Yes, I am a year behind on finishing this series. It is a disgrace. But, I persist. In case you have missed (or forgotten) the previous episodes, here are parts [1], [2], and [3].

So, at this point AC and I had been enjoying the laid-back small-town lifestyle in Saarloius (Germany) for about a week. As the length of our stay was indefinite, and the hotel appeared to be empty, we had no reservation and simply paid for the room each day. At least, that was the plan, until one morning the cheery clerk informed us that we would have to vacate the premises in two days, as the hotel was fully booked. So, we called around. The other hotels in Saarloius were about to be full as well. As were the hotels in metropolitan Saarbrucken, and basically everywhere else in Southwestern Germany. As far as I could tell, there was about to be a massive influx of Germans for some sort of “festival of fire”. And they wanted us out.

Frantic planning ensued. AC’s infirm relative (the reason for our trip) could not yet travel by air, so we were restricted to land routes. We had at least a week to wait. After some deliberation, nearby Paris was chosen as a desirable resting spot. The next morning, we woke early and hopped on the high-speed train, springing for the outlets and guaranteed seating available in “first class”.

Our arrival in Paris was…unfortunate. We arrived during rush hour, me lugging three sets of bags out of the station into the Parisian heat. The taxi driver watched me struggle, with a (possibly imagined) smirk. As we drove into the city, through the smog, I decided that Paris was overrated. It was smelly and dirty and filled with people. I hated it already.

The taxi dropped us off at the front gate of our hotel, in the Quartier Latin. The hotel was nice, and AC took me out to a pleasant little spot with cafes surrounding a park. French teenagers came and went on mopeds. The situation seemed altogether less dire. And then the bill came. 12 euros ($18) for a mojito. Also, none of the restaurants were open yet - they close between meals, and apparently “dinner” starts at 8 pm. So I dined on Paninis, purchased through a window (small windows in the sides of buildings seem to be a primary source of nourishment in mainland Europe. Basically a drive-thru for pedestrians). Then we strolled along the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. Five minutes after we arrived, Parisian police told us the monument was closing, and we would have to leave.

Paris and I, we just could figure out how to make it work.

On returning to the hotel, AC learned that Air Canada had arranged a special flight for her and her infirm relative. They would leave in the morning, flying back to Canada in First Class (!). I was being abandoned in Europe, and in vile Paris, no less! Naturally, my Air Transat return ticket was immutable. I had 3 days to kill before there was any point in returning to Frankfurt. Panic!

When morning came, AC took me for fresh pastry. We strolled through quiet streets, where the filth of the previous day was being hosed off as fresh bread was unloaded from trucks. In contrast to the previous day’s madness, it was quite pleasant. But soon she was off in her taxi, and I was left to my own devices. I grabbed a Panini, paid for a few hours of hotel internet, and considered my options.

Clearly I was not going to stay in Paris. AC had a brother in Spain, but travel time was too high. Friends in Berlin were busy. London, though - London was just across the channel, mere hours away. Hotels were expensive, but I managed to find a bed in what seemed to be a reputable hostel, and a return flight to Frankfurt on Ryanair could be had for a dollar! So, it was decided - London. I made my bookings and checked out of the hotel. I had an afternoon to waste before I boarded the Chunnel train, so I figured I would spend it walking around Paris, (briefly) seeing the sites. I would be a turbo-tourist, taking in what was on display in this foul city so I could say that I’d been there and seen that, and then get the hell out.

I wandered Paris for a day. In those few hours I stumbled across castles, cathedrals, and massive gardens at every turn. This journey is documented below. But most importantly, I discovered that Paris and I got along quite well, once we were over the initial awkwardness of introduction. In fact, by time I had to catch the Eurostar train to London, I was regretting my decision to leave (in part because the price of the train ticket and hostel would easily have paid for 2 more nights at my hotel in Paris). But, it was done. I was finished with the continent and off to England.

- - - - -

By now, some of you may have noticed that this travel log of mine uncharacteristically lacks photographic evidence. See, in my rush to leave Canada, I forgot to bring a camera. But it was during my walk around Paris that I remembered my mobile phone camera. Naturally, the pictures it takes are terrible - low resolution, poor color reproduction, and so on. But I’m going to subject them to you anyway, if you’re willing. Plus, the captions are entertaining. Click here to see the set on Flickr.

