About winter...

I used to hate winter... When I was a kid, I was convinced I would move out of Montreal as soon as I would get a chance. I was always attracted by California and Australia but anywhere without rough winters would do.

I met the mother of my kids at the university. My initial plan was to go do a PhD at MIT or Standford but she wouldn't follow, so I didn't go (I also got the opportunity of starting my PhD without finishing my masters degree, because I was sooooo gooooood :-). A friend of mine said that I was week... I had the choice between promise land... and.... sex... And I chose sex... week.... week.... soooooo weeeeek... ;-)

Well, as we often say, even though that relationship didn't work out for more than say... 16 years and a half... I have two great daughters, so it was well worth it...

But back to the subject of winter, it is true that having kids, help appreciate winter. They simply love it when it snows... But they don't have to shovel it!!!

I started to accept winter just a few years ago. There was about 3 feet of snow that had fallen during the night, and I had to go out to shovel the stairs down to our driveway (these are wide and deep stairs). I got dressed, sighing loudly, kind of discouraged about the task at hand, but resolved myself to do it.. I had no choice, right? Well... When I opened the door and stepped out, in the freezing cold, I took a deep breath of fresh dense oxygen, and actually appreciated it... I look at the big pile of snow in front of me and decided not to discourage myself as I usually do and approach it just one step at a time... A 3 feet deep step, but still... One step at a time... And I went through the whole thing in no time... And felt good about it...

Since then, winters have been much easier for me (though last year, I was really thinking about moving to California, and work at the Google head quarters, but I would never leave my kids behind, so this time it is not sex that prevented me from going to promise land, it is responsibilities... though it all started with sex of course... whatever)...

And the reason I wanted to talk to you about it today, is that I had a few interesting moments recently, where I simply walked in my kitchen, and had a winter feeling (I don't know if it is the outside temperature, the early darkness or what), but it really felt like winter and I appreciated the warmth of my kitchen and it kind of brought me back to passed winters spent in this kitchen (don't ask my why the kitchen, I don't know, there seems to be a special aura in there), but the weirdest thing is that... it felt... good... weird... It feels like winter, and it feels good... Really weird...

I tried to analyse this... Maybe it is because it reminds me of past winters when my family was still whole and I had my kids full time with a woman in the house... Maybe... Then again, maybe not... Maybe I actually appreciate the fact that for a few months we get secluded in our houses, and the warm comfort of our kitchen brings us a sense of well being that I learned to appreciate... Maybe.. I don' know...

How do YOU feel about winter?

BYE
MAD

Sleepy in the bus...

Salut,

sitting in the bus for my first morning ride in almost two weeks now. Got back from California Tuesday night, and did a little detour to GG's place until the wee hours... Hey... I had not seen her in about 10 days, come on, gimme a break... So I went home and went to sleep a little before 4AM on Wednesday morning, woke up at 8h24 to catch the 9AM train (I find the train more comfortable, but the schedule is not flexible enough for me to take it often... I could have used the train this morning, it is 9h23 now and the bus is just starting, so I would have been sitting in the train for the last 23 minutes as opposed to freezing my ass out at the bus terminal, but since the earliest train back is at 15h40, arriving home at 16h20, it will be a bit tight for my Thursday taxi night, there is a kids dance class that starts at 17h15 and I must have time to get some grocery, prepare dinner and eat it before, so out of the train at 16h40, at school 5-10 minutes after, kids out of school another 5-10 minutes later, this doesn't leave me much time...

Anyway, sorry for the information overload, but hey, I don't think you would be here reading this if you didn't crave for more... :-) But I must admit, it might not be as interesting to read about my public transport timing issues not being well synchronized with my kids school and leisure, but it's not just about what we say sometimes, it is how we say it that makes it interesting or not.

One of my literature teachers once said (and I say that, like if I had many of them when I only been to 3-4 creative writing courses at UQAM :-), most if not all stories have already been written. We simply tell them differently now, but all in all, they are the same stories told again and again and again and again... And we are not only talking about Hollywood movies here (and don't get me wrong, there are lots of good movies made in Hollywood, I just use it to make a point). We have been telling each other stories for a few hundred thousand years already, and there is only a finite set of them...

