Adam lay debugging

30Nov09

It’s been awhile since I posted a good parody…so since it’s Advent, here goes! This is to the text Adam lay ybounden; you can pick your setting of choice. Those of you who’ve found and fixed nasty bugs “before the customer finds it” will understand the sentiment here.

Adam lay debugging
Debugging on his box;
Four gigabytes
Thought he quite a lot.

And all was for a seg fault,
A seg fault that he caused
That coders finden
with debuggers paused.

Ne had the seg fault caused been
The seg fault caused been,
Ne had so many err boxes
Filled up the screen.

Blessed be the time
The seg fault founden was,
Therefore we moun singen:
Deo gracias!

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Saved by the sailing bag

21Sep09

Around the Barnet Sailing Co-op (whose new website I’m supposed to be working on right now instead of a) moving, or b) blogging about moving), most if not all of us maintain a “sailing bag” — or perhaps more than one — that contains all the requisite “can’t live without” bits for at least an afternoon sail if not longer. This practice has a number of nice qualities, including having everything you need all in one place most of the time, and allowing you to nearly spontaneously head out for a sail without running around the house. My sailing bag caontains a couple of changes of clothes of various weights, a full set of foul weather gear, my inflatable PFD and harness + tether, a bosun’s knife (one of those ones with a shackle puller, buckknife, and marlinspike), a sample-size baggie of laundry detergent, a full toiletries bag, a plastic French press/cup, an anchoring/docking guide, the CYA binder, cables and chargers for my cellphone and palmtop, and a couple of flashlights–among other things. Having come back from an extended cruise, my sailing bag also contained a roll of TP and several rolls of paper towels.

When I returned from cruising up to Desolation Sound a few weeks ago, I decided to drop my sailing bag off at my new place, simply because it’s one less thing to move–and it just might come in handy. This particular move has at times turned into a bit of a disorganized mess, but dropping my sailing bag at the new place has turned out to be THE best thing I’ve done this entire move. Why?

• I decided to spend the night over here earlier last week before moving, since I had both an evening and morning activity downtown. After the morning gig, I headed back to my place, just in time for the rain to cut loose and pour, causing me to get completely soaked (and with an evening networking event to go to). So…throw everything into the washer, use the detergent (from the sailing bag), put on the foulies (ditto), and hop back on the bike to continue running around.
• Since there’s a bunch of work I need to do on my old place, I left almost all my tools behind temporarily so I can get everything done quickly. After moving the AirPort Express over from my old place, I wanted to get my stereo set up and listen to some good hard blues while unpacking (c’mon, who wouldn’t?). The APX has a tiny little reset button that needs to be pressed with some object. Any pins, pencils, etc. are packed away. So what happens? I go over to the sailing bag, grab my bosun’s knife, and poke the reset button with the end of the marlinspike. Bingo!
• The toiletries bag has (or rather had) about a week’s worth of things like contact lens solution in it, thus taking the pressure off packing the bathroom and finding out a decent place to put everything.
• My new shower is a definite oddity (but in a good way); it’s almost impossible to hang a shower caddy in it. But of course, the shower caddy can be hung with just a little bit of rope work. So off to the sailing bag to grab a couple of extra long shoelaces, and a couple of bowlines and a few round-turn-and-two-half-hitches later, the shower caddy is up and secure. Not the most elegant piece of ropework, but as soon as I figure out where my knot book is and have an hour to spare, I’ll figure out something better.
• In packing my espresso machine, I discovered that one of the tension rings had slipped down and was sitting in the water rusting (thus explaining why my morning lattes the last few weeks have tasted a little ‘off’…whoops!). Remounting it requires pliers, which aren’t here yet…well, except for…the Leatherman tool in my sailing bag! A couple of pinches and all’s well.
• I’m (mercifully) unpacking a lot of boxes and have to break them down to slide through the cardboard recycling slot downstairs. I own at least two Olfa snap-off cutters, but neither are here. But my bosun’s knife is, and if it cuts rope, it cuts corrugated cardboard just fine. Yaaay!

