Pierre Phaneuf's Diary

So I went for a weekend in San Francisco... I was planning on that already, so I had packed a light raincoat and a few long-sleeved shirts, so I wouldn't look like a tourist, but as it turned out, I forgot them in Mountain View and looked like a tourist anyway! After obtaining a lender bike for the weekend (thanks Noé!) and deciding to leave my laptop at the office so I could travel light, I hopped on the Google shuttle and managed to get the wireless Internet they have onboard working on my iPod touch. This was already kind of cool, but I was totally amazed when I thought I would consult the map and I pressed the "go to my location" button, just for the heck of it, and it actually got it! I was then further amazed at how it seemed to do a kind of pseudo-tracking, updating my position every ten seconds or so... So I didn't feel quite as lost as I did the last time.

After getting together with morethanreal, dropping off my stuff at her place and inflating the bike's tires (I quickly found out that the brakes were not working well at all either, which was a bit worrying, considering how hilly San Francisco is!), we headed to some show she had heard was recommended that night. It was in a small but pretty cool art gallery, where they had a good number (maybe a hundred or so?) of speakers embedded in wooden sculptures, hanging by wires from the ceiling. The curator later told us that this is an art installation and that they are actually operational, seemed like this could be pretty cool in itself, but as it turns out, the main attraction of the night was a DJ. He was pretty competent, I have to say, and enjoyed his set, despite the fact that we had just missed a part of his performance where he donned a dinosaur suit and hugged everyone in the audience, I was a bit disappointed having missed that! It's funny how people recognize my accent, including in particular the bartender, whom I was asking for a beer. He pointed me at the menu with just two beers available (this was a temporary setup), and I told him that, well, I had no idea what either of those were. So he apologized quickly, asked me if I knew about Unibroue, to which I responded in the affirmative, and he then told me that I would find the first one horrible, and that the other one, well, wasn't nearly as good as Unibroue, but would probably not offend me too much. Heh!

After getting back to morethanreal's place, there was some inevitable discussion about music, of course, and I introduced her to the new Apple Remote application for her iPhone. She fell in love at first sight, it would seem, she even moved her iPhone dock to put it beside her bed! We were pretty tired, but she had put on Black Eyes's eponymous album, and it is quite good, we just had to finish it before going to sleep.

The next day, I wasn't feeling too sore from sleeping her couch, which was good, because we were heading out to Tour de Fat! There was a brief stop for chocolatines and cappuccinos, of course, it wouldn't have been civilized otherwise. There were crazy bikes, crazy bands, and crazy beer! Much fun was had, including bouncing around with (very) limited success on a pogo-stick. I then accompanied morethanreal to a tattooing session (hers, not mine!), which was pretty cool, including a pretty classic Californian laid back surfer artist. I then headed back with her to pick up my stuff, had some (spicy!) burrito on 16th, then headed to jbdeboer's place, where I elected to stay that night (thanks, by the way!). That place is up. Very, very up. Like, on top. Yowzer. I had some idea of taking a cab from there to the DNA Lounge, but I was too wiped and gave up (fail!).

On the upside of being at the top is the good view (hmm, there's the view to Lafayette Park, which can be interesting according to the "near here" feature of some random iPod Flickr app!), although it was a bit cloudy. Biking down Gough was mental, though! I realized at some point that with the intersections being flat, that I couldn't see past them! All of that while going upward of 40 kph, of course. That led me eventually to a nice breakfast at Cafe Petra, since there was too many people at Ritual (and I don't think they have food either). I biked around the Mission, dropped by Good Vibrations (got myself a book), then back up around Market and Stockton, where I resisted the siren call of the Apple Store. I managed to get some excellent coffee at Bluebottle Coffee, once more, and then eventually got lost in the Tenderloin without realizing it, while I was taking photos. It was very sketchy, especially with my big SLR camera hanging from my neck.

Monday, the excitement level was much lower as I went to Barefoot Coffee Roasters with a team-mate who is a fan of good coffee. It is also very good, although I preferred Bluebottle's. As it is customary in Mountain View, we were back home before 10pm.

