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One measures a circle, beginning anywhere

12

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Been liv­ing on too much sin and not enough sleep, though mostly it’s in the form of calo­ries and sugar. Thank god I have an Asian metabolism.

Things are hap­pen­ing so quickly around me. Chris is get­ting seri­ous with his girl. Pat and Jen had their first baby, a boy named Kyden. John’s get­ting mar­ried in April. (What? Yeah. What? Yeah.) Funny how I’m start­ing to feel like the one who’s all settled.

It makes me fan­tas­ti­cally proud to say that I’ll be assum­ing best-man respon­si­bil­i­ties, though I still asked John who he was going appoint cause I never feel like I can take any­thing in our friend­ship for granted. His anger at my hav­ing asked was prob­a­bly the warmest ges­ture I’ve had in a while. That means with the bach­e­lor party, the wed­ding, and another wed­ding I’ve to film, I’ll be dri­ving to Toronto three times between now and spring.

I’ve already lost John to an extent, as he’s only had about two months to plan his wed­ding, and he’s been busy with such. But even though our phone calls were my main form of con­tact with the out­side world, I haven’t noticed their absence, or as much as I thought I would at least. I think I’m get­ting used to being so out-of-touch with peo­ple. There’s so much ful­fill­ment one can find in a book or a movie or an instru­ment, let alone the vast­ness of the internet.

One of my ven­tures was mak­ing a trial World of Warcraft account1, just so I could try being social at a dis­tance, but I still couldn’t bother inter­act­ing with other peo­ple. And since the whole point of pay­ing a monthly fee for an MMORPG is to have that kind of inter­ac­tion, I stopped when I maxed out at level 202 on the third day. Good thing too, because it was the only thing I did for those three days.

I used to feel so guilty about being alone, think­ing I should be tak­ing advan­tage of some oppor­tu­nity to be social. Then I real­ized that if I ever got too uncom­fort­able and lonely, I’d get up and do some­thing about it. I’m too happy and too com­fort­able here right now. I think that’s why I can’t tell if this is where I’m going, or where I already am.

  1. Which I’d pre­vi­ously vowed never to play, know­ing my addic­tive nature to any character-building games, and WoWs never-ending game­play. [↑]
  2. The max level for trial accounts. [↑]
Date  February 15, 2011
Tags 
Categories  Daily Life Random

fall and falling

1

Darren and I crashed at the same time. It’s like we’re going through this together. I wish I was back in T.O. with him and Chris, cause some of the best con­ver­sa­tions of the year hap­pened in that car. We’re all in the same place, all young men on the mend.

I’m very pleased to say that Darren’s now the owner of a wild cherry sun­burst Seagull Entourage Mini Jumbo (but with a pick-guard and cut­away). And I’m totally jeal­ous, as I’ve been drool­ing over pic­tures of gui­tar bind­ings and rosettes myself lately. I had bor­rowed Jesse’s ginor­mous1 gui­tar for a bit, and I felt like I was pinned under a piece of fur­ni­ture every time I tried play­ing it. It totally turned me off gui­tars in gen­eral, but as I was walk­ing through the Ottawa Folklore Centre today, I saw a series of much smaller acoustics. I had to keep walk­ing. The last thing I can afford is another hobby and another toy.

moon

Got this shot through the lens of my tele­scope, which is why you can see the cir­cu­lar out­line of the eye­piece. Big enough to make out the geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures like the Mare Insularum splotch on the top left. Taken when still bright out, but the moon shone bright through the daylight.

I had a decent night of sleep for the first time in far too long, maybe because I’ve writ­ten more in the last week than in the three months before that. Strange how clear and calm­ing and inspir­ing it is to be rested. I still don’t know what I’m feel­ing though. It’s like I just don’t know what to think anymore.

A ridicu­lous amount of Starcraft II has been played. John and I have even been play­ing against each other, which is strange for us because nei­ther per­son wants to beat the other (out of sports­man­ship), but nei­ther wants to lose either (out of fool­ish pride). I was far more dom­i­nant in Warcraft 3 because it’s micro dri­ven so we never did 1v1, but Starcraft is macro dri­ven, which John is much bet­ter at. He’s proven him­self to be a very wor­thy oppo­nent with sev­eral good games on me. I’m so glad Blizzard doesn’t record the num­ber of hours played in a person’s pro­file now.

