Montreal is a lovely city, mixtures of lovely buildings old and new, a working city with people living there, someplaces gritty, but at least the city is alive. Rachel takes me to a couple of museums and we have some good walks around the city and the docks. It would have been nice to yacht up here but getting up the St Lawrence seaway is tedious. I could have cruised the great lakes and got the boat lifted out for the (severe) winter. On balance leaving the boat in the Azores for a year is a more workable option.
I arrive by train and leave by plane. Not too tiring as the train seats are very comfortable so sleep is possible.
Whales are a big thing in a lot of places in Canada
One of R's favourite bars, spooky sculptures welcome? you in.
I love the random placement of Adirondack chairs everywhere
One person powered tourist buggy
Really neat adventure place near docks - I used to rig Himalayan rope bridges across our garden in Donaghadee for the kids, and various diabolical rope swings and trains <sigh> how I enjoyed making (and testing) them.
We also saw a panic room - my niece and fiance, Keri and Mike run a company doing these in England.
Other buildings too
We climb a tower to get a better view
Down below we see a random collection of (bored) soldiers marching approximately to the drum
Lovely Adirondack chairs everywhere. Chill out spaces.
A nearby museum has a good history of the town and also an Egyptian exhibit, these are well made.
Queues for Sunday brunch, I have a lovely brunch with Rachel, Jonathon, Daria and Jonathon's parents. My french language skills are woeful (pretty non-existent apart from blurting out an approximate french word after several minutes of furrowed brow) By approximate I mean the last three letters of every word are essentially created by a random number generation machine in my head. Still I get to play UNO in french that evening with Daria, J & R. I have an outstanding score by the end of the evening.
Lovely painting of your man Leonard. No not Nimoy, though now you come to mention it...
A museum exhibit I took to - random text generation with some heuristic rules, AI is coming...
Well, slightly better than the infinite number of monkey computer experiment. (Only Apple aficionados will know of that one I think - and I mean Apple ][ microcomputers, pre-Mac!)
Also a room with face recognition and targeting, pairing and people tracking software, it is well done - I am reminded of Matt programming face recognition software for me as part of a consultancy job we did many moons ago.
The software saw us arrive together and showed us connected with a white line no matter where we went in the room. we are (all) being watched (always!)
Thermal air coming off my big sweaty body
And then the breath of angels exhibit - a masterpiece of plumbing.
Your breathing in and out makes the bags go in and out, your breaths get mixed with everyone elses (Ugh)
On-off solenoids divert air one way and the other.
Motors drive toothed belts. John and I have played with similar technology when we built our 3D printers and CNC machines.
I like the chair you can't see.
Actually I think the exhibit could be a bit dangerous (legionairre's disease?)
But my children never listen.
We also see a spooky smoke bath that puffs words at us. Cool... is there anyone there?
And a really cool globe, every point is a light and a speaker and you get waves of composers sound washing over you, unfortunately all of each composer's tunes are played at once - they ramp up in a building crescendo
The software to control it was cool
<Super-Nerd mode on >
looks like an old fashioned set of X window primitives running on a proper UNIX system
<Super-Nerd mode off >
The wiring has me gobsmacked, how some suffer for their art.
Finally a heart moving movement - the lights above me pulse according to my heartbeat. My heart still works I am glad to say.
And sadly my time is up and I head to the plane. So nice to see Rachel snuggly ensconced in her new home, and her new home (flat, city, country) such a good place. With Jonathon, Daria and the new Cat too!
Now, a note for the wordsmiths; snuggly and snugly mean two different things? (adjective vs adverb)
"Snuggly and snugly are quite different in meaning, though frequently confused. Snuggly is an adjective meaning 'comfortable, warm, and cosy', as in a snuggly pair of slippers. Snugly is an adverb meaning 'in a very tight or close-fitting way', as in the ring fit snugly on her finger"
Thank you
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/snuggly
(I confess I use this site to check my speling sumtimes)
Lovely photo of you and Rachel!
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