april 2005
Sign of the horse
I saw this rhyming sign on a bridge in Stanley Park the other day:
Very nice. But look at those cyclists flagrantly disregarding the sign’s terse prescription. Kids these days - I ask you!
That reminds me ... I saw the most wonderful band name in a local music paper the other day: Equestrian Death Camp. I know it’s imprudent to want to see a band on the basis of their name alone (they’re playing in town tonight), but I’m so intrigued. However, I have a prior engagement this evening, so it’s OOTQ, alas.
A couple of other great local band names I’ve read are my!gay!husband, Vancougar (which is funnier if you know the other meaning of cougar), and, best of all, You Say Party! We Say Die!
Damn, that’s good. I’ve never heard them, but I’d go in a shot.
30 april 2005 ~ 13:45 
Picture this
Yo, check out my new photos page. The first (and only) gallery up is of my trip with my mother last week to Grouse Mountain.
I set up this gallery as a kind of “proof of concept,” and it seems to be OK so far. If you see any glitches, though, please let me know, and I’ll be yours until the end of time, etc.
Clearly, I finally got around to writing the photo gallery script that I’ve mentioned wanting to build a couple of times before. It’s written in PHP, and comes in at a smidgeon under 6KB, which isn’t bad. It produces valid XHTML and CSS, and appears (so far) to be accessible, though I could (and will) go further with that.
Basically, all I have to do now to set up a gallery is to drop my edited photos into a directory on the server, knock out a very simple “metadata” text file containing the photos’ titles, descriptions, ALT text, and so on, and put that file in the same folder as the photos. That’s it (other than creating a link to the new gallery on the photos page, of course). The script automatically creates all of the navigation elements and link title text, and uses the metadata file to gather and display the correct title and description for each photo.
Best of all, there is only the one script, so if I eventually change the way it works, I will only have to edit one file. Handy.
It looks a bit stark at the moment, but I quite like it that way, I think.
Anyway, enjoy. I’ll be getting more galleries up soon.
28 april 2005 ~ 15:51
Joint responsibility
I saw this sign on a newspaper rack a couple of weeks ago:
Note that it merely advises against sharing joints, not against smoking pot itself, and this comes from the official health officer. Marijuana is so widely tolerated here in British Columbia that it’s basically legal, it seems.
A couple of days ago I was out in Burnaby with a couple of friends, and as we passed a bus stop, we saw two girls sitting there, passing a spliff. One of them held it out to us and said, “Wanna toke?” It’s that open. I routinely smell the stuff on the street, and it’s openly for sale all over the place. I don’t partake, personally, but I have no problem with it.
Anyway, in case you were wondering, the public health warning was nothing to do with the herb itself, but was due to the fact that a recent meningitis outbreak in Vancouver has been traced back to saliva on shared joints.
However, one has to wonder why they’re not also warning against sharing drinks and kissing. Seems like they’re trying to scare people away from pot smoking by framing the issue in pragmatic rather than moral terms. People don’t care about breaking the law, but no one wants to die of a swollen brain. Now that’s sneaky.
26 april 2005 ~ 12:04
Poster child
I saw this poster on a lamppost on Granville Street, and thought, “Yes, I did. Well, kinda. And now I’m just a boring old git.”
Talking of the word git, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has developed his own source versioning tool with that name. If I had been drinking tea when I first read about that, I would have snorted it out of my nose. Rather an unfortunate name for the UK market; Linus is clearly not familiar with British slang. Either that, or he’s actually a programmer geek with a sense of humour.
25 april 2005 ~ 09:51
Caught with his pants down
Seen at Metropolis at Metrotown, Vancouver, April 2005.
22 april 2005 ~ 10:11
Top of the Popes
Having lived in San Diego, fifteen miles from the border with Mexico, I’m so used to seeing the word papa on Mexican restaurant menus that my first thought upon hearing the Vatican’s election proclamation “habemus Papam” the other day was that the Cardinals were announcing that they were in possession of a potato, which didn’t really seem worth shouting about.
