Greg and Kat's blog

It’s snowing again in Vancouver. I learned several things today on my way to campus.

First, one shouldn’t leave one’s umbrella in one’s office and think “it probably won’t be that bad tomorrow anyway”.

Second, don’t walk out to the bus stop on a snowy day and forget your wallet, especially if you left your umbrella in your office the night before. You’re just going to have to trudge back and get it.

Third, don’t sit in the back of an articulated bus when the roads are slippery. You have too much information back there. For example, you notice things like “I seem to be moving sideways” even though you know full-well that the back wheels don’t steer, so the only way that could be happening is if you’re starting to fishtail.

Kudos, to the bus driver: he did seem to know what he was doing. Still, I don’t think I have ever considered kissing the ground when I got safely off a bus before.

So I’m here. We’ll see if I learn “if it’s snowing, fuck it, stay home” when I try to get off the mountain. Here’s a pic out of my office window, taken with my phone:

Update 5:00: Home safe.

We have been busy since Kat has been home. It’s a combination of holiday festivities and people wanting to see Kat while she’s back. To give you an idea, these have been the engagements for seven of the last nine days:

• CMPT Xmas party
• Moderne Burger with Kelly and Paul
• wine tasting with some CMPT people
• Eunice’s defence dinner
• sushi and too much wine with Anne
• Thai with Pam and they boy (after buffet lunch at the DAC with the CMPT staff)
• Italian with the CSSS exec and hangers-on

I think I might be missing a dinner with Oli and Tina in there too. Tomorrow is Kat’s Ama’s birthday, so there’s another big dinner for that. Then Festivus (no celebration planned), Xmas eve (at Kat’s family), and Xmas day (at Kelly and Paul’s). Maybe there will be a break in the Xmas-New Year’s gap, but I suspect stuff will come up.

Last night during the exec dinner, something tweaked in my brain. I finally realized what it was this morning: I’m tired of food.

It’s not that I feel like I have been overeating (although I probably have), or that I’m feeling especially fat (but I wouldn’t mind losing a few). I just really can’t get excited about eating anything. Maybe it’s just my brain warning me that I’m headed down the road to becoming a bloated man-ball.

Anyway, can’t write more now. I have to get some work done before another buffet lunch at the DAC with Kat’s lab.

Last week, I was talking to a faculty member on exchange from China. He drove home something I knew, but had never really thought too much about: “Chinese” isn’t a very precise description of anything. That is, there are a lot of cultural differences between parts of the country.

So that got me thinking, which didn’t do any good, because I don’t really know anything about the subject at hand. That got me reading Wikipedia.

In my travels, I came across the Wikipedia article on Chinese Cuisine. In particular, the blue bar down the right of the page that lists types of Chinese cuisine caught my eye. There are apparently “eight great traditions” of chinese cuisine. I know something about some of them, but there are definitely some gaps.

So, I propose a quest: The quest to find and consume representative samples of each of the eight great traditions. This seems like a good city to do it: there are decent numbers from at least some of the regions. I should be able to find some restaurants, right?

Who’s with me? Anybody have good leads on restaurants? (Opinions not accepted from people who speak English with a Canadian accent—go ask your grandmother.)

Kat’s family is Fujian. Cantonese should be easy enough. There are plenty of Szechuan restaurants, so I’m sure I can find somebody with an informed opinion around somewhere. Our partner school in the DDP program is in Zhejiang, so hopefully I can find somebody with some insight. That’s four.

I don’t watch the news very often. I find that mostly, the world can get on just fine without me paying too much attention. I watched the CBC news tonight. There was a bunch of stuff about the Liberal leadership race. I noticed a trend…

Michael Ignatieff is the front runner. Ignatieff is a hardcore public academic, having worked at UBC, Oxford, LSE, and Toronto.

Stéphane Dion is the son of an academic and has had faculty positions at the Universities of Moncton and Montreal. A less impressive CV, but nothing to turn one’s nose up at.

Bob Rae is the least academic of the bunch. He was merely a Rhodes Scholar. Rae and Ignatieff both studied under Isaiah Berlin—seems like there might be some kind of conspiracy in there.

