Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, July 1st 2008 at 2:45am
My mom wrote a poem that she read at dinner tonight. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Your graduation, leaving for Ottawa, seem an opportune time
To finally be the recipient of a personalized rhyme
Your accomplishments and achievements over the past several years
Your induction to the group of software engineers
Your myriad friendships and the respect of your peers
The number of friends with whom you drink beers
All speak to your successes in various spheres
And to how you’ve grown and evolved over the years
And although it was often a challenge parenting you
Your positive attributes always shone through
From your earliest years you always displayed
A curiosity for learning that left others dismayed
Reading fluently from encyclopaedias at the tender age of four
Playing games like Quarcetti and enjoying a classical music score
Were just some eccentricities that set you apart
But that won you a special place in my heart
Being so cerebral, not a jock like your peers
Made growing up somewhat difficult in your formative years
Your intellect and social skills were just not yet in sync
Your ability to problem solve, analyze, think
Were light years ahead of the average norm
So it took a few years for a coherent self to form
But now you’re so popular, sociable, fun
Innumerable friendships you’ve easily won
You’re smart, independent and you still love to learn
The respect of peers and professors you easily earn
So know that I’m proud of all you’ve achieved
And in your potential I’ve always believed
Though I know you’re ambivalent as you prepare to leave
And for bars, friends and festivals you surely will grieve
In time, you’ll adjust; new adventures you’ll find
And for sure you will visit all of us left behind
Please e-mail or phone, as you must stay in touch
‘Cause you know as your mom I will miss you so much
Isn’t that awesome? I don’t remember what Quarcetti is, and I couldn’t find anything familiar on Google. But it is true that for my eighth birthday, when asked what kind of music I want, I asked for classical music and received a boxed set of Mozart cassette tapes. Back then I used to listen to classical music while building my lego sets. I was one of the kids that followed the instructions to the letter, never wavering, each time I got a new set. Only once the set was built and subsequently deconstructed would I allow myself to be creative and build things from all kinds of parts.
I’m really going to miss this place, and all of you.
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, June 18th 2008 at 6:52am
This is my mom’s bean dip recipe that I threw together for Nerd Movie Night on Monday. It’s pretty delicious and really, really easy. So easy that I can make it (although I did have to call my mom for some of the details)…
Ingredients
1 15.5oz. jar of salsa (pretty much any salsa will do, I used a jar of Tostito’s Medium)
1 19oz. can of black beans
1 bar of cheese, any kind you like. I used a 540g bar of Medium Cheddar because that’s what they had at the grocery store.
Steps
Rinse the beans in a strainer or colander
Dump the rinsed beans into a baking dish (I used an 8″ square baking dish)
Open the jar of salsa and dump it on top of the beans
Mix everything up with a spatula or spoon so that the beans are spread relatively evenly throughout the salsa
Grate the block of cheese with a cheese grater (or avoid the whole step by buying grated cheese)
Spread the grated cheese evenly over the baking dish
Shove into the oven at 350° for 15 minutes.
If the cheese isn’t melty enough after 15 minutes, let it stay in there a bit longer.
Remove the baking dish and let it cool. It turns out it was still way to hot after 5 minutes so we let it cool for closer to 10 minutes.
Serve with tortilla chips!! Yum!!
This stuff was so popular it never even made it entirely around the room. It’s delicious and super-easy to make.
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, May 11th 2008 at 11:20pm
It’s like thick, syrupy awesome-butter spread liberally over two hours and ten minutes, garnished with awesome-sprinkles and jellybeans. I don’t even like jellybeans, but I’d eat them just to watch Speed Racer again.
I have vague memories of watching the original Speed Racer cartoon as a kid, though I’m not sure how young I was then. Fresher in my memory is The New Adventures of Speed Racer, an American adaptation that was more like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than anything else. According to Wikipedia, it was pretty unsuccessful and only ran for 13 episodes. That’s a damn shame, because the theme song rocked.
The new movie was a perfect adaptation of what I remember from the original cartoon. It felt like watching a cartoon. It was so exaggerated and over-the-top that I was giddy the entire time. It was outrageous, chock full of cartoon-style action, impossible physics, wild colours, ninjas, cheese, and everything else that I love about movies. Speed Racer was the most awesome movie I’ve seen since Godzilla: Final Wars. It’s a total throwback to old school Japananimation, from back when it was still called Japanimation. If you’ve ever paid attention to how those old cartoons were animated, you’ll love all the little details in Speed Racer. There were some scenes that were a cool modernization of the multiplane camera, where buildings in the background seemed 2-dimensional in an otherwise completely 3-dimensional world. Visually, the movie was stunning. The casting was likewise perfect. We’re talking Patrick-Stewart-as-Professor-X calibre of perfect.
Speed Racer isn’t a movie for people who are expecting a real movie. It’s a movie for people who want to see a cartoon exploding all over their brains. It’s a movie I’d watch over and over again and again like Godzilla Final Wars, which is my current movie of choice for when I need a dose of instant awesome.
Speed Racer made me all happy and giddy. I’d see it again any time.