So, next time I move, I think you can guess the first thing to get packed and moved over.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Skipping generations

13Aug09

I was having coffee with a client who publishes one of the major local ‘new home’ papers recently, and we got to talking about generational housing preferences. Apart from the usual and easily discernable ones (downsizing empty-nest baby boomers comes to mind), I noted one I’ve seen in doing work with the Heritage Foundation (among others): the mini-trend of GenX and GenY’s being the ones doing the most interesting (and usually sensitive) renovations and restorations to heritage homes and other forms of repurposing. Off the cuff, I guessed that this is probably due to the currently ebullient housing market making older houses and fixers about the only things remotely affordable if your housing preference isn’t a 1-bed or 2-bed condo, but she noted that there’s possibly something deeper going on. Our Boomer parents tended to worship ‘new’, ‘convenient’, and ‘fast’; at least some of this mentality probably rubbed off on us during our childhood even if we might now at least partially abjure it. As a result, many of us didn’t get much in the way of genuine built or furnished heritage either. So we grow up, and in a globalized and somewhat rootless world with easily available design artifacts, we get to bricolage our own heritage. One of my friends also pointed out that given the Boomer tendency to appropriate everything and anything except stuff their parents did/had, the most fecund territory for things to grab and make our own is things from about 1910-1950. Vive la art deco, midcentury modern furniture, vintage clothing, and early vernacular jazz dances!

As I finished making a half dozen jars of raspberry cointreau freezer jam and freezing several baggies of pesto, it occured to me that this set of explanations doesn’t limit itself just to built space and furniture fashions: it also goes to at least partially explain the rise in “craft skills” like cooking, canning, gardening, knitting, sewing, and so forth. There are a number of explanations for this as a general trend: recessionary thrift being the new retail therapy, a general desire to be environmentally sustainable and consume less in the way of processed/pre-built manufactured items (might this be a neo-Arts and Crafts movement?); and in the case particularly of food, to get something that’s of better quality and better for you. In my case, and probably that of many others’, there’s also a sense of creative escape and the care and feeding of a general desire to mess about with flavours that you wouldn’t ever see in commercially processed food. A lot of these skills we’re having to acquire as adults; they’re skills we likely didn’t learn from our parents, either because we didn’t think to ask as kids, or they didn’t teach us because they themselves either didn’t have them or didn’t use them frequently enough for us to be aware of them. On the other hand, our grandparents probably did out of necessity, so one might say that a lot of useful skills, and possibly some foodways that would otherwise be lost, are skipping at least one generation. Case in point: while my folks (among other things) made their own yogurt and maintained a quite extensive (by 5-year-old kid standards, at least) vegetable garden until we moved out of a relatively rural area when I was about 5 years old, my folks mostly abandoned this for most of my growing-up years. So, while my mom definitely has a green thumb and bakes even though she (admittedly) doesn’t cook to anything more than a ’survival’ level, doing things like canning freezer jam definitely wasn’t anything she or my dad ever did. My grandmother on my dad’s side I think did/does, but the one who was really “famous” for it in the family was my great-grandmother, who’s probably smiling down from her heavenly garden as I write this (although what she’d think of adding hard alcohol to one’s freezer jam is arguable). Her freezer jam as part of a sandwich with honey, butter, and peanut butter is one of my earliest discernable food memories, and I’m sure there’s something there that’s contributing to my love of a good homemade freezer jam in particular.

While crafts like knitting and crocheting have been ‘in’ for some people of my generation for the last couple of years at least, reviving an appreciation of preserving local food is something that seems to be gaining traction, at least according to the latest issue of Western Living, as well as KCRW’s Good Food. Intriguingly, some people are also sharing and getting more variety by starting their own very small scale CSAs to share canned/prepared food around, much as a “traditional” CSA does with raw fruits and veggies. One hopes that all of this points to a tastier, more varietous, and more sustainable future!

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Lofty aspirations

15Jul09

As most of you know, my townhouse is on the market, and with that comes…the joy of househunting! It’s been awhile since I’ve last moved, and I’m rather enjoying looking at places. Of course, it’s also somewhat frustrating (reach > grasp, and all), and it’s also a bit of a head-bend because I’ve gotten used to walking into a space and immediately figuring out where the interesting details are and how (and when) I would photograph it, which is not the right question to be asking. The right questions to be asking are (in order) “could I live here?” “do I want to live here?” “for how long?”