The next day, we went for dinner on Castro (in Mountain View) at an Italian restaurant with a very colourful owner, who seems to be a big George Michael fan. Excellent service, though, setting up a table just for us (my other team-mates are known there, it would seem), and of course, singing at the table by the owner. There was some ice cream after, and some of us were rebellious and went home past 11pm!

Now, I'm about to be taken out to In-N-Out, which I'm told I just have to go to. Sounds questionable, but hey, I've done worse.

Uh, there was a traffic jam on my small street today when I left for work?!? Complete with no less than two city buses, trying to work around the cranes and other construction equipment currently cluttering the street... Weird.

Oh, man, I've been meaning to post for exactly two weeks, yet didn't. I did this thing where I thought about hypothetical posts that I'd be writing while on the metro and biking, then forgot to actually post it.

It helps that there has been a fair deal of biking going on, beginning with what I called the Weekend of Doomed Awesomeness for a bit (if only in my head). This started by going to Mutek's Nocturne 3 with tygrbabe on the Friday. Then, went to the Mondial de la bière with azrhey in the afternoon, after which tygrbabe joined us to go to Mutek's Nocturne 4. How to follow this best? Sunday, I showed up at cpirate's place almost in time (9am-ish, after going to bed at 5am!) for, you know, a little Tour de l'Île (with scjody as well), after which we stopped for well-deserved poutine at La Banquise (and a coffee, so I could stay conscious). Then (the same day!), azrhey and I met with rezendi for a quick pint before catching Le Salaire de la peur at Cinéma du Parc. In case I might have survived, tygrbabe invited me to see She Wants Revenge for my birthday (got me brownies too, woot!), on the Monday evening (we were joined by fuzzyilla too, ahoy!).

While I thought Nocturne 3 was quite excellent (Millimetrik and Modeselektor were awesome, Kid Koala very good, although I've seen better sets from him, and the other bands were quite fun too), Nocturne 4 let me a little bit down. Most of the bands didn't "click" with me much, and the whole programme was running late, which combined with the act I wanted to see most (Deadbeat, was excellent!) played last, made for leaving the place extremely late. Still, it was nice too, I just wish I could have slept in the next day!

I'll have to agree with tygrbabe, She Wants Revenge was good, but they'd have to put out a killer album for me to go to their next show. Some of their opening bands were really wacky and not all that good either, including a "punk" band that sounded like Avril Lavigne on speed.

So after that, I, uh, didn't do much for the two last weeks, as you might have guessed. I did bike to work a lot (for which there was tremendously good weather!), played with my own early birthday gift to myself (a new top-end 24" iMac, Core 2 Duo 3.06 GHz and GeForce 8800 GS, smokin'!) and coded (mostly on Quadra, more than 20 commits just this weekend!). There was a visit from musicdieu and cpirate, watching of Euro Cup games, and Munchkins.

azrhey and I went out on the city last Saturday, was quite nice, and I got myself a nice watch (Danish design and titanium? sign me up!). We ended up going to the cinema and watching You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Yes, I know, I know, but it's actually pretty funny, mostly due to the weird cultural references (fizzy bubbles and hummus, baby!), and was saved because I have a small idea of what's going on in that culture, and would probably have been even funnier if I was actually part of it. I don't really expect it to do well, although there's a fair share of stuff that a lot of North American would find funny (silly fight scenes, sexual jokes), but I laughed really hard at the hacky sack, fish and hummus jokes, myself.

On a closing note, I've had a weird email recently from OkCupid (which I do find entertaining, for various reasons). I often get the "come back to our site so you can see and click ads" emails, but this one was different, telling me that there was one particular user I should message where there was some sort of category 5 crazy outlier match. Apparently, the love of my life is in New York state, which is too bad, because I'm not, ha! It then showed the usual "you might be interested in those people" bunch of people, but as opposed to the usual, this morning it was a bunch of my friends, so, well, I guess it sorts of works? I do like my friends, they're nice and everything. :-P

So, a new year again, eh?

There was (in alphabetical order) Apples to Apples, Doctor Who, drinking, flashing (getting to be a NYE tradition!), kissing, making out, and so on. This can't possibly be all that bad, now, can it?

