March 17th, 2008, 2 Comments »
It was a whirlwind week of meetings, appointments, errands and a conference in Vancouver last week. On Saturday I made the move across the water and have taken occupancy of our Fairfield apartment.
I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a modern reno inside the shell of a 1912 heritage house, with some original features (doors, floors, stained glass) retained. The office upstairs is big and bright, and has a rooftop deck off it with views of the Olympic peninsula and downtown. It’s furnished down to the face clothes and grapefruit knives, which is awesome. One trip to the grocery store and I’m ready to work.
It took Shaw Cable two trips to get my internet access working, but at least they were on time, honest and efficient. Julie’s in Morocco for another two weeks with her sister, so I expect to get plenty of work done.
One thorn in my productivity is that I had to take my MacBook into the shop. About three months ago, the fan started to sound like a crippled Sea King helicopter. It was seriously loud, and it would often rev and spin out. The surface temperature of the laptop increased, and I started seeing worrying behaviour in graphics-intensive apps like World of Warcraft.
Given that the thing is less than six months old, I’m underwhelmed. I count myself lucky that it didn’t melt down in Morocco, where I suspect that there’s a dearth of Apple stores.
I took it into Soho Computer Services here in Victoria. They’d only had it for four hours when they called to confirm my diagnosis–the fan is shot. Kudos to them for the quick turn-around.
Hopefully I’ll have my muted, cooled MacBook back by the weekend. In the meantime, I’m using our underpowered G5 iMac. It’s in desperate need of a RAM upgrade, but it’ll have to wait until I get my laptop back.
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August 10th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Okay, I’ve finished my Gnomedex talk, and so can begin to chill out after an extremely nutty 72 hours. A few random notes from the past few days:
- Big carry-on bags are one of my air travel pet peeves. It seems like about a third of all travelers bring a bag onboard that, according to the rules (which seem to never be enforced), is too big. On my flight home, somebody was trying to wheel a rolling bag down the aisle, and it was too wide! That ought to be a clue that’s it’s over-sized. Is the 15 minutes wait for your checked luggage that vital to your life?
- Kudos to the local MacStation. On Tuesday, I bought another MacBook to replace our other aging PowerBook. I brought it home with a busy evening of work planned. I turned it on, and it was totally b0rked. Hilariously, when I started it up, it just played the Mac startup tone over and over and over again. Even when I closed the laptop. I was in a big hurry when I returned it the following morning, but the folks at MacStation took care of me and swapped laptops (and my added RAM) immediately for one that worked.
- A big thanks to Ianiv and Arieanna for giving me a lift down to Seattle. We had a two-hour wait at the border, but I brought treats, so it was okay.
- I was surprised to feel quite sentimental about coming back to Vancouver. The day after arriving, I woke up early and walked downtown over the Cambie Street bridge. It was a joy to look at a textured, cloudy sky, smell the cedar from the docks under the bridge, and hear the cries of seagulls. I felt more sentimental in part, I think, because Malta is far more different from Canada than Ireland was.
- I haven’t had a Slurpee or sushi yet. I must get on that.
- Yep, the urban planning of Seattle still licks.
- Yep, those are cows behind me. It’s actually a country road, because I made an awful joke about John Denver, related to this project.
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July 10th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Somebody asked, so (in a slighly Fowleresque style), here’s a typical weekday for me on Malta:
8:30 - Wake up. Check email to ascertain that there weren’t any late afternoon crises on the West Coast.
9:00 - Have breakfast.
Rest of the Morning - Any of the following:
- Go for a bike ride.
- Ride to one of several spots on the coast and go swimming or snorkeling. We’ll get up around 7:30 if we’re doing this.
- Go to the ’shops’ in our local village for groceries. There are only two shops, and one has a subset of the other’s merchandise.
- Go into Rabat, the main town on Gozo, for groceries, coffee, shopping or sundry administrative tasks.
12:30 - Mess about the computer, reading feeds and blogging.
13:00 - Have a quick lunch.
13:30 - Work.
17:30 - Have a snack. Most days we’ll sweep and mop the back patio. The neighbours have one of the biggest trees on the island in their back garden, and it overhangs ours. As such, there’s usually plenty of leafs, seed pods and bird droppings on our deck. I don’t bemoan this activity because it still feels novel, and we often use this time to talk and brainstorm about projects.
18:00 - A little more work.
19:00 - Eat dinner.
Evening - More work, usually, though the amount varies. Occasionally we’ll go for an evening bike ride and/or swim, or into town for an event. Tonight, for example, there are apparently horse races on the town’s main street. Horse races! On the street! I’m very curious.
23:30 - Go to sleep.
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