Forgot to post this: the online site for reserving a spot on the Tall Ship Kajama. It would appear they really really really want to know how old you and your passengers are:
By the way, they only have three kinds of fares: Child, Adult, and Senior.
It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m just chilling and doing what most people do for fun on Saturday afternoon – debugging a corporate application. Yep, I learned I would be expected to be working on this about 28 hours ago. I’m not to complain, but there are a few bugs here that appear could have been caught by the coder if he/she actually loaded the app up to see if their code actually worked.
Regression testing does love company – everyone else is here, so when in Rome, start debugging.
I haven’t had a chance to update this blog for a while because of an unusually high workload. In the free time I’ve had, I’ve embarked into the seedy underworld known as mutual fund research. I swear, the suits purposely make things complicated to justify their salaries.
I will return.
If you had to drive around hundreds of people a day, all with vary degrees of hygiene and politeness, you would be grouchy too.
Nevertheless, there are, in fact, nice public transit workers. Here’s a few bon mots I’ve heard TTC drivers say and who put a smile on my face:
* “I hate to sound like your nanny, but please look both ways before exiting the car. Cars today will just smash right into you. If you do plan to kill yourself today, please give me your money first.”
* “Attention: to your right we are passing a one horsepower vehicle.”
* “Next stop Niagara [Avenue], hang on to your raincoats.”
* “If you’ll be so kind, please move to the back. We are serving cocktails in the rear of the streetcar. [pause] And it’s on me.”
On the bookshelf: William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, his latest book and his first foray into a story based on the modern age. That’s right, this time he has no cybernetic femme fatales or sentient holograms to rely on; he only has his stylized prose going for him.
The story is still very technocentric, with the jetsetting main protagonist Cayce (pronounced “Case”…hmm remember him?) trying to uncover the author of a series of CG videoclips posted anonymously on the Internet. A Macintosh G4 Cube, an iBook, and a corporate credit card are the main props. Still, Gibson manages to squeeze in his obligatory visit to Tokyo and a brush with organized crime. His use of metaphor makes everything sound special.
However, in the end, you realize you read a whole freakin’ book on email and forums and Internet video.
In the D drive: Doom 3. No interactive environment. Very few physics or ragdoll effects. Requires a top-of-the-line PC just to run properly. The one thing that defined Doom – large, arena-like rooms with the screaming hordes of hell barrelling toward you – is noticeably absent. Instead, you traipse through identical narrow grey corridors in pitch dark while dispatching monsters in twos and threes as they try to ambush you from behind, which stopped being scary after the 263rd time they did it. You can’t actually be “knee deep in the dead” because dead critters just disappear in a puff of red smoke.
Still, great graphics. I especially like the PDA (a touch of System Shock), the crisp, clickable graphical displays, and of course Super Turkey Puncher 3.
“I have declared Sunday ‘Family Day’,” my sister proclaimed when she flew into Toronto for the weekend.
It wasn’t so bad. Mom even complimented me _twice_ on my driving skills, we had a surprisingly decent authentic Shanghainese lunch at the bizarre landmark known as Chinese Hut (fish in wine sauce), I got to upgrade my mom’s PC to AOL 9.0 (Totally different from AOL 8.0! Now with a slightly lighter blue colour scheme!), and rescue my stamp collection from my parent’s home. We also went to grandfather’s grave to pay our respects.
My mom is growing spaghetti squash and kapoca in the backyard, turning most of the ground to a canopy of snaking vines.
My sister also picked up a gift from Thailand for me. She always fusses that I am impossible to get a gift for, but to my credit, her last gift was a plastic replica of the Statue of Liberty. Much like the real Statue these days, the replica is locked up somewhere and no one gets to see it.
This time, she a wooden toad with a wooden stick in its mouth. You’re supposed to use the stick to stroke the frog’s ridged back, creating a relaxing croaking-like ambience. It certainly proved its worth when I was installing AOL.
We spent the last night watching The Joy Luck Club for the first time, over a roasted red pepper loaf and some St. Andre brie. One thing I must admire is how faithful the film is to Amy Tan’s book – the voiceovers are virtually taken ad verbatim.
The Joy Luck Club always brings an emotional response from me, because I see myself and my own mother inside the characters. We suffer from not only a generational gap but a cultural one; my parents were immigrants to Canada, trading a life of rags to one of riches. Or, with the case of my mom, a life of riches to rags to riches, which explains her chronic thriftiness.
We have an amical relationship, but hardly an close one. As kids, my sister and I were pushed, even berated, to only tolerate the very best from ourselves and our lives. Sometimes I felt more like an acolyte than a next of kin.
And so I can relate to the sinking sensation the main protoganist Jing-Mei feels: that nothing I do can ever be “best quality”, can never be good enough. There is a lot about my mother’s past I don’t know and she refuses to talk about. I don’t understand them, and they don’t understand me.
She worries about me, I know this. She can only show it by giving me giant melons from her garden. And I, not knowing what to do with it, end up mostly throwing it away.
I got a GMail invite. Personally I’m a bit ambivalent about it all. I’m interested in the concept of using GMail is a cyber life recorder, but the practical me just sighs and says, “Ho hum, another email account to manage. And a web-based one too.”
To be frank, I’d rather have a 1GB of webspace than a fatty mailbox. Then again, someone suggested that I could keep photos in there and manage them via Organizr, so the GMail account may come in handy after all.
All in all, both apps seem fairly nice to work with. Some have suggested they have transcended to a level of usability that was once the sole domain of desktop apps. This means the Network Computer is closer than ever.
Aside: Have you noticed that if you type in “alcohol” in Google your first search result is not about the devil’s milk we all enjoy responsibly from time to time, but the Alcohol 120% CD copying software. Goes to show, geeks would rather rip music than imbibe.
First Excursion: The Humber Bay Pedestrian Bridge. I actually knew the engineer who built it. There are three types of animals hidden on the bridge structure.
We took a stroll down the Western Beaches, and it amazes me how beautiful our neighbourhood is. Virtually all the lakeside all the way to Ontario Place is striped with trails amid parkland and beaches. And ice cream stands, which Silverlotus approves of.
Finished off the invigorating walk with a dinner at Yumi on Bloor West. It’s sugarpops to have a good Japanese restaurant close by, even if it’s a bit on the pricey side.
Second excursion: Tall Ship Kajama, facing aft on the port side as we travel westward in Toronto Harbour.
I took Silverlotus and her parents on a boat cruise on the Kajama, a three-mastered schooner. We sailed from her berth at York Quay due west to the mouth of the Humber Bay and back, for a total of 1.5 hours. Fortunately, the clouds rolled in just as we docked.
Not too long ago, Harbourfront was a grimy industrial complex. Now it’s a thriving tourism area with many docks for many ships.
An interesting observation: York Quay has fifteen gardens, all designed by local artists. My favourite is one composed of plants growing out of old television sets, by Janet Morton.
We spent the next hour whiling away browsing the tourist traps at Queen’s Quay.
I actually got Silverlotus to put on a hat – it was a giant $70 Tilley hat that you could hide a machinegun in, but a hat nonetheless.
V has a fairly nice job. Problem is, it doesn’t pay too well. He was promised a raise if he received a good quarterly performance review.
!>()http://gallerie.silentblue.net/albums/toronto/Sidewalk_Closed.thumb.jpg 150w 113h! His boss hasn’t given him a quarterly performance review in one and a half years.
Well, until two weeks ago. He got a “highly favourable” rating. As thanks, they bumped up his bonus limit. But no raise.
So on Saturday, I spent most of the afternoon helping V out with his resume. Time to look for greener pastures. Here are some tips I have:
* Make your name in a bold, big font. Place your name as a header on the second page, too. This is your time to shine, baby.
* Place categories in order of relevance to the job you’re applying for. If your Education is more relevant than your work experience, put it first – and vice versa. Yes, this means you’ll need to keep several copies of the resume.
* Place items within categories in order of relevance. The resume police won’t come out if you don’t follow chronological order.
* Remove all things not relevant to the job. That includes past work experience, and skills. The Activities category should be taken out all together.
* You don’t have to list specific dates for jobs, graduating, etc. The year should suffice. If the job or course was particularly short-lived, including the season is acceptable (i.e. Summer 2002)
* Quantify everything. If you don’t have an exact figure, estimate. How many customers did you serve? How many sales in dollars did you bring in? How many percent does your new brainchild improve operational efficiency?
* Everything should be able to answer the old age question, “So what?” You must be able to justify each point, each job, each accolade, each school project, and why it’s on your resume, and why it makes you the perfect candidate.
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry…Command and Conquer was the first CD-ROM computer game that I truly enjoyed. You could control an entire army, from securing resources to devising stratagems. The background story was incredibly complex, for a game: two sides, the noble GDI and the charismatic Brotherhood of Nod, waged a war on the ground and through 
propaganda in a bid to be the first to control and understand an organism known as Tiberium that is slowly taking over the world. I used to play it so long, my contact lenses fell out of my head.
You could tell there was love put into this game. Playing as Nod, if you uncovered three crates spread over several campaign levels, you obtained a nuclear warhead in the final mission. As GDI, you received a different ending movie depending on how you destroyed the Nod Temple – if you used the orbital Ion Cannon, you would see the charismatic Nod leader, Kane, spread his arms like a cross-like figure as the beam pulverized him and his stronghold.
Red Alert and Red Alert 2 continued the tradition of background rock music, fancy install sequences, over the top FMVs and crazy weapons that were a hoot to use, but still remained firmly entrenched in a modern combat setting. Despite being prequels and spinoffs, they too offered teasing glimpses into the alternate universe that C&C created.
The true C&C storyline still yearned for its rightful sequels. Westwood planned it to be a trilogy: Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun, and Tiberian Twilight.
However, Command & Conquer 2: Tiberian Sun, hyped for over four years, turned the C&C story into a sci-fi cliche with UFOs and mutants, and was a commercial flop. By then, Westwood was dead and assimilated into the EA monolith. Generals, while very pretty, was devoid of storyline or artistry. It was C&C in name only. The golden goose from Las Vegas was officially poached.
It’s hard to get excited by the possibility of Command and Conquer 3: Tiberian Twilight. Will it bring the old excitement back, or will it be the final insult?