Je Me Souviens

His name was Kevin McKay, and he was 24 years old. As far as I know I had never met him, and he had never lived very close to me - most recently, he was from Edmonton, which is so far out west that it may as well be on another continent. He died on the other side of the world, in a dusty backwater of a country - if Edmonton is on another continent, then the village of Nakhonay may as well be on the planet Mars (and in a sense, it is). However, despite the fact that I have never met him, I learned of his death with sadness and was moved to tears by his return to Canada for burial. Like the deaths of many others in that same faraway country whom I never personally knew, it served as a very poignant reminder of a reality which I am easily shielded from, living in an affluent country.

To give a bit of background on myself, I have been interested in military history since I was a very young child, which resulted in me spending some of my teenage years in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. I grew up reading about World War I and II, Korea, and Vietnam; World War II was the one I studied the most intensively however. The Battle of the Atlantic, the London Blitz, the D-Day invasion, Guadalcanal, the carrier battles of the Pacific, Pearl Harbor, Midway - all were familiar, and I could recite from memory many details of each of these. To me, war was a tally sheet of numbers, map coordinates, unit movements, and decisive battles - it was a very clinical (and very exciting!) thing to read about.

However, there were some things which I didn't really understand when I was reading about these (although it took me until many years later to realize that I didn't understand them). I read about the people whose homes had been destroyed, about the firebombing of German cities, the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most especially about the Holocaust with a sense of detachment that only age and maturity can recognize. I can still bring to mind some of the pictures that I saw and some of the stories that I read, and though they had little impact at the time, they now literally make my stomach churn and fill me with anger and sadness. Now that I have a home, a family and a community which I live in, I can imagine what impact and devastation each of these events would have caused to thousands upon thousands of people who were the same as me. I can imagine the fear driving me away from my home and into hiding, profound sorrow of holding a dying friend (or child) in my arms, and the unbridled rage which I would have towards those who caused it. Because of that, I consider myself to have been extremely lucky to have been born here in Canada, where the likelihood of such things happening to me during my lifetime are effectively zero.

Canada has been involved in the war in Afghanistan (it's a war, don't kid yourself or play word games with it) for almost 10 years now, since December of 2001. In that time, 144 Canadian soldiers have died and over 360 have been injured, which gives a total casualty count of over 500 as of today. Those are the raw numbers and statistics of warfare, the calculus of combat. However, as discussed before, these do not tell the whole story. Canada's military is an all-volunteer force - that means that every single person who has been in Afghanistan (including those who have been wounded or killed) has chosen to be there. I'll say that again, and I want you to think about it for a minute or so - every single soldier, a Canadian citizen, has chosen to go into combat in Afghanistan, with a very real likelihood that they will be injured or killed in this faraway land.

From the moment that the first four Canadian soldiers were killed in April of 2002 (I remember it vividly, I was extremely angry at the American pilot who broke the Rules of Engagement to do it and my mood still grows black when I think of it) I thought about volunteering for the Canadian Forces so that I could go to Afghanistan to support an idea that I believe in very strongly. To me, the war in Afghanistan is about giving the Afghan people, who have suffered through warfare and oppression for almost 30 years now, a chance to break the cycle of violence and to re-establish a more peaceful way of life. It's not about territory, it's not about oil, and it's not about the kinds of things that most of the wars I've read about have been fought over - the intent is truly a humanitarian one, to try to establish enough stability that peace can settle in. I believe in that idea strongly enough that I went to a recruiting center, got the necessary paperwork, and brought it home to mull over - I also started working out to ensure that I could pass the fitness requirements. However, I ultimately did not follow through with it - the cost of leaving behind my family (both immediate and extended) and my community, combined with pleas from my wife, were enough to sway my mind. I just couldn't do it - I couldn't risk making my wife a widow, not seeing my children grow up, and giving up everything that I knew in order to go halfway around the world and become a highly visible target for a large number of violent people. Because of this, I have an untold amount of gratitude for those who are stronger than I am, and who are able to risk it all to support these ideals, and to try to bring peace to a faraway land - they are each a better person than I am, and I feel as though I owe each of them my life and those of my family and friends.

This brings me back to Kevin McKay. He was a Private in the Canadian Forces, and he was killed a few days ago in Afghanistan by an "improvised explosive device", which basically means a homemade pipe bomb stuffed with whatever explosives could be found. He was due to end his tour in Afghanistan only 2 days after his death, and his body arrived at CFB Trenton today. After that, his body was brought to the coroner's office in downtown Toronto for an autopsy, and once that is complete he will be buried with full military honours. Once again, that's the clinical description, and it does not tell the whole story.