I went to the party of maery, Patrick and iangurudata with azrhey, liberation_now, obskura, scjody and tygrbabe, which was pretty cool. There was this thing with a clove orange going around, which was kind of fun, but provided me with ample occasion to face my shyness. I tried to do good, but I mostly fumbled and ended up feeling rather dorky, it seems. I reflected on the delta of going from partying in Barcelona to partying in Verdun for NYE, but while the venue might be a bit sketchier, being in good company more than makes up for it!

azrhey and I went back to liberation_now and tygrbabe's place after the stroke of midnight, for a nice evening of hanging out and playing games (Apples to Apples!). There, it was eventually discovered that Bailey's and wine are actively evil when mixed together. Very evil. As in, we all ended up sick, to various degrees. Eurgh. Still, a pretty awesome night.

We were going to go to my dad's for dinner the next day, but as it turned out, the snowstorm (combined with a nasty hangover) put a stop to that.

I'm in a weird headspace these days. This is the first time I'm unemployed in, what, ten years? Totalling about four jobless months since I dropped out of school (which was no big loss!), and it was willingly both times, once again to move to Montreal. I'm being a bit of a homebody, which is not that different from my year in France (yes, I'd go to work, but that'd be almost all I'd go out for), but this time I'm not depressed, I'm just, you know, at home. Rather relaxing, I must admit, but better not over-extend this!

I went out photo-walking with jul3z last Saturday, which was quite nice. I had nearly zero inspiration for photos for a long time now, and coming back to Montreal, I've had it coming back to me, but seems like I was never carrying my camera at the right times (despite carrying it around a good deal, doh!). We went along the Lachine Canal toward the Old Port, and while it was a good time chatting along with her, mid-day sun and my self-imposed restricting myself to my 28mm/f1.8 didn't make for anything great, I feel, but it was nice pushing myself a bit, and I did spot a few places that could make very interesting photos with better light (by the way, jul3z, here's that chain that's gone missing!).

We then watched Stranger Than Fiction, which I had seen bits and pieces of on the flight from Casablanca to Montreal. To start off, it has a nice casting, with Will Ferrell (but it's not a Will Ferrell movie at all), Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, and they did great job of giving some texture to the characters without being too blatant about it. For example, tiny details like Hoffman's character pouring himself some coffee at the start of a conversation, then as it ends, pouring back the content of his mug back into the coffee pot just had be imagine the lifecycle of his coffee, and what it must taste like at the end of the day. The subject is also one that I like, that of finding purpose and meaning in life, but it wasn't some overly cheesy grand meaning either, it was just the same kind of "ordinary" meaningfulness that I experience often, of appreciating what you have and being happy.

gregorama is right, girls in Montreal are a severe whiplash hazard! (hey, the subject says "random item", you were warned!)

The geeky type can find some dynamic language humour (Perl hackers know that there is indeed such a thing!) involving the Visigoths (that, the Perl hackers might not have known, but they probably suspected) here.

I boggle at how much attention to details Apple has sometimes, and how they manage to instil this attitude to their developer community. While I had previously noticed that, for some reason, moving around word by word in the location bar of my browser using the Control and arrow keys worked in a nicer way in Camino than it did in Firefox, where they use a slightly different set of delimiter characters, and they put the cursor in a different place depending on the direction you're going, avoiding the cases where you get just one character off of where you want to go (say, over a dot or a slash). But I just noticed that while double-clicking on a word selects that word, if you hit the Delete key, it deletes the word and the preceding space. Selecting character by character doesn't "discover" that you stopped at word boundaries, though. Oh well, for all I know, it's going to be in Leopard.

I'm probably one of very few people to be excited by what's coming in C++0x, especially as my top peeve about C++ templates seems to be fixed. One of my big use for template-based meta-programming was to detect errors at compile-time, but providing readable compile-time error messages is currently impossible (my error "messages" are often things like "variable YOU_FORGOT_TO_DO_THIS_THING does not exist", surrounded by a huge chunk of useless, unrelated context). Of course, actual lambda (even though Boost has a really neat hack to do it now) and type inference are very nice to have too. The latter will certainly help cut down on the amount of "foo<bar, baz>::const_iterator it = bob.begin()" typing I'll be doing, as it will now just be "auto it = bob.begin()"! My wrists thank the C++ language committee.

