I’ll try to rattle this out before I forget most of my trip to Montreal.

My car was delayed leaving for quite a while due to other people having work and interviews to do, in the mean time I bought The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen which I ended up reading most of during my stay in Montreal and the trip there and back.

After we got to Montreal (like 6 hours later) we met up with the other car and had dinner. And by had dinner, I mean we walked… for a very long time… looking for a restaurant, and it was probably half an hour before people started stopping and looking at the menu’s for places. This should have foreshadowed things to come. See, we were a group of 8, and no matter what the size of the group, I’m guaranteed to be The Fat One (I’m sure there’s a lemma on that somewhere), so while everyone else managed to keep up, my feet and shins and such began to hurt, and more, and worse, and so on. So I ended up trailing at the back some distance. We eventually hit a restaurant we accepted who’s name I cannot remember and stopped. There was a bit of a line, but in their very cramped dining area they managed to seat the eight of us. I had brochette du poulet if I remember correctly, which was pretty good. Oh, and then we walked back. Since it look us like 2 hours to find a restaurant, and then another 2 hours maybe to eat, plus getting to Montreal late in the first place, is was kind of late by the time we were done. Walked back some ways until we hit a bar called, strangely, Le Drug Store. I had a couple of amaretto and pineapple drinks and the evening passed with only one horribly embarassing photograph.

We headed back to the hotel (Days Inn) at some point, I can’t even remember. Then I checked out the room, it was very nice actually: two double beds, one for me, one for Curtis (no more spooning, yay); A TV; bathroom; semi-functioning lamps; a phone that always claims there is a message… well, despite those last few things, it was still a nice room, very clean and beds were comfy.

I woke up with a terrible headache… having drunk two drinks the night before. Why? Anyway, At around 11 we headed to a place called Coras (which I have no idea if I spelled right) for Brunch. Everything there looked terribly fattening, so I took the most healthy thing I could find, a banana-hazelnut chocolate crepe. It was huge, so I only ate about three quarters of it before giving up. Then we were off, for .. more.. walking. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with walking, but I do have my own difficulties with it… like nothing shows off to others very plainly how out of shape I am when I can’t keep up with their 2 hour treks walking at what I consider an entirely non-leisurely pace. But, strangely, but luckly, the subway for Saturday and Sunday was free, so we used that a bit.

The first part of the trip was shopping which is always a futile experience for me. Well, clothes shopping, we went to nice places that simply don’t make clothes that fit me, so I hung out with the girls and totally failed to be of any use at all. Alicia tried on a jacket and asked what I thought… I thought it fit okay, but the colour was drab. She liked the colour, but thought the fit was way off. I’m lucky I’m a guy and can get away with not having 17 pairs of shoes and outfits.. I have clothes, not outfits… and so I digress. Later we split up, some went back to the hotel for sleep, but not Curtis, Alicia, Laura and I… we headed to Old Montreal which was actually very close to our hotel anyway, and checked out the rain. Yeah, I Should probably mention that, it was pretty nasty all weekend, it never poured while we were out in it, but I did get damp due to my boycott of umbrellas. So it wasn’t the best weather, but we did sight-see a bit, which was nice. There are some photos of it, but as they include me, I’ll never post them myself. I was amazed at how often people spoke english there, I never needed to use my french at all. Then I tried actually using my french, and each time, failed miserably. Even stuff that made no sense… we were getting drinks at a place, and I asked for “Un Coke”… the guy asked me in english to speak more slowly… “A Coke”… “ah, une canette de Coke”…… .. …. .. .. … “oui”. That was the last time I made an effort. Then we tried to go to dinner, which was even more futile than the first time, since we brought wine and thus had 3 conditions, relatively cheap meals, bring-your-own-wine allowed, can seat eight, and no lines. Well, we gave up on that last one after a while and waited in line (after searching for a couple hours) for a couple hours. Someone then heard it would be another half hour before the line would move again, and as the rain was starting to come down, we sent an envoy to find another restaurant, and we did, Mochica.

Now that is a strange place. It didn’t have the bring your own wine, but it does have some of the longest wait times around, which curtis constantly defended as a Brother Chef. But the wait gave us time to go to the bathroom and check out the little wooden sculpture of two little guys, one attempting to force the other to felate him. I am not kidding.

