Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

...after a fashion, anyway.

I spent most of the night trying to sleep and failing, finally falling asleep when my alarm went off and waking up just under and hour later with only half an hour of time to get through the usual morning routines.

Jetlag sucks!

Back to work this morning. This is good. While holiday is great fun, some sense of normality (inasmuch as the work I do can be considered normal by any definition) makes the holiday worth living for.

My blogging rate should hopefully decrease to normal levels again too now, as I'll be typing out code instead of adventures.

Back to work

I got home this morning (I think it was morning). As usual, I had the pleasure of sharing an airplane with some asshole with a cold and now I have the cold too. In addition to the jetlag.

Must sleep more. zZzZ

20:29 EDT

This week has certainly flown by! Tomorrow I'm flying back to Belgium and I'm mentally preparing myself for the mind-numbing boredom of the flight.

I had a great time in Canada and I'll definitely come back next year. I'll never miss a BSDCan again! Thanks, Dan, for giving me an excuse to come to Canada. :-)

Today, I spent most of my day lazing around the hostel rec-room. I went biking this morning to Vieux Montreal and the Vieux Port, but I realized quickly that biking in Montreal pretty much amounts to committing suicide. It's as if the cars were aiming for my bike!

Didn't take many pictures. Perhaps it's the looming trip home, but I found Montreal to be much less interesting than the other places I've been in the last ten days.

Visited two of the breweries Erwin recommended to me. My confidence in Canadian beer has definitely been restored now. The beers from La Barberie in Quebec and the ones I had here, definitely made up for the disappointing (and disgusting) beers I had in Ottawa and Niagara Falls.

I have no idea what I'll be doing tomorrow morning. My flight is at 18:40 tomorrow, and I'll have to be at the airport a bit early to do the checkin dance with my bike.

Can anyone suggest anything for me to do in Montreal tomorrow morning? With hindsight, I definitely should have stayed in Quebec another day, and taken the train down this evening. But that can't be helped now.

Next year, I think I'll head straight for Quebec. Overall, it was the most interesting place I've been and has the most interesting things I still want to see. That little island, for starters!

Oh yes, I need to go shopping again tomorrow. I ate two bags of munchies I bought for Carmen and now she's placing even more orders. Those tricky expatriated people. I guess there's no mail-order service for munchies. I'd hate to think what a shipping company could do to things like that... :-)

20:28 EDT

As I wrote before, I got to travel first class to Montreal. Excellent for a one-timer, but I think I'll stick to cattle class.

There was a choice of three different dishes and the penne I had were quite tasty. I guess I won't have to become a "rail vegetarian" in addition to being an "airline vegetarian". After the food, I got some tea (or the closest thing to tea available in bulk - of course) and a cognac.

And that's the problem.

I consider trains as a mode of transportation and not as a mobile kind of entertainment. The food is nice on the longer distances (three hours is not particularly long, but it's just about hammering at the gates of "long") but the cognac really isn't necessary. I'm also not used to the constant pampering ("would you like some chocolate?", "some more coffee sir?",...), just let me fiddle with my laptop and leave me alone, thank you. But leave the tea here. :-)

Perhaps I'm just too humble for all that?

Note I'm not complaining -- thank you, VIA for putting me in first class. Next time I travel, however, I will just buy the regular ticket.

Having said all that, I think the "VIA 1" is excellent value for money (I mean the regular fare, not the staggering $19CAD I paid for it). Regular fare between Quebec and Montreal would be $76CAD and $112CAD in "VIA 1". For the additional $36CAD you get: an apetizer, a main course, electricity for your laptop, tea, chocolate and cognac. Roughly the same kinds of things you could buy for $36CAD on a city main street, in other words.

Being a geek, I wonder how this scales to longer (more expensive) journeys. In Belgium, first class is always 15% (if I remember correctly) more expensive than cattle. Not particularly scalable. I'm too lazy to check the difference for longer trips on VIA's website. I leave it as an excercise to the reader!

