I’m off to Seattle this weekend for a Java conference, so you might not hear from me much for a few days.

We’re going to the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium. We went the last time it was held in Seattle, and it was fantastic. The hotel accidentally labeled the conference No Stuff Just Fluff that time, but it definitely had stuff. I really picked up a lot from it.

The focus is on learning. You don’t have to sign up for the individual sessions, so you decide what to view throughout the day instead of committing at the beginning, and no one tries to sell you anything or push their products. It’s set up in a way that allows you to get the most out of it.

The conference is right in Seattle this time, instead of being in Redmond, so we’ll have more to do at night. It should be a fun weekend.

I had planned to spend a lot of time writing this week, but here I am sitting in the Vancouver airport, waiting for my 5:00 flight to Victoria, and I haven’t written a single word since my last post.

Last time I was in Kamloops, most of my friends were gone and I was there strictly for leisure, so I had a lot of downtime. With friends in town, and half the week dedicated to work, time flew by this trip, and I’m actually a little sorry to leave. I had a good time.

The weather was great in Kamloops, which was a pleasant surprise after walking through rain and looking up to grey skies all winter. I never realized how much my mood is affected by weather. I wouldn’t say I was depressed this winter, but I was just generally disinterested in everything around me. Now that we’re having the occasionally sunny day, I find myself going back to my hobbies and wanting to pick up new ones. It might have something to do with spending the winter in wet darkness rather than snow.

At least this trip home had a little excitement in it. When I first arrived at the airport, I walked into the washroom and someone was being yelled at for smoking. He ran out, and they just let him go. I wish I had known you’d only get a stern scolding in this situation back when I smoked. I might have chanced it.

After that, I sat down in a seat facing the tarmac. An aircraft taxied passed, and the air from its jet engines blew a big, metal carry-on luggage cart about fifteen feet into the air, smashing it against the window in front of me. Thankfully, the pane was laminated glass or something and the cart just bounced off of it. If it hadn’t, I may not have had all the proper body parts remaining to type out this post. It was cool in that life-flashing-before-your-eyes sort of way.

It was a refreshing trip away, at least. Maybe I’ll feel a little more energized now.

Hell must have frozen over - Vancouver airport finally has free wireless internet. It seems silly, this day and age, to be excited about free wireless, but it sure beats paying $10 dollars an hour for it.

My trip to Kamloops is going surprisingly well. My taxi driver was friendly and interesting, and the traffic was light. I bypassed the check-in line at the airport by using the self check-in machine. No one was in the security line, so I walked on through to my on-time flight. Arriving in Vancouver, I had a rice bowl and beer before chatting with a friend in town here on my cell.

I’m sure my good luck will run out any minute now. My next plane will probably go up in flames.

..not by me, of course. I’m no terrorist, friendly airport security people…

Tomorrow night I’ll be flying to Kamloops for work. I’ve extended the stay through Easter weekend, so I can have some time with my family and friends there.

Whenever I’m on a flight, I think of this song. I first heard it while watching Hackers back in 1995 and became obsessed with it. It’s played during the opening scene, when Dade Murphy is flying to New York, and it sets the mood perfectly. Hackers had a lot of cringe-worthy moments, especially for anyone with some knowledge in computing, but it had geeks that weren’t completely socially inept, interesting pop culture and technology references, Angelina Jolie, and great music, so I think that made up for it.

Orbital was a great UK electronica duo, unfortunately now defunct, and this is from their second album Orbital 2, released in 1993.

I went to Vancouver this weekend to visit friends, and it was a lot of fun. I should make an effort to get over there a little more often, but the ferry ride from the island makes the trip, however short, very irritating.

We ate and drank at some great restaurants, did a little shopping, and generally had a good time. Chris even made a nice home-cooked meal for us to enjoy, which was excellent and very appreciated. This last month, I’ve gone off cooking a bit. Sometimes it just seems like more hassle than it’s worth when you live alone, but it’s unhealthy and expensive to eat out too often.

