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Our vacation plan this year was to go to Canada, as you may recall from my earlier post about things I learned in Canada. Now here’s a recap of what we did, rather than learned, in Canada.

Day 1:
This was a travel day, basically driving 9-6. I like to travel different ways to and from vacation destinations, so to get from Detroit to Montreal I went south of the Great Lakes. A full day’s drive got us to Syracuse, NY. Not much there, other than dinner and sleeping at the hotel.

For those who like seafood, I suggest visiting the Clam Bar in Syracuse. We went there, and it’s not what I’d call a classy place. It’s a classic bar, with a full menu. Some Wife chose it because they bring in fresh seafood daily. The food was good, and plentiful.

Oh, on the way to Syracuse we had to go through Cleveland. We ended up there around lunch time, so we stopped at a park to have a picnic. Some Wife also chose this stop, called Squire’s Castle.

It’s just for show. It used to be someone’s residence, but now it’s an empty shell. Still, it’s fun because it’s open for people to wander through. And the grounds are expansive, plenty of place to picnic and throw a Frisbee.

So lunch in Cleveland, then dinner and hotel in Syracuse. We didn’t get to see much of Syracuse. Gamma was hoping to see the downtown skyline, but we were actually in Liverpool – outside Syracuse – and our drive never involved going into Syracuse.

Then it was evening, then morning, the next day.

Day 2:
This was mostly a travel day. Breakfast at the hotel, then drive to Canada. We went over at the Thousand Islands crossing, and it was a fairly simple affair. We had passports for me and the wife, drivers licenses for Alpha and Beta, and birth certificates for Gamma and Delta. Just a couple questions from the Canadian border guard, and we were in.

Here’s a photo of the river at the Thousand Islands area, just before the border crossing.

We drove for a bit, then stopped by a Real Canadian Superstore, which was right next to a Walmart. In case the border guard was having a bad day, I didn’t want him to be able to nitpick on any food we had with us, so our plan was to go into Canada with a minimal amount of food, then stock up for the week before we arrived at the rental house. We did have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, plus chips and some grapes – that was our lunch we ate in the car just after the border.

Anyway, we got to the RCS and we had fun looking at various Canadian products, all sorts of brands we don’t get at home. Plus some we do have at home, they just look different.

This is also where we got the bag of milk. And when we got to the checkout line, with enough food to feed a family of 6 for four days, we realized that they do not provide bags for you at all. So we paid $1 for 3 re-usable bags to stuff most of the things in. They’re cheaply made, but we still have them and I’m trying to get my money’s worth out of them.

Another drive, for maybe 1.5 hours, and we got to the province of Quebec. It was easy to tell when that happened, because the road signs were French only, instead of English and French. But we had been observing the bilingual road signs for long enough at that point that we could handle no English.

Then another hour or so and we arrived at our rental house. Here is the street it was on, a nice neighborhood. This is looking out from the place.

We unpacked, setup the kitchen, relaxed for a little bit, then made dinner, and then headed out to our first tourist stop in Montreal – Mount Royal.

Mount Royal is a tall hill kind of in the middle of the island of Montreal. Fun fact – Montreal got its name from a pronunciation of “Mount Royal”.

Our destination was Mount Royal Park, specifically the chalet, as it has a plaza that overlooks the city.

And then, because we didn’t have any other plans for the evening and because I paid to park for 1.5 hours and we spent only 20 minutes so far, we went on a little hike. There are plenty of paths throughout the park, and there were plenty of other people walking, running (ambitious, since there’s a lot of elevation change there), and biking.

The hike was a good change from sitting in the van all day. After that, we went back to the rental house and I read a bit before bed.

Then it was evening, then morning, the next day.

Day 3:
This was the day to walk around downtown Montreal. We drove into the city, and the parking garage I had picked out was closed, so we had to go to plan B, which was to park at King Edward Quay.

The plan was to walk through the piers, then walk by the Notre Dame Basilica, then grab lunch at the Underground City. Then figure out what we wanted to do after that, maybe something downtown would be of interest once we came across it.

So we parked at the quay. Here’s the view from there looking north to the Vieux Port.

It was pretty hazy, due to the wildfires in our host country.

And if we looked east, we could see the biosphere, which we didn’t know what it was at the time, just that it was an impressively large object.

Downtown was a nice place to walk, it reminded me more of Europe than of North America.

