I went to a borders today that was going out of business and got a couple new toys. I got a Kobo ebook reader and a Demy by Key Ingredients. First impression of the kobo is that it is fast enough to read off of, but not as fast as the 3rd generation Kindle. The Demy is a slick device with a couple flaws. One is that it requires desktop software to sync and two the "saved list" feature/button isn't a list, it's simply rotates through the items you have saved, so it is really painful to use the saved list to actually save recipes to cook later. I got the Demy cheap enough that I'm considering getting another one that I can alter in fun ways :)

A couple quick impressions from the trip Sonia and I took to Taiwan for her cousin Arthur's wedding. One is that sidewalks are for selling not for walking. The streets are good enough to walk on. Second is that there are a lot of scooters in Taiwan. It should be easy to meet green house gas goals**. 1) Get electric scooters down in price (it looks like they are close), 2) Finish off the nuclear power plan so that the new electric scooters are powered by something other than coal.


** Obviously there are many complications and emission sources I'm not thinking of.

I'll start with an apology that I didn't get any pictures this weekend. However, many, many other people did. This weekend started with a simple holiday supper for Sonia's work (ok, there was some Karaoke). Then it moved on to the crazy. Saturday was Santacon. I pre-partied with Sonia's crew (she even stopped in on her lunch break). Then had a delivery of 1/2 Cord of firewood that will be well used over the coming year. Then it was back to SantaCon still dressed as an Elf to meet up with Lina. Then back to Sonia's crew to bring Sonia her reindeer antlers that I'd forgotten to drop off at her place. (ok, there was some stops for karaoke, Lina was at the Mint, and Sonia was at Encore).

Sunday was as crazy as Saturday, but not as long. The Santa Skivvies run was a simple get dressed down to the bare essentials of red underwear and a santa hat, then run into the Castro from The Lookout, and back. Since any Santa event wouldn't be complete with only Santas, Sonia dressed and Santa and I was the red-nosed reindeer (complete with reins). (ok, there was no karaoke on sunday (the Mint was closed on the way home from The Lookout).

So I never had the chance to see Weeping Tile in Concert, but this year I have managed to see both Luther Wright in concert and Sarah Harmer. That and I found "The show 1995" channel on youtube which does have weeping tile in concert. And Uncle Remus.

I discovered another awesome monthly event. This time it was Sci-fi Burlesque. I got a couple pictures, but unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the storm trooper. Nothing says awesome like tribbles, storm troopers and burlesque!

The previous interesting event was Bawdy Storytelling.

I have a lot of papers lying around. I now try to keep them organized, but I haven't got through the back log of when I didn't organize them. Sometimes I come across stuff that I'm happy I had in the pile. The following was my attempt at a valedictorian speech for the 2005 Math class at the University of Waterloo. I was not the valedictorian, but I tried, and thus have a speech.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Doctors and children of all ages. Thank you for spending our last day at Waterloo, here with us. I am one of those people who won't be staying here after day, but somehow I was still chosen to be the valedictorian. So, when I was asked to be the valedictorian by some friends of mine, I was thrilled. I also though I could do a good job, heck, I got my degree in CS, therefore, I can do anything. So, I accepted the nomination. I looked at the nomination form and didn't find any hints on what to talk about. At this point I realized that this speech may be a little underspecified. In fact, there was no specification at all.

I gathered what I could from the form, i.e. a speech had to be written by, and performed on the 18th of June 2005. Skip forward a few weeks, I'd accomplished nothing more than vague thoughts on what to talk about, then I got an email. All potential speeches had to be presented on the 6th of April 2005 (the deadline had moved up, and still no specification). However, a performance objective was given in that email -- each speech must be completed in 5 minutes. Given that I don't have a spec, I can only hope no one else has one.

What follows is my implementation of this unknown specification.

Another cycle in our lives is over. We are finished our latest round of education. This time from the University of Waterloo, in some Math program. Many of us have changed significantly while we've been here, but we are still the same people. We know we are older, we can guess that we are wiser, and we are certainly more educated. So, here is a quick tour of my cycle through Waterloo.

When I got here back in September 2000, I was amazed at how many smart people could be put together in one small place. I am actually still amazed by all the smart people here. I simply happen to know a bit more about some of these people and the amazing things they have done. With all these smart people here, I even had to do homework to keep up.

Skip forward to second year. Second year is when the university decided there is no more room for me in residence. In fact, they do that to almost all second year students. So, I found a sleezy place to live off-campus and started discovering what life is like outside the university bubble. For example, there are stores not in the plaza. There are a couple malls, a bus station, and a train station.

By third year Waterloo had become home despite working in two other cities and growing up on the other side of Toronto. I no longer had to fear being kicked out of CS since I had enough courses with good marks racked up that my cumulative average wouldn't drop too low unless I started failing, which would have been a bad thing to do.

