DTD Lives in 2011

Vote on Monday

2011-04-30T00:53:00.004-07:00

If you live in Canada and you're old enough then you need to vote on Monday, May 2nd, 2011. Starting in 1867, voter turn out has always been between 60-80% but in the last election it was a record low of 58.8%. I am not sure why so little of the population turned out to vote, but I really hope more people care about this election. Apparently there has been more than 2 million people vote in advance, so that is awesome.

So, my first message is "VOTE". No matter what party you are voting for, it makes sense to at least pay attention to the direction the country is going in and get involved at least enough to tick a box rather than hiding in the dark. I know it's a big country, but even if you don't think it affects you now, I'm sure sometime in the future taxes, wages, employment, healthcare, the environment and/or Canada's global reputation will matter to you.

You may notice that a lot of ad campaigns by the political parties focus on ripping apart their opponents - almost as much as they do on making promises about how they can do better. Normally I would say that this is a horrible practice and really everyone should just focus on making promises and then actually keeping them. Also, it is hard to say you will do better if you haven't actually been the one in power - you have little proof that you will do better. Now, I say "Normally" because this election I make an exception because I find the history of what has been done by those in power to be absolutely horrible. This election I urge you to please, please, PLEASE vote for anyone BUT the conservatives. That is, DO NOT vote for the conservatives. Stephen Harper has been slowly wrecking the country. There are many examples of it. But first something positive.

I am going to vote NDP, mostly because in my riding that is who will beat the conservative candidate, but as a bonus, NDP is who I usually vote for anyway. In my riding of Surrey North, the NDP candidate is Jasbir Sandhu. He is an all-around good guy who has lived in Surrey for more than 30 years, owns a small business, and has been an instructor at the Justice Institute of BC. I also agree with Jack Layton's stances, especially giving less money to oil companies and more to the environment. I do not own a car but I do have to breath the air. Yes I know oil is used for a lot more, but these are huge companies that don't need help.

Ok, so now onto what is wrong with the current conservative government. First of all, there is a ton of organizations and websites that seem to be against Stephen Harper. Like me, they seem to be more focused on getting him out of power than who replaces him. This is scary and I've never seen anything like the hatred before but looking at all they say and what is in the news, I understand and agree with them. Check out Project Democracy which is specifically gearing to helping Canadian pick the candidate in their riding that is most likely to beat the conservatives. This is to stop votes from being split between the other parties while the conservatives win.

It is not hard to find websites describing all Harper has done. The website below sums most of it up.
Which Canada will You vote for? - This site provides many comic strips about what Stephen Harper has done in power. Each strip can stand alone if you don't have time to read them all. If this were fiction it would seem ridiculous, but it's reality and it's scary.
Comics Evidence - Yes, those are just comics so how can we trust them? Well they also provide a page with a zillion links to the news stories that backup the comics.

On top of all that Harper somehow finds a way to be full of himself. Basically in the end I have a very hard time imagining anyone taking the country in a worse direction.

Life is Sweet

2011-04-17T20:17:00.004-07:00

Life has been busy and I have neglected this blog for a couple months, so here is an update.

In the last few months, I worked hard on editing my thesis, successfully defended it and submitted an 8 page paper to a conference on my thesis work. I am done all my school requirements now and will attend the convocation ceremony on June 15th! I'm not interested in doing a PhD, so I'm all done school. I am the main developer of my research group's software though, so they are going to hire me full time to continue working on its development. Thus, my normal life will continue without the thesis stress and with more hours of software development than before. The current deadline is a demo at a conference on May 7th and 8th.

I haven't had much time for fun and games with all the thesis work, but I regularly went to drop-in ultimate and indoor soccer to stay active. Soccer is over now because it was through school but ultimate is just getting busier now that the weather is improving. Today I ran in the Vancouver Sun Run, the largest time 10km run in North America. I finished it with the same time as last year, 52 minutes. Maybe next year I'll have more time for training.

I haven't had that much time for socializing but recently I've spent more time hanging out with other grad students, as well as the usual board game nights with friends and making sushi with my siblings. I also traveled to Edmonton for a week shortly after defending my thesis to visit my friend Toni. The trip was really fun and relaxing even though I was sick the entire time. We played in the snow, went to the museum, watched a lot of movies and played many games. It was great to escape my regular life for a while, although I did do some paper editing while there.

Las Vegas

2011-02-01T23:23:00.009-08:00

We arrived in Vegas around 7:30pm, too late to go to the opening reception for the conference. We were also exhausted.

We stayed at the Wyndham Grand Desert hotel.

We dropped our stuff everywhere in the big suite. We had the one at the end of the hall that takes up the whole width of the building but also requires you to walk the whole length of it after you get off the elevator.

Our posters had been delivered to our hotel after being printed in Vegas. Also we left a bunch of luggage there that we didn't need in the canyon.

Outside our tower was a pool and hot tub that were open 24 hours. After I checked my email in the computer room, I went in the pool and hot tub with everyone else. The hot tub had some hot waterfalls you could sit under.

The first night we went to a Chinese restaurant where we ordered some dishes to share among us all. It was a very good meal. All the meals in Vegas were quite good.

Then a couple people went back to the hotel but the rest of us wandered along the strip looking at hotels and walking through some of the casinos.

When you're on the strip everything is so big and they've also copied monuments from other parts of the world, like the Eiffel tower. The funny thing is the strip is only about 12 blocks long on one street and then the rest of Vegas around it doesn't have many high buildings, so from the air it looks really weird and also really small.

In the afternoon on the first full day of the conference was the poster viewing. I stood by my poster but even though I was #3 I was squished into a tiny aisle with a poster directly across from mine about 5 feet away. #3 means I was the 3rd person to submit a poster. For some reason, #51 was the one facing the door as you entered. I had a good chat about my poster with the one group of people who had a poster on a similar topic - decision support in the OR.

That evening we had dinner with the people from Salt Lake City because Matthias now works with us and used to work with them at the U of U. We had dinner inside the mall of the Venetian which was also the conference hotel. The mall is made to look like you are in outside Venice, or some Disney version of it. There is a perfect, lit up blue sky above you and there are canals with motorized gondolas on them. The gondoliers sing songs to their passengers as they pretend to steer the gondolas with their paddle while really steering with their foot. The Mexican place we ate it was really very good, although when we asked about the Happy Hour special which they had a sign for they said it was only for people sitting inside. As if we really were outside....under the fake sky.

That night no one really wanted to walk around and see things so I went off by myself to see the part of the strip in the other direction from the night before. The four big hotels in that direction, all around the same intersection were the MGM shown above,

the Excalibur,

New York, New York,

and Tropicana.

Here is the view of the Excalibur from my bedroom.

The next day was another full day of the conference but we decided to go see a show after the conference banquet. The banquet was quite good. It was in a club with waiters walking around with appetizers, an open bar with a limited selection (beers were pretty much just Heineken or Corona) and then a buffet of Italian-ish food. I had a good chat with some undergraduate students from UBC who were randomly at the conference and at one point confused with us because the organizers didn't know there were two groups from UBC. One of them said that another project he is working on is getting ready to install many charge stations around the lower mainland for electric cars. That is awesome.

Anyways, we went and saw the Blue Man Group after the dinner. I didn't really have any expectations. It was pretty cool. They are quite funny in how they act like children or aliens who have no idea how things work and so they play around with things in a musical art-making way. There was some audience participation which may have been planted because although the lady acted pretty normal, she was hilarious in her reaction to the blue men. Near the end of the show they basically toilet papered the whole audience, which I thought was quite the waste of paper.

