Blessed by the Potato

So, almost exactly 24 hours after I left my parents house (and about 25 hours since waking up), we finally got to the hotel.

The flight was actually not too bad (bearing in mind that it was a 12-hour flight). We were lucky and didn’t have anyone sitting in the 3rd seat beside us (the plane is laid out in 3 rows of 3), which gave us a lot of room to spread out and get WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos going. The plane, a brand-new Boeing 777, had a bunch of neat amenities to make the flight go a bit better. There was a selection of on-demand movies on the screens in the seat backs in front of us, as well as power outlets for our laptops (2 outlets per 3 seats). Unfortunately, the outlets seemed to have extremely low-amperage breakers, because the power would keep shutting off (there’s a small green light to indicate when the outlet is energized) with my laptop on. I could charge it when it was off though, and Dave had no problem running his non-beastly laptop. With a 12-hour flight even being able to use the laptop for an hour every 3 is a decent compromise (and if I had taken Wayfare up on her offer to take her laptop, I might have done even better). While I’m on the subject of laptops, I should also note that we got the internet in the room working so I can blog and check my email — my STMP server isn’t letting me send any (not a big surprise there), but there’s still webmail for sending. Dave’s using my computer at the moment as well, partly because we only have one ethernet port, and partly because his laptop has a 3-prong grounded plug, whereas all the outlets here are 2-prong ones. It is convenient for the most part, since it’s the same 2 prongs (at the same voltage and roughly the same frequency) that we have in North America, but is unfortunate when you get a 3-prong outlet like that :(

Anyhow, the service on the plane was pretty good. The seats had enough leg room that I wasn’t too cramped (though I would be a bit if I had my bag under the seat in front of me instead on the empty seat beside me — I might have to use the overhead bins for the way back). The flight attendants were all pretty good, and were especially free with the drinks and snacks this time (none of this tiny glass of Coke — they gave me the whole can :) In fact, I find it weird how good Air Canada is once you get in the air, and how actively hostile to their customers they are at the ticketing phase. For instance, their tickets are generally non-refundable, unchangeable (but, for a fee, you can opt to change them, for a second fee, later on… such BS). They didn’t end up getting my request for a veggie meal (the travel agent didn’t seem to put it through right, and I forgot to call AC directly), but when I asked one of the flight attendants for more of the corn chip things, he gave me two big handfuls of them :)

I lost my watch on the plane, it was really strange how it disappeared. I was trying to put it in my pocket, and dropped it down beside the seat near the window. When I had a chance, I got down on the floor and looked around for it (something else that would have been difficult with a 3rd, strange, person in that seat), but couldn’t find it. I figured it went behind me to the next seat back, but when the people back there got off the plane and I went to look, there was no sign of it. Some flight attendants helped look when the plane was empty, and we did everthing including tearing off the velcroed-on seat covers and cushions, with no sign of it. It simply vanished!

After that, we breezed through customs. The lineup wasn’t too bad, and they had absolutely no questions for us other than “anything to declare?” Waiting around on the plane meant we didn’t have to wait for our bags, and went on to the train. That, however, was a bit of a problem. We each had about 20,000 Yen (roughly $200) in cash, which should be plenty for lunches, trinkets, cabs, and the like, and we planned to put everything else (like train tickets) on VISA. Unfortunately, the train only took cash, despite having fancy machine-readable tickets. So, we parted with nearly all our cash, and headed out on what the conference organizers hailed as a 4.5 hour train ride. It came out closer to 6 hours, and would have been over 7 if our plane wasn’t early. Part of the problem is that the BEMs officials, aside from taking glee in torturing their scientists with obscure travel destinations and terrible planning, thought that Nartia airport was actually in Tokyo (from their description, attached directly to the Tokyo train station), rather than having its own train station over an hour away.