The last one is a bit of a doozy–I’ve owned my current place for ten years now, which is about seven years longer than I thought I would when I bought it. That’s the longest I’ve ever actually been in one place; I’d been at my folks’ for 7 years when I moved off to university (they’ve lived in that place for 17 years, which is the longest they’ve stayed around!), having moved in before the start of my third year in undergrad, thanks to SFU’s then-policy of kicking people out of Rez after two years point final to deal with massive undersupply of housing units. It’s largely been a good ten years…I’ve gotten lots of experience doing renovations and other bits of house-related work, but it’s also time to move on and move closer to downtown, especially since the need to be close to SFU, which this place is, is long gone.

One of the side effects of buzzing through a lot of living spaces with a camera, and being generally architecturally aware, is that you at least think you have a good handle on what you want for an ideal location, and you start sizing places up based on how close they fit to an ideal. There’s a great book on my shelf by Clare Cooper Marcus called House as a Mirror of Self that I should probably pull out once again, grab myself a pencil and a glass of good wine, and do a few exercises from. She’s Jungian, and the central thesis is that the living arrangements we choose and/or create generally reflect something generally subconscious: e.g. always leaving or returning home, re-creating a special childhood place, bonding, etc.

Since I was first exposed to the idea of loft living, I’ve wanted to live in one, for a bunch of reasons including: it’s a nontraditional space, there’s open space for customization, high ceilings, a ‘funky’ atmosphere, and a good mix of the Hildebrandian virtues of prospect, refuge, enticement, and peril that lead to really pleasurable and interesting spaces. So I’ve naturally been looking around at local lofts. Vancouver has very few “true” lofts (a ‘true’ loft being one that’s actually converted from former warehouse use as opposed to being a “loft-style apartment” purpose-built as such), but as one might expect, this sort of living arrangement naturally attracts people who do creative work. One of the problems I’ve had being out in ‘the boonies’ is the relative isolation; while there are some tasks that are best done with a good pair of headphones and one’s cats for company, I’ve often missed being able to share with other creatives: as Ian Fleming once put it, nothing propinqs like propinquity. I looked at a place a few days ago that, although it’s just slightly out of my price range, is in a great location and is designated “work/live”, which means that work is compulsory and using the living space is optional (it does, I’m told, have the distinction of allowing you to write off far more of your living space on your tax return than you’d otherwise be, since zoning allows you to use your unit for meeting clients if you need to). Consequently, the place has a bit of an ‘incubator’ atmosphere of small-biz cool, and tends to empty out in late evenings and on weekends, which makes it generally quieter than it could otherwise be.

The other consideration is layout. I’ve long had a soft spot for the ‘mezzanine’ layout, where you have a double-height ceiling, and half (or so) of your space is accessible by stairway. The lofted part you of course use for bedroom and/or office space, which gives you better separation between live and work spaces, which I’ve found to be nearly essential; although I did for quite some time have my work space as part of my bedroom by necessity, I’d like not to have to return to this configuration unless it’s accompanied by something like a molo design softwall or shoji screen. This configuration also means that your space has a bit more character than being, well, a gussied up and somewhat overpriced bachelor suite. I’m also likely wanting to re-create a well-loved childhood space, as I noted in an earlier post.

And of course, I’d love to have a gas stove, space for a reasonable small kitchen garden; and access to workshop space would be cool as well. It seems that it’s possible to get workshop access and/or lots of others in the building doing creative work, at the cost of the mezzanine plan; or something mezzanine-planned that’s either on the ground floor (Artiste on 4th and Main works this way) or is in a building that’s a non-community. Allow me to satisfy both criteria, and give it to me for a reasonable monthly rent (or something where I’d be able to customize, and want to spend the next 5-10 years, to make buying a place in an odd market worth the risk), and I’d sign on the dotted lines. But I suspect that this ideal might not actually exist and I’ll have to compromise on one or more attributes…and the question becomes, which criteria are more essential than others?

