I'm back from 4 weeks in Argentina. 4 weeks is just long enough for the place you were staying to start feeling like home, and the place you left looks damned weird when you get back.

Pictures on my Flickr page.

Happy Holidays, all. Today was the ending of my Xmas vacation time, so I'm back to my joyous bicycle commute. Several things happened over the holidays of note, but I'll chose to pick 2 at random.

Julian and Teething

Julian may or may not have been teething for the last week.  The signs were all there - drooling, chewing, and misery... but he's only 4 months old.  Also, don't let people understate how hard it is to deal with a teething child.  He was outright miserable - it wasn't just the crying and lack of sleep - it was the heartbreaking whimpering of a baby in pain, with nothing to do but hold him.  Either way, by some inexplicable miracle he seems to have bounced back (save for one backslide last night).  As for his other assets, he continues to grow at an absurd rate, bursting his way into 9-12 month size clothes at under half that age.  He's still mastering the fine art of sitting up, and is waging an ongoing war between frustration, laziness, and self-soothing when it comes to the skill of grasping and stuffing toys in his mouth.

He still loves his gym, and he's enjoying his "Sophie the Giraffe" - a French teether-toy made of natural rubber.  He's been mauling it so hard he's given its face nostrils.

He's freaking awesome.

Super Mario Galaxy

Wifey bought me Super Mario Galaxy for xmas.  The game lives up to the hype, it is awesome.  The maps are constantly innovative, the minigame-esque puzzles are constantly startling and exciting, and the game never seems to frustrate me.

But of course, I'm a curmudgeon.  You already know the sixteen flavours of awesome that SMG is.  So, I'm going to grouse about the minor flaws I've found in the game, because flaws are far more interesting than excellence.

First off, the game is easy.  Maybe this is because I already ran through Mario 64 multiple time and am twice the age of the target audience, but I didn't break a sweat until the third Bowser fleet.  I find myself frugally storing up ammo, simply because most adversaries are simple enough to dispatch manually, and the star-bits are generally ineffective against the ones that aren't.  Still, the game is really, really picking up now (although I'm well-over halfway through, I think), for example the the Ghost race got my heart going, and I'm starting to shoot my way through some of the tougher brawls.

One thing I notice is that the game is pretty tight on revealing the old 64 moves - it seems to assume you remember how to triple-jump, long-jump and black-flip (the punch-related manoevers are long gone, along with the punch-button).  I could see the game being much harder without that knowledge.  On the other hand, the wall-slide means that wall-kicks are actually possible and no longer insanely frustrating.

The game revealed an odd insight about my taste in games: I hate games that are based on secrets.  If you gamed during the late NES through to the early N64 era, you remember secret-oriented games.  The heart-tanks and upgrades of Megaman X.  The various goodies of Mario 3.  The switch-blocks of Mario 64.  These things drive me batty - it's not just that they frustrate you with backtracking and nasty challenges that were intended to be simple based on a previous pick-up.  It's that they screw you up in other games.  In Galaxy, I find myself squeezing every level to the fullest, leaving no foe unsmashed, no corner unchecked, and so-on, simply because of the risk I might miss some essential secret needed to make the gameplay a proper experience.  Galaxy seemed pleasantly bereft of these features ... until I found a (*SPOILER FOLLOWS*) "green star" in the Floating Fortress level, which apparently unlocks some sort of Trial Galaxy.  Also, I can't seem to figure out how to re-rescue Luigi from the first galaxy. (*END SPOILER*) 

This sort of stuff drives me batty - it sets off a twisted OCD in the hindquarters of my brain.  I keep reminding myself that Galaxy isn't like that - I'm probably just missing a few hidden worlds, not essential crap like the gun-upgrade of Megaman X.  Galaxy is kind - the bee suit is right in front of you on the bee world - you don't have to track down some absurdly-hidden switch-block to enable it a-la Mario 64.

