Author Archives: Alan V

Toronto day 3

Posted on by

Today has been spent traveling the city by subway and streetcar, which has been awesome. I love the public transportation system here… you’re literally waiting 2 minutes or less for a subway or streetcar, no matter where you’re going.

America’s drinking age of 21 is dumb. Booze is good. I had a rum and cola with lunch today (and was tempted to order some triple sec with orange juice or something) at a pub, and went to a liquor store and bought some orange/pineapple wine to have with the leftover brie as a snack. I also have a bottle of hard raspberry lemonade in the fridge awaiting sometime when I’ve had fewer than 2.5 drinks in a half hour.
Drinking is good. Drinking in excess is not. I think this is something a lot of college students need to figure out. Meh.
In any case, I haven’t gotten carded once while here. I guess I look significantly older than 19.

Tonight (rather soon, actually), we’ll take the ferry to the island south of Toronto and hang around there a bit, hopefully getting photos of the sunset.
There will be plenty of piccars posted to photos 2 eventually.

Toronto day 2

Posted on by

Today was spent walking around Toronto, visiting various places.
We walked a few miles to a park that was recommended by the local “things to do” paper only to be highly disappointed. The plants were mostly dried up and dying, there were weeds everywhere, and the fountain things that were recommended weren’t all that interesting. Then we walked around the Chinatown area and found a bunch of really cheap fruits and vegetables (tomatoes at $0.15 each… a thing of strawberries for $1…).
We also found something that lambert would love: a cheese store. That resulted in us deciding to have a dinner of (imported French) brie on crackers and fresh mozzarella with tomato with strawberries and green tea ($0.79/box)… all for about $4/person.

We’re heading to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) later tonight to browse their exhibits, and tomorrow will probably be spent travelling the city by streetcar and visiting the island via ferry.

Toronto day 1

Posted on by

Wheee, I am in Toronto.
The drive up was mostly uneventful, except for some periods where it rained really hard, and except for a couple Budget moving trucks that seemed intent to prevent Greg from passing them… at one point, they quickly merged into the same lane to let a few cars pass, and then very quickly cut him off. Meh. In any case, we lost them in traffic (finally), so yay.


Yay for the legal drinking age being lower here. I want to go have a legal drink sometime before I leave.

Camera repairs, take gaaah

Posted on by

I had a wonderful weekend… however, two things could have made it better
1) The weather could have been nice instead of being all rainy and muggy and cloudy and bleh.
2) My camera could actually be fixed instead of having the exact same problem within minutes of me pulling it out to use again.

So yeah, they didn’t actually fix my camera… same issue as before, except that I am now $250 in the hole.
I’m going back there tomorrow morning (even more inconvenience for me and for Greg, who has been amazing and helped out so much in dealing with their terrible hours and such) to get them to fix it for reals. So meh.

Camera repairs, take four

Posted on by

I wish this could be a “my camera is back and I am happy” entry….
My camera *is* back. However, they somehow lost the button that pops up the flash, so I currently have a paperclip attached to the strap that I have to insert into the hole to pop the flash.
Grrr.
There should not be this many problems with a company that is named for doing camera repairs.

In any case, work on Friday was amazing. I now have a total of about 28 bug fixes integrated into the codebase, fixing everything from minor code cleanup issues to major exception-at-runtime-and-loss-of-data issues.
I also worked a bit with another intern trying to get some software running off of the web.
Yay job satisfaction!

There was tasty dinner followed by 3-layer vanilla bean cake last night. I think this was actually the first time I’d eaten out in a while… and it just made me appreciate more how much cheaper it is to cook yourself (and not any less enjoyable than eating out if you have someone else to cook for :) ).

This weekend (later today, actually) is Ohio funness for twinsday. I get to photograph twins! Here’s hoping my camera holds up… given how much I paid to have it fixed, it’d better.
I should also call the company today and complain about the flash button. Bleh.

So yeah, I don’t recommend this camera repair service.