I immediately thought my sisters would love the show, except that they should not visit Vegas until they are a little older. There are people on the streets everywhere trying to get you to come see naked ladies.

After the show we went to a couple different bars and walked around Vegas some more but I eventually went back to the hotel room and then for a dip in the pool before heading to bed at about 4am. I woke up a few hours later and was the only one from our group who went to a bit of the conference that morning. I took down our posters and brought them back to the hotel so we could pack up and check out of the hotel just a little late.

Our plane wasn't for a couple hours later, so we hung out in the lobby and pool area. Some guy walking by asked us what this donkey show was all about, but I have no idea.

Also in Vegas I gambled a little in the slot machines and as usual I could have won a few dollars if I'd walked away after the first 10 minutes, but instead I lost everything I put in.

Overall I was much more impressed by the Grand Canyon than Vegas. Vegas is a really weird place that I don't understand how people can live there regularly. The show we went to was pretty cool and I would like to see more shows but I think I will just catch Cirque du Soleil when it next comes to Vancouver.

Out of the Grand Canyon

2011-01-27T22:48:00.008-08:00

The next morning we woke up bright and early, had some quick breakfast, packed up and hit the trail.

We started by going across the other suspension bridge. The sun was shining, just not making it into the inner canyon.

The trail followed the Colorado river for twenty minutes or so.

Then we were heading up a valley out of the inner canyon.

There were 3 or 4 streams we had to cross by

hopping from stone to stone or stepping on logs.

Eventually we found the sun, although we were getting a good workout and
didn't really want more heat from the sun.

We were only in the sun a little while before we rounded a corner
and went right back into the shade.

We hiked for a while just inside the shade line and stopped for a snack
at a place where we could stand above or below it.

After 2 hours of hiking we made it to the other campground where there was water.

Then began the final long leg of the journey. We basically had to hike to the level of the top of those high walls in the distance. When walking towards these walls it was a mystery to me which way we would go in order to get up them. It appeared we were walking into a dead end with steep walls all around.

The trail had a lot of switch backs and managed to wind its way
in between and around the steep parts.

Still, we never went around any large corners, we could always
look back and see how far we had come.

The trail went up through the gap in the top right.

The look back became more and more spectacular.

Because of the direction the slope faced we were in the shade until the top. After the 3-mile rest house (3 miles from the top) we passed a lot of people coming down on day hikes or couple hour hikes. Some young Japanese tourists were not wearing jackets and they were walking down along the icy trails in sneakers.

This diagram was in the 1.5 mile rest house,
which is in the hermit shale layer of the Grand Canyon.

The view of the canyon getting really close to the top.

Sometimes you have to let mules pass.

The view from the top...and my last photo of the Grand Canyon.

The hiking trip was awesome. The views were amazing and it was not crowded or hot this time of year. The thing that surprised me the most was the level of difficulty of the hike. I did not find it challenging and it only took us 4 hours to get down and 6 hours to get all the way back up. The steepness of the trails is much less than the Squamish Chief or the Grouse Grind. I suppose it needs to be so people can backpack in.

Next we drove back to Vegas for the conference...the reason I was in the US.

Into the Grand Canyon

2011-01-21T00:11:00.007-08:00

On Jan. 10th, 2011 we arrived at the Grand Canyon at about 8pm Arizona time (7pm BC time). It was after dark and much too late to pick up our back country permits so we were forced to camp on the rim.

I went there with 4 coworkers from my hospital job. We would later attend a conference in Vegas. So anyway, it was Joanne's birthday so we had a chocolate birthday cake for her.

I slept in this 3-person tent between two other guys, which is perhaps how I survived since it was about -19C and the sleeping bag I brought said 4C on it and I had been told it was rated "comfort:11, limit:6, and extreme:-7". There was a heated washroom I could have slept in but that would have been admitting defeat. I wore many layers so just my feet were cold.

The next morning we woke up around dawn and drove and then took a bus to the South Kaibab trailhead. We hiked down the South Kaibab Trail all the way, across the Kaibab suspension bridge and over to the Bright Angel campground. The next day we crossed the other bridge and took the Bright Angel trail back up.

Here is my first view of the canyon that morning. It is hard to capture the hugeness of it in a photo. It is hard to even comprehend the hugeness of it when you're there.

For the first half of the hike there was snow near the trail and sometimes it was icy. A lot of the trail is steps but not very steep steps. Mules have to walk up and down the trails. Sometimes like this we were walking with steep slopes and a good view on both sides. There are no guard rails.

Down there is a cliff where the snow ends.

It was often easy to see very far in front of us to where we would be in 10 minutes or half an hour. The trail ahead wound around the right side of the pillar of rock past the end of the snow.

Here we are going behind that pillar. We were often on the edge of cliffs.

Some mules passed us on the trail.

We ate some lunch here, just before this gap to ascend into the inner rim.

Once through there we could see down to the Colorado river. You can see a trail way down there near the river that we hiked along the next day on our way back up.

There was more red sand at this level. The canyon has many different layers.

Here's a group photo minus Matthias who took it. I borrowed Jon's Olympics toque for the trip because mine somehow got left in my luggage at the hotel in Vegas.

Here's a view of the suspension bridge from above. It has many cables, so it isn't the kind that dips down or swings. They initially brought down all the cables on men's backs...not by mule.

This is looking back across the bridge at the short dark tunnel that got us there.

After setting up camp, we walked over to the nearby Phantom Ranch where hikers can pay to stay in cabins. They had a canteen there which we got some hot chocolate at. We also went back later and had some beers and played trivial pursuit.

There were deer that wandered right through the campsites. Also, late at night we saw a skunk and also a ringtail. There were also a few birds including a woodpecker.

There were many cacti at different levels of the canyon but the most at the bottom near the river.

I have sooo many more photos so I will probably put them up on facebook or flickr. Also, I will make another post about the hike back out.

Christmas 2010

2011-01-05T17:13:00.007-08:00

As per usual, I will now blog about events that happened weeks ago.

First, I saw some of the lunar eclipse, which was the first total lunar eclipse in 3 years and the first total lunar eclipse on the day of Winter Solstice since 1638! Unfortunately for most of the time, the moon was hidden behind clouds.

For Christmas, I was on Saltspring Island from Dec. 22nd - 28th. Christmas was much like Thanksgiving, my whole family + one (this time Eric) crammed into my parent's new place and we did a few things outside, but the weather was crappy and my dad managed to re-injure his leg. I think perhaps all of us visiting is bad luck. I think he will be fine, but the injury has meant he won't be skiing again soon.

Farley and I arrived on a ferry Wednesday night.

The house was all decorated with lights, a Christmas tree and this little village of houses.

My little sister played the piano at least once a day while we were there. She is the youngest but probably the most musical of our whole family, since she is also learning the flute.

My brother Ben showed up on Thursday. Ben, my two sisters and I played some games of Robo Rally. I won one of them and my sister won the second after a great come back.

On Friday, it was Christmas eve. Rebecca and Eric showed up and we iced lots of gingerbread cookies.

We had smarties, mints, chocolates and three colours of icing. Farley chipped at the mints with a knife in order to create a powder which he sprinkled on his gingerbread man. My man looked like some kind of bird.

We played a game of Rumikub, like Rummy except with tiles. I did pretty bad on the last round but won the game by a lot of points.

On Christmas morning there was much giving of presents. My little sister made me a board game by drawing a map on a piece of paper and making many cards as well as folding some paper frogs for the game pieces. We played it and I managed to win.

The cat terrorized the window sticker town.