It seems one of my ideas has been picked up by some people in Waterloo, in the form of AideRSS. Now, I want an "Edit" button in the Firefox toolbar that would use AtomPub, okay?

After a smooth flight, azrhey and I arrived in Copenhagen Wednesday evening, greeted by skjalm, who's kindly keeping us safe from the elements, even kicking himself out of his own bed! Not to mention use and abuse of his Internet, booze, food, and what-not! He made us a very nice dinner of home-made lasagna, accompanied with some of the tasty mead that he's made himself. And a solid eggs and bacon breakfast the next morning.

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Photos from that trip can be found here.

Ah, catching up! On the 5th, I went to a show, Razorlight (with The Tatianas). There was a strange event, where a girl from Toulouse found out I was going to that show through last.fm, and asked me to go with her, but she ended up sick and unable to go anyway. This would have been the closest to an Internet date I would have been, which is pretty weird, particularly as it was completely out of the blue for me.

The show itself was fun, but left me unconvinced of buying their album. There's a bit between Franz Ferdinand and The Hives, and they had some pretty good songs, but others were rather weak. But they were still entertaining (with the singer climbing to the mezzanine via the stacks of speakers at one point, for example), though, and I had a good time. I only caught the last part of The Tatianas, and in a way, they were better, catchier songs, but they were not really my style.

Going there and back was an adventure in itself, actually. I was initially hesitating to go, because it's about 7-8 kilometres away, and I had to bike there in the dark, on the bike path along the Canal du Midi. It went okay on the way there, despite missing a small bridge that would have kept me on pavement rather than hard-pack (which isn't too bad, but remember I'm on a road bike, for all intents and purpose!). When I came out of the show, though, it was raining. Not too hard, but 7-8 kilometres later, I was pretty completely drenched. Biking in the dark on a narrow bike bike right next to water (no handrails there!) when it's raining and slightly slippery, it's good for your heart. ;-)

On the 9th, azrhey and I went to the Toulouse Carnets, a gathering of Toulouse bloggers, and had much fun. There was pondering of going to a bar downtown after, but we decided on going to the Dubliner, the other Irish pub close by our place. The place turns out to be super-friendly, reminding me a bit of the Mad Hatter back in Montreal. There was a bunch of people, probably students, where the guys were cross-dressing, in that "ha-ha, I'm dressed like a girl" way, and seemed to be enjoying themselves a great deal (I got several offers for sex!). At some point, two girls arrived, seemingly the only ones also cross-dressing, but they didn't go at it the "ha-ha" way. They had quite nice suits, one of them especially tack-sharp (in that cross-dressing 1920's pimp kind of way). I'd say something about how I like butch girls (not that this generally works out, ha!), but azrhey would quickly correct me and say that I like girls with a pulse. Heh.

On the 14th, I took azrhey out for BURGER. Except it was crappy Quick burger, which is a kind of Belgian McDonald. I kept seeing them and wondering about them, maybe they were something that could be like a Arby's to me, but no, turns out it's just awful. Seems like it's really hard to get decent, tasty burgers around here, say, like we had at the Old Dublin or something...

Last Wednesday, we went to see Taxi 4, along with muadda. That was pretty funny, as far as the Taxi movies go. It featured the marina of Monaco, where I expressed the idea of, one day, going in a rowboat. That would be awesome. :-)

And finally, last Sunday we had two co-workers over to introduce them to the spirit of Montréal, through watching Bon Cop, Bad Cop, followed by a dinner laid out by azrhey. There was salmon with olives on it and stuff, so you can guess that I didn't have much to do with the food!

Ouch, that was a bad week. So, of course, I didn't write.

There was this moment, at some point, where the root causes of my annoyances here were coming together before my eyes, and I could see that they weren't specific to particular companies or individuals, but a product of the whole system, and that, therefore, there was precious little chance of avoiding it. They're not intrinsically negative things, but similarly to apenwarr, I like small and responsive, rather than big and stable.