17:56 EDT

Wow - the "adventures" are certainly mounting up. Before, I rarely blogged more than once a week, now I'm blogging twice in the same hour. I wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Am I on the road to Twitter, and thence to total lunacy? Hope not...

So my Brompton was in the way on the train. It turns out the first class car is a bit more packed than usual. The bike is now hanging from a baggage rack. Yes, hanging. It's a ridiculous sight to behold. I would take a picture of it, but the rest of the people on the train have already marked me as "nuts", I'd like to try to maintain some kind of image. I'm in first class after all. grin

Or not - I'll take a picture of it when getting off the train in Montreal.

There's electricity on trains in first class. I like.

17:11 EDT

I think I mentioned Quebec was always uphill. Except for the trip to the station, that is; that's all downhill. I didn't feel like walking with my luggage and my bike, so I put the luggage on the bike.

So far so good.

Then a crazy idea occured to me. Why not just ride the bike?

So I did. Almost vertically downhill. Overloaded Brompton. Rush hour.

That was pretty scary. But thrilling at the same time.

I don't plan on trying this again anytime soon, but it's good to know that it can be done. Baggage, Brompton and rider arrived at the station safely and are now enjoying the comfort of the first class lounge while smelling bad and probably warming it by a degree or so too.

Had another argument -- in gasping French -- about my bike. No, I don't want to check it. If it doesn't bother anyone, I'll keep it with me. It's unlikely to bother anyone since there are exactly six people in the first class lounge at the moment. If it does bother someone, I'll find a way to make it not do so.

Next stop: Montreal.

13:06 EDT

This morning, I went to visit the Citadelle of Quebec. As I wrote before, it's impossible to take pictures of it. Either you see only grass, or you see only walls. Very clever of the French (and later of course the British) to build it like this. Without any regard for future tourists who might like to take pictures of it.

Before visiting the citadelle, I strolled around the old town some more, and took the Promenade des Gouverneurs to the Citadelle. A very nice, if somewhat tiring walk.

You can only visit the inside of the citadelle as part of a guided tour. The Canadian military still uses it as a barracks and I assume there are bits they don't want to have photographed by tourists.

I had the option of a tour in English, together with a busload of American tourists who came to Quebec to improve their French (this is wrong in so many ways...) or a tour in French to which no one else had subscribed yet. And no one else ended up subscribing, so I had a private tour. The guide spoke French mostly in a way I could understand. Turns out that his wife happens to be French and he lived in Nantes in Bretagne for a while.

From the inside, I was able to take some pictures which might actually show the architecture in a way that does it justice. I'll take my pictures off my camera on the train tonight or in Montreal.

Now I'll go for a visit to La Barberie and a liquid lunch followed quite possibly by a solid one.

23:02 EDT

I got her email address. :-)

Don't ask.

21:03 EDT

Perhaps the title of this post surprises some people. :-)

I have just been on a rather long walk on the the walls around Quebec and around the Citadel. I'll visit the inside of the citadel tomorrow, but judging by the outside and the walls around the city, I have to say the French designed things rather cleverly.

They really used the terrain to make life difficult for any attackers. If you're standing next to the walls, or even on the walls, you can't see into the citadel. From a distance, you can't even tell where the walls end and the citadel starts. That's pretty cute!

After my walk, I had some food, and increased the number of good Canadian beers I've tried by one. The pub was very reluctant to let me have it though. Are you sure you want to have this beer - it's dark and bitter - Oh great, yes please! ... then she comes back with a tiny little tasting glass - perhaps you'd like to try it before I give you a whole pint - the tiny glass was excellent and I could finally have a whole pint. Yum!

After visiting the citadel tomorrow, I'm going to visit a little brewery near the station: La Barberie. Of course, you'd find me going to a place like that. The brewery comes highly recommended by the (bearded) guy at the hostel who also recommended the walk on the city walls.

