Back East for Christmas

As every year I visited my family back in Halifax this winter. I had a very enjoyable Christmas, so far we had one LAN party over at my friend Jon's place (Wes & Josh showed up as well). There shall be one more before I leave.

Yesterday I saw Dan, one of my High school friends again. He had been teaching English in Taipei (Taiwan) for the last two years, and will go back for another. After that he is planning to do his Masters in Fine Arts at UBC. When he was telling me this I pointed out that he should imediatly proceed to get an apartment for himself and his girlfriend at St Johns College, since that is the best place to live while going to school at UBC. He is also an awesome DM, so I hope all you D&Ders back at SJC will get to meet him.

On a totally different note I would like to point out AbeBooks to everyone who may need to purchase text books anytime soon. I acquired the text for my course next semester there, and for an excellent price too. I will report back later on what i think of the place when the book arrives.

Back East for Christmas

As every year I visited my family back in Halifax this winter. I had a very enjoyable Christmas, so far we had one LAN party over at my friend Jon's place (Wes & Josh showed up as well). There shall be one more before I leave.

Yesterday I saw Dan, one of my High school friends again. He had been teaching English in Taipei (Taiwan) for the last two years, and will go back for another. After that he is planning to do his Masters in Fine Arts at UBC. When he was telling me this I pointed out that he should imediatly proceed to get an apartment for himself and his girlfriend at St Johns College, since that is the best place to live while going to school at UBC. He is also an awesome DM, so I hope all you D&Ders back at SJC will get to meet him.

On a totally different note I would like to point out AbeBooks to everyone who may need to purchase text books anytime soon. I acquired the text for my course next semester there, and for an excellent price too. I will report back later on what i think of the place when the book arrives.

Let's just pick up from here

Since the west coast *usually* is much warmer than the east coast of Canada it's quite possible to sail here the entire winter though. With that attitude, ignoring the fact that the current climate seems to have tried to show us that all this rotational invariance business is bollox, I met up with my firend Ian and went out sailing today. We were on duty with the race committee, meaning we had to set the course and record the results of the races. This I thought would make a great excuse to have some beers and watch people sailing about, however we also double as the rescue boat crew. After some deliberation we came to the conclusion that some people would have issues with a couple of drunks operating the only rescue boat at our disposal.

Talking about beer: Like some breweries the Vancouver island brewery makes a seasonal beer. It's called the Herminator, and supposedly one of the best beers in the world. Well with that kind of claim I had to try out this ice bock. Prepared for disappointment (after all they say that the fake Budweiser they sell here is the king of beers) I was very pleasantly surprised. Especially since I felt quite drunk after having a few, at which point I realized that it had a friendly 9.5% alcohol volume. Tasty and good for getting drunk! I am so bringing a case to the lan party next weekend.

Finding a New Vantage Point

Well, long time no post. Let me try to sum up what I did in the last couple of months.

First I went for holidays back home to Halifax, where I met up with Pat just before he headed back to Edmonton. I also met up with Jon, an old friend from school and some other friends from university back East. There was beer, LAN parties, and planes. Then there were snakes on said planes.

On the way back to Victoria I stopped in Ottawa to visit a conference at Carleton. I explored the Ottawa downtown, which on Monday and Tuesday nights is not so impressive. I did manage to visit the Zaphod Beeblebrox and have some Pangalactic Gargleblasters. All this while whatching a teenage punk band up on stage that had somehow managed to get all their friends in. There was a ton of drunk teens moshing in the pit there. Very entertaining. Aside from that I was quite impressed with the war museum in Ottawa. The civilization museum was OK, but not as good as the war museum.


I got back in Victoria just in time to leave for Vancouver where I attended Chris' bbq & good-bye party. I had an awsome steak. And beer, and more beer. And Calum offered some Scotch, which was also good.

After a weekend of that I went back to Victoria, got started with the fall semster, and promptly took off to Spain. There was a workshop in Sant Feliu de Guixols along Spain's Costa Brave (about 100 km Nroth of Barcelona) I got a day at the beach, a day (more importantly a night) in Barcelona, and loads of good wine and food out of that trip (well and I learned loads of stuff about ATLAS but I am not here to talk about work). Anyway, Barcelona is an awsome city. I got to see a good bit of the old town, Las Ramblas and Gaudi's unfinished cathedral. We had some Tapas and wine in the evening somewhere in the old city, then a fellow grad student from the Univeristy of Toronto and I went off to party. I finally returned to our hotel just on time to get my stuff and head to the airport ... finally back to Vicotoria for more then half a week :)

Here then I got started TAing and got back to doing work. I also participated in a couple of beach cleanup dives. I helped my landlords out with a discover SCUBA course for which I recruited some of the Grad students here. Good time were had, and yes more barbeque.

SO next is a workshop (Trigger and Phsyics) to CERN end of this month. I will also drop by in Hamburg, and hopefully Berlin after the workshop.

No Brunch This Weekend :(

I did not have time to pop by any pub this weekend for brunch ... but I have the names and addresses for two new ones, that appear to have a nice breakfast menu. Both seem to be within a short bike ride ... maybe a bit long of a walk from my place. I will report back on this next weekend.

Yay for *nix

Not to me outdone by Carly's geekness I now also have Ubuntu installed on my comp. Here is how it looks after spending a couple of minutes to get E running and looking pretty:

So yeah, I think I got this for doing work from home ... just in case I feel to lazy to walk outside to the bus. Now that I am done blogging let me boot back into into the 3v1l empire to game.

Breakfast at The Monkey Tree.

Last weekend I head breakfast at The Monkey Tree after playing racquetball for the first time ever. That is a fun sport. We also played some Tennis on a table as well as on a court ... after three hours of that I did not feel like going all to far, so I chose the closest pub of interest which turned out to be a 10 minute walk from my place.

Sadly I the only breakfast food they serve is the old combo of bacon, sausage, hash browns and eggs. There was one small and one large entree thus I had the large entree.

Lastly the cutest girl in there was busing the tables, and seemed to be scared about talking to me. I can understand this since I had not taken the time to get a shower or slip into some more socially acceptable clothes, so I must have looked like some horrible, smelly slob ... I should give her credit for delivering coffee to me whenever I ran out actually ^_^

A Bit of Gaming

Xfire seems to have lost track of how much gaming I did today. It was one of the more gaming oriented days in my life, so here is what I did:

1. PB&Jam + coffee for breakfast
2. Started Halflife and made it though Ravenholm
3. Intermission for lunch and soccer:
1. Installed Lost Coast and Codename Gordon
2. Made Coldcut Sub
3. Watched Argentina pwn the Ivory Coast
4. Beat Lost Coast
5. Beat Codename Gordon
6. Played Dawn of War to the last mission, and too a break to make some burgers for supper

Made possible my the letters B, A, W, L and S.

The Number Of The Beast

To celebrate the day, I got above album. I've been meaning to get some Iron Maiden since listening to it at Jan's place during our Dungeons & Dragons sessions. Yummy metal goodness.

The Smugglers Cove

While I had intended to make another breakfast post out of this, the Smugglers Cove pub is not a breakfast pub. It still gets a honorable mention for it's nice pub atmosphere, excellent fish and chips, and close location to UVic. A beautiful pub for lunch or just a few beers.


In other news, I dropped by the bank again to chat up the totally tantalizing teller but was thwarted by her absence. I guess it's time to move on to the cutie at the dive shop ;)

Breakfast at Floyd's

Last week my housemate Alisa's brother told us about this nice breakfast spot called Floyd's, a diner at Quadra and Yates. I was undecided between getting the "Lumberjack" and "Mt Kilimanjaro". The waitress told me to get the Mt Kilimanjaro "don't even think about it twice" I believe she said. I must say that I was quite happy with my order, which consisted of a mountain of whipped cream on top of French toast with a clear treeline of Blueberries, raspberries, and Almonds. The sauce that came with it mixed quite well with the readily supplied maple syrup. I still dream of that dish, damn it was good.