In France (and most of Europe in general, it would seem), things are optimized for stability, from the top-down. They have a strong, controlling state, unified almost all the way down, with cities having a little control (not much), and the bulk of decisions emanating from the center. Have you ever wondered how such enterprisey things as the WS-Deathstar ever see any use? As far as making money and keeping things the way they were, they are doing a marvelous job, actually, but when it comes to things like "making a difference" or "doing something I could give a flying fuck about", well, it's rather less than stellar. For example, do you know Bull? No? Never heard of them? It's the premier European IT supplier, something a bit like IBM, but for Europe. They have such giant customers such as Dassault Aviation, EDF, Total, Boehringer Ingelheim, La Poste, SNECMA, France Telecom, T-Com and the SNCF. What, you've never heard of most of these either? I can assure you, they're all gigantic, half of them are or have been nationalized at some point, and the system will roll on forward whether you know about them or not! I do think there is change coming, but the timeframe is in the decade, I would say. I'm not that patient!

At first, I didn't know what to do anymore, and that left me very sad. This being a systemic issue means that finding another job wouldn't do it. Starting my own company wouldn't really do it either, as I'd have this system to deal with (and more pressingly, would quickly have serious problems with hiring).

That last thought kind of surprised me, though, in another way. Previously, I didn't want to start a company. I didn't want to do management, didn't want to deal with the business end of things, and I was rather afraid of the risks. I just wanted to program. But in the last few years, I did management (and actually enjoyed it, I reluctantly have to admit), I got interested in business, probably from hanging out with apenwarr, even if it wasn't to his scale. And ironically, this project of moving to Europe had me face my fear of risks, where I didn't know where I'd work, where I'd live, how I'd get to stay in the country and other such things. So, oddly enough, I'm now considering doing something I can't do here, but only because I have come here!

Now, I'm not just packing up just yet! I still want to travel around Europe some, and I can do a good amount of the early work on just about any potential idea for a startup from here. So I'll be doing that.

For the shorter term, there's a trip to see some of azrhey's family for Christmas, and possibly a short trip to Barcelona for the New Year, getting pick-pocketed and all, as the tradition requires. And I've discussed some idea of going to Copenhagen to see skjalm, which would be very nice.

I also met two hot girls on the train, Hungarian and Italian. See, it's not all that bad around here, hehe!

After getting my electricity more or less sorted out (I have a high-capacity wall outlet right above my kitchen sink, nothing can go wrong with this, can it?), the lady azrhey and I went out to the Superclub Videotron of Death in Ville-Émard, and rented a few flicks to cuddle up to.

We started off with Les Sous-doués, which is something the lady said I had to see. Can't say I didn't like it. It was stupendously dumb, yes, but quite funny in its own style. Maybe my weakness for teenage comedies helped, there! This is definitely not exactly for everyone, though!

For something entirely different, we then watched Immortel (ad vitam), a movie based on a trilogy of graphic novels by Enki Bilal, and directed by the same. While it wasn't the greatest movie ever, it definitely had the visuals of European graphic novels to it, with a sometimes rather clashing, but always stylish mix of real actors and computer-generated characters. The Egyptian gods playing Monopoly while waiting for Horus' sentence to go through, for example, was a nice touch. It also helped that the two lead actors were rather hot. :-)

Started feeling a bit icky between then and Thursday morning. Blast. Nothing too serious, but I expect a wave of sickness and pestilence at the office (sorry guys!).

Thursday evening, visited blacksquiggles and xipetotec with tygrbabe. Their creepy kids called me creepy again, blacksquiggles high fived tygrbabe, to everyone's (including the kids!) amazement.

I was actually planning on getting up early to get solid work done, but I was feeling icky again, so I decided to sleep it in, in the hope of keeping it at bay rather than stretching myself thin and breaking down. Oh well.

There's a day-trip to Ottawa in the works this Sunday, if there's any suggestions of fun things to do in the capital, send them over!

I think I'll be keeping a close eye on the news when I'll be in France (thanks to dmg for the heads-up!). :-)