Posted by Skrud at Monday, September 22nd 2008 at 5:14pm
Adjusting to life in Ottawa has been much more difficult than I thought it was going to be. Instead of whining and complaining, I’m going to focus on the positive things about Ottawa.
Ottawa is Pretty. There’s no doubt that Ottawa is a gorgeous town. There’s a lot of contrast between old and new buildings, and gorgeous sights like the Chateau Laurier and Parliament Hill. The Rideau Canal runs through the city, and walking across the bridges connected the two halves of downtown makes for some nice views. The Rideau Locks, which connect the canal to the Ottawa/Outaouais River are also pretty impressive. The best part is that if I happen to be out for a night on the town in the Byward Market I can look forward to a very pleasant walk home!
Pubs. Ottawa is a pub town. You won’t really understand what this means until you see it for yourself, but there are a lot of pubs in Ottawa. I’d say that Ottawa has pubs the way Montreal has strip clubs. It never ends! There’s no shortage of places to go for a pint, and lots of these pubs are really nice. Pub food in Ottawa is likewise leaps and bounds ahead of Montreal. As far as Ottawa goes, pubs seem to be the center of everyone’s lives. Families go to the pub for breakfast, business people are always in the pubs for lunch, and everyone hits the pubs for dinner. There are easily more pubs than actual restaurants, at least in the downtown area, so why bother going to a “real” restaurant?
My Apartment. Even though I live alone, my apartment is pretty awesome. I’m on the 13th floor (love the fact that it’s actually 13) and I have a full-sized balcony facing downtown, overlooking the city. Looking out my window I can even tell time by ball atop World Exchange Plaza. It’s more than spacious enough for a bachelor, though I need to learn to cook … and I suppose clean more regularly. :S My apartment is right smack in the middle of Centretown, which means that I’m about a 15-minute walk to the Clocktower (Ottawa’s only brewpub) in one direction, and the Byward Market in the other direction. And there’s a grocery store half a block from me.
Toy Stores. Okay, I really just mean store. But seriously, Mrs. Tiggy Winkles is so much cooler than any similar store I’ve seen in Montreal. The closest thing that would come to mind is the second floor of Urban Outfitters on Ste-Catherine, but minus the clothes. This place (and its sister store, Lost Marbles) is full of trinkets, geek toys, and various other little gems — like a hammer/bottle-opener. It’s a good place to pick up a silly gift for someone.
The LCBO. Everyone knows that the selection of liquors available at the LCBO easily trumps that of the SAQ. Not only that, but stuff is usually significantly cheaper and you get air miles.
Tags: life, moving, ottawa, separation | 6 comments
Posted by Skrud at Monday, April 21st 2008 at 10:50am
As the big move looms closer, I’m slowly beginning to realize how different things are going to be and how many changes need to be made. Today, a representative from the moving company came by to look at the stuff I have so that they’ll know what’s needed come packing/moving day. The entire assessment took less than a minute, since I don’t have a lot of stuff.
These are things that I’ll probably pick up during a few IKEA runs once I’m in my new city:
- A bed (right now I’ve just got a futon mattress on the floor)
- A sofa for people to sit/sleep on when they come over (and for video-gaming)
- A TV Stand
- A dining/eating table plus chairs
And in the slightly longer term, things to invest in:
- A really awesome mattress
- A new TV (I’ve still got my old CRT that I bought when I was 15)
- A stereo/sound system … though I supposed I can use my desktop PC in the meantime
- Beer making kit, since I’ve decided to start making my own.
What kinds of things were you missing the first time you moved out on your own?
Tags: future, ikea, life, moving, ottawa | 15 comments
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, January 30th 2008 at 5:39pm
Placing 2nd in the Quebec Engineering Competition was completely unexpected. I was there to have fun and attempt to solve interesting problems. I really didn’t expect us to come in second! What’s even more, is that we found out that the first place team beat us by only 0.7%. Wow! That’s extremely close! Luckily both teams get to advance to the national Canadian Engineering Competition in Waterloo.
