Our reward for finishing our long project at ASAP was a three-day, two-night trip to Montréal. It’s the largest city I’ve ever visited. I took some notes while I was in the city.
August 26
OK, I admit it. I don’t like cities. I feel uncofmortable in them – at least until I get familiar with them. That aside, though I’m sitting in our hotel room at La Tour de Centre-Ville, right in the center of Montréal. It’s a fairly nice hotel – far from the best I’ve stayed in, but good nonetheless. Last night we went walking up a few blocks to a nice Italian restaurant, and then we checked out Sharx pool hall. I played a few games with the people from ASAP, and then we went over to the arcade across the street. I can now honestly say that I’ve played Dance Dance Revolution (Extreme!), and I can honestly say that I suck at it. I enjoyed the walk through Montréal except for the fact that it was 2 AM (heck, I wouldn’t feel comfortable in downtown Bangor at 2 AM). The French/English problem hasn’t been too big, and except for an unfortunate incident that left one of our group members (following the bus in a car) in America, the bus ride and customs were fine. Today I’ll be exploring the city some more and maybe getting a chance to ride the subway.
August 27
Penguins are cool. Really. We saw some yesterday at the Biodome near Olympic Park. Ducks are still my favorite animal besides dogs, but penguins come in a at close third. Affter riding the subway back from the dome, Mike (the head of ASAP) took a few of us New Media Society types over to the SAT, a few blocks from our hotel. What they’re doing there is awesome, and it’s a lot like what we’ve said we’ve wnted to do for a while at the University. It’s basically a place for digital artists of all kinds to meet, discover, and chat. There was everything from VJ’ing to immersive environment creation there. It looked really promising, and, even better, it looked like it could be done in Maine.
August 28
It’s great to be back in America, but I really enjoyed the trip west. We were able to catch Matrix Reloaded in Montréal’s IMAX theater on Tuesday night (AWESOME), and we went to the contemporary art museum ysterday morning. I also had time yesterday to climb Mont-Royal and get some really great pictures of the Montréal skyline (and buy a shirt). After I travelled back through McGill University, I met up with the New Media Society members (again) and we chilled in front of the World Film Festival grounds near our hotel. Our Cyr bus ride home was long (we got back around 2:00, and then I had to drive home), but we had fun by singing/listening to singing/trying to ignore singing, watching The Matrix, and more. We had to wait a half an hour for a customs agent to greet us, then go inside and declare ourselves, while two customs agents searched the bus (welcome home!). Besides that delay, though, we made pretty good time and even stopped in Gorham, NH for some McDonald’s.
It was a wonderful trip, and I’m really glad I decided to go. I think we all became a closer group because of the trip, and I was able to relax and have fun after a really, really busy couple of weeks. Now there are three and a half days until I have to go back to school. Can somebody lend me a week?
And because there’s no such thing as too much time on the water, I went to Monhegan Island that Thursday. My grandmother had been trying to get our family to go for years, and we finally decided that it was a good time to ride over. I had a great time; it’s a completely different lifestyle, but it’s nice for a change. While they went shopping for a bit, I went and hiked a few of the trails around the island and did some Geocaching. We saw everything from a tugboat wreck on the island to whales (probably) on the way over. I also got to see a different view of my favorite lighthouse (Marshall Point) and got to meet some really nice people on the boat. Check over at PTP for some photos coming soon.
We got it on our second try; I went down to Bar Harbor to watch whales for the 8th or 9th year two weekends ago. The boat ride was fun, and I took my GPS this time so that I could see where we actually went and saw whales. Hopefully I’ll be able to compare them to next year’s trip.
On our trip we saw five or six finback whales which probably averaged between fifty and sixty feet long. We were also able to see an ocean sunfish, which is a weird-looking large fish pictured above. Probably the best three hours I’ve spent on the water for a long, long time (even though it’s some of the only time I’ve spent out on the water for a long, long time). Photos coming soon to PTP.
Almost two weeks ago I rode down with Laura to see the Capitol Steps perform. This is my third time, and the second at Merrill Auditorium in Portland. The show was awesome – the jokes about Republicans were funny, of course, but most of the Democratic ones were, too. I even added to my CS CD collection with their newest album, Between Iraq and a Hard Place. They did some classic songs (”Glory Paranoia”, “401K”, etc.), but my favorites were new ones (especially “God Bless My SUV”, “Total Recall”, and their latest Lirty Dies backward monologue). The five singers were some of the best of the entire company, and their expressions and tone really carried the concert.
Overall it was a lot of fun, and it was fun as always to laugh at the Steps and at Laura’s twisted sense of how government should be run. I can’t wait to do it again. 
You most likely won’t hear from me over the next few days; I’ll be in Montreal until Wednesday/Thursday with people from ASAP. Should be a lot of fun.
Hopefully I’ll have some time after I get back to write about all the great stuff I’ve been up to over the last couple of weeks.
Until then, bonsoir!
I’m writing this entry at the LLPI, the 2nd Annual Learners, Laptops, and Powerful Ideas conference at the University. There’s an iBook lab set up here (these are really nice machines… I want my PowerBook…), and I just finished listening to a lecture from an educator at the University of Michigan talking about how he thought handhelds were more important than laptops for students. More later… time for another presentation.
(from the Maine crime statutes)
What, have you actually ever BEEN to a Bingo game in Maine? They can get pretty rowdy…
“B-2″.
“B-2? C’mon, you ****, I needed B-3!”
It always freaks me out just a little when I get so excited about a new project on the Web.
As is the norm with me, I came up with the idea to create a new format to my blog about three days ago and decided to implement it immediately. Why, you ask?
The new skin of this blog is now the same as the one I use for justinrussell.com, the main site. Better integration, in other words. New skins will be coming down the line soon (including a duplicate of the old format for all you hundreds of thousands of adoring old format fans).
There’s a earlier and later posts interface that actually works. My old blog choked when you were dealing with archives of one category; it should work fine now.
There’s a better posting interface. That doesn’t do much for you, but it makes my job a lot easier.
There’s a slick new way to add comments. You might need to unblock pop-ups for justinrussell.com (sorry) in some browsers, but I think it works much more cleanly now.
There’s better module integration. See those little close boxes on each module? Can you guess what they do? Try it. I dare ya. I’ll even give you a free cookie (literally) if you do.
It’s template and class based. My work at ASAP has taught me stuff. Classes in PHP make work a lot easier, and templates make it extremely easy to add new skins.
It’s (mostly) completely commented. Since I wrote this one from the ground up, I commented my code along the way. You’ll be seeing the source, if you want it for anything, in the future.
…and random other stuff. See the dropdown box for the category selection module? the new dates format? the new printable format? Explore. Have fun. Let me know if you broke anything.
Not everything works yet, and there are a few things left to do. I have to port the old comments over to this blog, and I have to ping weblogs.com and blogRATE, and other stuff. That’ll all come down the road.
I’m excited about blogging again.