The Lumberjack is two of each toast, egg sausage, bacon and ham together with some pancakes. Their description was: "After this meal you will either want to build something or go for a nap." ... Maybe next time.

Alisa had a entree called "Listen when I am talking to you son." It seemed similar to the breakfast no. 2 at the OnlyU.

And, yes the diner is pink.

A Weekend Of Diving

So this weekend I did my advanced open water diver training with Alisa. Our first two dives were a little troubled but the last three were a load of fun. Here is what we did:

• Night dive at Ogden Point: Here I learned that having 20 lbs of weight on your tank makes for very awkward weighting.
• Deep dive at Willis Point:
  
• In your open water course they tell you not to dive while recovering from a cold. This is good advice as I found out here. Well, we decided to neglect it so I can have my advanced for this weekend, and we had some trouble diving here because both Alisa and I were recovering from a cold. With some work, however, we made it to 80 ft. After surfacing I had a nosebleed. The lesson to be learned I suppose is not to push too hard.
  
• Also, I can solve puzzles faster at depth then at the surface.
• Navigation dive at Willis Point: Floating in the middle of the ocean, seeing nothing but Alisa floating off to the right is a little disorienting. Thus trying to navigate a square pattern by compass makes for a fun little challenge.
• Naturalist Dive at 10 Mile Point: See if I can find five plants, five invertebrates, and five vertebrates. We had the five plants done before we started diving :)
  
• Drift dive at 10 Mile Point: Wait for the current to kick in a bit and then get taken for a ride along the amazing wall out there.

The last three dives were a load of fun and it all worked out nicely in the end. Now I can go dive with everybody this weekend.

Acronyms

So physics is filed with more acronyms then you can shake a stick at, and getting into a new experiment always confronts you with a new vocabulary of three to five letter non-words. Until today I had not idea ATLAS (the name of the experiment I am now working on) was in fact just another acronym, I had thought that they had simply chosen the name because the main physics goal is to find something called the higgs, which ultimately is supposed to be responsible for matter having mass. While I am sure that is the motivation for this particular name, ATLAS stand for ... Hold you breath ... A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS. Yeah I know, I was disappointed too, but hey the experiment is still way cool.

Roll The Dice To See If I Am Getting Drunk!

So if you are reading this you likely got an email from me quite recently mourning my passing. Just in case you didn't realize I'm not dead yet, I just moved to Victoria :P

So responding to my email Parie asks "Are there any girls there?" Well, most girls around I believe are students at UVic or have recently graduated from there. Furthermore I would like to say that they are either in a probably are in a serious relationship or very flirtatious. Don't believe me, well let me tell you about my first day shopping for some essentials to get moved in here:

On my way to school I stop by the bank where I spot one of the hottest ... err i mean most beautiful girls I have had the pleasure of observing with my own two eyes working at one of the tellers there. The first thought through my mind is ... yeah the old guy in front of me will probably get to talk to her and I will have to work with the Asian guy next to her (nothing against Asian guys, but ... well I am sure any guy of any ethnicity gets my point). By a rare stroke of luck I actually get to talk to her though! At this point my brain grind to a halt with something like "omgwtf do I do" being the last thing shooting though my head. So while I am stuttering trying to get a form out of my backpack she politely asks me how I be doing. My first thought being something like "really nervous but OK ... I'd be doing way better if I could take you out for lunch later." But that just seemed way to cheesy and bold for a little nerd like me, so I just stammer "OK I guess". At which point she says "Wrong answer" ... my brain just gave a little halt there and I went though the motions of getting my direct pay transfer form filled out. I walk out the door and my brain clocks back into reality with a resounding WTF. So any/all of you girls out there tell me what the right answer would have been? Got any good guesses? I have not quite figured it out yet ... but hey there is girl count number 1.


That was probably the best of the stories I have from that day, but I believe I was hit on twice by some pretty girls on my way though the Victoria shopping areas ... that day! I have not flirted with that many girls in a year, let alone a day.

