Back at the Cafe
I spent part of yesterday at the cafe that I used to frequent on weekends before the pandemic and through most of my undergrad. I’m writing this newsletter from my usual seat near the large windows that open up to Granville Street. I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t busier on the days I go. A seat is basically guaranteed when I show up (usually around noon - 1pm), and more than half the cafe is empty. I don’t think it’s because the coffee here is any bad (at least not worse than any other cafe in the area). Maybe it’s because folks in the area prefer to frequent some of the fancier shops and roasters that are within a stone’s throw of here.
The cafe provides a nice amount of ambient sound. They always play some form of inoffensive canned piano jazz, which I block out of my earphones anyway. It’s not super well-lit, but some light floods in from the large windows that I always sit near. Aside from the skittish hiss of the espresso machine whenever someone places an order, there’s a calm, almost a sleepiness that appears to wash over the entire cafe.
On Friday, some folks from the lab and I went to East is East in Kits, to celebrate the end of the academic year. Before that, we’d sat around in the long tables in the lab, taking alternating sips between sickly-sweet peanut-butter flavoured whiskey and the last of the whiskey I had brought to the lab. The peanut butter flavoured whiskey tasted more like liquified peanut butter than anything else, it even coated the tongue like real peanut butter does. Nico brought in some of his incredibly tasty pretzels, which were mostly consumed in short order. I’d love to taste them freshly out of the oven, one day.
It was my first time going to East is East, and I was not disappointed. It was located inside Calhoun’s Bakery, a former Kitsilano institution frequently visited by UBC students. I remember visiting here once or twice during my early undergrad. The inside of East is East was warm and rustic. Most of the furniture appeared to be hand-hewn from large trunks of trees. Large carpets were draped over walls, and the lighting was dim. The food was great, too. A favourite of mine was a salad that had judicious amounts of cilantro scattered throughout. For entertainment, we read some surprisingly colourful fan fiction written about Microsoft Clippy, everyone’s favourite office assistant.
I spent yesterday working on part of the tool I’m building for my thesis. UI development with Java/Kotlin is less annoying than I thought. That said, I think I haven’t hit the part of the thesis where I’m inevitably going to be flailing wildly. Later, I worked a bit more on the open issue I have for the Scala Package Manager. I finally understand why implicits are as annoying as people say they are. I have an implicit definition that appears to require an implicit parameter to function, but produces a non-fatal error during compilation, which reports that the implicit parameter is unused… I could fix this by annotation the parameter with @nowarn, but that seems like an unnecessary hack. I guess I’ll wait for what the reviewers have to say.
Last night, I finished reading Pachinko. I don’t think I’m ready to write about that in detail quite yet, maybe I’ll write about it next week.
That’s it for now, see you next week!