My dinner was the Pulled Chicken in some sort of sauce. What I got was what I would have considered Obliterated Chicken, it looked like it had already been eaten once, but after being assured by another who had ordered it, having been just as surprised and trying it, it turned out to be okay tasting after all, I just ate with my eyes forward.

After that we got ready to go clubbing, which I was dreading, since as I think I’ve iterated before, I am not a clubber. I’m just too unattractive. But, as it turns out, no worries.

Most of our party was homosexual, so we ended up at a gay bar, which I didn’t clue in to at the time (we cabbed there, yeah, no walking!). I think I realized something was amiss when the drag queen dance show started. But at least I didn’t feel bad about having not picked up. I danced a bit, but my terrible dancing cannot compare to that of all my gay companions, or indeed the rest of the world at large. The last part of the night was spent trying to scream at each other to find out if we were leaving, when, and what was that about leaving. The music was really really loud Alicia, when asking me if I wanted to join in with having a shooter, nearly perforated my left eardrum, and not in a good way. I actually drank relatively a lot, considering I had promised myself that I wouldn’t drink after the headache of the night before, but the $1 shooters they had must have been watered down (or perhaps just slightly boozed-up water). At 3 am the place closed and we headed back to the hotel only stopping to have slices of pizza at a little place. Alicia agreed to split a peice with me, and then decided to decline, I tried to convince her otherwise, to the point of simply eating my half and deciding to throw out the other half, until the others we were with decided to eat it, heh. Curtis abstained from the pizza, but if he had offered her the slice, I bet she would have taken it. Piffle.

We went back to the hotel and I slept quite well, but we had to wake up relatively early for the check out. After that, not much to say, the two cars met up at a restaurant where curtis ate the largest amount of poutine I could even contemplate, and I looked at the condom machine in the restaurant bathroom. One of the dispensers actually sells four items, that are in a theme (pleasure pack or something)… a condom, oil, oriental ring which I have a shrewed idea about, and pleasure extender which I can’t even being to guess at. The great thing was is that they expected you to actually “collect all four”… like you’re going to keep buying from the machine hoping to complete your pleasure pack collection and have that wild sex with supplies by some roadside restaurant.

We met up once more to divvy up our money for the shared expenses, the hotel, the car rental, the booze, and I pretty much exausted my budget for the trip, which was $300. Then Laura drove me to a subway station where I could take it to a nearby stop and … yes, walk home. At least by Sunday the weather was amazing.

So ends the account of our voyage to Montreal, it was pretty fun though the weather was sucky. One day I hope to return, armed with some better french.

Humans deal in Base 10, with the numbers 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, but Computers deal in binary numbers, 1 and 0, also called Base 2

Base 2 numbers are very long, and hard to look at, take a look at this number I picked at random
00001001111110010001000100000010100111010111010011100011010110111101100001000001010101101100010101100011010101101000100011000000

wow, that’s pretty long and hard to look at… it happens to be 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 in Base 10 notation.
How do you do that? Well, each digit is an additional power of 2, just like in a base 10 number each digit is a power of 10, the right most (or least significant digit) is 10 to the power of 0, multiplied with the digit, making it the digit itself, the next number is 10 to the power of 1 multiplied by the digit, and add them all up. In Base 2, it’s 2 to the power of the digit.

But Computers deal in Binary, but it’s hard to look at them, so we break them up into groups of 4:
0000
1001
1111
1001
0001
0001
0000
0010
1001
1101
0111
0100
1110
0011
0101
1011
1101
1000
0100
0001
0101
0110
1100
0101
0110
0011
0101
0110
1000
1000
1100
0000

Each set of 4 bits can represent 16 numbers,
0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0011 = 3
…
1111 = 15

Base 16, known as Hexidecimal, is nicely compatible with binary since you can do this chunking and translate the digits directly.
So in base 16, the numbers 0 through 15 have a single “symbol” to represent them, like 9 is 9, but A is 10, B 11, C 12, D 13, E 14 and F 15

