I recently discovered a pretty useful site for finding out when various products become available at the LCBO. It's called Drinkvine and it was made by a guy who enjoys fancy beers but did not enjoy trying to figure out which LCBO had them and when.

You input your favourite beers/wines and your preferred LCBO locations and it will email you when your drinks are in stock at one of your locations. It works pretty well. Of course they're just scraping the official LCBO website, but it seems to be pretty up to date.

Tonight instead of going to bed early I created a separate RSS Feed for my Photos page. It will update every time I add a new photo. Enjoy!

Now that January is over I can post my goals without them sounds like resolutions. Maybe that will help them come true?

In an earlier post I mentioned that I wanted to prioritize some of the things in my life and I figure the easiest way to do that is to come up with some concrete goals and see how well I do at achieving them. Then I can reevaluate those goals next year and adjust them based on how I did. This should also help me decide which things truly are important to me. If I get irritated trying to keep up with certain things then it is clear that those things are not as important and I should devote the time to other endeavours.

Anyway, in no particular order, here are my goals for the year:

• Blog at least once a week
• Climb at least five times a month
• Add at least twelve new photos to my photos pageover the course of the year (the idea is to go out to take photos at least once a month)
• Cook something new at least twice a month
• Start and complete a personal programming project (possibly a recipe storage thinger accessed through my website to hold the recipes for all the new things I cook)
• Read more books, nothing concrete here because books can vary in size and readability a lot (I used to read a ton, but haven't done as much lately and I miss it)
• Travel to at least one place by plane
• Travel somewhere new in Canada
• Purchase a home of some sort

The last goal may override and/or be mutually exclusive with all of the other goals. It is also the scariest. I worry that when interest rates go up the housing market will stop being insane and prices will come down. We would like to purchase a house after that point and not before. But when will it happen? Do we just keep waiting forever? Grah.

Anyway, it should be interesting to see how I do with all of this stuff.

Today for lunch I walked to Church and Alexander to get a burrito. That's over 2km which is pretty far in the cold on a work day. But I have been restless and wanting to be outside despite the brutal cold and I had recently heard of this new burrito place in the area, Chino Locos.

Anyway, the burrito was totally worth it. The ingredients in mine were: slow roast pork, guacamole, tomatoes, edamame beans, red onions, black beans, green peppers, cilantro, cheese, sour cream, and chipotle sauce. So it's not really a "standard burrito" but who cares when it's that good. Maybe it's just the frostbite talking but I'd say it is the best burrito I've had in Toronto (and there are a lot of "gourmet" burrito places downtown).

Also of note, I decided to check out the worst block in Toronto since it was on the way (George Street between Dundas and Gerrard). It was definitely sketchy and I wouldn't really want to be there at night but, as I suspected, it wasn't that bad. Sure, about 50% of the houses are boarded up and there is a giant men's homeless shelter and there are tons of dodgy looking people loitering around, but many of the non-boarded up houses were perfectly fine, a couple were even kind of nice. Toronto doesn't really do "bad" like other cities do.

When I moved this website off the University servers and onto our shiny Dreamhost account I also "temporarily" took the website code out of revision control (CVS at the time). I intended to reformat my home machine and set up a new repository and get things all happy and good. Maintaining any code for any amount of time without using a source control system is a terrible idea.

Well it's been over two years and I've been extremely lucky that nothing bad has happened to my website yet. Today I have restored it to revision control, hosted on my still awesome ReadyNAS Duo. This time I chose Subversion since it's like CVS but a bit better. I toyed with the idea of using Git, but I determined that the extra features it adds are not really targeted at a single user environment.

This work is part of a larger endeavour I am engaged in to eventually retire my desktop computer. It was purchased in 2001 just before I entered University and it has been running almost constantly since then. I have definitely gotten good value out of that purchase. Running Linux, it is still perfectly useful for web browsing and email so I've never bothered to upgrade. However, I mostly use my laptop and now with my NAS I don't need to keep my desktop around as an SSH server or storage device. So I'm moving all my data to my NAS in an organized manner and then one day soon I will power down the desktop for good.

