It just took me a bloody hour to walk a movie back to BlockBuster. Normally it would take 20 minutes, but there is a FSCKING ICE STORM in Montreal. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating. For Montreal natives, it's probably not a full-blown ice storm yet. But it's freezing rain and the sidewalks are death-traps. As far as I'm concerned, that's an ice storm, and we're all going to freeze to death.

It does not help that I live half way up a hill. To get anywhere I have to either slide downhill for 2 blocks, or, I don't know - fly? There's no way I'm going up.

If it were sunny, it might at least look pretty. But it's not. It's grey and the only interesting bit were the cars that had been out all night. They look glazed, like donuts. If I had a car I could drive it. On the street. Where the ice is all melted. I tried walking on the street but was instantly honked at by every passing car.

I went to the Cock 'n' Bull pub on Monday. It was craft night. It wasn't nearly as dirty as I'd imagined (or secretly hoped).

Oh shit, right - it's a new year. 2004. Whoop-dee-doo! I drank a lot of wine on New Years Eve and had a nasty hangover in the morning. It was good wine. On New Years Day I saw Calendar Girls. It's a movie about some women in England who make a Nude Calendar for the Women's Institute, and then they get all famous and stuff. It's pretty good. I think it might have been a preview or something, because it was only showing on New Years Day at the Paramount downtown. So maybe you can't see it. That's rough. But if you can, it has some great lines. I will not try to reproduce them here, because that never works out...

Happy New Year y'all.

They are running a new scam in Montreal. You know how all those convencience stores and other small shops have "5 dollar minimum" for interac? Well it looks like they've stopped doing that and replaced it with a per-use Interac fee no matter how much your stuff costs. The Fruterie Du Parc charges 10 cents, the dep down the street from my place charges 25. I read something on the net by a guy who said you should use credit cards instead of Interac, because the service fees are lower. I'm starting to think he was on to something...

In other news, Emily Glass was whining on the bus today that I didn't link to her phidgets-like thing. So now I have.

BTW, check this out: Pictures of Mars.One of the pictures for 01.05.04 is in 3D. Yes, Three Dimensional Mars! I know you're as excited as I was. I'm also linking to this page, which has a 3.2 GB satellite image of Canada, in case I want to download it later. Or in case you want to find your neighborhood. Or check out mountain goats from above.

Finally, check out the cloth simulations that the people in CPSC 587 did at the UofC this semester. Bad Ass!

Speaking of simulations, I found a textbook that explains how to implement the fluid stuff I spent that entire semester trying to figure out. Unfortunately it's expensive and I'm poor, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to get it from the McGill library...I bet it explains all the stuff that was in that stupid classified Los Alamos tech report that I couldn't get. Argh. Argh Argh Argh.

Last night I went to the Cock N' Bull for craft night again. I didn't mention last time that I didn't stay for craft night - I was on my way to get groceries, I just stopped in to say hello. I lied because I wanted the 3 people who read this site to think I have an interesting social life. This is not the case...

But last night I went there and actually did crafts. They had plasticine (which some of you may know only as Play-Doh(tm). For some reason I do not think of them as the same substance...) Anyway, I made some Bad-Ass crafts, including a scorpion and a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag. Then I felt like I had time-traveled back to 80's hair metal, so I made an Elvis dice. I cannot explain. I wish I had a digital camera so I could preserve the Bad-Ass-ness for all eternity...or any camera. I bought one of those printers that can do scanning and photocopying. Totally unnecessary, but pretty...

I'm going to share some links with you now, kids. The first is a sort of flash-cartoon thing called Strindberg + helium. I found them last spring and thought they were fucking hilarious. I also thought if I shared that fact with anyone they would think I was a bloody lunatic, backing away slowly until they felt far enough away to bolt for the door. But, I was redeemed when someone else showed them to me. So either we're both bloody lunatics, or you might enjoy it too...

Oh, right. The other link. Drawing on Acid. Apparently the US did some experiment in the 50s where the fed an artist acid and asked him to draw the same picture over and over. The results are interesting, but I think the observer commentary is the best part.

It's -40 million and I forgot what I was going to type about.