This reminds me of a very good short story from Borgès in his Fiction collection about an impressively large library that contain all potential books of 410 pages, each having the same number of lines and each lines with about the same number of characters. Every possible combination of characters was there, so there were lots of books. Only a small portion of these books were actually readable, and even fewer actually made sense. Yet, since all the possibilities of combinations of characters were there, all possible stories (that could be told in this given number of pages) were somewhere to be found, including the exact story of your life, or mine or anybody else, whether real or fictional... This is kind of impressive... mind boggling actually... Can you imagine finding one of these books? Wow...

So the point is (yes, there is a point to all this, even though it isn't always clear to me when I start writing a post, I always end up converging to something kind of interesting, and it is rarely on purpose :-), I didn't want to believe it then, but I do agree now that all stories have been told, all possible lives have been lived, yet, we keep on kicking, and I keep on writing... because, it is not only about the story itself, it is how it is being told, it is not about the life that you have to live, it is how you live it, or again, as I quoted Mr. Randy Pausch in a previous post, it is not about the cards you were dealt with, it is how YOU decide to play them.

So even when I simply tell you stuff that might not seem interesting in itself, ask yourself why are you reading? How come you want to keep reading? Is it just curiosity? Or is there something bigger, something harder to explain or even understand, that keeps us all together, like the force. May it be with you!

BYE
MAD... Obi MAD Kenoby :-)

Prepare for take off

Sitting in the plane, writing on a notepad because we just took off and we can't use electronic devices… But I just realized that taking off doesn't impress me as much as it used to… I remember the first time I was on a plane, taking off was soooo coooooool...

Ho, we can now use electronic devices, even though we must still keep our seat belt fastened, this plane has two distinctive warning lights, one for the seat belt and another one for "turn off electronic devices"...

So now, I'm typing on my computer, but not for long, because I don't have much battery left, I used it all on the first flight from SFO to ORD, and now I'm heading to Montréal.

So I'm hitting the save button every few seconds, because I don't trust my Mac to go to sleep elegantly, it sometimes do it in an unpleasant way... Ho well... Toys will be toys...

So, what I wanted to talk about is the fact that there are too many things that don't impress us anymore because we got used to it... Like the take off of an airplane... Or the colors of a sunset (though this still amazes me like crazy, I can't stop taking pictures of the sky at sunset even though I already have tons of pictures of sunsets, I just don't get tired of it)...

Actually, as I was taking pictures of the sunset and other interesting views from my airplane window between San Francisco and Chicago, I realized that I take way too many pictures... With digital, it doesn't matter too much, I used a bit of electricity, and shorten the life of my cell phone a little bit too, but nothing drastic so that it could be called waste...

But I wondered why I was taking so many pictures... Could it simply be to capture these moments that amaze me now, in case I get so used to them that they don't amaze me anymore? Like a plane taking off...

Or could it be because I'm alone? Since I have no one to share this with at the moment that I live it (like those walks on the beach along side California Highway 1), I take pictures to that I can share these moments with people like you until I get to live them with someone else?... Could it be?

I don't know, but at the same time, I don't want to stop being impressed by the magic of nature and also technology which you already know how much I love. When thinking about some pictures I took of myself on the beach, and also reading a book about the father of the main character that might suffer from Alzheimer, I was imagining myself, old and grumpy, not remembering a thing, and someone I love was showing me those pictures of the days when I was letting myself easily be impressed by something as simple as the sun setting down on the ocean while I watch it and take pictures of it with my back laying against the rock of a cliff...If I ever get in that state, with absolutely no chance of recovery... Please... pull the plug...

BYE
MAD... Feeling a little gray, coming back from Sunny California...

This is SOOOOO me....

BYE
MAD
P.S.: Yes, I'm alive... And I'll be back with a few post that I worked on while off-line yesterday... after a week of crazy work work work across the meetings galore I was describing previously... Did you miss me? Please say yes!!! Because as you can see in the image above, I have no clue how love works... So gimme some... :-)

WTF do I do with my life?

Sitting under the Californian sun at a terrace on Castro street in Mountain View.

View Larger Map
Click and drag on the map,
It's pretty cool!
Having a chicken Caesar salad and an Alley cat amber ale.
Don't know yet what I'll do with my afternoon. Might go to Napa. In my previous trips in the area, I often went to the beach, driving between the see and the cliffs, it's a beautiful scenic road the California Highway 1.

In those previous trips, I also often panic, thinking that I might not be properly investing the precious time of my life that I had the luxury of enjoying here.

