December 2002 – Krishen Greenwell

Me update

It’s been a crazy weekend. [warning: post discusses getting sick; may not suitable for the easily queasy]
Executive summary:

Friday
- 10:30am: Meet Michael D for coffee; Hillside Starbucks; Kathy is working; I had two grande Americanos; run into Mr. Holman while talking to Kathy with Michael
- Eat with a few good friends at South Bay Restaurant. Do *not* eat here. (More on this in a later post).
- 7:30pm. Bowling at Mayfair Lanes
- 11:30pm. Home
- 12:30am: Boston Pizza Hillside with Davin and Jim. Geek around with digicams and are a general pain in the arse for our waitress
- 3:30am: Home again.
Saturday
- 8:45am. Wake up. Unsettled stomach — throw up Boston Pizza!! @!&$*#%@ Feel much better.
- 10:15am. Arrive at Cup Of Joe’s cafe in James Bay for breakfast. Ordered the “I can’t believe it’s so cheap” special. Do not start eating it. Order glass of milk to calm stomach.
- 10:46am. Recognize signs of impending extreme stomach upset. Make way to Cup of Joe’s washroom. Throw up glass of milk and earl grey tea. Feel better.
- No jacket. Freeze to death in rain waiting for the #28 bus home from downtown.
- 1:00pm. Home
- Head aches. Lie down.
- Two minutes later Get up. Wake Davin. Check/send email to keep Hilary and Michael in the loop about going to Vancouver trip with Davin and Mina to see Jimmy Van M.
- Create, confirm mastaur travel plans to Vancouver. We will try to get the 5pm ferry.
- 1:20pm. Back to bed.
- 2:20pm. Woken; trip to Vancouver cancelled. Jimmy Van M is sick.
- Call Hilary, can’t get a hold of Michael; suggest Grant Plant at Hush for later that night instead.
- 4-8pm: Fever and headache. Pampered by family. Very nice.
- 8pm. General miserableness
- 8:30pm. Daniel calls. He leaves for a week tomorrow. Evolution at 10pm? Not sure. He will call back before he goes.
- 9:20pm. Miserableness. Call Daniel, Hilary, cancel with both.
- Sleep
Sunday
- 4:30am. Headache goes away after ingesting tylenol bought by dad in the late hours of saturday night. Ibuprofen did not help.
- 6:30am. Temperature returns to normal
- 12:00pm: Get up
- 1:50pm: Screw up Starbucks’ SKUs by switching to a box of Tazo Chai for Tazo Awake.
- 2pm: arrive at Maryanne’s place; give her box of tea; chat about her trip to India with Todd; discuss the problem of having too much beer and 10 dozen veggie burgers! Not very allergic to her cat, that is good.
- 6:20pm. Pick up Sarah; explore Coquiltz Park, watch Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can”; a good conversation or two.
- 1:40am: home

There are a few pictures from all of this, to be posted soon…

Airports and Internet

Just spotted a timely article over at the New York Times about internet access in airports [free registration required].

Flight to Victoria

Just posted some pics from the voyage I affectionately refer to as the “Trip from Hell”. Click the airplane to view!

Well, I made it to Seattle airport — SeaTac — Friday around 6:10pm. Too late to make the 6:30pm flight to Victoria, which I thought was the last flight in that night. When I got to the ticket counter, I found out I was wrong — there was a 10:45pm flight to Victoria that night too (though it was oversold!).
I put myself on standby for the 10:45pm flight, though my chances were slim. Thanks to a very nice girl named Maya at the Alaska Air/Horizon ticket counter at SeaTac, I also got a confirmed flight for 10:15am the next morning in case I didn’t make the 10:45pm flight.
I decided to stay in SeaTac overnight. It was an alright experience, although I discovered two things: (1) Don’t forget to bring your iBook’s power adapter with you on a trip, especially when you’ve just bought a day’s worth of high speed internet from an airport, and (2) the public address message “Vehicles parked on the drag will be impounded. Please return to your car immediately!” gets pretty grating on the nerves at quarter past four in the morning (especially when you hear it every five minutes).
At check-in time — 4:00am, I managed to upgrade my flight 10:15am flight from Seattle to Victoria to 7:30am! That was cool — and the flight was only half full. Nice!
My first attempts to call home from the Vic airport resulted in voicemail, so I decided to call my good friend Sudie to see if he’d pick me up. He couldn’t, but he did offer to call my house repeatedly until someone picked up!
Dad came and got me, and I was home by about 10am Saturday. After a quick breakfast it was out to “Korean Gardens” with Calvin and Amy, and a couple of their friends. That was very yummy, though in retrospect I should have probably just gone to bed!
Back home around 3:00pm, made some quick calls and emails to see who was coming with me to a very special all-night dance events (I’m not going to refer to it the usual way — I know Google’s bots read this site daily). Hilary was able to make it. Cool!
There was a pre-party at Chrissie‘s going on at 8:30pm — it was 4:30, so it was time for a quick nap. I was trying to make up, in four hours, for not having slept for 56. Hmm.
Picked up Hilary and her friend Jen, headed off to the pre-party was great! Chrissie and Rich gave folks “treat bags” and I got a promo copy of DJ Bedlam‘s new mix CD! 😀 Then around 11:30pm, it was off to a great night/morning of electronic music. Davin took his camera with him. I’m not going to write about it here, but I will say it was a great location; no neighbours to be seen — and you felt a little extra-sneaky, dancing to what was probably very pagan music in a church hall! 😀
The cleanup crew arrived at 6:00am, expecting to get started right away. Nope.. Braeden was playing one more track and that was that!