To surmise, by empirical evidence I would say I have data to support that there are girls in Victoria at a 68% confidence level level ^_^

Breakfast at Maude Hunters

So for the second installment of breakfast in Victoria I visited Maude Hunters Along Shelburne just be Cedar Hill X here. As you can see on the map the pub is quite close to the UVic campus also making it a prime location for a lunchtime getaway. The easiest way to get to the pub by bus is to take the 26 from my place to Shelburne and McKenzie, then take the 27 or the 28 down along Shalburne to Cedar Hill X (there is a bus stop right next to the pub), look for the Maude Hunters sign:

I had to squish in between a couple of tables to find a comfy spot along a bench inside. Afterwards I realized that the pub also had a little patio. Once seated a pretty little waitress delivered me ye ol' breakfast menu. I was trying to make up my mind between the steak and eggs and the three piece French toast with blueberries when the guy next to me got his excellent looking Eggs Benedict. It seems that is what fate had in store for me for the day, and I very much enjoyed my southwestern style Eggs Benedict (from their selection of about six different styles). Every time my coffee got close to running out I was offered refills, which had me full to my content with coffee. To round it all off I had a pint of Killkenny's, from the tap. To surmise then the good points speaking for Maud Hunters:

• Pretty waitresses, that seem to pay good attention to you (they are also seemed chatty, which was a nice bonus since I was sitting at my table all alone)

• Great Eggs Benedict

• Killkenny's, a selection of the local Vancouver Island beer and, to Shawn's delight, Strongbow on tap

• It's right next to the Great Ocean Adventures dive shop (where I purchased a mask/snorkel combo before breakfast)

Bad sides (i had to work on these):

• Controversial to their website's ad, they do not open until 11:30am (which is why I went to the dive shop first btw.)

• Close location to the UVic campus may make me an alcoholic ... who am I kidding I already am one.

Breakfast: Jon's Place

So End of April I had to move to Victoria from my good old home St John's, UBC. Shawn was so nice to drive me down here, under the condition that we go diving ... and so we did. Shawn has some great pictures from our dive up at his website.

Before we went diving however we needed breakfast. We had been staying at a hotel, so I asked one o the receptionists where a good place for some breaky would be. "Well," she said "you should check out John's place at Douglas and Pendorra". Then she proceeded to show me on a map where John's Place was.

We proceeded there, where I had a big juicy omelette, and Shawn had more French toast then he could handle. And coffee too. Aside from excellent food it sports a comfortable 50's diner vibe, similar to to Sunshine Diner in Vancouver. A great place for breakfast, I shall keep it in mind for future brunch dates. I will also go there again and get a few pictures to throw up here.

Finding A Good Vantage Point.

Well I am more or less settled into my new place in Victoria now. I have a coupe of pictures of my house up here.

So what could possibly be interesting about a blog on living in Victoria you would like to know. Well we'll have to find out on the way. I have to admit, before I got here the first time I was horrified about the place. I felt like i was going to live in a retirement home, that for some reason had a university attached to it. So far the place does not look so horrifying :)

First off, yes there are a lot of old people here. They seem to be mostly concentrated in Oak Bay, a strange place that is. Nice ... but strange ti seems. There is laws on when you are allowed to mow you lawn for example. And there is a bylaw that will let you sue your neighbors if you feel they have too much weeds in their garden. Tehee, remember we are talking about Vancouver Island here

I got sidetracked ... the next largest population group seems to be the students that go to the University of Victoria. It's a nice campus, in the suburban area close to where all the rich folks live. It similar to the UBC campus with less construction and all the raccoons and skunks replaced with bunnies. I'll try to get a picture or two for you guys.

Finally there are a lot of newly wed or newly divorced people here. These seem to be the population group supporting the previous two.

Overall this makes a very interesting population meld. Everybody seems rather relaxed, and they just seem to enjoy life here. There is great diving, great sailing, and great beer. Hence this will most likely be a blog about a) beer, b) diving, c) sailing. On top of that my friends Calum and Parie over at St John's at UBC asked me to scout out some good breakfast pubs, which in fact makes the main motivation for this blog. Finally you may even learn about the more interesting results of my attempts at cooking :)

So yeah there it is. post 1, done!