I want to be in France in this sea­son. My neigh­bours just came back from Paris and told me it was really foggy. I wouldn’t mind. Really. I’d love to walk down the stony path of rue Saint Vincent — the set­ting of one of my favourite Yves Montand songs — when it’s cov­ered by a hazy mist and I’m sport­ing a cozy sweater.

I spend 21 hours of the day in my room, and I’m never bored. I don’t go out of the house for days at at time. I have nei­ther the rea­son nor the desire to. I think I han­dle being alone too well.

  1. This word totally didn’t get picked up by spell-check, which means the Firefox dic­tio­nary is pretty decent. [↑]
Date  September 22, 2010
Tags 
Categories  Daily Life Photos

Team Fortress 2

10

On nights like this, I won­der how I’m going to kill the time before it’s late enough to fall asleep, wor­ried that I’ll be bored on a Friday and con­se­quently faced with the fact that I’m so very alone. I was crav­ing some kind of human con­tact tonight, but spend­ing time with peo­ple takes too much energy nowa­days so I decided, instead, to play Team Fortress 2.

I pur­chased it on an impulse, but this was still three years after TF2 first came out. There’s a very good rea­son I avoided buy­ing it for so long: it’s the sequel to Team Fortress Classic, one of the games I was most addicted to in my life, and a huge time sink1. An entire day could go by with­out real­iz­ing it when I was play­ing TFC, and I pur­posely didn’t buy TF2 when Aaron was get­ting into it too; I knew I wouldn’t stop if I had friends encour­ag­ing the habit.

TF2

 

Read the rest of this entry »

  1. Also the same rea­son I haven’t tried World of Warcraft. [↑]
Date  July 10, 2010
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Categories  Daily Life

Four Day Vacation

3

I’m in Toronto right now, at John’s house. He has the cot­tage for his birth­day week­end, so I took two extra days off work to see him. It’s kind of strange how much I’ve been see­ing him lately. In the past, we’d go over a year with­out see­ing each other because he was in Windsor for law school and I was in Ottawa with­out a car. But now that he’s been called to the bar and I’ve obtained the Civic, things have worked out.

We plan on going to the Ontario Science Centre today — some­thing I’ve wanted to do for a while1 — then dri­ving up to the cot­tage tonight. We’ll spend two days at the cot­tage2, maybe take a day trip to another town, and drive back on Sunday. Aaron also called me yes­ter­day about his co-ed baby shower on Sunday, which i’m not sure if I’ll be attend­ing yet, since I’ll have dri­ven eight hours that day.

Sunsets and Audiobooks

The drive was absolutely amaz­ing. The weather was per­fectly cool, and the sun took its glo­ri­ous time set­ting over a few hours. I think the most sat­is­fy­ing part is get­ting to the sec­tion of high­way where the 417 splits to the 416, and one can stay in the left lane and accel­er­ate through the turn, leav­ing all the traf­fic behind.

I lis­tened to some audio CDs of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking on the way over. The con­cept is that our first reac­tions (made within a few sec­onds) are often intu­itively cor­rect, and that even after think­ing about some­thing for a long time, we end up going with our gut feel­ings any­way. We’re made to believe that the more impor­tant some­thing is, the longer we should take to make a deci­sion. I’m espe­cially guilty of this3. Wally lent them to me in an effort to help me act faster so I don’t miss any oppor­tu­ni­ties. Not sure if they’ll help me, but the way it delves into processes of the human psy­che is a very inter­est­ing lis­ten nonetheless.

Feeding Butterball

Left Dolly lots of food, and I’m hop­ing she doesn’t eat it all. The rea­son why I feed her by hand is because she doesn’t have any sense of how much to eat, and bal­loons up if not con­trolled. In either case, I expect a lot of poo in the lit­ter­box when I get back.

