I can’t make this stuff up: the new Microsoft operating system offers users nine different ways to turn off their computers.
It’s a Rap!
(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)
Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.
Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.
We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.
Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.
Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.
From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.
I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).
One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.
During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.
The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!
After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.
In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.
Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.
Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.
It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.
(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)
Required Reading
The official VM wife has started her own blog! She’s at Minimally Invasive. Since it uses the same template as this blog (I’m cheap), you’ll only be able to tell us apart by the fact that Amy’s posts are far less jaded than mine. Also, she has better hair.
Down the line, we may put up duelling posts about some of our domestic wackiness. For the moment, we decided she should take the lead on the time I almost made her a botulism-tainted martini this week.
Never a dull moment!
Unrequired Reading: Dec. 1, 2006
Since I moved this blog up to a new version of the WordPress platform, I can do some neat stuff, like putting the rest of this post inside that “more” section, so it doesn’t take up so much space.
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 1, 2006”
Let it Rain
I just had one of the best meals of my life. I can’t even begin to describe the peanut and tamarind black cod, the lamb-three-ways, the blue fin tuna, or any of the other bazillion dishes we had. All hail Michael & Guy Rubino!
Containment Policy
I spent a chunk of the day wearing containment gear during a visit to a drug manufacturing facility near Toronto. Unfortunately, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement before the visit, so there was no way to take photos of myself in this amazing get-up.
My guide for this tour told me that the facility’s policies are for redundant safeguards against contamination (there’s some high potency materials in this site), so we were overdoing it for the sake of added safety. Even so, we didn’t enter any of the production suites where the material actually gets handled; the staff in those rooms wear full rebreather gear on a daily basis.
So, as you can tell, I’ve started another trip. This one’s pretty brief: I’ll be visiting one more drug manufacturer tomorrow, then hitting the Raptors/Celtics game with my contact at that company, official VM buddy Sam Ricchezza, last seen writing the Raptors report in our NBA preview, and goofing on me for not coming up to visit him and see his company.
Right about now, I’m hitting up the minibar for a caffeine fix. I’m also eyeing the pod-coffee machine pretty suspiciously, but it might be necessary to keep me awake till dinner, which we’ll be having at Rain, which “was once the site of Toronto’s first women’s prison,” according to the site.
Anyway, I took Shakespeare Wars with me (hardcoveritude be damned!), and have enjoyed the first 50+ pages. I’ve also got my Yoga for Regular Guys with me, since I’m trying to make a habit/practice of that. The weather’s pretty grotesque, so I doubt I’ll be able to take any good pictures. It’s a pity, since Toronto’s a kinda neat city. It’s my 3rd trip here, and it’s always struck me as a pretty good place to be. Admittedly, I know nothing about the economics of the place.
Balance transference
The nice thing about recognizing that my impulses can only lead to extravagant impulse buys (like the $1,500 I nearly spent on a new laptop last week), is that I actually have cash on hand when something significant occurs, like yesterday’s $900 bill for work on my car (tires, 60,000-mile tuneup, various belts, differentials and filers).
The added bonus of putting $900 into the Element of Style is that it kills the big impulse buy of getting myself a new car.
Black Coffee in Bed
Jane Galt has written about plenty of important topics these last few years, but none as important as Best Practices for Coffeemaking. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, especially since I recently moved back to paper filters after two years using a gold filter. We recently bought a new coffeemaker, because Amy concluded that having coffee waiting for her when she wakes up is never a bad thing, and the old one wasn’t programmable.
Despite my issues with buying products from German companies, I went back to the Krups well on this one. They haven’t done me wrong yet, and this new model’s been working out okay. But the big change, as I mentioned, is tossing out the gold filter and going back to paper. This was supposed to be a temporary measure, but I’ve been pretty happy with the coffee in the morning, so I’m sticking with it. Also, contra Galt, this new machine has a built-in water filter. I may take up her suggestion and get a Brita pitcher.
Which brings me to my #1 suggestion for good coffeemaking: get good coffee. This means whole bean, and not the Starbucks beans at your supermarket. For me, the best affordable stuff ($7.99/lb.) is the Kenya AA “Out of Africa” beans I get at Chef Central. When I wanna splurge, I head into NYC for Porto Rico Importing Co. and buy Hawaiian Kona ($24.95/lb.).
In the afternoons, I have a second dose of the stuff. I make this with a French press mug from Bodum (which they don’t seem to make anymore, according to their site). My coworkers goof on the devotion I have to making this stuff (“You actually grind coffee in the morning and bring it to work?”), but I believe that life is too short for coffee that comes out of a prefilled bag from a “drinks station”.
(At a conference & trade show in Paris in October, some exhibitors had complimentary coffee for attendees. This was my first experience with pod-style coffee, and it’s a poor substitute; trust me.)
So get good beans, grind your own either the night before or in the morning, and maybe use filtered water. And you can go too crazy trying to get “the perfect cup”. As one of the commenters on Jane Galt’s site put it:
The problem with increasing one’s level of coffee snobbery too far, is the same as the problem with wines, home audio, or any other hobby that deals with diminishing returns: the increase in required investment (time, money, or frequently both) to go to the next level of enjoyment, begins to far exceed the marginal return from doing so.
(One major caveat I need to make: I take my coffee black. I’m pretty sure I adopted this style because it reduced the amount of variables that go into preparing the stuff. This way, I only have to deal with the quality of the beans, the water, and the coffeemaker. No worries about the milk being off, or having the wrong kind of sweetener available. Maybe I also drink it this way to avoid the chemicals and/or calories in the additives. Or I’m just all hardcore and shit.
