hurc something something Spider-man 3 someting something

AWESOME TEASER.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/spider-man_3/large.html

For those unfamiliar with Spider-man lore... here are the characters we get a glimpse of in the trailer...

Sandman
Eddie Brock
Venom
Gwen Stacy
Green Goblin 2 or Hobgoblin

Yes yes. I know I'm leaving some fo you in suspense with my last blog post, but I'm just too damn excited about this movie...

Oh, anyone going to see Superman Returns?

hurc's life is about to change...

So there's a reason I didn't get a chance to finish my log of my trip to Brantford. For the sake of completeness, here's a short paragraph of Day 3 of that trip:

Woke up in the morning. Skipped brunch for a couple more hours of sleep in the tent with the warm sleeping bags. Left Brantford in mid-afternoon for Toronto. Stayed there for a few hours to have some decent Korean BBQ. Left TO at around 7:30pm and got back to Montreal just past midnight. Long day indeed.

Since that trip, I went on another driving trip, this time with the family to NYC for a cousin's wedding. You can read all about it on Joey's blog. This trip isn't the purpose of this blog entry.

On second thought, I'm just going to say one thing; there are some recent developments that will drastically change my life in the near future. Stay tuned for more news...

hurc's weekend adventures in Brantford - Day 2b

Day 2, Part 2 - The Buck & Doe

For most of the day, I was debating whether to drive my car to the reception hall, or just cab it, so I don't have to worry. Knowing me and my tolerance for alcohol, I probably shouldn't be driving after tonight anyway. We end up hitching a ride with someone to the hall.

As we're entering the parking lot, another pick-up truck drives by us, rolls down the window, and asks:

"Is this where the poker tournament is?"
"Uh... we're not from around here, we really don't know."

Looks like the Buck & Doe has got some competition tonight. Hope the poker tournament won't steal away too many people away (it didn't).

When we're inside, we notice that we're really the only people there. I guess it's true for any party, regardless the event; never arrive on time. People tend to arrive fashionably late.

For the reason, I hate being late. I'm guilty of being late from time to time, but I always plan on being on time. It's hard to take you seriously when you can't keep to your schedule.

First thing I do, is buy some alcohol tickets. Remember I said this is a fund-raiser? Well, you buy tickets at the door, which you exchange for alcoholic beverages. I really wasn't in a beer mood, especially not after having way too much the weekend before at the beer fest. So all I had left was either rye (Canadian Club) or vodka (Absolut). I'm not a big fan of Absolut, but then again, I'm not a rye drinker... yet.

The night went by pretty fast. People poured into the hall at a fairly regular rate. We got there at 8pm, and the food was only served around 11pm. Even so, I wasn't even hungry, I was still feeling the burgers from the afternoon, and had been snacking on the party mix all night long. Food was pretty standard fare: pizza and roast beef sandwitches. That's what you get for a 10$ cover charge.

We played games, like Crown and Anchor, which is like a roulette game. I lost about 10$, a quarter at a time. There were raffles too. I didn't buy that many tickets, so I didn't win any prizes. There was dancing. I danced a bit. Yes, I did dance, although I did skip the slow dances, it would look pretty weird to be dancing on my own.

All in all, it was a great night. We got a ride back to the house, and many people were still hanging around, even at 2-3 in the morning. They have this huge fire pit and there was this great fire going. It was probably about 10 degrees Celsius, so it was nice to sit around a bonfire.

When it was time for bed, A., P. and I jumped into the tent we pitched early in the day and had ourselves a backyard camping great time! Well, it was 3am, so all we really wanted to do was sleep. Sooooo...

In the morning, we were planning on leaving fairly to head to Toronto for some Korean BBQ...

hurc's weekend adventures in Brantford - Day 2a

Day 2, Part 1 - Visiting Brantford

C. woke us up at around 11am. I was really groggy from sleeping on that uncomfortable air mattress, but nothing a good shower can't fix temporarily. By the way we were all dressed, C.&Y. pretty much had breakfast on the table for us already. When they said that we should have breakfast, I thought we were all going out somewhere.

Homemade breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs with mushrooms and other ingredients I don't quite remember, toast with butter and jam, and various fruits. The best part was the Peameal Bacon. You know the joke; if Canadian bacon is ham, what do Canadians call bacon? Turns out there are variations of Canadian bacon that isn't ham, or at least not the ham that you think.

After breakfast, except for the people that rode with me, everyone had something to do for the day, before the big party, which would start at 8pm. So A., P. and I would have to find something to entertain us for the day.

We ended up at a driving range and mini-putt course. We each hit a basket of balls and then played a round of mini-putt. It was such a great sunny day too, so it was nice being outside. After that, we actually went to a mall and shopped a little, or at least A. shopped a little. :)

We were back at the house at 5pm for dinner, where a BBQ feast of hamburgers would be ready for us. Great homemade burgers. Not sure to what extent the burgers were made, but I wouldn't be surprised if they ground their own meat. I mean, it's farm area all around.

Some actually went to take a nap, while P. and I played some Big 2 to pass the time. I hadn't played Mahjong or Big 2 in such a long time, but in the past few weeks, I've been playing so much that I've lost count. No for money, mind you, but it's still fun to play. I'm told I can be pretty competitive.

