I checked out the original tweet and the contest details and decided to retweet as well, you’ll never know.

And then, on Friday the 13th, I got these tweets:

Yay! I had won!

I never win things but now I did. So on 7 October we’ll be flying in this gigantic plane, the biggest passenger plane in the world, to Paris, making a lot of people jealous. This plane is normally not flying on the Paris-Montreal route, but it’s a special flight celebrating the 60th anniversary of Air France in Canada.

Air France A380 Landing

Okay, Paris is not my dream destination, that was Thimphu, the capital of the kingdom of Bhutan, who’s former king invented the GNH index, the Gross National Happiness Index. But I’m sure we’re going to have fun.

Now we’re researching a cheap hotel in Paris. If you know one, please leave a comment.

Update: No need for an hotel anymore. A friend offered to loan us her apartment in the centre of Paris for the weekend! Thanks for all the tips, in comments or by email.

Two days ago I bought Alison a hammock for her birthday. I had no idea how I came up with that gift, she never asked for it. Then I saw this photo, taken 3 years ago, that I used for our calendar. Subconsciously I must have been inspired by it.

Unfortunately it rained and thunder-stormed all day yesterday so Alison couldn’t try it out. (Fortunately it cooled things down a bit, after a week of sweltering heat with temperatures of 30-35 and high humidity)

She likes it. She stole my iPad and just read the whole Internet. And Plume likes it too, just as Poupoune did before. She eats her Kong toy and enjoys the rocking motion of the hammock.

Plume is slowly taking over the special place Poupoune had in our lives. I still love Poupoune, but she’s getting older and isn’t as active anymore. She still goes on walks, but usually not in the morning when she’s too stiff of arthritis. She seems reasonable happy although she’s a bit jealous of all the attention Plume gets. To keep her busy we gave her a Kong for own and that seems to have helped.

Alison asked if she could use the ladder: “I want to remove the vine out of that almost leafless tree so maybe it will do a bit better.” I went into the basement to get the ladder, which took some effort since I really should clean up, and put it up against the tree for her. Then I went inside to continue my work on the computer.

A few minutes later Alison came in. “Uhm, I think the tree fell down.” I asked if she was okay and then went outside to see what had happened. The tree had snapped off at its base, just below ground. Apparently the reason it didn’t have much leaves was that it had rotted away, probably because the strangling vine had deprived it of nutrients. Fortunately it didn’t fell all the way to the ground which might have injured Alison, but just fell a metre until it rested against the neighbour’s garage. I hate that garage, since it takes away a lot of sun from our garden, but for a change it proved useful.

I interrupted my work, got my electric saw out of the garage, and went up on the garage’s roof to cut the tree in pieces. That went pretty quick and a few hours later the whole tree was in my car and I was underway to deposit it at the Eco Centre at the end of our street. Usually when I come here to deposit debris of one of my renovations it’s very busy with contractors. But today it was Sunday and there was hardly anyone. So I was relatively quick back to work.

A. and I tried out Bixi today. I used my own bike but for A. we wanted to get a Bixi.

We went to “our” Bixi station and I tapped the solar powered touch screen. Two icons were visible, one of it disabled. After I tapped the big icon I was presented with the screen shown above. There appear to be 50 pages of this legalese text, with Article 1 to x, in either English or French. Rather overwhelming, and maybe at the page 10 there are instructions, but I never clicked through so far.

Instead I just put my credit card in the credit card slot.

After a short while two other icons appeared, but before I could figure out what they meant (there is plenty of room to add a text next to it, and after 50 pages of text one or two words would be really helpful here) the printer printed a ticket. It had a 5 digit code on it, and a pictogram how to enter it. After a moment of confusion I found out that next to each bike there was a small keypad where one would punch in the code. The code contains only the numbers 1, 2 and 3 only, so it’s not to hard to do. I entered the code and a red light started flashing. Not good. After three more tries we entered the code in another bike’s keypad and finally it worked: a green light lit up, the lock released and the Bixi bike was ours to use.

We adjusted the saddle and off we went. It was A.’s first ride in the city in decades, so we started on a quiet residential street. The steering of the bike is a bit “nervous” but after a while she got used to it. She liked that the centre of gravity was very low.

Our destination was the Jean-Talon Market about 1.5 km away. I had a iPhone map that linked to the map on the Bixi website that supposedly shows realtime information about the amount of Bixi’s available at every station. More importantly, it shows how many free spots there are at each stand. Because the Bixi has no lock, and after 30 minutes of “free” use it gets really expensive. If you’d use the Bixi for three consecutive hours a whopping $16.50, on top of your $5 daily fee, would have been charged to you credit card.
In order to not break the bank you have to bring back the Bixi bike to a station within 30 minutes. Fortunately you then can immediately get another bike, and use it for free for the next half hour. But this means there should be stations, with free spots, at regular intervals, otherwise you are more or less stuck.

