I finally won Lunatix! It took me nearly a year, but I did it. Unfortunately they’ve discontinued offering the shirts as prizes, and I’m not sure what to choose from the available options. There’s a lot of other things I want to do online, especially since A is going over to visit her parents for a little bit, but she suggested I get offline so the bike shop could call and let us know the repairs to our bikes were done. I suppose I could just call them and ask if everything was done and then maybe get back online, but I do want to play RollerCoaster Tycoon for a bit so I guess I’ll go into the office and do that.

Today I gave Atlantic Kayak my credit card info to sign me up for their Sea Kayaking I class this coming Monday. I’ll probably know a good portion of what they’ll be teaching, but you have to take that class before you can rent from them, and I suspect they’ll be renting much later into the fall than the local boathouse.

Some interesting and confusing personal stuff is going on for me right now, it’s kind of scary. I’ll have to see how it goes.

The trip was wonderful. We arrived very late Thursday night, and when I saw the room had two beds perpendicular to each other I started to cry because I was so tired and that was the last straw. While on the phone with my mother I realized none of the furniture was bolted down and the beds were made of lightweight wood, so we switched things around and I was much happier.

Friday morning I tried to navigate us to La Ronde, which started its life as the amusement section for the 1967 World’s Fair and was recently bought by Six Flags. We ended up driving across the city a couple of times before finally getting there. I had forgotten to wear sunblock but only got a light burn on my forehead and nose; we waited in lines all day and went on all of the coasters.

On Saturday we went out to Bonsecours (about an hour from Montreal) and visited the Mine Crystal Québec, which gave a tour of the quartz mine entirely in French that we could listen to on tape in English via Walkmans with headphones. It wasn’t terribly elegant, but it worked okay; I was glad they didn’t include too much on the Vedic text but instead tried to be factual (while also not omitting everything mystical). The tour took 90 minutes, longer than we’d expected, and by the time we got back to the city we were ready for a nap. I tried to get online but the number was out of service, so I called my mother to have her check, hoping I’d copied down the wrong number. No dice - it was the right number, I’m just unlucky. I played Transport Tycoon while A slept, which she stopped doing as soon as a family moved in down the hall with lots of loud children and lots of door slamming. That night we tried to go to Girly’s, a lesbian café mentioned in the guidebook my dad bought for us. We probably should have called first, as it turned out that place was closed and replaced with something called Dee Dee Dragon, which wasn’t even open.

Sunday we drove out to the countryside again, looking for a town called Sutton. We had a brochure for a chocolate museum there, but it turned out to be a very small shop whose tour probably consisted of an hour’s lecture on chocolate - in French. We wandered around the town for a little bit, then came back to the city and walked around Vieux-Port and went through the labyrinth. We tried to go to a restaurant called La Maison Kam Fung for dinner, but we weren’t thrilled with the menu posted outside, so we went to the IGA supermarket near our hotel (it’s part of the Complexe Desjardins) and picked up some things from the deli to eat at our hotel.

Monday was the great (mis?)adventure at the Olympic complex. We went on the tour of the stadium - it’s big enough that they can shoot fireworks inside, even with the roof on - and then went up the tower and looked around. After lunch we walked through the Biodôme, but it was so crowded we couldn’t really see much; I did get some good pictures but not as many as I’d have liked. There was a welcome video at the entrance to the Biodôme that played in English and then in French before starting over, and it had both open captions and an interpreter in an oval. The interpreter for the English was just a kid - maybe about 12 - and I wouldn’t say he did a great job (he looked really nervous), but the interpreter for the French was older and did fine. ASL is mostly the same in the United States and Canada so I understood both versions, but it was really strange to see words like “water” signed in the French version: the sign for water is initialized with a W, but the interpreter for the French section mouthed the word “eau” while signing the W-initialized sign. After the Biodôme we took the free shuttle over to the Insectarium and Botanical Gardens. I couldn’t handle the Insectarium: I do not like bugs at all, so I sat near the gift shop until A was done. We walked around the gardens after that, and when we finished we headed back to where we’d been dropped off by the shuttle, only to find it stopped running at 6:30 even though the gardens didn’t close until 7:00. We had already been walking for hours and hours, and we dragged ourselves back to the Pie-IX station of the Métro. A was too exhausted to get dinner, so around 10pm I picked up Chinese from one of the many restaurants around our hotel.

