logloglog

Bixi is Montreal’s new shared bike system and it was recently rolled out. Not all bicycle stands/stations were installed immediately but according to this sign they were going to install a Bixi station 150 meter from our house last Saturday. These stations install very fast. They are solar powered and after they are lifted of a truck they require just a few bolts and that’s it.

But somebody in the street thought it was wrong and glued this note on both of the signs:

Saturday came and went and no Bixi station was installed.

Sunday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

Monday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

Tuesday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

But finally, on Wednesday, a big truck came and dropped off this station. The bikes were added today. It is not installed in the original location (which would have cost two parking spaces) but, just as the note asked/said, on the other side of the intersection. So now it’s 170 metres from our house. We have many stations nearby, another one is 200 metres in the other direction, and there’s a third a bit further away, almost 400 metres, near the park.

This weekend I’m going to convince A. to make a test ride. And if it’s a success she might get a Bixi pass for her birthday. Or a bike.

If you have an iPhone or iPod you might want to check this site to get an interactive map that you can load in Google Maps which shows the location of all 300 stations and how many bikes (or free spots) are available at every station. Because some stations are at times totally empty and others are totally full, which is a problem when you either want to get a bike or want to drop one off.

I’ve been so busy lately that I totally forgot to announce on logloglog that my iPhone application is no longer a secret. Apple finally approved it and it’s now for sale at an iTunes Store near you. If you are fast you can still get it for free, because I decided to give it away for the first couple of days. Afterwards it will be $0.99 or the equivalent in your local currency.

The star of the application is of course Poupoune. She works under a stage name, as do the other cleaners. That way we can make things up on their weblogs, because these are modern times and all cleaners have weblogs and Twitter accounts.

Here is the website, so you can check it out for yourself. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch you can still watch the demo video, also presented by my favourite dog.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of this and I hope you, and a lot of other people, like it. I really hope this is going to be a success since I need to pay a few of people who helped me with this, and it would be nice if I could pay myself a little too for all the hours (many hundreds!) I worked on this.

Oh, and you could really help me if you write a review in iTunes for me. You don’t even need an iPhone or iPod for that.

We went for a walk on Mont Royal (the mountain) before A. was taking a flight to Winnipeg. The mountain was literally covered on Trillium. I always think Trillium sounds like something straight out a science fiction movie like Star Trek or Superman, but it actually is a plant with three leaves coming out of the stem at one point and also triangular shaped flowers. It’s the official flower of Ontario, and protected as an endangered species. Not endangered at all on our mountain though, but probably protected anyway.

Poupoune loves running around them, sniffing for… I don’t know but it smelled good to her.

I haven’t been posting a lot, I make mini posts on Twitter and that’s about it. Here are some updates:

I am still voiceless and totally out of shape. My lungs still aren’t 100% and I cough when I whisper too much.

Not speaking isolates me a bit. I haven’t seen my friends in a while at first I because didn’t want to infect them, and if you can’t speak there is not much point anyway. You’d think I should email them but for some reason I don’t.

I’m anxiously waiting until my secret iPhone application passes through Apple’s totally opaque approval process. They rejected it once for a stupid reason, but I changed it (albeit grumpily) and now I have to wait again. In the mean time I work on the website that accompanies the application, and I’m even adding some new features for the next version.

The moment things go “live” I’ll let you know.

Not much going on here, and that has several reasons. I have a nasty flu, cold, or whatever that is going on for almost a week and a halve now. (No, it’s very unlikely it is H1N1, if it was I should be dead by now.) 

It gave me a high fever, made me lost my voice and I have terrible coughing fits. Because my voice box is not working (Laryngitis) the coughing sounds I make are very high pitched like they would be when one pokes an adolescent boy with a breaking voice with a burning stick. It doesn’t feel that way, fortunately, but it still is painful.

I can’t go out of the house, since if I do, I might infect others and certainly now, people are extremely worried when they see an overdressed person coughing hysterically while walking on their sidewalks. Any physical activity also just renders me completely exhausted and I cough even more afterwards.

Contacting people by phone is also hard because they can’t hear me and even whispering is bad for my Laryngitis.

So my social life is very dull and boring since all I do is sit in my chair and read the Internet. And I work on my secret iPhone project, with some napping in between. Today I basically finished the project (after nearly 3 months!) and I’m going to submit it to Apple for approval tomorrow. Finally, I was running out of steam a bit…
Even though I can almost feel your curiosity I can’t tell you more about it before it is accepted. Apple might rejected it for some stupid reason, and I don’t want to give my competitors too much of a head-start in their efforts to copy it. Not that it is very likely they are reading logloglog, but you never know.

This application is also the reason for the move to a real domain for logloglog. It is very possible I will get much more traffic on my corporate site soon, and I want to make clear this is my personal weblog. The old loglog goes off-line in a few days. If you have links to loglog in your blogroll please update them.

Hi, I am moved to see you!

You made it to the new location of logloglog. Three logs, so that’s not too hard to remember.

If you read logloglog through a feed reader and you haven’t done so already, please update your feeds since the old feeds will be silent from now on.

The entries feed is here, and the comments feed resides here. That way you’ll never miss a post.

On the last day of our holiday we take a long walk along the beach of Vancouver until we reach Wreck Beach, Canada’s biggest official nude beach. And even though it is March and quite chilly we actually saw some people skinny dipping.

I also saw these big floats of giant logs. I had eyed them on aerial photos (like here on Google Maps) but now I saw them in reality. The trees get felled in Northern British Columbia, the logs are dumped in the river and then, when they reach the sea, they are collected and assembled into big floats that are pulled by tug boats to this sheltered bay.

These logs were once giants hundreds years old and it’s a real shame that most of this wood is going to end up as toilet paper or cheap plywood.

So, and this was the last post on loglog. I thought a post about logs was an appropriate end.

But wait, there is more. Loglog is going to move and get its own domain. Loglog is dead, long live logloglog! Fifty percent more log for the same price!

( Important note from your admin: in a few days your old RSS feed will cease to work. If you still see this post as your last entry, head over to the new site and re-subscribe to our spanky new feeds!

Thank you!)

We’re leaving Vancouver Island and now finally we have a day of foul weather. We do a short hike along the rocky point of Ucluelet, and the storm and rain makes it even better.

Then we head back to Victoria where we’re going to spent the night in a Moter Inn, have breakfast with someone from A.’s high school in Nigeria (who she hasn’t seen in 28 years), drop off our rental car and then go take a bus on the ferry back to Vancouver.

Today we took a float plane to go float in a hot spring.

We’re in Tofino, an old hippy and surfer community, discovered by resort developers and the rich tourists and thus getting too expensive for the original inhabitants. They haven’t all left, a lot of them try to make some money off those tourists when they aren’t surfing and smoking dope. So there are almost ten boat companies that take you on a small boat for a whale watching trip that can also be combined with a visit to some natural hot springs on an island nearby. It sounded all very nice to me, but it was rather expensive and as you might know by now, me and boats don’t go very well together. While we were getting ready to leave the “Budget Bed & Breakfast” where we booked a room, we overheard that the three young Swiss tourists that stay in the other room have missed the last boat and are since they are leaving tomorrow missed out on their last chance to see the whales. Good, so I’m not the only one.
We go visit a parade consisting of all emergency trucks and boats of the village with blaring sirens and a couple of kids dressed up as whales. After that A. and I pass the local float plane airport and A. wants to go inside and enquire for prices. We find out that if we charter a plane and split it in five it is only slightly more expensive than taking the overpriced boats. So I call the Swiss and after some convincing, some frantic running to fetch towels, camera and swim wear, and some shopping for food we are airborne twenty minutes later. The plane is a De Havilland Beaver float plane built in Canada in 1954. Despite its old age it flew perfectly. It didn’t crash but the noise was almost deafening despite our ear protection. It was a rather bumpy flight but I apparently can stand bumpy aircraft better than bumpy ships.

The views from the air were spectacular even though we saw neither whales nor sea otters. After a 20 minute flight we landed near a dock in a small bay and the plane took off and left us there by ourselves. From there it was a 45 minute walk through a very beautiful old growth rainforest to reach the hot springs. A boardwalk with lots of stairs was built to protect the trail from being overgrown and to protect the rainforest from the visitors.

The hot springs were indeed very natural. The hot springs in Jasper had been closed because it was winter but from the pictures I had seen it looked just like a normal swimming pool. This one surely didn’t. At first we couldn’t even find where we could bathe because we only found a stream with very hot water (more than 45 °C), but nowhere was there a place deep enough to immerse ourselves. Then another girl, a passenger from the first boat that had arrived, came and showed us some small puddles around a big boulder, where the stream ran through just before the very hot water mixed with the cold sea water. According to an information panel these hot springs have the biggest flow of hot water in Canada. It was very nice.

After lunch and smoking a cigar overlooking the Pacific Ocean we walked back to the dock and took another bumpy flight back to Tofino, were I now sat next to the pilot. The views were even better this time.

Sometimes it does matter.

After spending two days in Victoria we rent a car to explore the rest of Vancouver Island. It’s raining cats and dogs but halfway on our way to Tofino, in the middle of nowhere, I really have to pee. I pull off at the first parking and luck is with me. It’s not raining as hard anymore and there is even a real composting toilet. But hey, the trees surrounding me are really big… I accidently stopped at a major tourist attraction, one of the few remaining stands of century-old Douglas fir.

I go back to the car and tell A. that even though it is raining she has to put on her shoes and coat and get out of the car. We walk around in the rain in a rainforest and it is great.