Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Sometimes, xkcd can be so...

You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.

Mmhmm... No comment. :-)

I've decided to go to HAR2009 by train in a couple of weeks. Plans are to work a mostly full day on Wednesday and take a train in the late afternoon to Nunspeet via Rotterdam and Amersfoort. Christophe has kindly offered me a ride from Nunspeet station, though I might decide to Brompton the 6km instead if it's not raining.

Any other geeks planning to take the train from Belgium to HAR on Wednesday? We could geek out on the train together.

This time two weeks ago, I was in a tent somewhere near Cribs Creek on the West Coast Trail. This time last week, I was in Victoria, digesting a very tasty dinner. Today, I am at work, catching up with hundreds of emails.

Painful.

One of the first emails I read was from my travel agent, informing me that United has kindly cancelled the direct flights I was booked on in September between London and Denver. My cunning plan to get into the US without going through ORD was foiled again. To add insult to injury, United felt that 45 minutes would be plenty of time to change terminals in Chicago.

Wondering what they were smoking, I called United's Belgian phone number and was rather surprised that it was answered on the first ring by a gentleman in Bangalore. Very friendly chap but decidedly unhelpful. He wasn't even able to tell me what they were smoking.

Luckily, Connections continues to provide the excellent service I've come to expect from them and they were able to put me on an earlier flight in under five minutes on the phone. Unfortunately, they couldn't tell me what drugs United were on either. Regardless: if you're looking for a good travel agent in Belgium, I can highly recommend them.

Now for more email... And perhaps trying to see if anything still compiles.

23:43 PDT

We did it - we hiked the entire West Coast Trail! It was awesome. Brochures claim it's a "mere" 75km but with all the ladders and occasional detours between the beach and the trail, my GPS registered 96.13km at the end.

We had rain the first three days and got unbelievably soaked, cold and demotivated at Tsusiat Falls. Being able to dry a bit at the dock on the Nitnat Narrows -- not to mention the excellent salmon sold by the native running thne ferry -- considerably lightened our mood. Day 4 started a bit cloudy but by the end of the day, the sun was shining and all was well. We had sunshine the rest of the hike.

The West Coast Trail is every bit as challenging as advertized. Most of the trail is "well maintained" but it's still a rain forest: whatever structure you build, it will either rot or be overgrown in time. Some of the boardwalks were rotten to a pulp, other parts were sucked into swamps and just about everything was slippery with moss or mud. But that's part of the game. The ladders are brutal with a heavy pack -- an excellent work out! -- some hikers we met on the trail counted over a thousand rungs between Logan Creek and Cullite Creek, a relatively short stretch. I can't imagine where they found the energy to count though! I lost count at 200 rungs just past Thrasher Cove on our way to Gordon River. Many more followed that day. Near the end, the trail went down three ladders to a stream bed only to go up five (I think -- I even lost count of the ladders) again 15m on.

In terms of wildlife, we only saw one bear on the way to the trailhead. On the trail, we only saw droppings (without bits of undigestible hiker-gear embedded in them) and footprints. We also saw cougar prints, some eagles, a whale, some seals and sea lions, deer, and lots of very interesting small birds. Notices on the trail warned of wolves and habituated bears and cougars but we must have been too rank to be interesting to them. It's amazing how you can stink after six days in the bush!

I would definitely recommend the West Coast Trail to hikers looking for a serious challenge. It's tough stuff but well worth it. You won't find nature like that anywhere else in the world.

A more complete report -- and pictures! -- will follow when I'm back in Belgium on a real internet connection. Tomorrow we're off to Tofino to nurse what remains of our limbs in some hot springs. Fun fun!

It was great to be totally "off the grid" for a week.

I run a business. This means I often have to print stuff for my accountant. I also feel that for the prices I charge my customers, the least I can do is send them an invoice on a piece of paper.

Unfortunately, Firefox still can't print.

With the exception of three countries (of which I am aware) everyone in the world uses ISO-standard A4 paper. For some reason however, Firefox continues to insist that I should be using "Letter" paper. I can't imagine where it gets this idea. It can't possibly be my "locale" (which is set to C) and I've certainly not configured this crazy papersize anywhere.

When will this be fixed?

I don't so much mind a default -- even if it's stupidly set to something only three countries in the world use -- if I could override it. I can click on "file" and on "page setup" until I'm blue in the face. The PostScript being sent to my printer continues to be wrong. Even if I "print to file", it's wrong. I can then fiddle with the PostScript to make it right, but I should not have to do that.

I really don't feel like grepping through the hundreds of megabytes of source code that Mozilla is to find where this silly papersize is coded to change it. Software should have sensible defaults. If software gives an option to override defaults, it should actually accept the override, not just ignore me.

Grumpy. Very very grumpy.

The web sucks. Browsers suck. I'm told that as technologies advance, humans regress as a form of self-defence. Have humans regressed too far? Is technology having to catch up with the dimwits?

Let's go back to simple.