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Attacking the magazine pile

08Jul09

For the last five years, I’ve had a nearly omnipresent backlog of unread magazines–with some subscriptions (normally of magazines that are more of a ‘quick read’) being more up to date than others. As part of preparing to move and performing the inevitable ruthless decluttering routine that one must do to turn one’s place from a cozy spot you’ve lived for the last 10 years to something that’s salable, I’ve had to triage the Looming Magazine Pile and clean out a lot of backfile that’s accumulated on my shelves. In doing so, I’ve made a few realizations and uncovered a lingering frustration or two.

Realization #1: Have a criteria for what periodicals you keep, and why. We’ve all either known someone or had a collection of National Geographic ourselves that we just can’t bear to get rid of. There’s a certain sentimental and aesthetic value to having a collection of beautiful magazines, but for most of us city dwellers, we’ll likely be close to a library where we can get easy access to backissues if we need to. For some magazines that aren’t carried by your local library, there’s no real choice but to keep things around if you need them. (For me, Lenswork and View Camera fall into this category). It makes great sense to use one’s own magazine collection as cache: keep the last n years around of anything that you need to access quickly and isn’t available online.

Realization #2: Some magazines obsolesce faster than others. Some (National Geographic) basically don’t obsolesce. This is obvious, if you think about it, for computer-related and a lot of science magazines. Aside from a few issues that you might want to keep around for historical and archival interest, most IT publications are best suited for cat-box liner territory after no more than about a year. (Some are probably cat-box liner as soon as you get them. I won’t name names here, but you can look on my floor after I’ve finished spray-mounting photos and it will be obvious). Even more theoretically focused publications put out by the IEEE or ACM have a limited life, though it’s longer. The nifty thing about those is that they’re easily available online in the IEEE/ACM Digital Library, which leads to…

Realization #3: When a publication is available online or in print, weigh carefully which one will actually work better. I used to prefer getting stuff in print because it would actually get read (in bed, on the can, waiting for buses, etc.). This switched around when I went almost-all-digital when I was on the road all the time, where the exact opposite was the case: carrying paper sucks, so things in digital were the only things being read. The big advantages of paper for me come down to annotations, aesthetic value, and durability. Digital of course has the advantages of searchability and portability (providing you’re reading on a laptop, iPhone, or other device you tend to carry around anyway). Some things work well both ways. I maintain a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated in both digital and print editions because I’d rather use print in the kitchen, but digital is more searchable (and usable if I want to look up some recipe or technique when I’m in someone else’s kitchen).

Frustration #1: Usable online indices. Since one of the great advantages of digital is searchability, it follows that you should be able to combine the best advantages of paper with a digital index. If you’re publishing simultaneously print/digital, there is absolutely no excuse for not providing a digital index. Even for publications that won’t let you download fulltext unless you subscribe, having a (usually free) search facility that gives you a full date lets you check the stacks and get to the paper version if you have it. Cook’s Illustrated does a great job of this. Fine Cooking isn’t bad, though sometimes it returns weird results; ditto Architectural Record. Of course, because magazines generally serve a fairly well-defined niche, providing either indices (by facet) or directories (Yahoo-style) that take advantage of the subject domain would be great. For instance, why can’t I search Architectural Record geographically or by building type (e.g. I’m interested in new museums in San Francisco, or anything new in the last 3 years in Seattle).

Frustration #2: Why can’t I either access online or download backissues in PDF of magazines for which I’ve paid for a print subscription? I’m a former subscriber to Western Interiors and Design, and while I don’t refer to my backissues all that often, I do occasionally look at them for good ideas about how to photograph particularly Northwest/West Modern interiors, which several photographers in the early issues (I subscribed from Issue #1!) did with great aplomb. Since these are used infrequently, it’s hard to justify the space they take up in my magazine collection, but since I can’t get PDF editions, if I got rid of these, there would be no way for me to access them at all, which would be a shame. It would be nice even to be able to get more or less current backissues of things I currently subscribe to: I’m dumping all but the last 3 years of Canadian Architect, but since I’m a current subscriber, I should be able to get PDFs of issues for which I’ve already paid as a print copy. This is basically the same ‘format-shifting’ problem currently being hashed out with MP3 vs CD in the music marketplace.