Posted by Skrud at Saturday, May 10th 2008 at 2:35pm
Finding an apartment in Ottawa this week, more than anything, made the fact that I’m leaving feel undeniably real. Until now I had been in limbo between disbelief and hard reality. I’m actually kind of excited for the move, but I’m definitely feeling anxious about moving out on my own and having to deal with all kinds of things like insurance, RRSP’s, getting Ontario ID’s, a new cell phone number, and changing my address in virtually every database on the planet.
I really like the area I’ll be living in, and the job promises to be fun and exactly what I want to do. Encouraging me is the fact that virtually everyone I’ve run into has told me that “IBM is a good company”. This goes both for IBMers, ex-IBMers, and people who “had a brother/uncle/nephew/father who worked for IBM”. Ottawa also seems to have an endless sea of pubs, kind of like the way Montreal has an endless sea of strip clubs. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding a nice pub near my apartment, and then there’s always Zaphod’s. Because the pubs are so numerous and so close together, I think a pub crawl (or several) is in order.
Also encouraging me is the good base of friends I already have in Ottawa, and new friends that I’m just making. I’ve been hanging out with some of the current IBM interns on IRC and they’re pretty cool people and good company to bend elbows with. I’m also looking forward to Montreal friends coming up and visiting me. You will come visit me, right? I’ll make sure to have a couch for crashing on. (And my place is right down the street from the bus station). Just bring me some Québec microbrew beer. And bagels.
On the other hand, I still feel like I’m being uprooted. Montreal is where I’ve lived for my entire life. I’ve grown into this city, and I love being surrounded by the tall buildings, the mountain towering over them, the waterfront, the plateau, the bars and pubs, and most of all the people. Montreal is an intensely friendly city and I’ve made an incredible amount of really close friends here. I also have a dream of living in downtown Montreal loft, while I’m still young enough to thrive in the big city. I’m really going to miss running into people almost every time I go out. I’m especially going to miss Brutopia, which I’ve been frequenting for seven years.
Ottawa isn’t so bad, though. It’s so close to Montreal that coming back for the weekends is more than plausible. (My friends chipped in and got me a Greyhound flexpass for my birthday, so I know I’ll be coming back a lot.) It could be worse, and had I been offered a job further away, I probably would have declined. I don’t really want to make new friends in new, faraway places. I’m a huge fan of the friends I’ve currently got and I’d much rather be closer to them than have a job far away.
So Ottawa is a decent compromise. It’s close, and the job is awesome. Although Ottawa does seem to think that a bunch of tulips surrounding a Beaver Tails tent constitutes a “festival”. They have no idea what they’re missing. In Montreal we would call it “landscaping”. I’m more than a little disappointed that I won’t be in Montreal for the entire summer. I’m moving at the beginning of July. At least I’ll still be here for the Fringe festival, but I’ll have to make frequent trips to catch Fantasia movies, the Jazz festival, Just for Laughs, and pretty much everything else.
Reasons to come visit me in Ottawa
You can go to Red Lobster
You can pick up some Fireball whiskey (and other non-SAQ beverages) at the LCBO
I was in Ottawa for two days this week to find an apartment. The mission was successful, largely thanks to Rosa from Dada Relocation who had an entire day of apartment-visiting planned for my mom, my sister and I. We saw at least 12 different apartments and got driven all over the city. I settled on a great place half a block from Bank Street and a block away from Somerset. It reminds me a lot of the Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal and is surrounded by pubs, bars and restaurants. I think I’ll like it there.
One thing that drove me absolutely mad is the fact that people in Ottawa keep referring to soft drinks as “pop”. I thought it was just me being crazy, but my mom and sister were completely baffled by it, too. Every time someone mentioned “pop” we had to think for a split second about wtf they were talking about. I mentioned this on twitter and was sent to a survey about the Pop vs. Soda Controversy. As you can see, the “pop” scourge is especially predominant around the East-Central United States and most populated areas of Canada.
In Quebec, we typically call the drinks by their brand name (like “Coke”, or “Pepsi”, or “7-Up”) and use “soft drink” (or “boisson gazeuse”) as a generic term. The Pop vs. Soda page confirmed this. You occasionally hear people say “soda”, but almost never pop. It serves as a marker for people who come from out-of-province. I wonder if this is in part because of the great Pepsi vs. Coke Controversy, since <sweeping generalization>francophones typically prefer Pepsi while anglophones prefer Coca-Cola</sweeping generalization>. Therefore, it’s necessary to differentiate competing brands of soft drink by referring to them by their brand name instead of a generic term. Our generic term preference for “soft drink” in English is probably influenced by the fact that the French term is “boisson gazeuse” and sometimes just “liqueur”. I imagine that in translating from one to the other, “soft drink” seems much closer than “soda” or “pop”. It also sounds better than “gaseous drink”. (Although the term “liqueur douce” does exist, it’s rarely used.)
Idle speculation aside, I don’t think I could ever get used to “pop”. I’ll always end up doing a double-take and try to figure out what people are talking about. I think I’ll just place all my beverage orders in French to avoid the controversy altogether… at least until someone wages a war between “boisson gazeuse” and “liqueur”.