My brother Ben got me the portable edition of Settlers of Catan which we played a few times. I won the first game but lost all the rest. It's very convenient for playing in a car or on the ferry and the only thing I don't like is how the desert always has to be the middle hex.

I also got my sisters Dominion, a card game that is very quick and fun to play. We played it more than anything that week and my sister and I won as a team the first time.

We also had a couple family games nights. For the first one we were in pairs and earned points in completing the lyrics to Christmas songs, talk about it (like taboo), outburst, charades, and probe. On the second night we played the dictionary game (like Balderdash) and minutes to limit a game where you try and come up with words that start with a certain letter and fit a certain category.

My little sister and I went on a walk at dusk and she showed me around the bushes down the far side of their property. Then we cut down the neighbors drive way (which is partly on their property) and walked to one of the nearby lakes.

At dusk the lake looked very spooky. I also went on a walk with my mom and Ben to another lake during the trip and another walk with Natalie at 10pm where we saw a star made out of lights that appeared to hang in mid air. Walks at night are pitch black because there are no street lights. There is also not much of a shoulder so we took a flashlight to let cars know we were there.

Triscuit like to lie by the fire.

I played disc golf three times on the trip with scores around par 4. At the start of the second game Farley lost his disc way off to the side in the bushes. The wet weather made the ground a swamp and so we were all clambering over logs looking for it when my dad slipped and hurt his leg. He also fell onto the lost disc. Farley also lost his disc on the first throw of the third game but I found it without anyone getting hurt.

On boxing day my grandpa and his wife visited and I learned a little more of my family history. Two of my great grandparents were born in Scottland and that side of the family is from Glasgow. This is where the Dunsmuir name comes from. Farley left us on this day to meet his girlfriend in Surrey.

On Monday, the last full day on the island we went on a tour of the island, visiting some of the beach access.

It is too bad the weather was ugly while I was there. Of course, I didn't expect to be able to go swimming so I hadn't brought my swim trunks. In the summer, it will be awesome to visit their place though, because they are surrounded by 3 lakes, all within walking distance and you can swim in any of them. Christmas was very fun with lots of family time and board games...soo many board games!

Up next...a camping trip in the Grand Canyon followed immediately by a conference in Vegas.

Visiting Seattle

2010-12-28T22:55:00.008-08:00

Back on Dec. 18th I spent only 8 hours in Seattle but it was first time seeing Seattle so I tried to soak up as much as I could.

I was dropped off near the Space Needle.

Instead of going up the needle, I decided to check out the science fiction museum and experience music project.

There was one room with many pieces of science fiction props, a timeline of science fiction and many video clips to watch. R2D2 was in the robots section.

An animatronic Donatello was also behind glass.

They had a fan-made borg costume and also this face piece that Patrick Stewart wore when Picard was transformed into a borg in a Star Trek TNG episode.

They also had the model used as the Death Star in Star Wars. It is about a meter wide and the backside of it is not complete. Instead you can see inside it where they put a light bulb to make light shine out of it.

Upstairs they had a Battlestar Galactica exhibit and since I've never seen a full episode this chart was useful.

They had a couple full size ships from the series along with a model of the galactica main ship. They also had some costumes that characters on the show have worn. What was most entertaining to me was an interactive monitor that presented moral choices that occurred in the show. Then I had to pick an action and it told me what percent of people agreed with me and also a clip of what they actually did on the show.

The experience music project was cool too. They had this big sculpture made of nearly 700 instruments stuck together, 40 of which are self-playing instruments. The big exhibit there was for Jimi Hendrix who I'm not really a fan of but it was still interesting. I went into a theater and watched part of a concert of his where he smashed his guitar, poured gasoline on it and then lit it on fire. At the EMP they also had many booths where you could learn to play an instrument and rooms where you could record yourself. I could have spent most of a day in these two places if I had more time.

Back outside I walked around the building to see its crazy architecture. In the area was a closed down carnival with some little rides. There was also a monorail but I wanted to walk across Seattle.

My next stop was the Hurricane Cafe which some friends recommended to me as a place to really fill up - a typical greasy spoon diner. I had a taco salad there that was really good. Then I walked to downtown Seattle and along the waterfront for a while passed many piers until I reached Pike Place market. It's like Granville Island except inside one giant building in many levels going up a hill. Seattle is much steeper than Vancouver.

I went passed the fish market which didn't look too amazing except that everyone was taking photos of it, so I did too.

Then I visited the library which is shaped really weird with an overhang.

The 4th floor is all red.

The escalators are all very green and the stairs are orange.

I sat on the big open 10th floor for a while and read a book.

The walls were sloped inward on two sides.

They were sloped outward on the other two sides. Later I went online with my laptop on the library's free wifi. I talked to Gordon who told me the library was designed to look like a stack of books. Ah, now it makes more sense.

Outside I went back over near Pike Place to visit the original Starbucks because I had a couple more hours until my bus left.

On the way I passed this very odd building that I wouldn't want to work in.

I went south and located the Amtrak station where my bus wasn't going to leave for an hour so I searched for food in the area. There wasn't much around there but I found a place called Samurai Noodles. Upon entering, I was surprised to find all the employees were caucasian. I'm so used to having any asian restaurant in the lower mainland be actually run by asian people. Anyways, the food was still quite good.

My bus trip back was uneventful as I slept almost the whole way but had to wake up to walk through customs at the border. I got home around 1am and collapsed into bed. I had succeeded in visiting all the places my friends suggested. My brother went to Seattle a couple weeks later and saw a lot more of it than I did because he did not restrict himself to just the downtown area. Next time I'm there I definitely want to check out the chocolate factory/shop he went to.

Visiting Boeing

2010-12-20T01:07:00.004-08:00

Last week I went on a journey south to the Seattle area to take part in a face to face meeting between people from SFU, UBC, Dalhousie and Boeing. The Dalhousie group is joining our Canadian visual analytics efforts and I went to present a demo of our software CZSaw to them and to people at Boeing. I also got to see the big Boeing factory. I didn't take any photos of any part of it though.

My supervisor originally asked me if I was free Mon - Wed to visit Boeing and then later he wanted me to come down Sunday and return Wednesday. I wanted to go to Brad's sushi birthday dinner on Sunday night so I hoped to go down late Sunday. So he said I could rent a car and drive down late Sunday and I would get reimbursed. Unfortunately, I haven't driven a car in a year and a half. Driving an unfamiliar rented car in the dark in the winter across an international border is not my idea of the best way to begin driving again. Luckily some other people were heading down super early Monday morning.

I was picked up around 6:15am in Surrey. Near Seattle we used the HOV lane to skip most of the traffic and get to the Bellevue Boeing site perfectly on time. We were given special passes to get passed the gate which labeled us as international guests who needed to be escorted. The morning talks were by software engineers at Boeing and they were quite interesting. They provided lunch in the same room and then in the afternoon I gave my presentation.

The only thing I screwed up on during the trip was forgetting to bring my HDMI to VGA adapter to be able to plug my mac into the projector. I still don't know where it is. When I got there in the morning I realized that all the Boeing employees had Dell laptops. Also, all the guests with macs had the new mini ports so they had different adapters. So I was forced to do the presentation on my supervisor's laptop. We were prepared for that as a backup though.

The presentation went great. I was demoing the old version 1 of CZSaw, while we have been working on developing version 2. Progress is slow on the new version and it's not ready for a good demo. By now I am very used to demoing CZSaw 1 as I did it many times at VAST. I went through many different features during my 20 minute presentation. There was some good discussion and questions about it.

