• On the way down, the customs officer asked who my passenger was. I said that she was my girlfriend. Then he asked how long have we known each other. I said since November; then I asked if it was too soon to go on a trip to Oregon together. He smirked and handed us back our passports.
• The drive down took as long as advertised. There were the occasional mini-jams.
• We navigated Portland using a combination of Google Map printouts, tourist brochures and a mapbook. I probably should have borrowed my brother’s GPS. (When I got back home he was wondering why I didn’t ask him for it.)
• Powell’s Bookstore was my mecca.
• Woodburn was the outlet of choice. Did I mention that Oregon has no sales tax.
• Japanese food is interpreted slightly differently than that of Vancouver. I mean, what would you call a BC roll in Portland?
• The King of Roads through the Columbia Gorge was very scenic.
• Newport was our home base on the coast. We got a room with a view of the ocean. This was a lot warmer than braving the very strong Pacific winds.
• Whenever I was on the beach, I had two thoughts: how beautiful the view was, and whether I can acquire some property.
• Food service at restaurants was excellent. Food was very good. Seafood was good too. When Frommer’s give it a star, it’s worth checking out.
• I was carrying a Lululemon grocery bag, exiting a restaurant. Random girl: “Lululemon!” Me: “Yes? Are you from Vancouver?” Girl: “Yes!” Me: “I guess we’ll start carrying Lululemon instead of wearing Canada flags, eh?”
• Who on earth would bike the Oregon coast highway? You are so exposed and naked to the elements and the speeding cars!
• Florence sand dunes was like being in the desert.
• Cannon Beach was very pretty.
• Seaside’s beach at night allowed people to have little bonfires on the beach. We didn’t have any wood handy unfortunately.

I wouldn’t mind going down again.

Hello readers. Look at her blog. Now look at mine. Look at her blog. Now back to mine. Is your blog as “interesting” as mine? I think not. How about her blog? Is your blog as interesting as her blog? Don’t you wish you can have thousands of subscribers? And look, there are comments and regular readers. Sadly, her blog is not your blog. But if you go to her workshop, your blog could be like her blog.

Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on the Internets with a blog your blog could be like. What’s in your hand? Back at me. I have it – that WordPress theme that you’ve always wanted. Look again, the WordPress theme has turned into diamonds. Anything is possible when your blog is like her’s. I’m on a zebra.

The Old Spice Man is godly; my writing is not worthy.

In case you are wondering, I did go to a writing workshop by Kelly Diels. She is very professional and has tons of stuff for the aspiring writer. Yet at the same time, the personality and style that you have come to know and love is also present. (Note: I am not a long time reader of her blog, just came across it recently.)

Her big points, mutated into my words:

• Keeping the door ajar – Work ethic. You’ll never find time in real life to do the writing that you want. You have to want it all the time and be working continuously. This can mean quickly jotting down notes when it strikes you during the day. This can mean mining your own conversations, emails, IMs for material. This can mean forcing yourself to write daily as a way of exercising your muscle. This can mean that you might just do 2 sentences today but really good sentences.
• Procrastination, perfectionism – You can’t count on inspiration to strike you. You must produce even if you’re not inspired. The Old Spice Man would probably strike me down if I use the cliche about perspiration.
• Personality – Tell a story. Incorporate details. Be you. Evoke the emotional response. The personal story is the brush strokes of the bigger picture. Be courageously vulnerable.
• Tweetable = Writer’s Win #1 – How do you know if your writing is good? When there is a sentence in the prose that stands out like a gem, so much so that people will tweet it far and wide.
• Me Too = Writer’s Win #2 – How do you know if your writing is good? When your reader vigourously nods his or her head and gives you the epic “Me Too”.
• Purpose – Mommy bloggers of today are capturing the life as we know it. Writing lets you travel through the space-time continuum. I happen to know of a teenager who never would have imagined that her diary would be read and translated in the languages of the world.
• Structure – Kelly uses a corset as the metaphor of choice. As a man, I just feel weird trying to explain it in my own words. But it was a really good metaphor.
• Imitate – Channel the styles of your favourite writers. Eventually your own voice will come out.
• Old school tips – Kelly also brought up a ton of other tips that I should already know but just haven’t thought about because I used to think that English classes were for the cool popular kids who wanted to do creative writing and not for nerdy bookish math types like me. Rhetorical devices. You need writing peers.
• Making a living as a writer – Being personal makes you stand out from the dull. Who reads Case Studies? I would if they weren’t so boring. Your blog is the different kinds of voices that you are capable of writing in.