New Game

I bought John a copy of Assassin’s Creed for his birth­day, which thank­fully was on his list of games for which to watch. It was devel­oped by Ubisoft Montreal, the same stu­dio who made Prince of Persia, and plays very much the same way. An open-world con­cept with lots of stealth ele­ments. Certainly a game I could get into. We take turns play­ing, and it’s made me real­ize that I haven’t been play­ing much myself in the last few months.

A Sense of Overstimulation

Life has been some­what over­stim­u­lat­ing lately, and I can’t blame any­one but myself. After spend­ing a day shop­ping for house­wares with Julie last week­end, the house is a big mess, with things scat­tered over the coun­ters and floors. I haven’t even had a chance to write about the last time I came to Toronto. It seems like life is going faster than I can keep up. I’m just try­ing to enjoy it, espe­cially when the weather is this beautiful.

After all, life is for the liv­ing. This won’t last for­ever. I get to look for­ward to some time alone when every­thing is settled.

  1. I don’t think I’ve been since grade 4, so over 18 years ago. [↑]
  2. Last time I was there was two years ago [↑]
  3. John says that I tend to over ana­lyze things to the point of paral­y­sis. [↑]
Date  August 21, 2008
Tags 
Categories  Daily Life

Christmas Wish-List '07

4

A look into my cur­rent tastes, updated for 2007. This list is some­what shorter than last years because the ones I haven’t checked off still apply, and I’ve been guilty of some spend­ing this month; The first two sea­sons of Robson Arms on DVD (which I des­per­ately waited two years for), sea­son six of Trailer Park Boys, my mit­tens, a RAZR 2 (the cell phone I’ve had for five years died), an elec­tric tooth­brush, and var­i­ous gifts.

Photography

  • Bogen / Manfrotto Background Support System 314 ($280) — To quickly set up dif­fer­ent coloured back­grounds in my pho­tog­ra­phy room.

    Bought it on sale, which was still $260.

  • Arca-Swiss Monoball Z1 Ballhead ($475) — My cur­rent tri­pod isn’t strong enough to hold most of my lenses in place, and the lock­ing mech­a­nism is extremely chintzy. Very frus­trat­ing when work­ing with dark shots. A ball­head would give me tremen­dous flexibility.
  • Gitzo GT3530LSV Mountaineer 6x Carbon Fiber Tripod Legs ($625) — Carbon fiber tub­ing makes for an extremely light and portable set of tri­pod legs. Packed with all the impor­tant lit­tle fea­tures like an anti-leg rota­tion sys­tem, the Gitzo leg lock­ing sys­tem, and remov­able rub­ber feet.

Furniture

  • Rubix Cube Ottoman ($129) — A black, two-toned square ottoman to go with my leather couch.

Housewares

  • Bodum Assam 2-Cup Tea Press ($25) — I have one of these at home, but it would be great to have one at work too, so I can make more than one cup of tea at a time.

    Julie bought me a Stokes gourmet Formosa tea infuser for Christmas 2008. A lit­tle cham­ber for loose leaves dan­gles from the top, as opposed to a press, which can cre­ate bit­ter­ness in tea.

  • Braun Impression WK 600 Kettle ($90) — A large ket­tle for my tea. Right now, I have to boil water in two cup inter­vals, which takes a while when guests are over.

    Andrew and Alex bought me a sim­i­lar model for my birth­day, and it’s SWEET.

  • Tingler Head Massager ($15) — On Jason’s rec­om­men­da­tion on my recent post about man­ual stim­u­la­tion. The reviews say that it helps put you to sleep, and that can never be a bad thing.

    Found a cheep one at Zone for five dol­lars! Doesn’t vibrate or any­thing but still pretty good. Next is find­ing some­one to use it on me.

Games

  • Orange Box ($50) — A nos­tal­gic trip back to the days of my favourite game ever: Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life. I hear the game­play has changed a lot, but I don’t care. We’ll prob­a­bly be play­ing this at the next LAN.
  • Odin Sphere ($40) — A side-scrolling fan­tasy RPG for the PS2 that I don’t want to miss.