I'm currently sitting in the hostel bar trying one of their productions. The (pretty) girl tapping the beer seemed to have read on my face that I know something about beer and asked me if I knew why one of her taps might be foaming like a mad dog. After I finish this beer, I'll see if I can help her debug the problem. I'm helpful like that, you know. :-)

Walking back here from the restaurant, I found a very interesting graffito on the wall next to the entrace of the university:

This made my day! (Together with the two pretty smiles I encountered, of course).

Less blogging, more drinking.

17:41 EDT

While the city centre of Quebec is definitely not suitable for biking (always uphill, in every direction), the area around the city is excellent.

Today, I biked up to the Chutes de Montmorency and emptied my camera battery there. Without battery, I hitched a ride with someone to cross the bridge to the Ile d'Orleans. The (very nice-looking, pretty blue eyes) girl selling ice-cream whom I asked to bike-sit while I walked around the waterfalls told me that it should be possible to bike to the island, but either she was misinformed, or I've not looked hard enough.

It's really a pity that my camera chose this moment to be empty. Why does this camera not have a nice little indicator like my phone to tell me how its battery is doing? It tells me three pictures away from total emptyness that I might like to check the battery. How long have humans been making battery-powered devices now? Hello?

Tonight, I plan to take a little walk on the walls of the city and tomorrow I want to see the citadel just outside the centre. I will also need to find some food.

Tomorrow night, I'm taking the train to Montreal. I am travelling first class for the amazing price of $19CAD. The 50%-of-my-last-ticket reduction on my next ticket would have made the ticket free-and-then-some, and they couldn't do that. So, first class it is. I wonder if that includes a foot-massage and some girls peeling grapes for me. Probably not. :-)

I'm impressed with VIA's friendliness. It's the only rail-operator I've encountered so far who do not treat their passengers like garbage and who believe that delays are just par for the course. I hope they expand into Belgium and conquer the NMBS out of business. That'd be the day...

Erwin sent me a list of brewpubs to visit in Montreal. I look forward to trying some of those out. I had a nice beer on the island for lunch today, bringing the total of good beers tasted in Canada to two. Not very impressive.

Holidays are also very good (or bad, depending on your perspective) for my blog. Waiting for all my batteries to charge, I took a look at how my webserver is doing (I might be biking around Canada but I'm still a geek!) and it is quite busy serving blog-readers my ramblings. I might even have to resort to giving the machine a bit more bandwidth. But I'll do that when I get home maybe.

Time for a walk. And some food. And maybe a beer. Hopefully a nice one.

23:31 EDT

After an insanely long train ride, I arrived in Quebec this evening. I left Niagara Falls at 06:30 this morning, and got here at around 20:30ish. The train from Montreal to Quebec was an hour late.

The NMBS can learn something from VIA though: in return for my patience (as if I had a choice) I'm getting a rebate of 50% of the price of the ticket that got me to Quebec on the next ticket I bought. I bought my ticket to Quebec in Niagara Falls, which means my ticket back to Montreal will pretty much be free, or not far from it. Great stuff!

Though I didn't encounter any kind of hostility to my bike in Montreal like I did in Toronto, the staff tried very hard to get me to check it in rather than take it on board. The train was a new and different model and they are clearly not yet familiar with the dimensions of the hand-baggage area and how they compare to the Brompton. Of course, my Brompton fit just fine!

Having gotten to Quebec, I have started familiarizing myself with the local language. It is definitely not French.

All the nice French terminating sounds like -ent or -in or even -ion have been smashed together into something that sounds a bit like -ain. The s-like sound in -tion has been turned into what sounds like ch.

So when you want the bill in a restaurant, you ask for l'addichain.

Urgh.

I also noticed that the formal "vous" is not used much in Quebec and people will look at you strangely, wondering if you're addressing a number of them if you use it out of habit. That's an optimization I can live with.

The passe compose is dead too. Everything in the past is imparfait.

Other than the language, my first impression of Quebec is: uphill. The gears on my bike have come in very handy, particularly the low and very low ones. All the streets are uphill both ways. But there are not many cars and they're easy to bike on. The hacked-on inner tube in my front tyre seems to be holding up well, though the steering and braking feels a bit mushier than what I'm used to.

With dinner tonight, I had the first proper beer I've had since I've been in Canada. The Rickard's Red they had in Ontario was not bad, but nothing to write home about (think "just another ale, badly tapped"), but it couldn't compare to the house-brew I had today.

Planning for the rest of my trip is on hold until daylight. :-) The youth hostel I'm staying at is very nice, and it seems that I got one of the very last bunks. The place is packed. I'm staying here tomorrow night as well.

I'm wondering what to do about the Ile d'Orleans. Now I'm in Quebec, the island seems quite far away. It's 20km and there are no trains. Busses are not particularly convenient either. Biking with my luggage with me is a bit tricky uphill and 20km is also just out of range of leaving it in the city and commuting back and forth between the island (especially lacking trains).

I'll have to see what I'll do about that in daylight. I think a beer in the rec-room is called for, perhaps with the nice Belgian girl I met here earlier. Fly a few thousand kilometres to escape the Belgians and still they manage to find you! :-)

11:37 EDT

Blogging on the train is starting to become a habit. :-)

Sometime after passing the Kingston station, I decided I'd go straight up to Quebec tonight. I'll spend Friday night in Montreal, so I don't need to worry about trains interfering with my ability to catch my plane back to Brussels.

...unless plans change, of course!

Tonight, I'm staying at the Auberge internationale de Quebec. There is an older couple sitting next to me in the train, and they're very impressed with the way I'm using all these wireless things and what you can do with laptops.

It is pretty amazing, actually. I found a place to stay, asked them if they had room and booked, all while moving at 150km/h.

If only the trains had power sockets. I'm having to conserve battery power again. The laptop, while handy for booking things and reading touristy information, also makes for a fine single point of failure: all my maps are on there, and my booking numbers and my list of things to see. If the laptop is out of power, I'm lost and helpless. Well, maybe not quite helpless, but close.

An even scarier single point of failure is my laptop bag, which contains my passport, my ticket home, my phone and (often) my laptop. I don't want to think about losing that or having it stolen. That would seriously suck.

If I was superstitious, I wouldn't have tempted Fate by even thinking this. I guess I'm not superstitious then. Has anyone seen any ladders I could walk under or black cats I could encounter? :-)

I hope the beverage-trolley comes again sometime soon. I'm dying for a cup of coffee.

09:33 EDT

I left the hostel in Niagara Falls for Quebec this morning at an insane hour. I somehow managed not to wake up my roommates.

On the train to Toronto, I discovered that cheap flights were just not going to happen, so I decided to take the train up to Quebec. The train ride is nearly eleven hours, and I have to change trains in Montreal, but I'm not in any kind of hurry.

Did some shopping for Carmen in Toronto. I have no idea how these things will taste when they finally get back to Europe. My bag gets thrown around quite a lot, which usually isn't very good for crispy foods.

At the station in Toronto, boarding the train to Montreal, I encountered the first instance of Brompton-hostility in Canada so far. Up until today, I have only met people who either wanted to know what it was, where I got it, or if I could should them how it worked. The "gate attendant" at Toronto station wanted me to know that VIA has a strict policy against bicycles.

When I pointed out to him that it was folded up, and therefore a piece of luggage, he went off into the deep end trying to explain to me that regardless of its folded up state, it was still a bike. Seeing where this conversation was going, I put the cover-bag on my bike while telling him that a bike is something with two wheels to ride on, and that a folded up collection of metal tubes in a bag could definitely not be considered to be a bike, by any definition. He'd gotten a bit quiet by the time my bike was in its bag. When I then asked him if he'd like to check my "other" bag for stray bicycles which might contravene VIA's policy on them, he walked away shaking his head and mumbling something about "tourists".

Silly person.

I took the bag off again on the platform and the bike is now happily sitting in the baggage area next to me. Just as it has been on the last four VIA trains I've taken in Canada so far.

At the moment, I'm still trying to decide whether to spend a night in Montreal tonight or to go straight to Quebec. Note how fluently I discard plans and make new ones? Imagine having to travel with me, I must be a nightmare! I'm having a blast though.

The train to Montreal spends a long time near Lake Ontario. The parts of it I've seen on the way from Ottawa to Toronto make me look forward to more. It's a pity that taking pictures on trains is so difficult. I have tried a few times but promptly deleted the fuzzy results.

23:17 EDT

I've been sorting through the pictures I took here this evening. I won't upload the lot of them until I get home, but I particularly liked these two.

They look surprisingly good.

22:29 EDT

Went for food this evening with Greg. We had good food and it was great to finally meet in real life. Face to name mappings are always good and it's fun to be able to have a body-language-enhanced conversation rather than one littered with smilies and such.

After food, we drove around a bit -- travelling b train and bike, you necessarily only see things in a very concentrated area or a very linear one. A car can cover much larger areas, which gives a different "feel" for a place.

Greg is a member of a historical society specializing in the history of roads in Canada. While this sounds a bit ridiculous, it's actually quite interesting. The layout of cities and the roads between them does, in fact, make sense.

At the moment, I am sitting on the deck of the youth-hostel in Niagara Falls, thinking about the rest of my trip. The way I'm planning this trip (or not planning it, actually) is proving to be very enjoyable. I have pretty much been planning this trip in an ad-hoc way. I got to Canada knowing that I had to be at BSDCan and back to Montreal next Saturday. The time between that is all mine. I just use my laptop to look for interesting things and book transport as I need it.

I can highly recommend this travelling formula. It gives you a lot of freedom and you can see as much or as little of a place as you like. You can also make it as cheap as you like (or as expensive, but why would you want to?).

Tomorrow, I am off to Toronto, where I'll do some shopping for Carmen. I also have the address of a "beer market" I'm told is quite interesting. The free wifi at the hostel is helping me find nice things to see as I go.

After Toronto, the plan is to fly up to Quebec city and bike around the Ile d'Orleans. That plan might change a bit though, depending on the price of flights (I don't like spending money on airplanes).

One of the nice things about youth hostels is meeting interesting people. A helpful Canadian girl just suggested another website to me where I could possibly find cheaper flights. Unfortunately, their cheapest flights were an order of magnitude more expensive than the flights I had been able to find already. She'll get over her embarassement eventually, I'm sure.

Next step: Toronto - leaving here at 06:35 tomorrow morning. The hostel is nicely preparing me a breakfast for the road. Great stuff! I need to remember to take my bike to my room, because the reception, where it's currently stored, won't be open in the morning. And I do want to take my bike with me.

17:57 EDT

After BSDCan, I left for Niagara Falls. First a four hour train ride to Toronto and then another two to here. It seems that I am unable to escape schoolkids. The train from Toronto was late because of a herd with loads of luggage. Oh well -- nothing I'm not used to!

Saw the Niagara Falls last night and today. They're more impressive in real life than on pictures. Definitely worth the trip!

Unfortunately, the area around the Falls, is a circus. Reminds of Ibiza, where I've never been, but of which I've seen pictures, or an even worse version of Cyprus or Mallorca. Casinos, enormous hotels, really expensive food places and the kind of tourists who give "real" tourists a bad name.

This morning, DaCa and I took the boat trip "under" the Falls (they mean "in front"). You get a complimentary plastic bag to serve as a raincoat. At the end of the trip, they invite you to keep the bag as a souvenir... Mmm... :-)

It was surprisingly difficult to find lunch today. It appears that "lunch" is something not done here. We found a place which looked promising, but turned out to be serving breakfast (at noon, mind). No go. Eventually, we found a rib place where I ate a very tasy salad. There was a fork in it. I didn't eat that.

Took heaps and heaps of pictures. I also put the night pictures from last night on my laptop and they're surprisingly good. I'll tinker with them a bit before putting them online.