The point is: my best practices for coffeemaking need to be balanced against this bizarre predilection I have. Similarly, never trust me with any issues involving alcohol.)
Not Feeling the Pynch
I’m in between books right now. This condition never lasts long, but it’s strange that it’s happening just now. See, there’s a new book out by an author who used to be my fave, but I’m not interested in reading it, and I’m not sure why that is.
Last week, I stopped by a nearby bookstore and took a look at the new novel by Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. I used to consider myself a devotee of his books, but I was surprised to find that I had little interest in buying this one. This is a marked change from the winter of 1990, when I got out of a (barely) moving car to run into a B.Dalton’s after seeing the newly published Vineland in the window. There was even some bating of my breath in 1997 when Mason & Dixon was released. Now? Bupkes.
It’s not because of an aversion to long / involved books (AtD is nearly 1100 pages); I just finished a 600-page exploration of the history and meaning of the mourner’s kaddish, worked my way through a 1200-page biography of Robert Moses last summer, and read Proust’s opus in the spring of 2005.
The problem (I think) stems from a short work by Pynchon: his introduction to a recent edition of George Orwell’s 1984. I read the intro a few weeks ago, and was amazed by how much Pynchon came off as an aging hippie who was trading off his old licks. Pynchon’s attempted hijacking of 1984 to tacitly denounce the Bush administration read as something far less nuanced than I’d come to expect from the writer. This, of course, led me to suspect that I was too kind in my past readings of Pynchon’s work, but I haven’t gone back to check.
(A gentleman named Mark Ciocco summed up pretty nicely some of his problems with Pynchon’s 1984 intro in a post and a followup) on his blog a few years ago.)
So, by the time this new book saw print, and the first review (from a right-wing newspaper) mentioned the cardboard-ness of The Bad Guys in the novel, it struck me that maybe I’m just too old for Pynchon’s whole Merry Prankster / anarchist counterforce approach, in which the doomed valiant create chaos just about for its own sake, with the corollary belief that order is inherently evil. Or maybe he’s too old to see the present era with the vivacity of his earlier work. Or maybe he’s still writing allegories of the struggle against Nixon.
I’m rambling, which you’re used to by now. I’m trying to convey this suspicion I have that, despite all the gorgeous, Rilkean prose and labyrinths of symbolism he broke out in Gravity’s Rainbow, and all the intricate, encapsulated plotting of The Crying of Lot 49, and even the wondrous camaraderie he evoked between Mason and Dixon, this guy may be a burned-out wreck who complains about The Government, Big Business, Dehumanizing Technology, and other embarrasingly obvious targets.
Driving home tonight, I heard a song by the Who on my Sirius radio. I hadn’t heard Cry if You Want in a bazillion years, and my first thought was, “Man, Kenny Jones was a boring drummer.” But then there were the lyrics, which feel apropos:
Don’t you want to hide your face
When going through your teenage books
And read the kind of crap you wrote
About “Ban the Bomb” and city crooks
So I’m back where I started: between books. I’d start Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book, but I’m flying soon (Toronto to visit a couple of clients) and I don’t want to carry a big hardcover with me. I could always follow Ron’s recent suggestion and start reading the Philip Kerr Berlin Noir omnibus. Choices, choices. . .
Pray for change II
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been out of the office for the past week-plus (except for Monday). When I have a big block of time available like that, I tend to put together a big-ass list of stuff that needs doing. One of the items on the list was cleaning off the console table.
The table is at the top of the stairs and is the first place small things get dumped upon entry into the house. It was covered in receipts, ATM slips, office memos, warranties, baseball caps, maps, Post-Its, and small change.
I made a couple of passes through the paperwork, dumping most everything in the shredder. Soon I was left only with a significant quantity of change. I dumped it on my desk and thought, “Well, as long as I’m clearing that stuff out, I oughtta get the change that’s been piling up in my car for the last 3 years, too.”
That was a little tougher, insofar as pennies and nickels were consigned to the cup-holder area, which left some of the coins at the bottom a little sticky. In fact, there’s still a penny that I simply am unable to pry from the cup-holder, but I guess that’s tribute to Charon or something.
On the other hand, the actual change-holder, which I use for quarters and dimes, turned out to be cavernous. Amy joked that I’m going to get better mileage and handling now that I’m not hauling a ton of loose change in the car.
So I looked at this enormous pile of change lying on my desk, and I thought, “Surely the time it’ll take me to count all this is worth more than the value of the coins.”
But my ethnic stereotype was undeterred. It took even longer than I feared, and put me in mind of being a little kid with a piggy-bank. Final count?
- $5 in Sacajawea dollars
- 1 50-cent piece (I also carry a “lucky” one in my wallet)
- $1.71 in pennies ($1.72 if you include the one that’s permanently stuck to my car)
- $4.00 in nickels
- $18.70 in dimes
- $23.25 in quarters
- 25.60 Euros (about $33)
- 64 Danish Kroner (about $11)
- 400 Hungarian Forints (about 3 cents)
I don’t think there’s any sorta lesson I can impart from this, outside of “Don’t let your change pile up” or “Just use CoinStar, fer chrissakes.” My next challenge will be finding someone who can exchange the Euros and Kroner, since my local bank won’t touch foreign coins, only paper money.