Memos: Drinking Tea Before Bedtime Edition

• May be going to California next month for a training course in Cocoa Desktop Application Development at Apple. How cool is that? Me being me I'll surely go through a couple more OS X programming books between now and then, but the course looks pretty intensive and the setting, with the instructor showing you how to really do things quickly, should be a great help. That's something I've heard said about the value of directed education: while everyone has access to a library full of books, it's knowing which books to read that's the trick.
• God I hate Ariel and Verdana and every other stupid ugly Windows font. I wish the rest of you could see how nice this blog looks in Helvetica. I always go through the trouble of using “proper curly quotes” but stupid Ariel just makes them look square anyway. boo-urns on ugly fonts.
  
• Listening to Built to Spill's album Ancient Melodies of the Future at the moment. Enjoying it so far, very straight-forward grunge-tinged rock with a nice tendency to mash at a synth in interesting ways. My main criticism would be that the songs aren't very distinguishable from each other. I'm not familiar with their other albums so I don't know if this is par for the course for them, but I can't exactly pick out individual songs that stand above the rest. It's just a nice sounding album but one that tends to run together.
• They still haven't bothered plowing my end of Grafton St. I've seen snowstorms before in Charlottetown, but this is the first that I can remember where, 3 days after a storm, the only plowing done on my street was a snaky one lane path by a plow driver who must have been drunk to make such a non-straight line. And of course the sidewalk clearing is limited to whichever neighbours decided to be good souls and eke out a little trench where the sidewalk might be, usually not connecting to the adjacent trenches. And while the thought counts, I just end up walking on the road anyway, avoiding the cars doing a slalom down our little twisty trail that used to be a road. Starting to hate this city.
• I'm in the middle of 3 books right now, Hey, Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland (which I've left unfinished since Christmas), America: The Book by the “Daily Show” people, which is hilarious but after the US election I'm feeling rather laissez-faire about their impending demise, and No Logo by Naomi Klein which is one of those books I should have read a while ago but never got around to it. All good, can't ever decide which one to pick up at any given opportunity. I'd like to carry all three around with me but the last two are too damn big to bring anywhere.
• I'm still waiting for the charming exterior to wear off the starbucks guy at the ATC. I'm beginning to suspect he's a coffee-slinging robot.