Category: Travel

A good friend and I trekked out over Thanksgiving weekend to Philadelphia to see an Aimee Mann concert. For regulars of this blog, you’ll know the friend as JT Alfons. We arrived to the hotel on Friday evening, headed out to Harrisburg for the concert that night. It was pouring rain and visibility on the…

On Thursday evening, I left for a hacker conference in Las Vegas. This was to be a last hurrah for me. Given that my interest in internet security had waned, I was there not so much for the talks, but to say a final farewell to the friends I had made over the years. The…

I’ve just come back from a week-long escape to Cuba. I decided that I would do this two weeks ago, and organized it all the Monday before my departure. The trip was a success. I read an entire book – the Pulitzer-winning The Forever War by Dexter Filkins – and got a head start on…

What a great trip. Arrived in London from South Africa early on a Monday. I dropped off my bag at the hostel and started to explore. Bored after my first day, I asked my sister where I should go. She recommended Brighton. So off I went the following day. Arriving, I didn’t expect much. Brighton…

I’ve been in South Africa for the last week on business. I did have the opportunity yesterday, thanks to a kind co-worker at this office, to explore a bit outside the realm of my hotel and workplace. It’s been a very good trip. South Africa itself is very much a country of two worlds: the…

A few weeks ago I attended the 19th edition of Defcon in Las Vegas. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Defcon is a large annual hacker conference. There are a number of talks on various topics of interest to this subculture, such as computer security, the law and digital rights, novel uses…

One month ago, I embarked on a road trip with Jay and two of his friends.  The trip started out from my home town of Ottawa, and we would hit up Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington D.C., New York City, Boston and Montreal. We did all of this in seven days.  …

An operations manager approached me last Thursday. Him: Are you busy this weekend? Me: Yeah, a little. Him: Oh. Me: Why? Him: Well we’re looking for a volunteer to go to Paris. Me: Ontario? Him: France. Me: I’ll go! Within 24 hours, I was on a flight. I did what I had to do there,…

This weekend, Jay, Jon and I made a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally. It took 10 hours of driving to get down there, but we all found it well worth the travel time. The purported point of the rally was to focus on what was good about America and…

I’m in South Africa right now. The country I’m in has a 79% black population, and yet, you would never know it from looking at the makeup of the places I’ve been visiting. It’s so… black and white. For instance, I’m visiting a geophysics company. Its sixty workers, safe for one man, are all white.…