Food

Alright why not. Here is what I like to consume:

1. Cinnamon Danishes. Some of the bakeries around here make really good ones, chalk full of shortening. They taste best on Saturday morning
   
   
   
   
2. Vanilla Cappuccino. This is really bush, because I like the instant stuff, President’s Choice, and it’s odd because I don’t even normally put sugar in my coffee. Also best on Saturday morning. The stuff that comes out of the machine at Cheskie’s Bakery is good too.
   
   
   
   
3. Stella Doro Swiss Fudge Cookies. Also full of shortening. Are we seeing a pattern here?
   
   
   
   
4. Pizza. Best the way my wife makes it. But if it’s from a restaurant, then best not from a pizza restaurant.
   
   
   
   
5. Fries. No point in going out to eat if you don’t get fries. I’ll take poutine in a pinch. But not with pizza. No fries with my pizza please.
   
   
   
   
6. Crab Salad. Not real real crab of course, Pollock that looks like crab, and maybe it taste like crab and maybe it doesn’t; I wouldn’t know. It’s gotta have onions, and hot pepper rings, and some good dressing
   
   
   
   
7. Beer. Corona, Coors Light, Miller’s Genuine Draft, Labatt’s Light, oh I’m not fussy. Just nothing more than 5% please.
   
   
   
   
8. Coffee. Best from my own Black & Decker One Cup Coffee Maker. My wife bought it for me. Thank you dear.
   
   
   
   
9. Bean soup, or minestrone soup, or cabbage soup, or… I make one mean soup
   
   
   
   
10. Lentil soup, or vegetable soup, or chicken soup, or … my wife makes one mean soup.
    
    
    
    
11. Boloney. Not easy to get. We have salami they say. I want boloney I say. It tastes the same they say. It doesn’t taste the bloody same I say. Anyway, baloney.

The Easier It Gets, The Harder It Gets...

I develop applications for mobile devices. Well, that’s an exaggeration; I am working on one application which, I suppose, will run on more than one device, assuming it ever gets finished.

Here’s the thing. When I read about the pioneers of computer programming, the guys who started doing Fortran, who wrote the internet protocols, the guys at the Xerox Parlo Alto Research Center who developed the graphical user interface back in the 70’s when there were no PCs to run it on, Tim Berners-Lee who invented hypertext and therefore the world wide web, well I kind of feel like a pretender.

I mean I can’t count in binary nor in hexadecimal, I don’t know squat about memory addressing, the only assembly language I know is the sheet that comes with the pantry you buy at Reno Depot, and I don’t understand that either. I’ve never stayed up all night working against an ever-getting-closer deadline, surrounded by cardboard pizza boxes and dozens of discarded coffee cups. Not me. I go home at 5.

We have high-level tools that make it easy to program. All the drudgery is taken out of it. No counting bits, no convoluted API calls that requiring marshalling or thunking. No memory management. Easy.

So the mobile app, you know. It’s supposed to run on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC, or a Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone. If that means something to you I’m glad because it means nothing to me. But I’m doing it.

So here is the setup. I use a program called Visual Studio 2005, which we use to create applications for Windows and for the Web. To do mobile you need an add-on. I don’t remember how I got the add-on, so if my PC fries and I have to reinstall, I’m in trouble.

Here’s what I know I have.

· Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC SDK [Software Development Kit]
· Microsoft ActiveSync (to synchronize a mobile device with a PC, and to allow one to use the environment of the other, but don’t ask me what that means)
· Microsoft Mobile 6 SDK
· Microsoft Virtual PC (this may or may not be involved)
· An actual physical mobile device sitting in a cradle which is connected to my PC