I just noticed that Ulmer is sending email to my hotmail account. Hosers: I do not read it. Most of the time all I get there is penis-elargement spam. And now that they 'upgraded' hotmail so the interface is all javascript or something, I can't really use it. See, I configured Internet Explorer to have high security paranoia-type stuff a while back...and now I can't figure out how to undo it. Hotmail pops up security warning dialogs every 3 seconds. Send to rms@unknownroad.com for prompt replies. (It's at the bottom of the page, in case you forget later).

I know you've probably all been keeping up on the Mars action happening over there on, you know, Mars. But in case you haven't, they have Three Dimensional (3D !) pictures. You need a pair of those red/blue 3D glasses that came with cheesy comic books when you were a kid. I guess you can buy like "pro" ones too, but mine are just cardboard. They work pretty well. This one is my favorite so far - the big version covers my whole screen at super-high res, and I get a little Mars window. I just can't get enough of that Mars...

I finished reading Bel Canto yesterday. The first chapter was so good I almost didn't want to keep going, because I didn't think there was any way it was going to stay that good. But it did. I forced myself to not just read the whole thing in one night - you know, reading until dawn because I can't stop. I only read it on the Metro in the morning and on the way home. Sometimes people I work with are on the Metro and I talk to them, but this week there were days where I was secretly hoping I would be alone so I could read this book. Sick, I know. The only caveat is perhaps the ending, which was not what I was expecting, and not particularly satisfying either. Needless to say, if you need a good book - this one works. Read it. Now.

Deep-Fried Hamburgers.

I'm going to Kendo tommorrow, unless I wuss out. It's going to hurt so bad.

Well, traffic skyrocketed this month, thanks to links from chowpat and matt, and a post on mikeP's Delerium list. I will not define "skyrocketing", because that would be sad.

I was shown this recently. Why are dancing Asian children so funny? I think maybe it's the costumes. And the music. Anyway, I clicked on the "more videos" link and ended up at the homepage for Rob Pongi's Video Happy Hour. It's some kind of comedy TV show in Japan, as far as I can tell. Click on the 'Video Channels' links on the bottom right side and you'll get lists of clips. They are quite odd. This one from North Korea is not so funny, except maybe the bit where the artist seems to consider the Korean war and "Americans beating North Korea for an Olympic gold medal" as offenses worthy of the same level of outrage. Maybe the translation was bad...

I only found out yesterday that Spirit (the mars rover) had stopped communicating for a few days. This was not insigificant news, for me at least. I read it in a free daily French newspaper, so I didn't really know what had happened, I had to wait all day at work to come home and find out. But by then communication had been re-established. Relief. But it's still out of commission for weeks at least. The other one (Opportunity) landed today on the other side of Mars. Maybe it will have some new 3D pix, but they said it landed in a plain, so they will probably not be super-exiciting...

Apparently there is some new web archive of thousands of British intelligence photos from WWII. It's supposed to be here, but I think they got swamped with traffic and maybe decided to sell said traffic to some web hosting company. I hope it comes back...

Nothing much is happening here. It's too bloody cold. We had a small dinner party thing last night, and I talked video games with this guy. He had an interesting theory about Pac-Man that I will share with you. He was convinced that the creator of Pac-Man must have been suffering from some sort of mental illness. I didn't understand at first, but really - think about it. What the fuck is Pac-Man? Of course, he is a yellow sphere. But what is he doing? There is no representation of reality there. Space Invaders made sense - you're defending earth from invaders. Ok. Tenous mapping to reality established. What about Pac-Man? He is trapped in an endless series of mazes where he has to eat all the dots and avoid ghosts? WTF? Was it even a "he"? Only because they put on a pink bow later to make "Mrs." Pac-Man. But did they ever meet? Did Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man go home together after a hard day of dot-eating and ghost-avoiding? No, they didn't, because they were trapped in an endless series of mazes.

So the person who came up with Pac-Man was obsessed with Mazes, Ghosts, and Dots. And it never ends. Pac-Man just eats dots. They have no effect on him - he just eats dots. He evades the ghosts. The game goes on forever. There was no story, no goal. Eat dots and avoid ghosts. That is all Pac-Man's life amounts to. Does anyone identify with Pac-Man? I hope not...