If you are new to Flickr, you want to click on the first small image on the right, and then use the small images (again on the right) to move forward. If you start a slideshow, make sure you turn on the captions, or you’ll miss the colour commentary (click on ‘options’ in the bottom right).

Some brilliant internet person has discovered that if you take the Garfield out of Garfield comics, they get a whole lot more entertaining (in a bizarre sort of way). [ link ]

AC tried to convince me that when the rugrat arrives, we’re going to split everything 50-50. Everything. Luckily I found this educational website full of important parenting tips, which totally gets me off the hook. [ link ]

So, I know I haven’t been so awesome on the prompt EuroTrip updates. My bad. But I have to interrupt your irregularly scheduled program for the following public service announcement. Dumpling House Restaurant, of 328 Spadina Ave, in Toronto, is now closed. Closed because sometime today, it failed a City of Toronto Public Health Inspection. It failed this inspection miserably - so badly that a Health Hazard Order was involved, and the proprieter was issued a summons. It failed, in short, because of rats:

But wait. It gets worse. You see, today I dined at this fine establishment. Today. Today I had lunch at Dumpling House. The same day that it failed a City of Toronto Public Heath Inspection. The same day that a Health Hazard Order and court summons was issued. The same day that rats were witnessed, scurrying about with their little rat feet over top of the table where delicious dumplings are formed. Delicious rat-contaminated dumplings.

I finished lunch at 1:30pm. The first comment on this blog post that broke the rat story was posted at 4:06 pm. So the shutdown was maybe at 3pm? A scant hour-and-a-half delay, and I might have witnessed the shutdown in action. I might have been sitting there, dumpling in hand*, when a crack team of Public Health Inspection officers came sliding down by rope from the Official Public Health Rapid Response Team helicopter, crashing through the window, while megaphones blared “put down the chopsticks and step away from the pan-fried lamb” **.

Or, perhaps, I simply would have arrived after the shutdown, and missed out on the rat-contaminated dumplings entirely. Of course, then this post would not have been written. And, I would be feeling distinctly less queasy about the whole thing. It’s always a trade-off, I guess.

News travels fast - even the National Post is blogging about the Dumpling House rats. The proprieter of Dumpling House is quoted, stating that it is not Dumpling House in particular that has a rat problem, but the City of Toronto as a whole. Well, clearly, yes, there are many rats in downtown Toronto. But the rats inside the window, contaminating the dumpling preparation area? Definitely a Dumpling House problem.

The worst part is, now the lab has to find a new dumpling place…

* In fact, I do not eat dumplings with my hands. But “dumpling pinched precariously between two chopsticks” wasn’t really working, sentence-wise…

** This is how I imagine a Public Health shutdown happens. The more likely “man-with-clipboard” scenario hardly does the situation justice, in my mind.

In June of 2007, I took an impromptu trip to Germany, which led to a wacky European adventure. This is my story…

When we left off last time, I had just arrived in Saarloius, a tiny town near the border between Germany and France. AC and I stayed in a quaint little hotel called the RATSKELLAR. Sounds cozy, no? Actually the RATSKELLAR was pretty nice, it had a little patio which overlooked the town square (yes, a town square!). Unfortunately, the town square had been completely torn up for renovations, and construction started at 7 in the morning. That meant I was always up in time for the complimentary RATSKELLAR breakfast, also known as Frühstück. Unlike those lame North-American “continental” breakfasts (ie muffin and OJ), this was a hearty German breakfast, with a wide assortment of breakfast meats. Actually I was a bit taken aback by the meat selection - generally I consider bacon and sausages to be the only permissible breakfast meats. But this is not the German way. They did have toast, though, so I managed to keep from starving.