According to the map that I checked when we left home there were 7 free spots at the Henri-Julien/Jean Talon stand. There was none. I checked the map again on my iPhone, and it still said 7 free spots. Next stand, 300 metres further away on Chateaubriand/Bélanger. According to the map, 5 free spots. In reality, none.
Finally we found one free spot on the Bréboeuf/Jean-Talon stand, 800 metres from our destination, but in another direction. Again, the map said there should have been many free spots, and there were only two. Since this bike station was almost nearer to our house than to the Jean-Talon Market we felt kind of cheated.
We decided to cancel our visit to the market and instead to go back home. In order to do that we needed to unlock another bike. I typed in the code from my ticket but got a red light. We tried all bikes but none of them would unlock. The code-ticket had a phone number on it that I called for assistance. After a short wait a man answered me in very poor English and told me to swipe my card again and I would get a new number.

Of course! The old code was only valid for that station, and had expired after I unlocked the bike. But swiping your credit card repeatedly feels quite dangerous, especially because there is absolutely no feedback on the amount actually charged. (I still don’t know, since my online credit card record shows no charge at all.)

Again, some printed instructions, either on the pay kiosk or on the ticket would have been immensely helpful. They might have been there, but buried in a 50 page puddle of legalese, it’s unlikely that anybody would find them.

After I swiped my card again, I got a new code (I now figured out the two icons meant print code and show code on screen), unlocked a bike and rode back home.

So our first experience with Bixi wasn’t that positive. The bikes are great, but the information how to use it isn’t great,worse, it’s almost non-existent.

Also, if the information on the Bixi website is not correct and up-to-date, you can’t plan a trip. Without my iPhone, I wouldn’t even have known the locations of the “nearby” stations. A printed map on all the stations showing the nearest stations would be a really obvious solution here.

Bixi is nice, but you shouldn’t want to use it to go to a destination, like the Jean-Talon market, or a cinema downtown or things like that. Chances are that you can’t drop off your bike and either you pay a lot of money or have to walk quite a bit. Or both. I later learned there is an icon that becomes active when the station has no free spots left that will extend your half hour with 15 minutes so you have time to find a station that does have room to drop off your Bixi. But since the icons have no text there is no way you would know. When there is no room for your bike you don’t go to the touch screen to find a solution. At least I didn’t.

The ratio between bikes and stations is not good. On the Bixi website they talk about 3000 bikes and 300 station. Most stations don’t even have 10 places, so when nobody uses a Bixi, like at night, all bikes should be parked and everybody should have put them perfectly very spread out over the network. That isn’t going to happen. Realistically there should be two or three times more parking spaces than bikes.

And then there are those instructions: 50 pages of legalese interspersed with instructions is just ridiculous. Quebec user interface designers are either terrible, or those things are designed by the son of the director who is studying graphic design at a Cegep. I have no idea. The same applies to the interface design of the STM Opus terminals, but that is another rant.

I know Bixi is still in its infancy and not completely rolled out yet, but many of the above points are basic design flaws that could have been easily avoided.

For know, I don’t think A. will get a Bixi pass for her birthday, and not only also because she told me she would never use it to go to work downtown. She has more reasons than the ones pointed out above but still.

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.

It’s our first day in Vancouver and we wander a little around the city. Visit a nice garden in Chinatown, try to avoid the junkies and homeless people on Hastings street, accidently find ourselves in front of the Vancouver office of A.’s company. On our way back to A.’s sister’s house, where we’re staying, we pass long lines in front of all Irish pubs since it’s Saint Patrick’s day.

(Lines also in front of the English pubs which is kind of funny historically speaking; I guess if one wants to make money religion is not important.)

We arrived late in Winnipeg so our scheduled 4 hour stop was cut short to one hour. I didn’t care too much since I’ve visited Winnipeg before ( Read here and the next posts about that trip).

We went on a short stroll through the Forks, where we saw the worlds longest skating rink, a cool bridge with ice on it so you could skate over it, and had a chat with a guy that ran a sound recording studio right in the middle of a shopping mall.

When I told people we were going on this trip everybody warned me that the part of the trip through Manitoba and Saskatchewan would be very boring because the landscape was all flat. So I feared the worst, especially because I hate the flat Dutch landscape.

So when we left Winnipeg I prepared myself for some boring hours and even thought of doing some work on my current programming project. But the landscape was actually quite pleasant. We travelled between rolling hills, covered with snow (although in Montreal there was more snow that in Winnipeg) all the way towards Saskatchewan when it got too dark to distinguish much outside our always moving picture window.

So don’t believe people when they say Canada’s prairie provinces are all flat. It’s a big flat lie.