Gord Load Almighty, this “blog” has lain dormant for a long time.

In the meantime, WordPress’ back end has changed radically. It’s a super clean design, but I’m also browsing at 1920 x 1200. If I crush the window in, it’s a little more cluttered. All the different greys are a little confusion. I’m not entirely sure where to look for everything yet. I’m sure it’s all very intuitive, but for now I’m just going to keep typing in this single box and then I’ll hit the big blue Publish button. Or wait, do I want to put a photo in?

current desktop

The image inserting interface was initially baffling. Uploading was easy, but I couldn’t find a way to actually insert the image. I finally just hit the Enter key, and there it is. Weird.

One day, an alien civilization will debate on whether or not we are a threat to them. I hope that the alien bureaucracy in charge of the planet-killing deathray never, ever gets ahold of anything anyone has ever done on the internet.

The CBC news website allows people to comment on news articles. I realize that this was a brilliant move on their part, because it probably limits the amount of crackpot letters they get via Canada Post. Now people can voice their knee-jerk reactions with far more knee-jerkiness. One article talks about a sexual assault on a SkyTrain and a commentater’s solution is “freeways, tunnels and more bridges….and we need them yesterday”. When the RCMP closed the Second Narrows because of a possible jumper, the amount of rage filled pages. Selfishness reigns supreme and it’s incredibly troubling. Who are these people? The poster who can’t use simple punctuation and doesn’t understand how a helicopter works; is this person in charge of a handgun? Designing load-bearing walls? Air traffic control?

There are professionals out there who have spent a great deal of their lives getting to important positions in their respective fields. These are useful people making useful decisions. And then there’s some guy who doesn’t know how to operate a shift key raving about how you should move to America if you don’t want your car stolen.

I missed my usual bus today, so I ended up taking an alternative route (I’m pretty happy I have transit backup plans). The alternative means I have to wait ten minutes between transfers, so I was buried in a book when the black Buick started honking. A girl in the car is yelling at me.

SCENARIO ONE
I’m some chump reading Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass (I still haven’t finished the Dark Tower). It has a purple cover and I obviously am from the bottom rungs of society who cannot afford my own vehicle or non-band related clothing.

The girl is yelling “You’re a pussy!”

SCENARIO TWO
I’m some chump reading Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass and I am clearly not paying attention to my surroundings. A bus is approaching from around the corner and I won’t see it until it’s about to pass me.

The girl is yelling “Your bus is here!”

So a heartfelt fuck or thank you to the mysterious stranger in the black Buick. For future reference though, please start yelling louder, earlier. Also, to compensate for the Doppler Effect, stretch out your words as you careen past me.

Well, the last time I posted there were still eight NHL teams playing hockey. Turns out my complete nonsense predictions were complete nonsense (1 for 4?). Since then Cito Gaston rose from the dead and soccer was briefly interesting once again. I believe I have my finger on the pulse of the sporting… pulse.

Meanwhile, it turns out Rogers (ROGERS!) is making customer unhappy (unheard of!) because of their pricing plan for the iPhone. I know this must come as some kind of crushing blow to many, since cellular service providers in Canada have always been leaders in customer satisfaction. Regardless, in this time of dwindling energy and food supplies, I am glad to see people are still dedicated to vehement outrage when it comes to the cost of being a geek.

It’s no real secret (except for the fact that this entire blog is kind of a secret) that I can’t cook. Being the child of a stay-at-home mom meant that almost all of my meals were taken care of for years. My first four months on my own were spent consuming large quantities of canned fruit and Wendy’s. (The canned fruit was a brave attempt to stave off scurvy, which was clearly my largest dietary concern). My last roommate will provide ample anecdotes of my culinary curiosities such as: the steak that caught fire, the pizza that needed to be dipped in beer because it was the only way to make it pliable, etc. Even after getting married my greatest achievement is probably bolognese sauce and most of the time I can’t even spell that properly.

My wife, as fantastic as she is, has been plagued with dietary problems most of her life. This past summer she was diagnosed with gluten intolerance i.e. she has celiac disease. Suddenly fast food, pizza, and most other restaurants were totally inaccessible to us. By some happy coincidence, that same month we moved to within 15 minutes of a celiac-friendly grocery store. But then a month ago we discovered that the wife may also be lactose intolerant. Hooray! Now her favorite comfort food, cheese, was also off-limits. After recovering from the initial shock, we found out that some cheeses were still okay, thankfully, but a lot of recipes that involve cream or yogurt were a bit tougher to pull off.

So for many months I’ve been making pastas with rice spaghetti and pre-packaged pad thai. It’s been sufficient, competent food, but it hasn’t been much.

To summarize, I am a mediocre chef who suddenly lost many of my comfortable easy options for cooking. At the same time, we’re quickly running out of places to eat out and we’re getting kind of sick of making pasta every third day.

So this weekend, something broke.