After having walked around for nine hours on Monday, we didn’t want to do much walking on Tuesday. We went to the Notre Dame Basilica and took the tour there, then walked through the Marché Bonsecours and had lunch there. One of the shops had an old copy of Kanawa, the Canadian paddling magazine, but wouldn’t sell it to me; instead the shopkeeper (who wasn’t very friendly) told me I might be able to find it at a store called Multi-Mags, so I looked them up in the phone book. There were several locations along Rue Sainte-Catherine, but A wanted to go back to the hotel so I walked up there myself. I had wanted to stop in at another shop along there, and then I kept walking in the same direction looking for 352 Rue Sainte-Catherine. When I got there, I saw no Multi-Mags, so I asked at another store and the guy told me they were a few blocks up. I walked and walked, then finally realized around the 800 block that I was on Rue Sainte-Catherine Est instead of Sainte-Catherine Ouest. I kept going for a few more blocks, visited the Gay Chamber of Commerce, and finally reached the Multi-Mags on Sainte-Catherine Est…only to find they didn’t have the magazine. I gave up and dragged myself back to the hotel; that night we ate at the food court in the Complexe Desjardins.

Wednesday was spent driving home, of course. We got caught in a traffic jam before we were fifty kilometers outside the city, and were forced to get gas at a full-service station (there are surprisingly few self-service places up there). We had lunch from McDonald’s - it had been forever since I’d eaten there, but Canada has the McVeggie and the nutritional information indicated it wasn’t that bad for me. (I had given up on the diet, and while I was trying not to be stupid I also wasn’t counting points or anything…it was just too hard while on vacation where I couldn’t get anything reliably and had to eat out a lot.) We had planned to stop for the night in Hershey and visit Hersheypark on Thursday, but I realized it would be very expensive and we agreed we could make it home…we got in around 11pm.

Thursday we went to Six Flags America, which was a blast. It was cloudy and cool, so there were no crowds and no lines; we were able to stay on some of the rides after the first time around. We mostly went on roller coasters, as we had done at La Ronde, but we also went on the freefall and the whitewater rafting ride, which - to our dismay - soaked us including our jeans (we should have known better!). I was glad to see that Joker’s Jinx was open; it had been closed last year because its restraint system wasn’t good enough. That was the first time I was on a LIM coaster, and it was great. I ended up making my own track record page after seeing that Coasterbuzz now wants you to pay $20 to use theirs.

I have gotten all the pictures from the trip off the digital camera, but I have yet to select the good ones, resize them, and crop out excess stuff. There were about 200, but many are duplicates; I’ll probably still end up with a lot so I may post them on Yahoo! Photos as I did with the Turkey pictures.

I was intrigued enough by blogger wishlists to write about them, and now I have come across another curious phenomenon: bloggers with CafePress shops. Of course I’m tempted to come up with my own design, but I know nobody would buy it. (I haven’t even finished the one CafePress project I started over a year ago, anyway, and that had a real live target audience.) I admit that I don’t know any of the people who have shops listed there - except for Wil Wheaton, but I bet people do buy his stuff - so maybe they have really devoted readers who would be proud to wear their logo. But personally, I just don’t see the point of that sort of ego-stroking. (Again, this is not to say I wouldn’t do it myself. I probably will someday, even though it would be bad for my self-esteem because nobody would buy anything.) I haven’t found any products about blogging yet - I think people would buy shirts that say “I Blog” or something else - probably anything on a Blogsticker would sell as a product.

I like the questions from last week’s Weekly Wrapup so I’m going to answer those today.

