Canadian Savage Love readers, Dan Savage makes your voting decision easy:

There isn't really time to engage my Canadian readers in a discussion about your upcoming election, VOTE, as it's just days away. Instead I'll just order my Canadian readers to vote for Paul Martin and his Liberal Party allies ...

I already did so at the advance poll while I was in Waterloo this past weekend. If I wasn't so lucky to have been there on that particular day, the other option was voting by special mail-in ballot. BUT if you live out of the country like I do, you must sign a form that says you intend to resume residence in Canada. Hah! Wouldn't you just LOVE to have that little tidbit on file, Revenue Canada?

This past weekend I was back in fabulous Waterloo for convocation. I put almost 1000km on my rental car driving back and forth was from Waterloo where my girlfriend and friends were to Hamilton where my family was staying. It was an exhausting and expensive few days, but it was nice to see that whole world again. To get home, I woke up at 5:30 on Monday morning, and STILL sat in stop and go traffic on the 401 on the way to the airport. How do people live like that? Next time (?) I will be flying to the new Kitchener/Waterloo international airport (YKF) with three daily flights from Detroit.

A week ago I attended a talk by the famous Andrei Alexandrescu at Amazon. Of course Andrei is the author of Modern C++ Design, or "The cRack bOOk" as it was known at my previous company NITI. (As in, you must be "on crack" if you're doing such unnatural things with templates) The subject was "A Policy-Based basic_string Implementation"

Honestly, I was disappointed with the talk because I don't think he explained things as well in person as he does in the book. A bunch of my coworkers bailed on the talk and went back to their offices still in the dark about policy-based design. I know it was because the presentation wasn't all that enthralling -- If you had read the book, you could follow along, but there were huge gaps that left most people confused.

After the talk I was lucky enough to get my copy of the book signed by the author. I'm still jealous of all the NITites who met Joel Spolsky but maybe this makes up for it.

I played two more games of drop-in hockey (as it's called here) since my last post. Wednesday I was at Highland arena and tonight I was at Lynnwood. Google was almost no help in finding Seattle area arenas, so I put together this little chart.

Arena	Times	Comments
Kent Valley Ice Centre	Tuesday 9:00 pm - 10:15 pm Thursday 10:10 pm - 11:40 pm	Long drive.
Castle Ice Arena	Many different times, but all during the day.
Everett Events Center	Tuesday 7:30p - 8:45p Friday 9:15p - 10:45p Sunday 2:30p - 3:45p	Very far from Seattle.
Lynnwood Ice Center	Friday 11:00pm to 12:30am	Full of punk-ass high-school kids ... and they are good!
Highland Ice Arena	Wednesday: 10:15pm to 11:45pm Saturday: 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Olympic View Arena	No info.
Kingsgate Arena	No info.

The Kent Valley Ice Centre had $10 pick-up hockey tonight and I was there. I was the worst player as usual, but it was super fun. Kent is a long 20 mile drive south of here but I'll be there again next week for sure! P.S. If you go, the map [quest|point] directions are WRONG -- you will end up at a dead end in a trailer park. Just use the map on their site.