Blog: Archive for December, 2000

Not much memorable happened during this time period except for my brother and sister-in-law visiting all-too-briefly, bringing us gifts from America.

Christmas! We opened our presents, and ended up with some cool stuff, although I only got one thing off my Wishlist.

We braved the crowds to check out Boxing Day downtown. As it happened, the places we were heading weren't particularly mobbed, although A&B Sound was. Luckily, we didn't care.

We got Lloyd Cole's The Collection CD at Sam the Record Man—the only Lloyd Cole we've found in Vancouver, by the way! We left the Granville Book Company with the Modern Library edition of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of American Cities, which I've wanted for ages now, and a recent Greg Bear book for Melissa. Then it was off to Granville Island, where everything was closed, and a march up Fourth, in hopes that Duthie Books would be open (it wasn't).

We peeked in various kitchen and chatchka shops that were open, and wound up at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where we caught a Tuesday night matinee price showing of State and Main, which was terrific. Unfortunately, Alliance-Atlantis, who own the Fifth Ave., have decided that people should pay CN$10.50 for regular showings of movies, and CN$8.00 for matinees, meaning that we may well have seen our last film there.

I suffered a nasty sinus headache as the price of yesterday's expedition, but recovered in time to watch the Scrapheap Challenge final on TLC. Confusing, as Alan Cox had claimed that the Americans won. (They didn't win this one—we're guessing Alan and Telsa have been watching the next season in the UK. Either that or they've faked up the results to put the Americans in their place!)

Started in on the revisions to Melissa's thesis. In between, I tossed together some Mason code to layout this blog page. Sometimes I impress myself. Now all I have to do is figure out some sort of database-y solution to storing and retrieving the entries....

Today's big achievement was finally getting Gronk, Jamie Zawinski's MP3 jukebox, to work! Now all we have to do is start ripping....

A long slide into depression and apathy, followed by a glimmer of hope as we decided to go see the Arnold Schwartzenegger film The Sixth Day at the cheap theatre, which was dashed by the discovery that my car's battery was dead. Again. Damn.

Another day of few accomplishments mixed with depression. Worked almost all the kinks out of the ripping process, and got three machines in on the act, so we managed to process about a dozen CDs.

Also the end of the second millenium, which other people finally seem to be realizing. We have no plans, however, and end up feeling somewhat bad about the whole thing. A midnight walk resulted in very few encounters with people (unlike last year), and only a few fireworks.