All settled in Ottawa

The 1st thing I did after leaving Waterloo was to spend a few days at Alex's beef farm. His little sister actually has a pony! Apparently the incremental cost of owning a pony is affordably low if you live on a farm and have lots of hay handy. I fed the pony its daily allotment, which just about made its day. I even played with the baby calf, who somehow got the idea that I was its mommy & kept licking me. I think he was a tad disconcerted not to find an udder on my jacket. Alex taught me how to stoke a furnace, which was interesting as I've never done that before, having always used electric heating. His parents are some of the only people I've ever met who wake up earlier than I do. I think they were equally surprised to find out how little I sleep. During the day, Alex & I wrote the framework for a 4-player networked game of Pong and killed a whole slew of ladybugs by sucking them into the vacuum cleaner. After staying at the farm, we went to drop Sarah (Alex's girlfriend) off in Guelph, where we explored a few interesting stores downtown and ate lunch at a vegan restaurant called Cafe Aquarius, which has a most sumptious non-meaty food I've ever tasted. Apparently, they let clientelle borrow their crockery for take-out meals! I suppose they figure that anyone who feels morally obligated to live as a vegan would be highly unlikely to steal their dishes.

I left for Ottawa a few days later and was picked up at the airport by Steph & Dan (2 friends of mine from St. Paul's). I spent the next few days at Steph's house just outside Kanata. Her mom, who just happens to be a CS grad from UW, works with an arm of the govt. that takes hi-res satellite images. She brought in a large image of downtown Toronto to show me. I could see individual cars on it and even the shadow of the CN Tower. Steph's dad is a freelance geologist and I had several interesting discussions with him about techniques used by mining corporations to find good spots to dig/drill into. He also wanted to start using Linux on a machine he had picked up for that express purpose, so I got him up & running with an old version of Corel Linux that he had on him. Steph's brother took me bike shopping, since he seems to know more about bikes than anyone else I have ever met. I now have a new hybrid (road/mountain) with front shocks. While I was there, Steph & Dan took me trampolining in downtown Ottawa, which was exhausting but a lot of fun.

Speaking of downtown Ottawa, that's where I'm living now, with Andrew & Shannon (his girlfiend, who is at OttawaU) in an apartment that has amazing plumbing and a sun room. It also happens to be right on the bus expressway, which is extremely convenient as I can get to the heart of downtown in about 5-6 minutes. Downtown Ottawa is quite a happenin' place and I hope to explore it in greater detail over the course of the summer. Drew & Shannon took me to this delightful little (no kidding, it only seats 30 people) Vietnamese restaurant. On Sunday I went to church with them, which was interesting because Shannon's pastor is leaving but hadn't told anybody until she announced it to a shocked congregation, whom she had been with for the past 17 years. Drew & I had bit of a misadventure when we misjudged how far away a hobby store was & ended up taking a marathon bus ride into the boonies of Ottawa! Some days after I moved in, his friend Stephanie (from Montreal) came to visit and we saw Spiderman & played frisbee in the park. Spiderman had a fair amount of cheezy dialogue but was enjoyable all the same. The 4th person living in the apartment with us is this guy from Turkey who we barely see because he has no classes and isn't working so spends all day out with his friends: quite the phantom roommate!

I started my new job on the 6th and have spent the 1st 4 days in non-stop learning mode, as they brought in person after person to teach us new things. If things continue this way, this will be the best co-op term I've had so far. I signed an NDA so I can't go into my work in too much detail but it turns out that OTI is IBM's secret weapon against Sun & Microsoft. We are working on an open source IDE called Eclipse and I'm going to be on the team that writes the version control system for it, which is based on CVS. Although the office uses the dreadful Lotus Notes, I may be able to use Linux despite that, since it is one of the officially supported platforms and they want people to make sure our code runs well on it. The office has a nice litle restaurant below it and to top it off, they have free chocolate milk in the fridges :-) No foozball but there's a PS2 with an incredible sound system that I have yet to play with.

On Friday night, 2 of the other co-ops and I drove to Montreal for an overnight trip. We stayed in a res room that Jen Thorsley (another OTI co-op from McGill) got for us. That night we went to a french nightclub in Old Montreal, which was like being in another country! The following day we browsed around the McGill bookstore and climbed Mt. Royal, which had us all completely out of breath by the time we got to the peak. There was some kind of local festival going on at the top, with music and free snacks. Unfortunately the zipper on my leather jacket broke while I was there and I'm going to have to get it fixed now :-( Just before we for Ottawa, Jen & I watched The Sweetest Thing, which is really funny; a lot like There's Something About Mary, we thought. On the way back, we took a bit of a detour because Montreal's highways aren't quite clear as to which one goes to Ottawa and so we almost ended up going to Kingston!