The Japanese trains are quite efficient, timely (every station has at least one white-gloved official with a stopwatch), and clean. I found the whole automatic ticket process really confusing though: we got 4 tickets to get from the airport to Kanazawa, an overall fare ticket, as well as a ticket for each train along the way. Different gates wanted different tickets, and combinations of different tickets, and we always got it wrong and have the gate beep and close on us. Then the officials would help us, and take our tickets, and we had to try to ask for them back (to get reimbursed by work). The Shinkansen (bullet train) wasn’t as impressive as I was expecting, at least at first. There weren’t any reading lights or individual air vents, and it didn’t really get up to speed until after we got out of the city (over an hour before we got over 200 km/h by my extremely rough eyeball estimate). The last train in our link, which took over 3 hours, was pretty painful. It was really hot and stuffy, and despite getting a seat in a non-smoking car, someone in there was smoking. It was also pretty noisy and rough — it rocked and jerked up and braked a lot, with a lot of squealing wheels.

Finally, after 24 hours of travelling, we got to our hotel. Checking in was pretty rough — I know my Japanese is worse than their English, but it didn’t make the process any smoother. The hotel has a 1 room, 1 key policy, which is pretty rough with 2 people in a room who are probably going to be attending different talks at different times… a policy that’s made more painful by the fact that everything in the room turns off if the keyplate isn’t left in the slot by the door (so while we’re out, the room gets hot and sticky, and if someone wants to walk off for a bit at night, the other one has to be ready to let him in — if they fall asleep, the one out for a walk might be SOL, but if the one walking takes the key, the one staying won’t have any lights). Dave suggested that we leave the key at the front desk when we go out, and then whoever gets back first could pick it up without worrying… but that seemed like a painful idea to begin with, then we got a call this morning asking for “Mr. Gen” — turns out Gen’s registered to our room, and they have no idea who we are. I don’t think I’ll be handing the key over just yet.

The phone says they charge for local calls, but I wanted to know if that applied to toll-free calls as well (for my calling cards); the front desk had no idea what I was talking about, which is just as well: the phone connection in the room is terrible, so I was better off using the pay phone anyway (I can call out for free from there — at almost $1/min on my phone card).

Evil Dead: The Musical is, IMHO, the best musical comedy out there. For those who don’t know, it’s a combination of the first two Evil Dead movies, with a lot of the catch phrases from the third one thrown in for good measure. Oh, and it’s also the only musical I know of where the first three rows get drenched in blood.

I saw it for the second time on Thursday, and I’ve got to say that the first show we saw (2 years ago), while the whole idea was still experimental, was more enjoyable. It’s hard to be sure after 2 years of memory fog, but some of the songs have been changed (expanded for the most part; I’m pretty sure “look who’s evil now” has a different, more up-tempo instrumental, though Wayfare thinks it’s the same). The comedic timing also seemed to be off in this one, with the dramatic pause removed from the classic “Name’s Ash [cha-chunk], Housewares” as well as a few other points. In the first version, there were a lot of squirting blood special effects, so the first few rows “may” have gotten covered in blood, but for the most part the actors managed to keep it on the stage. The current show has increased the blood volume, and now actively aims for the audience (even handing out disposable ponchos during the intermission). The new theatre space is great: there doesn’t look to be a bad seat in the house, so don’t be afraid to buy tickets in the back if you’re afraid of a little blood.

I liked the Canadian cast; Wayfare bought the CD (which is I believe recorded from the New York group), and I really think the Toronto cast is a lot better (with the possible exception of Cheryl (? — Ash’s sister)). A lot of the songs are really clever and catchy: I think “Cabin in the Woods” is going to become mandatory listening for any future cottage trips. Now, Wayfare says the singers on the CD sound better to her, sounding like “obviously trained singers” but I think that’s what I like least about the recording: they sound like they’re just belting out the lines with very little feeling or humour, and sound like they’ve been trained to project their voices (which isn’t really necessary in this day of mics and speakers).

Of course, the biggest change to the show from when we saw it first is the ending, and that I didn’t really enjoy. Wayfare had a great suggestion for that: keep the original ending, close the curtain, then use the new ending as an encore.

I saw the latest Pirates movie tonight, and quite liked it. I’ll talk about it in more detail after the spoiler warning. First I’ll talk about the theatre itself: the London Silvercity is the biggest, newest, and most conveniently located theatre around us. The movies themselves are always shown well: they don’t usually have problems with reel changeovers, scratched film, the sound is usually not too loud, yet never too quiet, and the airconditioning is usually comfortable — like many theatres it can be a touch chilly in the summer, but it’s never made me so cold I looked for my jacket before leaving (true story: one time at Empress Walk I was so chilled by the AC that, even though it was spring, I got confused and thought it was winter and spent a few minutes looking for my jacket before coming to my senses; I think this effect was helped by the fact that whatever movie I was watching was set in the wintertime).

However, the service there has always been sub-par. While the staff has never been rude, they’re very slow. The box office line can get fairly long at times, and it’s not usually because there are a ton of people, it just seems to take them a long time to move them through (perhaps this isn’t the staff’s fault though: the credit card machine could be slow, or perhaps customers are chatting them up or taking a long time to make up their minds, because we usually get our tickets in fine time once we finally get to the head of the line). The concession stand is much worse. The staff there are downright lethargic. Today, we lined up with only two people in front of us, and it took about two whole minutes to get to the front of the line. That’s with one person’s order already in before we lined up, and the next person only wanting a drink refill. Two minutes doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but for what got done in that time it was just ludicrously slow. The workers never seem to know their tills or how to count change, and are slow in all their actions to boot, as though everything behind the counter was happening in slow motion.

The staff there also have very strange habits when it comes to getting popcorn. Even if there’s a popper spewing forth fresh, hot, delicious popcorn right behind them (and when the lines are short, we’ll often pick which till to go to based on which one has fresh popcorn bubbling out), they’ll walk away, past the next popper and around out of sight (the concession is set up in the big round dish form) to get it. That, of course, adds significantly to the service time. Also, they’re really bad at popcorn management in general, often letting batches burn for a while before finally dumping them, and being downright neglectful in starting new batches during busy periods. Perhaps its because their concession has something like 6 poppers (at Cineplex we only had 3, and for all but the busiest opening weekends we would only run one or two), but they often let some run completely out before bothering to pop more — we always had to be one the ball, quite often putting in another batch as soon as the current one was dumped. In fact, it seems from casual observation as though they only have a few people “designated” to start batches. The popcorn is never very good there: quite often we get stale bags, batches without the proper amount of salt (generally not enough rather than too much), many batches with small, broken bits (which also comes from packing), batches where the taste is fine, but the texture is just completely wrong… and even when a bag of popcorn is generally good, there are always one or two pieces that are just rotten and make you go “blech!” We should probably complain to a manager at some point, but haven’t yet, although we have taken advantage of the free refills (on larges) and dumped a bad batch before. I find all of this quite bizzare, because the theatre makes most of its money off the popcorn: if it’s not constantly popping, people are less inclined to buy. If it’s not consistenly tasty, people are less inclined to buy. (We buy partly because Wayfare is a popcorn fiend, and partly because we almost always use “Night Out” passes that include a free popcorn). Even when they’re not very busy, they should consider keeping the poppers in use more, even if they have to close down part of their concession ring (we generally only go to “event” movies now, but even on weekdays they’ve got at least 3 poppers open — having just 1 or 2 open but constantly popping might work better for them), or pop half-batches so they don’t end up with too much excess. Finally, the seats there are not fantastic. They’re fairly comfortable for someone my height, but even just a little shorter (like Wayfare), and the shoulder support becomes a neck-wrenching headrest. The floors today were quite slick, and I couldn’t keep my feet in a civilized position, they kept sliding out in front of me, and I accidentally kicked the seat in front of me a few times when my foot lost traction.

Anyhow, on to Pirates:

Spoilers follow.

…

I really didn’t like the second movie — I saw it in the theatres, but even though my family has it on DVD, I’ve never watched it a second time (at least, not all the way through). A lot of the sequences were just way too ridiculous (Jack falling down the cliff while tied to the pole, the whole waterwheel 3-way swordfight), and really the whole thing was just the first act for this movie, right up to the (lack of an) ending. Plus everyone seemed to recognize the East India Trading co guy (Lord Beckette), but even checking IMDB I don’t think he’s in the first one. He has some sort of history with Sparrow, and it’s implied in this one that he betrayed Sparrow at some point (in fact, they may even have been partners in the distant past), but it’s never fully explained in this one.

This one I found a lot better: partly because it has an actual ending, partly because when the sequences get ridiculous, they’re kept shorter, and partly because Geoffrey Rush’s return brings the series up a notch. Not only does it add some more tension aboard the Pearl, he just simply looks like he’s having a blast in the role, which brings back some of the fun from the first one (the second really took itself too seriously for the amount of ridiculousness in it). This one had a few neat twists in it — I’ll give a second spoiler warning first — for instance, I never expected Will to take Davy Jones’ place, even when he was half dead. I thought Bootstrap would, especially in the seconds before it happened when he looked at his knife, or Jack, or even Elizabeth (who would follow him into death rather than waiting for him on shore for decades at a time, unaging).

I didn’t really care for the explicitness of Jack’s delusions (or the strange fascination with the peanut and licking things), especially since it was inconsistent in its lack of delusions right when Jack made his final decision not to captain the Flying Dutchman. I mean, the first one with him trying to captain the copies of himself in the Locker was ok, but I got really annoyed when he started talking to the miniature selves poking around his dreadlocks while everyone else was around.

Finally, one detail confused me at the end: Will proposed to Elizabeth during the battle, but didn’t the second movie open on their wedding being interrupted by East India/British troops?

I really like our new house. It’s cute, spacious, quiet, in a decent neighbourhood (from the front), and even has an as yet untested guest room. Renting has an advantage because we’re not responsible for a lot of the big-ticket items, and they even come to mow our lawn. (Plus the hot real estate market still scares me) Our landlord’s a nice enough lady… but man is she useless when it comes to making repairs (and there aren’t that many that are required). Most of her suggestions involve “buy a tube of that yellow expanding foam and just spray it everywhere.” I don’t really mind helping out and putting some work into the house, largely because I plan on being here for a few years, and because I’m a bit of a nonconfrontational sucker, and often find it easier to just fix something myself than harangue my landlord. I’m somewhat handy, but only somewhat.

One problem we can’t fix though is the water that seeps into the laundry room periodically. It lead to a mold problem a few months ago that we spent a fair bit of money trying to control — first we bleached the wall a few times to kill it off, but it grew back. Then we got this mold inhibitor stuff that worked fairly well on most of it, but there was this one brick that kept resprouting. A UVC lamp helped clear the air of spores and made it smell decent. We called her a few more times to fix the root problem, and she tried to pass it off to us to caulk or patch, and fortunately Wayfare was very good about staying on her case and making it clear that the problem was bigger than that. So finally she broke down and called in some guys (including her step son in law, if I got the relation right) to seal the entire wall with this blue foam stuff (she’s big on her foam). The guys did a decent job of sealing up that wall, but to get to it they had to move the washer/dryer out from the wall, and in the process disconnected the dryer from the wall vent, and just left it for me to fix. I’m not entirely sure how to go about it, either. In principle, it’s simple: plug the steel tubey bit into the port on the dryer. The problem is that the port is in the very far bottom corner, and the tube they used for the vent is completely inflexible with no joints, so I can’t connect it to the dryer away from the wall (where I could reach), and then push the dryer back. It has to be done with the dryer nearly against the wall. I don’t know if I should just get some flexible tubing for the job, or call a professional, or try moving the duct from the top to see if I can correctly jam it in the dryer port (blind). Hey, speaking of flexible tubing, I think I saw some in the ceiling of the laundry room, not really connected to anything…

The house, being over 100 years old, has certainly gone through numerous renovations. I’m afraid it looks like the current landlord hired some pretty questionable contractors along the way (from what we’ve seen so far, nepotism seems to be a big factor in her decision making). The newly redone bathroom (apparently finished just months before we moved in — it still had unpainted patches where the toilet paper holder was to go) has a vent, as many modern bathrooms do, to help blow humidity and unwanted vapours out of the bathroom, and ostensibly, outside. Ours has this flexible piece of ductwork (the kind that, IMHO, should be on the dryer) that goes into the laundry room, and just kind of sits there in the ceiling joists, not connected to anything. Likewise, many of the water seeping in problems (there was a problem with the stairs right before we moved in) has simply been fixed (rather sloppiliy at that) with expanding foam and paint. Now, I don’t play a house inspector on TV, but that does seem like it’s only going to do so much to help the problem. I would think that then the water would just pool up behind the new barrier and rot away the wood or brick, or in the winter, freeze and cause some real havoc. On the other hand, it is a much more involved task to get to the other side of the foundation and water proof that. And, as pointed out earlier, some of the plumbing work was “creative”. By the way, we’re still waiting for that pipe to be fixed.

My current theory is that she doesn’t consider the house a big part of the property value any more. Technically, her dental practice owns the house, and uses the “backyard” for parking (there is in fact, no backyard, just a nice sized deck for us, and a paved parking lot). While the house is very cute, has lots of history, and is in generally good condition, it’s now “just” a rental unit for her practice. She has said that she plans to sell the practice soon (and the house with it), so I think she’s already trying not to sink too much money into something that won’t offer her much return (that is, the state of the house is not really going to help her sell the practice for more, she just needs to do the minimum to keep us as tenants). Looking a bit further into the future, I think she might also consider that if the house were to be sold, the lot would probably be valuable enough as a place to build a newer, bigger house (or rental complex) on that the state of this house wouldn’t factor in greatly.

PS: We’ve lived here 6 months now, and the cat still thinks forced-air vents are the coolest, most interesting thing you could put in a house. Far more interesting than ants, for sure.

PPS: We also need the bulb on the security light fixed. It’s on the roof, and when the landlord suggested I change it myself and just bill her for the lamp, I was willing — it’s only a single storey bungalow, how bad could it be? Of course, after getting up on the ladder it turns out I’m more afraid of heights than I thought. I don’t want to start bugging her about changing it, since it’s clearly not the sort of thing she’d do herself, and it seems stupid to make her hire someone to do it… But without the snow to reflect the ambient light around, it’s really dark back there. So is there anyone brave in the London area that would like to climb up on my roof and change a lightbulb? I’ll make you some cinnamon rolls!

At first, I vigorously opposed Windows XP as an operating system. It just moved so many things around, buried settings in the control panels behind a number of extra layers of opacity that one simply didn’t have to bother with in 98/ME. It wasn’t just something else to get used to — it was a pain providing long-distance support for relatives, and even to this day I still sometimes wonder why it is that after finding my way down to the network connections page (and not internet options), then clicking properties on the connection whose IP I want to change, I still need to go through another level of clicking “properties” when having to change IP settings is a pretty common task…

However, over time, it really grew on me. In particular, its stability. I always used to have to plan on when I would have to shut everything down and reset the system; could I safely leave it until morning? If I pushed it, then I might lose a bunch of open work, or at least suffer through a lot of slowdowns until I did… with XP, a lot of those concerns went away. I can pretty reliably leave it going for weeks at a time now (though sometimes I’m limited by the automatic updates that install themselves and then want to reset the computer right then, user input to the contrary or not). In fact, I’ve gotten a little too cocky sometimes in terms of forgetting to save my work frequently.

Tonight, though, all that good will went down the toilet as I faced several old school Blue Screens of Death. I wasn’t even doing anything to get them. I was running BrainVoyager, and with the program idle, walked away for something, and when I turned back there it was.

BSOD.

Of course Brain Voyager is likely to blame since it is limited-production scientific software, but nonetheless, XP generally handles errors better than completely seizing up and crashing. Ordinarily, I might have just thanked whatever minor office deities were around at the time that I had saved my work just before getting up, but tonight I got really mad at the computer. What right did it have to force me to hard boot it and start from scratch? Even saved, it takes time to load all the brain images back into memory, and time just for the system to come back to life. Time to click on the annoying “your system recovered from a serious error, tell MS about it!” message. What’s with that message, anyway? I wish there was a way to turn it off, because I never send my error reports to MS. It’s not like they’re going to up and try to fix XP now, or try to make 3rd party software cooperate better. It’s just more time before I can recover from the error and get back about my business. I am, of course, lamenting all this lost time because I’m still at work and it’s closing in on 3 am.

A lot of the bitterness, though, I suspect comes from the Animal Crackers. It has been my experience that Animal Crackers are an angry food (though this is a realization I’ve only come to tonight). Almost every time I eat them, I find I get excessively annoyed at almost everything. It’s strange, because they sort of start out as comfort food, and they’re just so cute. They’re also somewhat bland and easy to just keep popping in your mouth in an unthinking way. But before long you’ve got this whole cookie menangerie in your insides, seething with hate and rage.

(Part of that, I suspect, may come from the fact that I really only ever eat them when I’ve got all-nighters… but nonetheless, I’m not impressed with the BSOD tonight.)