Instead of doing the most productive thing with my time (i.e. my taxes) on Saturday I decided to Google gluten-free perogies. At some point, I zoned out (as I usually do during Google or Wikipedia searches) and wound up here: Karina’s Kitchen. I don’t know what kind of evil sorcery this woman employs, but in the past two days I’ve managed to cook four of her recipes. Karina is amazing and her recipes a) sound delicious and b) are eeriely easy to make.

I’ve even baked. Twice. Before this weekend I’d baked maybe three times in a decade. There is something amiss here, but I don’t know what it is.

And it gets even weirder: I BOUGHT A CAST IRON PAN. I don’t know anything about cast iron pans. I didn’t even know what seasoning a pan meant before Saturday! What is going on?!

Needless to say, I completely screwed up the seasoning on Saturday (wrong kind of oil) … but I fixed it yesterday, and tonight I made cornbread. Cornbread! Italics abound! Exclamation marks run amok as I completely lose myself in my own little blog posting world where everything revolves around food that was concocted via knowledge made only possible by DARPA.

Sorry, what?

Anyways, here’s a list of what I made:

• Skillet Cornbread with Green Chiles
• African Bean & Sweet Potato Soup
• Banana Chocolate Chip Bread
• Buffalo Sausage Stuffed Peppers

Not a single problem in the whole bunch. All were winners. Some modifications were necessary (can’t find Green Chiles in suburban wasteland of Surrey, buffalo sausage contained milk ingredients(!) so we just went with ground buffalo, we made our own salsa from the Rebar cookbook), but everything tasted awesome.

The only downside was that everything seemed to take forever to make, but that’s probably only an illusion created by my addiction to the internet and driving. With a little bit more foresight and planning, I hope to go an entire month week without dining out.

In conclusion: I cook now?

I spent today working on a personal project. Based on Paul Hillsdon’s animated gif, I’ve made a little Flash slideshow chronicling the history of Vancouver’s rapid transit systems. The 1977-2009 section is almost identical to Mr Hillsdon’s (with a minor tweak to cover the demonstration stage of the Expo Line circa 1983 (which I’m not sure counts, but what the heck)).

However, I’ve also added some extras. To make this a bit more “historical” there are now BCER Interurban lines based on data from the Gábor Sándi’s excellent Tram Site. It’s interesting to see how the system for 2009 kind of, somewhat, in a way resembles the system of 1950.

The rest of the changes are purely interface related: a legend and a control system. This thing is very much in a beta stage (or a charlie stage?). From a design perspective, I definitely need to pretty this thing up. Adding more data would be fun, but probably time consuming. Population, density, ridership, politics, etc. could all eventually be a part of this. If I had access to more maps/data, I could also start throwing in things like bus exchanges & loops, trolley routes, FastBuses, streetcars, HOV lanes, cancelled freeways. Of course, once all that clutter starts to creep in, I’d also need to create an option for turning on and off routes/layers.

But seeing as the wife thinks I’m a nut for having spent most of a Sunday building Flash maps of SkyTrains, I should probably cut this out for awhile.

Stumbling ever closer to my 25th birthday, I find myself pausing and peering back nervously over my shoulder to reflect in a state of perpetual fear upon my life’s work. Being happily married to a wonderful wife, living in relative comfort, and not being pursued by shadowy government agents, I feel like I’m doing alright. I do realize that some people my age are curiously wealthy working as outrageously successful writers, porn stars, and/or civil servants. Thanks to my crushing insecurities and self-esteem issues, this sometimes annoys me. But I have amassed a grand collection of tourist pamphlets from the 1960s and a bottle of moderately price bourbon. I sleep away from strife and corruption. My past may be haunted by poor decisions, but no criminal record or ongoing civil lawsuits pursue me. I am an independent owner and operator of my own wok. So here, in my 25th March on this stumbling planet, I feel pretty good about stuff.

And thanks to the internet, I can constantly find new things to bring me down!

Jonathan Meades Eats Fast Food. Man I love the BBC.

I kind of forgot that you need $400 million of federal money for the Evergreen Line. But apparently $66 million is enough for the provincial government to give it the green light.

That’s great and all, but no one can decide where to build the line. It’s taken years, but only now are people thinking about routes. TransLink is only giving the public until March 17 to help them decide on the desired routing. It feels like a year long engagement and they’ve picked the church the night before the wedding.

I drove out to the Port Moody/Burquitlam area for the first time today. My first impression was, ‘why the hell is there going to be SkyTrain here?’ It’s a barren wasteland populated only by depressing late ’60s low-rises and poorly maintained American-made pickup trucks. Maybe there’s a big demand for rapid transit at the world’s saddest strip mall, but I can see people along Broadway and UBC going into supernovas of rage over the Evergreen Line.

On a completely different rant: if you drive a Hummer, you shouldn’t need to slow down for speed humps.

Coquitlam’s Evergreen Line is getting some more cash flow. $66 Million from today’s federal budget. Within 5 years, Metro Vancouver could potentially have two new rapid transit lines. It took 17 years for Toronto to get it’s stupid little Sheppard Subway to go five stops deep into the heart of nowhere.

As someone who rides transit once a week, this is very exciting news indeed.