Now, ok, these days this is all not so far fetched. There are lots of games that boil down to "eat dots and avoid ghosts". But those are rip-offs of Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the first. The guy who made Pac-Man was sitting there with this entirely new machine, the likes of which no one had ever seen, where he could create a virtual world to entertain and delight. And he comes up with a game that goes on forever, where your only goals are to eat dots and avoid ghosts. What sort of mind comes up with that world? Was it supposed to be a statement on the human condition? Maybe a warning about video games themselves? If so, we all missed it.

Brilliance? Insanity? Who is to say...

New pants today. New pants New pants New pants. You think this is no big deal? I had no idea where to get pants in this city. The only clothing stores I have ever seen fall into 3 categories: The Gap, Trendy Brand-Name Boutiques, and Trendy Montreal Designer Boutiques. Now. I don't really like The Gap. And I'm not Trendy. I've been living off 2 pairs of pocket pants and a pair of jeans, all of which I had when I moved from Calgary. They are all in rather bad shape...

But where the hell was I supposed to go? There is no Warehouse One in Montreal. There is no SportChek. WHERE WILL I BUY MY CLOTHES? They have Winners. I can get hoodies and boxers and socks at Winners. I'm set on the hoodies/underwear front. But you can't find good pocket pants at Winners. Khaki's, maybe, but they don't have enough pockets. I NEED POCKETS!

I have, from time to time, considered the trendy boutiques. I have never actually went inside, but I've walked past and thought, "maybe they sell pocket pants". They probably don't. It's probably not 'in' this year or something. Everyone in this city is so fucking stylish and trendy. Sure, they might have some pocket pants with little custom-sized pockets for your cell phone or something. But I imagined any place selling functional pocket pants would probably have gone out of business years ago.

But today was different. Today I went into Roots. There is a Roots on Ste. Catherine a few blocks from my house. I don't go into Roots alone. I was with someone today. She wanted to go into Roots. We went into Roots. I found pants.

Oh, but first - inside Roots. There was a DJ. Yes. A fucking DJ. A DISC JOCKEY. Inside a clothing store. He had his own booth - and a pretty big booth, at that. Now, he looked bored out of his goddam mind. But there he was, two turn tables and a microphone. Besides the DJ, there was a salesperson:customer ratio of easily 2:1. The sales people all looked like they stepped out of those dancing Gap ads. There were just too many - it was creepy.

So, anyway, I found pocket pants at Roots by accident. They had a pile of "on-sale reject pants" that included several models of pocket pant. I tried some on and immediately bought them, then vacated the premises ASAP - before the massive sales force could talk me into a Roots meshback hat...

I just finished The Da Vinci Code. It's pretty good. The story is not spectacular - it's definitely written to be made into a movie. That many twists and turns do not fit into 400 pages. IMO, the book seems to have been written because the author knows all this cool stuff about religious symbolism that he wanted to tell people. So he fit into a boilerplate innocent-man-on-the-run-from-global-conspiracy plot which I will not bother to discuss. What the author really wanted to do was talk down the Roman Catholic Church.

(Note: some of this may spoil the book. You are warned)

The book was about the Holy Grail. You know, like Monty Python? Sort of. Most people (me included) think the Holy Grail is a cup. Specifically, a chalice - the one that Jesus drank out of. Supposed to grant eternal life to the drinker or something, according to Hollywood. But according to symbology majors, "blade and chalice" refer to "man and woman". And the Holy Grail isn't a cup, it's actually a person - Mary Magdelene. I'm not a biblical scholar, but apparently in the bible Mary Magdelene is a prostitute who tries to tempt the big J-C. In reality, lots of people think that Mary Magdelene was Jesus's wife.

Why do they think that? Well, apparently most of our culture derives from symbolic stuff that was around before the big religions. The book claims that most of the stuff in Catholocism was stolen from the Pagans. Pagans are bad, right? Well, apparently pagans were just people who didn't buy what the Church was selling - they kept believing in their old gods - so the Church vilified them. Satan is built out of Pagan symbols - he has horns because the Pagans wore masks with horns, and so on. Voila, instant evil Pagans. Apparently this is also where the whole idea of Witches came from. The Pagans worshipped female gods - in the book they talk a lot about this "sacred feminine". The Church was definitely not down with this - they wanted the boys to be in charge. Hence, women became the original sinners, and the Church burned 5 million women as witches. They didn't mention that in Religion 30....Oh, and they leave Mary M out of the bible, for similar men-are-more-important reasons

Sorry, sort of rambled there. Anyway, the book claims that Mary Magdelene's coffin, along with a few chests of documents proving that J-C was married to her, and that they spawned a whole bunch of kids, is the Holy Grail. And that it has been hidden for two centuries by a secret society called the Priory of Sion, which has had such diverse leaders as Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci. Why is it hidden? Because the Church wants it destroyed. If it got out that the Big J was not divine/celibate/etc, that he shacked up with Mary M and produced some rugrats, then the Church would, you know, have lied to everyone for a few centuries. Basically, a PR nightmare. Between this and those horny priests...