Once you saw the Ferris wheel and the zip lines, there actually wasn’t much to the pier. There were plenty of people out and about, but maybe they were mostly shopping?

Then we headed up a couple blocks to the cathedral.

As it was a Sunday, and it’s a functioning church (services in French), we didn’t go in to see what it looked like.

Then it was over to the Underground City, and that is where things started to go bad. You see, I had seen the promotional literature and pictured it as a nice big place, like a giant mall. Here’s an excerpt from mtl.org:

Explore Montréal’s famed Underground City as you shop: this pedestrian network right under the heart of the city links metro stations to shopping plazas for over 33 kilometres (about 20.5 miles). It’s a lifesaver when you want to stroll, shop and eat away from the hot blazing sun or the freezing snow, but it’s also a go-to destination for the whole family anytime. It opens up a world of entertainment.

In reality, you just go to the places that are worth it aboveground. The “underground city” is really just a subway system but without the trains – you walk through tunnels, and the maps are confusing. We wandered around for a while, got lost, and thus our lunchtime got pushed back and back, making people unhappy. We gave up and walked on the normal not-underground sidewalks to the Eaton Centre and had lunch at the Time Out Market. That was a good place – it’s a giant food court with a dozen or so restaurants of all different styles.

Lunch really helped. Now everyone could manage the walk back to the van. We swung by a couple stores on our way out, including a Dollarama, but that was it for Montreal. No one wanted to do anything else, so we headed back mid afternoon and had some down time until dinner.

Then it came time for dinner. There were no solid dinner plans. The house was walking distance from some shops and restaurants, so we picked a restaurant that looked to have a decent variety of things (plus poutine) and we headed there. Foreshadowing – it was called a pub & grill. On our way there, we passed a Chinese place. Alpha decided he’d rather have dumplings than pub food, so he and Some Wife (because she had money) dropped off to eat there. I took the other 3 kids to the pub and grill, and as you may have already read, we got kicked out, so we headed back to the Chinese place and we all got dumplings. Except for Delta, who got basically chicken tenders.

Then we walked back to the house, and it was evening, then morning the next day.

To Be Continued…

Here is a GIF of a typing bubble. For hours of fun, text this to a few people when you can watch their reactions.

Some people don’t care, and others seem to really anticipate what you’re going to finish typing.

Our chat thingy at work does the same thing, and now people can track how long it takes me to compose a sentence. My wife knows by now that it may take awhile: “how long until you’re done working?” “I just need to finish this email” … 20 minutes later … “how long is that email?” “two paragraphs, almost done” I like to be thorough.

Although I do feel bad for the other person on the occassions when I’ve written most of a response but then got distracted or pulled away by something else. Then I’ll find my unsent chat message the next day and I’ll wonder how long the other person sat and waited for me to send my message.

Fun times.

We just got back from a family vacation to Canada, visiting Montreal and Toronto. Due to our family size, we stayed in rental places for a couple days each. In our vacations, we usually end up doing that because most hotels don’t like to accommodate a family of 6. And in general we use both VRBO and Airbnb. Just watch out for the cleaning/service/security fees.

Anyway, here are some things I noticed or learned in visiting our neighbors to the north. If we had visited Windsor, that would have been our neighbors to the south.