After breakfast I usually hid in the hotel room, fighting off jet lag and avoiding the Saarlanders, who generally didn’t speak a word of English. Also, as a very small town in rural Germany, there wasn’t exactly a lot to see in Saarloius (like I said, the town square was being renovated). I did venture out a few times, to restock the tiny fridge in our room. These grocery missions inevitably ended with me staring blankly at the cashier and holding out money in response to whatever German-questions she asked. Since Saarloius is kind of off the beaten track, the cashiers didn’t seem to have a lot of experience identifying non-German-speaking tourists based on the tried-and-true “please just take the correct amount of money from my hand” gesture. Instead, there would be an initial period of awkwardness, where it was clear that the cashier was trying to decide if I was retarded or just messing with her. I assume she eventually went with “retarded”, because she always seemed to give back the right amount of change.

Perhaps you can now imagine why I avoided leaving our room in the RATSKELLAR.

Other than a minor traffic mishap, in which I was nearly run down by a car driving backwards as fast as many drive forwards, my time in Saarloius was uneventful. AC and I had a nice dinner at an outdoor restaurant, with a waiter who spoke English because he had recently abandoned a failed acting career in Los Angeles. This was nice for AC because he understood the concept of a “vegetarian” dinner. At one point, I also ventured into a coffee shop to get a latte, which I prompty spilled all over the counter. The barrista said something gruff-sounding in German which I took to mean “don’t worry about it, dear customer, I will deal with your mess”, so I made a rapid escape.

Tune in next week, when we get kicked out of our hotel and then flee across the border to France.

As I explained in Part 1, in June of 2007 I took an impromptu trip to Germany, to save AC from boredom in a small town called Saarloius. Last time, I was just getting ready to fly from Toronto to Frankfurt in Germany. Despite the last-minute Air Transat booking, I managed to score an aisle seat, so I wasn’t quite as cramped as the poor suckers in the middle (Air Transat really packs ‘em in). After a several hour delay, we managed to take off, and eventually land without incident. The next step was to get on a train…

AC’s train trip was more exciting than mine, because when she flew to Germany she had no idea how to get from the airport to Saarloius. Actually she didn’t even know she was going to Saarloius. She barely had time to pack before we taxi’d out to the airport and put her on a plane. When she landed, she texted me: “now what?“. Over text message, I gave her directions and told her what to buy. Every half hour or so I would get a text from her that said something like: “In Mannheim - what next?“. And, half-way through the trip I found out that her destination had suddenly changed, so I had to re-direct her. Planning her route by text message, half-way around the world, was pretty exciting - it felt like something out of an action movie. Of course, when she finally got to Saarloius, she just went to her hotel, instead of breaking into an embassy or something like that…

Since I had my itinerary all planned out, my train ride was far more prosaic. There were a few times where I would get out at my stop and discover that I was standing on what seemed like an abandoned platform in the middle of nowhere. But, inevitably another train would show up, right on time.

So, after something like 14 hours of travel, I finally made it to Saarloius, and met my Skype nemesis - the angry old man who ran the hotel front desk at night and spoke not a word of English. At first he seemed a bit icy - I’m not sure he realized I was AC’s husband, and not just some tourist she had found at a bar, and was clearly irritated when I hung out in the lobby trying to use the wireless internet. But, eventually we bonded when I worked up the nerve to ask him how to make outgoing calls. After some initial confusion, he grabbed my hand and pointed it at the phone, shouting “NULL” (which he pronounced “knool“). I realized that he meant I needed to dial 0 before making outgoing calls, but he wasn’t sure I got it, so he shouted “knool” at me a few more times, with increasing volume, until he decided he had said it loud enough that I understood. After this incident, he was as friendly as any other angry old German man (at least, I think he was friendly….).

Next up: sausage.

I have been meaning to write about this for the last 6 months. I finally got around to it.

As you may or may not know, in June I took a trip to Europe. An unplanned trip to Europe. For reasons I will avoid discussing over the internets, AC was spending the month in the south-west corner of Germany, in a town called Saarloius. A month in Germany might sound exciting, but Saarloius is very small and very German, and AC doesn’t speak German, so she was kind of bored. Naturally, I had to come to her rescue. In an airplane.