Hell, maybe that's why I find Galaxy so much easier than 64 - not that the game is simpler, but because it's so much more pleasurably straightforwards.  There is no endless meandering trying to ferret out an ambiguous objective - the game is generally linear.  Still, I do occaisionally miss that feeling of first arrival in Thwomp's Castle in Mario 64, where I first got that sensation of "wow - this looks cool.  Let's go exploring!".... but on the other hand, Galaxy delivers so much more fun-per-second, the payout is definitely worth it.

To me, that's where the game is really paying off.  Fundamentally, there seems to be three approaches to gaming these days:
1) Short and sweet movie games.  Deliver constantly new whiz-bang content, but have under 10 hours of play.
2) Endless repitition.  Sixteen million variations on the same damned theme.
3) Get lost.  The player spends so much time getting from point A to B or finding the next objective that they heardly spend any time actually _dealing_ with said objective, and so the content is stretched out.

Galaxy is none of the above.  It is endlessly fresh and fun.

Galaxy Review Addendum

There were three nits I have to pick that I missed in the review:

1) Spare lives are pointless.  They don't get saved, they don't get recorded, and since half the time the Princess has a letter full of them waiting for you when you log in, you're never short of them.  This wouldn't be a nuisance except the game is full of little side-puzzles for which the reward is an extra man.  Worthless.

2) I haven't tried it, but the "second player" job seems pretty dull.  There are a lot of parts in the game where starbits are absent or useless, and starbits are the only thing player 2 does.  Speaking of the wiimotes, the "shake to spin" gimmick is cute, but a button-mapping as an alternative would've been nice.

3) The camera.  It still has all of the flaws of the Mario 64 version - it seems like whenever I want to use the left/right buttons to rotate, it tells me I can't.  The first-person look mode has a limited field-of-view, which is similarly frustrating.  And even worse, the camera controls under water are terrible whenever you want to do a fine movement - the arrow buttons totally fail to work, and the camera does not adjust to face the same direction as Mario.  Even the painful whirling of Monkeyball's camera during fine-motions would've been preferable to the terrible underwater camera behaviour.  Still, it beats the Sonic Adventure series.

On the other hand, shell-riding underwater is holy-crap-lots-of-fun, so underwater levels still kick ass.

I'm back working in Hamilton again - the contract work at Exposoft is done. For any dotnet developers looking for work in Mississauga - bug these guys for a job. It's the kind of pre-dot-com style office everyone dreams of working in. Casual atmosphere, overseas business trips, razor-scooters for getting around the office, an X-box with a wide-screen TV, and a freakin' basketball court. Nice place to work, fun people. I'll miss it.

That being said, it was the wrong way up the QEW, which is the driving equivalent of swimming up river. So, I'm back to biking to work, and the weather's let up nicely. It's a refreshing experience to wake up at seven and be home by a quarter after five.

nfotxn recently asked me why I don't do any baby blogging... and I didn't have a good answer. So, here's some hyper-nerdy baby blogging: look what damage a dad can do with a printer, a plain-white onesie, and some iron-on transfer paper.

If he looks huge for 2.5 months old, it's because he is. Our little lead-y bear weighs in at 14 lbs.

And yes, I have more onesies planned.

Okay, yesterday, our washing machine died. Little-known fact - you can't live very long with a baby and no washer. So, we're shopping for a washing machine, and it's scary. We decided we wanted to be good little prosumers and join the front-loading revolution, and so I've been hitting up epinions et al for dirt on everyone I can find.

Holy cow, it's like a minefield out there. I'm not talking "oh, this has 10 positive reviews and 1 negative one", but that most models are down to three stars just because the reviews are all 1s and 5s. Every model under $900 has mold problems, and a few over $900 have electronics bugs or static electric failures. The only one that reviewed consistently well is the Samsung Silvercare line, which advertises the esoteric feature of dissolving silver ions into your water to disenfect your clothes - cool, but creepy... and that one's gonna be $1100, so it'd damned-well better be good.

Well, back to the hunt.

At 5:57 pm, August 31st, 2007, all 8lbs, 5oz of Julian Tomas Zarate was born. He has dark hair, inquisitive eyes, and very good lungs (ow).