Your door is a jar.

And I had to freaking line up for it! Two people in front of us!

Total cost: $2. Return by 7pm the next day. I have seen the future!

I used to get zip.ca (which is a Canadian netflix like service). I loved being able to create a massive list of things that I wanted to watch and be “surprised” when my 50th pick arrived instead of the next DVD in the Sopranos series. What I don’t like is when I get behind in my watching. Life sometimes get busy and I can’t be bothered to keep up with the DVDs. While there are no late fees, there is a nagging thought about not maximizing value of the “unlimited” DVDs per month, which was limited by the speed of Canada Post.

Don’t get me started about Blockbuster.

By the way, your public library is totally loaded with lots of good stuff too, if you don’t need to watch the latest greatest.

This “stunt” was done in protest to the requirement of having to use your real name, if you want to play on Blizzard’s games.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I would just prefer to hide behind an IP address. But for the information of myself that I am making available online, there is an internet approval committee (i.e. me) that decides if it is safe to put up or not, and it’s not just any old random crazy stuff. (You may beg to differ after going through the blog’s archives, but please humour me.)

As for WOW and StarCraft II players, I think that there is really no good reason to force people to use real names. I mean, I don’t use my real name when I go on plentyoffish for safety reasons, right? There are unscrupulous women who would think nothing of seducing and taking advantage of poor innocent Alfred!

On the Alaska Airline flight back home to Vancouver, the pilot was handing out credit card applications. “Sign up for a credit card, get a free plane ticket.” Sure why the heck not. Even with the credit card’s annual fee, I could just cancel it after using up my free plane ticket, right?

My card arrived in the mail soon after. Hmmmm, how come I don’t have a free flight? Oh geeze, there were two levels of cards to choose from and I chose the lower level one, which doesn’t give you a free plane ticket. But I have already shelled out money for the annual fee. Arrrrg!

However, they started me with a decent amount of Bonus Miles, halfway to a free flight. Maybe, just maybe, I could earn the rest of the way to a plane ticket…

Fast forward to 2010. Looks like I might be able to cash in those miles for a flight after all, except that there are several different categories of free flights. If I want to fly on a nice Thursday evening and return Sunday night, I need even more miles. But technically, I can use up the points on a flight if I want to. I mean SURE, who wouldn’t want to leave Vegas early on a Sunday morning?

It’s so close I can taste it, this free plane ticket. Then I can be done with this damn thing and get onto a better card.

So, would you pay $2 a month to get a letter from a fresh MBA?

I think that I am so fatigued from the shallow articles, the ads and the “1 2 3 4 5 next page” links that I might eventually start paying for content.

I took it into the bike shop. Busy like heck, but my dazed and confused look definitely got the attention of someone pretty quickly.

“Hi, what can I do for you?” He asked. I detected the urgency in his voice that could only mean that he was probably working non-stop since the store opened.

“My bike’s been in the garage for a while and I am wondering what it would take to make it safe to ride, other than filling the tires and adjusting the brakes.”

He quickly looked at the bike. Squeezed the brakes, studied the cables.

“A tune-up is $50. And we don’t do anything with plastic brakes here, so we would have to replace them with metal ones. That would cost $20 and the labour would be $20. So it would come out to about $100.” I hesitated my reply. In that sliver of thinking time, another customer tried to jump the gun and get the bike shop man’s attention. The other customer was politely told to wait a second. I knew I had to decide quickly.