I live in Pickering, which is along Highway 401 - this is the road which leads from CFB Trenton to the coroner's office, and the stretch between Trenton and the turnoff for downtown has been renamed the Highway of Heroes, with a poppy used as the highway's logo. I spent most of 2008 and 2009 flying out of town for work, and this meant that every Sunday afternoon I would drive from Pickering to Pearson International Airport via the 401. Many times this coincided with when the bodies of the most recent Canadian casualties were coming back from Afghanistan, and this resulted in a very poignant image and memory which will remain with me for the rest of my life. As we drove west on the 401 towards the airport, every single overpass had people lining it who were there to pay their respects to the soldiers whose bodies were being returned home. Flags, banners, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and flashing lights were on every single overpass that I saw, as thousands upon thousands of people who had never met the soldiers in question came out to pay tribute to them. Summer or winter, rain or shine, it made no difference - they were always there, always saying goodbye. Today was no exception, and each overpass was packed from end to end. After seeing that again, I decided that I had to write this - in my own small way, I hope it helps to pay tribute to those who are willing to give up everything for distant strangers, and who are offering their lives to make the world we live in a better place for everyone. I also hope it gives some small comfort to the families of those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan - it is not in vain, it is not for nothing, and above all else it is definitely not forgotten.

Je me souviens.

Where I got my nick

I stumbled across this today, and it brought back memories - this was the comic that I got my nick from:

Crystal Methodology by Chet Haase

I found this post by Chet Haase to be a highly amusing post - it's a great commentary on software development processes, and like a lot of good humour it makes you laugh more because a lot of it is true.

From the post:

Rapid Application Development helped move developers from the more stodgy development processes of earlier decades when people were dumber onto quicker models of development, based on fast prototyping work. Rabid Application Development takes this a step further. Instead of using prototypes as ideas to help with future, more stable work, the prototypes are the product, and are checked in as soon as they are complete, or in many cases, sooner. The key to Rabid Development is to keep the engineering team going at such a frenetic pace in coding and checking in code that nobody, including the client, ever realizes what a complete load of crap they've produced. This model is used throughout most university CS courses and has become the default process basis for all homework assignments. It is also the mainstay of software startups everywhere.

Picture Madness

I've posted a ton of pictures, some from this Christmas eve and day, some from my company's holiday celebrations, and some more from our Europe trip last year. I also put geolocations on a lot of pictures - I'm making good use of my time off. :)

Overheard on the train this morning...

"It takes the epidermis off of your skin"

-- A lady talking about a beauty product of some kind, possibly hydrochloric acid.

My trip to Cuba

I was recently in Cuba for a friend's wedding, and I had a very good time there - I also learned a lot about the country, and I want to relate some of those lessons to others since accurate info about Cuba seems to be hard to come by.

In the past, I've had the pleasure of working with a fellow who is originally from Cuba, and who now works and lives in the USA. Since I was going down there for this wedding and since it's rather difficult to get from the USA to Cuba, I brought along some gifts for my friend's family (a pair of rollerblades and a bunch of Computer Science textbooks). The plan was that I would rent a car, meet with his nephew in Havana, go to the family's hometown for a visit, and then return to the resort I was staying at.

Four months before we went down, we emailed the resort to ask about car rental - we followed up a couple of times, but never received any emails in return. I also asked my travel agent, who assured me that getting a car shouldn't be a problem once I got there, and that they probably had automatics too - it became painfully obvious that she had no idea what she was talking about when we got there and they had only 2 cars, both of which were standards and both of which were rented for the entire time we were there. After a bit of stress, we split a taxi with another couple who was also going to Havana, and we had to modify our plans since we would no longer be able to visit the family's hometown (it's a bit of a distance from Havana).

We met up with my friend's nephew Luis (not his real name) at the Hotel Nacional in Cuba, and the first task that we set out to do was to draw some money off of one of my credit cards (a Visa). For those that are unfamiliar, Cuba has two currencies - one is the Convertible Peso (CUC), which is artificially pegged to the US Dollar at an exchange rate of 1.08 USD == 1.00 CUC. The second currency is the Real Peso (CUP), and it has an exchange rate of around 25 CUP == 1 CUC. The vast majority of tourists never see CUPs, and they do all of their transactions in CUC. Because our resort had no way to get money off of a credit card, and because we were short on money, we needed to get some in order to pay for the taxi we had taken to Havana. It turned out to be quite an adventure.

First, we went to a Cashier's counter on the main floor of the Hotel Nacional - even though they had a Visa sticker on their window, they said that they were only able to convert cash to cash and could not take money off of a credit card. They recommended that we go to a money exchanged which was downstairs. We went there, and were informed that they needed a passport to take money out of the credit card - this was a problem, because everyone (including the hotel) had told us not to lose our passport, and to put them in the safe and not take them out until we left. Nobody bothered to tell us that foreigners needed passports to take money out, so we had a bit of a problem. We were told that there was an automated machine upstairs, and we went up there to try it out. I put in my Visa, and it asked me for a PIN number - at this point I was baffled, because as far as I knew my Visa didn't have a pin number. I tried a few possible candidates, and then gave up - my wife also tried hers, with the same effect. We then decided to go back downstairs and see if we could sweet-talk the person behind the counter into giving us money without a passport - the guard stopped us at the door and told us that it was almost lunch, that there was at least a 45 minute line now, and that we'd have to come back after 1:00.

Great.

Luis told us about a bank which wasn't far away which would probably overlook the passport requirement, so we got into the taxi with the other couple and went there - we got there at 12:04, and discovered that most banks in Cuba close at noon on the last business day of the month (it was Friday, November 30th). The guard refused to let us in, so we went looking elsewhere. We went to another credit card place only to discover that they just tested if the cards worked and were unable to actually take money off of them (odd, but whatever) - we then went to another machine which was OFFLINE and another bank which was closed for lunch (the guard recommended we try again at 1:00). We decided to cut our losses for now, go and get lunch, and try again to find something in Old Havana. For those keeping score, we had tried 7 different places by this point, all with no luck - I was really loving Cuba at this point.