After my presentation, a Phd student and a professor from SFU Burnaby gave a presentation on some text analytics that could be added to CZSaw. They were the ones that gave me a ride down to Seattle and they proceeded to give a demo using CZSaw with some data they had crafted. It was awesome that they were able to give a demo after just receiving CZSaw a couple weeks before and with no training and on a different operating system (Mac) then my demo. Woot.. Java! Still, it was hard to watch him accomplish things the long way around instead of the quick ways I use. Apparently a few things need to be more intuitive. The extensions they propose to our tool would be great and I look forward to working with them soon.

After all the presentations we had a break before dinner plans, so I checked into my hotel room and went online. I ended up doing some programming on version 2 before heading out to dinner. We had dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant and the food was pretty good. I had grilled swordfish. After dinner I did a lot more coding to get ready for our internal demo of CZSaw version 2 later that week back at SFU.

The next day I had to wake up early (7am) to head north to the Everett Boeing factory. I caught a ride with some professors at 8am after the continental breakfast. We were given a presentation from some ergonomics Boeing people about reducing injuries that mechanics get. Over the last few months, one of our students used Tableau and helped them very quickly analyze some data to determine what tasks were causing the most injuries. Tableau allowed them to shrink a task that would have taken weeks in Excel down to only a matter of hours in Tableau.

After the presentation we caught a little bus across the Boeing campus to the giant airplane factory. The factory holds many planes being built in 4 bays with huge doors that can be opened to tow a plane out. Inside the bays are open with the ceiling about 6 floors up (there are 6 floors of offices between the bays). We had to wear protective glasses and were driven around on 3 little carts through the streets inside the factory.

We got to go inside two 777 planes at different stages of production. We were in the cargo hold of one and in the passenger cabin of the other. It was before any of the inside lining had covered things up and you could see a huge space above the cabin that I didn't know was there. Apparently on long flights, crew can sleep up there. The planes were part of a moving line as they slowly move forward the whole time across the bay floor. They have to be all finished by the time they reach the end of the bay so that they can then be wheeled out the door. So basically, pieces of planes go in one side and finished planes come out the other. The coolest thing about the factory was just how massive the building is and how big the planes are inside it. Normally you don't really get close to a plane outside of it, you just walk down the enclosed ramp. It was cool to walk under the huge tail wing of a 777 and marvel at how it gets off the ground.

After the tour we caught a bus back to the first building and ate lunch in the cafeteria where they had a huge variety of food. Then we drove back to Bellevue. There were some business meetings in the afternoon which I sat in but mostly because I had no where else to go. I did some coding. That night we had dinner together at a delicious Mexican restaurant. That was after my supervisor and all the professors from Vancouver already left. I failed to get the schedule changes that there was nothing really happening on Wednesday, so while they went back I had another night in the hotel.

Luckily I made up for it by getting a meeting scheduled to demo CZSaw one on one to a software engineer / analyst at Boeing. It was another great meetings as he had some good feedback about the tool and how we might improve it. I think we will take trips to Boeing more often now.

After the early morning meeting I met up with another student and a guy from a Vancouver Boeing subsidiary to catch a ride to downtown Seattle. I spent 8 hours in Seattle seeing the sight before heading home. I took a lot of photos for that part of the trip, so I'll put that in the next blog post.

VisWeek 2010

2010-11-05T23:14:00.006-07:00

So, it has been about a week since I returned from VisWeek 2010. This year's conference was just as educational and fun and probably more useful to me than last year's conference. There were many more SIAT students there this year than last year and my research group was attending with a different agenda this year.

I was volunteering once again so we flew in on Saturday the day before the conference. I did some registration bag stuffing which was supposed to be 1:45 but was really only 20 minutes because we finished everything. Then in the evening there was a quick training session where they basically read out the online FAQ's about the volunteer tasks. I wasn't doing anymore shifts until Wednesday after VAST.

This year I began the conference Sunday morning with a 3 minute presentation along with many other 3 minute presentations from award winners involved in the VAST Challenge. It was in this rather small room in front of about 50 people.

Those in my CZSaw research group received an award for Mini Challenge 1 and also along with some other students we were given an award for our Grand Challenge entry too. The workshop was all day Sunday with presentations and a panel in the morning. There were some interesting ideas about how to change the challenge for next year. They might add or edit the data halfway through it or they might have a challenge with less of an absolute answer underneath everything (closer to real life challenges).

At lunch Eric and I went out to lunch with Awalin, another grad student from U of Maryland. She won an award in Mini Challenge 3 by using a plagiarism detector on genetic sequence data. Another Mini Challenge 3 winner came from a research group that came up with many crazy ideas when brainstorming solution methods. One involved each genetic stream being used as the pattern for the levels of a zombie video game. His name was Harshawardhan, but if anyone said his name it was usually just shortened to Harsh.

In the afternoon there was a time for everyone to give demos to everyone else although really everyone was just wandering around to others spots and I was busy giving demos half the time so I didn't talk to everyone else. The other half the time Eric was giving demos.

I demoed for Will, a student from UBC who won a VAST challenge with a team from there 3 years ago. He had seen the very early version of my Semantic Zoom View when it was a class project in a class we both took at UBC last fall. Now it is part of CZSaw and it's my thesis project.

I demoed for John Stasko, the professor at Georgia Tech who created the system CZSaw's data views were inspired by. That was great because we had a conversation about how the two systems are different and the hard problems to tackle. When he saw the SZV (that is my thesis) he was interested enough to say that he must get his student to come talk to me about it, so a little later I was demoing it for the student and explaining the algorithms behind it. I don't worry about them copying my approach. Instead I'd be really happy if they did because it'd mean they also think it's useful to analysts. I suppose this is one large difference between academia and the corporate world.

I demoed for Pascale Proulx, a lady from Oculus Info Inc., the leading Visual Analytics software company in Canada. They make really cool temporal geographical software called GeoTime and a visual analytics environment called nSpace. She was there to receive their award for Mini Challenge 1. They have won an award 4 out of 5 years now. She seemed interest in the SZV too, but unfortunately our demo was cut short because the demo session was over. I failed to remember to give her my card and except for her presentation the next day I never saw her again. I believe after the presentation she must have caught a flight out.

Next there was a short discussion about the future of the challenge and then a conclusion. Most of the main challenge organizers are not going to be directly involved anymore and it will need to be run by volunteers so it may be challenging to put one on next year. One of their biggest tasks is making up the fake data for the challenges.

So Monday and Tuesday there was the Visual Analytics Science & Technology conference (VAST) and I went to almost all the paper sessions for it. There was also a VAST Challenge panel Monday afternoon and my co-supervisor Chris presented for our group. Here's one of the organizers slides announcing our award.

Here's a slide I made for Chris' presentation that shows my Semantic Zoom View. It helped us to solve the challenge. After the VAST Challenge panel, there were fast forward, 30 second long presentations as trailers for the posters and interactive demos. Eric did you fast forward presentation.

The last thing left for Eric and I to do with regards to CZSaw was demo it throughout the week. We had registered it as an interactive demo so we at least needed to demo it during the poster sessions Monday and Wednesday evenings. Originally they put us at the dark end of one of the poster rooms. Not many people came by and got a demo.

Then they moved us to the bright open exhibit room which was packed during the breaks. The reason it was packed was because that's where they put the coffee and the snacks. Here I am with the CZSaw poster, used both during the workshop and the rest of the week in our demo spot.
One of the people I demoed for is Chris Stolte, vice president of Tableau software. Tableau would be an awesome place to work as they make software for data visualization that is so much better than Excel. I am using Tableau for analysis of my data for the study that's part of my thesis. Anyways, he was impressed enough by CZSaw and the SZV that he asked me what I was currently doing and I said I was graduating soon. Then he said Tableau was hiring. I said I would love to work at a company like Tableau and he said Tableau needs people who can make interactive visualizations like the ones I have made. It was awesome! Of course first I have to focus on graduating. He said he's not allowed to tell me to apply before I have graduated. I said I would not throw away 2 years of my life by just dropping out. I've got to finish first. He went to Stanford but he also did his undergrad at SFU. Anyways, I gave him my card.