The book is absolutey chock-full of claims that this is the truth.Some of it seems rather far-fetched, but it's definitely a topic of some disupte. Google for "Priory of Sion" and you get about 13000 hits. Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence that can actually be followed up on is due to Da Vinci himself. Apparently Da Vinci was not a fan of the Church. He was not above taking their money for commissioned paintings, but that didn't stop him from inserting some stuff of his own. There is this one - click on the thumbnail there for a large version - of Mary (Jesus' mum) of some Angel. Look at the way the one hand is holding an invisible head, and the other one is dragging her finger across it's invisible throat. Creepy, no?

The big one is The Last Supper, which is supposed to be of Jesus and the apostles, eating before J-C gets nailed up. But if you actually look at it, the person to the left of Him-with-a-capital-H doesn't really look like a man. They say that might be Mary Magdelene. The guy next to her is supposed to be Peter (one of the apostles), and he's doing that crazy hand-across-throat thing again. Like maybe he wants to knock her off. In fact, pretty much everyone at the table looks kind of pissed. Oh, and if you look at the elbow of the guy sitting sort of in front of the person who might be Mary M, you'll see a disembodied arm that doesn't seem to belong to anyone. And it's holding a dagger. Weird, no?

</conspiracy theory>. The book throws all this info at you so fast that it seems kind of ridiculous (less ridiculous than the above 5 paragraphs...) - but I think the painting stuff is interesting. Oh yea, it also says that the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of Da Vinci in drag. Apparently this is a well-known theory. So, there's something for you to ponder, if you're bored...

Oops. Just noticed that I've been dating things 2003 again. Silly...

So there is a blizzard happening right now, but last night I was at Cock 'N' Bull Craft Night. And I made a bad-ass Space Pirate costume:

See, bad-ass eh? You can click on that to get a bigger version, for your desktop. I need to get a digital camera so I can show you my other bad-ass crafts....

I went to the Blue Dog and listened to Poems on a day that I will call Wednesday, although it may have in fact been a Tuesday. It's uncertain. I'm not sure exactly why there were poems at the Blue Dog, but my pal Anoreg (spelling? I don't know...that's how it's pronounced anyway....) was reading some of the poems. His poems were "da bomb", if I may say so. The other poems were less bomb-like. Some of them were, in fact, rather painful. Well, that's not totally true - the poems themselves weren't as painful as the poet's desire to explain them to the audience before reading them to us. A little pre-poem banter is expected - who it was written for, or where the inspiration came from - ok. But explaining the definition of some of the bigger words in the poem about to be read!? I guess it was just in case we didn't "get it". Whatever, IMO you give the audience some credit and assume we are not drooling idiots.

That said, Anoreg had a bad-ass poem about Wilma and Fred, of Saturday morning cartoon fame. He was the best poet there. Nuff sed. The Blue Dog was pretty cool, except for the feedback in the sound system. Having spent a summer setting up and running sound systems where people talk into microphones, I have little tolerance for it being done incompetently. I wonder if that's what the life of an A/V club geek is like, all the time. According to Yahoo Travel, "Blue Dog has an eclectic musical mix from reggae to rock, with the real action happening after 11 PM." I was there until one...I guess I saw the real action...the beer was pretty cheap? I don't know. It was a good place, anyway.

Other news: Anand-o is making a TV show? Check out this promo. It's going to be on NUTV I think...maybe I'm confused. Oh, and congrats to KrugerJ, who is getting married. Yes, married.

Ailidh just pointed out this song about the upstairs trust fund hippy chick and her dolphin safe love (he's canning her tuna!) Look for the "Just click here" link...

Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day, yo.