Unless anyone out there has a use for a machine with a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 processor with 512MB of RDRAM (yes, that version of the P4) and 120GB of hard drive space? It also has a wonderful 17" flat Sony Trinitron CRT monitor. You can't buy monitors like that anymore.

The Internet is awesome. On January 6th of this year, a guy published on his website "Two Gentlemen of Lebowski" which is an interpretation of the entire screenplay of the movie The Big Lebowski written as if it was done by William Shakespeare.

For anyone who knows and loves the movie, this new work is pure gold. It renders famous and memorable lines in ways even more hilarious than the original. Just imagining Walter (John Goodman) saying the line: "Marry, sir, my heartstrings do you tug; They urinate upon thy damnèd rug." makes me laugh out loud.

For people who haven't seen the movie enough times to memorize most of it, the Shakespeare version probably won't mean a lot. But with the Internet, all of the people from all over the world who do love the movie can come together and make something happen that could never have happened in the pre-Internet world. By January 13th the author had signed with an agent to get the work published as a book and a theatre company in New York decided to perform the production for a minimum run of two weeks starting in March. In just over a week thousands of people had read the script and generated enough interest to prompt people to invest real money into further promotion. Hopefully the copyright owners are open to this new interpretation and don't destroy it forever.

Last night Matt and I went to see Avatar in IMAX 3D. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the plot was simple and full of holes. But the visuals were simply gorgeous. I found myself just enjoying the scenery. Whenever something strange happened in the plot I simply looked around a bit and didn't worry about it because there were so many things to see. The world shown in the movie was interesting enough and had enough detail that it was almost like visiting a new place in real life. Very cool.

Also, the CG was spot on. I never really thought about the fact that none of the scenery I was enjoying was real. Weta Digital did a really good job.

In addition to a photographer we had a videographer at our wedding. I wasn't really keen on this idea as I do not like seeing myself in videos. Photos are OK because I can normally hold a non-horrifying pose for a short period of time (and bad photos can always be deleted when I fail). But video, that's a little frightening. I'm not a trained actor, I shouldn't be the main character in a video.

Anyway, over Christmas we received the finished DVD. It's really well put together with a nice set of menus and the whole collection of official photos in slideshow format. The full ceremony and the speeches from the reception make up the bulk of the content on the DVD. They were well recorded and more or less what I expected. However, unexpected by me, there were short video messages from each member of the bridal party which were totally awesome. There was also a short music video edited together by the videographer from clips of the entire day. I like the music video quite a bit as it edits out all the strange faces I make and only keeps the nicer footage. Also it's short and covers all the major events.

Another thing that happened over the Christmas break was that a lot of relatives complained that I haven't posted any wedding photos on my blog. To them I replied that I put about eighty photos up on Facebook because I figured I would reach more people that way and I was too lazy to do both. Well I was scolded for being lazy (as many of my relatives are not on Facebook) and so I have to post some photos on my blog here too. I'll probably get to that this week, but I thought I'd start out by posting the music video from the DVD. The music is "Saving Grace" by the Cranberries which was the song we had for our first dance. If you'd like to download the movie to your computer instead of just watching it on this webpage, right click here and select "Save." Enjoy!

I was up at Downsview today to check out the construction progress at John's new gym. It's looking really good! Anyway, while I was in Downsview station I took a couple pictures.

Lights on the stairs

All Trains, Downsview Station

For New Year's Kim and I hung out with Chris and John eating yummy homemade pizza and salad and cake and beer. We watched the new Star Trek on BluRay and I drank several bottles of St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout which was delicious. I recently had some on draft at C'est What and the chocolate-coffee flavours are just delicious.

Over the past week I've been playing a bunch of New Super Mario Bros. Wii which I got for Christmas. It's pretty fun. Overall the level setup and progression is a lot like Super Mario Bros. 3 for NES but there are features from all of the original Mario games up to at least Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. It's a traditional 2D platformer like the original Mario games and thus it's awesome. I played all of those games approximately a million times each so it's cool to have another in the same style.