Although Vancouver is less than 3 hours away from where we live we never visited it before. Main reason: we needed a visitor visa to get into Canada. We would have probably postponed the visit to Canada for much longer if we didn’t have to get out of the US to renew our visas.

We found Canada, at least the British Columbia part we saw, to be different from the US. The speed limits were posted in km/h, the lanes were narrower. The artificialness we grew accustomed to in the US was gone. Vancouver itself is way more European than any other city we saw in the US. It reminded us of Bucharest - in a good way.

The “experience” at the US Embassy was priceless. The only thing that went well was the fact that we got the visa renewed. The whole experience feels very un-American, from being made up sit in line in the rain, having people bark orders at you and having to wait in at least 4 queues. It reminded us of how things work in Romania.

Overall we really really liked it in Vancouver and we will probably be going back to thoroughly explore the area.

Food?

I can already taste it…

Look, either you give me food or I’m gonna eat you…

After food effect

http://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/blue-lake
29.10.2011

We did this hike hoping to see some autumn colors. Instead the winter had already taken over.

First three pictures are of Diablo Lake, part of the North Cascades National Park:

Pictures of the actual hike, with the frozen lake covered in snow in the last two pictures:

Back in the 90’s when the internet was going mainstream people used to actually write their web pages in HTML.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that, if you have multiple pages, there were certain parts that they would share.

Changing these parts for all the pages was painfull. At first they figured out a way to generate the pages by keeping the common parts in just one place and insert only the parts that were changing for all the pages. Dynamic pages were being born. Many ways of dynamically generating a page were invented.

Nowadays, for a relatively small blog, Wordpress (or a similar publishing platform) is the way to go. While it has its advantages, it also has some major drawbacks:

• you need a database to power the blog
• the pages are generated on the fly (Wordpress in written in PHP) so there is the additional time overhead of that
• you need to install security updates almost imediatelly as they appear
• you need to be carefull when backing up

Advantage: the convenience of using it is a big plus, and the reason Wordpress is so popular.

Now, if Wordpress is too mainstream for you and makes you look uncool it’s time to go back to the root (of the internet) an make your blog consist of only static html pages. At this point you will probably ask yourself: are you insane? Well, not really.

An interesting solution for generating static pages is Jekyll It’s what powers GitHub Pages, GitHub being that wonderful place on the internetz with the largest programming hipsterz per square-feet number :)

Now, if you don’t feel like writing your own logic and css styles for using Jekyll, somebody already did a pretty decent job. I give you you: Octopress

Once you:

• figure out how to export your current Wordpress blog into a format the Octopress/Jekyll can understand
• fix the crap that the exporter managed to export
• add support for tags
• add support for youtube brackets (basically what the wordpress plugin did)
• figure out how to enable comments via Disqus
• customize the theme so that your blog doesn’t look like 95% of all the blogs that use Octopress
• run the generator & copy the static pages over to the server

You are done.

The result: decent and extremly fast (static pages ftw). All the disadvantages of Wordpress are gone. The process of writing and publishing new content is a bit more complicated but that doesn’t really bother me. You can als get a bit more crazy with the transformations you do to your blog’s content by writing a couple of scripts

A few fast and hard rules when it comes to interacting with Covrig:
1) Always wear socks. If not Covrig will sniff and lick each of your toes. It’s his duty.
2) Don’t wear shorts. If you do you will receive a thorough checkup. With the tongue.
3) Don’t wear baggy pants. Covrig won’t hesitate to try his small teeth on them.
4) Don’t hold anything in your hands. Covrig will assume that it’s for him and will attempt to chew it.
5) Don’t eat in front of Covrig. If you do you will see all the sadness in the world compressed in his little melancholic face.
6) Flowers are forbidden. Covrig like flowers. He especially likes to eat them.
7) Don’t leave your shoes unattended. If you, do you will end up chasing Covrig to get them back.

What are you looking at?
 

sad enough?
 

Did anyone say fooood?
 

…sniff…sniff…
 

like a boss
 

The Seven Falls pictures are the last ones from our not-so-short trip to Colorado. In the first post after we returned, I had some raw random observations. Let me distill two of them, for posterity.
I said that we will never rent a car from Budget and that Google Navigation screwed up big time a couple of times.
The Budget story:
We chose to book a car from them (through Orbitz) because it was marginally cheaper than one from Avis, and by marginally I mean 4-5 dollars. Big mistake.
Now, for the geniuses at Budget, here is a little secret: people expect to pick up their car fast (we are usually hungry, tired or pissed off after a flight so make it fast) and expect to get what we paid for. It’s that simple.
Well, for us it was not.
This bald guy greeted us and started asking us the normal  “where are you folks from”, “what brings you here” questions. A compact car pick-up. Are you planning to go to the mountains? Maybe, why? So, the golf head starts explaining how the car has a small engine and will probably be underpowered and the AC won’t work, bla bla. He offered to upgrade the car to a Jeep for a small fee… How small? Almost as small as what we payed for the car.
Really? You expect me to pay double? Of course we don’t want to pay double. The next 10-15 minutes he tried selling us all the possible and impossible insurances. Also tried giving us a V6… you know powerful car. 20 minutes in, he decided to give up and give us the car - an Yaris Sedan. That’s cool. We like the Yaris - we own one.
We went to pick up the car only to find out that it didn’t had power windows or power mirror? AC? Is this 1979? Who would want to rent this car? So, baldy gave us the lamest car he had… I mean we didn’t want the V6. It’s our fault.
Another 10 minutes of not buying an upgrade and all the insurances and we were given the option to go for a Hyundai Accent - which isn’t a terrible car but it’s also not the sharpest tool in the shed. Add to that: coffee stains on the back seats and big scratches virtually on every side of the car.
We looked at the car, wondered why we didn’t go to a real rental car company and took it. 35 minutes in, we drove off after they “documented” all the scratches and the coffee stains.
The Google Navigation story:
The only reason you would want to use this with a smart phone is that it always has an updated map. An update free map that is. Apart from that it’s a disaster.
The voice sounds like a criminal robot. A criminal robot who is way to specific with the instructions it gives: “After 231 feet, you will see a small stable with 3 black horses. Turn left if there are only 2 horses in the stable”. You see, a normal GPS unit has a restricted set of vocal instructions - prerecorded human voice instructions. There is a small learning curve, but that’s it. Stay on the left lane will always mean that you are not going to exit the highway at the next exit. Turn left, turn right and go straight on will always mean just that. In case of Google Navigation, being too specific means that you have to pay close attention to what the robot is mumbling instead of watching the road.
The routing that it does is also… interesting some times. An epic fail: instead of making us do an U-turn and go back 400 feet, it made us take an _UNPAVED_ county road that, after 15 minutes,  got us to the same place. Guess we should have taken the Jeep upgrade, eh? Smaller fails: not understanding what the robot told me and getting lost or consistently loosing the GPS signal. Making us take roads that were longer than what the normal GPS recommendations doesn’t even count that much when you think about it.

Seven Falls, Colorado
03.09.2011
http://www.sevenfalls.com
More like 3.5 falls, but an interesting experience nonetheless. The part that we really loved? The stairs. Best cardio workout of the whole vacation :)