Some great Pubs

Before I ever moved to Victoria my friend Calum pointed out that the city had a wealth of "not just good byt excellent pubs". I whole heartedly agree with his statement. Because I am open about my love for the pub atmosphere around Victoria my office mate Sam consulted me on advice where to take some visitors this weekend and asked me for some pubs around town. Sam's request served as motivation for me to write up a short list of my favourite pubs in Victoria and further up along Vancouver Island. As an encore I created a map locating these pubs. I would like to share this map with you and ask that if you to add any favourites that you feel are missing. For example, I did not include the various n-mile houses since I don't frequent them, but the few times I have visited 4mile pub the food and service there have been excellent.
:

Here are some of the pubs above as a list with some personal opinions and trivia. Please comment below with any details you'd like to share on these or other pubs.

Good brew pubs around town:

• Spinnackers - notable because it is Canada's oldest brewpub
• Swans - Pub & hotel owned by UVic
• Canoe Club - The pub has a sweet patio but the food is pricy
• Moon Under Water - excellent beers, in a industreal part of town though

I can confirm that the Moon Under Water and Canoe Club will fill your growlers.

Just good pubs:

These pubs serve a good selection of local and import beers. The food is good and most present a pleasent atmosphere.

• Bent Mast - neat atmosphere in a heritage building in James Bay
• 5th Street Bar & Grill - good pub to watch a game, wood over for good pizzas and burgers
• Smugglers Cove - cozy pub, good food, close to UVic
• Maude Hunters - Good Eggs Benny for a Sunday Brunch. Good all-round pub
• Grad House - The excellent pub and restaurant operated by the Graduate Student Society at UVic. The food is good and costs are low as the pub is run as a non-for-profit service to the students

A little outside of town

These fine establishments are well worth a visit should you find yourself in their neighbourhood. For example I like dropping by any of these after a day in the outdoors up island.

• Craig Street Brew Pub - Excellent beers and food in Duncan
• The Crow and Gate - Canada's interpretation of a British pub, near Yellowpoint by Nanaimo
• Black Goose Inn - Parksville, often booked up for events so worth checking before you go

X11 Fonts in Recent Ubuntu Releases

Opening X11 windows such as emacs from remote machines fail to display fonts in recent versions of Ubuntu. This may be fixed by installing the x11 font packages:

xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi

Unfortunately currently apt doesn't update the font path, so you need to do so manually:

xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi:unscaled
xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi:unscaled
xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi
xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi
xset fp rehash

Taken from the ubuntu forums here.

Hat Futures

A recent TED talk discussed how the economy is transitioning with technology taking over many traditional jobs.  As far as I understand he points out that creativity will become much more important in the future. Here is the talk:

Now listen to Gabe Newells reflections on valve's recent success in the hat busniess.

It seems to me that valve has a great answer to how people will keep themselves busy and entertained in the future, at least for those who enjoy creating and participating in games. It makes me optimistic about the future :)

How to shrink a PDF

Ghostscript has a handy way to downsizing pdf's if you don't need images and so on at full resolution:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

As seen at ubuntugeek.

Oma's Quarkkuchen

My granma makes an awesome cheesecake (Quark is a type of soft cheese).  Here is how to do it.

Boden:

• Mehl 150g - 1cup
• Backpuder  1 gestrichenen Teeloeffel
• Zucker 80g - 1/3cup + 1tbsp
• Butter  80g - 1/3cup
• 1 kleines Ei

Zutaten als Knetteig verabeiten.  Dann Teig ausrollen, in ausgefettete Backform mit etwas Rand auslegen.  Darauf Fruechte verteilen.

Belag:

• Quark  1kg 
• Zucker  150g  - 3/4 cup
• 1 Vanillezucker
• 1 Vanillepudding
• 5 Eier, Eigelb & Schnee
• Aprikosen oder Pfirsiche

Fruechte und Quark aufsieben.  Danach Qark in Schuessel.  Eier teilen, Eigelb und Eiweiss.  Ei-Schnee schalgen.  Alle Belag Zutaten in Quark ruehren, und Eischnee mit Schneeschlaeger unterheben.  Quarkmasse danach auf belegte Backform verteilen, und, nach erreichter Backtemparatur, einschieben.

Ofen auf 280 F, 80-90 Minuten. Waehrend des Backens Ofen nicht oeffnen!

Graduate Student Life Is So Hard

This weekend was just miserable.  On Saturday morning I barely managed to roll out of bed, just to have the bright sunshine outside scorch my poor eyeballs.  After recovering my site I had to slip into my SCUBA thermals at go to ten-mile point, where I jumped into the frigid north pacific because the tides were just right (current table).  As you may expect from a lousy site like ten-mile the dive was just dreadful and I barely escaped from the dreadful critters lurking in the ocean down there! On top of that all the cheerful folks from the UVic SCUBA club had the audacity to praise all the "life" they found in the ocean.  After finally hauling my under-appreciated bum out of the water we decided to go to Smugglers cove for a beer.  If you know me at all you probably figured out how much I dislike alcohol in general and beer specifically ...

As if all that wasn't enough I just had to run into the folks from the AquaSoc at UBC who had just returned from that windswept waste known as Race Rocks.  They twisted my arm into going out to ten mile again with the the next day, why I agreed to that I still don't know.  But let me return to things at hand:  after all that diving that dreadful rogue Ian called me up and forced me to go for a sail in Cadboro Bay.  Again I had to deal with the sun burning my retinas and the freezing wind chilling me to the core.

In conclusion I hope I convinced you how life as a grad student out here is just not worth it, why am I even bothering to tell people about all this ;-)

Now, taking off my cynicism hat, it's too bad that the UBC folks caught a bad day out at race, I hope that the diving at ten-mile made up for it at least!

Reverting With git Subversion Style

I was already familiar how to reset the entire head of my git repositories to a desired state, but what if I needed to revert the changes in one specific file which I had managed to bugger up while keeping all my other changes.  The only reason this was hard because my brain is still slightly working in subversion language:

git checkout filename

so just check out the version of the file you want.  This will land you in trouble if you have a banch with the same name as the file, in which case you can do:

git checkout -- filename