“Okay, let’s do it. Can you do it today?” I asked.

“Haha, noooo. But we can have it ready for Thursday. Can I get your name and number?”

* * * * *

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig wrote extensively about the satisfaction of being self sufficient in handling any repairs that his motorcycle needed. He had a friend and fellow motorcycle rider who balked at the idea of even learning the simplest thing.

I know I should learn, but I just can’t be bothered at the moment, even though this is costing as much as an oil change for my car, if not more.

In the Stanford prison experiment, student volunteers were randomly assigned the roles of prisoners and guards. All hell broke loose and the experiment had to be stopped by day six. They probably picked the most mentally stable and healthy volunteers to start, right?

In Toronto, the G20 Summit was taking place and the police descended on rioters, protesters and random bystanders. Some were more deserving of the prison than others. However, one thing is certain: All stereotypes of Canadians being nice have been destroyed.

What do these three scenarios have in common?

I think that when you are charged with keeping order amidst all the chaos, a certain fear creeps up. You want to do a “good” job because doing a “bad” job will result in even more chaos and madness. Soon fear sets in and you “work” harder. How do you “work” harder? How do you “police” harder, or “guard” harder? You arrest more people. You start being meaner and being less lenient. You lay down the authority. Soon you become numb and you lose yourself in the role.

My experience as the “policing” class rep was nothing compared to what’s going on in Toronto or what happened in the Stanford prison experiment. However, the parallels are striking. My chalk on the blackboard was the police arresting the people: fear driven, indiscriminate, and just doing my job.

As for the police in Toronto, do they deserve disciplinary action? Whoever was in charge knew that this would happen anyways. When it’s all over, there will be some PR backlash for a while and then people will eventually forget. That is, until the next time it happens again.

The thing that struck me as interesting was how Meryl Streep’s character (i.e. the magazine editor) had these discussions in the meetings about the contents of next month’s magazine. How a certain style was done two years ago, can we do something new. Fashion is all about trends and people wanting to follow into new and exciting trends.

The tech world is currently so fashion driven! I normally consider myself to be substance over style but even I succumbed to buying the famous black Macbooks back in 2006. The black ones cost more than the white ones with exactly the same specifications; guess which one I bought, haha! I don’t have an iPhone but I lust for it, even though the new ones have antenna problems. But the cool kids will still like me if I got a new Android phone, right?

Of course, once you get past the hardware, there’s the software. NoSQL is very hot and chic right now. And cloud computing is all the rage. Programming languages? PHP is making a comeback this season in the form of HipHop; but don’t count out Ruby on Rails yet! And the perfect accessory to your web app today is most definitely HTML5 – you want to be a leader or a follower?

Oh it is a glorious time to be in the industry right now!

Today, coding by “Google” is an accepted and effective technique for getting the job done. I remembered pouring over the Win32 API manuals – good times! They even included examples!

So what are the consequence of using code from an example from MSDN? Did they explicitly say that it was okay to use it, even if it was presented to be used in such a fashion? Most of the time, there is an implicit understanding that educational code can be used… for your education.

However, someone who does not understand the consequence of the GNU General Public License can get himself into an intellectual property minefield quite easily, especially the coding by Google types. Let’s get right to the point: if you lift a portion of the source code from a GPL-licensed program and add it to your own program, you have created a “modified work” or work that is based on the “previous work.” If you distribute a version of the modified work, in binary form, you have to make available the source code for the “modified work”.

In other words, the GPL license is intended to be viral and ensure that the derivative works are also open sourced. Your boss probably wouldn’t appreciate the unintended consequences. There has been cases where proprietary software had been caught violating this and was forced to release their source code.

I am not about to argue for the merit or demerit of the GPL license; every “artist” has his own reasons for making his work available. However, anybody who enters the software world in a professional way needs to understand the consequence of GPL and the proper usage of code found on the Internet. By not educating new programmers about the GPL akin to not telling freshly minted stock traders about the consequences of insider trading.