So take our chunks and work out what number it is in Hex

0000 = 0
1001 = 9
1111 = F
1001 = 9
0001 = 1
0001 = 1
0000 = 0
0010 = 2
1001 = 9
1101 = D
0111 = 7
0100 = 4
1110 = E
0011 = 3
0101 = 5
1011 = B
1101 = D
1000 = 8
0100 = 4
0001 = 1
0101 = 5
0110 = 6
1100 = C
0101 = 5
0110 = 6
0011 = 3
0101 = 5
0110 = 6
1000 = 8
1000 = 8
1100 = C
0000 = 0

And when you arrange the string of Hex digits back into a row, you can see, it’s easier to read

And so concludes converting a totally random series of bits into Hex.

I’ll write about Montreal later.

I dunno why, but this song pops into my head from time to time. It’s the theme for a short-lived animated show called Cybersix. I’m not even entirely sure what it’s about, except that the heroine disguises herself as a man. Anyway, the theme:

There’s a time when the moon reveals its face through the clouds.
I let out a sigh and want to cry out loud.

But deep in my heart I feel love so alive.
In the depths of my soul I know we will survive. Cybersix.

And here is the theme itself:

I’ve actually been up to a reasonable amount of stuff recently, and more to come.

Last wednesday, I went to a Raptor’s game. Yes, I’m as surprised as anyone. Friend Brett asked me to go when tickets awared to a coworker trickled down since apparently no one likes basketball except him. And in desperation he asked me if I wanted to go. I assume desperation since anyone who knows me probably knows how much I enjoy spectating sports, heh, but I decided to go, since it was something I had never done before. It was enjoyable enough, though I didn’t know anything about the teams or the players, or even, to my horror, the length of the game. See, I always thought they played in some sort of quarters but they were called periods or something, and assumed that it all added up to an hour. But no, of the four periods, they are each 12 minutes. So something I would normally joke about (like wondering where the puck is at a football game, or shout out ‘he made another score-point’) suddenly bit me. Oh well. Unfortunately, the Raptors lost, but I was amused at the Raptors mascot attempt to get the audience to clap in response to his drum. One attempt was so pathetic he threw the drum to the ground and walked off. I also found myself getting into the game, shouting when the Raptors defence screwed up once more.

The next day I went to a company event at Spacco’s, a bar/billiard place we’ve been to before (both with friends and company functions). I only stayed for an hour, I really don’t know that many people at work, at least, well enough to stand around and talk to about things other than work, and all that makes migling an excersize of futility and trying to make it look like my fidgitting hands are normal, yeah.

On Sunday, I went to ‘The Beaches’ with Alicia. She warned me that it wasn’t all that great there, but it seemed fine to me. One thing was at a cafe patio a guy came up, said excuse me, and held up a flash card explaining the dire straights he was in and could we give him money. That was a new one for me. Oh, sure, big signs to get attention like “need money”, but not flash cards. But he was on the patio, thus interfering with customers, so I declined giving him anything. Alicia did, so I probably look like some sort of cheap monster or something. He probably targetted us since he thought I’d give money to him to look generous in front of her, heh. Now, on the street, I’ve done it, many times, if I actually have the change (I tend to rely on debit card). But I didn’t want to encourage him to basically walk into a business (patio is part of the cafe dammit) and successfully beg. Probably sounds terrible. Fine.

Anyway, then we went walking along the beach for a while, sat down on large rocks and talked for a while. The weather was nice, though the sun seemed a little feabler than I would have expected. Not a cloud in the sky, but it was getting colder and colder. We went for dinner a while later, adn then for ice-cream, and I managed to have it melt all over my shirt and pants, I’m some kind of classy guy. I walked her home, and by that I mean we went all the way from the beaches to her place which is far north (on the TTC of course), then I took a bus west a little then the subway all the way back to Yonge and Eglinton. She had originally described her route as seedy and wanted to leave before dark, but it was well dark before we left. I always feel more comfortable walking her home, the protection-instint runs high. While I was there I saw some pictures of her recent trip to Japan, and got a cute little porcelain cat that works like a bell she got me as a souvenir. All and all a nice day, one of the best ones in recent, or even moderately distant memory, heh.