In fourth year, I could see the end in sight. Grad school applications needed to be done pronto and some interesting job prospects lured me away from yet more years of school. Co-op didn't help keep me in school, I enjoyed the working world. I know there are others that used co-op to find that the working world wasn't for them. I expect those people to be in some school for a good long time.

Now we are at the end, and the cycle is complete. I've been across the country, lived over in sunny California, and biked through Scotland, but no where has compared to Waterloo, or the great people that make it such a wonderful place to be. I'm sad to go, as I'm sure many of you are, but I hope you are excited about the next step at the same time.

That was my 5 years, in a non-chronologically accurate order. But it's been even better to help and see people do amazing things. Small things, like getting a group of friends together to go get pints of Bubbletea. To large things like running frosh week for thousands of first year students.

Now that we have looked at the past, what about the future? One of the things I didn't wan to say during this speech is that "We are the future". What does that even mean? Are we useless now? I don't know what it means, it could even be partially true, but we are not useless. In fact our time is now! Among this graduating class are those who are doing cutting edge research. There are those we are already running their own companies. There are those who are already half-way through there plan to rule the world. There are even those of us who are simply going to help others do those things. So, we are not "the future", we are "the now".

Being "the now", (don't I sound like Dubya?) is one thing, but we should always be "the now". We can always make now be our time. We should do this because if we aren't the ones living happily and making the world a better place, in our own ways, then who is going to do it?

If nothing else, I really hope everyone lives happily. For me, I found if I can keep my hat then I can be happy. Well, I can be happy promoting "No Pants Day"!

DOWN WITH PANTS!!

At the end, I finally figured out the specification for this speech. It's simple: Remind people of the awesome things they have done here, the amazing people they shouldn't forget. Lastly, to convince people to keep doing the awesome things despite what might happen or what obstacles appear.

Thank you, I enjoyed being your VD today.

I was riding home tonight along Howard street. I passed a cop on a bicycle, then started speeding up so I would make the next green. I made the green I was shooting for, but unfortunately was caught at the next couple lights. So the cop (who I think took the pedestrian signal as a means to go at 4th and howard) caught up to make at 6th street. At that point he said to me "Boy, you are in shape!". Ahh, it's good to be home :)

Is it me or does Apple leave out obvious features from v1 product launches? 3G on a phone, a camera on a tablet... It's like they don't want them to sell.

I've been running home from work on mondays for the last couple months. I started with the direct 3.5 mile route home. Now each week I vary my route a bit, last night I took Geary most of the way west. However, while running I was thinking I should find as many hills to take on the way home with only a small amount of back tracking. Well this 5.3 mile run looks to be a good approximation. Anyone up for a run next monday evening?

Sita sings the blues is playing at the red vic. I went to see it tonight, it was really cool. There are 4 styles of animation and the narration is a lot of fun. The narration style is 3 people sitting around chatting trying to remember a story. The really cool part is most of the music is recordings of Annette Hanshaw from the 20s.

My part in tonight was using 2 rolls of dimes to pay to get into the movie :) That's two rolls of dimes now back in circulation.

On thursday I went out to see Loquat, The Greycoats, and Head like a kite. Head like a kite was a lot of fun, they had a dancing panda and foam heads (the ones you put whigs on) to throw around the audience. The strange part of the night was that I met Mark Johnson again. Mark was someone who knew a bunch of the same people as me in secondary school, then we both did co-op Math/CS degrees at UWaterloo, and since leaving school have both lived in the bay area. I didn't know Mark was in SF until this week, well, now we've met again, four years later.

Random thought:
Why are Canadians more patriotic when they are away from Canada? I saw a guy with a flag on his ipod shuffle while running yesterday.

Today I found something that bubble shared on Google reader. It was AWESOME. So I shared it. The second best part of my day, besides finding the item was seeing two other friends share the same thing. This is why the internet was built!

Also, climbing was good today. Trisha seems to improve much faster than me. 5-6 - 5-10B in one day. I have now finished only one 5-10A.

If anyone is still on Orkut, you now can import your friends birthdays into calendar. There is a link off the homepage. Now all I have to do is write some scripts to scrape all the local convert and movie venue calendars so I don't have to pick up the onion every week.

Horse Gym USA has a picture of a Canadian at the top of the page.

San Francisco looks like a small place from the top, i.e. the top of Golden Gate Heights. It also seems like all the views of the city face northwards. Mt Davidson does have some views south, but they aren't as pretty. San Francisco is sand and rocks, the trees that do well here are not from here. The cloud forest plants should do well, the botanical garden has lots of them.

This post is for Akash. You'll have to ask him why.

