The Penalty Box

On Sunday there was a company outing to Lytton to go rafting on the Thompson River, a service provided by Hyak River Rafting. There was the option of camping the night beforehand, which I did not take up because I’ve lost interest in camping. It sounds like I made a sound choice though, as it turns out the campground is near some train tracks, which had trains going by about once an hour. All. Night. Long. The downside to my choice was needing to get up at 5:30 to carpool with some co-workers up to Lytton. It’s normally a 3 hour-ish drive (we had to be there before 9:30), although if you are of lead feet, you can make it under two and a half hours.

The day was split into two secstions: in the morning was the powered raft and in the afternoon was paddle rafts. For the powered raft, you’re sitting on a raft with about 15 other people with a 20 horsepower motor strapped to the back. It’s difficult to tell how much of the speed is due to the motor and how much is due to the river’s current. Still, it was fun heading into the rapids. The downside was the wind that was channelled through the canyon. Normally the temperature in Lytton this time of year is about 30 degrees, but it didn’t even hit 20 until sometime near noon and didn’t get any warmer the rest of the day. This meant it got a little chilly on the morning run, even through the windbreaker jacket and pants I was wearing. If it were about 30 degrees, the water would have been very cooling, but alas, it was almost like a slap in the face. Of course, if you weren’t awake before getting on the raft, you were certainly awake after the first rapid. This part of the trip took about two hours and went through such playfully named rapids as The Green Monster (of Death), The Witch’s Cauldron (of Death) and The Fluffy Bunny (of Death). Notice a trend? The website doesn’t add the “of Death” suffix to each rapid, but the guides always seemed to emphasize it, so who am I to argue?

The second part of the day took place after lunch, which was the paddle boat part of the trip. Whatever fun we had on the powered rafts in the morning increased exponentially on the paddle rafts. These were smaller rafts; most were about 10 people each, but there was one or two larger rafts holding 10+ people. Couple the slightly warmer temperature with the fact that the only locomotion of the raft was the act of paddling and there was no shivering to be had. Cresting the rapids in the smaller boats was pretty awesome, especially at the front where there isn’t anything to lodge your foot into and you have to lean way over to dig into the water. If the people in the raft don’t paddle, you don’t make it through the rapid and you are in the water. Still even then on some of the bigger rapids it felt like I could fly off at any second, but it was great fun powering through them. The best rapids to go through for me were The Green Monster and The 18th Hole. We switched positions a few times during the trip and I was at the front for The Green Monster. There’s nothing like cresting over the rapid, leaning over to dig into the water and waving at nothing because your oar doesn’t reach that far. You can’t stop though, because pretty soon you’ll be at the valley of the wave and need to dig in to paddle over the next one. My shoulders are sore as all hell at the moment and my hip flexors don’t feel that much better either. It was completely worth it though, and I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have serious motion sickness. This was even more fun than zip lining.
My only regret of the whole trip is that I don’t have a waterproof camera. Some of the landscape along the Thompson River is very picturesque and there was various amounts of wildlife along the river banks. I saw a bald eagle, a couple of ospreys, a blue heron and a black bear. Even the rapids would have made for some great pictures if I had a camera. One of those waterproof, shockproof little cameras would be a good thing to tote around in any case as I won’t be able to lug around my DSLR all of the time.

Growing up in a Chinese household exposed me to many a seemingly crazy remedy for one ailment or another. Compared to Western remedies, they always seem strange, teetering somewhere between experimentation and homeopathy. They are also guaranteed to taste bad. Buckley’s ain’t got nothing on this stuff. I could never tell if my parents were giving these remedies to me as a prank or to somehow punish me for being a whiny little snot whenever I got sick. At times, it seemed the Chinese equivalent of feeding your kid cod liver oil; sure it’s supposed to be good for you, but your parents probably drew more joy at making your face contort in reaction to something foul tasting than actually figuring it was good for you.