So I'm a dad now. There is no feeling in the world like watching your son's eyes open for the first time. I'm just home for the moment to shower and grab a bite to eat, then I'm back to the hospital.

Okay, I'm just going to blog oodles of crap right now.

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Well, happy belated Easter. My cat (named Cat) is in observation at the veterinarian's office. Plugged urinary tract. Fortunately it looks like we caught it early enough, and he should be fine - but it's a scary experience. Apparently in the worst-case scenario a cat can go from healthy to terminal in only a day or two.



Consider this a public service announcement - if your cat (particularly if males) goes through symptoms like this, call a vet immediately.

So, the story: On Easter Sunday, we were having a party... the photo above is one of the last moments before his problems started. First, he came out of his litter-box crying in a weird, gurgly way I'd never heard before - this is rare, since Cat never meows. He then spent the rest of the evening sitting in the litter-box and trying to pee, then coming out and licking his privates. He looked pathetically constipated - but he remained quiet, and I had no idea how serious his condition was. Before bed I looked online to see if there was anything to do for a constipated kitty... and read about various urinary tract conditions and became concerned. Still, I figured if he had such a serious condition he'd be howling in pain, so we went to bed and I resolved to check his litter-box in the morning to make sure he'd used it.

But he's a really quiet cat.

In the morning, we went downstairs to find he'd thrown up all over the carpet and was crouching on the floor. He wouldn't even move or clean the vomit off his own chin... at that point we realized the severity of his condition. So, off to the vet with him. Apparently he responded well to treatment (painkillers and a catheter) and they're gonna keep him there for a few days.

Apparently we're going to have to change his diet now. Makes me feel guilty for not buying him better food - we just fed him Purina Cat Chow - it's not junk, but it's not health food. If I'd known beforehand the risks, I'd have been feeding him a better balanced diet.

So, take this story as a warning: your cat can get clogged, and that clogging can kill him.

It's late at night and I got up early this morning, and I'm not even tired. Usually this is frustrating. Tonight, it's not.

Three subjects today.

First, my job. I'm currently working in Stratford. My employer has contracted me away from the normal in-house developing to work there. The commute is hard - Stratford is 1.5 hours away at best. If I were paying for my own gas this would be horrific - the Altima guzzles $20 per day with that trip. Something is wrong with that car. The time out of my day is hard, but it's okay since I know it's temporary and then I get to go back to biking to work.  But either way, the time in the car is giving me plenty of time to think, and to listen to music.

Second, music. Benjamin Gibbard is Jesus.  I listen to The Postal Service and suddenly I'm 5 years old again, sitting on my bunkbed playing C64 games with my brother.  I went through Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism album like five times today in the car - every song boils away my nerdly cynicism into pathetic romanticism.

Third, Hyperion.  I just finished the fourth (and final) volume of Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. 

• Hyperion (1989)
• The Fall of Hyperion (1990)
• Endymion (1996)
• The Rise of Endymion (1997)

Good, good books.  Simmons has a gift for Tolkienesque "this sword is a thousand years old and forged by the hand of Olsindrul before he slew Orthoth at Ugluk'num" sort of thing, and making it believable.  Everything is catastrophic, final, and spectacular.  It's all about poetry and death.  The only catch is that he started at the top - Hyperion is a wonderful science-fiction version of The Canterbury tales, which tells each story in a unique, distinct style.  It's the closest thing I've read to science-fiction poetry.  The Fall of Hyperion ends the short-story approach and puts the whole thing together into The Big Epic Story of Epicness, and does it well.  It has a good, solid ending, as it was meant as an end to the series... so you can stop reading there if you like.

The latter pair, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, are the perfect classical messianic epic... but it loses a lot.  It's heavily laden with 20th-century references, repetitious long-winded speeches on the metaphysics of the setting, and near-constant retconning.  Still, this is the story everyone desperately wanted Herbert's Dune series to be (instead of accepting the Dune series for what it is).  Where Dune became a terrifying morality play about ecology and religious stagnation, Endymion remains a high-flying space opera soaked in philosphy, poetry, and romance - complete with the kind of perfect tragically sappy ending that only a sci-fi concurrently peddling human salvation and anti-entropic-force-fields can provide.