These various pieces work together in ways that I can’t fathom. There is something called an emulator. It simulates a mobile device on your desktop, working in its own virtual space. It works with ActiveSync and it doesn’t work with ActiveSync. I can’t get the emulator to work outside Visual Studio but other people at my workplace can. Sometimes one emulator will work and another won’t. I have two pocket pc’s on my desk. One connects to the internet, one doesn’t. We’ve spent hours trying to get these devices to connect to my web server with no luck; I had the best networking guys helping me. Then I pull a handheld out of the box by my desk, they all look the same but apparently I’ve not used this one before, and voila, it connects to my web server, it connects to the internet, it doesn’t even have to be in its cradle, and ActiveSync is in disconnected mode so it’s not in the picture. I showed my networking guy; he is impressed but he has no idea why this one is working. Believe me, neither do I. but at least it proves that my application is working.
And just today the whole structure was crashing and burning. Nothing would run; I was getting esoteric messages telling me that the device was already running (it wasn’t), that there was an error in ConmanClient2.exe, a file that doesn’t apparently exist on my hard drive, or that there was some other deep-in-the-kernel-of-the-virtual-device error that suggests that something somewhere is utterly corrupt. And there are so many places to change configuration settings. Should the transport be DMA or TCP? Do I enable the NE2000 PCMCIA network adapter? Do I bind to the Fast Ethernet Adapter or the connected network card (which, as far as I know, is the Fast Ethernet Adapter – you following this?) Do I map any serial ports? And if so to what? Should I reset the virtual device? And if so do I do a hard reset or a soft reset?

Oh my goodness.

And, there is no information about this. No real help files, no real information on the web, you’re on your own. I don’t know if Microsoft would offer tech support, probably not.

Not even Dennis Ritchie could figure this one out. Meanwhile I have this sudden craving for pizza…

Things That Make Me Happy

This is about Things that make me happy. I don’t mean things like health and warm weather and the sound of rain falling on the living room window. No. I mean Things, things you buy with money, and that exist in the corporeal world. Things I have, that I bought, or that someone bought for me. Money can’t buy happiness? Yes it can. I buy things with money and they make me happy. It’s that simple.

So here are some Things that make me happy:

1. My Sony Discman – this was a birthday present from my wife 3 years ago. It sits in my bedroom and I use it before I sleep. It remembers where I left off, even if I stop in the middle of a track. And it plays regular CDs and MP3s, so how could I not love it.

2. My desk. This is my spot. I don’t have an office; the desk is in the basement where the kids have their desk / computer set up, but that doesn’t matter. This is my spot. It is an L-shape secretary’s desk and it has a pull-out thing for my keyboard and one drawer and on my left I have…

3. My boom box. I bought this in December of 2006 at Sears, and buying it was an adventure unto itself, but I got it, and I have it, and it plays regular CDs, and MP3s, and cassettes, so what more could I want. It has a sub-woofer which I have not used since we moved, because I can’t quite figure where to put it, but that’s ok, I’m happy.

4. My coffee cups. One is a straight black cup, on which my wife painted the Batman logo, and it could not look more genuine, and the other is a Conordia University cup that I bought myself not long ago, and I’m not sure why but it makes me happy.

5. My Sony Walkman. Ok this is all about music so maybe this should be on my other blog. But whatever, I have 3 of these, walkmans (walkmen?). One is in the kitchen plugged into a pair of computer speakers, another I take with me when I walk at night and when I go to work and come home from work, and a third one has not yet been opened. I bought all three on eBay.

6. Shelves. We bought these shelves 2 years ago when we moved into the house that we so recently moved out of, and they are shelves meant I think for CDs or VHS tapes, but I use them for music tapes – cassettes – and it is the first time that all my cassettes have a place to live. So that makes me very happy.

7. My plants. Some I bought for various places that I’ve worked and they came home went the job went south, some I got for my birthdays. I like them. That’s all. They all live in the kitchen now.

8. My Concordia bag. I borrowed a bag with a strap from my sister when she was here two years ago and I said boy I need to get me one of these. And I did but it broke. So I got another and it broke. These bags were very cheap. So I didn’t know what to do. Then I found this one at the book store at Concordia University, and it wasn’t so cheap, about $15, which seems like a lot for a bag with a zipper and a strap, but I got it, and it’s good, and I use it, and it has its designated function in my life, and it makes me happy.

9. My Batman keychain. Surely I don’t have to explain this one…

I Don't Know Much About Art, And I Have No Clue What I Like...