There were various things I had to consume in the name of good health. Most are boiled from different herbs and spices. One particularly foul tasting one that I don’t know the English name to came out blacker than coffee and had an extremely bitter and sour taste to it, and not the good bitter or sour either. Another one was made from boiling a flower and some spices. The resulting beverage supposedly kept away coughs and phlegm. Did they really work? Hard to say. I didn’t drink the stuff every day and my memory is fuzzy on when I got sick and when I was actually drinking it. At the time, I didn’t have the scientific wherewithal to organize a control group. There wasn’t any real reason to doubt my parents’ insistence that these things worked, and “but it doesn’t taste good” wasn’t a good enough reason not to consume the remedies. For note, “it doesn’t taste good” being a bad excuse wasn’t just limited to medicine; it’s probably one of the reasons why I’m not so fussy about vegetables today.

So when I came down with a rather nasty dry cough last week, my mother suggested a Chinese remedy recommended by my aunt. I was willing to try anything at that point as the cough kept me up at night so I didn’t sleep well and I was starting to sound like my voice box went through a trash compactor. Cough drops didn’t work, Vicks Vaporub didn’t work and Buckley’s provided only a brief respite, not near long enough for me to get to sleep before the next coughing fit came along. Instead, I was instructed to cut up a banana into pieces and put them with several pieces of raw unprocessed sugar into a bowl. This combination of banana and sugar was then to be steamed for 5-10 minutes, or until the sugar was dissolved into the banana. The mixture ends up how you think it looks like: mush. And like all Chinese remedies, it certainly did not taste very good. It wasn’t as bad as Buckley’s, but it still wasn’t like eating a banana split either. The texture was also mostly unpleasant, but I’m sure anyone without teeth would enjoy it (or the British).

Did it work? Maybe. I didn’t have any coughing fits after eating it for a couple of days, but it’s also possible that I was at the tail end of the virus anyway, so this could have been a placebo for all I know. I’ll have to keep this in mind and try it out nearer to the beginning of this kind of cough next time. Perhaps it will work for one of you, dear readers, but that depends on how willing you are to try something unconventional on the assurance from the people who say that drinking tiger bone wine will help your sexual performance. Not to say it’s all bunk; the putrid smelling medication my mother brews up every spring for her allergies does alleviate her symptoms very well and doesn’t seem to have the problems over the counter remedies have in not working after one season. It does make me glad I don’t have allergies though. *knocks on wood*

1. Those who say “we don’t need version control” are usually the people that really need version control.
2. Apparently you can attract a Stage 5 Clinger at a wedding without bedding her. Is 300 text messages a day “clingy?” That’s not the word I would use. My co-worker has some kinda talent that’s for sure.
3. Cooking with bacon fat is one of the simple pleasures in life. Everyone should do it. Yes, even vegetarians.
4. Ziplining is completely worth it. I need to check out Whistler’s zipline tours now that I’ve done Grouse. Anybody want to go this summer?
5. I saw some kids throwing firecrackers at each others’ faces, cackling like they do in Jackass. Is it bad that I wanted them to redirect their efforts to their genitals so they wouldn’t be able to reproduce? The one catch is that one of them was a girl, so that would require a white van and the help of the Chinese government.
6. From the Twitter page of one Emmanuel Arceneaux, BC Lions football player: “God gave us two ends — one to sit on and one to think with. Success depends on which one you use. Head you win, tail you lose.” Of course, outside of the philosophical postings, his remaining tweets are written like a teenager. You win some, you lose some I guess.
7. I was recently told I am a tall, handsome man by an 83 year old woman. Nice ego boost, you figure, even if she is doing it in a “you remind me of my grandson” kind of way. Then she proceeds to tell me she is legally blind. This about sums it up.
8. If you don’t have any plans for the weekend, you should check out the Resonance of Love concert at UBC on the 26th. A friend of mine organized it to raise some money for the Haitian earthquake disaster.
9. Anyone want to come see Nikki Yanofsky on July 3rd with me? QE Theatre. If you’re not familiar with her, think Ella Fitzgerald, except 16. Amazing talent.
10. Futurama is back! Huzzah!

As per Chinese New Year tradition, I went home and ate myself silly, topped off with some of my mom’s awesome apple pie. Happy new year folks. Good health and prosperity to you all.

For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve been in China and Hong Kong for the past two and a half weeks. I got back earlier this week and have been recovering from jetlag. It seems coming back from the other side of the world is always tougher than going there. 15 hour time differences kinda suck. I still have about 900 pictures to go through, many of which consist of people walking through my shots. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped; the sheer number of people (17 million in Beijing alone) often causes no actual open shots. Other times it was just mindless douchebags. Speaking of douchebags, the tour guide in Xi’An was one. But let’s do a small breakdown of the trip.

