Ryan J. Allen

Hey Internet, where have I been?

The answer at lunch today was “The Works”.

I presented my final presentation for ADM2381 last Thursday afternoon. The presentation was good, but not great. I certainly didn’t differentiate myself from 200 other students. I did, however, manage to use the smallest prop imaginable: a screw.

Upcoming I have a trip to Toronto to see Nine Inch Nails perform. This will be followed by a day in Kingston and the annual NASCAR weekend in Watkins Glen, NY. The best part about all of this is that I will be riding everywhere, which means over 1500 km. An average of nearly 200 km a day, though there will be 3 non-riding days, unless they turn into riding days.

Saddlebags I ordered months ago finally came in, just in time for the big trip. I am pretty excited about them. I installed them last night on my ghost brackets, which allow for easy removal. Pretty Good.

Today is Brian’s last week at QNX and tonight I will be making him some chocolate chip cookies. He deserves them.

Much more, I’m sure, but I just wanted to get back into this posting thing.

This happened to me just last week:

Good news, Internet: I will be returning to my birthplace the last weekend in August.

I cannot even remember when I was last in Halifax. Possibly 2002. I have seen a few family members since then–the few who have ventured down to Ontario–but not all. I am excited about this trip.

Dear Internet:

I had a little bit of a geeky day today. I invested in an external hard drive and spent some time backing up data and setting up Time Machine on my Macs.

I installed iPhone 2.0 on my iPhone. I have been trying Mobile Me since last week and I am anxious to see how well the contact and calendar syncing works over the air. I played with the App Store a bit, too, and can say that the iTunes Remote Control by Apple really rocks.

I updated my TomTom and began preparing it for a trip to Toronto, Kingston, and Watkins Glen in the next couple of weeks.

I backed up the “most important” data I have in the Cloud via Mobile Me’s iDisk.

And finally, I moved some mail that was stored locally onto the server, which happens to be be hosted by Google/gmail. I moved some saved sent and received mail–all of it–which brings the number of messages I have stored on the server to around 15000. The neat part of that is that I’ve only been saving e-mail for about a year and a half (less than that, actually). Which means that I send/receive about 10000 e-mails a year–nearly 1000 a month. And that’s just personal e-mail; it doesn’t include work e-mail. What did people do before e-mail?

It was a fun day. Nothing too deep, but it feels good to have things organized.

Oh, and the Dark Knight is pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

As an amateur sushi eater there was a lot I could learn from the Sushi Eating HOWTO. If you aren’t well versed I’m sure there’s much you can learn from this as well. Maybe there’s even something for you veteran sushi eaters. I tired, so I’m rambling.

The Sushi Eating HOWTO introduced me to sashimi–essentially a dish with just the raw fish, none of rice et al that goes with sushi. As suggested, we tried this at dinner Friday night and were presented with an assortment of raw fish. One of the items–which I believe was cooked–was a shrimp. Now, please just take a moment to go visit the wikipedia page for shrimp. Take a look at the shrimp image. See the more red one on the right? Imagine that on a plate in front of you. Legs, head, eyes, and all.

Okay, so you eat the shrimp tail, and clear off the rest of the sashimi and the waitress comes to clear the plate. When taking the plate with the head of the shrimp on it she asks if you would like the head fried. What? Yes. Fried. Deep fried shrimp head. Apparently that’s a normal thing. Some minutes later your friend the shrimp returns, a little greasier than before, ready for consumption. It still has the feelers, or whatever, and the legs, and the eyes.

It’s not bad. Even the eyes. It’s kind of nice to see an empty plate, too.

I have always been a fan of the birthday paradox. Maths goes against your intuition to prove the astoundingly high probability that two people in a small group will share a birthday. And we see that in practice in our day-to-day lives when we meet new people and learn of their birthdays.

Well, I’ve long thought about the use of the maths behind the birthday problem to reduce the effectiveness of crypto but never really realized the source of this theory was the birthday problem. I was recently reading about some kind of vulnerability that specifically referenced a “birthday attack” and knew immediately what it was talking about. I am excited to now know the correct term for this.