We had lunch at a restaurant called La Zaragozana, which claims to be the oldest restaurant in Havana - the food was quite good, and Luis took some time to explain what life was like in the real Cuba (not the sanitized version that tourists get from the resorts). I'll relate what I learned here.

Luis is a university student, and he explained to us that, although university was paid for by the state, there were many incidental costs such as clothing, food (apparently what is served in residence is almost inedible) and transportation (and sometimes rent) which were not paid for. In addition to this, students were forbidden from getting part-time jobs to cover these expenses - it is illegal in Cuba. He also explained how renting of living space was illegal in Cuba as well - there are a very few state-owned rental properties, and rents are high and waiting lists long. Under the communist system, it is illegal to be a landlord and to rent out property, so people find creative ways around it - you will find a person and live with them, rent is paid under the table, and if the police come knocking then you are a relative who is just there for a few days. People are also forbidden from buying or selling cars now - people are allowed to possess cars which their parents possessed (remember all those pictures of 1950's cars in Cuba?), and until about 15 years ago new cars could be purchased after waiting on a long list, but after the USSR collapsed all private purchase of cars was rendered illegal. Property can also not be bought or sold - families own properties, and the way that you get your own property is that your family gives you a piece of their property as your own. Now, put all of these together, and you get:

• You want to go to university, but you can't earn money to pay for it by working - this means that you either have to already have money, or your family needs to support you
• You can't rent an apartment, so you have to either live in state-provided residence (I hope you got on the list right when you were born, or you won't get in) or commute from your home (good luck to anyone going to university more than a short distance from home)
• You can't buy a car to drive to university from your home - you'd better hope that either your family has a car, or that you have a nearby friend that you can get a ride from
• Once you graduate university, you still can't buy or rent, so you have to commute to your job from the same place
• You can't take a job in a new city, since you can't buy property or cars

Kinda crazy, isn't it?

One of the other absurdities that Luis described for us was the salaries which are earned by Cubans - he said that, after he graduated university, he had a salary of about 20 CUP a day to look forward to (that's less than $1 USD), with a total monthly take-home approaching 20 CUC (remember, 25 CUP == 1 CUC). After 25 years of faithful service, his salary will balloon to 30 CUP a day (wow, what a payoff) and he will be taking home about 35 CUC a month. This had been corroborated by another fellow we had spoken to earlier in the week who was trained as a History and English professor at Havana University, and who was driving a taxi that some of my friends went to Havana in -- he said that he was now driving a taxi because, as a professor he would earn 20 CUC a month, and as a taxi driver he would earn 25 CUC a night on a bad night. This leads to two major perturbations in Cuban society:

1. Everyone (and I mean everyone) is either acting as a taxi to earn money (I found out that my friend in the USA had actually sold taxi rides in the evenings), selling things on the side to tourists, or somehow working multiple jobs or participating in the black market to make ends meet (everyone)
2. The people with the highest education and the greatest skills are in poverty, and those who work as gardeners, housekeepers, waiters, and taxi drivers are the richest of the rich - not what one would expect in most of the rest of the world

Luis also described how Cubans are treated as second-class citizens in their own country - they are not allowed to stay in tourist resorts (even if they have the money to pay for it) or even to go near some tourist areas, they are not allowed to go to certain hospitals which specialize in treatment of foreigners, and the set of artificial barriers gives the Cuban people a strong inferiority complex (I've heard the term apartheid used - it's scarily accurate). Police and military enforce these separations, and several times while on the beach at the resort I saw the police intercept people walking along the beach and tell them to go elsewhere. He also described how the Cuban newspapers will try to make life in Cuba seem good by comparison to the rest of the world - they publish excerpts about disasters, wars, scandals and diseases in an attempt to make the Cubans believe that they are better off than everyone else - most people don't buy it, but there are always some naive ones. He told us how he feels that, when Fidel Castro dies, major changes will have to happen - the people are reaching a boiling point, and they are rapidly losing patience with the heavy burden that the state puts upon them. Despite their best efforts, news and information about life outside of Cuba leaks into the country from many places, and people are starting to realize that there are other choices available to them. Cuba is a beautiful country - I really hope that they are able to make a peaceful transition away from the communist system, but the track record of other countries makes me nervous (there are 30 or so examples of countries that transitioned away from communism in and around the collapse of the USSR, and basically none of them were pleasant). Luis, like many others in his position, is hoping to find a way to leave the country before that happens, however the Cuban laws again make it very difficult for him to leave, and he has several hoops (and years) to go through before that can be a possibility.

After learning about these things at lunch, we started our quest for a bank again - we finally found one, and we were able to convince the guy behind the counter to give us $200 CUC so that we could pay for our taxi and our food (VICTORY! yay!). We then started to wander around the old city, and saw many sights such as Pigeon Square (pigeons endlessly circle around this square, it's an amusing thing to watch) and a very old church (350 years or so). We went to the market and picked up a painting for my aunt, a bag for Luis to carry the rollerblades and books in, and a wooden sculpture for my wife's mom - we then dropped Luis off at his residence (and rapidly turned around when I realized I had forgotten to give him the tools and spare parts for the rollerblades) and headed back to the resort, Potemkin village that it was.

