As I was driving home from Andreea’s today, I thought about a cool photography project. As the title implies, I want to take ‘a’ picture every hour for twenty-four. It won’t just be one, it’ll be a whole bunch i imagine, but I’ll choose one from each hour. Then… I’m not sure what I’ll DO with the pictures, but it’ll be fun at least.
I imagine I’ll need to plan out a little, know at least a couple locations I wanna go to and take these pictures, to save time. And I’ll have to make sure I’ll have enough battery to last me for 24 hours, although I could always recharge one at home and come back later to grab it.
For now I’ll think of what I wanna shoot, or at least the area, and then I’ll take a day this summer and do it.
I finallly bought a Flickr Pro account, and I uploaded a bunch of pictures from Victoria! You can go to my gallery and see them (the CSS is kinda fucked up and therefore looks weird), or you can see them in all their full-size glory on my flickr page.
Shawn, Andy, Andreea and I just back from Victoria, BC yesterday, on Canada Day to be specific. We were there for the entire ‘long’ weekend, including the Monday which was not a holiday but both Shawn and I had it off. We left Vancouver Saturday morning, and slept three nights in a hostel called Ocean Island.
On first impression the hostel wasn’t super great… We got there at 12 but they made us wait till 3 to use the rooms we booked, and once we DID get into the rooms, they were very small. Andreea and I had our own private ‘room’. The floor area was mostly taken by a bed, which is all we really needed, and a tiny fridge. There was no room for walking around or anything, and the door just barely missed the bed when swung open. They also provided us with a foldable chair, but if you wanted to sit on it, you wouldn’t be able to open the door anymore. Shawn and Andy (and Angelo and Wilson too actually - they came with us too, only they left early to go to Tofino) had dorm-style rooms with 2 to 3 bunk beds, and filled with travellers from all over the world. The bathrooms were decent too, and since all we really did at the hostel was sleep, and since it’s right in downtown Victoria and super cheap, it was overall a great place.
Victoria in general was also amazing. We did a lot of random things and spent a lot of money, but it was all a lot of fun and therefore worth it. One restaurant we went to, ’sanuk’, was likely the best food I’ve ever had. We also went to a lounge on Douglas called ‘The Mint’, where the DJ played Quantic the whole time we were there. I knew all the songs! It was definitely epic.
I didn’t take many pictures while there, but I’ll put up some of the good ones on Flickr shortly. Check back later, I might have them up today if not by the end of the week I will for sure.
So after having seen the video for Weezer’s Pork and Beans (thanks to Andy, I didn’t know they made a video for it yet) I’m definitely going to buy Weezer’s new album. Here’s the video:
I can’t believe they got all these famous YouTube personalities to be in their video! Apparently Rivers Cuomo said that shooting it was like living inside his computer. So tomorrow, I’m going to go buy the album.
I just finished reading a book yesterday, something I haven’t been able to say for a few months at least. The book’s called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy”, and that’s basically what it’s about. It’s not the ‘regular’ type of book I enjoy, since it’s non-fiction, but it was really good! Andreea recommended it to me - it was a book she had to read for her American History class - and I’m glad she did. I never thought I’d be this interested in economics, considering I took an economics class and it was relatively boring, but it’s written so well and it catches you that you can’t stop reading it.
The book is basically about an economics professor who decides to find out everything about her T-shirt’s life. It’s like an extended anecdote, and she explains all the history and economics behind every part of her story.
It starts out with her going to Florida to the souvenir store she bought her T-shirt from. From there she finds a local manufacturer who buys blank shirts from China and then prints them. She calls the Chinese supplier, and to start at the beginning, she asks where he bought the cotton from, to make the T-shirts. He said: “Texas.” Surprisingly, Texas is one of the world’s (and at times THE) largest producer of cotton. The book explains why this is, citing historic and economic reasons. From there the book follows her to China and then even to Africa, which is where a lot of used T-shirts end up for re-sale in African markets.
The book is really interesting, I found out a lot of surprising things, such as the crazy amount of products you can make from cotton or cotton bi-products, or even old T-shirt shreds. What was also really crazy was how subtle law changes in the US can have a huge effect (positive and/or negative) on other parts of the globe, and that there is a real market for used textile products.
Anyway, if you see this book anywhere, you should grab it, it’s worth the read!
I’ve had my Slickr Gallery installed for a while, but I didn’t like the way it looked at first. I’ve been messing around with the CSS and finally figured out how to make it look decent. It’s still not exactly what I’d like it to be (I want to get rid of the dotted links for example), but it’s close. By close I mean it’s good enough for me to advertise it!
The way it works is that it finds sets I make on Flickr automatically and it uses lightbox to display the pictures. It’s really slick as the name implies, it looks very smooth and sophisticated. I don’t have a lot of pictures up there since I don’t take pictures enough these days and I only upload the ones I really like to my Flickr account, but just the other day I put up five pictures of Darcy, Andreea’s new kitty. Check it out and tell me what you think!
I was driving home from my girlfriend’s the other day, listening to The Stills. I was thinking about how earlier that day we listened to her iPod in the car. Her music, although the same genre (vaguely categorized as “Rock”), is quite different, and I was wondering why I like mine more and she likes hers more. I’ve pointed out to her that her music often sounds like “pub music”, something crazy and fun that would play in the background while you’re getting smashed. She listens to a lot of British bands, and a lot of them are like that, happy, fun, exciting! My preference on the other hand is different, for lack of a better word.
Driving a little further, it suddenly struck me why that is; ever since I was young, I always preferred music with minor harmonies. When I used to play piano, I always liked the more “minor” Classical era music, never really liked anything Baroque, and I loved the Romantic era pieces. My favourite classical music pieces (that I can name) include the second movement from Beethoven’s seventh (A minor) and Mozart’s Requiem (D minor). I obviously never learned to play those on the piano (cause they’re not for piano and plus, I wasn’t good enough), but my favourite piano pieces were also generally in minor keys.
Twelve years later, I still prefer music with minor harmonies. A lot of my favourite bands generally write songs in minor keys. A good example would be System of a Down. A lot of their songs are in minor keys or at least have a lot of minor harmonies between the guitars or vocals or vocals and guitars. The Stills are another example.
My girlfriend on the other hand likes Major harmonies, and that explains why the style of music we listen to is very different even though we may like exactly the same bands! Her favourite songs would sound very different from mine. On a side note, I do like a lot of songs that aren’t in a minor key, there’s just less of them.
If you’re not new to the internet and you’ve filled in online forms from time to time, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. For a couple of years now a lot of forms have some sort of “Are you human?” confirmation, generally it shows you a picture of a word, or a random combination of letters and numbers. Clearly hackers have been able to design bots to figure them out, so now they’re more and more complicated. I can’t even read them sometimes, and here’s the latest attempt to ward off bots:
It took me a while to figure out what they wanted me to enter… It looked to me like all the letters/numbers had a cat next to them, but it only wants four. First I thought it was a trick question because they asked for “letters”, and there were only four letters in the picture, but that didn’t work. Then I tried a bunch of stuff, in the end “NU7K” worked… I guess those have ‘clearer’ pictures of cats?
If you’ve been reading my last couple of posts, you know that I don’t do this very often, and that my posts tend to be an aggregate of a whole bunch of different topics. I need to stay on track and post more often, maybe now that school is over I’ll have a bit more time.
That brings me to my first topic: I’m done school! Finally, ugh, that was a brutal semester. I thought three classes would be a breeze, but it turns out that one class with an insane work load (CMPT 275) and two math classes (MATH 232 and MACM 201) at the same time is marginally more fun than smashing your fingers in with a hammer. At least now I’ve got the worst class in the Computing Science degree out of the way, and I’m down to just one more math class. Plus, I somehow managed to do really well in the two classes I’ve seen my final mark for, and those are the ones I thought I’d do worst in too…
Anyway, I wanted to talk about the start of the Sofa Kings‘ second season in the VIHL! We won the Iron Championship last season, but that was in the least skilled tier. This season we registerd for Brass, which is one level higher, and either because we’re really good or because our opponents really suck this year, we blew them out of the water. Our first game ended 13-3 or something like that, and the second 11-2. We played really well, everyone did. Our goalies were solid in both outings, and we kept the play generally in the other team’s end. Not only did we score a lot, but we also shut the other teams down very well defensively. As a result, we’re now in Copper! Yes, that’s one level above Brass, so basically we’re two levels higher than last season! I’m pretty excited. I’m looking forward to the challenge Copper will offer us, and even though I’m probably not going to be very good, it’ll be really fun and a lot more rewarding when we win. We wrapped up our exhibition last week, and the regular season should start near the end of April or early May. I can’t wait!