Movies/Shows

  • JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure OVA ($52) — My favourite anime of all time: a com­bi­na­tion of fas­ci­nat­ing uni­verse, and very intel­li­gent action. I cur­rently have a copy in Japanese with French sub­ti­tles. While this helps me learn more French, I also don’t under­stand much the phrases.

    Found a copy of this for download.

  • Reno 911 sea­sons 2–5 ($90) — An hilar­i­ous, orig­i­nal look at law enforce­ment. Trailer Park Boys from the other side of the law. I have the first sea­son (thank you Music World for going out of busi­ness and giv­ing me 20% off), but I’d love to get the rest, along with the movie.

    Bought all of these on a lark. Did not regret the decision.

Date  December 16, 2007
Tags 
Categories  Random

Christmas Wish List '06

0

Thumbnail: Christmas cupcakes

You know it’s get­ting close to the hol­i­days when the fresh cup­cakes at the local bak­ery start hav­ing Christmas tree sprin­kles, so I thought I’d make a Christmas wish-list. Usually I have no prob­lem spend­ing money when I want some­thing, but I’ve been sav­ing my money as a goal lately. I’ve been good too, only spend­ing $120 on myself in November (two movies, a toque, and win­ter shoe spikes) as opposed to the $500+ I nor­mally do.

This isn’t a fan­tasy list by any means; these are prac­ti­cal things I even­tu­ally plan on buy­ing. I just can’t jus­tify get­ting them at this moment. Of course, I don’t actu­ally expect any of these things to show up under a tree on the 25th, since I don’t cel­e­brate Christmas, although this isn’t by choice.

Photography

  • Canon EOS 5D cam­era body ($3800) — The 5D sup­ports a very nice 12.8 megapix­els, but most impor­tantly, it has a full-frame sen­sor that would let me take full advan­tage of my wide-angle lenses.
  • Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens ($950) — For those extra-wide group shots, and styl­ish fish­eye distortion.

    Bought a used ver­sion of this great lens for roughly half the MSRP in early 2007.

  • Speedlite 580EX flash ($600) — I cur­rently have the Speedlite 420EX, which can used as an off-camera slave to be set off remotely. It takes a flash like the 580EX to act as a wire­less master.

    Bought this flash with an umbrella and light stand in the sum­mer of 2007. Extremely happy with the off-camera results.

  • Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX ($750) — Macro pho­tos have been espe­cially dif­fi­cult because of the exag­ger­ated cam­era shake with a 100mm lens. A nice macro flash would allow me to increase shut­ter speed, and get evenly lit shots.
  • Wacom Intuos 6x11” tablet ($450) — For edit­ing my pho­tos in Photoshop. I have one of these at work, and I can’t get over how much bet­ter a tablet is over a mouse.

    I was start­ing to get shoot­ing pains in my wrist and fore­arm, so I bought this tablet in early 2007 to ease the strain of mouse pos­ture. It has greatly helped, and on top of that, work­ing with brushes in Photoshop is a delight.

Games

  • Playstation 3 ($650) — I’m cur­rently wait­ing on this one, since none of the launch titles inter­est me, but it’s my next-generation con­sole of choice. I wanted the Wii for the longest time (back when it was code­named Revolution), but the lack of HD sup­port and dated hard­ware quickly turned me.
  • Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess ($60) — I can’t pass up the leg­endary last game in the Zelda series. It’s com­ing out in 12 days for the Gamecube, although I may see if I can bor­row Pat’s/Aaron’s/Trolley’s Wii to play it with the Remote and Nunchuk instead.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 ($60) — I’ve been wait­ing for this game ever since I fin­ished the orig­i­nal Neverwinter Nights over two years ago. My next pur­chase was either this or Company of Heroes, but John bought me the lat­ter for my birth­day and so we could play online together. It was as much of a gift for himself.

Furniture

  • Saga sofa ($1400) — Getting this in a nice dark-brown leather is one of the options with which I’d like to replace my old Ikea couch. I wasn’t par­tial to leather until I saw the unit in the store, but it boosts the price closer to $1500.