So I’m now down to 1 big file box full of stuff, and I’m working through that issue by issue. One hopes that by the time I move, I’ll be much more periodical-light. Or maybe I’ll just get frustrated enough to subject my entire collection to a bandsaw (or electric high-volume paper cutter, given that I know someone who has one in her basement…really!) and feed it through a duplexing sheetfed scanner.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment

Let’s hit the non-streets!

10Jun09

Last weekend, I helped out–as I have for the last few years–as official photographer for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s annual Heritage House Tour. As usual, they brought in a great speaker for the volunteer orientation earlier in the week. This year’s speaker was John Atkin, one of the best-known local Vancouver tour guides, author, and fount of all urban trivia (you haven’t really gone on a downtown tour until you’ve watched him jaywalk backwards across four lanes of traffic with a tour group, pointing out neat architectural features on nearby buildings). Last year’s speaker was James Johnstone, a house history researcher who went through a brief outline of how he goes about researching the history of heritage houses in the city. The talk could have easily been subtitled “fun with fire insurance maps and water hook-up records”, since these are some of the most reliable and readable resources we have for making sense of the murkiness of vernacular architectural history.

One of John Atkin’s most charming downtown tours (last run a number of years back) started at the VAG and ended at what’s now the Vancouver Convention Centre expansion, and got between those two points entirely on spaces between towers, accidents of history and zoning, public amenities, and other unofficial thoroughfares. In this tour he introduced us all to the joy of some ‘vestigal streets’ and alleyways in the downtown core, including Eveleigh Street (Pop quiz: where is this? Answer at the end of the post), and the unnamed but technically public (although it’s signed to the contrary) thoroughfare that will get you from the VAG onto Burrard St. without going onto either Georgia or Robson. Much to my Debord-fueled neo-Situationist glee, it turns out that this goes the opposite way: there are streets that are named on official maps but aren’t really even streets, don’t follow their official boundaries, and…whoa!…there’s one literally in my back yard!

Awhile back, the strata of which I’m a part had our property lines resurveyed, largely to determine whose responsibility maintenance for a few fences and large trees was. We found a number of interesting things in this, including: none of our property lines were where we thought they were; amazingly, a few of the lot line markers, first placed in about 1965, were actually present (underneath a lot of undergrowth–who knew?); and finally, that the trail (maintained largely voluntarily by us locals) that will get you from Highview Place up to my place “the back way” is actually a city street.

Recently, I got a copy of of an annotated GIS aerial survey map for my complex, which came as part of a little information packet for our strata about some test holes being bored in preparation for the on-again-off-again Evergreen Line construction, which will run (depending on choice of alignment, and assuming it ever gets built–it’s been cancelled and un-cancelled at least twice in the 10 years I’ve lived here) underneath Snake Hill. There’s a joke about looking up boring in the Yellow Pages and seeing “Boring: see Civil Engineers” (often made by engineers of other stripes, as well as city planners), but in this case, the map wasn’t particularly boring, because it showed the correct boundaries of the ‘back trail’, a.k.a. …drum roll please…Pacific Street.

This piqued my curiosity. It turns out that this ’street’ is actually listed on Google Maps, but other than its start position, Google gets the rest of it completely wrong. According to the City’s cadastre map, the street properly runs west of the single-family house atop the Highview/Clarke intersection, which means that the ‘flat’ part of the trail follows the map, but it dead-ends a bit early before the trail in practice heads up the boundary between the Chateau Place lot and Plan 26648 on the cadastre, a.k.a. ‘the big ravine out back’. So for those of you who’ve visited my place by getting off the 160/97 and following my ’strenuous but fast’ directions to come in the back, congratulations…you were actually on a real “street” even when you were feeling like you were going off to the middle of nowhere and wishing you’d brought hiking boots. I wonder how many of these anomalies exist in, say, the City of Vancouver–and if anyone has taken it upon themselves to document and produce a compendium of them.