1. What kind of computer do you use? What operating system? If you’ve made a conscious choice to use a particular OS, what prompted the decision? And are you rabidly loyal to a particular OS — if so, why?
At work I have a Dell Dimension, and at home I have a Compaq Presario desktop and a Compaq Armada 7730MT laptop, which is our primary machine: we mostly only use the desktop for its USB ports. Both the work machine and my laptop use Win95, and the desktop has Win98; once I get some more RAM into the laptop I want to install Win98 on there as well. I will probably always stick with Windows machines, though I’m not opposed to using Linux. I don’t think I’d ever make the switch to the Mac world, though I’m comfortable using them.
(more…)

I really hate coming back from vacation and finding the temp has totally changed things around. And being fussy like I am, I hate seeing somebody else’s handwriting in my appointment book. I like a clean desktop on my computer; she left it littered with items including a PDF copy of her résumé. (At least that afforded me the opportunity to learn she graduated high school a year after I did. It also told me she already has a B.A. in Political Science, but at least I graduated high school before she did, dammit. Interestingly enough, she was also in Kappa Alpha Theta and participated in the curious thing that is Birthright Israel.) She even left my chair at a different height setting. My boss said the temp did a great job, she learns quickly…so what the hell do they need me back for if she’s so great? I like going on vacation, but damn I hate coming back.

Added She even started a new folder with her name in a stupid place for the stuff she was working on. Hello, honey, I told you what tables to save things in and they were already there so why did you go and put data in the wrong place where it shouldn’t be? And my boss just mentioned that she kept the key to the door. He gave the temp the key to the door, even though they are so damn worried about security back here. I wasn’t gone that long, for crying out loud.

We’re back! We got in around 11pm last night, and I have yet to finish writing up anything to tell what we did all week. Because my ISP’s Montréal number was out of service, I wasn’t able to get online as I’d hoped, except for about five minutes from a pay-per-minute terminal in the hotel lobby. All I did then was clear out some spam to make room for more, but I still ended up going over quota and I think messages were bouncing. So I am going through everything now, and then A wants to use the computer. It may be a while before I get up a trip report, and while we did have lots of fun it’s good to be home.

I am pretty sure I am all set to go. I scooped the LitterMaid (it’s everything the commercials promise, until it breaks), put out the trash, filled the cats’ feeder, wrote down the hotel’s phone number for A’s little sister MK, who is coming to take care of the cats daily for us. I filled my pillbox (I am a walking pharmacy) and picked out several books to read; I don’t have as many magazines as I’d like but hopefully we’ll stop somewhere on the way and I can pick up a puzzle book and a magazine. The laptop is coming with us, of course; even if I can’t get online I will be able to play Transport Tycoon and work on some CSS coding with TopStyle (I am bringing both my huge Learning CSS book and my little CSS quick reference), and I will keep a travel journal for posting later. We’re stopping off at my parents’ house on the way (they’re an hour north of us), and then getting on I-95 and driving north. The weather is supposed to be very good, I’m really looking forward to this vacation.

I’m getting ready to leave work in about an hour; I’ve spent the day so far training the temp. A is going to pick me up at the metro and drive me to my doctor’s appointment, then she has her last cabling class tonight and my evening will likely be spent packing the suitcase(s) and geeking.

I’ve noticed that wishlists are popular among bloggers. Here is my evidence for that statement:

• Most of the blogs I read have a link to a wishlist, generally hosted at Amazon.com.
• Daypop is tracking more than 800 wishlists and more than 20,000 items.
• Noah Grey, creator of Greymatter, lists someone as having donated if they contribute at least $10 by PayPal - or send him something from his wishlist.
• A Google search for the phrase blog wishlist returns nearly 30,000 results.

And so on. This strikes me as peculiar, because camgirls are ridiculed because of their wishlists. What makes a blogger more deserving of gifts, or less deserving of stigma?

Some years ago, I made my way into Yahoo’s directory (in the Begging category, a dubious honor) with what I called the Gimme Page. (Yahoo has since cleared the dead link from their database, a rare occurrence.) This was essentially just a homemade wishlist, but it somehow got minor attention; I received lots of “what are you, insane?” and “you greedy bitch” e-mails. I turned it into a wishlist at Felicité, and things quieted down; somebody eventually bought me something from the list.

Because I am an incurable listmaker, today I keep not one but several wishlists. Having gone round the track and returned, I’ve resurrected the gimme page as a meta-list of wishlists.

Newsweek has an article called Living in the Blog-osphere, which seems to be the typical mainstream prattle. Link courtesy my mother.