13 Mar 2009
White Swan, Black Swan: nice vocals, I only caught a couple songs

The Donkeys
Decent band, fun to listen to. A good whale joke:
Two whales are sitting at a bar
one says to the other [long whale noises]
The other says, "man you are trashed."

Quick to get on stage and play

Phosphoressence
Good country rock band. Slow to start playing and some assholes decided to pop into the front of the crowd, they were tall so they blocked a bunch of peoples view. Then they gained an extra 3 people and started moving backwards. For once someone actually got inside my bubble.

7 Mar 2008 -- Red Devil Lounge
* "Three of" (good luck googling these guys) -- very good
* A, b, and C -- not good, the lead singers voice cracked a lot, they did look like they should be in the movie "That thing you do" (my first date was at this movie).
* Moonlight Sexy -- ok, Andy didn't like these guys
* Marcy Playground -- Great!

14 Mar 2008 -- Writers with drinks
S.G Browne with Breathers: A zombie's lament. The chapter he read was really funny. I think this was the best part of the night. The host was also really good, but the host could be described as slightly scripted talking out of her ass.

I went to see Fruit Fly at the Castro Theatre tonight. It was a really fun movie and very local. Oh yeah, it's a musical, I don't think I've had that much fun watching a movie since I saw Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter the first time. The opening number is a song about public transit and not needing a car in San Francisco. The previous film by H.P. Mendoza is Colma: The Musical, it's got a lot of the same cast and also look like a lot of fun. Unfortunatly, movies are behind music and I can't find a stream or download on hulu, amazon or youtube of Colma the musical.

Anyway, if anyone wants to go see Fruit Fly it is playing in Berkeley on friday. I don't think I'll make it out to that since the Castro Theatre is having a triple bill "nerds with balls" Midnites for maniacs on friday.

In other good news, I couldn't get either a Petzl size 1 or size 2 harness since my legs are size two, but my waist is size 1.

For anyone that goes to Cantina at 580 Sutter, you may as well skip the cocktails since they are weak and overpriced. It's as good to go for the crappy red strip which is still overpriced, but at least only by a dollar or two.

[This is something old I wrote up while I was in Brazil]

It turns out I can't have an uneventful *set* of flights when Brazil is involved. My first flights to Brazil would be the most uneventful, I got earlier flights than I had booked. The next time I tried to fly, I flew out of Brazil, which since I booked through an agency outside Brazil I had to get paper tickets. The paper tickets didn't get to me in time, so I basically had to rebuy my tickets.

So this time, I learned my lesson, I bought the international tickets separate from my inside brazil tickets. This means I could get electronic tickets all the way. One problem is that I can't pay any of the Brazilian carriers directly since I don't have a Brazilian CPF. So a friend bought my ticket the day before I left. The ticket had a small problem, I had to go through Rio to get to S o Paulo. I would have two hours between the flight from Rio to the flight to JFK. Unfortunatly the leg from Rio to S o Paulo was an hour late and I had to run to get checked into to the flight to JFK. It turns out I had lost my seat, but I did get on the plane and wasn't the last one to check in. The way back to Belo Horizonte was supposed to be simpler, I had a lot of time in S o Paulo before the direct flight to Belo Horizonte. Well, unfortunatly the boarding passes I was given was for Larry Morrison going to Lima, not for James Morrison going to S o Paulo. It feels really bad that the woman who checked me in, used checked two pieces of ID, and the security guy who checked my boarding pass didn't notice this. I didn't notice this either since I had two boarding passes with the first one going to Miami. Anyway, so after Larry and I had the same seat on the flight to Miami we figured out I had the wrong ticket. I got the right one then we were off. We arrived in Miami in good time, but our gate was occupied, which meant we disembarked 20 minutes late and 10 of us had to push through the aisles to get out and onto the connecting flight to S o Paulo. This flight was again uneventful. However, in S o Paulo there was a nice long wait at customs, no processing time for me, then the discovery that I had made it to S o Paulo, but my backpack hadn't. Fortunatly, there was a second flight from Miami arriving in 30 minutes (left 2 hours later than mine) that should have my bag. It turned out I did, so I could finally go check in for my flight to Belo Horizonte. That checkin was almost uneventful, but again the line took forever. I waited for 8 minutes as the second person in line. Again, I took no time getting processed. Given the time I take to go through customs and checking in, how could both those lines move so slow?

It's been a little wet around here recently. Enough so that I bought an umbrella yesterday. Unfortunately, I didn't take it out on my walk today. So on my way back from Golden Gate Heights, I felt more soaked than when I went out to walk all of Broderick in the pouring rain.

On the getting things done front, I have finally put up my disco ball. It's been 9 hours and it is still up so I think it will hold over night.

I would like to thank James for saving me two tubes and two floor pumps.