Cats!

Yesterday Margo returned from a few days in Portland. She came back with her rented truck loaded with a china cabinet, a massive and heavy piece of furniture that's been in her family for some time. And she also brought back our old cat Emma.

We left Emma with Margo's cousins five years ago when we left the continent for Europe. On visits to Portland she no longer recognised us. We haven't been able to give her a good home until now ... when we were renting, one of the upstairs owners was allergic to cats.

She is slowly adapting to her new home. Just as she did in Portland when we brought her from the pet shelter, she pretty much disappeared at first; now she's taken residence under Margo's bed, coming out for food. I managed to get this shot just as she turned to retreat.

But she's slowly warming up. Margo says Emma let her pet her this afternoon.

We're keeping the cats away from each other for a while. Margo has a plan to introduce their smells to each other in a friendly way first. But we're hoping they are good company for each other: the rambunctious youngster and the wizened elder.

Gadgets!

This morning was like Christmas morning for me. I got a new computer yesterday.

Now that we're settling into our house, we can do some of those things we've been meaning to do but didn't because we didn't have a good home for it. And, after spending tens of thousands of long-accumulated savings ... what's a little more? So I got to do a bit of shopping in recent days.

The catalyst for a new computer was my ability to work from home. My previous iMac has served me faithfully for much longer than I would have guessed. From walking it out of the Apple Store in London's Regent Street, to shipping it across the Atlantic and across the continent, it has given five years of reliable service housing our thousands of photos and hundreds of albums, being a fine Java development environment, showing hundreds of DVD movies and shows, enabling hours of Skype video chats. Its 2.1 Ghz dual core processor was more than enough for my needs, and as the years went by and I watched clock speeds barely rising, I saw no need to upgrade. But it has finally come to a bridge it cannot cross.

In my job we use the Scala language, which is built over Java, but is a more flexible and powerful language. However, because of the extra capability and complexity of the language, compiling and running Scala code often takes more resources - especially memory. For me to be running and debugging in our full development environment, including multiple servers, some running inside the development tool ... it could be done, but the memory demands caused lots of disk swapping, and the performance was slow and unresponsive enough to be getting quite frustrating.

The older iMac has a maximum of 3 Gb, and I have it up to 2.5. To reasonably accommodate the full development environment, I'd probably need at least 4, ideally more like 8. So ... it was finally time to move up, adding one more to my long list of Macs. (Though it was certainly no hardship.)

So I'm typing my first post on this new machine. I've already updated the OS to the latest version. I also used the Migration Assistant to restore everything from a Time Machine backup, and though I haven't completely reviewed the results, I'm very impressed: It appears that all my apps, data, and settings are here, as if I've just logged out of the old one and into the new one. And it comes with 4 Gb of memory, and when my order for more comes in this week, it'll have 12, not far from its maximum of 16. That should serve me a few more years.

(I was too lazy to go into deeper recursion.)

Which brings me to my next gadget: a smartphone, the one that took the photo above. As with my older iMac, I got by on my dumbphone for a long time. I just couldn't make a compelling case to buy into a new phone. I could make calls from anywhere I wanted, and there were few places I spent my day without wifi. And can you think of anything that depreciates faster than a smartphone?

What swayed me was the concept of carrying my online data with me. My online identity is pretty much housed by Google - my email, blogging, calendar, contacts, some documents, and now with Google Plus, my little bits of social networking. I realised there'd be good value in being able to access that anywhere, enough to convince me to pay the price for it. Plus, I was really slow texting replies to my mates on the numeric keypad. (Not that I'm much faster with the onscreen keyboard - I'm still missing keys often.)

I settled on Google's latest phone, the Nexus S. Latest for only a short while, though - their new one is rumoured to be out in October. However, this allowed me to get an S pretty cheaply.

I went with Android because that's also a Google creation. It's Java-based, so developing apps for it is more natural to me than it is for Apple's iOS (not that I have plans for writing apps; I'd just played with both developer tools.) And it's great to explore the other major handheld device ecosystem, to dive into its apps and market and get to know its OS.

I wanted the Nexus because it's the purest Google experience. Lots of other companies make Android phones, but they tend to build their own tools on top of it, so, much like buying a Windows computer from, say, Hewlett Packard, and getting tons of HP tools you didn't ask for, these phones have unwanted enhancements of questionable value. Plus, updates to the Android OS come more slowly for other phones because the vendors have to build in their own enhancements again; I'll get updates right away.

I chose Mobilicity as a carrier. They're an up-and-coming independent provider. They have the best prices I know of - I get unlimited voice and data for just $25 a month, and as far as I've seen it is truly unlimited - but the cost is that their coverage isn't as comprehensive as the big 3 Canadian carriers, though they are rapidly building out their infrastructure. Since I bought the phone outright, I don't need a contract and can switch at any time.

