Free Beer and the Sporrans of the apocalypse!

As of yesterday I'm the proud owner of a City of Edinburgh Library card. Tired of my endless job search I decided to do something different for a day, so I, ah, went and got a Library card. The poor guy at the membership desk didn't know what hit 'em. I had it all, proof of address, proof of signature, the lot. Oh, I know what he thought, this hippy kid with a foreign accent is not getting his hands on my books. Ha! His face was a picture of defeat once he saw my little red UK passport.

I've already finished the book I took out, but I still think that my Library card beats any souvenir you can by on the royal mile. It just screams: I came! I saw! I beat a librarian at his own game! As for your "I went to Edinburgh, but all I got was this Lousy T-Shirt" T-Shirts, well you can stick them in your sporran and smoke 'em.

But the my nerdly powers don't end their gentle readers:

Last night I got drunk for free and ended up in a conversation in which we discussed the portability of Mac 68k Pascal code to x86 C++ via a PPC based cross compiler. Wow, nerd alert.

It all began when with a call from Warren, one of the other Canadians who lives in the hostel.

"Hey Buddy! What are you doing at 1 am tonight?

"Ummmm..."

"Can I interest you in some free beer?"

It turns out that the pub that Warren works at was going to be clearing their beer tap lines for cleaning. Fortunately for me, that means 2-3 pints of beer per line, times four lines, must be poured all at once. Since the bar is closed while this happens, around 10 pints of beer were on offer at the end of Warren's shift.

Halo, Warren's bar and the designated site for the nights de-bachery, is at the ass end of Princes street, so after tucking Shannon in for the night (the poor thing had an early shift in the mourning, plus she was tired out from turning twenty-three that day) I trekked my way around the castle and dodged the occasional maradering Hen-Night (Canadian: Stag'et) on my way to meet my beer.

I almost walked past the place, as their sign was broken, luckily Warren saw me before I drifted all the way to Leith in an iPod induced haze. Only one guy was left at the bar, a regular named Duncan I later learned. He ignored me while Warren and his supervisor finished cleaning the bar. After a while spent shooting the shit with Warren, I mentioned that I have sailed a bit and Duncan lit up like a Christmas tree. Well, a Christmas tree that has had at least two to three drinks anyway.

By this point around twelve to fourteen pints had collected on the bar. There had been a mix up with the Carling, so we got a few more then expected. We relocated all the beer and ourselves to a table and began the serious busyness of making sure non of this beer would go to waste. After 3 pints we were all marveling at the sheer genius, from a business standpoint, that is Guinness Extra Cold. The same beer keg feeds both taps, but it costs more for the slightly colder one! We had Duncan in hysterics when we told him of the existence of Miller Ice, a "colder beer" that comes in a bottle. It turned out that Duncan worked as the in-house Software manager for a major bank and the conversation suddenly veered towards Microsoft bashing, as it always does when two people discover that the other guy is a Mac fan two. And from their it was only a hop, skip and a jump and I wound up talking about cross compiling old Pascal code while drinking free beer at 4 am in the Capital of Scotland.

On a side note, Mom you can find my mailing address here.

Norwich and Back Part 1

Well, I survived hagfest, and it was a blast. I'd like to claim that my lack of productivity this week has been for recovery purposes, but I would be lying. In fact the night out before I even left for Norwich left me in a sorrier state then the actual party itself. For some stupid reason, Thursday night turned into quite a drinking session, so I was mildly hung over on Friday morning for my short flight (in a Canadian made dash 8) from Edinburgh to Norwich. Tom's car broke down on the way to get me from the airport, so I took a taxi to his house instead. Tom himself was not there, so after carefully weighing the pros and cons I walked two streets over to the nearest by pub for lunch and pint. Tom and company showed up in the English equivalent of a pick-up truck which they were using move all the stuff for the following day's party. A lack of seats led to me lying in the back of the truck bed, wearing a construction hard-hat while clutching some giant cardboard flowers.

After spending an exhausting few hours we retired to the same pub I had lunch in for a few more pints, then moved on to The Fat-Cat until the rest of the guests arrived. The Fat-Cat has 86 different kinds of Organic beer, plus 6 kinds of cider. At one point some one who had been giving me strange looks for a few minutes gathered up the courage to ask me if he had indeed seen me riding in the back of a truck with giant card board flowers, posing like a porn star.

End of part 1