Monthly Archives: August 2007

Toronto day 2

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Camera repairs, take three

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As further proof that it only takes one thing to ruin my day, I offer today as an example.

I had a very good day at work. Today was mostly spent integrating my bug fixes into the code base and ensuring that I didn’t break anything.
A nice surprise came at around 10 AM when the camera repair shop called me to tell me my camera was fixed. Yay!
I talked to another programmer about one of my bug fixes, as he had a similar issue that he was working on. He praised my fix and wondered how he hadn’t thought of that before, and said that he was going to base his fix on mine. That made me feel really good about my ability, especially since this was probably the most complicated fix I’ve done this summer (involving multiple asynchronous calls and interaction between more than three threads).
My boss said that he liked many of my fixes, and that the issues he was bringing up were all nitpicks.
Overall, I integrated over 10 bug fixes into the codebase today, fixing two priority 1 bugs, as well as a bunch of other lower priority bugs.

I headed home a bit early to grab my credit card, lens, and memory card (so I could pay and test my camera), leaving work feeling very satisfied.
I bused to the camera repair shop. It took about 30 minutes.

So apparently they decided to close over an hour early today, and hadn’t bothered to tell me this morning when they called about my camera… you know, in case I decided to go and pick it up today or something.
As a result, I was in a rather bad mood as I boarded the bus home.
The bus back was extremely packed and I was getting claustrophobic, and people were blatantly ignoring the “please move to the rear” signs resulting in there being about 10 people standing at the VERY FRONT of the bus (despite the fact that there were both seats in the very back and nobody standing behind the first row of seats), making me miss my stop at Craig.
Overall I spent over an hour on two buses going downtown and back. I was not very happy when I was coming into Fairfax.
As I approached the elevator, I saw this girl entering the building from the front, and held the elevator for her. Not only did she take forever to walk to the elevator (almost as if she was going deliberately slow to spite me, since she definetly acknowledged that I was holding the elevator for her and she wanted it). Then she proceeds to take the elevator to the second floor.
GAAAH.

Now I am rather annoyed at the world and this company, given that they took 4 days to even tell me what was wrong with my camera (because their technician was out… but it seems to me that if your company is named “Camera Repair Store”, you should have more than one technician), the repair was more expensive than I was expecting (although, to be fair, I suppose that wasn’t their fault), and they closed early and made me waste over an hour of my day for nothing. And I am still cameraless.
*sighs*