Missing Macworld

For the first time in a long time, I won’t be attend­ing Mac­world Expo Trade Show in San Fran­cisco this year, which opened today. There are many, many jour­nal­ists and blog­gers cov­er­ing the show, Steve Jobs is not giv­ing the keynote tomor­row, and frankly, in recent years, aside from the plea­sure of vis­it­ing one of my favourite Amer­i­can cities with see­ing many friends there, I haven’t really got­ten that much out of the show itself, either in terms of any­thing I didn’t already know or new busi­ness. So, this year I’m sit­ting it out, but that doesn’t mean that it’s out of mind. For that rea­son, this piece by the Onion came as a wel­come surprise:

Apple Intro­duces Rev­o­lu­tion­ary New Lap­top With No Keyboard

As usual, the Onion hits it out of the park. Bravo.

Update: I can hardly believe it, but appar­ently a blog­ger thought this was a real prod­uct and reviewed it.

Too Much of a Good Thing

You can have too much of any­thing, be it snow, hol­i­day days off, or time spent indoors by the fire sip­ping hot choco­late. All of these things are good things, until you have too much of them.  The snow has def­i­nitely out­stayed its wel­come in Van­cou­ver in 2008/09. It is cer­tainly the most I’ve ever seen in the rel­a­tively short time I’ve lived here. It’s not only the depth, but the dura­tion and rep­e­ti­tion that has us going more than a lit­tle stir-crazy. It’s been 22 days of the white stuff on and off, but never melt­ing away, since the first of it fell on Decem­ber 13. (I learned from Frances Bula’s blog about the city that the record for Van­cou­ver is 33 days in 1964/65.) Pam and I have despaired that each time we dis­cuss ven­tur­ing out with the car, to make a trek down to meet my brother, or even just fill the tank, sure enough, the flakes start to fall some more and we shelve our plans yet again. We’ve been out, trudg­ing down to Granville Mar­ket and back with pro­vi­sions more than a cou­ple of times, but our lack of snow tires and the treach­er­ous roads have kept the car under­ground and unusable.

Things that I have learned from this Snowmegadon, as oth­ers have referred to it:

1. The city of Van­cou­ver has 47 snow ploughs. Yes, in Canada it’s spelled ‘plough’, not ‘plow’ as it is in the States. They are get­ting 5 more snow ploughs before the 2010 Olympics, which will bring the num­ber up to 52. That’s for the whole city.
2. Roofs here were not made for this kind of snow accu­mu­la­tion. There have been many col­lapses, although most of the seri­ous ones I’ve heard of involve north­ern Wash­ing­ton state, rather than BC, but I’m sure that there have been several.
3. YVR (the Van­cou­ver Air­port), despite being voted Best Air­port in North Amer­ica in 2006 and 2007 is also not made for this kind of weather. It has peri­od­i­cally had to shut down. There have been many sto­ries of peo­ple spend­ing days (and sleep­ing there at night) dur­ing some of those shut-downs. Lug­gage has piled up. Who wants to bet it won’t get that high a stand­ing in next year’s vote?
4. Rats don’t take a snow day hol­i­day. Pam and I saw one in the snow:
   Ratty in the Snow

I’m sure that I’m putting on weight from all the cook­ing I’ve been doing. Tonight it was Thai-Style yel­low Curry. Last night it was Swedish Meat­balls (if we were going to have Scan­di­na­vian style weather, then by golly, we were going to eat that way too).  Late Decem­ber and early Jan­u­ary has seen Pot Roast, Roasted Lemon-Herb Chicken, Pizza (all from from scratch) Souvlaki-style Pork (from Costco),  Kasha Var­nishkes (Buck­wheat Groats and Far­falle for those who aren’t famil­iar) French Toast, Buck­wheat Pan­cakes, and other assorted home­made culi­nary projects like apple­sauce and sweet pickles.

We’ve also got­ten to bed later and later and slept in later and later, until I finally said the night before last that we had to adjust back to PST, rather than the roughly Hawai­ian time zone that we seemed to be liv­ing in.

Now, with the hol­i­days offi­cially over, I’m hop­ing that we can escape our condo and get out and about. Besides, blog­ging about the weather is almost as bor­ing as being cooped up for the past 22 days.

Happy New Year! What if 2008 was a Hoax?

I’m going to start the new year with some thoughts about 2009, which I like more than last year for one triv­ial rea­son already: it’s far eas­ier to type. But before that, one final reflec­tion on 2008: On the evening news, a reporter asked some peo­ple on the street this ques­tion: If you had to describe 2008 in a word, what would that word be? Most (but not all) gave words with neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions. I remem­ber some responses, includ­ing ‘chal­leng­ing’, ‘dif­fi­cult’, and ‘unfor­tu­nate’. I’m not sure what my answer would have been. On the one hand, lots of bad stuff hap­pened last year, but on the other, the US elected the first African-American Pres­i­dent and it was not all bad for me, per­son­ally. Matt Hard­ing, the guy who was behind the Inter­net viral video Where in the Hell is Matt claims that his beau­ti­ful danc­ing trip and Inter­net video was actu­ally an elab­o­rate hoax. I’d like to join with him, and actu­ally sug­gest that all of last year was just a hoax, too.

All except for the bit about Obama get­ting elected and a bunch of other things, that is.