Going for food with Greg this evening. Looking forward to that!

The youth hostel I'm staying at here is highly recommendable. It's very colourful and the people are nice. The prices are also very reasonable. As usual, I'm the loudest snorer in my room. I will apologize to my room mates when I leave them at 06:00 tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow, I'm taking the 06:35 train to Toronto. There I'll do some sight seeing and hop on a plane to Quebec. Planning is an ad-hoc thing. The best kind of planning!

Watch for pictures.

10:01 EDT

Just back from breakfast and getting ready to leave the residence. Putting pictures from my camera on my laptop, I remembered that I have met the only person in the world who drinks beer through a straw. And I have proof!

[blogged with permission ;-)]

07:53 EDT

Yesterday was the last day of BSDCan. I had a great conference! As usual, I enjoyed the hallway track and the pub track more than any of the "real" tracks, but I saw some very good talks on the real tracks too. Particularly the Google talk about poisonous people was fantastic.

Last night, we went for beer and food to some Irish pub. The food was very good, but I ended up drinking Leffe because the Canadian beer was really not worth drinking.

Spent most of the evening in the excellent company of Dru's daughter. I will not try to spell her name. She claims there's an "l" in it, but I can't imagine where she'd want to put that. Calling her "Taffy" will work fine though.

Taffy did a good job trying to introduce me to Canadian beer, but luckily, she gave up after the second beer she made me try turned out to be the worst beer I have ever tasted. How can people drink this stuff? American beer is like remineralized water, but this stuff didn't even qualify for that. Urgh!

I think I convinced her to come to Belgium at some point. Though I didn't get that signed in blood on paper. :-)

At the pub, I also learned how the Canadian tipping algorithm works. It's fundamentally broken. Instead of bars paying the waiting staff and patrons adding tips to thank them for a particularly good job, patrons are expected to add 15% (for nice and easy maths after a couple of beers!) to the bill by default.

Being me, I managed to convince the waitress of the European system. She got a very nice tip at the end of the evening for putting up with us.

Now off to breakfast at Cora's. I wonder how many people will be hung over this morning. I stopped drinking beer before I had one too many so I could enjoy the evening with a clear head. Discussing 19th century French horror fiction with a nice girl requires this. :-)

After breakfast, I guess I'll do some sightseeing around Ottawa before taking the train around noon-ish to Toronto and from there to Niagara Falls.

Fun fun fun!

12:02 EDT

There is nothing more useless than a bike with a flat tyre. After breakfast, I googled for a bike shop in Ottawa and the closest one was Foster's Sports Centre on Bank Street.

They had never seen a Brompton before but they had a lot of fun looking at how it worked. I guess bike geeks are as fascinated by Bromptons as computer geeks are by shiny new electronic gadgets.

It turns out the valve was pretty much torn right off the inner tube. I have no idea how that could have happened. That's not a "fixable" puncture though. So they set out to replace the inner tube, but they didn't have the correct (weird) size. With some fiddling, they managed to get a slightly larger tube on the wheel though. This should hold up fine until I get back to Belgium.

Foster's were great service. If you're ever stuck with a bike issue in Ottawa, I can recommend them. I don't recommend having a bike issue though. It was not much fun carrying the Brompton for the fifteen minute walk from the residence.

Now listening to OpenCVS talk. Thanks Ollivier for bridging wireless for me. :-)

08:23 EDT

Off to the pub last night to try to find some good Canadian beer. It seems they don't have any in Ottawa, so I spent most of the evening drinking Irish beer instead. Fun chat with Wietse about the wonders of email and source control and some of the crazy things IBM released on society ("ClearCase").

After that, drank more beer with Mark, Ollivier and Erwin. Details are a bit foggy, but I didn't find my way to the hacking lounge after the beer.

The lock on our door at the residence has a mind of its own, and my fighting it in a slightly foggy condition must have amused whoever watches the closed circuit security cameras.