I happened to visit during a freak snow storm, which is just my luck. I was catching a ride with another friend from Victoria, and we had to make a quick trip down to Abbotsford to grab his bike before returning, and for the first 30 minutes of the trip we were averaging about 10km per hour on the highway. The last thing you want to do when you’re tired and hungover is drive through fresh snow surrounded by Vancouver drivers.

I think I’m going to return to Vancouver in a couple of weeks to watch Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, an avant-garde play from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, and Tom Waits, the coolest man on earth. It should be an interesting show, I think.

On an unrelated note, I made haggis tonight for a belated Robbie Burns Day. I now have enough left over to keep me frying for a week.

Here’s ‘Clap Hands’ from Waits’ Rain Dogs:

• Sorry for this mass of text. I’m too tired to write any CSS to add linebreaks, and my CMS dictatorship, commonly known as WordPress, won’t let me add them manually in the HTML. I tried.
• Thanks everyone who left book recommendations on the last post. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve read so many writing books and haven’t written a damn thing. Reading about writing is just so much easier, I suppose.
• My friend, Tanya, sent me a photo the other week of a strange plastic object with a plus and a minus on it. I was really excited for her, because I thought she bought the new hand-grip Wii controllers, but it turns out she’s just pregnant (and I’m very slow). Congratulations Tanya!
• I’ve been exhausted this last week. I must be fighting off the black plague that has afflicted everyone around me. I fall asleep if I stop moving for more than twenty minutes. I slept through Friday night, after getting home from work. The next morning, I went golfing and fell asleep the instant I got home, napping through the entire sunny afternoon. What a waste of a day.
• I’ve been writing plot ideas and character sketches in my wee Moleskine to ready myself for NaNoWriMo. I have the opening of my plot ready to go, and I just need to find a middle and an end somewhere. I’m excited to start writing, but I also have a rising feeling of dread as November creeps closer. I don’t want to fail this challenge, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine writing that much in a single month.
• I’m trying to plan a trip for early next year, but I’m having a hard time deciding where to go. I’ve narrowed it down to:
  • Scotland, to meet relatives and finally visit the motherland. Unfortunately, I’d have to suffer through nasty weather at that time.
  • Various bits of Scandinavia, to visit friends I studied with in Austria. Also terrible weather.
  • Australia, to backpack with my friend Lee-Ann. She might be moving there next year, and I’ll tag along for the first few weeks if she does. Fantastic weather.
  • Backpacking alone somewhere in Africa or Asia. I have traveled alone before, and I actually quite enjoy it, but I’ve only done it in western/central Europe.

  I’m not very good at narrowing, as you can see.

I’ll be in Seattle this weekend for a Java conference, and then off to Vancouver for the Smashing Pumpkins concert on Monday night, so there might not be too much action here in the next few days.

I ordered a new computer this week, and it just arrived today. I wanted to use my existing case, so I decided to just order the parts and put it together myself. I only had enough time tonight to clean out my old computer and mount the new motherboard, so it’s just sitting there in a pile at the moment. I am, however, typing this post on my shiny new 22″ widescreen LCD monitor!

When I ordered the computer, I didn’t know about the conference or the concert. I was originally planning on buying a lot of food on Friday night and playing games straight through until Sunday. I wasn’t even going to put pants on. I feel like there’s a universal conspiracy keeping me from my new toy.

Oh well, off to bed. In order to make it to Seattle in time, I need to get up tomorrow morning at 4:30am. I haven’t gotten up that early for two years, and I’m not really looking forward to it.

I didn’t know about this, but it seems Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are at it again. This time they’re motorcycling from Scotland to South Africa, covering 15,000 miles and 14 countries, in a new BBC series Long Way Down.

I loved their around the world trip in Long Way Round. I watched every episode of the series, multiple times, and tore through their fantastic book. Both, the series and the book, were amazing and really made it easy to imagine yourself struggling down the dirt roads of the Mongolian countryside on your own BMW GS.

The new series airs this fall, and Amazon has their book listed, so we’ll soon have a new adventure with which to follow along. Can’t wait!