Now I remember visiting the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and you walk into this foyer type place, you’re facing a stair case which leads to the main exhibits, and on the facing wall there was this frame with nothing in it. And we said they must have taken the picture out for some reason, but of course there was a picture there, it was just all white was all. So here is a white canvass, I guess it had white paint on it, and it was art. Ok it was art.

And last week I saw something similar, a white picture. This one was called (Steps) December, and it was by Charles Gagnon. And then there are the usual abstracts, stripes and splotches, and couple of works that look like stuff my kids bring home from school. Literally. They deliberately look like kids’ drawings.

This occurs to me because I was recently at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (which is the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) and I got to see Monet, Cezanne, Rodin, Picasso. Then they have the contemporary Art Exhibit, which is mild next to what’s at the Musuem of Contemporary Art.

So people look at that stuff, and the usual refrain goes, anyone could have done that, why is it art. And the usual answer is anyone didn’t do it, that guy did, and he’s an artist, so it’s art.

So what that means is this. If I break a dish, then arrange the pieces on a canvas randomly, and call it “Porcelain Rapture” or something, nobody will pay attention, and it’s not worth anything. But once I’ve done something, anything, that people recognize as “art,” and say I’ve got a government grant (that helps), and now my name is known in the right circles, and I break a dish, then arrange the pieces on a canvas randomly, and call it “Porcelain Rapture” or something, now it’s a work of art, and people pay attention, and pundits will write about it, and say that it bespeaks the reality of bourgeois disillusionment with fragmented consumption, or something like that.

And people have a lot of trouble with this. I don’t. I don’t have trouble with this. I don’t think that art is about pictures hanging on a wall, not anymore. Nor is about beauty, or even creativity per se. Art isn’t just about what you create. It’s about who you are when you create it, it’s about who you know, it’s about who knows you, it’s about your place in the artistic community, or lack thereof. Art is a process, a vision of reality, a version of reality, it’s very serious, and it’s completely and totally funny.

I guess it’s a metaphor. It has to be a metaphor, or what’s the point right?

The point is that a pile of stuff sitting on a table could be a pile of stuff sitting on a table, or it could be a great work of art (or at least a work of art). Nothing we do, nothing we have, nothing we create, nothing we say, none of it exists in a vacuum. It all comes down to context, and the context is what gives it, not just meaning, but reality. And that’s how it is with everything. Had Sargent Pepper been made last week it wouldn’t be a great album. A guy can break the record for the 100 yard dash 5000 times in his backyard, but if he doesn’t do it at the Olympics it isn’t squat. And if Joe Not-an-artist paints a white canvass white then so what. But when Joe Artist does it…

Rocks Rock...

The Dark Knight guards a small piece of the Canadian Shield, on the desk of the VSL Poltroon...

My mother used to have a rock tumbler. You’d throw in a bunch of ugly stones, add this polishing gunk, and let it go for about a week. Then you’d change the gunk and let it run again. You’d keep doing this until the rocks were rounded and polished to a shine. Not all of them made it. Not all had the wherewithal to withstand all that punishment. But the ones that did revealed an aesthetic quality that was not apparent to the untrained eye.

And so it’s my untrained eye that failed to detect the presence of the Redpath Musuem until a few weeks ago. Now I’ve been living here for, what, 6 years? And I’ve been working downtown since mid-June, and I worked in Westmount for 4 years, and that’s a 15 minute journey from McGill University, and this treasure chest of rocks and minerals, crystals and fossils, has been just waiting for me, less than 10 minutes away from here by foot.

I confess. I am a closet rockhound.

My wife and I visited the Royal Alberta Museum, in Edmonton, during the summer of 1984. They had, presumably still have, a geology exhibit that would melt the heart of any mineralogist. My wife couldn’t get me out the room.