But, they were all in political science or public policy. As a computer scientist, I’d probably have to settle for being a lousy Premier or something.

Even our “populist” leader, Stephen Harper, has an MA in Economics.

As most of you know, SFU Burnaby was closed today (sorry, Paul). So, I had an unexpected day off. Or, more correctly, an unexpected day to work at home.

So, what did I do with my day?

I saw that they had closed the campus before I went to bed, so I could sleep in. My mother phoned at 8:00 to… uh… tell me it was snowing? I grumbled something about the University being closed. “Oh, were you asleep?” “Yabayngh.” I phoned back later and confirmed that it was indeed snowing. I took a few more pictures.

Then I heard the landlady shoveling the sidewalk. I went out to do it for her, thus a five minute conversation ensued about what I was trying to do. It almost ended with me saying “give me the damn shovel and go back in the stupid house where it’s warm!” She’s afraid of going outside. Possibly because it was icy, or possibly in general. As usual, I only caught about every third word.

While I was at it, I brushed off the car. The locks were a little stiff, but I managed to get in. Since then, the temperature has gone down, and they’re totally frozen shut. I had to walk over to the Safeway to get a few supplies, instead of getting proper groceries.

Did some laundry. That was a long time coming—the supply of socks was running a bit low.

But mostly, I worked on my CMPT 120 final exam, which I’m hoping to have done and sent to duplicating by Wednesday. By the way, I have one more reason to not cheat on assignments: the instructor isn’t exactly in a generous mood when making up your exam. I might not get the drunken “favourite instructor” honour at the next LAN party.

A full day, I’d say.

It’s snowing in Burnaby as I write this. That’s strange, particularly since I don’t remember it being all that cold when I was out earlier.

Having been inspired by Anne (who said she was doing the same), I went out to take some pictures. My Rebel XT is at school, but I did have the Canon A710 that I got Dad for Christmas (but haven’t sent yet). It has image stabilization, so it seemed quite well suited to night shooting and the long exposure times that come with it.

Indeed, image stabilization is cool, as you can see from the results.

The first shot I took, that metered to a full second was too long for my hand and the image stabilization to hold still.

While I was waiting for my beverage at Starbucks, I found the exposure compensation setting on the camera (so I could tell it not to try to get a bright picture, and leave it a little underexposed—that shortens the exposure time). Back out on the street, things got better.

The exposure time on that last picture is 1/4 second. That’s really long for a clear hand-held shot. I wouldn’t get anywhere close to that without the stabilization. Thumbs up.

But, my vanilla creme wasn’t nearly hot enough to offset the cold and damp that came from going to get it. Should have stayed home and made hot chocolate or something. Thumbs down.

The stuff coming out of my tap is looking a lot more like water and a lot less like languid mud.

I decided a few days ago that it wasn’t even close to worth it to worry about the water for teeth brushing, and other incidentals. I also did dishes, because it was getting a hard to find somewhere to put down new dirty dishes. I’m still alive.

I’m still boiling water for drinking, mostly because it’s not that much of a hassle. I tried an experiment tonight: I boiled water, let it cool and ran it through a Brita. I’ve got to say, it’s downright tasty—the filter seems to suck the earthiness right out of it.

But, I grew up with really hard water, so I might have a different baseline than others. To give you an idea, you could never drink the last inch out of the jug of water in my house. A surprising amount of stuff would come out of solution and settle as it cooled. That was always swirling around the bottom of the jug.

I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the GVRD, but this is what’s coming out of my tap right now:

Apparently, the problem is turbidity. According to Wikipedia, 1 NTU (turbidity units) is the bar to clear, and 0.1 NTU is the target. The GVRD turbidity page (who would have thought they had one?) says we’re at 53. I will repeat the title: Mmmmm.

So, we’re supposed to boil the water. I’m undecided. Option 1: saying “fuck it” and calling people pussies for not wanting to deal with water that has a little character. Option 2: not taking the chance on being that one stupid bastard who dies after not boiling his water.

I’m also wondering how long it takes particles like that to settle out. I boiled some water, partly to conduct that experiment in the fridge.