January 30th, 2008, 15 Comments »
A few people have expressed dismay about our moving to Victoria and not back to Vancouver. Somebody even told me in an email that “Victoria was lame”. Is it? Maybe a little, but we have fond memories of living there during university.
More practically, we’re returning to the West Coast to build a house on some land we have on Pender Island. There’s much better ferry access to Pender Island from the Victoria side than the Vancouver side. There are far more trips, and the trip is much shorter (45 minutes instead of a 2 hour multi-island milk run).
Assuming it’s not a total disaster, we’ll live in the house we built. For how long? That’s hard to say. We’re already talking about renting it out and living abroad again, so we might live there for 6 months or 16 years.
We do have plans to make very regular trips by ferry or seaplane to Vancouver, so Vangroovy is not getting rid of me quite that easily.
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January 28th, 2008, 59 Comments »
UPDATE: After some confusion (see the comments), I’ve established that the cable provider is in fact Shaw, not Rogers, in Victoria. I’ve adjusted this post accordingly.
Maybe it’s just the plodding web access here in Morocco, but today I visited both Shaw and Telus’s websites today to scope out Internet access when we settle in Victoria in April of this year. They both offer a premium service at 5 or 6 MB/s and a 60 GB maximum per month for about $40 to $45 (before all those ridiculous extra fees). I assume there are discounts when you package Internet access with a landline (unlikely) or TV (likelier).
This is like voting for a prime minister in recent elections. Which is the least distasteful choice? I’ve complained (and heard many complaints) about both services in the past. Which is, uh, less worse? My criteria would probably be:
- How long does it take to get service after signing up?
- How reliable is the service?
- Who’s less likely to penalize me for exceeding the 60 GB maximum (a real concern, now that you can download HD movies that might average 4 GB)?
- Who’s less likely to filter network traffic and selectively decrease download speeds for bittorrent traffic and the like?
- Whose corporate policies are less repugnant?
What would you recommend? Maybe I should just go with carrier pigeons?
When we lived in Yaletown, I could circumvent this sort of red-state, blue-state problem by voting independent and signing up with Novus. Are there any such alternatives in Victoria?
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November 27th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Via Waxy, I read about a comedy troupe from Victoria, BC undertaking a rather unusual telethon. They’re playing Desert Bus, a hilarious anti-game that’s part of Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, an unreleased video game from the mid-nineties. From Wikipedia:
The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.
The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time.
Thus far, they’ve raised nearly US $15,000 for Child’s Play, a charity started by gamers that raises money for “toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world”. I sent them $10 just for their tenacity.
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August 29th, 2007, 1 Comment »
- When you live on a tiny speck of land in the middle of the Mediterranean.
- When you live on an island off the coast of an island.
- When you take some visiting friends down to see a local tourist attraction.
The last person you expect to see is an international rock sensation.
Julie and I are with our friends Rob and Suze, and we’re wading around in the shadow of the spectacular azure window. We’re just on our way out when we pass a group on their way in. Suze points out that we’ve just walked past none other than Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and occasional nudist.
Rob snapped a surreptitious photo while I resisted the temptation to go over and ask him if Catholic school girls do, in fact, rule. It was a bit surreal, as it’s kind of the last place you expect to meet the guy who wrote, say, “Sexy Mexican Maid” or “Fight Like A Brave”.
I happened to see Mr. Kiedis and his girlfriend again today as they were riding a scooter down Republic Street in the island’s main town of Victoria. That dude has a lot of tattoos.
I saw over on Malta Forums that somebody scored an autograph.
In related photographic news, check out how I managed to ruin this perfectly lovely shot. That’s me with the snorkel. I did manage to compensate for it, though, by snapping this nice photo with Rob’s camera.
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July 11th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Last night, as part of Rabat’s festa, Gozo’s main city hosted 36 (36!) horse races up it’s main street. The course was a straight-away, about a kilometre long and went up a seriously steep incline.
It was pretty fun, and definitely not a show for the tourists. There were a smattering of visitors around, but the majority of the fans were locals, drinking beer, smoking cigars and consulting race programs. I assume there was a schwack of gambling going on, though I didn’t actually spot any.
I’m sure it was pretty safe, but I liked the imagined danger of the horses (and harness racers) roaring past the crowds with nothing but a few feet between them. As you can see in this photo, the crowd actually stands in the middle of the road to get a better view until the horses get quite close.
I took a bunch of photos, and these were the fourteen best ones. It’s a busy day here, so I made extensive use of the poor man’s Photoshop–ye olde ‘Enhance’ button in iPhoto.
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May 25th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Just because I’m in Malta doesn’t mean I’m not keeping up with the local goings-on. Mind you, I did miss that whole DemoCamp thing. I must have been snorkeling and missed the memo:
- According to the supporters of the Whitecaps downtown stadium proposal, apparently the Gastown-based opposition has conceded, given up or come onside. I don’t know how true that is, but their website is gone.
- Via MetaEffecient, Victoria is building a mondo-huge, green community comprising over 1000 residences on an otherwise bleak part of the upper harbour. What took them so long? The land is waterfront property that’s a stone’s throw away from downtown. Will it be Yaletown 2.0?
- Via Jules (who apparently only orders pizza online–I didn’t even know you could do that), GreenDimes will stop your junk mail, plant a tree and conserve water for CAN $37. Apparently it only works on junk mail with your name on it, though. Who will stop all the random fliers which I received and never, ever read? In our apartment, there was a fistful every day that went from the mailbox to the blue bin.
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May 7th, 2007, No Comments »
When moving to Gozo, one of our biggest concerns was how hard it would be to get stuff. By stuff I mean everything from mushrooms to office chairs to computer monitors. There are 27,000 people on Gozo, but, Rabat, the main city, apparently only has 7000.
We were dead wrong. There are dozens upon dozens of stores in Rabat. There are, for example, at least five different furniture stores, plus we found a carpenter who builds furniture. A lot of the stores seem to sell odd combinations of things–a lamp store also sells toasters–but you can get everything you need.
When I lived in Dublin, I was shocked by the number of travel agencies. The Irish love their sun holidays, and I guess they weren’t really booking online en masse yet.
In Gozo, there’s a similarly large number of real estate agencies. You can’t throw a dead rabbit braised in red wine sauce (one of the national dishes) without hitting a couple of letting and sales agencies.
The diversity of shops is, I think, due to an almost complete lack of franchises (there’s a couple of McDonalds, but that’s the only franchise I recognize) and plenty of owner-operators. Store owners stock what sells, and are happy to accomodate odd requests.
The only thing I may have to order from abroad is one of those little speaker units that you stick your iPod (Nano, in my case) into. I asked at a stereo (plus toys plus sporting goods) store, and they didn’t have any. Other than that, we’re able to get almost everything we need without even going to the main island.
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