I've had the phone for over a week now and it's giving me lots of usefulness I hadn't anticipated. It's neat riding the train and seeing your position updating in real time on maps. I can be in a store and can refer to my wine tasting notes, or pull up a list of albums I'm curious about, or go online to get more information to help me make a decision. I drove someplace new (see below) and the Navigator app made my phone resemble a sat-nav, with audible driving directions and a great 3D map.

So the tiny minority of North Americans without a smartphone has decreased by one.

And on to my last recent gadget ... a CD player. What?, you ask, you didn't have one already? Well, yes and no. True, every computer in the house can play CDs, as well as the PS3. But none of these are connected to the hi-fi in the "family room" (which is what I think Margo is calling it ... but it's really my man-cave). The PS3 has served nicely but now it's in the basement with the TV.

Many of you will wonder why I bother, since it's all ripped to MP3/MP4 anyway. I bother because I can hear the difference, and when I'm enjoying an album, I want the full experience with no data loss.

That said, it's surprisingly hard to get an affordable CD player these days. The big box stores will sell Blu-Ray and DVD players that also play CDs, and might carry one or two models of CD changers. At the other end is the audiophile market with specially engineered digital-to-analog converters and exotic materials and such, which you can hardly get into for less than $500. What I wanted was a decent single-tray player, without a bunch of extra stuff, for a hundred or so, like I could easily get ten or twenty years ago.

So after some online sleuthing I found Innovative Audio in nearby Surrey. They not only sell quality used equipment, they have the know-how to service it too, so you can expect the gear to have been inspected and serviced well. After using the aforementioned GPS capabilities of my phone to get there, I walked out with a Sony player with some respectable audiophile credentials for $65. Sure, it's about 20 years old, the remote is missing, and I had to hunt for the manual online, but it plays like a champ, smoothly lasering through a scratched disc that none of the other computers can read without lots of sputtering.

So it's been a nice ride, scratching a few geeky itches.

Jupiter

Margo called me on Friday morning. She and Sarah were thinking of looking at kittens. Taken at face value, a statement like this admits the possibility that a kitten might not make its way into our house by the end of the day. But I knew better, and of course, when I got home, there was.

Me, I'm ambivalent about cats. Sure, they're cute and all. But I imagine: new carpeting smelling of cat wee. New hardwoods scratched by kitty claws. White furniture scratched to shreds and covered in cat fur. Think The Cat Came Back.

But Margo and Sarah have done their homework. Margo's had Sarah reading a book about taking care of cats. Sarah is now the cat's primary caretaker. 

Sarah named him Jupiter. Not for the planet, but for the god. She's been reading lots of Rick Riordan and such lately, where Graeco-Roman gods are brought into the modern world. Kids eat that stuff up.

So Jupiter has been living in Sarah's room, leaving only as a passenger in Sarah's arms. Yesterday morning he joined us at breakfast so I got some first pictures.

Sarah says he's ten weeks old, something like an eight month old human baby. Margo and I are having lots of schadenfreude as Sarah is woken up in the middle of the night and otherwise having less freedom and more responsibility. We thought we'd have to wait until we were grandparents to get a taste of revenge.

Yesterday Sarah said to me, "You know, I can kind of understand how annoying I must have been when I was smaller. I'm not apologizing, though."

Sarah's School and the Coquitlam Crunch

Class sizes are being finalised at Sarah's new school. Students are assigned to teams, the classmates they'll be spending most of their time with, and the teams are colour-coded. This week we were informed that the teams would be posted on windows at the front of the school, so today I walked Sarah to school so we could find her team.

Here's Sarah entering her new school grounds.

She's Yellow, by the way.

We parted ways on the way back. I wanted to hike the Coquitlam Crunch: a 5 km trail underneath BC Hydro power lines, a strip of greenspace running north-south from a substation in the hills down to the Fraser River. This part of the trail, right next to Sarah's school, is 2.5 km from the upper end, and this is where many people start.

From the top, I had a nice view of the Fraser Valley to the southeast.

And to the southwest, Port Moody and Burnaby. Here are some Port Moody condo towers.

And this panorama shows the same condo towers on the left, the towers of Metrotown in the centre, and Burnaby Mountain and Simon Fraser University on the right.

Neighbourhood Party

Yesterday afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to hear live music coming from the courtyard. A badminton net had been set up. Drinks and food and camp chairs were under the shade of a canopy. I introduced myself and enjoyed the music (performed by former students of a neighbour who teaches at the nearby high school). Later the girls joined us after their naps. I contributed a few bottles of wine and as it slowly disappeared, we met quite a few neighbours and guests. Sarah met lots of other kids - most are younger, but one is also starting middle school.

Sitting on the grass under a cloudless sky, enjoying food and drink and music and conversation, I kept remarking, "This is so great!" This sense of community is just what I'd hoped for. I look forward to contributing to it. I'll be participating in the next neighbourhood cleanup, and offered to help coordinate online tools. Margo will help coordinate Halloween activities with another of the neighbourhood mums. We're really happy top be here.