I have a problem.

I know that’s the first step to fixing it. In fact I was going to write this post paralelling AA’s Twelve Steps, but then I went and read what the twelve steps actually said and decided against it. I definitely have to agree with James Frey on that one. But I digress.

My problem is much less serious, anyway. It’s a two parter.

I am a Linux snob. It’s hard to really articulate why but there are plenty of websites out there to tell you why it’s better than Windows. It might have a comparatively steep learning curve, but there are fancy graphical versions that look like Windows (KDE) or Mac OS (Gnome). One thing I have noticed is that everything is free. If you want to do some arbitrary thing on Windows, from word processing to manipulating audio files, you almost always have to pay for a program to do it. On Linux, if you have a job to do, chances are somebody has written a program to do it for free. (Example: OpenOffice.org can do everything Microsoft Office can do, and some things it can’t, like making PDF files.)

But compounding my general linux snobbery (and this is the second part of my problem) is the face that I don’t use those fancy versions that look like Windows or a Mac. I use a little windows manager called dwm, from the aptly named suckless.org project. I suspect anybody who hasn’t used it, or at least seen it, understands it.

Oh crap, I’m being ellitist again. This is the problem! They even warned me on the dwm website that this would happen.

I think I’m just in a bragging kind of mood since I lately discovered how to display my computer’s battery life in the status bar (it turns out everything you need to know is in /proc/acpi/battery/). Yes, Windows will automatically put a little battery thing in the taskbar. The point is that I programmed it myself, and I can tweak it to display however I want. (As a sidenote, I discovered that when not doing anything, my computer uses about 800 mA. If I put my monitor brightness up all the way, it consumes an additional 300mA, dropping my battery life by about an hour.)

I guess this is a major part of the appeal of dwm—you can tweak it in lots of ways, so everytime you compile it it or even just pipe something new into the status bar, it feels like a program you’ve written yourself. Anybody who’s ever written a computer program or script to do something knows what I’m talking about. You get a much greater sense of accomplishment from spending three hours debugging a shell script that does a job in three seconds than if you just took five minutes to do the same job by hand. It’s like hunting a deer for supper with your bare hands when you could have just bought a steak at the grocery store.

Oh, and I also hate using a mouse. Mice are for suckers.

Now I’ve not only admitted my problem but gone on a nice diatribe proving it was true. Damn. Well, my battery is only at 15% (according to the little script I wrote!) so I might as well go find something else to do.

That was the most delicious apple I’ve ever eaten.

I think after about three months, I’ve finally started to understand some of the lyrics to Regina Spektor’s On the Radio—”You’re young until you’re not, you love until you don’t, you try until you can’t.” Combined with this week’s series on xkcd, I’m feeling very much like asking the next person I see to go fly a kite with me. Preferably one that looks like a pirate ship, but I won’t be picky about it.

I just came back from the gym. The sun was protesting the indoors, so I swam a few lengths in the outdoor pool before going back into the weightroom. I heard someone mention one of my professors at McGill. I suppose if I had really learned to seize the day I would have jumped into the conversation like, for a moment, I wanted to, but declined.

Later I noticed someone checking me out, and though I did say “hi” later as we walked past each other, I was content then to otherwise keep to myself and enjoy the boost in self-confidence. Is it bad that that boost is directly proportional to how attractive the other person is? I suspect we’re all guilty of following that formula. Regardless, it’s good to feel like the hottest shit in town.

I bought an apple on my walk home from the produce stand. Jona Gold. Forty cents. Sweet and with a texture almost like nashi.

Continuing my walk, I passed a couple of really good looking guys my age. For reasons unexplained, and for a just moment, I felt a little like a chimpanzee. Seeing guys like that in the gym, say, always makes me both a little self conscious and a little more determined in my workout.

But today I decided instead to forget it, continue walking, and enjoy the sun and the most delicious apple I’ve ever eaten.

It took me two weeks, but I’ve recovered from the jet lag from the four hour time change I went through flying here.

Seasoned travellers among my readers are probaby scoffing at taking so long for such a little adjustment. Let me explain.

By the end of my two weeks in New Brunswick, without constraints of school or work, I settled into my natural wake/sleep cycle, which left me waking up around 12h or 13h and sleeping again at 3h or 4h. Generally switching from this vacation freedom to a normal work schedule is a tough ride, but this time a four hour time change in between the two worked in my favour. If you thought about it in terms of west coast time, I was already perfectly scheduled to do a 9 to 5 work day.

So my “jet lag” was not your typical type. For me it meant waking up at a respectable 8h the day after I flew into British Columbia to go to work. I kept it up for two weeks, including one weekend. Let me say that again, because anybody who knows me will not believe it: Last Saturday and Sunday, I woke up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I’m talking out of bed and going about my day, not just awake enough to hit snooze. It was fantastic.

But now my blissful jet lag has worn off and my body is trying to put things right, trying to settle back into its regular happy schedule of waking up at noon. It’s a perfectly fine schedule—it only looks lazy to people who wake up in the single digits and assume I go to sleep again at the same time they do. The only problem is going to work in the morning. I’m worried for Tuesday.

At least there’s always the option of starting my workday at 13h and staying until 21h or so. Three cheers for flexible work environments!