Throughout the week Eric and I demoed for a variety of students and professors and people from industry. We demoed for Ted Selker, who invented the trackpoint, the little nub in the middle of the IBM thinkpad keyboards that is an isometric joystick for moving the cursor around. I also gave him my card.

When I was volunteering during the second half of the week Eric did much demoing of CZSaw, sometimes to large crowds. CZSaw definitely got a lot of attention between winning the awards and being demoed throughout the week.

With the fun of being a student volunteer I connected with many more students than I otherwise would. However the more useful part of the conference was the demoing of CZSaw that really helped me show my work and skills to some key people in industry. They not only gave us some useful feedback for further development of our tool, but also now hopefully they remember who I am.

Salt Lake City

2010-10-31T22:22:00.007-07:00

So before I make a post about the actual conference, I wanted to post about Salt Lake City and the fun times I had outside of the actual conference.

The conference was held in the building on the left which is the Grand America hotel that was created for the Olympics. The building on the right is the Little America hotel where I stayed along with all the other student volunteers.

The two hotels were across the street from each other. The UTA train ran down the center of the street and also there were flags provided to use to cross the street and make yourself more visible.

There was snow on the mountains around the city. The city itself is at a high elevation of 1288 m, so none of the mountains around it have any trees on them. It's quite different from the Vancouver area.

On the third night there (Monday) some other students and I checked out a place called the Bayou. It was a cajun restaurant (think New Orleans) with a huge beer menu (Beervana they called it) with 255 beers from around the world. The only strict drinking law left in Utah is that you can't have a double shot. I tried some local beer and some Czech beer and Andrew bought me a beer for my birthday. We all split a slice of alligator cheesecake which was an appetizer, not a dessert. It was not that great - it just tasted and felt like cornbread.

On Tuesday at lunch time I went to check out the University of Utah disc golf course. Unfortunately I missed the train and unlike the skytrain they only run every 15 minutes. I decided to walk and it took me about 50 minutes.

The disc golf course had a great view of the city and I could see the conference hotel waaaay off in the distance. The baskets on the course looked almost brand new but I was the only one on the course the whole time I was there.

I really sucked at the course but it was still lots of fun. I played through it quickly, jogging up to my disc so I could head back to the conference at the end of the lunch break.

The park it was in was right next to the last train station so it was easy to just catch the train after I finished playing.

After I got off the train I took some photos of the city-county building which was a block from our hotel. There were many buildings in the city that looked like castles (most of them churches or temples).

That night I went back to the Bayou, but this time with some professors and a guy from Boeing who we work with. When we left the restaurant it was snowing! Here's the view from the balcony of my hotel room. The snow melted over the next couple days.

On Wednesday morning I got up a little earlier than I needed so I went and took some photos in the courtyard of the Grand America. The hotel was very fancy!

That night a huge group of mostly students went out to a bar called the Beerhive. It had a decently big selection of beers and there were pool tables and a foosball table. We played many games of foosball and I improved a little bit on defense, but ultimately let in a very weak goal and then decided to retire.

When the bar was about to close up, the only three students left, Alex, Andrew and I decided to walk a few blocks north to see the big temple since I hadn't seen it yet. This is the train going by as we walked.

Here's the temple all lit up and looking like a disney castle. It's pretty intense.

When we got back to the hotels Andrew decided to be very safe in walking out onto the street. I'm not sure why, since we didn't even need to cross!

The next morning I took a photo from the balcony of the 2nd floor of the Grand America.

Thursday evening was the student volunteer party. It was on the 9th floor of the Grand America and this is facing north from its balcony towards the rest of downtown SLC.

The party was a really good time as they gave us lots of pizza, wings and beer, and of course we had the good company. There was much mingling and meeting new people.

There was also a little bit of dancing but it never really picked up. It was always just a few people dancing with everyone else watching.

Before the party I went in the pool of the Little America which was half indoors and half outdoors. You could swim under a divider to get to the other half. It was quite chilly outside but the pool was on the 2nd floor and I watched the sun set. I also went in again the next morning really early. The pool hours were 4am-11pm.

After the conference ended in the early afternoon we got a taxi to the airport and then a flight back to Seattle. Overall the week was a lot of fun. Next I'll have to post about the work and school portion of the week, which was the reason I was there!

I am 27!

2010-10-22T01:28:00.003-07:00

I had my birthday a couple days ago and now I'm older. Also, I had some new experiences last weekend.

First, on Saturday I went to a football game with some other grad students, but I forgot my camera. It was a BC Lions game at the temporary Empire field. I think I may have seen one of their games before but it was a long time ago. The other grad students were mostly international students who had never watched a football game before.

The game was rather boring. They were playing Edmonton, one of the only teams in the league that had a worse record then them. Edmonton managed to pull ahead and it got exciting at the end when BC managed to tie it up. Then it went into overtime and BC lost. There were some weird calls by the refs that we couldn't figure out which sucked.

During the game there were a lot of little orange footballs thrown into the crowd. Some people took these and threw them at the cheerleaders and lots of people threw them on the field at the end of the game. Also, there were 2 and a half streakers that ran onto the field. One guy made it all the way from one end to the other dodging many security guys and an Eskimos player before he was tackled in the far corner. Another guy knocked down a couple of the security guards before he was grabbed. They announced a few times that any fans running onto the field would be arrested whether they're wearing clothes or not.

So another thing I had on Saturday night which was actually scheduled to start at the exact same time was a LAN party. My friend Nate hosted one and I showed up really late - after the football game and transit back to Surrey. I've never been to a LAN party and I suck at computer games but it was still lots of fun. We played Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. I also played a little Portal at the end of the night. It was a really late night!

On Monday I went over to my grandmas to celebrate my birthday with a few relatives. My brother, grandma, cousins and aunt were there and we had some ice cream cake with a smilie face on it.

I went there on Monday because Tuesday (my actual birthday) was quite busy. I usually have a few meetings at school plus ultimate in the evening. My research group is busy preparing for a conference that I leave for on Friday. We needed to spend our group meeting looking at our poster and our slides to get them in good shape, but everyone was taking forever showing up and getting ready to go. Finally everyone was there and then they brought in a cake and sang Happy Birthday! By that point I kind of guessed that was going on, but that didn't make it any less awesome. It was a lemon meringue cake and very good. We ate it while having our meeting.

That night I went to ultimate and got the usual hardcore workout. My friend Adam showed up who hasn't come in forever. I had tried to get people to come out to ultimate and/or the pub afterwards to celebrate. So, after ultimate Gordon drove us to the pub where a bunch of my friends were waiting and we hung out for a bit. They bought me a King Kong shot, a dirty martini, and a flaming lamborghini. The shots were quite good when I expected them to be strong, they instead tasted great. It was a fun time and a good casual celebration of my birthday.

I've been busy pretty continuously since then, getting ready for the conference and my normal routine. I went to indoor soccer again this week and some people showed up. We played a couple games of 3 on 3 and hopefully more people show up in the future. Also, I went to the documentary night some grad students organized and we watched Man on Wire about the guy who walked on a wire between the world trade center towers. It was very dramatically done and entertaining. I also went to the swim night and this time we had it at the Newton Wave pool. I swear it used to have a big rectangular pool as part of it but now it's gone...replaced with gyms. Also, the bit of the waterslide that goes outside, that you see from the bus station, is now a lie. It's not part of a functional waterslide anymore, although there are still 2 waterslides.