I just took a picture of this page with an interesting shadow from my glass of water with coca cola logo on it.

Let's try it with my beer now :-)

OK, so, I was saying that I used to stress about not properly using my time here... But what does it mean to "properly" us one's time? It's all about what we want to do with our life, right? Most of the time, we think of what we are "going" to do with our lives, in the future tense... Like if our lives were only to become and never "to be"... Here... NOW!... So Now, I wonder, what am I doing?...

Well... I'm writing these words on a notepad that I will hopefully type on a computer (as I'm doing now, while eating at the Davenport Roadhouse :-) and post it (soon.... soon... :-)...

{some time passes}

Now I'm sitting in front of the starbucks (and I'm typing the text while in bed at the hotel) with a venti latté in my hand, ready to roll in the big Mercury Grand Marquis that Enterprise gave me because they were out of smaller cars... ho well...
But where will I go? So back to the topic of freaking out in the past because I might not "optimize" my time here based on standards that others have set to define what it means to "properly" use one's time... Well... you know what? I don't give a fuck!... I'm going to do whatever I please and if I feel like doing squat or even work instead of visiting a museum or watching a nice sunset while walking on the beach... Who cares?... My loss... My choice... But if I don't give a fuck, why should I worry... We are so weird...

Go MAD Go...

BYE
MAD
P.S.: I have a post about a similar subject, in one of my French blogs.

Meetings gallore...

Salut,

this is a small morning quickie, to show you that I'm still alive, I survived an incredible number of hours sitting at meetings for a single day. A bunch of us (from Google Montreal) are here (Mountain View, Ca, in the silicon valley) to pick the next project we will work on... So we are courted by a few projects that we will get to choose from.

It is interesting to see how we are openly given a choice of what we will work on, yet reminded that what the corporate priority would be, trying to influence the choice a little bit... But so far, we are still free to choose... Though they expect us to be at least 5 on the same project for it to make sense to have people in Montreal working on it, so our freedom is kind of limited by the freedom of the others...

So it will be interesting to see what comes out of this... But I surely wouldn't this to sound like a complaint what so ever, I know that in most other normal companies, you don't 'really' get to choose what you work on, you are being assigned... Google is so cool...'

Well, I'll finish by letting you know that I'm typing this in my bed while GG is watching my my head laying on a pile of pillows using the newly released Google Talk Video, have youn tried it? It is really good... Try it... You'll see... And you'll see VERY CLEARLY... Google rules!!! :-)

BYE
MAD

About to take off...

Sitting at the gate, waiting to board flight 8262 from United which is actually a Air Canada plane with another flight number, ho well…

It’s 7:23AM, we’re boarding at 7:30 to take off at 8:05. So I had set my alarm clock set at 5:00AM knowing I would take some time to get out of bed, in the shower, then in the car, on the road and to the airport early enough in case there would be some traffic at the customs and security. Of course, I had forgotten to print the details of my trip and the computer connected to my printer crashed (what else is new?)…

But I made it early enough to have time for a large latte and muffin (which I’m still taking some sips and pieces between the lines, like… now… :-))…

It amazes me to see the amount of detailed organizations our lives are floating through. Can you imagine the number of ideas from different people needed to converge so that the last 2 and half hours I have just lived worked as it did?

Some might say that simpler would be better. I could have woken up at the same time, have a breakfast at home, made from food that would have been raised on my land by a women that would have given me zillions of kids so that we would all get out of the house at sunrise and take care of the land and stock that feeds us. I would have built our house from my own hands with wood that I would cut myself on the land I own, etc… etc… etc…

But I was born with a set of skills that suites computer science so much better. And working for Google, which helps so many people find the information they are looking for. A company like Google, based on a technology like computers and Internet wouldn’t exist without the collaboration of multiple generations of people having the talent, the energy and the will to invent new things to make the life of others easier and hopefully more enjoyable.

Even though many people complain that technology has brought us a stressful fast pace life, I think it improved so many other things that it was worth it. It is just up to us to take the good and leave the bad out of it. Relax, don’t stress, breath in, breath out, one step at time, things will be good if you are good… Just trust your good side and invest a little bit of effort controlling the bad one, you’ll soon see, that you won’t try to blame technology so much anymore :-)

OK, boarding time… Talk to you later :-)

BYE
MAD
P.S.: Pour les francophones je vais aussi documenter mon voyage en Californie sur mon autre blog mad-voyages…