1. Begin arbitrary terrorist attacks.
2. Have a mutiny plot to overturn the President and seize power.
3. Have assassination attempt on the President, possibly related to above plot to take power.
4. In the process of addressing the terrorist threat, Jack must say “There’s not enough time for that!” and disobey orders to do something his way, probably resisting arrest.
5. Have Jack arrested again, which he will either talk or punch his way out of, yelling “You’ll just have to trust me!” the whole time.
6. Terrorist is killed during interrogation, uttering only a few useless words, which Chloe will turn into a set of entire life histories of some other terrorist cell.
7. Moving any prisoner/witness to “a safe location” results in escape/kidnapping of said prisoner/witness
8. Terrorists kidnap a member of the Bauer family.
9. Replace head of CTU for no apparent reason, even if (especially if) it’s 4 in the morning during a crisis. Current head of CTU acts shocked and protests, even if they knew they were being replaced for the last few hours.
10. Terrorists plan an attack on an anonymous target, i.e. CTU.
11. Replace the replacement head of CTU, repeat as necessary
12. Save the kidnapped Bauer, transport them to safe location (see point 7).
13. Just when we think we know what’s going on, who the terrorists are, and they’re about to be apprehended, show lead terrorist guy on the phone taking orders from some random other guy of a different and completely unrelated terrorist group.
14. Repeat above steps as necessary until end of season.

There are quite a few odd things I’ve noticed about Vancouver. St Hubert’s is called Montreal BBQ, and Couche Tard is Mac’s. Slightly odd translations, sure, but forgivable. A little more off-putting are the small black squirrels. I can’t explain it, they just look creepy in comparison to the big fluffy grey ones.

Whenever someone travels to a new place, it’s a common cliche to say that people are so friendly and polite there. I often think it’s just an artefact of being new to a place. In your hometown, you know where the bank is and how the buses work. You don’t have to ask questions much. In contrast, when you’re travelling, you do have to ask for help from people, and it often surprises us just because we aren’t used to receiving it if only because we usually don’t ask for it.

And with that said, I have to say that people are really friendly and polite here. I’ve been getting the impression from all over the place, but I have one specific example: When people get off the bus, even through the back door, they shout out “thank you” to the driver. On top of that, the drivers say thank you when you pay your fare.

Maybe people are just happier when the ride buses that look like crickets. Specifically, the lucky cricket from Disney’s Mulan. Seriously.

You’ll have to forgive me if over the next while I start leaning more towards diary-style entries than whatever other style I might have had before. I thought I should open the summer with that disclaimer.

Vancouver has been nothing but sunshine for the last week, despite its rainy reputation. I’m very appreciative of the fact that my lab has windows in it, unlike last summer. The UBC campus itself is huge and green, unlike McGill which I’d have to describe in comparison as small and cement. The big difference is that UBC is isolated as a community in its own right, whereas McGill leaks out into the city and doesn’t have to worry about building residential areas and restaurants and recreational things on campus.

The point which is getting me conflicted right now is that I’m very tired from a lot of hiking around over the last few days but very reluctant to be lazy and stay in when it’s so nice out. Sure, it’s 10 o’clock now, and I just got in from a long day, but it’s barely even dark yet. I think I need to get down off this sunshine high.

I would be tempted to claim that there was not a single cloud in all of Canada yesterday afternoon or evening.

I started, as always, in that little propeller plane at a modest 15 000 feet over the late-winter woods and lakes of New Brunswick. I feel I can say late-winter since, even though we’re well into May at this point, the branches are still bare are some snow and ice still persists on the water’s surface. I didn’t take a picture this time, though.

Flying into Montreal I noticed that among the checkboard farmer fields there was an occasional rectangle of houses. I can imagine the family, after generations of bringing in the harvest, deciding for one reason or another to leave it behind for greener pastures—figurative ones this time—and letting the developers come in with their subdivision.

After a meal of St Hubert’s chicken in the airport I was airborne again, this time for the long haul to Vancouver. Quebec and Ontario continued with standard east coast scenery before giving way to the Prairies, where the checkerboard squares are larger and reach, literally, to the horizon in every direction, only occasionally giving way to a winding river valley. Brown wheat faded to white, blue, and navy, exactly like being in the shuttle watching moonrise, except with a less pronounced curvature and no celestial orbs. Still, it was a nice view.

I guess I must admit that, though I did see a lot of the Rocky Mountains, closer to Vancouver they seemed to be holding back some cloud layer, so I didn’t get to see the city from above. The city knows how to make a first impression regardless—that much was clear as I was walking by the stone walls, native artwork, and waterfalls in the airport. Yes, waterfalls. And today, after a beautifully sunny afternoon just after sunset, I walked from my house to the beach and put my feet in the Pacific ocean. Not bad for my first day at a new job.

First of all, I’d like to say that I just ran into a raccoon in my garage as I was coming home and am a little freaked out. But putting that aside…

I have a five hour layover in Montreal tomorrow afternoon. Does anybody want to trek all the way out to Dorval and hang out? Considering the domestic departures part of the airport has exactly one place to eat, and it’s a bar, and by “bar” I mean “booth which serves alcohol”, I’m more than willing to pass through security again for some good food and company.

Just thought I’d throw that out there.

I’m still in zombie-vacation mode, so be thankful you get this much to read from me.

• My mom made lava cakes. From scratch, thanks to the Take Home Chef. *Drool*
• I love Ted Mosby, even if he is partly played by Bob Saget, and I only met him three days ago.
• I was recently handed a book with the following recommendation: “I can’t take it any more. I tried, I read three quarters of it, but I just can’t read any more. Take it.” I’m not sure if I should look forward to it or not, even if it did win the Giller Prize.
• Rory seriously needs to dump Logan and get someone non-jerkish.
• Facebook controls my life, and it spit up errors when I tried to make it stop importing my blog. Error! Facebook owns you! You cannot escape!

That’s all for now.