Day 0 - Travel: A grand total of 16 hours in the air (around 13 to Hong Kong, then 3 to Beijing). One flight attendant was wearing some pretty rank perfume on Cathay Pacific. Flew Dragon Air to Beijing, and got food on a 3 hour flight. Hear that Air Canada? Also, a 5 star hotel in China is not the same as a 5 star hotel in North America. Though for note, China apparently operates on a 7 star scale. Still, the one thing I learned about hotels in China: if you stay at an international hotel (like the Hilton), you’re okay. If you stay at a hotel run by Chinese people not from Hong Kong, make sure it’s less than 2 years old because maintenance is awful. The shower leaked in my room and water stains on the wall.

Day 1 - Beijing: Met the tour guide today, her name was Rain. Apparently English teachers there helped pick English names for the students out of a dictionary. Rain has a friend named Apple (and not Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid). First stop was the Summer Palace, where the Emperor went during the summer to cool off (as much as one can cool off in a Chinese summer). If there’s one thing Chinese emperors knew how to do, it was to use manpower for luxury. There’s a 780 metre corridor at the Summer Palace to keep the emperor out of the rain. Every inch of the corridor’s ceiling has paintings on it, from parts of the known world (at the time) to nature to people. It’s amazing how it’s held up for so long. It’s a shame there hasn’t been more money put into restoration; in fact, they’ve actually turned a couple of the old buildings into bloody coffee shops. That’s the government for you. Oh and the reason why China lost the Opium Wars: the money that was supposed to build a navy was used to build this palace.

Day 1 also involved going to Tianamen Square. Unfortunately, Mao’s mausoleum was closed. There were, however, 5 CCTV cameras on one pole. Suck on that, UK. The Forbidden City was also on the stop list. It is big. The architecture and stone work is absolutely amazing though. Each building was crazy detailed and had symbols to determine who could go where and who lived where. The place had thousands of rooms; given the number of servants, concubines, officials and caretakers, the number of rooms isn’t surprising but I still had to stand in awe of the sheer size of it all. Even with the size of the place, people STILL got into my shots and I had to elbow my way into good shooting positions. Fortunately, I was like Yao Ming in comparison so moving people out of the way wasn’t a problem. Oh, another thing learned from China: don’t make eye contact with vendors and they’ll leave you alone; otherwise they’ll follow you for a block or two trying to hawk whatever trinkets they have.

Day 2 - Great Wall: There are two sides you can climb when you get to the Great Wall. One is steep, sort of like the Grouse Grind. The other side is near vertical. I’m not kidding. It still is something you have to see in person to appreciate the vastness of it all. The number of people needed to create such a monstrosity with no modern machinery to lift the stones. The bad air did make it more difficult to climb, but it was completely worth it in the end. The smog unfortunately did make the pictures not as awesome as they could have been, but the view was still spectacular. Second half of the day involved viewing the Ming Dynasty tombs (some funny signs there…gotta love the typos and literal translations) and an acrobatic show. The show was as good as Cirque de Soleil acrobatics-wise, but Cirque has the more creative and colourful costumes.

Day 3 - Travel to Xi’An: Here we met Frank, he was like a bad history teacher on meth. He rushed through everything: we got pushed through the Xi’An History Museum in 45 minutes. All in all, a general douchebag. If you ever go to Xi’An and your tour guide says his name is Frank and his name means “Great Ordinary,” you’re going to get rushed through everything. Slow down on purpose.

Day 4 - Terra Cotta Warriors: Movies don’t do this place justice. The scale is just ridiculous. Just before going to the tomb, we visited the factory where warriors are made in the same fashion they were when the first emperor ordered them made. It takes days to weeks to scuplt them (depending on size) and baking in the kiln for hours a day. All in all, one full size warrior takes about a month. Seven thousand have been uncovered so far. There are MORE. The level of detail is insane. Each warrior is painted, his face, armour, everything. Oh yeah, each one is also 6 feet tall and 300 pounds. Hollow. There are currently 3 pits open. One has infantry, another has calvalry and the third pit has warriors not yet put back together yet. And they still haven’t found the actual entrance to the tomb, which is supposed to have a non-full scale replica of the known world. Just thinking about the sheer manpower needed to create such a tomb, A TOMB, is nuts. The whole thing took about 45 years to finish, back when the average lifespan was about 50. So two whole generations built this tomb for the emperor. All under heaven indeed.

