Category: Life

So I planned to drop in Montreal for a quick one-day jaunt this weekend. I bought my tickets online, and presented myself at the Greyhound bus station at about 6:40am (departure: 7:00am).

Ideally, I’d pick up the tickets, be on my way, and that’s that. Unfortunately, the poor decision process of one employee did not make it so. I went into the line to pick up my tickets. The one employee working the desk was on the phone, while the person that she was attending waited. From what I could understand, this guy had American tickets that weren’t valid to go out east.

He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she kept trying to call new numbers. At this point, she should have perhaps quickly processed a few people before returning to him. But she didn’t. So I waited. At 6:57am she was still on the phone. I said fuck it – and went and bought a one way ticket at an electronic station there. So not only did I buy the return trip tickets online, but now I had bought an extra ticket to get to Montreal. Sucks, but shit happens I thought.

The day in Montreal was nice. The person I went there to meet was a no-show due to a mishap, but I hooked up with a good friend of mine and had some excellent dim sum.

When it came time to go back I went to the bus terminal in Montreal, and presented them my papers to get the ticket. They refused them, stating I needed to have picked up the tickets from Ottawa. They said the paperwork stated so. I checked – it didn’t. It said I could pick it up at a Greyhound station, and I assumed that since it was online, it meant any station – just like airline tickets. I explained to them the situation, but they didn’t care. They told me that I had to buy the ticket to get back a second time. Oh and no, I could not speak to a manager.

This really pissed me off. On the way there – okay – it sucks that I had to buy a ticket a second time, but I could deal with that. But that they refused my ticket back – and told me to buy it again – that really upset me.

This was a no-win situation. Even had I waited for that worker in Ottawa to finish her business, and miss my bus in the process, then that initial ticket to go there would have been invalidated (only good for that one time according to staff.)

So thank you Greyhound, for telling me to buy my tickets twice.

On the weekend of November 7th, I shall be in beautiful Quebec City for Hackfest, a bilingual hacker con. In exchange for five books and a banner on the Rice Tea website, they will waive the entry fee and provide me a table to sell the book.

It’ll be the first time that I sell the book publicly like that, so I’m really curious to see how it will all go down.

In other news, I’ve been hearing lots of positive comments about Daemon lately, a techno-thriller by author Daniel Suarez. He originally started self-publishing the work as well, and I aim to replicate his success. In any case, I’m thinking of picking up his book from Chapters.

What’s new in my world:

• I’ve lost 10 pounds since August 3rd. Progress has stymied lately, but I aim to lose another 20.
• I’ve lost my appetite for video games. I don’t own a television or pay for cable, and books have come to fill the void. I usually read two hours a night now, if I’m not out fulfilling some sort of commitment.
• I’ve finished one book by the name of Nickel and Dimed, which covers the situation of the working poor in the United States, but is evidently just as applicable to Canada. I also just finished off Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. The title is a little misleading, as the book is in fact a dry historical account of the record industry from the end of the Disco era onwards. It is, however, full of interesting tidbits – such as the explanation for the surge of boy bands in the late nineties.
• Interest for my own book, Rice Tea, has picked up a tad. It’s being mentioned on a few free ebook sites, which has led to my first actual donation.

I was busy cleaning up some old boxes of stuff when I ran across this:

It’s a shareware floppy of Wolfenstein 3D, distributed by Atanak Software. Atanak was a local enterprise, churning out these things over in a suburb of Ottawa. Anyways, back in the early nineties, you could find these disks in odd shops across town. I remember that the hobby shops had them. At 99 cents, these were pure awesome in 3.5″ form.

Last time I talked about Rice Tea, I had this to say:

Back to Rice Tea, the production of the audio book has been very beneficial to me. I didn’t realize to what point some of the dialog was bad – I literally laughed out loud in some bits.

Shortly thereafter, I stopped recording the audio book. I was constantly pausing Audacity in order to change the wording in the novel, and after doing this for the umpteenth time, I decided that I would be better off just to get the bloody book right in the first place. I spent the next few months painstakingly going through every page of the text *multiple times* to QC what I had written. This effort concluded a few days ago with the release of revision ricetea_20-07.

Much of the novel has been reworked, with the dialog having suffered the brunt of the changes. So to everyone who bought Rice Tea before, you’ll now be receiving a complimentary copy of this latest version. I’m very satisfied with what I’ve produced, and I’ll be submitting this last version to Libraries and Archive Canada as part of my legally-mandated deposit.

You can get Rice Tea here.