Now that they've officially blogged about it, I think it's OK to mention here that Patrick and Toni have a new, healthy baby girl named Kiera! She was 6 weeks premature, but that doesn't seem to have done much harm. Kim and I are both super excited and happy for the new family. We have to start figuring out when can go to Australia for a visit because we can't wait to meet Kiera and see Patrick and Toni again.

If you're interested, there are already a bunch of photos posted on their blog.

For Christmas, my brother and I got my mom tickets to see Rain: The Beatles Experience, which is basically a concert put on by some of the world's foremost Beatles impersonators. This weekend was the show and we all had a great time. The performers did an amazing job and it was amusing to see all the baby-boomers in the audience really getting into it.

After the show we took my mom to Weezies, a great restaurant near King and Parliament. I had arctic char and the most delicious piece of pecan pie ever. We also enjoyed lots of wine and good conversation. Despite being in the same city as my brother we're still kinda failing at seeing each other regularly so it was nice to catch up.

Today we of course watched the Men's gold medal hockey game. It was crazy after the win, Toronto just exploded. We stepped out on our balcony and all we could hear were car horns and very excited yelling. It was pretty cool.

I love watching the Olympics! Normally I don't watch "sports" as I've never been any good at them but the Olympics are different for some reason. I just really enjoy watching them.

However, in most sports, the actual active competition bits are quite short. And in between competitors there are endless commercials and scads of obnoxious commentator banter. So while watching the Olympics I've also been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning (using my laptop). Growing up I watched a lot of the episodes, but mostly out of order in reruns and certainly not all of them. It's geeky, but so far I'm really enjoying them.

I just finished watching The Secret of Kells which is nominated for Best Animated Film at the Oscars this year. The story is about the creation of the illuminated Book of Kells (which Kim and I saw at Trinity College in Dublin last year). The film is hand drawn, traditional animation and is absolutely beautiful. Almost every frame attempts to evoke the patterns and colours of the book itself and the result is fantastic.

Perhaps the film affected me more because I've been to Ireland recently, however I think that it stands on it's own quite well too. I will definitely be buying the DVD as soon as they get a North American distributer (which seems likely given the Oscar nomination).

Check out the official website for more information, trailers and a really nice gallery of images from the movie. To see the movie, either wait for North American distribution or use the powers of the Internet to "acquire" it immediately. However, if you enjoy the movie, be sure to give financial support to the studio (Cartoon Saloon from Ireland) when it becomes possible.

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.