And upcoming, friday I’m leaving with her and others for a trip to Montreal, woot vacation (short though it may be)

If I don’t come back, avenge my death.

It probably hasn’t escaped many people that something unfortunate occured at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, killed 32 people, and then himself, and left a rambling legacy. His manifesto is a little odd, I would have expected something a little more obvious like the difficulties of love and life, but he goes on about revenge against vague ideas, rich people, but no specifics. Which is a pity, since perhaps some sort of coherent motive would have helped. But probably not.

The thing that strikes me whenever something like this happens, is the sheer futility of life. You can grow up, work hard, get educated, find love (obviously talking about someone other than me, thanks), get married, have a child, and the child grows up, and then some asshole comes along and kills them. Or your child before they grew up, or your love, or you, or you as a kid, or whatever. No matter what you do, there is nothing, nothing at all, that will stop some crazy guy, or even a merely determined sane guy, from wiping out anything and everything you cared about. And ultimately, with that kind of lack of guarantee, it does seem to be a pointless endevour… but people go with it anyway, since it seems to be worth trying, and just hope it’s some other person, or kid, or spouse, that gets killed by the next crazy guy, because there will always be another one.

And people always want to make sense of things like this, and so do I frankly… I mean, I can understand some guy killing his girlfriend for dumping him, a reprehensible act of course, but you can understand why… I can understand why a husband or wife would kill their kids and then themself, as punishment to the other and/or to spare the children having to be with the other. Horrible, but you can see how the hamsters ran in the wheel… but the ones where some guy (or guys, and of course, this is a guy thing, rarely do women engage in this crap) goes and kills a bunch of other people.. “I’m taking them with me”, and then the suicide… it’s hard to understand…

But, given the description of this latest mass-murderer, I think I do… mind you, that’s a lot of screwed up hamsters in that wheel. But I was actually informally ‘voted’ most likely amongst my ‘friends’ in highschool to go on a killing rampage. Oh, they laughed then, but that was still before Columbine, you know, when it was a school, and not a landmark in history. See, when you’re taunted and made fun of consistently, for years, well, you tend to take a grim outlook on people, and eventually, everyone is a potential enemy. Hell, to this day (or rather, in the days I was in university) I would avoid going down hallways with groups of people who looked mob-like (where they all knew each other) since I was wary of being insulted/assaulted as I passed. Old quirks die hard. So you stop talking to people, at all, go cold, go quiet, you just want to be left alone. Anyone who doesn’t immediately hate you will ignore you since you’re so damned cold and unfriendly, and those that do hate you (for whatever reason, mine was for being fat, hurrah) will continue to hurt you any way they can because, why the hell not? So then you’re entire interaction with people is defined by those bad ones. You just hate everyone… everyone is the enemy… the only reason that person (pointing randomly at someone never before seen) hasn’t hurt me is because they haven’t been given the opportunity yet, but mark my words, give them a second, and they’ll just spit on me. (interesting side note, I’ve actually been maliciously spit on by someone, how many people can say that?) When everyone is your enemy, the day you snap, everyone is your potential victim.

I’m not trying to justify or derive sympathy for what the guy did, in the end, it all comes down to your own decisions, of course, but perhaps his thought processes went something like that. Now I wonder what the fallout will be… irrational fear of Asians, stupid new rules (no making the gun gesture with your hand)…

What I wonder about is all the other people who were like him, and like me, in school. The quiet ones, the loners seeking their own seclusion, writing violent stories (I wrote a couple crazy things I won’t repost under advice from an attorney)… I guess it will be like it was after Columbine, where any kid wearing a trenchcoat was threat-in-waiting.

So to all you loners out there, smile once in a while, get out of the dark stink of the comfy lounge and write a poem about happy daisies on a hill or something, or else you’ll wind up in Guantanamo Bay.

UPDATE: I’d like to make it clear that the rambly bit above was meant to be humourous, speaking in that stream-of-consciousness paranoid way. I’ve been told that people might think something else. So I’d like to mark this entry with a giant flashing SATIRE sign flashing over it.

