Visit to Ontario

I recently went back home for a quick visit and wedding attendance. Man I've been to a lot of weddings. There were two this weekend. So I got to visit with both sides of the family for a wedding and a birthday. Here's a photo from the birthday party with my first cousin once removed.


I also got to go to Toronto for another wedding. We hung out at the CN tower the day after the wedding, its been a long time since I've been up there and now I don't feel tempted to go up for a long time. Neat views though, it would be fantastic to live on Toronto island.

On my flight to Ontario I set my alarm for the wrong time, I woke up at 5:15 am and my flight was leaving at 6 am. Holy crap. I made it from bed to the airport in under 20 minutes and just managed to catch the flight. My luggage, however, did not. But at least this time it showed up at home two days later unlike the last time when it was scheduled to show up after I had flown back to Vancouver.

The flight back had the fancy air canada entertainment system so I watched two movies. Jumper - with a neat premise but the guy was such a twit I had no connection and kept waiting for the movie to build but suddenly it was over. The other movie was Cloverfield, it also had an interesting idea but featured these vapid 20-somethings who just could not make good decisions. I mean, come on, the lights are flickering out, you're in an electronic store why the hell don't you pick up a flashlight! And if something was hunting me in the dark I'd keep my hands on the rebar that was so successful fighting them off the last time. As Erwin likes to plan for a world of zombies, I like to think about surviving post apocalypse (i.e. the book Last Canadian). So perhaps my reading has better prepared me... So my recommendation- skip Jumper and Cloverfield was worth the rental.

New PC

Yeah, I got my new eeePC! I swore I was never going to get another laptop until I found a computer I was actually willing to carry around and now the cheap ultraportables are coming out.

So its a nice small portable reasonably priced computer. They keyboard is rather small but not unexpected. I won't be writing my thesis on this guy but its great for surfing and checking e-mail. And the big point is, it actually is a portable computer. There's a huge glut of them coming out, especially since the new atom processor for good battery life is being released. My eeePC doesn't have that but the new 901's starting to come out in July will.

update: to continue my rant about my crappy vaio, I just reformatted it in preparation of donating it and what's really annoying is when you do the factory install, they don't just give you the OS disk, no, you have to install all the crap. Sony has sold space on your computer to advertiser's etc and every time you reset your computer their crap comes back.

The eeePC is decidedly short on bloat. Not that it doesn't have its shortcomings, I haven't seen a way to add software in the easy mode yet. But at least the system is open enough and people have created a huge number of resources for tweaking. Starting fresh on the stupid Vaio always meant at least half an hour of deleting the crap and of course you could never be sure you were getting rid of all of it.

Pet rats

So tonight I handed over the pet rats that I'm looking after to another couple from Little Mischief Rescue who I am fostering them for. I haven't had them for very long but I'm going to miss them! When I come back from all my travels I'll get them back and see how much they've changed.

They have great personalities, very different and obvious. Anyway, here are two pictures right after they had a bath.

Their names are Salt and Pepper. I read this morning on the newsgroup for the rescue that someone in Victoria is dumping rats. These are domesticated animals and will probably die quickly out on their own. Its just the owners way of killing them without actually having to think they are responsible and its disgusting. Someone even dumped the rats, in their cage, into the dumpster! How can you do that! You aren't even pretending to yourself that the rats are going to run free and live off the land.

Anyway, my experiences with the rescue makes me aware of how beneficial it would be to adopt an animal from them (or others). You'll get an animal who's personality has been assessed and the rescue wants to suggest a good match to people who are adopting. The animals are well socialized, Salt and Pepper are litter trained already and used to handling. All in all, you get animals that have had a lot of attention and care unlike a pet shop, especially one of those big generic ones.

So I will miss the stinky boys (they are rats after all) in the evenings, when I sit at the computer and Salt or Pepper will run up my arm to sit on my shoulder and just hang out. So cute!