The day before we left, I managed to injure my knee in the pool (later diagnosed as a medial tendon strain) - that made walking very difficult, and I'm still recovering from it. Our flight also got delayed by over 4 hours, so we got to sit in the airport for much longer than we originally thought - I spent the time reading, drinking tea and pondering the storm that we expected to land in. Now I'm sitting here, back in Canada, and thankful for the many things that I sometimes take for granted.

Europe Trip: Chapter 4

At the end of our last episode, our heroes had arrived in the ancient town of Caen, which was levelled during World War II. What will happen next as they tour historic Canadian battlegrounds?

We arrived at the Caen train station, and walked across the street to the Etap hotel where we were staying. We found the Etaps to be a fantastic deal - they were about 36 Euro for a room for a night, and they had a comfortable bed, an in-room bathroom with shower, a T.V. (not that we watched it), and a sink. All we wanted was a place to sleep, shower and put our things, and the Etaps served fantastically for that.

As soon as we got our stuff dropped off at the hotel, we raced back to the train station (which also serves as a bus station) and caught a regional bus to Courselles-sur-Mer, which is where the Juno Beach Centre is located. Courselles-sur-mer is a little town which is right on the English Channel, and it's quite pleasant. It's hard to imagine thousands of soldiers streaming through there on a rainy June morning, but that's what happened.

The centre was quite interesting - they offered guided tours, and we went on one. They took us around the beach, and showed us several German bunkers and observation posts which were preserved. One of them had a large shell hole in the side, a testament to the destructive power of even small-caliber naval guns (if that bunker had been hit by a large-caliber shell e.g. a battleship's main armament, there wouldn't have been a bunker left). There were tunnels that they used to offer tours through, however they had been closed when a section of one of the tunnels collapsed.

After visiting the centre, we walked back into town to catch the bus back to Caen. We had over an hour before the bus was scheduled to arrive, so we went to a restaurant to get some supper. It was a little restaurant right beside the docks, and it was run by someone who definitely had the feel of a kind aunt. We looked at the menu, and I asked her what she recommended. She described a very nice whitefish dish with a cream sauce, so we both ordered it and it was absolutely fantastic - the fish must have been caught that morning. Very full and contented, we walked back to the bus stop and caught the bus back to Caen. We strolled around the city a little bit, but it didn't feel like the kind of city it was safe to stroll in, so we went back to the hotel for the night.

The next morning, we hopped on another train to Rouen, which was our midpoint on the journey to Dieppe, an infamous name in Canadian military history. While in Rouen, we caught lunch and shipped a puzzle to my parents' house in Thunder Bay - I had picked it up at the Louvre for my mom, and I didn't feel like carrying it around for the rest of the trip. After lunch, we caught a train from Rouen to Dieppe - it was an interesting and uneventful ride through very beautiful countryside. We arrived in Dieppe, and it was a bit of a walk to our hotel, which was another Etap. Just as before, we were impressed with the Etap, and we dropped off our luggage and started to stroll around town.

We first went to the beach, which was quite unlike Juno Beach - the beach at Juno was sand, whereas the beach at Dieppe was made of palm-sized rocks. As you can imagine, the sand beach caused way less problems for both people and machines than the rock beach did. In addition to the poor terrain, the second thing I noticed was the commanding cliffs on the ends of the beach, which provided a perfect view of everything going on. Standing on that beach, I realized that, when the defences on those cliffs were not neutralized, the Dieppe raid was doomed to a very costly failure.

We then walked past the site of the casino to the west end of the beach, at the base of a cliff which has a castle on top. There was a garden there, with several plaques commemorating the hundreds of people that died at the base of that cliff. They had tried to find some shelter from the enemy fire, and were unsuccessful. We spent a while there, reading the plaques and the pillar which described Dieppe's history, and then walked up the southern slope of that cliff to the castle.

There were several slots which had been cut into the castle for machine guns, and it had been turned into a formidable defensive position by the Germans. It was a very beautiful structure, but the fact that it remains standing indicates a massive failure on the Allied side before the Dieppe raid - that castle is an obvious and commanding strongpoint, and it should have been turned into rubble before the raid was launched. In addition, there was a gun emplacement cut into the cliffside beside the castle, and other bunkers on top of a nearby cliff. The magnitude of the errors committed on that day, and the number of people that died as a result, continues to anger me.

We walked back into the centre of town, and went to a restaurant which was along the central dock. We ate at a small restaurant there, and had another delicious meal. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep, and got up in the morning to head out again. We caught a train back to Rouen, and then got on a train to Arras. Our hotel in Arras was right across from the train station, and it was called the Hotel Moderne Arras. It was a decent hotel, and we dropped our things off and caught a taxi out to Vimy Ridge.