So in short, I'm thoroughly buzzed in that way that you can only get by absorbing piles and piles of romantic, maudlin culture can give you.

So, in short, good night and feel the love.  Choose again.

So, another Hallowe'en passed, more leftover candy. Noticed some things: colouring books are a big hit with the under-4 crowd who are underexposed to Candy and are frightened by the process of bumming sweets from strangers... plus the parents seem pleased too.

Anybody else agree with me on this: the older you are, the better your costume must be or else you get the cheap no-name candy? That is, the older kid who comes as a man-sized box of KD gets a couple of fun-sized Twix bars, while the young teen in the "Sum 41" t-shirt carrying a mask tucked under his arm gets a single packet of Rockets.

Oh, and attention Trick Or Eat mac students: wear a better costume. When I see a stubbly guy walking up my porch carrying a sack, I think it's some bugger who wants free candy - not a charity worker. When I did Trick Or Eat, I put effort into it - Lindsey and I went as Big Red Riding hood and the Little Bad Wolf.

Too bad I didn't get to do a Jack'O'Lantern this year. Car troubles made shopping for massive gourds too cumbersome to ponder.

I got a new job a couple of weeks ago. I'm working at CareLynx, the renamed/spun-off IT branch of Steelcare. It's very cool to be working for a company that actually does stuff. Not just booking systems and websites, but actually really does stuff. Steelcare is a warehousing and transportation company for Hamilton's big industry, steel. Now, warehousing sounds pretty dull until you realise that the average truck can only carry one or two rolls of steel at a time - this stuff is really big, so the hardware they use to move it around is impressive. We're not talking skids and forklifts here.

So I'm starting into the typical developer/analyst role, and it's looking like a good job. My coworkers are fun people, and the workings of the facilities themselves never cease to fascinate me. Although I'll need to get into golf if I want to fit in.

Weekend of Stuff

This weekend I discovered something incredisexy: we have a Canada Computers in the Dundurn Fortinos plaza. That blows my freaking mind. I've made lengthy detours on Toronto shopping trips to hit up their downtown location - the place is mindbogglingly good (though sketchy) for new parts.

Also, I went to The Movie Palace and saw A Scanner Darkly last night. Both the theatre and the movie were a visual orgy of lost potential. The Movie Palace is a wonderful old theatre with cushy seats and dinner-theatre-style benches... and a projectionist that managed to screw up no less than four times (first no sound in opening, then shaking mid-film, then flickering at the end, and then screen cutting out at the end).

The movie itself had tons of good scenes, and Robert Downey Jr. friggin' awesome. Even Keanu and Wynona manage to be quite good - a rare showing for those two. The directing, the script, the bizarre computer-rotoscoping-animation that was used for the whole film - all awsome. The problem was in the pacing. The movie just crawled, full of tons of random scenes of hilarious-but-repetative drug-induced ranting... and then ended very quickly, so fast you almost lost track of what happened.

Also, on Saturday we went to Niagara-on-the-Lake to visit some wineries. I got lost many, many times driving around - but we got a map towards the end that made it all good. I have to say, a quick guide for places to go:

1) Start off by reserving a tour of the Jackson-Triggs facility ($5). The tourguide is the best for a "crash course in tasting wine".

2) If you're interested in icewines, the Peller Estates tour ($5) that we went on included a glass of it, and they teach you how to drink it. I don't know if they do that tour all the time though. For those who don't know, icewine is exquisite if you know how to drink it, and the most expensive cough-syrupy-crap if you don't.

3) Strewn wines consistently kick ass. Their tasting bar is pretty minimal, but everything they make is excellent - much better than the bigger companies listed above. Plus, they make "Second Harvest" icewines, which are nice if you want a fruitier, cheaper, less freakishly sweet dessert wine (they're made by crushing the leftovers from icewines).

