ReidNews > 2004

Just went for a bike ride

Posted by rae in family
at 2:16 pm on Thursday, 29 April 2004

Whew! Luisa and I went on a long bike ride just before lunch. Below is a map of where we went. Click on it to see a twice-as-big version.

The path of our bike ride

The first half wasn’t too bad at all. My tires were a bit under-pressure, but perhaps this is normal for mountain bikes? We had to walk around a mudslide that had covered the path, and at the end we had to walk up the long path up from the shore to pretty much Kingston Road.

I did a “quick” exploratory hike up a steep hill to see if we c0ould bring our bikes up to shorten our diversion westward. Well, since I had to stop four times on the way up the hill just hiking on my own, there was no way we would be able to carry the bikes up without a LOT of strain. So I ended up coming back down via a much easier (but more thorny!) route.

One we hit Kingston Road, the rest of the ride home was pretty uneventful, except when we hit a steep section and I broke one of my gear cables trying to downshift. Fortunately I was stuck with the range of really low gears, so it wasn’t too bad. I’ll have to take the bike back to the shop. Maybe the owner will fix the cable for free since I’ve only had the bike for a couple of weeks!

View Comments

Nanotechnology rave

Posted by rae in science
at 10:20 am on Monday, 19 April 2004

I posted this to a slashdot thread

If we somehow do manage to get home “makers” (as they’re sometimes called in SF), it’s true that the economy will go to Hell in a handbasket. However, everyone’s dependence on that economy will follow. In effect, everyone will be able to make their own food, CD players, etc, etc. It will be the beginning of the Real Information Age™. People will trade nanorecipes for fridges, stoves, ovens, photovoltaic arrays, computers, and cars over the internet. Just about anything you buy right now will be “downloadable”. Like the latest Porsche? Here, someone scanned the one he bought (by dumping it into a maker in “record” mode) and uploaded it to rec.maker-recipe.auto.

Aside from social needs (hospitals, internet service, transportation, government) there won’t be a whole heck of a lot left for people to do. Expect the cost of physical labour (and people’s incomes from that) to dwindle. Expect the cost of goods to do likewise. “Knowledge workers” who design new items, the recipes for which can be sold over the Internet will do well. These will be people who know How Things Work, and who are currently emplloyed in the manufacturing industry, so at least some people will make the transition nicely.

In a lot of ways it will be good. It will remove a lot of resource bottlenecks such as food, water, oil, .. chocolate. How it will impact our need for energy depends on the efficiency of the technology. Will the energy cost to make a barrel of oil be higher than a barrel of oil? If not, we’re in good shape. If so, then we would be in for interesting times.

View Comments

Michael is 14

Posted by rae in family
at 10:20 am on Monday, 19 April 2004

We’re entering the second year of Michael’s teenager-hood, and so far, so good. I think we’re quite lucky that Michael is such a good kid. We have our altercations over things like how late he gets to stay up, how much he should spend on WarHammer stuff, etc. But at the core, we all get along really well.

I wish I had more time to spend on things like playing D&D with the kids. Actually, now that I think of it, I have some time right now. Hmmm…

View Comments

New bike

Posted by rae in family
at 6:30 pm on Saturday, 17 April 2004

I went out today and bought a used mountain bike.

my new bike

It’s an 18-speed Raleigh (I think), and it’s good for what I want it for — going to a bike with the family. My old bike was more of a speed bike, and frankly I never used it.

my old bike

It’s a Miele and it cost a bit when I got it back around 1990. It’s way light — lighter even than Ronnie’s old, small bike.

We’re going to take Ronnie out to look at a new bike this week. He’ll be getting another used bike (it won’t last long at the rate he’s growing). We found this place at Brimley and Progress Ave (northwest corner) that seems like a self-owned, bike shop. It’s short on decor and long on low prices and lots of grease and hardware. Check it out if you like. Oh, the guy there doesn’t have an interac machine yet (he says it costs $60/month to rent, and about $1,000 to own), so you might want to pay cash. Can’t remember it’s name offhand. I’ll try to post a comment later.

View Comments

Free Wood Stove

Posted by rae in family
at 6:22 pm on Saturday, 17 April 2004

This could be yours! We’re trying to get rid of a wood stove. It’s big and heavy, and we’re happy to give it to someone who cam come and get it! Below is a closer shot.

It’s very heavy and we’re not sure how to get it out of the basement. It’s sitting in the corner of my office area, and I expect part of the wall around it will have to come down. I don’t know how much it weighs, but it is made of thick metal (iron?).

Give us a shout if you’re interested!

View Comments

Been sick..

Posted by rae in Reid
at 7:33 am on Thursday, 15 April 2004

Went home early Tuesday and spent all day yesterday staying home, sick. The throat/cough thing again. Getting home early was a good move. Sleep seems to really stop these things in their tracks. I slept a LOT over the last couple of days.