Vimy Ridge and the area immediately around it has been turned over to the Canadian government, although it is not technically Canadian territory like it would be if the Canadian Embassy was located there. After the battle at Vimy Ridge, it was preserved in the condition that it was in, and it remains like that today. The surface of the earth all around Vimy Ridge is pockmarked with craters, and there is almost no level ground except for where the roads are. It's quite a sight, and it really brings home how much a concentrated artillery barrage, even with World War I technology, can devastate and destroy things. There are signs all over the place which warn of unexploded munitions beyond a certain point, and they also reminded one that a very large and pivotal battle took place there.

There is a large white memorial at the top of the ridge which commemorates the Canadian casualties of World War I. The memorial was covered by a large tarp because it is being restored, but there was a large pile of white stone which appeared to have been shaved off of the original memorial durng the restoration process. Since it apeared to be destined for the garbage heap, I took a small piece and brought it with me - my own little piece of history. We walked around the memorial, and also walked around the preserved bunker system at Vimy. We were there until closing time, and we caught a cab back to Arras and called it a night. The next morning was a big day - we were heading to Berlin! We boarded a TGV at Arras...

...and voyaged off into the sunset (sunrise?) for another chapter.

Interesting factoid of the day: We got a firsthand look at the way the French system works while we were in Paris. I watched from our hotel balcony as three hotel employees collected several bags of garbage (well above the limit for a customer) and waited by the side of the curb. When the garbage truck pulled up, one of the hotel employees gave the garbagemen 6 beers - he put 4 into a bin on the side of the truck, opened one, and gave one to the driver who also opened his. They sat back and drank their beer while the hotel employees loaded up the garbage truck. Once they were done, the garbagemen thanked them and continued on their merry way. The lesson of the day: a six-pack trumps local by-laws in France.

Breaking news! Aum shiva!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program for some amazing, incredible news:

There is now a planet (well, pluton) named Eris!@#!@#!@# That's right - Today, on Boomtime the 38th day of Bureaucracy in the year 3172 of the Discordian calendar, Eris was identified at the edge of the solar system.

Hail Eris!

HAIL!!

Europe Trip: Chapter 3

Editor's Note: Pictures from the trip are now available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/straxus/sets/72157594161408278/.

At the end of our last episode, our heroes were about 40 minutes late getting into their train station in Paris. What awaits them in the "City of Lights"?

We get off the train, lugging our two backpacks and suitcase with us, and go down to the commuter railway (RER) platform, where we catch the D train. As soon as we get to the platform, the (now-familiar) smell of urine attacks, and we start breathing through our mouths as we wait for the train to appear. Finally one shows up, and we get onboard - it smells just as bad as the platform, maybe worse. We take the train to Gare de Lyon, and get off (as fast as we can). We go to the surface, and start trying to find Rue de Lyon, which is the street our hotel is on. Through some bad navigation on my part, we head in the wrong direction and realize it after 15 minutes when we get to another metro station. We turn around, finally find our road (and subsequently our hotel - Holiday Inn Paris Bastille, 11 Rue de Lyon), and check in. We drop our stuff in the room, and race over to where my family is staying (The Corail Hotel, 23 Rue de Lyon) about an hour later than we were supposed to be. We say our hellos, and catch the train to the Louvre. We wait in a long line to get in, and then stroll around the museum until close to closing time. After that, we head for supper, and go to sleep.

A word of warning about the Louvre - some areas of it are like a maze. At one point, I started mumbling "ou est la fromage?" (where's the cheese?) because I felt like a mouse in a maze - I even asked one of the staff about it, and got a good laugh for my troubles ("je ne sais pas ou la fromage est! Bonne chance!").

After visiting an art museum in Brussels, and then the Louvre, we decided that we wouldn't be visiting any more art museums for the rest of our stay in Europe. I realize that a lot of people like them, but I was bored out of my mind and so was Olga. When my family decided to visit the Musee D'Orsay, we opted out.

Other places that we visited included the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, located on Montmartre hill, followed by a brief stop in front of the Moulin Rouge - meals there are ~170 Euro apiece, so we decided we didn't care that much about eating there. We also went to Notre Dame Cathedral, which is on an island in the middle of the Seine river called "Ile de la Cite" (City island). Highlights of the Notre Dame trip included seeing a fish helium balloon stuck to the ceiling and being greeted by a deformed fellow at the exit who must've been doing his best Quasimodo impression while asking for change. The cathedral itself is quite large, but as with most famous things the image and the story are larger than the place itself - if you buy into the legend surrounding a site, you're almost certain to be disappointed when you visit it.

That night, we also visited the Eiffel Tower - if you're in Paris, and you're a tourist, you basically have to do the Eiffel Tower as a rite of passage. We spent at least 75-80% of our time at the Eiffel Tower in lines of one sort or another, all of them for elevators to get up and down - I found it quite interesting though, and got a lot of good pictures while we were there. There are thousands of strobe lights spread all over the superstructure of the Eiffel Tower, and at night they go off at regular intervals, sparkling randomly in an attempt to make the tower look like a diamond - I found it pretty successful. I attempted to book us some reservations at a restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower about a week before we went to Europe, but I had no luck - the person laughed when I asked if there was space for any of the days we were in Paris. As well, for those of you keeping track of the date, we visited the Eiffel Tower on May 1st (also known as May Day), which is a major French holiday that makes all the hotels full and all the tourist attractions busy.