Does this sound like madness to you? Well, it kind of was. But we had been talking about taking a real vacation for a while, and here was our chance. Plus, I got to walk into a travel agent and answer the question “When would you like to leave for Germany?” with “How about tonight?“. Downside: flying “tonight” is expensive. Actually I didn’t get to fly “tonight”. I got to fly “in 3 days, when the next Air Transat plane leaves for Frankfurt”, because Air Transat charges half of what Air Canada does when you want to book a trip to Europe only 3 days in advance. In retrospect, I should have paid for the Air Canada flight…

I spent the next 3 days alternating between packing, organizing things for when I was gone, and blind panic. Oh, and trying to call AC’s hotel with skype. This was harder than it sounds, because I was calling at roughly 3AM in German time, and the overnight attendant at the hotel front desk was a grumpy old man who didn’t speak a word of English. Initially I tried to formulate sentences with Google Translator, like “room 9 please”, but I’m sure I butchered the pronunciation and the grumpy old man was completely disinterested in trying to decipher my broken dialog. Our conversations would go like this:

<rms> Hello! raum 9 bitte!
<grumpyoldman> !?!!!?!?! (angry-sounding german words here)
<rms> …..um…..raum 9 bitte? (pronounced slightly differently, with less certainty…)
<grumpyoldman> !?!!!?!?! (more angry words)
<rms> ….ok….I’ll call back…

I quickly abandoned my valiant attempts at cultural exchange and had a German friend call, who learned that (1) the grumpy old man was on his cell phone and I should just call back later, and (2) he would prefer if I just called the room directly and left him alone. I could never get that to work, so we eventually established a system where I would call and shout “Carpendale, bitte” (shouting because the skype connection was abysmal), and he would shout back “Carpendale, ja, ja” and connect me.

I started to realize that communication might be an issue on this trip. See, I’ve been to Europe a few times, but only to England and Ireland, where I speak the native tongue (well, sort of). But I quickly discovered that in Germany, most people only speak German! Troubling. So, I spent a while on iTunes, filling AC’s iPod up with “how to speak German” podcasts. I had a brilliant plan to listen to these on the plane, and do the accompanying worksheets. Seriously. I think I managed to listen to the first 2 or 3 before I realized that, like with the French, there was no way I was going to teach myself anything beyond “please” and “thanks”. The backs of the worksheets were good for doodling on, though.

Anyway, now that I had a plane ticket, German podcasts, and a growing realization of the madness of the whole plan, I was ready to go to Germany…

Comedy Gold.

Today I have various bits of edutainment for you. But first, Happy Birthday to my wee sister, who turned 21 today. Actually, yesterday. Well, technically, 2 days ago, depending on your timezone. Regardless - Happy Birthday, Sis’.

Ok, on to the entertainment. Well, it’s not really that entertaining, actually. But it is educational. Apparently the corporate behemoth that is Dove (you know, the soap people) have reformed their fetishizing-waiflike-bulemia-victim ways, and are now using “real girls” in their advertising. Or, at least, they’re willing to show you what the real girl looked like, before the makeup team and photoshop artists got at her:

I wasn’t particularly surprised by the make-up part, but the Photoshopping blew me away, and I’m a frickin’ professional computer graphics nerd. I’m well aware of the crazy photoshopping that goes on these days, like this Faith Hill “re-imagining”. But this video is insane. Did you see what they did to her NECK?!? Who has a neck like that?!? And then they give her bugged-out alien space-eyes!?! Freakish. It’s basically a caricature. I wonder why we don’t notice this kind of thing…

Ok, now on to the lowbrow humour. Below is the subject line of an e-mail that was forwarded to most of the departments at a certain university-which-will-not-be-named (senders have been hidden to protect the guilty):

AC pointed out that the slip may have been Freudian in nature, which hadn’t even occurred to me.

(Yes, I am making jokes at the expense of a dead man (well, tangentially, at least). Hear that scraping? It’s the bottom of the barrel…)

Finally, for your nerding pleasure, don’t you just hate it when you don’t have a fixed memory address containing jmp esp to point your buffer overflow attack at? I know I used to. But not anymore, because some ingenious hacker-type has come up with a solution - Temporal Return Addresses.