    Bought a Scotch couch in October 2007 from EQ3 in a black leather instead. Sold my old Ikea couch to help pay for this.

  • 2MORROW side table ($150) — To go with the sofa.

    Bought a frosted glass sidetable from the same series as my cof­fee table from Zone in late 2007 instead.

  • B2C 36″ stor­age ($550) — A place where I can store my books.
  • CONICK pen­dant light ($120) — I’d like to have this above my din­ing table. The light fix­ture I have now is a lit­tle dated.

    I bought a rail light fix­ture from Ikea instead. It’s bet­ter for direc­tional light, and much cheaper.

Appliances

  • Grind & Brew Thermal Automatic cof­feemaker ($150) — This baby grinds, brews, and can be set on an auto­matic timer to do both right before you wake up. Unfortunately, it’d be all decaf for me.
  • Ultra Power Series stand blender ($180) — For smooth­ies. Because lunch sand­whiches get bor­ing quickly.

    Got myself a nice Hamilton Beach Eclectrics Blender at the begin­ning of the year. Been mak­ing smooth­ies almost daily ever since.

TV Shows

  • Six Feet Under ($230 for the com­plete series) — I’ve been want­ing to watch these with Bronwen for a while now. I only got to the mid­dle of the sec­ond sea­son, but it really put the hook in me.
  • Trailer Park Boys ($150 for sea­sons 1–5) — I’ve seen up to sea­son 3, and every year, the Trailer Park Boys keep me guess­ing about how much mad­der things will be in Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

    Bought these up to the sixth sea­son in early 2007 to watch with Bronwen. She loved them. Still look­ing for the Christmas special.

  • Battlestar Galactica ($100 for sea­sons 1 & 2) — I only got as far as the first sea­son, and this is one of those shows that you can’t watch out of order because you’d be com­pletely lost.

Movies

  • Best In Show ($20) — This movie charmed me the first time I saw it. One of those movies you can watch at almost any time. Christopher Guest at his best.
  • Punch Drunk Love ($16) — P.T. Anderson’s sim­ple, beau­ti­ful love story.
  • Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle ($15) — Because every­thing about this movie reminds me of sum­mers with John.
  • Contact ($16) — The begin­ning of my fas­ci­na­tion with astron­omy. And Jodie Foster.

    Louise bought me this for Christmas 2006.

  • Boys n the Hood ($16) — A movie that touches me, even though it’s set in a world com­pletely removed from my own.
  • Waking Life ($10) — I wish I could explain what it is about this movie that draws me in so much. Maybe it’s the fact that every time I watch it, I under­stand some­thing new. Also the first movie I ever saw high. Triptastic.
  • The Breakfast Club ($18) — The ulti­mate teen angst movie. Also cur­rently the only movie to use the term “Neo-Maxi Zoom Dweebie”.
Date  December 1, 2006
Tags 
Categories  Photos Random

Pita And Friend

0

After the last house­warm­ing party, Pita stayed the night, hav­ing come all the way from Montreal, not want­ing to drive back after a few hours of drink­ing. I asked him to stay on Sunday, and we ended up play­ing all the old Gamecube games that we used to play and mas­ter, back when we lived together. We never had the chance to do this since he moved to Taiwan and back to Canada over two years ago, so it was quite a rem­i­nis­cent experience.

Discovering I had a free week­end, I invited him over a lit­tle while ago for two days of pure gam­ing. The invi­ta­tion was extended to his room­mate, after Pita said that I should meet her, being a hard­core gam­ing chick who appar­ently can kick his ass in Soul Calibur 2. I have yet to observe this ass-kicking chick phe­nom­e­non for myself, and unfor­tu­nately, I haven’t had any time to prac­tice with Kilik or Raphael, so I’m pre­pared to get my ass handed to me. I’m hop­ing to make it up in Super Smash Brothers Melee.

This is the last week­end of fun before I start to get seri­ous about work (aside from a LAN party I have planned for the first week of November). I decided not to take the job at the book­store, and put my full focus on a web solu­tions busi­ness that I reg­is­tered this week.

They should be here any minute.

Date  October 1, 2005
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Categories  Daily Life
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