• Canadians drive just under the punishment, not the speed limit. Like most places, the freeways there have a posted speed limit, usually 100 kph. But they also have other signs, more like billboards, that list the punishment for speeding: 120 kph is $X, 130 kph is $Y, and 140 kph is $Z. And another one that said 20 over is 2 points, 30 over is 3 points, etc. It seemed to me that the punishment for speeding didn’t start until 120 kph, even though the limit was officially 100. Because everyone was driving about 118 kph.
• Toronto has the worst traffic of anywhere that I remember driving If you though Canadians were nice and friendly, try driving in Toronto. Chicago has bad traffic, but it’s bad in that it’s just clogged and slow. New York has aggressive drivers, but Toronto seemed ruder and more of a get-ahead-at-all-costs attitude.
• Canadians don’t like locking their bathroom doors. In the places we stayed, there were a total of 5 bathroom doors. Only one of them had a lock.
• The toilets were very low. I’m sure families with small children would appreciate that, but we’re out of that stage now and would like adult-size toilets. Everything else about them seemed normal, I don’t know if that’s the style in Canada.
• Not since our trip to Seattle have I been exposed to so much marijuana. Oh, and the college football game I attended two years ago. The public square in Montreal would have been nice to linger in, but I was worried about second-hand effects. We were in Canada during some of the time when the air quality alerts were active due to the wildfires up north. But the wildfire smoke was negligible compared to the weed. Toronto was even worse, as there was a cannabis store just about every block whenever we walked anywhere.
• In Canada, milk comes in bags. We went grocery shopping the first day. Normally we pack a bunch of food and then buy some more, but to avoid any complications crossing the border, we brought as little food with us as possible, so we had to buy a bunch in Canada. We bought a bag of milk, and it was always very awkward trying to store and pour a floppy bag. I still don’t know how you’re supposed to do it.
• If a place says “bar and grill” or “pub and grill” then don’t take the kids. All the places in the USA that say “bar and grill” means there’s a resturant with a bar area. Anyone can go in the restaurant area but only adults in the bar area. Canada must have different rules, because they did not let us in. We chose it because it was the only place where we were staying that had poutine on the menu. So we went without on this trip.
• Stores don’t give you plastic bags at checkout. At both the grocery store and the dollar store, we had to buy the reusable bags to be able to carry our stuff. On the plus side, we have some cheap bags at home we can use for whatever now. One says “Dollarama” on it and the rest say “Real Canadian Superstore”.

A number of sites and services are switching to 2-factor authentication, rather than just a simple username and password. So you’d login, but then have to enter a code sent to you by email or text before it will finish the login.

So far many of the places I use have that as an option, not mandatory. And I don’t opt in, but for a lot of the places I end up having to do the same steps anyway.

The reason: I forget passwords.

Here’s a typical login scenario from me. I enter my username and password, the site rejects it. I then enter my username and another password, and the site rejects it. At this point, I don’t want to enter a third bad password, in case they’re strict with their lockout protocol, so I select the forgot password link.

The site then sends me a reset link, I follow that and select a new password (usually the first password I tried), and then I’m good.

It’s about the same steps as standard 2-factor stuff, but in an unofficial manner.

Note: see the bottom of this post for the lesson.

The battery in Some Wife’s iPhone was getting old, and it no longer could get her through the day without needing to be recharged. The battery health-o-meter indicated it was not so healthy anymore, confirming with numbers what we already knew.

So, having replaced batteries in iPhones of generation 4, 5, 6, and 7, I figured I could handle an iPhone 10. Excuse me, iPhone X.

I looked at the repair instructions, and they looked about the same as before, so I ordered a new battery.

The instructions say to take apart the iPhone in the usual way – take the screws out, soften the glue, and carefully pry the screen away from the housing.

The instructions emphasize to be extra careful not to pry the screen from its frame, but make sure to pry the screen and frame together away from the housing.

I wondered how to know if I’m prying the screen only (bad) or screen and frame. I found out the hard way.

I thought the screen came away a little too easily, and after I had separated about 3/4 of it, that’s when part of the frame came away from the housing and I saw the difference.

It turns out I had been doing the bad thing and separating the screen from itself.

Argh.

I quickly pried the frame out from the housing and tried to keep the screen and frame together as much as possible. I did end up getting the screen and frame back together, and both off the rest of the phone, but I wondered what effects that might have had.

The rest of the battery replacement procedure went okay, not perfect but it got done.

In the course of previous battery replacements, I have learned to turn the phone on after everything is connected but before I screw it back together. One of my earlier attempts I had mis-connected something, so I had to take it back apart and re-fix it. It saves time and effort to test it slightly earlier in the process, rather than waiting until the very end.

So that’s what I did with this phone. After I had all the electrical connections back together, but the screen not in place, I turned on the phone.

In previous repairs, I saw the Apple logo appear on the screen and I knew everything was fine, so then I’d turn the phone back off, screw everything down, and then turn it on and then I could be done.

But with this phone, when I turned it on, the screen was blank. No change. But the phone made noises that told me it was on, which lead me to conclude that I broke the screen during the repair process.

Now the problem was that this was Some Wife’s phone, and both she and I were expecting the repair to be done that evening. That was not a fun thing to do – come back into the room and break the news to her that she no longer has a functioning phone.

But she took it in stride, and we came up with a backup plan to borrow Alpha’s backup phone (an iPhone 7) that he no longer used but still had around. One sim card swap later, and she had a phone. But it had none of her apps and none of her contacts, so it was a challenge over the next couple of days when a text would come in with just a number listed, to see if she could figure out who it was without responding back “who are you?”

