Fredericton is a black hole that is determined to not let me escape its grasp. As it turns out, U-Haul is no longer even guaranteeing me a truck at all. They’re going to call me if something turns up. However, the location on Prospect St closes at 8 tonight and 5 tomorrow, and then is closed until Tuesday, while the location across the river closes at 5 today and is then closed until Tuesday. There’s a local guy who might have something (he won’t know until 9:30 tomorrow morning), but if we rent from him, we actually need to bring the damn truck back to Fredericton.
I just can’t believe this. I’m ready to cry, here. Isn’t this the sort of hideous mess that making reservations is supposed to prevent?
Well, two days from now, I'll be back in Wolfville. Fredericton has been interesting, and there have certainly been a wide range of high points and low points. Plus, all the stuff going on with my job has left me feeling chock full of validation-y goodness.
At any rate, my work report has been submitted, I've given my last presentation, and I have one last feature to finish up at work tomorrow before I leave. And if I can manage to be even marginally competant at figuring out the tiniest bit of JavaScript, that should be no problem.
I have scourged the kitchen for my stuff. I have gutted my room. My walls are naked. And things are in boxes. I think this time moving isn't going to suck quite as much. But that's largely because of my dad. It's cool, because he stays up later than me packing, since I have to get to work in the morning and he has nothing else to do in Fredericton. So it's like Christmas backwards; I get up in the morning and there's all this stuff in boxes that magically appeared over night, only it's all stuff I already had.
On a sometimes-I-hate-the-world note, the U-Haul reservations system is the work of Satan. Apparently when you book, they guarantee you that you will get a truck, but they won't guarantee where you get to pick it up. Big deal, right? There are at least three U-Haul places in Fredericton. Wrong-o. Somewhere in the messed up minds of people who created this system, "the area of Fredericton, New Brunswick" does not refer to only Fredericton and its reasonably adjacent towns, but to places nearly two hours from here. We may actually have to go almost to Saint John just to pick up the damn truck. Now, I do realize that this is the busy season. That's why I booked the truck a month early.
[sigh] And it's supposed to rain on Saturday. Just once I'd like to pack up and move on a precipitation-free day.
Anyway, this should be my last entry until I get back to Nova Scotia. G'night all.
Due to my impending departure from a city with a mall, I've been freely spending. After dropping into Chapters, I think I've sucessfully fulfilled my pretentious literature quota for a while. I picked up War & Peace, a book of stories by Kafka, and Maus in two parts. Also Backlash by Susan Faludi and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer; for those of you who don't know, these are both pretty famous feminist books.
Later on at Walmart, I ended up picking up Soylent Green. Andrew and I had been planning on renting it last night anyway, and it was cheap enough that if I watch it a couple of times, it'll be worth the cost.
Two things about this movie:
Today, I had cheesecake and samosas for lunch. : )
In other news, I've given my co-op presentation, and I'm part way into my work report. A week from today, I'll at long last be heading back to Wolfville.
Quarter after two and heading home. About frickin' time.
As of roughly 7am this morning, after much procrastination, I completed my first ever contribution for a scientific paper. How scary is that?
Now I'm at work, and very, very tired. And despite the fact that I've been here long enough by now that I could go home, I have accomplished next to nothing today. This is something of a problem, since I need to give a co-op presentation tomorrow and I don't have any slides yet. So I can't leave until I'm done. And I'm so tired.
<< bitchbitchbitch >>
The sky is very orange and there is a raccoon in the back yard. There has also been quite a bit of thunder and lightening, but I don't have any pictures of that.
Update (11:12pm): I'm so sad. The people from Animal Control had to shoot the raccoon. They said he looked really sick, so he had to be killed and sent off for rabies testing. Poor little guy. : (
A couple of days ago, Andrew and I were out for groceries, and on the way home spotted a really bright object in the sky, to the right of the moon. I dismissed it as Venus, thinking it was too bright to be anything else. Then it occurred to me that it was a bit late at night for Venus. Then I forgot about it.
Thanks to an email from Ryan, and a confirmation from NASA, the mystery has been solved. Apparently, this month Mars is going to be closer to Earth than it has been for anywhere from 5000 to 60,000 years.
I. Want. My. Telescope.
I'm seriously tempted to ask my father to bring it down with him when he comes down to help me move. He's coming up on the 26th, and Mars' approach culminates on the 27th. So I'd have enough time to get a good look, and send it back with him when he goes home. Because god knows it's not going to fit in the apartment.
Under 75-power magnification, Mars will apparently appear as large as the full moon. I'd really hate to miss that.
Finally I've played around with the style sheet a bit. I think it's looking pretty good so far... Still need to fix up the comments stuff to match the rest of the page, but it's late and I want to go to bed. I'll get around to it tomorrow. Now that I have more of an idea of what I want to do with it, I'll be less likely to put it off.
G'night, all.
Update (9:49pm): Fixed up the comments to match the rest of the site. When I said I would, even.
At long last, my project has gone live.
Not that we expect it to be entirely perfect and robust just yet. It's live in a 'come and try to break it and please let us know how if you do' sort of way rather than a 'it's shiny and perfect and let's tell everyone in the world about it' sort of way. So with that as a combination caveat and invitation:
As a word of explanation, as this beta-ish version happens to lack one, RACOFI is a multi-dimensional music recommendation site, with an exclusive focus on Canadian content. Because hey, I do work for the government, right? The idea is, you create an account, and then rate a few albums that you recognise. Click on 'Recommendations' and by using one of two algorithms RACOFI will predict your ratings for other, unrated items, and present to you a list of the projected top ten. To do this, it uses various 'collaborative filtering' algorithms (thus the 'CO' 'FI' part of the title.)
Next to refine your results, should you care to do so, click on Search. Here, you can give weights to the different dimensions, depending on how much you care about each. You can also select for music from certain years, labels, or from within a certain price range. All this information is straight from Amazon.ca, so it should be reasonably accurate. : )
Note: The stuff in the 'questions' box is, as far as I can tell, pretty random and doesn't really affect things in any real world sort of way. Anyway, this section of the project relies on 'rule applying' algorithms, thus the 'RA' in the title, and is the entirely the work of my co-worker Marcel Ball.
I guess that pretty much covers it. If you guys give it a whirl, it would be greatly appreciated, since the more ratings we get, the more accurate the predictions will be, in theory. In the long run, one of the real goal of this project is to further the study of the algorithms involved, so lots of data is a good thing.
Also, we're trying to promote the Canadian music scene. While this part may be more delusions of grandeur... We're planning on adding another feature to the page pretty soon, so that artists can submit information on themselves (an informational URL would be required). So hopefully it might give them a little exposure that wouldn't have otherwise be available. Should this thing happen to take off.
They are planning to keep this thing going after I've left, so you never know. It could happen. : )
Perhaps this has something to do with our rough border crossing.
This is probably the coolest thing to auction off that I've ever heard of.
And so, it's now time for 'My Trip to Maine', or 'The Weirdest Border Crossing Ever and Other Stories'. While I realize that it's a full week late, I'm not exactly punctual in real life so I see no reason why my blog shouldn't follow suit.
So Friday the 21st, Brandon and I headed down to Maine for the weekend. We had briefly considered going to New York or Washington, purely for the sake of having gone. We abandoned that plan in favour of going somewhere close enough that we'd actually have time to do stuff before having to leave to come home. Thus, Maine. For the fourth time.
Brandon picked me up in Fredericton, and we headed down to cross the border at Vanceboro, where we had the worst border crossing ever. The way I figure, either a) they were convinced, for some unknown reason, that we had drugs, or b) they were very bored and playing at seeing how much they could freak us out. There was a younger guy and an older guy, and they were surly and suspicious from minute one. They seemed suspicious about everything: our jobs, how late we were crossing, even the untidy state of Brandon's backseat. Everything we had with us they went through... Judging from the state of my bag afterwards, they actually riffled though my underwear. I'm surprised they didn't want to frisk us, no joke.
After about half an hour at customs, we were grudgingly sent on our way. We headed south until we were so tired that we were starting to hate each other. We took that as a cue to find a campsite. We got our tent up shortly before dawn, discovering along the way that Brandon's brand new tent was missing tent pegs and a fly. I ended up sleeping in the car anyway, due to the very loud conversation of a murder of crows somewhere very near by.
The next morning we headed into town for breakfast. We ate at this really nice little local place recommended to us by the camp ground owners. After eating, we left to discover that we were temporarily trapped. Our car was parallel parked on the town's main drag, which was closed off as everyone gathered to watch a parade. So we stuck around for that, and then headed off again.
Enough for tonight. More on Maine later, I think.
