Happy Birthday Adrienne!

Just a quick update on this cold and freezing rainy night. Last weekend was pretty good, I went skating with Kim on Friday night which was really fun. On Saturday I managed to get a haircut, buy new jeans, finish most of my C&O assignment and complete a few other mundane but useful tasks that I can't remember anymore. Sunday saw the successful return of myself to Waterloo and me finally learning what terms like "1st and 10" mean in American football.

This week I am applying to jobs, making test cases for the compiler and hopefully participating in strange psychological experiments for the purposes of extra credit in my Psych 101 class. Good times!

Oooh, I remembered a picture that was worth posting. On the last day of work all the co-op students got to get their picture taken with the Oscar that Alias was awarded in 2002 for technical achievement for the development of Maya. It was VERY cool to get to hold it. A definite shout out goes to John Gross and John King for making it happen. Here is my picture:

Me with the Alias oscar

So, it's been a long time since my last post and as a result I've forgotten most of what has happened. The quick rundown of what's happened is: more rock climbing with Alias folk, the Alias Christmas party (awesome!), Kim visited for a while in my last week of work, four holiday dinners (goose, turkey, ham, salmon), got to see Mike (and start him out on Perl) and KJ, hung out a bunch with Kim, saw a bunch of movies (including King Kong and Harry Potter), lots of fun Christmas presents (5 seasons of Simpsons!!!), moved from Toronto to Waterloo and probably a ton more stuff that I'm forgetting. I should post some pictures from the break, but I don't feel like formatting them and stuff so it probably won't happen. Oh well.

This term is gonna be nuts, I've already put in maybe 15 hours on Compilers (the result being a mostly functional scanner for Ada, the language we have to compile). Also I have other courses (I think, haven't really looked at them yet). Plus, I have to get a job so that I can um...you know, become a real person or something.

The apartment in Waterloo is good as always, of course. I got my roommates to watch Grey's Anatomy, which means that we've been into the 4 or 5 episode marathon sessions already.

Last night Matt and I watched The Big Lebowski for no particular reason. Such a good movie. Interestingly enough I think Mike watched it yesterday too. Probably because it rocks.

Here are some pictures from the climbing gym we went to on Sunday.

Me on a wall

The outside of the chimney

Me in the chimney climb

Me in the chimney climb

So instead of just saying I should fix my site, I went and did it right after writing the last post. You can see that my site now displays the last five posts at any time. Also, the bottom link on the default page will show you all the posts for the current month, which conveniently activates the code to cycle backwards by month.

Long time since the last update, I really gotta change my backend code to show a set number of previous posts rather than the posts for the current month. Then I won't feel bad about long spans of time with no updates.

Last weekend Kim came up to visit and we had a pretty damn good time. Her bus was late on Friday (something about a gigantic multi-car accident on the 401) so we didn't do anything then other than get supper at McDonald's. On Saturday we went to the ROM and looked at a bunch of stuff. Kim really likes it there, and I had a good time too. The museum combined with Kristjan's website made me really want to go to Europe (ie. Rome) or anywhere that isn't North America. Hopefully once I finish school and get settled I'll have a chance to do a bunch of travelling.

After the ROM we got some Pizza Hut (sooo good, it's been too long) and then headed up to the airport (via TTC) to meet my friend KJ, who was coming in from a year long stint teaching in Asia (specifically China and Taiwan). While waiting we shared a $7 fruit smoothy that was really good (even though quite expensive). KJ was really surprised to see us and even though we only got to chat for 20 minutes I'm so glad we took the time to get up there. I really don't see her enough and it made me realize that I miss her quite a bit. I'll be seeing her again at least once before she heads back to the other side of the world.

On Sunday my mom (who was also in Toronto) came over and took Kim and I out to IKEA for $1 breakfasts. It was pretty good food for the price and afterwards we wandered the store for at least 2 hours. I was pretty tired afterward so I went home and relaxed for the rest of the weekend.

So, onto this weekend that is just finishing up. Mike came to Toronto to visit this weekend, and spent some time hanging out at Alias on Friday. I didn't get much work done as a result, but I did get to play some Xbox 360 for an hour, so I think it all balances out somehow. Friday was also the end of term lunch for the co-op students which means that I now have another Alias t-shirt. Sweet!!! Gotta love the swag!

After work on Friday Mike took me to the house of his friend Ya'el for a Shabbat dinner. It as pretty cool, lots of good food, about a dozen friendly people and multiple bottles of nice wine. I really enjoyed it.

On Saturday Mike and I headed off to Yorkdale mall for some Chirstmas/Chanukah shopping and just general mall stuff. I'd never been to Yorkdale before so it was pretty cool. In addition to several Christmas gifts I also picked up a new plain white button-up shirt for $19 (regular $70) at Club Monaco. Good times.

After the mall we went downtown and met up with Alex for supper at Spring Rolls. It wouldn't be a visit with Mike in Toronto without a stop at Spring Rolls. Fortunately their food is pretty good, so it's always a fun time. Later on we went and saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I thought it was really well done compared to the book and the graphics were more or less up to current standards. I have some minor internal conflicts with the whole Chronicles of Narnia stuff due to the intense Christian parables in the story (ie. the Lion, Aslan, is Jesus -- no, really, C.S. Lewis was intensely religous and did this on purpose). I don't have much use for organised religion and even less for Christianity. But despite all that I very much enjoyed the story in the movie. I think C.S. Lewis (and the creators of the movie) accomplished something very significant in their presentation of the whole Christian theme in a delightful and compelling way. This is not to say that I've hopped on the conversion train (next stop, self-righteousness and condescending attitudes), but it makes me wonder what the world would be like if the religious nuts throughout history were more open to creative manipulation and interpretation of the various sacred texts (despite the heavy Christian themes, there was much in the movie that could be seen as heretical). Hell, I wonder what the world would be like if the religious nuts were just more open in general. I also wonder if I would be more open to religion if religion was more open to anything else. Basically the movie just put me in a very thoughtful mood.

Please note that my use of the term "religious nut" in the preceding paragraph, is by no means a judgement on everyone who is spiritual...only those who proceed in religion with a closed mind. If I believe anything it is that we are meant to question everything and pursue truth in all aspects of life.

On a lighter note, today we went rock climbing! I love it! Mike and Alex and I met John and then got a ride up to a place in Newmarket. It was much better than the place in Scarborough that we went to a couple weeks ago, but not quite as good as the place we normally go to. It did have a really unique set of climbs though. They hand molded a huge wall of concrete to create a really realistic "chimney" section. A "chimney" is a section of wall that is closed in pretty tight on at least three sides. This one was cool because the molding made it like actual rock. They had some extra holds on the that part of the wall too, but it was also possible to do it without using the holds and just using the "natural" features of the wall. I managed to get to the top using only features and it was really amazing/fun. Totally unlike any climb I've done before. I would definitely be willing to go back there, just for the chimney section. I'll post some pictures later when I get them from Mike.

This has been a really text-heavy post, so I figured I'd end with a couple of fun photos. The first is an action shot of some pool balls being broke apart on the pool table at work. The other is just a macro shot of some of the random crap on my desk, featuring a Dreidel and a CD with some cool reflections. Enjoy.

Pool balls being broken apart

Dreidel with CD

Last night for wing night we went to Allen's on the Danforth for supper and it was pretty good. What was amusing though was that we saw Jian Ghomeshi, the singer/percussionist for Moxy Fruvous! For those of you who don't know that band, they did the song "King of Spain." If you haven't heard of it then you should check it out. It is early 90s pop/acapella that mentions Pizza Pizza and the Skydome!

Not much else has been going on lately. Adrienne came to visit Matt again last weekend so we all went to the Santa Claus parade. It was alright, probably the best I'll ever see, but I'm not a huge fan of Christmas or standing in the cold for hours or whatever. Bah! I am a fan of digital cameras though, so I took a bunch of pictures. Here are a few:

Herd of clowns

Peek Frean Maiden

Gorillas with bananas

Upside-down clowns

The Kool-aid Man

Moose in a canoe

Chicken noodle guy

Lots of sousaphones

Some car with something in it

Santa Claus

The Toronto subway

I think my biggest question is: Other than the picture of Santa, what do any of these have to do with Christmas? And it's not like I only posted the weird photos. Nothing was very Christmas related.

Guess what! I'm the number one result for "pickle" on Google's image search! Check it out! The image is my earlier pickle shot...reproduced for you here:

pickle again!

I found out this amazing fact with Google Analytics which is a free website statistic compilation thinger from Google. Pretty sweet!

I went home this weekend, but I didn't do too much. Basically I just spent time reinstalling Windows on Kim's laptop. Boooo to Windows! Booooo! Oh I also got to go to some birthday party with Kim for her Great Uncle or something...lots of random relatives that even she didn't know. Good food though. :)

I went through Waterloo on my way home today so that I could finally see my brother's apartment. It wasn't too bad. In other brother-related news, he got a co-op job at Maple which is totally excellent for a first work term.

Tonight along with the rest of my supper, I ate my giant pickle! It was pretty tasty. Below is a picture, note that it is on a dinner plate...no wussy luncheon plate for this pickle!

Pickle...uncanned!