Kiosks Suck

Currently I’m in Dallas, Texas, hanging out at the airport and paying 25 cents/minute to type on a really crappy keyboard with a 56k connection to the ‘net.
Due to nefarious circumstances beyond my control, I’m not going to be in Victoria until at least 7:30pm tonight, if not tomorrow.
Damn I hate being on standby. More later!

Hausfotos

I just put up a walking tour of the area around my apartment! Be sure to zoom in (all the way… click *twice*) to see the picture at full quality and follow around the tiny red “tour” arrows! 🙂 Check it out!

I sure hope this was the wrong number

Message received at 12:16pm today from 816-545-xxxx.
[british accent]: Hi this is, uh, Graham, I’m a web manager from Gateway.com and we received an order for five 600 XLs. Ah, I just wanted to let you know that, um, obviously we’ve been out to the website and we checked the pricing on here, it’s still showing as thirty-one ninety-nine, uhm, and somehow, uh the price on here has been manipulated to thirty-*one* ninety-nine, as opposed to, um, thirty-*one hundred* dollars and ninety-nine. Um, and so, uh your total for that should be.. um, a lot more uh, than is showing on the order, as I’m sure you.. well know. Your subtotal will be fifteen-thousand nine hundred and ninety five; there would be no shipping on it, so if you wanna to give me a call back, the number is 816-545-xxxx we’ll go ahead and process this. Um, as it is right now, if you want to cancel the order, then please give me a call back. Thanks, bye.
End of message

Put these wings to test

What a day at work. We’re on the homestretch now folks. Most of us are going slightly nuts. Software development is a funny industry. It reminds me of John Digweed.
I can hear you saying now, “How, good Krishen, could software development possibly remind you John Digweed?” I’m glad you asked. It reminds me of Diggers because you really can’t gain an understanding of either without more than a glance. There’s a bigger picture at work, a picture that forms over time. (Don’t your pictures work?)
When building software, you start off gathering requirements; then you create a specification, and plateau with a design. You start building with implementation; things get more frantic with testing. You tear and scream toward release. Then you break down.
I think you can see where this is all going. John Digweed makes you fall apart. Something like that.
Anyhow, amongst all the talk at work of compile errors and warnings and headers and build phases and frameworks and libraries and ProjectBuilder vs. Codewarrior, my manager asked me something a little more interesting. “Do you have a computer that can run Mac OS X at home?” “Yes, definitely do, I’ve got a Power Mac G4.” What, did he want me to testing something back at the apartment tonight?
“No, I mean back in Canada. Do you have a Mac there?”. Um, wait a sec! Was this his way of telling me I get to go home?! Somewhat excitedly, trying to hide it: “No, uh I mean, yes!”
“Because I’d like you to test our product while you’re there. You’ll need to give me your contact information, phone number, email, etc.” Me: “Okay!!”
Later that night, I found myself explaining to my manager that I had bought the Powershot G3 last week because it would be nice to have in case I got the chance to go home for Christmas. Not really sure how that slipped out, but it turned out to be a good thing. He put his previous implication in more precise terms. “I think you are going to go on your vacation. I’d really like you to go.”
Doesn’t get any clearer than that.
mp3

Leaving now

I write to you from work. God it’s late.
Did I mention it’s frickin cold out? Right now, it’s 6 celcius. Victoria is 3 degrees warmer!

I ownz0rs Le Powershot!

Well, with all this crazyness going on at work, I sorta somehow neglected to mention that on Wednesday, during lunchtime, I ordered the Canon Powershot G3! (You can read an in-depth review of the G3 here).
After reviewing online-retailer-digital-camera-prices-and-availabiliy through (As The Apple Turns sponsor and great resource) dealcam, I discovered dbuys.com had the best price — $724 plus $24 shipping/insurance. Most places are selling this camera for $799 or more! Ordering from online retailers can be a haphazard proposition, though, so I read reviews of dbuys through (another great consumer resource) epinions.com. My summary of the reviews? “Dbuys will sell you a base product at a good price, but will follow up with a phone call to try and push expensive accessories on you. Their customer service, especially their phone support, could use some work.”
My intention was to buy just the camera. I called dbuys’ 800 number instead of ordering through website, because I wanted to see just how bad their customer service could be. “Jim” answered the phone. I explained that I’d like to order the Canon Powershot G3. I heard a few clicks on a keyboard, and a few moments later he said, “that’ll be $724.” He asked me for a daytime telephone number, a credit card number, expiration date, the first line of street address (!) and my zip code. He told me the total, including the expedited shipping that I requested. “That’ll be $763, enjoy.” Click! That was the end of the call! The whole transaction took about a minute and a half.
I read on epinions that it was hard to get a tracking number from dbuys. On dbuys’ website, under “Customer Service”, is a form you can fill out with your name and email address. Presumably they’ll email you the information. They ask you to allow them one day to get your orders out the door, but after one day I still wasn’t in their system. I tried again the next day — Friday morning. Still nothing.
“Well, as soon as I get home, I’m going to email them and ask for a tracking number.” On Friday I came home to find that Fedex had tried to deliver the G3 to my door at lunchtime!
Yesterday, during my self-assigned “lunch hour” at work (I was there from 10:40 until 9:30), I picked up my package from Fedex’s branch outlet. Aww yeah! I also picked up a camera bag from Best Buy.
I’ve only had the chance to take a couple of shots indoors. The plan today is to take a few pictures outside with it. We’ll see how it goes — so far, I’m very impressed! There’s so much for me to learn!

Month: December 2002