The next day, we went to the Palace of Versailles. We spent the whole day there, and wandered around the palace and around the gardens a lot. My main reason for wanting to go there was to see the Hall of Mirrors - me being a history person, I wanted to see where the treaty ending World War I was signed. It was somewhere between a history museum and an art museum - I got a lot of good pictures, but a lot of time was spent staring at paintings, vases, busts and tapestries. The palace grounds are huge - there are giant parks, giant baths, giant fountains, and giant buildings.

We headed back to Paris, and had supper with my family before going to sleep. We met up again the next morning, had breakfast, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways - my family south to Italy, us north to the English Channel. We took a very modern and clean subway from Gare de Lyon to Gare St. Lazare, and caught a train north to Caen. I was very glad that I took some Gravol for this trip, because the 2 hour train trip to Caen was very rickety and shaky and I would have surely thrown up without Gravol, since I came very close to throwing up after taking it!

Our arrival at Caen signalled the beginning of the portion of the trip where we visited Canadian war-related sites. We stepped off the train in Caen...


...and I'll see you in the next chapter.

Interesting factoid of the day: Unlike most cities (major or minor), Paris does not have a central hub train station. It has 6 stations spread around the outskirts of the city: Gare du Nord, Gare de l'Est, Gare de Lyon, Gare d'Austerlitz, Gare Montparnasse, and Gare St. Lazare. If you need to pass through Paris on your way somewhere else, chances are you'll need to take the Paris Metro from your arrival station to your departure station.

Europe Trip: Chapter 2

At the end of our last chapter, our heroes had defeated the evil hotel lock and had been reunited with their possessions. What awaits them now?

We head out of the hotel, and back to the subway station. We decide to visit a museumish area of Brussels, and head down to the Schuman subway stop which is close to a large park called the Cinquantenaire. After grabbing lunch at a little cafe, we look at an art museum there (Greeks were very obsessed with male genitalia) and a military history museum. We then head to a restaurant called the Carpe Diem on the advice of a fellow at the Autoworld museum, and have a delicious meal. While enjoying supper, we watch the traffic chaos at an intersection just outside the restaurant - the lights are a bit confusing to me (a red light, a green cross, and a red arrow - what the bloody hell is a green cross?) and I become much happier with our decision to take the train over driving (not to mention that the vast majority of European cars are standard, and I have no clue how to drive a standard).

After supper, we get on the subway at Merode station (it's right outside the restaurant we ate at) and head back to the hotel. We breathe a sigh of relief when the key works, and promptly fall asleep again (still trying to recover from the flight and time change). The next morning, we grab breakfast and check out without incident, and head to the train station. As we are walking into Brussels Midi station, we are again struck by the overwhelming smell of urine, and I'm convinced by the hideous smell and the long stream of liquid that every homeless person within a few kilometres is making a sport of pissing on the garbage can right beside the front door. We find our train without incident, and hop aboard a Thalys heading towards Paris. We are planning on meeting up with my mother and sister and two of my aunts in Paris for around 12:30 at their hotel (which is very close to our Paris hotel), and everything is going well until the train comes to a stop 5 minutes after leaving Brussels. We end up sitting there for close to a half hour, and finally pull into Gare Du Nord station in Paris around 40 minutes late. We get off the train...

...and you know what ... means by now.

Interesting factoid of the day: The French TGV trains have the current world speed record for conventional trains, beating out the Thalys, Eurostar, and ICE trains by going an average of 515 km/h in a high-speed test run.

Europe Trip: Chapter 1

So, in the last episode our heroes were just approaching the gate upon arrival at Frankfurt Airport.

We pull up to the gate, and it's about a half hour earlier than expected (it's 11:15ish, and we were supposed to arrive at 11:45). We take some stairs down onto the tarmac, and take a bus to the main airport building. We wait in line for customs, and pass through without incident after a bit of a wait. Since we're travelling with only carry-on luggage, we are able to completely bypass the luggage carousel and head for the door - ever since I first travelled carry-on only to San Francisco, I've gotten addicted to not having to wait for my luggage for a half hour.

We head out of the airport terminal and over to the train station - Frankfurt airport has a very nice setup for this, with a major train station attached directly to the airport. It means that there's no need for airport shuttles, and no complicated transfers - follow the sign to the trains, and you can be on one of Germany's ICE trains (InterCityExpress, speeds over 300km/h) in a very short period of time.

Since we're going to be doing a lot of train travel, we crunched the numbers in advance and determined that a Eurail pass was the best way to go. The pass that we chose allowed us to use the train for 8 days (not necessarily in a row - the only limitation is that all 8 days have to be used within 2 months of validation) for 4 bordering countries (Germany, Belgium, France, Austria), and we get to travel in first class. We have to get this validated before we can use it though, and there ended up being quite a lineup. Thankfully, when we got through to the end the fellow we spoke with knew English, so we were able to get things done with a minimum of hand gestures and charades. After validating the pass, we figured out the best schedule to get to Brussels, our first stop (it's often spelt Bruxelles, and that caused confusion at points) - we'd go to Cologne (Köln) and wait for a couple of hours, and then catch a Thalys train to Brussels (Thalys is another high-speed train - it primarily does the Paris-Köln route). There was a second option which would have allowed us to continue on from Köln almost immediately, but that train was fully reserved - it's May Day weekend, so the lines to Paris are pretty busy. Hopefully that won't cause us more headaches later on.