Then, as several other bloggers have noted, the name “Pope Benedict” put me in mind of the Pontiff atop a muffin, drizzled with hollandaise sauce.
With a name like that, His Holiness should open a restaurant. Maybe he could style it on Baja California’s famous Papas and Beer, without the booze and scantily-clad women. I’m sure he could make a killing selling religious-themed grilled cheese sandwiches, fish sticks, and tortillas.
Damn, I’m hungry now!
21 april 2005 ~ 07:19
After the hurricane
Heavens to Betsy, what a busy week that was. The conference was extremely hectic; I got up at 5:30 every morning, was busy there all day, then met up with friends from San Diego and/or my mother afterwards, and got home late. Lather, rinse, and repeat. It was pretty exhausting. Then I spent four days with my mother, running around town, shopping, and going on excursions. I have a ton of photos, but I need a better way to present them, so I’m working on a gallery. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, here’s a photo, taken by my mother on Monday, of me looking marginally aloof on a snowy mountaintop.
20 april 2005 ~ 22:37
Wedding tips
When this couple got married, instead of exchanging rings, they gave each other the finger. Literally.
Seriously, don’t follow that link if you’ve just eaten.
8 april 2005 ~ 09:06
Alone again, naturally
So, Robbie went back to San Diego on Tuesday. I went to the airport with him, and we said goodbye there. That never gets any easier. Now I’m back at my apartment (well, actually at the coffee shop right now). It’s raining, which has become de rigueur these days.
I’m busy, though, which is good. I have to get my CV and portfolio sorted out in preparation for next week’s ISPI Conference here in Vancouver. Some people I know, including my professor Allison Rossett and some students I was at SDSU with, will be there, as will my friend Kat, who I used to work with, and who will be in town for a different conference at the same time. To make things even more hectic, my mother will be in Vancouver for a week starting next Monday. I won’t see her much the first few days because I’ll be busy at the conference, but she’ll be in a hotel downtown, so she should be able to find plenty to keep herself occupied. The British pound/Canadian dollar exchange rate at the moment is great (for Brits, anyway), so she’ll probably go apoplectic when she sees the prices of things here, and have to hire a shipping container to get everything back to Blighty.
Anyway, I promised photos of our jaunt to Whistler. The drive up was pretty spectacular. The Sea-to-Sky Highway hugs a dramatic coastline with views of beautiful islands, then turns inland and winds through forests and incredible snow-covered mountains.
On the way to Whistler, we stopped at Shannon Falls Park to look at the waterfall, which is six times taller than Niagara Falls, so I have read.
That doesn’t mean that this waterfall is incredibly huge (though it is pretty big); instead, it must mean that Niagara Falls are (is?) pretty darn small. I’ve heard that from people who have been there.
Whistler itself was very pleasant, although surprisingly modern. It all looked like it had been built in the last twenty years. The town is packed with gift and clothing shops, cafés, bars, and restaurants. There were an amazing number of fresh-faced, very young, mostly blond(e) people, who seemed to be mostly European, from what I could hear. I heard a lot of English and Scottish accents there. Although it was kind of late in the season, there had just been a fresh fall of snow, so the skiers and snowboarders were out in force.
We had a very good lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant, then wandered around for a few hours. There were huge piles of snow in the streets, which kids were using as fuel for snowball fights. Here I am in front of one. It really wasn’t that cold, surprisingly.
The drive home was as spectacular as the drive up, with the twilight sun casting a totally different light over the mountains than the midday sun had earlier.
I’ll probably be going up there again with my mother after the conference next week. I wouldn’t mind staying up there for a night or two some time. Even off-season, the area is popular due to the fantastic local hiking, which is more my cup of tea than snow sports.
I’m still sorting through the hundreds of photos Robbie and I took. More soon.
7 april 2005 ~ 12:52