Yeah, so life has been crazy with me fitting in time for these things around my thesis writing time and my prep time for this conference. Friday we drive across the border and stay in Seattle and then Saturday morning we fly to Salt Lake City where the conference is. I am a student volunteer at the conference putting in 22 hours of my time. Also, I will be making a short 3-minute presentation on Sunday morning, and then demoing our software many times throughout the week. I'm excited.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2010

2010-10-15T00:21:00.009-07:00

This Thanksgiving weekend was very memorable for many reasons, one of them not good. 10/10/10 was definitely an unlucky day for us, although it could have been much worse.

So for the weekend I went to Saltspring Island to my parents' new house where my two little sisters also live. My brother Farley and his girlfriend Jenny, and my sister Rebecca and her common-law man Eric, and my other brother Ben also went there for the weekend. We had 10 people in a 2-bedroom + cottage/shed place. Ben's girlfriend Kyla and Jenny and Farley's friend Alex also visited during the weekend.

So those of us coming from the mainland were picked up by my dad and sisters on Saturday afternoon and we decided to go play a round of disc golf. I haven't played that much recently so I now suck at it but it's lots of fun and Saltspring has a nice course. Unfortunately it started to rain harder and so we got quite wet. We also had agreed to meet my sister at a certain time because she wanted to wander around town instead of play. So we ran out of time and I only did 15 holes. I found someone's lost disc with no name on it though so that's good because I recently lost a couple discs.

So later that day we celebrated my birthday because I won't see most of my family again until a while after my birthday. Mom made one of my favourite meals, firecracker casserole, and then we had some birthday cake and ice cream.

Some of us also played Robo Rally which is one of my favourite board games. I brought a few boards games with me. We played a lot of board games over the weekend and I won many times.

So the next day the sun was shining and the rain had stopped even though that wasn't in the forecast. We thought this was awesome and a great day to go for a big hike.

It was a beautiful day but the mountain did not like us. The mountain is Mt Maxwell and the lookout gives more than a 180 degree view of south Saltspring Island and Vancouver Island.

We wanted to hike down from here to the valley below and then have my mom come pick us up.

Of course we couldn't hike straight down because it was a cliff. There's my siblings and my mom in the top left corner of the photo. So what we had to do was hike along the cliffs and bluffs until it gradually got easy enough to go down and cut back around to below the cliffs.

Ok, so then my sister saw a lizard.

Anyway, Ben and my mom were going to meet us later at the bottom so we said goodbye to them and started out.

It was a nice hike for a little while. We jumped across some little cracks and at some places we had to use our hands to get up or down over some rocks. Unfortunately the rocks were a little bit wet from the day before.

We came across some parts of rock like this where people had put in clips for rock climbing up them.

It was near one of these that the unfortunate accident happened. Here I was with my sister Natalie and she was taking a photo of the view. Rebecca and Eric were behind us and my dad had gone on a little ahead below us. So then I went down the next little bit and I was out of site of everyone else. At that point Natalie was going to take a photo of my dad who was below her. Then I hear Natalie say "Oh..dad, are you alright? Are you OK?" and my dad started cursing.

So then I came around the corner and my dad was lying on the slope with his head downhill from his legs and he's holding his leg and his binoculars are all twisted and dangling. His leg had a few gashes in it with a nasty one on his knee and one below his knee that went all the way into the bone! There was blood done his leg but it didn't seem to be bleeding much. I was so stunned and I didn't immediately know what to do.

My dad must have been in a lot of pain but one of the first things he said was to get his binoculars off of him so I helped get the strap from those off of his head and his arm while he turned himself right side up.

Then my sister arrived and took charge. She had recently taken a first aid course for her work. She also had a small first aid kit. We poured some water on the wounds and then I took off my shirt and they tied it tight around his leg to put pressure on the wound. He could still feel his toes and he didn't break any bones.

My dad kept apologizing for ruining the hike, and even at one point said we could continue without him, which was ridiculous. So then we started to hike back up to the parking lot because we were much closer to it than the bottom. We helped my dad climb up and down the steep parts while he hobbled along but the path was quite narrow at some places.

My dad suggested a couple of us go ahead and get a ride from someone at the parking lot. Natalie and I hurried ahead and I ran into the parking lot just as my mom was pulling out. It turns out the two of them had sat at the top for a while and then slowly made their way back to the van following a little bird. It was lucky for us because they were able to give us all a ride back down the mountain and over to the hospital.

It is really good my family now lives on an island that has a hospital. My dad used the first aid kit from the car to help his leg a little as we made our way to the hospital. At the hospital we waited for a few hours while the doctor cleaned up the wounds, tried to find the chip of bone that was missing, and did some stitching and then put 38 staples into my dad's leg. I am extremely grateful nothing worse happened to my dad or any of us and that we got to the hospital quickly and they were able to see him right away.

So after my dad was all bandaged up we helped him into the van and then we drove home and my mom tried to keep it slow driving along the twisty roads. At home my dad was able to hobble up the porch stairs by himself. For the rest of my visit my dad slept a lot or watched TV in his recliner but unfortunately my parents bedroom is upstairs but not behind a closed door and there were a lot of us squished into the living room.

So I setup some of the patio furniture on the bluff down the hill from the house to try and give him a little peace and quiet. We played a game of Settlers of Catan and my mom brought us some popcorn and beer. It was not as epic a location as playing Risk on the shores of Galiano and my 13 year old sister won (she had no beer) but it was still lots of fun. It also got our minds off the earlier part of the day. Ben didn't play but took some photos of the game with my camera.

He also took some photos of Triscuit.

Later that night we had a big Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing and two pies for dessert but my dad slept through it. He had some later but it's too bad that he was not able to eat with us. We were all thankful for much the same thing - that nothing worse happened that day.

Monday we mostly stuck around the house because we didn't want to go off on any big adventures without my dad and wanted to make sure he was recovering ok. But, again we didn't want to spend all day being noisy in his space.

So there were some antics with this bird that
Natalie loves so much but who actually belongs to Emily.

The bird went into the basket.

They also put the bird on the clothesline.

So the bird went for a bit of a zipline.

I also spent a little time up on the living roof...
but the door closed on us and Farley wouldn't let us back in for a bit.

Then in the afternoon we decided to give my dad full peace and quiet for a little bit and so we walked over to a farm where they make and sell lots of fancy cheeses. They also sell olives from around the world. I bought some cheese that has hot chilis in the bottom. It was really good!

I had to take another photo of Trisuit because she has so much fun peering in the many windows now from the porch that wraps around most of their house.

Oh yes, and my little sister who is much heavier than she used to be insisted on getting a shoulder ride still. She reminds me of Gollum in this photo. Yikes! I also gave my mom a piggy back ride during the walk back from the farm. She's a lot lighter than Natalie.

Overall the one word to describe the weekend is "memorable". Aside from the injury my dad suffered it was a fun weekend with the family. My dad is currently having a tough time recovering but he's a tough guy and I expect he'll get through it in less time than the average person.

The Near Future - October 2010

2010-10-08T00:03:00.002-07:00

First the recent past again, then the future. This week has been pretty busy.

I wrote an outline for my thesis and gave it to my supervisors, although I have already written a bunch of pages in some of the parts. It's crazy that the biggest task left is just the writing of my thesis. I'm also working on some analysis of my study data. It's not good. I don't think the numbers prove anything. I learned a ton watching people use the tool and hopefully that's good enough for a master's thesis.

