Paper-writing sweatshop, Day 3

Today's sweatshop wasn't so sweaty, actually. My paper had been finished last night, so I just needed to take care of my handout and some final organization. I ate a late breakfast, fixed some coffee, and then took to making my handout.

I wanted to make a marked-up map of downtown Toronto as part of my handout, but I was surprised to find that neither GoogleMaps nor MapQuest offered the ability to mark multiple locations! As it turned out, Google offered that service only on GoogleEarth, which provides satellite pictures rather than easy-to-read maps, while MapQuest restricted the service to third-party businesses paying for their mapping services (e.g., hotels.com's hotel location maps). Meh. In the end, I took a screen capture of an unmarked GoogleMap, imported it into Word, and then marked it up with Microsoft Word's "Drawing" tools. It was slow going and frustrating, but it looked good in the end. I would've probably gotten prettier results with Adobe Illustrator, but that would've taken much more time.

I also double-checked my flight and hotel reservations, started planning my trip to Chicago and Toronto/London for Xmas, and did some research on whether my cellphone would work in Hawaii. As the afternoon wore on, I started making a "to-do" list of things I needed to pack and things I needed to print out at the Centre on Monday. I suspected that printing at the business center in the hotel in Hawaii would be expensive (it turned out to be $1USD / page!), so my plan was to take care of my printing at the Centre and just drag everything along. Unfortunately, that meant that I needed to have my paper and handout in final form by Monday morning. My paper was done, but it was too long and I still needed to make a final edit to reduce length and correct typos.

Late that evening, a colleague and friend of mine called me and invited me out to dinner. Although I felt like I was somehow slacking (despite being pretty much done), I agreed to heading out for dinner. She took me to the Indian / Sri Lankan neighborhood near the La Chapelle métro stop where we ate a delicious meal of South Indian vegetarian food. Mmm. In addition to discovering a new neighborhood of delicious Indian restaurants, my friend also introduced me to a large Indian grocery store right across from the métro station, that carried a much broader selection of hot peppers, yucca/manioc (finally!), more spices than I could've imagined, and bags and bags of rice. Oh, and mangoes that promised better results than the ones I found in chinatown last week. Since I was leaving for Hawaii in two days, I didn't buy anything, but you can be sure that I'll be making mango salsa as soon as I get back to Paris.