Overall China thoughts:

• Food was average to terrible on the trip, but since it was all covered by the tour, I think they just took us to the cheapest possible places.
• Sights, entertainment and culture are fantastic.
• I’m surprised hotel service is so poor given how complainy western tourists generally are.
• Manners in Beijing are fare better than Xi’An, likely from orders handed down from the government for the Olympics. In Xi’An, you can’t walk a block without hearing someone hock a loogie. In Beijing, only the people from the provinces spit.
• Driving is a “make up your own rules” kind of thing. The following things seem to be optional: lights, following traffic lanes, not driving on the sidewalk. Fortunately, everyone’s going only about 30kph because of the sheer number of vehicles so there is time to stop if something crazy is done. Which is all the time.

Hong Kong was a lot of eating. Every. Day. I have a bunch of aunts and uncles, and of course everyone had to take a turn buying dinner. And lunch. I don’t think I ever felt hungry during my time in Hong Kong, I just shuttled between meals. What I really liked was the Octopus card. Public transit is cheap, efficient and fast. Kind of the exact opposite of Translink. What made the Octopus card awesome was that it wasn’t just a transit pass; it’s essentially a cash card. You can use it to buy drinks from the vending machine or buy stuff from stores if they accept Octopus cards. Stuff is also really cheap there, given the exchange rate (currently about 7 HKD to 1 CDN). Cheap doesn’t mean bad quality either; quality control at most stores is even more strict than here in Canada. Clothes shopping was somewhat difficult though, since I’m not exactly your typically sized Chinese person. XL shirts barely fit and even the largest pair of pants was about 4 inches too short.

Oh in terms of more funny names, I saw a waiter named Box and a bride named Ice. Dictionary names ahoy!
All in all it was a pretty fun trip, douchey tour guide and jetlag aside. I only wish I could have stayed longer if only to see a few more things in Beijing, see Shanghai and spend a little longer in Hong Kong. I don’t know if I could live in Hong Kong though; everything is just so bloody busy.

Damn you XKCD, damn you.

Bonus extra old feelings for hovering over the image to get the alt text. For those of you who follow this comic and never knew that, you’re welcome for the sudden urge to go back through the other 600+ strips to find out the alt text.

Life, and the relationships within it, is often about perspective. Your particular perspective in a relationship with someone, be it working, friendship, familial or love, is different depending on how you interact with them. Everyone has some level of crazy in them; some have OCD, some are geniuses, some are in love and some enjoy the squishing sounds that a stabbing knife makes. How much of this crazy you see in a particular person generally depends on the amount and quality of time you spend with them. What gets in the way of this time is barriers, which can be people (like your parents) or physical (like an ocean).

Take, for instance, that neighbour of yours. You’ve probably seen him do something a little crazy; maybe he goes running in short shorts when it’s so cold out your boogers freeze. You don’t know him too well though, so you’re pretty far away from his personal Crazy Tree. Because you’re so far out, he appears lower in the branches. The barrier here would be the walls of your domicile…and the fact that you don’t want to see him in short shorts. Ever.

Another example might be “That Girl” at work. You know, the one that can’t seem to shut up about her gerbil. She’s over in Sales though, and your manager generally keeps a tight lid on things so you can do some work. If your manager is good at it, you’ll never even notice just how much crazy has been kept away from you. But you probably will notice the less subtle ones, like Gerbil Girl there. You’re pretty sure she’s high up in the Crazy Tree, but you’re not close enough to be sure; your perspective just tells you that (I mean really, who names their gerbil Pinky McSparklepants?).

Barriers skew your perspective of how much crazy you see. The closer you are to someone’s Crazy Tree, the more you notice how high up they are. They could be just dangling off of a low branch or they could be swinging in the upper branches, screeching and tossing turds at you. Think about it; how much crazier did your roommate seem when you moved in with him compared to when you just had beers every now and then? Barrier of housing dropped there, letting you closer to his Crazy Tree. That supervisor that seemed really cool during the interview for grad school? Well, now that you work in his lab, he’s a turd slinger. Barrier of unfamiliarity dropped.