Travelling on the ICE was a fun experience. It's a very comfortable train, and it goes along at a very good speed (the highest I remember was ~323km/h). They are very punctual schedule-wise, and it's probably the fastest way to get around Germany in most cases (with plane travel, there's a lot of song and dance around getting the ticket, security, traffic at the airport, etc. which turns a 2 hour flight into 5 hours of lost time).

We got into Köln in good time, and strolled around the station for a bit. We booked a bunch of reservations on trains we would be taking later in the trip (e.g. Brussels -> Paris, Arras -> Berlin), and took pictures of a gigantic cathedral right outside the main train station. Then we hopped onto the Thalys train to Brussels - like the ICE, it was a very good experience, and we covered the distance between Köln and Brussels in 2 hours.

The first thing I noticed about the Brussels Midi train station is that it had pickpocket warnings on all the monitors. The second thing I noticed is that it stunk quite badly of urine - this was something I noticed in Paris as well. We found the subway about as quickly as we could, and took it to the stop closest to our hotel (King Baudouin station). Upon exiting the subway station, we saw a very bizarre (and very shiny) structure which we later found out was called the Atomium. We found our hotel without problems (Holiday Inn Garden Court), and dropped off our things. It had been close to 2 days since we showered (overnight flight combined with lots of train travel), so we promptly showered and then went out for supper at a nearby restaurant.

Until this point, everything was going fine.

When we returned to the hotel, our key wouldn't open our hotel room. After trying it a few times, I went down to the desk and told them about the problem. They re-encoded the card, and told me to try again. After confirming that it still didn't work, they accompanied me upstairs with the master key. When they tried that, they found that it also didn't work - it was time to call a technician. He showed up about an hour later, and played around with a little keypad that plugged into the door. He tried several things, and was at a loss to explain why the lock refused to open. They tried to call another technician, but they couldn't get ahold of him - we'd have to wait until tomorrow.

Fantastic.

They gave us another room along with a bunch of toiletries, and apologized profusely for the problems. I was glad at this point that I'd taken out my contacts - they had no contact solution, so I would have either had to throw them out or risk scratching my retinas by leaving them in overnight. We got to sleep quickly (we were dead tired), and I woke up around 7 a.m. or so. I decided to get dressed and grab some breakfast, and I checked on the busted door on the way down - still nothing. After eating a bit, a technician showed up, so I followed along as he got to work on the door. After about 20 minutes, he declared that it was beyond his capabilities and that we'd have to contact a specialist - the closest one was in the Netherlands, so it'd be a few hours. Around this time, I started asking if they had an axe in the hotel as it might end up being the only way to get into the room - a bit of nervous laughter was heard from the staff, and the specialist was called.

Several glasses of tea and a couple of croissants later, the Dutch technician showed up. He got to work with a wrench and a drill, and started to disassemble parts of the door lock. He was fiddling with a mechanism inside the handle, and I strolled off and looked at another hotel room door (it was around 11 at this point, so rooms were being cleaned). I figured that it might be possible to slip the door open with a credit card-like piece of plastic, and he ran off and grabbed something like it. After a couple minutes of fighting with the door, it finally popped open - hooray! Victory at last!

We grabbed all of our stuff, and moved it up to the new hotel room. The staff, who were very happy to learn that the door was finally open, apologized profusely (again) and said that the first night and two days of breakfast would be free as compensation for our problems - they also sent us a fruit basket and a couple of bottles of fancy Belgian water (Apollinaris). We showered, got changed, and headed out for our first day in Brussels...

...which is covered in Chapter 2.

Interesting factoid of the day: Euro coins, which are minted in 12 countries, all have the same front part. However, the back of the coin is done differently depending upon the country of origin - for example, the German 2 Euro coin has an eagle on the back, the French 2 Euro coin has a fancy pattern with a female statue and Republique Francaise on it, and the Austrian 2 Euro coin has a former Austrian Queen on it.

Europe Trip: Prelude

Today begins a series of blog entries about my trip to Europe, which wrapped up yesterday. As with any good story, I'll start at the beginning.

The date: Thursday April 27th

Today, I'm getting ready to leave for Europe. A good deal of the packing and getting things ready was done last night, and today I have to drive the dogs to Woodstock (to my wife's family) so that they don't starve to death while we're gone. My wife, who is "working" from home that day, decides to accompany me on the trip (it's ~2 hours there and 2 hours back).

As we're heading out, I plug in my iPod to the car stereo, only to see a folder icon pop up that says to call Apple support - fantastic. I decide to reimage it when I get home and reupload a bunch of music so I have something to listen to, but upon returning home I discover that the iPod won't even mount correctly on the computer - it's making clicking noises, and acting rather like a useless paperweight. Now I'm seeing a sad Mac icon (well, sad iPod), and I have no music for the next month. That'll end up sucking some serious ass down the road, I'm sure.

