Archive for October, 2007

Quietly 50

Monday, October 15th, 2007

A nice quiet passage of the 50th year, watching the sunrise from the 23rd floor of the Century Plaza in downtown Vancouver. The walk around the False Creek seawall was just what the other boys needed after the drive from Seattle, stopping to eat fancy burgers and fries at a bistro overlooking the marina along the way. From there a stroll through Yaletown’s renewed loading docks was just what the doctor ordered with sight seeing city architecture including an outside view of the Vancouver Public Library (on strike), then between GM and BC Place before heading back to the parking lot.

Dad and brother number four found the hotel easy enough, the suite’s dining room chairs added enough seats for everyone to have a good chat. Hotel employees were kept busy taking group photos after we piled out of the elevator going for dinner; a two block walk is all that’s needed to find what ever restaurant and food you can think of but as a family of non-adventurous eaters The Keg and a big steak was well received by all.

John brought up an old Kodak Carousel slide viewer complete with screen in addition to a photo albums that were as old as myself, sort of weird watching the slides as everyone has different memories good and bad and the comments were kept to a game of guessing who was who. Done by nine o’clock, said goodbye to Dad and David and an hour later hit the sack myself to be fresh at sunrise. Breakfast at Denny’s down the street, guess who forgot to bring their driver’s license for identification to get the free meal, oh well ;-)

Almost At 50

Friday, October 12th, 2007

It’s 3 in the afternoon on Friday and all systems are go for the Century Plaza at check in time tomorrow afternoon. John and Co. will be showing up earlier and have directed them to an easy meet up place (Science World) with ample parking for his truck.

I’ll treat them to a view of Vancouver that most people miss; the seawall along False Creek and through the glass canyons is enough for a bit of exercise for them after the drive up. Lots of restaurants in the neighborhood to eat, the density that has been built up through there through to Yaletown never ceases to amaze me and think it will make a nice off the beaten path Vancouver Tour.

NYT and Ubuntu?

Monday, October 8th, 2007

How about that, the New York Times of all places has a blog entry extolling the virtues of Linux. Just about has it right too regarding Ubuntu but no mention of the other Linux flavours other than reference to TiVo and Google using Linux, probably a good thing though because Ubuntu has become almost the least painful flavour to try. Myself, I prefer Knoppix if using a live CD but then it’s usually for fixing something like last spring when I needed a stand alone OS to run for a week solid extracting data from a failed hard drive.