See the following video for explanation (skip to about 4 minutes in for the part I’m referencing):

I never used to play stupid flash games, never. If I played a game, it was a full on proper game dammit. Sure, I played a few things in the past for like 20 seconds. Or occasionally joined a friend in some yahoo game (technically java, but same difference for my purposes). But as a single endevour, I never played the things.

But recently I’ve been tapping the relatively large resource of Digg’s playable web game category, and playing all sorts of interesting games that have totally destroyed my productivity whereever I may go.

So here are some of them so you too may suffer:

Gateway 2 – a spooky puzzle game

DiceWars – risk with dice, never before have I been so angry

Motherload – a game of ore excavation and, confusingly, battles with Satan

Winterbells – winter and bunnies and bells, very cute

Bugs – from the maker of the previous game, this one is a charming bug scaring game

Quest for the Rest – very short but interesting looking and sounding proof of concept puzzle game

Gridlock – a familiar puzzle game I’ve suddenly become decent at, level 35 is where I got stuck

Anyway, that’s just a few. I’ll see you in hell dicewars.

EDIT: Flow, how could I forget flow, it’s a really nice one.
flOw – a game of eating and evolution, no instructions as it’s meant to be intuitive, but eat red thingy to go down a level, blue to go up, and basically eat everything else. This is kind of what I wanted Zygote to look like when I originally conceived it as a 2D game, the style is minimalistic and perfect in a cellular biology kind of way.

EDIT2: 3D Logic Cube – view 3 sides of a cube and connect the colours, interesting

EDIT3: All Hallow’s Eve – one of the more fun survive-the-zombies flash games I’ve encountered, add house defenses, buy new weapons (from who?, oh well), and kill the advancing armies of zombies crying for brains. Easy is far too boring, try normal difficulty, and hard for any thing resembling a challenge.

EDIT4: Sprout – A coconut dreaming of being an oak tree, acquiring new forms to passively move across the countryside. An entirely too short puzzle game that has a lot of potential.

Woke up late today, got home late last night from a date. Yeah, a date, not the consumable, but the activity. I wasn’t sure if I should write this entry, since it’s a bit voyeuristic, plus she’d probably be annoyed, but for the moment she doesn’t know about this site or the blog, so hopefully she’ll be receptive once we’ve solidified our relationships.

I met her at work, her name is Kristen, but she prefers Kris for some reason. I dunno, it’s only down to one syllable from two, so it’s not like it’s saving any time. Anyway, that’s her real name anyway, as she’s chinese so that’s just her english name. Yeah, me and the chinese (or generally oriental), I guess my genes are seeking out a little hybrid vigour. She a developer for another group at my company, so I never actually see her day to day, but we met at last month’s company cake-day. I’d like to say I wooed her as a complete stranger, but a couple of coworkers who dragged me down there (I don’t like going for the cake… look at the fat man eat cake, wooo) knew her and so we grouped together. I guess I got her attention, or maybe one of my co-workers who knew of my single-status helped goose things along, but we chatted a lot longer than I think the company intended for the cake-break.

Anyway, I somehow got enough confidence to ask her out. Oh, of course, it wasn’t phrased like that, just if she felt like doing something, and she actually agreed. I won’t go into the details of the actual events, since I embarrassed myself a few times, and I’d like to hold back a bit. Also, despite my acceptance of modern day feminism, I felt kind of weird being driven around. I need to get myself a car. When she dropped me off at 3am last night, we kissed. I was nervous about the possibility of that, because I’ve been told in the past I was a terrible kisser (when I was taken unawares one new year), if even I should consider it a kiss, that was more of a peck. This was a kiss, we said our goodbyes and she left.

I guess over the coming week I’ll try to set up another one. I just have to keep things slow and not say anything stupid this time. I have to keep my feelings from the past from surfacing with her, as that’s, apparently, driven people away in the past. I’m still in shock really… and the worst part of this entire post is that it’s completely made up, there is a date here, check it, and be fooled, april fooled that is. If anyone is interested in why I picked the name Kristen, it’s because a) it’s not someone who could read this and think I was secretly pining for them, and b) it’s the name of a girl I had a crush on in middle school, so why not. I decided not to use the bad luck of a girl who’s name ends in ‘a’.