Off to enTrac now!

View Comments

Visual Studio C++ no longer actually C++

Posted by rae in development
at 10:05 am on Tuesday, 6 April 2004

Read this today in the MS Dev Roadmap mentioned on OSNews:

C++/CLI also streamlines the manner in which managed data types are defined and consumed. The new standard introduces keywords that are more intuitive to C++ developers than the underbar-underbar keywords of current Managed Extensions. In C++/CLI, the ref keyword is used in a manner similar to the Managed Extensions __gc keyword to define a garbage-collected class:
ref class MyRefClass { /* ... */ };
In addition, C++/CLI introduces a new category of type, the handle, which is used to signify the use of automatic garbage collection. Handles borrow the syntax of pointers, but use the carat (^) in place of the asterisk (*). The keyword gcnew is used to create these garbage collected objects, and returns a handle:
MyRefClass ^ c = gcnew MyRefClass();

So, great, they’ve added a new pointer-like type called the handle. And you declare it with the “^” character. Um, okay. Now, how do I use it? Can I say c->field? Maybe they’ve added the # character to act in the same way as ->? Then we get c#field!

Whatever this is, it’s not C++.

View Comments

Chester Brown & Seth @ the Rivoli

Posted by rae in friends
at 9:41 am on Friday, 2 April 2004

On Wednesday night I went to the Rivoli on Queen Street West with Jeff and Debbie. Ruth was supposed to come too, but poor Kaarel came down with Rigelian Fever. I hope all those blue spots are gone and I’m sure the tail has fallen off by now.

Chester Brown — he cut his hair!

I met up with Jeff and Debbie at the Snail, which I haven’t been to for a long time. I ended up buying over $100 worth of comics. Yikes, it’s maybe a good thing I don’t go comic-shopping regularly any more. I’ve probably saved thousands of dollars.

Debbie was anxious to get to the Riv well before the show started to save seats. I thought she was being overly concerned. I mean, only comic types will be there, right? Jeff and Debbie left the Snail early to get seats, while I took another 10 minutes to finish picking comics.

Boy, was I wrong. The place was *packed*. Here’s a shot at the end as everyone filed out.

Everyone heading out at the end

Thank goodness Jeff and Deb didn’t listen to me. Thanks to them I was sitting right at the front! The Riv serves food and drink (there was a bar at the back of the room), so we all had dinner there while waiting for the show to start. There were a couple of cameramen there, so something probably showed up on CITY TV or maybe Space.

Chester Brown talked first, and I found it really interesting as he gave a very honest insight into how he works. He brought original artwork from his Riel book, and showed how the way he drew characters changed over the length of the book. By the time he had finished, he was drawing Riel with a tiny head. So he went back to the beginning and re-drew Riel to look like he did at the end. This was because the whole work was going to be published as a single book.

I found this a bit confusing because I remember reading the Riel stuff in the back of Yummy Fur for a while. Oh well.

Seth was up next. His presentation was much more prepared. Chester would go back and forth amongst his slides in a very ad-lib manner, just to illustrate how his drawings had changed over time. Seth read from a script and plodded through his slides in slow, metronomic sequence. Still, his stories were very interesting, and I learned about several cartoonists I had never heard of before. Seth did start off with some autobiographical stories, so i did learn some more about him, but he didn’t really go into his work at all. how he did what he did, what his workaday routine was like. That was what I was hoping to hear. I guess I’ve always wanted to express my creative side somehow, and so I like to hear how those that make a living with it do so. Alack and alas.

Well, sorry, I didn’t mean to go into so much detail. You might want to read Debbie’s blog entry about the event, too.

On a side note, I was disappointed that Drawn & Quarterly, the publishers of Seth’s and Chester’s books, doesn’t have simple links to information pages about their works. All they seem to have is a big online store with what look to be time-expiring URLs. Boo, hiss. makes it hard to promote a book when you can’t make a good link to info about it.

View Comments

Debbie’s surprise bday lunch

Posted by rae in friends
at 9:31 am on Thursday, 1 April 2004

Debbie is always happy to be surprised

On Monday a small crowd snuck in to the Japanese restaurant Fune on Simcoe Street to have a surprise birthday lunch with Debbie. Debbie was expecting to just have lunch with Michelle, but there were about 10 people there instead.

I showed up late, so I missed the actual moment of surprise, but Debbie gracefully re-enacted her expression for me, as you can see above.

More pics here.

View Comments

blogs

friends

Site

Google Buzz

Categories

Pages

Unread Comments

Archives

Just went for a bike ride

Nanotechnology rave

Michael is 14

New bike

Free Wood Stove

Been sick..

Visual Studio C++ no longer actually C++

Chester Brown & Seth @ the Rivoli

Debbie’s surprise bday lunch