If you don’t know how a buffer overflow attack works, here’s the Coles notes - say you have some program with a function foo() that has a local array char bar[100]. Because the programmer is an idiot, the function contains a call like “strcpy(bar, line_from_a_file)”. So you create a file with a line that contains more than 100 characters, causing strcpy to write past the end of the array, overwriting the return address on the stack that foo() will jump back to when it is finished. Normally this causes the program to crash, because the return address was replaced with random garbage. But if you’re clever, you can craft a string that replaces the original return address with a new one - say somewhere else in memory that contains the assembly code to delete the hard drive, or give you administrator access. Voila, you’re a hacker.

But there’s one problem. You need to know the new return address, which is highly program-specific. The problem is that the addresses of memory buffers can change for all sorts of reasons, including people wising up and making them random, breaking this attack. Good, right? But those hackers are crafty. They’ve figured out that, really, you just need a fixed memory address that is constantly being incremented - like, say, a timer. Then you just wait until the bit pattern of the timer is the same as the assembly instruction you want to execute, then you (very quickly) point your return address there, and you’re golden.

Let me repeat that, for the kids in the back. The timer is an integer which is constantly incrementing. At certain times, the bit pattern of this integer is the same as the bit pattern of an instruction the attacker wants to execute. The buffer overflow attack can be executed at that exact moment - the attacker just has to be willing to wait.

But you’re safe, you say, because your source code is closed and nobody knows the addresses of your timer variables. Wrong again, because the crafty hackers have written a program which scans your program over time and automatically identifies addresses in memory that are constantly incrementing. Plus, on Windows it turns out that all processes have at least one timer that Windows makes for them. Wild.

If you’ve read this far but aren’t a programmer and don’t really understand, just trust me, this is a work of staggering fucking brilliance. And we totally lucked out, because most timers on computers count the date from 1970, and it turns out that for most of 2003, these timers contained a highly desirable bit pattern really, really often. Combined with all the worms that were running amok back then, and, well, it could have been messy.

(That’s the end of the science lesson - you may return to your facebook now…)

For my first 8 months in Toronto, I lived with some friends in the upper two floors of a house in “Little Portugal” (near Dufferin station). It was a great place, we didn’t have access to the yard, but we did have an awesome balcony with a nice view. We also had another squirrel invader. At the back of the house, there was an un-insulated “cold-room” on the second floor. Outside, there was a hole in the side of the house, in which this particular squirrel decided to nest. At first, we just heard the scratching (which drove the cat nuts). Then, one day, the squirrel started to come through:

At first it didn’t seem so bad. We figured it would hear us (and smell the cat), realize it was coming through the ceiling into scary human-land, and stop digging. At least, that was the story I told my roommate, because she was slightly paranoid about waking up one morning and finding a rabid squirrel loose in the house. (I have to admit, I did start locking my bedroom door closed - just in case…). But this squirrel wasn’t going to be deterred by a vicious, hungry cat, and things quickly escalated:

At first, the landlord figured a few strips of packing tape would do the trick. I tried to point out that this was an inferior approach, and duct tape would be far more effective. But in the end, no tape-based solution was going to keep that squirrel out. We were forced to abandon the cold-room and retreat back to the kitchen, barricading the door at all times (except when we had to get stuff out of the refrigerator). Although guilt was felt (by some), we requested an exterminator. The landlord was a bit squeamish about that, though, so instead she just had the hole patched over. The squirrel lost it’s nest and probably froze to death. And the cycle of life continues…

Toronto has lots of weird public service advertisements, like this one I saw on a full-size billboard in the subway (below-left). Maybe it’s only been since the SARS thing, but there seems to be a general paranoia about GERMS. Every bathroom at the university has signs explaining secret hand-washing techniques that will prevent you from leaving behind any GERMS. Secret techniques like “wiping down everything you might have touched with a huge wad of paper towel”. (I guess when it comes to GERMS vs Environment, GERMS win). I would not be surprised to learn that there is a number you can call if you accidentally contaminate something with your GERMS, to have a biohazard clean-up team dispatched immediately. Although, I guess Alberta does have the rat patrol. I wonder what weird neuroses other provinces have.

Also, fighting meats:

Finally, just in case you are ever having some trouble classifying different types of wood, the IKEA in Etobicoke has your back: