Derakhshan actually had something insightful to say. To be brief: he really doesn’t. Hoder is pro-Reformist and Tehran-centric in his outlook. He is very critical of anyone that doesn’t share his political ideology. Reading his site during the last election, you would think it was guaranteed that the Reformists would win, when I suppose if you had been actually paying attention it would be clear this wasn’t going to happen at all. People who can fly back and forth between Iran and Canada are not the sort of people that you should look to for reliable criticism of Iran.
So why bring this all up today? I checked out his site again after he posted on MetaFilter today, and he describes Reading Lolita in Tehran as anti-Iranian propaganda-literature. And you know he’s saying that with a straight-face. This is the go-to guy for news on Iran?
Update Feb 22nd 2007: He posted his thoughts on Reading Lolita in Tehran on MetaFilter today.
15 February 2007, early morning
Shima and I watched Michael Gondry’s latest film The Science of Sleep last night. To say it’s really weird would be an understatement. It’s a very surreal film. The film features Gael GarcÃa Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a pair of neighbours who over the course of the film develop feelings for one another — sort of. Much of the film takes place in Bernal’s dreams. The film constantly jumps between the real world and the dream world. It’s very strange. Gondry is very creative; the dream sequences are really quite a pleasure to watch. I liked the film; if you watch it, go in expecting something totally off the wall.
14 February 2007, early morning
It’s snowing — a lot — out side. I really wanted it to be a snow day. This is one of those times living in Canada doesn’t work out so well. There would need to be several times as much snow before they’d decide to call it a day.
12 February 2007, early morning
I watched Little Miss Sunshine with Mezan and Carvill over the weekend. It was a thoroughly enjoyable film. The movie follows a somewhat dysfunctional family as they travel in a beat up VW Bus to California so the youngest member of the family can take part in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. The actors all did a really great job; everyone is spot on with their parts. The little girl that plays the beauty contestant to be is incredibly cute, and definitely my favourite character in the movie. (Though all the characters are enjoyable in their own way.) The film is very good. You should definitely watch it, if only to revel in the train wreck that is these creepy little girl pageants, and to see Olive’s kick ass dance number.
9 February 2007, mid-morning
I use VIM when programming. It’s a text editor, originally for UNIX systems, that is popular amongst programmers. It is famous for its arcane and terse interface. Although meant for working with source code, it works quite well for editing plain old text files, but there are a couple format options you should turn on to make VIM work smarter. :set fo=twan1 will turn on a few useful format options: auto-wrap text to the textwidth, reformat paragraphs when they are changed, and recognize numbered lists. (You will need to turn on autoindent for the numbered list formatting to work properly.) Doing this will make editing README files in VIM a million times easier.
Comment [2] Nerd Alert
9 February 2007, early morning
My Blood Elf hit level 20 and change in the Ghostlands, the zone just south of the Blood Elf starting zone, Eversong Woods. Compared to the Undead starting zone, Eversong Woods and Ghostlands both feel like they have some history to them. (They both figure prominently in Warcraft III, so this may be why I liked them so much.) The quests are much better thought out in these two zones, compared to those in Trifal Glades and Silverpine. You end up traveling throughout the whole area, and the various quest-chains all relate to one another, and sort of push forward an overall story-arc forward. Things culminate in Deatholme, where you have to kill some evil archmage. Once this is done, you fly off to Undercity to start adventuring throughout the rest of Azeroth.
One of your last tasks in the Ghostlands is to return a necklace to Lady Sylvanas, who is the Queen of the Undead. She used to be an Elf, much like my character, but in Warcraft III, Arthas turns her into a wraith. When you give her back the necklace (the end of a quest), this cool Lord of the Rings sounding sequence begins. I haven’t encountered any other cut-scense like this one in the game.
This post is dedicated to my friend Cathy. She lives on a boat.
8 February 2007, late evening
What’s with Chloe in Season 5 of Smallville. She just picked up some random piece of junk electronic gizmo off the floor of Lionel’s office and started prattling off about what it did. Then she took it back to her laptop and triangulated some shit so they could find the person who planted the device. What the hell?
Comment [1] Television
8 February 2007, late morning
My shuffle has been spitting out Faye Wong track after Faye Wong track. The play list I use to make my random mixes contains the songs from almost every single album she’s put out. I guess when it randomly samples that list for songs to put of the shuffle, Faye Wong songs show up more often than not. I’m not complaining: Faye Wong is wicked. I just listened to her cover of Dreams by the Cranberries, which makes me want to watch Chungking Express.
8 February 2007, early morning
In Iran, a shop keeper may refuse your money when you want to buy something; If you compliment someone on an article of clothing, they may offer it to you; A taxi cab driver may refuse to charge you a fare, saying it was his pleasure to give you a lift. These are all examples of tarouf, a sort of faux-politeness Iranians subscribe to. The offers usually aren’t legitimate: you are supposed to politely decline the hospitality. It can get more complicated than that: for example, someone may ask you to come to their home for lunch or dinner, but you don’t know if they are being sincere. There would need to be a back and forth till one can correctly determine whether the offer is legitimate or not. There isn’t a real English counterpart to the word tarouf, though I think what I’ve described is pretty close. I find stuff like this interesting; words or ideas that have no real equivalent in English.
I started thinking about the word tarouf because I learned about the Serbian word inat while reading Drina Bridge. When NATO was bombing Serbia and Montenegro many Serbians reacted by throwing large public gatherings; when you are being bombed this isn’t a good thing to do. This is an example of inat: stubborn reliance or defiance in spite of what the consequences may be. That’s my stab at a definition from reading Drina Bridge and looking up articles on the web. I still get the sense some of the meaning gets lost when you try and translate the word into English — much like the word tarouf.
I can’t think of anything in Tamil like this. It’s possible I just don’t know the Tamil word for forcing your kids to become engineers, doctors, and accountants.
6 February 2007, late evening
Children of Men is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Holy shit that was good. Alfonso Cuarón has done an amazing job with this movie. He has captured a fascist future perfectly. Its scary how real it all looks and feels. I didn’t even think people could film stuff like the last few scenes of the movie. You need to see this film.
6 February 2007, early morning
My iPod shuffle made its way from China to my office over the course of a week, arriving yesterday morning. (The trip from China to Toronto took all of 2 days, the sorting and then waiting another 5.) This iPod replaces my 3rd generation 15 gig iPod. In some ways this is a step backwards — I have less space and no screen. I think I can live with that. I haven’t been using the full 15 gigs of my old iPod for ages now — certainly not since I left school. I usually listen to a couple albums a day, alternating between them. I don’t use the built in calender, notebook, or any of that extra jazz, and I’m usually aware of what music I’m listening to: I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to live without a screen. The iPod shuffle is quite nice. It is wicked small, dwarfed by the headphones I plug into it. Syncing a full gig of music onto it took about 5 minutes or so, if that. Apple says you can fit 240 songs on the player, but that’s if you encode them as 128bit ACC files. I usually encode at 224bit, so the files are bigger; I can fit about 150 or so songs on the player, which is still enough for me. Right now the shuffle picks tracks randomly from the music that was on my old iPod. I think I’ll keep this behaviour for the next little while. So far I’m quite liking the shuffle.
(I engraved Soundwave: Superior on the back of the iPod. It’s written in the tiniest text. I couldn’t fit Constructocons: Inferior as well, which is a shame.)
4 February 2007, terribly early in the morning
Listening to Life After Death by Biggie. I found it at a used CD shop on Queen — an awesome find. This CD is really good; I can’t imagine who would want to sell it. I’ve been looking for this CD for ages and ages now. I have all his other music. This isn’t much of an accomplishment: unlike Tupac, Biggie’s musical output took a hit after he died.