In the autumn of 1997 I took a geology course at the University of Winnipeg, and in October we did a field trip that took us to Whiteshell Provincial Park on the Manitoba – Ontario border. Now Manitoba consists of farms; the only geology one is likely to encounter is the hard kernel of a germ of wheat – farms and trees, farms and trees, no hills or mountains and rock outcrops or mesas or canyons or…

But at the east edge of the province, it turns out the big slab of rock called the Canadian Sheild, which gets deeper as you go west, peeks out from the depths. And so, it turns out, it’s not so boring after all. I took my kid on the field trip, he was 10, and he made friends with the prof, who offered a beer to anyone who could explain a particular petrologic phenomenon, and my kid refrained from answering, although he knew the answer, because he didn’t want beer, but the prof said too bad, I would have gotten you a root beer.

I brought home a few pieces of a not-quite-granite rock called diorite, with bits of garnet in them, and some fossils contained in Manitoba limestone, and a few other odds and ends. And they sit in boxes, and we cart them from house to house, and I keep saying I will put them out on display, but I forget. But I do have a piece of greenstone sitting on my desk, just a little piece of the Canadian Shield to keep me humble…

When I was a kid I used to hunt around the train tracks, then later when we went on holidays I’d be on the lookout for cool specimens. My mother was always looking for rocks that she could polish; she would have polished a beautiful crystal sample if I’d have let her.

And so here is the Redpath Museum, with hundreds of samples of minerals I’ve never heard of, beautiful crystals, incredible fossils, entire dinosaur skeletons. And I didn’t even know about it.

It’s the geode phenomenon. A geode is a big round ugly rock from the outside, but crack it open…

Life can be a geode. We have treasures around the corner, great places and experiences a mile or two miles away, and we don’t know about it until we make it our business to know about it. Sometimes it means pulling ourselves away from our PCs for longer than we’d like to, or it means going out when the weather isn’t as nice as we’d like it to be, or it means having to stay up an hour or two later than we’d normally do, but then we discover fireworks on national holidays, and Irish musicians in downtown pubs, free classical music concerts, or just these incredible places where there are lots of trees…

Anyone for rock hunting?

Soup with Green Pepper!

Sunday I made supper. I do that sometimes.
Here's what I made:

• soup
  
• salad
  
• salmon patties
  
• potatoes
  
• peas

I didn't use any recipes. Here's how I made the soup:

• chop up onion, celery, green pepper, and fry
  
• chop up garlic, and add to frying vegetables
  
• add water
  
• slice carrots and put them in the water
  
• add barley
  
• add salt and pepper, and find other fun spices, and add randomly: oregano, cumin, cayenne pepper, etc
  
• add a can of romano beans
  
• boil soup for a while
  
• add thin egg noodles
  

  My kids bug me that I make the same soup every week. Of course this is patently untrue. The soup they think I make every week is chickpea soup, which has chickpeas, tomatoes, and onions. So now I can't put tomatoes and beans into the same soup ever, or I get daddy you made the same soup again!
  

  This time I had this scintillating talk with my 17 year old daughter:
  

  You put GREEN PEPPER in the soup. Daddy you are so FUNNY!
  

  So what. There are soup recipes with green pepper
  

  They are FUNNY recipes!
  

  They liked the soup.
  

  I have been told in no uncertain terms not to put celery into salad. The salad is therefore:
  

  • green leaf lettuce
    
  • 
    grape tomatoes
    
  • 
    green pepper
    
  • 
    English cucumber
    
  
  They like the salmon patties too. Here's the recipe:
  
  
  
  • 2 cans of salmon
    
  • 3 eggs
    
  • Salt
    
  • Pepper
    
  • Garlic powder
    
  • Onion powder
    
  • Something else
    
  • A couple spoonfuls of hot vegetable sauce, which has been sitting in the fridge for months, and which really isn't so hot after all
    
  • A bit of barbecue sauce
    
  • Fry
    

  The potatoes are just potatoes and the peas are just peas. My wife said I want mashed potatoes. She said, make the potatoes and I will mash some. She said make lots. I made 15 potatoes. I think we ate about 9. I think she mashed one.
  The other thing I get is you ALWAYS make salmon patties (or tuna patties, as the case may be). Or course I only make one or the other every two months or so, but it doesn't matter. I could make once every ten years, and I would still get you ALWAYS make etc etc.
  

  Next Sunday I think I will make bean casserole. Let them complain about that.