And for those still wondering…Eveleigh St. is a less-than-one-block-long jot just east of Thurlow St, that terminates in the back loading dock for the Bentall buildings; it apparently did at one point join up with Pender St, and ran for a few blocks into the West End. Ironically, it’s probably best-known now to transit users, because Burrard Station Bay 6 servicing the 160, 190, and occasionally the 22 is signed on the bus shelter as ‘Thurlow and Eveleigh’.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Head ‘em up, move ‘em out

11Apr09

Welcome back to liminalspace! I’ve just moved over to wordpress.com after being (1) thoroughly fed up with dreamhost’s recent reliability or lack of same and (2) wanting to separate personal from professional a bit more. I’ll probably re-point urbanenomad.ca back to the house server, given that I’m no longer using it for professional use; this will happen at some point when I’m not under the massive time pressure I’m on right now. Those of you who used to get to stuff on my personal photo site via photos.urbanenomad.ca should use my professional site instead; drop me a note and I’ll let you know what it is (though chances are, you’ve already been using it).

This also means that you can look forward to hearing a bit more from me now that my IT ecosystem is now somewhat more stable than it was.

Additionally, I’m rebuilding my blogroll. If you were on my blogroll previously and want to be on again, please let me know.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Lindybombing the soundscape

14Jan09

Earlier today, I headed up the hill to the old alma mater to go to a short talk by Barry Truax, one of the fathers of Canadian elecroacoustic/soundscape studies and a professor from whom I got the opportunity to take several classes in undergrad. Not surprisingly, he was talking about audio culture, the pervasiveness of background music, and the extent to which we’re (both willing and unwilling) audio consumers. That got me thinking about one of the favourite practices of swing dancers: lindybombing!

For those of you in my readership who don’t dance, lindybombing is the practice of swing dancing somewhere where you usually wouldn’t dance–e.g. on ferries, in grocery store lineups, and such. It’s a fun way to introduce people to the dance who’d probably never see it otherwise, fiddling with cultural expectations (as a form of ‘culture jamming’ or two-person flash mobbing), and experimenting with alternative uses for architectural spaces. As it turns out, it’s also a great way to recontextualize schizophonic sound.

Schizophonia, as coined by R. Murray Schafer, is the split and re(dis)appropriation of sound from its original sources, and while the concept can describe the whole of recorded and reproduced music, it’s often trotted out when talking about schizophonic drool–which is to say, music that’s designed to be heard but not listened to, and often heard for completely commercial purposes because it will cause us to buy/eat/drink more and/or stick around longer (or not, in some cases). Muzak, of course, is the classic example of this, and in much the same way, those of us in the iPod generation tend to program our own soundtracks to life to pump into our heads on demand.

Lindy hop is a 1930’s vintage dance, which means that it’s almost as old as popularly available recorded music, and when we’re dancing to ‘classic’ recordings, we’re hearing the music in a way that’s not far off from how it was originally intended to be heard, although it’s being displaced in space and time. Dancing to music is at best one of the most intense and intimate ways to interact and co-create with a musical work–second only to singing or playing. When we lindybomb by dancing to a piece of background music, we’re not just having a good time and being able to say to your friends “hey, I lindybombed insert-name-of-location–cool, eh?”, we’re also–if only for the duration of an 8-count swingout–asserting that interesting historical music that’s being used as background drool for commercial purposes is worth the honour of being actually listened to and appreciated.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment

Coming back for a visit

04Jan09

I’ve been thinking a lot about old houses recently (partly due to bashing upon my letter of intent for the UBC Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture degree, in which I’m proposing to work on virtual temporal representation of built space, but that’s another post for another day). I’ve spent the last couple of days in Seattle on my way back up to Vancouver, and that’s meant that I’ve been able to drop by Redeemer, and interestingly, the house my folks and I lived in from grades K-4. Turns out that this place is for sale, and so that gave me a great opportunity to somewhat less than discreetly peek around the exterior of the place (my luck didn’t extend to having it be on an open house, unfortunately), then pop onto MLS to kibitz. In other words, I got to be the ’soul who’s lived in this place coming back for a visit’, as Genghis Angus’s House to Defend would put it. (That particular piece was introduced to me by the Enon Hall houseblog, which is definitely worth a read, though it’s less interesting now that they’re largely finished with their renovation), and it was a slightly surreal experience, given that the last time I saw the interior of the place was nearly, uh, 20 years ago.