Bird-o says I need an update, and I've got some time to kill. I just watched American Splendor. It was great. Go rent it and watch it. Harvey Pekar is my new hero, just for the line in the special features where he's being inverviewed at Cannes and he says "The red carpet, it didn't really mean anything to me". I'd like to read some of his comics....I wanted to rent the T enacios D DVD, but it looks like it's at least 8 hours, and I don't know when I'm going to ever find 8 hours to watch a movie...

I also watched Triplets of Belleville, courtesy of the aforementioned Bird-o. It's no American Splendor, but it was ok. Kind of weird. The triplets are kind of creepy, especially the part with the frog and the hand grenades. (Now you're interested, aren'tcha? I know it....)

Some excitement here at unknownroad.com. Some punk on this game-ladder website was offsite-linking to one of my raytracing pictures, using it as the background for his game stats page or something. I noticed when I saw that my traffic was double what it was last month. At first I thought, you know, finally I'm getting the attention I deserve. Then I came back to Earth and remembered that only like 6 of you actually come here to read my rambling. The rest of my traffic comes from google searches for "gdb tutorial". But everything was double, and then I noticed all the weird referrer log entries...

I'm not really sure what your'e supposed to do when someone is off-site linking and you want to stop them. I wouldn't care if I wasn't paying for the bandwidth, but I am. If I was running the server I would block them, but I'm not so I can't. Their site is all in swedish or something, so I couldn't mail them and ask them to stop (I can't find a mailto link...). I guess I could try to mail their ISP, but that seems harsh and a lot of work. I considered just replacing the image they were using with porn (that being the mature way to settle internet disputes), but then I decided I didn't need an army of 15 year old internet gamers pissed off at me. I remember when I was 15....something like that would have been akin to a declaration of war. I decided to just rename the image, so their link returns 404. Hopefully they are not persistent enough to come back and find the new link. That would be annoying...

I went snowboarding "East-Coast" style last weekend. I cannot say I was impressed. I started out getting up at 6 am to catch a free bus to Jay Peak, which is in Vermont. In the United States. Of America. I'm always wary of crossing the border, I have paranoid fantasies that any second I'm going to be shuffled off to some place like Camp X-Ray, or whatever they call it now. I've had some less-than-ideal experiences at Alberta/US borders. But it was pretty painless going to Vermont. A nice lady asked me for some photo ID and wanted to know what I did for a living.

The bus ride was ok, as bus rides go. The St. Laurent river looked like it was boiling. I wish I had had a camera...

Jay Peak was cold. It was -10 degrees Farenheight, which translates into something like -4 billion in Celsuis. Not to mention 30-50 mph winds. That's miles-per-hour. Miles. The wind howled on the lifts and I huddled away from it as best I could. At one point on a chair that goes to near the top of the mountain, I really thought I was going to die.

With wind like that, there wasn't much snow left on the hill. There was a 20 foot long sheer-ice patch on one of the runs that took me 5 minutes to get across. Rental snowboards are not the proper equipment for getting across ice. To say that the edges were dull is an understatement. But the bindings, the bindings were step-ins, which were amazing. I had no idea. If I was a little more stable coming off the chair, I wouldn't even have to sit down to do them up. I gotta get me some of those....

They have a 50-person gondola at Jay Peak. They really pack you in there. I only rode it once, because the wind at the top made me cold on the inside. The wind made the gondola ride fun...fun-scary I mean, because it was swinging like...like...like something that swings. We hung for a good minute before it "docked", I think so that our hanging coffin would settle down and not smash into the side of the gondola-port. (Gondola-port? WTF do you call that building?) I can't believe they have a gondola. The place is maybe as big as 3 Hidden-Valleys...but it had chairs every 5 feet and a huge gondola. Those Americans don't like to wait...

I would have said the day was a wash, but I found some "sweet pow" on the edge of a green by one of the chairs on what was going to be my last run. There is something very zen about riding an empty lift on an empty hill, as the sun sets and the temperature starts to drop. There's nothing out there but you, the mountain, and the cold. The sun was fading and I chased the mountain's shadow three times, the last on a wave of blowing snow, like I was a giant riding an avalanche.

The chair was slow and cold, but those last 3 runs made the day worth it. If that's what the snow is like when it hasn't all been blown away, then I might consider going back...