I was literally hanging from MK and Zout for this photo at the airport. And if there was a theme song it would be this: link to a YouTube video that you should have playing in the background while reading this post.

Sunday was a day to appreciate. We toured around Vancouver, experienced a bit of life in the city, but mostly I just enjoyed the company. I snapped only a few photos but highlights of the day included Bon’s for breakfast, English Bay, watching a homeless person be arrested right in front of us, the five-cent sky train tour, more Starbucks (grande iced coffee, light ice, sweetened with white mocha), sushi at Samurai, GranZOUT island, London Drugs, and roast lamb at Olympia. It was action packed to the point where I could almost sleep on the airplane. The little bit of rest that I did get was enough to get me through the day of work.

Thank you to everyone in Vancouver who made me feel more welcome than ever. It was an amazing feeling to be on the receiving end of such amazing hospitality. I hope that I can offer hospitality that is half as good as that which I received in Vancouver. I am truly blessed.

So, I’ve taken a liken to the mint mocha frappuccino. I don’t like the chips. But the promoted drink is the mint mocha chip frappuccino blended coffee. Baristas cannot seem to get their minds around any slight variation of the drink.

I’ve tried just calling it a “mint mocha frappuccino”. I’ve tried explicitly saying “mint mocha–NO CHIP–frappuccino”. I have extremely limited success with either. I’ve walked away with either the wrong drink, or the right drink and a “we’re sorry” card about 80% of the time.

Who wants chips in their frappuccino anyway? I think they should get rid of them.

Actually posted at 08:32 PDT. I’m lazy so the photos are in a gallery at the end.

What would a weekend in Vancouver be without a trip to Starbucks? Zout and I went to pick up some groceries for a barbecue he was hosting that night at the local Safeway and fresh fruit market. In the same building was one of the city’s fine Starbucks locations so I was quick to take advantage of that in getting a triple grande, no whip, extra hot, white chocolate mocha. It was a fine beverage that elevated the grocery shopping.

From there a well orchestrated pick-up by MK occurred and we headed to 23rd and Main for Dim Sum at Sun Sui Wah. This is a place that would have a virtual sign that says “no white people allowed” if I were on my own, but luckily we had a couple of seasoned veterans guide us. Karen, Meaghan, and Honto (again, possibly spelt incorrectly) picked out some choice Dim Sum dishes for us that were delicious. I did get a few photos of a couple of random things, but there was much more that went around. I can say that I was certainly stuffed after an interesting brunch experience.

With MK in reasonable shape we headed to his apartment where I met Marni and enjoyed Matt’s very spacious apartment. Not only is a nice, large apartment but it’s also conveniently located seconds away from Stanley Park. We saw some totem poles, had a nice picturesque view of downtown, then drove over the Lions Gate Bridge to North Van. North Van was, if nothing else, a fine spot to stop for a beverage from Starbucks. Grande mint mocha–no chip–light frappuccino blended coffee: mmmmmmm.

One final stop was made at a suspension bridge that was pretty neat. It kind of made me want to search for something similar in the National Capital Region. And as an added bonus I received a telephone call from one Evan A. Orovan at this time; he was able to kill two birds with one stone in being able to chat with both MK and myself at the same time. Brilliant.

Zouty McZout’s barbecue was a supreme success. I made fresh guacamole as my contribution to the event; Zout made his famous seven layer taco dip AND had some leftover feta pate from an earlier event. I have some comparative photos showing the state of affairs near the beginning of the event, and at the end. You can see that even a large group of us couldn’t finish all of the delicious samplings.

Oh, and did I mention that it was a theme barbecue? Well, it was to one man: Andrew Giles. The barbecue was, in part, honouring Kaia who is leaving for a one-year stint overseas next month. It turns out that Kiai plays the online MMORPG “World of Warcraft”, so the party was partly WoW themed. Mr. Giles dressed up as a character from World of World of Warcraft. Not much else to be said there.

MK and I departed the barbecue a bit early, while the party was still in full-swing. It was necessary for me to charge up for today because the next three days are going to present some interesting challenges to me.