Unlike the house we lived in when I was 2-5 years old, which we had to sell to a couple who proceeded to trash the entire 1.6-acre lot, garden and all, with junk cars and parts (making them officially white trash, I suppose!), this place looks like it’s been loved and largely improved since we left. The exterior got a fresh paint job, there’s a new fence and a nifty front deck in front of the living room that’s a rather nice addition, and there’s some new landscaping including a small fountain/terrace in back (the grass is still in awful shape, just like it was 20 years ago). Inside is a bit more curious–the living room acquired laminate floors, and the kitchen might have had a bit of work done on it. There’s at least a new fridge to replace the harvest gold thing we had, and the cabinets look a bit more up-to-date–though the layout is identical, so who knows. From the MLS pix, it seems the family room hasn’t changed except for new carpet: I can’t recall whether the wood paneling around the fireplace was there when we were, but given that it would have been typical for a 1965-era rambler, it probably was and I conveniently blanked it out of my architectural memory. The master suite has new paint and mouldings (no surprise there), but the master bathroom hasn’t changed much except for paint. I think the current owners did Entropy’s trick of theming their bathroom colours around the period colour of the sky-blue vanity top, just visible in the MLS pic; I seem to remember that we had to change out the subfloor and several of the fixtures in that bathroom prior to sale due in order to remove dry rot. The heating system also got changed out sometime in the last 20 years to a forced-air HVAC system (wow!) rather than individual electric baseboards.

It also looks like some subsequent owner removed the built-in bunk bed that my dad and I installed in what used to be my bedroom, which isn’t too surprising given that that arrangement really only works until the occupant of the space is about 5 feet tall. In hindsight, specifying that and living quite happily with that arrangement for a few years is probably part of the reason why I have such a strong proclivity for mezzanine-plan loft spaces.

So, having made my visit, I can say I’m pretty happy with what people have done since I lived there as a kid. If I owned the place now, I’d of course make a different set of changes–but I’m also not the target building user for a house like that. It’s designed, as is the rest of the subdivision, for families with either 1.5 or 2.5 kids–the small 4th bedroom means that it’s going to be a baby’s room or rather small office, and I’m a little surprised that some previous owner didn’t see fit to knock it out, spin the kitchen around, and make the living room and family rooms rather more livable. At any rate, it’s good to see that the old place has aged gracefully.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment

Prorogue me, baby!

08Dec08

Those of you who know me well know that I have a particular fondness for the Washington, DC-based parody troupe The Capitol Steps, whose first response when any scandal in the US government breaks is “what can we make that rhymes with this?”. It seems we’ve not only gotten a good scandal (a scandal, after all has to have at least one of [sex | power | money]; a good scandal has any two, and a great juicy scandal has all three), but we’ve been (re)introduced to the cool word ‘prorogue’.

So I think the current parliamentary wankulations definitely deserve R&B treatment, and in the spirit of the Steps — and with apologies to Roomful of Blues, Her Excellency, and, ahem, the Harper Tories — here goes. This is to Roomful of Blues “Roll Me Over” (sample here, here, possibly here):

Well I have a minority
we know what that entails
I get in late at night from Parliament all day
and the opposition’s fast asleep
and I know Michaëlle, she told me
before I go on a roll
I gotta shuffle off to Rideau and get ‘er in the room
’cause there’s one thing that I outta do:
Bloc, Grits and Dippers, don’t talk too much
Just prorogue this and break ‘em up, baby
Prorogue me, baby
That’s what I said:
Prorogue me, baby
That’s what I said:
Prorogue me, baby:
You can take it up baby in a couple months

Just rollin’ in at 5 in the morning
and Parliament’s asleep
Well, it looks so good: 85 seats
and all those MP’s
I can’t resist, don’t fight it
Want majority power
But it’s late and the electorate’s tired
so I gotta put some fuel on the fire
It won’t matter come election time
baby you know you gotta take care of business
You can do anything you like
Just prorogue it and let this ride, baby
Prorogue me, baby
That’s what I said:
Prorogue me, baby
That’s what I said:
Prorogue me, baby:
You can take it up baby in a couple months

[dance break]

I love this place in Ottawa
But mamma don’t worry ’cause I’m not goin’ home
Michaëlle says do anything you like
Just prorogue it and let ‘em ride, baby
Prorogue me, baby
That’s what I said:
Prorogue me, baby
That’s what I said:
Prorogue me, baby:
You can take it up baby in a couple months

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment