2007 – Nicolas Demers

I’m leavin’ on a jet plane

iPod charged? Check. Seriously West Coast downloaded? Check. Camera charged? Check. Cell phone charged? Check. Chargers for all aforementioned gadgets? Check. Ticket confirmation? Check. Yep, it’s time to fly out to Ottawa to reconnect with the family.

Gotta swing by the library to renew Les Misérables. Maybe at my parents’ place I’ll have the time to finish the fucking thing. Nah, I’m just kidding, it’s really an awesome book. Just… challenging. And long.

Heh. I’m even looking forward to the flight. Haven’t been on a plane in two years and after the last horrendous experience you’d think I’d avoid them like the plague. But (a) what choice do I have? (b) ehh, that’s in the past. Today’s a brand new day.

The Search For…

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in Wordpress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments.

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in WordPress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments. Other con: the search results are displayed in chronological order (timestamp for posts, creation date for pages). No clever algorithms to determine usefulness, even if it’s only giving a higher ranking to search terms in titles.

Other huge con: it won’t search the photo galleries. That runs off a completely different database, and while Gallery does have a search plugin, I think it’d look silly to use two different forms, each searching half my site. Not to mention, I don’t even know where I’d place them.

So it looks like we’re going with (2), a Google-powered search. The same as what I’ve got now? Not quite. I’ve registered a custom search engine which should do pretty well. It’s nothing fancy, but it will allow me to style the results page to a degree. There’ll be ads, but I can live with that. And it’ll make my job a lot easier, since I don’t have to worry about formatting the output of two different search engines.

What don’t I need?

I’m still working on the new site design. It’s slow. And frustrating. I want to do more than just giving my site a face lift, but honestly it’s damn hard to be creative when I’m still learning the tools. So I experiment. And I play. I add stuff. And I subtract.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much. It’s not just styles, either. Just recently I decided to scrap the login functions provided by WordPress. There are other ways to control comment spam (such as, hah, nobody reading my blog), and the “login/register” links were just… blocking me. Which I didn’t even realise until I removed them from the sidebar, and then everything fell into place. Visitors will get cookies to remember their info, so they only have to fill it in once.

And then there’s quotes. Do I want quotes in this upcoming version? If so, how? On big long pages, the way they are now? But do I want to put them in separate pages? It feels… untidy, somehow. I was never totally happy with the structure of the “Inspiration” section in the present version, though maybe it’s the asymmetry of it: one page of links vs. 3 pages of quotes. So what’s the solution? Are cool quotes to be nonessentials? Maybe I put a random one in the sidebar or footer, like Slashdot does (and like I’m doing for my blogroll)? Or prune them and keep them around in a separate page? I dunno. I like them, and I like that they bring some search engine traffic in, but I’m not convinced they fit with the rest of the site.

I’m cultured, y’all

Last Friday I went to the Eastside Culture Crawl. And I haven’t blogged about it not because I didn’t enjoy it or it didn’t make an impression me, but because I just didn’t know what to say. It’s… art. I don’t know much about art. Like the saying goes, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” And I feel the same applies here. Still, let’s give it a go.

For starters, it really wasn’t what I expected. I’d imagined big art galleries and showrooms, but the two studios I visited (the Mergatroid Building and Parker Street Studios) were very utilitarian warehousey buildings each housing many independent little studios. Which I should have known just from looking at the Web site, but there you go. And you know what? It was a lot better that way. It brought the exhibits down to a more human scale; looking around the small studios, I could see half-finished work (especially in furniture shops) and the tools of the trade. They felt like very productive spaces, and I could easily imagine the creative process going on.

Mind you, it didn’t bring the artwork’s prices down to a human scale, but hey; artists gotta eat too. I won’t go the “Why pay $1.8M for three coloured stripes?” route.

Crowds were fierce, and didn’t let up even when we left shortly before the exhibition was supposed to close. Not bad for studios set square in the middle of an industrial park, where parking was definitely not easy to find.

At first I took photos of the studios (including the studio names) but quickly stopped. I’d tried that before, when I went whale watching in Tofino and it just didn’t go anywhere. So instead of taking photos, I got up close and personal with a lot of the art. It was purely unconscious; didn’t even notice I was doing it until it was pointed out to me, which is even more interesting since I never thought of myself as a very tactile person. But there I was feeling and running my hands over the smooth ceramics, warm carved woods, cool plastics and cold metals. (Not the paintings hanging on the walls, of course. That’d be silly.) Neat. I’ve never tried building anything with my hands except IKEA™ furniture, but now I can totally see the appeal.

Enlightenment For Sale

Sunday was quite a full day of volleyball. A reffing clinic around noon, then dropping in to Intermediate 1 (I figured I’d have a good shot, since lots of people would be away for the long weekend), then my usual Intermediate 2 play. There was also a beginner reffing clinic between I1 and I2; I’d already taken it, so it gave me a chance to go grab a bite to eat.

I went to that little muffin/snack place, corner of Alma and 4^th Ave, realised I didn’t have enough cash, and went looking for a bank machine. On an impulse, even though it was dark and drizzling, I decided to wander up 4^th and after a block or two came upon Banyen Books. Wow. Now there’s a name that was totally not on my mind. I’d only been there once or twice probably ten years ago, when I was still in my kinda-paganish phase. To buy a copy of the Tao Te Ching, if I recall. Wait, no, it was to buy a copy of The Complete Book of Tai Chi Chuan, as recommended by my then-teacher, and I bought the TTC on my own because Taoism appealed to me. Ah, memories! So, I couldn’t resist: since I still had some time to kill, I went in to browse.

It was just as I remembered it. I’m pretty sure it used to be in another location, so the layout was probably different, not that that mattered much. And I remember they used to have one of those little fountains, the kind that always makes me want to pee, but didn’t this weekend, thank gawd. But everything else? Exactly. The. Same. Incense, soft music, the promise of magic and revelation in every Tarot deck and $50 crystal. I wandered the shelves of books on dream analysis and cosmic science and Celtic Goddess worship and all sorts of weird esoteric topics I’d never even heard of. So many fluffy morsels for people who’ll believe anything that feels good, people hungrily seeking something they can’t even name and wouldn’t recognize if they found it.

Truth is, I could feel faint echoes of the same yearnings inside me. There was a time when I too was a seeker, sort of. After dropping Catholicism, I looked for answers or at least wisdom in mythologies both old and new to replace beliefs that hadn’t appealed to me in a long time. I didn’t put much effort into it because I never felt that the spiritualities I absorbed were really what I needed. Nowadays, of course, I tend to trust my own judgment and revel in my skepticism. I don’t need faiths, spiritualities to make me complete or hand me The Truth.

Still, I have… moments of weakness. Now, in one corner of the store (next to handsome leatherbound Books of Shadows) were a few racks of sketchpads and notepads, all with very pretty covers. I was seriously tempted to get one. I hadn’t done any drawing in a long time, and I thought it might inspire me. Or at least push me to practice regularly, cos Gawd knows I need the practice. But really, wasn’t that more magical thinking? If they’re anywhere, the talent and the potential are in myself. Not some object I shelled out $24.95 + tax for, no matter how pretty it is.

So I left without getting anything, and went back to the gym to sweat off half my body weight. On the way home I bought a pad of unlined paper at Safeway for a couple of bucks, on which I’ve been doodling since.

“i used to <3 life.”

Thanksgiving photos are coming soon. Meantime, here’s what you might call an anti-Thanksgiving photo. I saw this graffiti for the first time as the train pulled into Waterfront station, and took this photo during lunch.

Enjoy. Or, not.

Giving Thanks For Whistler

Boo on me. Working so hard on my blog & gallery redesign that I totally forgot to write about Thanksgiving. And it was pretty special, since I spent it in Whistler with a few close friends. Just one day (Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon), but it was a hell of a day.

The good omens started on the drive up. It had been raining for a few days, but the weather was just then clearing up. Which meant dozens of gorgeous rainbows lining Highway 99. The first almost took my breath away, and it took all my concentration to keep my eyes on the road. Over the next couple of hours, I did get a little more used to them—and the gorgeous scenery I hadn’t seen in a while.

Then dinner, walking around a bit, and hanging out, then off to bed.

Monday promised to be clear, so I set my alarm for 6:00 to get some sunrise pics… forgetting the crucial detail that Whistler is surrounded by mountains. At 6AM it was still mostly dark, nowhere near actual sunrise. Oh well. So I wandered around, took some nice photos of Whistler in the early morning fog, went back to my room, tried to get back to sleep, couldn’t, went out again and finally saw a good sunrise over Blackcomb Mountain around 9AM. Then a few minutes later the fog came back in and hid it. Boo.

We had breakfast, walked around Whistler for a bit, then spontaneously decided to go up Whistler Mountain. What a difference 2 months makes! The last (and first) time I was there in 2003, it was August. Now snow covered the whole mountain (enough for at least one small avalanche), the hiking trails were closed, and I was kind of freezing. Sure, I was dressed warm, but obviously not enough for the mountain. Still: we kept moving, admired the scenery—and it was breathtakingly gorgeous with the fog-slash-clouds playing around the many mountains whose names I never bother to learn. Oh, and on the way down, we caught a glimpse of a mother bear out with two cubs.

We had an early turkey dinner, because most of us had to go back to Vancouver. That evening I went to see Between Heaven and Earth, part of the VIFF lineup. Excellent movie, much better than what I expected. I thought it would be about the trials and tribulations of two families of wandering circus folks in Uzbekistan. And it is about their trials, but so much more than that. The circus people are not passive recipients, they’re involved in their community, and even in national politics. There’s issues of tradition vs. modernity, faith and religion, and the greater social/economic picture of Uzbekistan. Great stuff, stark and troubling at times, but not sensationalistic.

Monsieur Smartypants

Okay, The Tick vs. Reno, Nevada is far from my favourite from Season Two (that would be Grandpa Wore Tights, with its brilliantly hilarious parody of Golden Age heroes), but the title seemed appropriate. After a hiatus of a few weeks I’m back at work on my site redesign, and making good progress. I’ve got a pretty good structure for the blog and assorted pages, though there are still some open questions and many tweaks to be done. And, I’ve started looking at customising my photo galleries. Yes, it can be done. The trick is that Gallery doesn’t use pure PHP scripts like WordPress, but Smarty templates, which I’m not familiar with. URL rewriting, another one of my worries, is also possible–I found a plugin for it–but it’s not working quite like I want it to. I may have to hack the .htaccess myself. That’s all right, though. As I said before, learning new technologies is part of why I’m doing this. The other part–and the real challenge–is to go beyond what I have now, not just give my old styles a new paint job while adding obvious features like comments. Which I already knew. But damn, it’s hard to be creative when I’m still figuring out the tools to be creative with.

If I lived downtown I’d be home by now

(Arrr!)

Well, I’m blogging from home, but still. It hit me tonight, with a dazzling clarity, as I grabbed a bite just before catching the last Trainbus: if I lived downtown I wouldn’t have to commute way out (okay, not way way out, I know) to the boonies, on top of an exhausting day at work.

(Arrr!)

Still haven’t taken any real steps to move out of the ‘burbs, but this is yet another kick in the pants.

Flown The Coop

They’re definitely on their own now. Since late last week, none of the juveniles have touched down on the roof for more than a few minutes, and haven’t even been fed by their parents. At least as far as I could see. Even the runt I worried about so much is flying like a pro, its flight strong, its gliding smooth as silk. It’s such a joy to watch them go after seeing them grow up. Funny to think just a couple of months ago they were still downy little chicks with useless wings and ravenous stomachs.

How far will they wander, though? Their ‘hood currently ranges over several city blocks, but how much will it change in their lifetime? I’m not clear on what “territory” might mean to a seagull when they’re not actually nesting. I guess it’s probably just a hunting/feeding range, overlapping with that of other seagulls, expanding or contracting depending on how much competition they face. But on the whole (I’m totally guessing here), probably not moving too much from generation to generation. Which means these gulls’ ancestors might have been around this area since before Europeans came along. Even before First Nations people–though I’m thinking not long before, what with Ice Ages and all.

Circle of Life, people. Circle of Life.