Where am I going with all of this? Show some appreciation for the barriers in your life, particularly the human ones. Once they’re gone, you might find yourself in the Crazy Forest in the middle of freaking Crazy Town and wondering how all this crazy just snuck up on you. Hint: it didn’t; your perspective just changed.

…but that doesn’t make it any easier.  It’s a curious emotional roller coaster when layoffs happen in at the company you work at. At times, it’s worse for those that stay behind. Call it Survivor’s Guilt, call it resentment, call it whatever you want. A sense of humour usually appears to mitigate the negative feelings, although it seems the outgoing personnel have a better mood than the ones that keep their jobs (at least the ones that are confidently employable). I won’t compare it to death because that’s far too much of a dramatization, but despite any rational thought of being able to continue communication through other means besides “being at work,” there is a brief worry of “I’m not going to see these people again.”

Besides the people front, one also goes through thoughts like “Wow, I still have my job” and “Shit, I have all this work.” How does one avoid feelings of resentment and bitterness? I don’t know if you can; when you work closely with your co-workers and develop friendships as a result, you can’t just shove all of that under a rug and go to work the next day without SOME kind of effect on your person. Tempering such feelings has a lot to do with how your company proceeds next (ie how they communicate, take care of those laid off, manage work expectations with a reduced staff). Talking to former co-workers probably also has a collaborative healing process.

In any case, it’s better to not make any decisions in a raw emotional state. Process, think, seek advice, decide.

I am amazed that turned out as coherently as it did. If it weren’t clear enough, layoffs happened at my company, but I was not among them. If, however, you are aware of openings for the following positions, I would be appreciative of an e-mail so I can pass the necessary details onto some former co-workers:

• Web developer
• Development manager/Project manager
• Office manager/Executive assistant
• Accountant
• Semantic modeller

Now I’m gonna go toast ‘em off with some scotch. Here’s to you, guys. Been a pleasure.

Ever get your brain really fried over a problem that you spent the better part of 5 hours solving? Then only to find out you only sorta solved it when you got home? And THEN realizing it’s not even goddamn FRIDAY yet?

I am mentally exhausted and I still have way too much work to do. I should’ve taken a vacation.

One of the questions generally asked in interviews is “Where do you see yourself in five years?” At the time, coming out of university, I figured I would actually think about this so I wouldn’t look like a total goof when it inevitably came up. It ended up pretty standard: pay my dues, shoot for making senior developer, be on track to, if not already, holding down some major project and responsibilities. While my end goal still is to hit the senior developer rank, I’m not so sure I want it in the immediate future. Granted, I’m only 3 years out of school, so my mind may change in the next two years. However, just by working and discussing with my peers at my company, the role of senior developer comes with a lot of responsibility (which I don’t mind) and a lot of extraneous crap (which I do mind).

Politics is the nature of the beast, no matter if you’re in academia or industry. Simply by working with people you have to deal with conflicting personalities, different ideas and unusual processes. In a more junior position, one is generally shielded from a lot of the political crap that goes on behind the scenes. Your manager gives you tasks, you do them, and the only real conflict you may deal with is with others who are around the same level of the food chain you are on. Of course, your manager might be a douchebag too, but for the most part you’re dealing with people you work with rather than for.

When you actually move up to a lead role, even if you aren’t a manager, you start dealing with management crap. It’s more sophisticated and complex than peer-to-peer crap, and there’s often less you can do about it. How much you can do about it depends on the company culture; is constructive criticism encouraged, or is it merely dismissed as “negativity”? Are collaborative efforts encouraged, or is the term just a buzzword to fake an inclusive environment? How much does management listen to the troops, trying to understand what’s going on in the trenches? Not being able to do anything is one of the most frustrating things when dealing with crap.
In analyzing any situation, I always ask if I’m ready for it. Ready or not, life comes with some unexpected bumps and situations. Work’s thrown a bit of a curveball, and the ramifications are yet to be determined. Overall, the last three years have gone nowhere near what my original “plan” was, but it’s not like it’s been a terrible experience; far from it, in fact (aside from a couple of hiccups). It’s often said life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. I plan to just roll with how things come; dealing with the unexpected separates the good developers from the bad ones.