I also gave a presentation to some first year students about our lab and what we do as grad students in it. It went well, I made some jokes and they laughed and hopefully some of them found the subject interesting.

I also went to one of the Vancouver International Film Festival movies with my brother who bought 20 movie tickets. I used one of his tickets but my birthday is just around the corner and he did stay at my house for a week. We saw End of Animal, a Korean film directed and written by someone just out of film school. It was one of the first times it aired outside of Korea and the director/writer and producer were in the audience. The director introduced the film by warning that it might get boring at times. It really wasn't...it was very intense and quite dark. Afterward, the audience asked him questions through a translator. It was pretty sweet to hear directly from the director.

On Tuesday I went to drop-in ultimate and got a good workout. Tonight I went to the pool for some swimming but the damn deep end was closed again for some water polo practice.

So I have a really busy month ahead of me.

I am continuing work on my thesis and analysis of study results. But I'm also doing an internship with a sub-company of Boeing called AeroInfo so I need to get a lot of work done on our software for this.

On top of that I need to prepare for the VisWeek conferences in Salt Lake City from October 23rd - 29th. We have 3 presentations there of varying lengths and a lot of demoing. I will most likely be doing the medium length presentation of 3 minutes. It's at the start of the workshop we're going to along with all the other people who submitted entries to the challenge. The conference should be awesome. I went last year and this year I am again a student volunteer. I should meet a lot of new people and recognize many from last year. I've managed to schedule all my volunteer hours so I have no hours on the VAST presentation days. The conference location in Utah is pretty much the opposite of Atlantic City where it was last year. Maybe I will get more sleep this time around.

In the short term future of next weekend I'm going to the BC lions football game with some other grad students. Also, there is a LAN party at a friends house. I don't think I've technically ever been to one of those. I will most likely be slaughtered in a variety of games.

In the shorter term future I am traveling on Friday to my parent's new place on Saltspring Island for Thanksgiving weekend and also an early celebration of my birthday. Last time I visited the place was to help them move in so I haven't seen it with them all settled in yet. It will be quite the packed house but it'll be lots of fun. We should go play some disc golf and hopefully the weather will be nice so we can go swimming. Maybe I'm a little delusional about wanting to go swimming in a lake in October. I don't think I've done that for my birthday before.

In the very short term future, the students of my research group are getting together tomorrow to plan some programming and how pieces fit together on version 2 of our software. Development has been moving at a snail's pace but hopefully it will pick up soon. I should get some sleep.

The Recent Past - Sept 2010

2010-10-04T01:10:00.005-07:00

September was busy. October will be even busier. I haven't gotten around to posting recently because I'm mostly been doing work instead of play and haven't take photos recently. Here's an update on my recent past.

Back near the start of Sept there was a party at Nate's where everyone dressed up as something starting with the letter A. I came as an addict (to alcohol (beer), drugs (ritalin (tic tacs)) video games, and gambling). We played some A games such as Are you the Traitor? and Apples to Apples and ate a lot of A food. I assume, someday in the future we will have a B party.

I've also gotten together with family and friends a few other times. I went and hung out in Vancouver at Rob and Q's place a couple times and we drank mango juice with mango ice cubes, and slices of mango. My brother Farley stayed with me for a week while he did some writing and he came to the drop in Ultimate. For my sister's birthday we made some sushi at her place and played scrabble. I barely beat her. In the last week I was sick for a few days, but I think I'm better now.

I've been going to Surrey drop-in Ultimate since the Spring and for the fall it's back at Newton Athletic park. Not many of my friends have shown up but it's great exercise and still fun. I've also gone to the aqua recreational goofing hour (ARGH) at the north Surrey rec center pool a couple times. It's simply called that by the grad student who organized it so that there is a time when lots of grad students go there together. Unfortunately this last week the deep end was closed for some people to practice water polo. Normally it's awesome though with a climbing wall coming out of the water, ropes up to monkey bars (called the Skywalker), a rope swing, and low and high diving boards. The pool also has hot and hotter sauna rooms.

At school, I did a couple presentations but spent most of my time running a user study and organizing the results. I managed to get 20 participants over the course of 2 1/2 weeks so I am all done now and onto analyzing the results. I kind of doubt I will prove anything statistically but I have a ton of useful qualitative feedback about what works and what doesn't with my text document visualization technique.

Eric and I presented an update on our work on my research groups software CZSaw to the Boeing guys and people from SFU and UBC at our face-2-face Boeing meeting. We have one every term. This time it was a two day thing but the skytrains were totally gibbled on the Friday so I missed most of the second day. Eric and I also did demos of CZSaw at a mini-conference on visual analytics for public safety at the Justice Institute of BC (JIBC) in New Westminster. I think that went pretty well and maybe some day in the distant future we'll work with the VPD.

This next month is going to be busy as I do a couple more little presentations before the big ones at VisWeek. I'll also be working on my thesis and study data analysis throughout. On top of all that there is Thanksgiving weekend, my birthday and then Halloween. I can't really think of anything planned for November. Perhaps I should just delay all my sleep time until then.

Moving from Saturna

2010-09-05T20:22:00.006-07:00

So on Sunday morning we woke up and took the early ferry to Saturna.

The island up ahead is Saturna and there's our moving truck.

They didn't have the right size truck for some reason so they gave us a bigger one at no extra cost. Normally that'd be great, except we had to pay more for the ferry! Also, the back of the truck scrapped the ramp when going on each ferry and the truck was too big to make it up either driveway. On Saturna, the driveway makes a sharp turn and has many trees beside it. We were forced to take loads of stuff down in the van.

Luckily almost everything fit inside the van.
The couch would make a cool new back seat for the van.

Here's their old house on Saturna.We spent the rest of the morning
and all of the afternoon moving loads down to the truck or packing.

While they were packing things into boxes I was carrying more stuff

out of the house and out of the cottage.

The attic of the cottage had a bunch of stuff in it and

walking across these planks is the only way into it.

In the evening we went across the island to their friend's place for a goodbye party. It took place in this shelter which resembled a kitchen and living room with 1 and a half walls. There was plenty of good food people brought and one of the hosts had planned a 5 hole disc golf course. Unfortunately the discs were already on Saltspring, so we played with plastic plates. On hole 3 they kept breaking in half on the trees. I got a very high (bad) score.

After dinner we sat in front of the fire and many people made some speeches about how my parents did some really good things for the island in their 5 years there and everyone is thankful for that and will miss them. Also my dad read some messages my little sisters wanted everyone to hear.

We stayed longer than most people and then got home around 8:30pm. We did some more packing until about 10 and then went to sleep. We kept Triscuit, the cat, inside so that she wouldn't be spooked by the almost empty house and run away. Unfortunately she meowed throughout the night and kept us all from sleeping much.

At 6am Monday we woke up and started more packing. We took one more load down to the van and then went to a friend's house for breakfast. The friend runs the bakery and we ate pancakes, bacon and eggs (fresh from their hens). Then we went right back to packing. Some people came to help including Dave who was driving the truck back to Sidney after. We lugged all the mattresses down the driveway and finished packing the van, while my dad put the kayaks on the car.

We actually got to the ferry dock early for the 10:20am ferry.

We set Triscuit's carrier on a rock by the car and
she kept trying to hide under the blanket.

The ferry showed up almost on time which was a change
from all the other late ferries that weekend.

We left the ferry at Mayne to wait for another ferry to Saltspring which was 45 minutes late. On the 2nd ferry we met my sister Rebecca and my grandma. They squished into the car while my mom and I went in the truck with Dave.