By the time we end up getting home and getting everything packed, it's too late to take the subway/bus to the airport, so we cough up $50 and take a cab. We get there a little less than 2 hours before (2 hours is how far in advance you're supposed to be there for international flights), but doing an electronic check-in saves us a lot of time and we get through security with 90 minutes to spare. Since we are travelling with only carry-on baggage, we don't have anything to check, and we don't have anything to wait for once we arrive in Frankfurt. I decide to get a coffee while I'm waiting, and win a free cup of coffee - finally something's going right. I also decide to pick up a couple of books ("Why Most Things Fail" by Paul Ormerod, and "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell), since I no longer have music to amuse me.

We get on the flight without incident, and pack our carry-on bags into the overhead bins - that means more leg room for the overnight flight to Frankfurt, which is good. The flight leaves at 10 p.m. EST (GMT -5), and arrives at 11:45 a.m. CET (GMT + 1) - that's a 6 hour difference, combined with a 7.5 hour overnight flight - party central. As expected, sleep is fleeting and uncomfortable, and there's only about 4 hours of true darkness before we find the sun again. As patches of land start to appear, I see Europe for the first time - there's an awful lot of green patches, and clumps of cities at frequent intervals. We pass over the UK, France, and Belgium, and come in to land at the Frankfurt airport about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. We come up to the gate, and...

...my first 24 hours in Europe will be in the next entry. Don't you hate cliffhangers? :)

Interesting factoid of the day: There are 2 Frankfurts in Germany, and I went through them both. Frankfurt am Main is located on the Main river, and is in the midwestern portion of Germany, in the state of Hesse. Frankfurt an der Oder is located on the Oder river, and it is in the extreme east of the country, in the state of Brandenburg on the Polish border (on the main Berlin-to-Warsaw rail line).

Poland

I'm now in Poland, time is short.

I'll write more later, but the way to survive is to glare at people until they look away.

Fun times.

La belle Paris

I'm sitting in a cafe right now across from Gare de Lyon in Paris, enjoying a cheese and tomato sandwich with a cheese and tomato salad (mmmm cheeese and tomatoes). It's been absolutely fantastic to not have to worry about anything for the last few days, given how busy work has been for the last long while.

Later today, we go to Versailles. I've done the Eiffel Tower, done the Louvre, been to Brussels for a couple of days, and heading to Caen tomorrow. I'll write up more details when I have more time, but time is short right now - have to finish lunch and catch a train.

Vacation time

Gone tomorrow to Europe, back in a long time. Going to do zero work while I'm there, and I'm looking forward to it.

The Long War

Well, the cat's out of the bag. It's not going to be a short war after all.

No shit, Sherlock.

I estimate 1.5-2 years to the invasion of Iran - as soon as Iraq has a modicum of stability, that massive US military presence is going to stroll across the Shatt al Arab and do some "large-scale military exercises" on their way to Kabul.

Baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Don't believe

A wise man once said,

"Believe none of what you read and half of what you see"

I don't recall who he was, but I didn't buy it for a minute.

Time to relax...

...you would not believe how long it takes to compile CenterICQ 4.21.0 on a 70 MhZ SparcStation 5. Hooray for stopping and smelling the roses until fall arrives.

And hooray for doing something mildly useful with ancient hardware.

[Update, 1 day later]

straxus@OpenStraxuSD [/home/straxus]# which centericq
/usr/local/bin/centericq
straxus@OpenStraxuSD [/home/straxus]# centericq       
Segmentation fault (core dumped) 
straxus@OpenStraxuSD [/home/straxus]#

Absolutely fantastic - I'm so glad I spent ~20 hours of CPU time on that, as well as clearing enough stuff off of the /usr partition that the compile was barely able to finish (the intermediate objects took up over 200 meg - big deal on a 400 meg partition!).

Esc

...from Toronto for another week, and I'm outbound to San Francisco until Saturday Mar. 11th. I'm trading coolish weather for warm but rain (and a boatload of work between tomorrow morning and Friday evening).

Checklist for San Francisco:

• Laptop (customer's company)


• Laptop (my company)


• Palm Tungsten E2


• iPod (4th gen, 20 gig)


• 5 days of nice clothing


• 1 day of relaxed, flying clothing


• Toiletries


• 4 cases of Coca Cola - one of the people at the customer's office is an expatriate Canadian, and he discovered that US coke tastes like pipe cleaner compared to Canadian stuff because the US uses 'high-fructose corn syrup' as their primary sugar source and Canada uses 'Glucose-Fructose' (i.e. table sugar)

Oh, if you ever want to get a lot of funny looks from airport security screeners and waste a few minutes, put two laptops through - they love that.

Next month, I will write entries about...

• The death of Thunder Bay


• The cusp of change


• Return of the Jet-eye


• Location, Location, Location


• Humourous Interlude

I promise.

My brain got this before I even read the story

I wanted to make note of a very interesting qbit of news from the Quantum realm that I stumbled across today:

Quantum computing without computing

I'm still trying to fully comprehend this - without running the algorithm, you can determine it's results due to quantum mechanics (counterfactual computation). If I understand this correctly, basically you cna eliminate all of the values that cannot be the answer beore running the algorithm, which leaves you with only those values that *can* be the answer.

My favourite quote from the article:

In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running -- Paul Kwiat