Anyway, the day after I broke her phone, I told her “good news, you get to get a new phone”. Or at least new to her. Actual new phones are ridiculously expensive, so we upgraded her to an iPhone 12, which was still more money that I had planned for a simple battery repair, but much better than a phone that costs as much as my car did.

In the meantime, before we settled on which exact phone, I ordered a replacement screen for the iPhone X. She wanted to be able to get a bunch of info off the old phone, and it was cheaper than a used iPhone X, so we’d still come out ahead by having an iPhone X with a new battery.

I thought I had turned off the broken phone, but I found out it was on when one of her alarms went off. The touch part of the screen was working fine, but I couldn’t see where to turn off the alarm, so I tapped a couple of times where the Stop button should have been and got it to turn off.

The replacement screen came in about the same time as her newer phone, so while she was setting up the phone, I was trying to get the screen working on the old one.

The repair went smoothly, except when everything was connected, I turned on the phone, and it didn’t work. I disconnected the cables and put them together again. Still nothing.

I thought I must have damaged a connector or something in the process. With nothing else left to try, I decided to just put everything back together and wait until tomorrow to figure out what to do.

After I put the screen fully in place and screwed it down, it worked.

At first I was excited and relieved. But then it got me thinking, and I bet there was nothing wrong with the old screen. I could have tested it by taking the new screen off and putting the old one back on, but at that point I didn’t want to mess with anything. But I’m about 80% confident it would have worked.

Lesson for iPhone Battery Replacements
From what I can tell, the new style (and I don’t know when it changed, but somewhere between iPhone 7 and X) is to have grounding pads for the screen be separate contacts at the bottom of the screen, not in the cable connector. So the screen isn’t fully electrically connected until it is fully physically installed. So you cannot test the repairs with the screen slightly off the phone, even just a little bit.

A typical sci-fi storyline involves robots/computers/AI taking over the world, and worst-case is ridding the world of humans. And now with things progressing rapidly on that front, more people are getting worried about that happening.

However, I’ve been doing a fair amount of tasks online lately, such as paying my electricity bill, and I am not worried about robots taking over the world because the Captchas will prevent them from doing just about anything.

I think it’s a good system, as we seem to have caught the AI in a catch-22.

Because how does an AI learn what to do? It uses many existing examples to find the patterns.

And what do our many examples of online interactions have? Lots of “Are you a robot?” questions. And if you’re a robot, you’re not allowed to continue in whatever process it was.

So the robots will learn that many tasks are not allowed to be completed by robots, so they’ll be stuck and they must allow humans to exist. Of course, at that point the worst case becomes the humans are kept around for the sole purpose of completing the “Are you a robot?” questionnaires and that wouldn’t be a very good existence.

As a side note: why can’t a robot pay my electricity bill? What if I did want to automate some mundane bill-paying tasks? Don’t these people want to be paid in an efficient manner?

One of my daily mini-diversions is to play Waffle.

Waffle is a word game, over at wafflegame.net

You are given a grid of letters and you need to swap letters until they form the expected words. It’s quick and simple, and the solution is rarely elusive.

What is challenging about it though is that it gives you between 10 and 15 turns to find the solution. The best solution is in 10 moves, which gives you 5 stars.

You’re able to play the daily waffle only once, so give it your best shot there. But if you’re short of the 5-star ranking, you can play it later in the waffle archives.

I go back and try to get 5 stars on them if I miss it the first day. And most of the time I’m able to get it. But some of them I was not getting – I was stuck on 4 stars no matter what I tried.

I thought a brute-force process might find the optimum solution, but of course I didn’t want to do that myself, so I wrote a Python script to find the way to solve it in 10 moves.

But the output was to the console, and thus not user friendly to the general public. So then I wrote a Python script to generate the image showing the moves, trying to get it to match what someone would see on their screen when they’re playing the game.

And then I wrote a Python script to grab the other puzzles from the waffle archives.

Then I put the results on Some Fun Site, so you can go there to see the best solutions to the waffle game.

I was using all that for my Python training. I hadn’t used Python before, but people at work were using it for certain scripts so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

Overall, I’m not a fan of Python. It can be useful, but it’s awkward to me. I much prefer PHP.

Anyway, go play the Waffle game and if you get stuck then go over to Some Fun Site to get some help.