I woke up this morning with one of those interminable nose bleeds I get some times. That was not much fun. I don't think I was drunk enough to bump into anything last night, so it's probably just the braincells I killed last night trying to find the quickest way out. :-)

Time for breakfast now, I think. After that, I'd like to find a bikeshop to help me fix my bike before I go to Robert's next machine gun talk.

10:14 EDT

Seems I've still not quite adjusted to the timezone yet. Last night, I passed out around midnight, so I think I'm still about two hours out of sync with "real time". With a bit of luck, my body is adjusted today.

Devsummit yesterday was good, but it was clear everyone was getting tired later in the evening. Indian food woke everyone up again though. :-)

There is very good wireless at BSDCan, and at the hacking lounge, but for some reason, my laptop doesn't like it. Perhaps the Linux kernel is just afraid of all the FreeBSD stuff in the air, or my Atheros card might be afraid of Sam.

If anyone in the hacking lounge tonight happens to have a pxeboot setup on their laptop, I'll happily provide beer if you let me replace my Linux with FreeBSD using it. :-)

Currently listening to Warner's MMC talk, reading his Wikipedia pages while going along. Off to Wietse Venema's security talk next, I think.

Still not seen any squirrels... :-)

16:55 EDT

After a fairly noisy flight, I arrived safely in Canada. Customs was a snap for me. My travelmate got a little more scrutiny from the drugs dogs and the friendly people from immigration, but we were out of the airport in less than half an hour.

The old trick of ordering a vegetarian meal on flights still works. I had a lovely vegetarian lasagna while my neighbour enjoyed what looked like rubber chicken with rubber mushrooms.

My bike also seems to have survived the trip. As I wrote this morning, I had to deflate the tyres. Inflating the front tyre, I seem to have done something wrong with the valve. It is leaking air. I will look into that more closely when I get to Ottawa. With a bit of luck, it can be fixed with simple duct tape and handiness. Otherwise, I'll have to find a bikeshop in Ottawa. That should not be too difficult either.

At the moment, I am enjoying free wireless access on the train from Montreal to Ottawa. They are having some satelite problems and as a "courtesy" are not charging for it. 30% packet loss and 10 second round trip times are indeed nothing to charge for. But it works, that's all that matters.

I hope to catch the other FreeBSDers who arrived in Ottawa earlier for dinner tonight. If IRC wants to stay up long enough for me to find out where we're meeting for dinner, this should go smoothly. :-)

End of first installment of Philip's Crazy Canadian Adventures.

Note to Nathalie, if she reads this: I have not encountered any squirrels yet. I am keeping my eyes open! The first squirrel I see...

I am currently enjoying the "WiFi Over Wire" offered at Brussels airport. Contrary to expectations (well, my expectations!) there's 802.3 on the wire and not 802.11 encapsulated somehow. This is disappointing. They advertise WiFi and give you Ethernet. Silly people!

Checking in my bike was interesting. For some reason, they needed me to put it in an expensive plastic bag (2EUR) and they wanted the tyres flattened. I didn't bothered explaining the laws of physics to them and just complied. I guess I'll just have to find a petrol station with an air-outlet somewhere in Canada. Pumping up tyres from flatness to usefulness with the mini Brompton pump is not much fun.

Looking forward to BSDCan!

Random thought of the night: I'm pretty sure I'm the first hacker using the wireless connectivity at Antwerp Central station, platform 23, to debug a FreeBSD/alpha panic through ssh and a serial gadget.

I guess I forfeit the right to be called "normal" a very long time ago. :-)

Laptop = love.

After reading Tom Klaasen's latest blog entry, I was reminded about the fact that my new ThinkPad has the "control" key in the wrong place, like just about every keyboard seems to do these days.

So I went looking for old keyboards -- you'd be surprised how many old keyboards a man can collect -- and I found that all my old keyboards have control in the correct place (next to the A, that is) with the exception of peecee keyboards.

Who should I blame for moving that most useful key to its current most useless place on the keyboard?

This entry typed on a Happy Hacking Keyboard.