4) Visit Caroline Cellars. It's a small non-LCBO winery on the outskirts of NoTL. They can't compete with the big boys by the direct approach, but they make up for it with hospitality and creativity. All it is is a tasting bar and a store - but what a store. The tasting bar is free, and they have a long list of strange mixes and fruit-wines. We picked up a half-vidal half-cherry sipping mix, and Becky bought some raspberry dessert wine. They also had a wonderful zweigelt (a light but spicy red) I was tempted to buy, and a white wine (forget what kind) that they spiked with a little icewine to get it up to a mild dessert drink. Their main draw is the bizarre dessert and sipping wines, but they do have some nice dinner bottles too.

Well, things got worse. Crunch time at my job has reached an all-time high, so I've spent the last week working until 8-10pm. I'm still utterly unable to make my deadline even with those late nights. Plus, I couldn't get our painter to do the last room (fortunately, Brodie came to the rescue again on that one - I hired him in Jose's place). But that's really only the beginning.

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In this entry, I'm going to follow the ancient livejournal tradition of using my space as a venue to complain like nobody has ever complained before. Remember that feeling of apprehensiveness I described when I got the house? I've figured out where it came from. The move. Fiasco does not begin to describe what I'm going through. The problem is that this process involves pissing everyone off, and tons of work.

 ( teh biggest rant evar )

I totally forgot to mention that the apartment has a pool. I just copied and pasted the amenities part of the description from the highrise's website and didn't notice that the pool wasn't mentioned in that section.

I hope that makes all the difference to the three or four people who read this blog and thus will beating a path to my door for this place.

Okay, I'm getting my stuff together to try and get somebody to take over my one bedroom apartment. The price is $729/mo, which includes everything except parking and the usual cable/phone/internet communications stuff. The room has A/C, a balcony and nice new appliances. Now, I need to move out for the end of December, so someone can take it over on January 1st. Ontario assignment laws say that they have the same contract as I do, including the period - so prospective tenants will be in for a lease from January 1st to July 31st instead of the normal year lease, so this is ideal for students looking for a place for spring semester.

shot of apartment:


shot of view from the window:


Building amenities: Squash Courts, Tennis Court, Exercise Room, Billiards Table, Sauna, Outdoor BBQ deck.
Anybody who can pass this info on to apartment hunter is my new best friend.

Also, if any of my design-oriented friends want to help me root through photos to pick out the best for advertising purposes, I'd really appreciate it. Brodie, I'm looking in your direction.

Photos are here. Information on the building itself is here.

So. These last few days have been... dramatic.

For starters, my father has left the country as of this afternoon. Despite being unemployed and 57, he stubbornly refused to retire. Instead, he's plying his skills in management, physics, and instrumentation down south. He's been hired by an outfit down in Tucson, Arizona to head up a new instrumentation department. It all sounds terribly exciting.

I did the dramatic goodbye thing yesterday. It was all tearful and sappy. He's leaving behind his friends and family because of his obsessive drive to work (and his stalwart refusal to stop spoiling his sons). He'll do well there - he always does. He's a sloppy, grumpy workaholic, but he's damn good at what he does and enjoys the hell out of it. He'll do well. He makes friends fast and doesn't mind long-term relationships. I'm less worried about the isolation and more worried about how he'll handle the fact that his new company doesn't want him smoking on company property.

At any rate, that bombshell has gradually produced a second bombshell - at the ripe-old-age of 24, I am a home-owner. No shit. Dad gave me and my wife Lindsey a house... well, actually he gave me and my two brothers a house - he gave my wife and I a house to live in while I scrape together the few hundred grand it's gonna take to buy my siblings out. Ben's gonna stay in the basement apartment, the rest will be free for me and my wife to raise a family in.

So yeah, I'm getting a house. In Westdale. For you Torontonians out there, that's the nice part of Hamilton (yes, there is one). Freaky. Plus, I now have an excuse to spend Chrismases outside of this godforsaken tundra we call a country.

Sometimes I swear I have a horseshoe up my ass so far it's a miracle I don't sneeze iron filings.

So why do I feel so worried?