The same weekend of the CEC, however, is the annual CS Games competition which is being hosted in Sherbrooke. I have spent the past month struggling to put together a team, and was extremely proud of the strong responses I got from computer science and software engineering students here at Concordia. We managed to register a compliment of two full teams, many of whom are in their first and second years of school. I couldn’t be happier! We’re going to bring these greenhorns to Sherbrooke for fun, friendly, nerdy competition and lots of partying. I’ve been coordinating with the team from ETS for us to share a bus down to Sherbrooke. They’ll be teaching our team French drinking songs while we’ll be teaching them the English ones. Cultural exchange for the win!
This is my last semester of school, and I’ve been looking forward to CS Games 2008 since … well, since the last CS Games. It’s my chance to go out with a bang, to party one last time with friends from all the Québec schools, a number of Ontario schools, and from all over North America. More than anything, I want to be the one to lead my team of mostly-freshmen to the battlefields of Université de Sherbrooke and show them what it means to represent your school, your friends and flaunt your knowledge and nerdly status. Then I get to pass along the torch, and these froshies will be the ones organizing the trip to CS Games next year. Maybe they can even get it hosted at Concordia in 2010! I have such high hopes for this new batch of students and I want to teach them everything I’ve learned over my years of student involvement. I’ll be able to get my team to mingle with other schools, forge alliances and friendships that will lead them on to be supreme powers in inter-university events. CS Games is my chance to do that; and I feel like it’s my last chance.
Now I’ve got myself stuck in this pretty sticky situation. CS Games and the Canadian Engineering Competition are mutually exclusive. They overlap completely, and there’s no way I can go to both. I can’t let down the other three members of my Consulting Engineering team – they’re convinced they need me. Apparently, in the national competition you’re allowed access to the internet, so my Google Fu will come in handy. Considering this is the first time Concordia has ever sent teams to the CEC, I would love to be a part of the inaugural team, boldly going where no Concordian has gone before. I want to be there to represent my university, and more importantly to represent my province. I’m proud to be a Québecker, and I want to join with the other Québec teams in drink and song and competition, especially before I move away to Ontario. While I’ve attended previous CS Games competitions, I’ve never been to CEC before. The pressure to attend CEC is terrible.
I wish I could fork a new process1 so that I could attend both competitions, then merge together again. But alas, there’s only one of me. I can’t go to both. I have no idea what I’m going to do … but I feel like I’m being torn apart and it’s depressing me. I put off thinking about it for the weekend, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Tags: cec, competition, concordia, csgames, life, party, school | 5 comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, March 2nd 2007 at 12:58pm
To hops
To malt
To yeast
To barley
To the Mesopotamians who invented it,
To the Egyptians who continued it,
To the Germans who perfected it
To us who love it
To beer!
Written at Brutopia, at approximately 12am on March 2, 2007 by Harley Cooper, Chris Beebe, and yours truly.
You can change the fourth line to whatever characteristic of your beer that you want to point out. So if you’re drinking a wheat beer, you’d say “to wheat” instead of “to barley”, or “to raspberry” or whatever.
You can also change the 7th line, in case you’re not drinking German beer or beer brewed in the German style. So if you’re drinking Belgian-style beer you’d say “to the Belgians who perfected it” … or substitute for Czechs (especially if you’re drinking Pilsner).
We also added a line before “To us who love it” to pay homage to our fabulous bartender:
To Kimberly who serves it
I love beer.
Tags: beer, Friends, life, poetry | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 13th 2007 at 3:33pm
Yesterday, Scott Adams posted on his blog about realistic, life-sized sex dolls currently in production. Speculating that it’s only a matter of time before dolls are imbued with an artificial intelligence that would make them virtually indistinguishable from a human woman. He left off with a question:
QUESTION: Hypothetically, in the future, if a sex doll robot was indistinguishable from a human woman, and you weren’t in a relationship with a human, would you tap the robot?
Today, he posted the responses:
About 95% of the hetero guys said they would. The other 5% expressed a strong preference for lying.
Like you didn’t see it coming.
Tags: life, random, robot, sex | 4 comments