Getting ready for the Buck & Doe...

hurc's weekend adventures in Brantford - Day 1

A couple weeks ago, I was invited to something called a Buck and Doe (yeah, I didn't know what it was either, just click on the link). It was going to be held in Brantford, Ontario, just West of Hamilton. That's a 7 hour drive from Montreal.

At the time, someone (read previous posts) was supposed to be going as well. So obviously, I was really interested in going and spend Quality time with a capital 'Q'. As the days pass, I find out from A. that she wasn't going anymore because she had too much school work to do during that weekend. That kinda dampened my spirits a bit, but I figured, what the heck, and decided to go anyway.

Let me take a page out of Amy's book and split my adventures into several posts, instead of trying to write everything down in one sitting...

Day 1 - Getting the weekend off to a good start!

I managed to take off early on Friday afternoon, so we could try and beat rush hour traffic. I picked up P. who lives downtown and then headed toward Ville St-Laurent to pick up A. from work. Traffic was ok, so I made pretty good time. I figured we would be able to leave Montreal by 5:15ish since A. finished at 5pm.

5:10pm - In car, waiting for A.

A. calls and says that she's not ready to leave work yet, so we decide to go up to her office and wait for her.

5:30pm - Still in the office

She needs to wait for her boss to come out of his meeting before we can head out. Both A. and P. then reminds that they both had very light lunches and were starving. I figured we would grab something on the way, but they were insistant on eating something in town first. They wanted either McD's or Scores. I gave my tie-breaking vote and decided to go to Scores once we were ready.

7:30pm - Gas'ed up and ready to go

We're finally good to go, after eating some great baby back ribs and all you can eat salad bar.

For the first couple of hours, it was pouring rain with very light traffic. I'd normally be driving quite fast on the 401 towards Toronto, but because of the poor visibility, I slowed down considerably, especially when trying to pass those big 18-wheelers. They were splashing so much water up when you drove up close, I had my wipers on high for a good portion of the first half of the trip.

We got into Scarborough at around 12:15am, which is actually pretty good time, considering the driving conditions we had. I thought we'd be there soon, but I had forgotten that our destination was Brantford, not Toronto. Still had another hour at least to go.

We finally got to Brantford and was at C.&Y.'s place at around 1:30am. We stayed at C.'s mom's place, which is actually located between Paris and Brantford. There's this road sign close to the house, that we totally forgot to take a picture of. It says:

Paris - 8 km
London - 88 km

Get it? if not, go grab yourself a map of southern Ontario.

That night, I slept on this really crappy inflatable mattress. It's almost like the ones you use for the pool, except the materiel is slightly different. It's so narrow that the minute you decide to roll to one side or the other, you might fly off the mattress. Luckily, I brought my own mattress to be used on the 2nd night. I did not sleep well at all that night...

hurc's career path

For those loyal readers out there, you know that I'm usually complaining about one of 2 things: relationships and work. Let me share my thoughts on my fledging (or not) career.

I've always thought that I was immediately pigeonholed in a Tech Support or Customer Service role whenever people read my resume, because of the years of good experience I have in the field. But after having been grilled for an hour on a phone interview today, I've come to realize that I'm clueless outside the world of call centers. I no longer remember anything from school.

I haven't programmed in years, not that I was very good to begin with. I'm not an expert on networking and have never built from the ground up VPNs or IPSec tunnels for corporate environments. I don't remember any theory behind all those Computer Science courses I've taken. My B.Sc. is just a piece of paper now.

Many will say, well, your Bachelor's degree teaches you HOW to cram, HOW to manage your time, and less about what you actually learn in class. But still. Unless I do some actual major studying soon, I will continue to bad at interviews, because all I know is tech support and call centers. It sucks, especially when I've been trying to get OUT of support.

This phone interview was also for a support role, but very different from what I'm doing now. There may be a testing aspect to it, so I'll get to learn some new stuff too, that may lead to other things, maybe QA, maybe testing. Not sure if I would be really interested, but it would be a good start I think. Even though I said that my interview didn't go so great, I think I have a small shot. But anyway, I don't want to get too much ahead of myself here...

hurc's horoscope for today

so I just got home from dinner and decided to browse a bit before going to bed. I check out my Friendster account to see what's new. Yes, I do have an account on Friendster. I don't usually believe in the stuff, but I clicked on the horoscope page, see what they say about me. here's what it says:

The Bottom Line

You're in a holding pattern right now. Wait until there's an opening and then move.

In Detail

You may wake up feeling a little directionless, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You are probably in a holding pattern of sorts -- waiting for the right time to come in for a landing, so to speak. There are things moving around you in unpredictable ways, but rather than going forward and hoping for the best, you're smart to stay back and let things settle on their own first. You have a very interesting view on things -- one that you should keep in mind for later.

you read what you want to read into horoscopes. they make it vague enough so that it can apply to several different things. but I still can't help applying this to my stagnant love life. does it mean anything? probably not. but I guess my mind was already made up and this kinda reinforces it.