October, 2006

I went to the protest at Hôtel de Ville last night, but I arrived 20min late and only stayed for 5 min. Everyone was watching the meeting on a projection TV, and it seemed like it was going to be a very boring event. When a security guard asked me to check by bag and coat downstairs I decided to leave instead... so much for me and solidarity. At any rate I hate protests, so it was pretty easy for me to convince myself to leave.

Another Letter to Ms. Fotopulous

matthew — Tue, 10/31/2006 - 09:55

Ms. Fotopulos,

I am certain that someone has brought this to your attention, but there
are currently 2 online petitions in existence regarding the Parc Avenue
name change:

http://causes.ca/duparc
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?parc

The first one has over 15000 signatures. Since these are only the
signatures of people with internet connections, I'm sure that the numbers
of people who would sign are larger. In fact, while I have spoken to
several people indifferent to the issue, I have yet to hear a single
person in favor of renaming Parc Avenue.

I hope you don't choose to ignore this.

Matthew

Pumpkin Pie in Montreal

matthew — Mon, 10/30/2006 - 14:45

Where oh where can I find pumpkin pie in Montreal? I haven't seen any in Mile-End, or the plateau... It's a mystery...

2006-10-30 Diet & Health (not so good)

matthew — Mon, 10/30/2006 - 14:19

I still have a cough, but other than that I'm feeling OK. I feel a lot more rested than I did last week.

Sleep: 8 hours solid
HR: forgot
Weight: forgot

Breakfast: a bowl of Vector with skim milk

Snack: a Skinny spelt cookie (carrot ginger)

Lunch: 2 zatars (with lettuce, olives, hot peppers, mint, and pickled turnip), tuna salad

Dinner: 2 slices of cheese pizza

Snack: yogurt

2006-10-30 Training (ok)

matthew — Mon, 10/30/2006 - 14:18

Still sick so I'm intentionally taking it easy.

Total Time: 1:30

12 pm - lunchtime swim
- Swim: 1000m 30min (easy mixed strokes and dolphin kick -- mostly sets of 250)

5:30 pm - YMCA treadmill, rowing and weights
- Run: 30min (heart rate 140 - 160)
- Weights: 20min (upper body and core)
- Other: 10min (rowing)

training

cough

matthew — Sun, 10/29/2006 - 22:47

not since i've smoked
have i coughed so reliably
the breath
    tickle caught
           a moment
the question of will
it goes softly
   hung a moment 
        harsh release
        bent over
is it over

i don't miss my smoker's cough

creative

Marathon Smile

matthew — Sun, 10/29/2006 - 20:29

This is a picture my friend Kavita took of me after I finished my marathon. I look a little goofy when I smile, but I must say I was pretty damn happy.

Hasidic

adie — Sun, 10/29/2006 - 19:12

I love living in Mile-End (and well Outremont)... Today the Hasidic community had a little parade down my street. I'm not sure what it was all about, but they were dancing and following a PA system setup in the back of a truck. The whole thing couldn't have lasted more than 15min. Strange impromptu things like that seem to happen in this neighborhood all the time.

lazy weekend

adie — Sun, 10/29/2006 - 18:08

Laze about weekend letting my body heal. With the exception of Friday I didn't do much of anything beyond geeking out and watching TV. At my most active I met a friend for coffee. I also believe that Friday was my last day of drinking, and today my last day of sweets. I may still indulge periodically in some debauchery, but periodically is word to notice and note. I have to start focusing on building a lighter stronger body. Some think me strange for things doing like this... but...

Tomorrow I'll start some mild training, but I'll carefully monitor my cough. I'll also start tracking my diet, my weight, and my standing heart rate (hard to remember to do in the morning).

I've also scratched the surface of writing my own Drupal theme using the PHPTemplate language. I plan to try to make it XHTML Strict and fully standards complient.

Save Parc Ave

adie — Fri, 10/27/2006 - 15:38

Here's a link to the Save Park Avenue site which is coordinating efforts related to stopping the Tremblay administration from renaming Park Ave to Robert Bourassa Ave.

Demonstration:
Lundi / Monday 30 Octobre,
19h - 7pm
Hôtel de Ville
275, rue Notre-Dame Est
Montréal (Québec)

Save du Parc / Sauvons du Parc

matthew — Thu, 10/26/2006 - 08:54

Aidez nous a sauver l'Avenue du Parc, que le maire veut rebaptiser, sans consultation publique, Avenue Robert-Bourassa. Signer la petition :

http://causes.ca/duparc

Help us save Parc Avenue, which will be, without any public consultation, renamed Robert-Bourassa Avenue. Sign the petition:

http://causes.ca/duparc

High Ed Web Dev: Day 4

adie — Wed, 10/25/2006 - 13:12

Oh the pain... I missed breakfast, and I only managed to make it to one of the morning sessions. Drinking until 2:30 is not wise when you're supposed to get up early in the morning. I did however take a couple of Tylenol, grabbed a sandwich thing at a weird mall, and went to the seminar on legal "Fair Use". It was pretty good, although I still have to check whether canadian law has something similar.

I ate lunch with some of the people I had gone out with the night before, bid my farewells, and decided to skip the afternoon session and take off. I figured I'd get more tired as the day wore on and that the drive might become dangerous.

Anyway I got home safe and sound, the conference was worth it, and all is well.

misc
tech

High Ed Web Dev: The Excursion

adie — Tue, 10/24/2006 - 13:12

So we went to The Rochester Museum & Science Center where they had an open bar from 6:00 to 9:00 as well as a buffet. We had the run of the whole place, and we had a planetarium show from 7:00 to 8:00. It was really quite fun, and I met quite a few nice people.

After the Science Center I ended up bar hopping with a click of people who had known each other from attending the conference for a couple of years running. I thought I was just getting a lift back to the hotel but... I didn't get back to the hotel until 2:30am. It was a strange night out, the people I was with were very nice, but in a way it had a frat party sort of feel to it. I ended up doing a shooter that consisted of a shot being placed on a plate with spillover, set on fire, and then extinguished with an upside down glass. The fumes were preserved within the glass and inhaled after sucking up the shot with a straw. It hits you pretty hard and pretty quick. Things got even a tad stranger when I decided to follow some people up to the presidential suite before heading back to my room, but there's not too much story to tell there...

misc

High Ed Web Dev: Day 3

adie — Tue, 10/24/2006 - 13:12

Had a great night's sleep and I'm feeling a great deal better today than I did yesterday. I woke up naturally at 7:00, but I still had trouble motivating myself to get to the first seminar.

The first seminar was good, but it was about SEO (search engine optimization), which I'm only partially interested in. I did however learn a couple of things that might help me out in the long run.

The second seminar was about designing universally accessible templates for faculty. This was a bit of a waste of time for me, they didn't say anything I didn't know, and it was pretty simplistic.

The third seminar about form fillable PDFs was pretty useful, and I'm sure I will be able to apply it to the Office of Research at Concordia where I work.

Lunch was good, I sat with the a bunch of the Canadians, and I seem to get along with them pretty well.

The first seminar of the afternoon was about security, and since I've been both a server and network admin, and since I'm a Linux freak (my favorite distro being Gentoo), I found the take on security to be very lightweight and simple. Still I could see it being useful to the other attendees.

misc
tech

High Ed Web Dev: Day 2

adie — Mon, 10/23/2006 - 12:55

Well up at 7:15 for breakfast at 7:45 to make the keynote at 8:00, but I got a good night's sleep, after my drive yesterday I went to bed at 9:30 - yes I skipped movie night.

So the first seminar this morning was too management oriented and not technical enough for me. Although it's in the TPR track (the technical track), and billed itself to be about web application security.

The second seminar was about Ruby on Rails, and it was great. I really have to use it to do something sometime, but the question is what? They impressively demonstrated how quick a simple web app could prototyped.

Lunch was good, but I took off pretty fast after. I decided to go to my hotel room, skip the first afternoon seminar, and have a little nap.

The fieldset seminar was good in the sense that I didn't know much about them (didn't realize that they even existed as a semantic organization element for forms), but bad in the sense that he could have said everything in 10min instead of an hour.

misc
tech

Training & Diet

matthew — Mon, 10/23/2006 - 12:43

I'm in Rochester, and while I planned to train, I neither think that I will get much of a chance nor feel quite up to it. Therefore I'm not really going to track training or diet for the next couple of days.

October, 2006

More On Parc

Save Parc Avenue

2006-10-31 Diet (double meh)

2006-10-31Training (meh)

Protest