On Saltspring we drove to the new house and Dave walked up the driveway to see if he could turn around at the top of it. After deciding that he could probably do it, he got in the truck, ready to drive forward up it.

Unfortunately the driveway is really steep and Dave did not line up the truck well so when he tried to drive fast from the road one of the wheels missed the driveway. The back of the truck dug into the road with the hitch ball making a big groove across the yellow line.

Then the truck was stuck. It couldn't go forward or backwards. So then we tried unloading everything out of it. We put all the stuff on the side of the road and the side of the driveway. I took a couple turns helping direct traffic since there was only one free lane. After the truck was completely empty it was still stuck. They managed to move it a bit by putting some boards behind the one wheel but in the end they called a tow truck. The tow truck lifted up the back and pulled it back no problem.

After that I helped my dad load the van at the bottom and then unload it at the top a few times. We also moved the really heavy furniture up the stairs and into the house, but then I had to leave. Dave drove the truck to the ferry and I went with him and we caught the quick ferry to Swartz bay. Then I said goodbye and walked onto the big ferry back to the mainland.

It was a pretty ridiculous and tiring weekend. I heard later my sister got a really good workout helping get most stuff into the house before it got really dark. Then they covered the remaining stuff with tarps, which is good because it poured the next day. Also, my parents missed the back to school BBQ they were invited to. I guess there are a lot of worse things that could have happened when moving between islands, like missing the ferry, but it was quite the stressful move. I'm glad it's over and they're all settled into the new place. I'll have to visit them sometime soon.

New Saltspring Home

2010-09-03T18:39:00.004-07:00

Last weekend I helped my parents move from Saturna island to Saltspring Island. These are both Gulf Islands but for comparison, Saturna has a population of 350 and an area of 31km squared. That's tiny. Saltspring has a population of 10,500 and an area of 183km squared. That's more normal. Delta is the same size but with 10 times more people.

So anyway, I took a lot of ferries! On Saturday I took a ferry to Long Harbour on Saltspring (it has 3 different ferry dock locations) and then a bus to my parent's new place. I had about an hour to hang out there before anyone else showed up, so I walked around the outside.

At the top of their steep driveway was a shed and a doghouse. My little sister Emily insists my parents have now promised to get them a dog. Currently all they have is a cat.

Most of the house is raised up on a rock so you have to
go up some steps to the porch to get into it.

The porch wraps around 3 sides of the house and is nice and wide. Their house is much smaller than the last place, but will get way more sun because it's up on top of the bluff it's built on. Also, they have way more land. My dad is already planning a disc golf course across it. I'm not sure how that's going to work because some of it is quite steep and it's all covered in bushes.

So next I walked down these stairs from the house.

I went down and down and down. Apparently a stream will flow down the hill under these steps in the winter and there will be a little waterfall or two.

At the bottom of the steps is a little cottage/shed that Emily will eventually move into. Right now I would call it a shed because it is a single room with no insulation. However, it does have a window and electricity. On the side of the little building is a covered outdoor shower. If it's not going to be used, she could always put a desk out there and work outside.

So eventually my parents and Farley showed up with a van load of stuff for the house. Also, my other brother Ben showed up with his new girlfriend to see the place and help unload.

Between the many windows in the living room / dining room is the wood stove.

Adjoined to the living room is the kitchen. It has much less cupboards than their old place and the stove and oven are separate. Also downstairs is my sisters' room that they will share until the cottage is fixed up. It has a skylight and Natalie, who will eventually get the room to herself is going to put her bed directly under it.

In the bathroom there is a big jacuzzi tub (jets included)
with windows right there and a skylight above it.

Upstairs and sort of overlooking the living room is my parents room and their bathroom.

It has a ton of windows like the rest of the place.

It also has glass doors that open up onto the living roof. Yes, this part of the roof is growing and so you are supposed to walk around on it by only stepping on the bricks.

So after unloading at home, some of the stuff in the van was meant for my dad's new classroom so we drove over to the middle school.

One thing going in the classroom is his very first computer from the 90's, a Macintosh Classic. I remember programming in Hypercard on that thing and playing games on it. It still works.

After the school we got some pizza and took it to Fulford ferry dock to eat. Then we took the short ferry trip (5 nautical miles) to Swartz bay, Vancouver Island.

We spent the night at my grandpa's place in Sidney, except for Ben who took the bus home to his place in Esquimalt (suburb of Victoria). The next day we got up really early to go to Saturna, but I will leave the move story for the next post.

Camping at Jones Lake

2010-09-01T00:26:00.006-07:00

One weekend in August we camped at Jones lake (aka Wahleach lake) near Chilliwack. It was an awesome trip if a bit ridiculous at the start and the end and perhaps in the middle too. We left Friday afternoon and somehow we only took one pot, my stove, and Q's BBQ and no other means of making food. I was the only one with any silverware, a plate, bowl and cup. We stopped in Chillwack to buy groceries for the weekend (way too much!) and picked up some plastic stuff and a new frying pan.

Jones lake is run by BC Hydro and we chose a campsite near the spillway, a part of the lake meant to flood when water is released...from some direction. I'm not sure if the lake rises and floods the area or if the water comes from the other direction.

We set up the tents and made some food but it was quickly too dark to do much.

There was a fire ban and without a fire there isn't much to do in the dark.

The next day we may have slept in a bit. I have no idea since we don't keep track of time when camping which is awesome. So once everyone was up we had some breakfast burritos sitting in a circle around our imaginary campfire. Then we decided to follow the road some more along the lake and go on a hike among other things.

At one point there was a big dip so we all got out of the car except for Murray to put less weight on it. Then we stayed out for a while and Rob started to steer the car because he could see the pot holes better.

On our hike we followed a small dirt road away from the lake which got less and less used. On the other side of a washed out part where there was a creek it was barely a road. Then we came to another creek.We walked up it to this waterfall. I decided I wanted to climb to the top of the waterfall.

So I had to climb way up and around it in the bush. I think the others were trying to make a dam below the waterfall while I climbed around. I was wearing shorts so my legs got really scratched up but I eventually made it to the top. Gordon took some good photos of me standing on top of the waterfall that I'll have to get a hold of. So then the guys had to wait for me to climb back down.

We kept walking the trail but it turned into little more than an animal trail. Still it would have been cool to follow this trail until the end and see where it goes. We seemed to be getting closer to a glacier way off in the distance. Rob really wanted to find the end of the trail so we kept going but eventually we left Murray and Q behind and I convinced Rob we should turn around.

When we got back Q was up a tree. On the way back down Gordon rolled his ankle on a rock so he had to hobble down the rest of the way. Even though we'd been running through the forest chasing Rob, he didn't get injured until we were walking back in a section where it was easy to see where you stepped. So eventually we made it back to the car.

Back at camp we decided to skip right to dinner since it was later in the day, but first we played a game of Settlers of Catan and had some spinach dip. I came very close to winning the game but my luck had run out.

The team of Q and Gordon almost stole the game in the last couple rounds. At one point Q rolled one of the dice right into his drink. Nice one! Anyways, Murray came from behind and won the game by jumping up from 5 points on his last turn.

Q also tried to open his beer using the fire pit (they should be good for something) but he kind of failed cause he broke the top right off the bottle.

So later that night some of us wandered over to the dam. We found a pipe that brought water up and over it and down the other side. It went into this box which Rob and Q investigated with their flashlights.

A little ways away water shot out from a pipe at a weird angle. Rob and Q put their hands in it. The water was warm but we never did get to swim in it.

The next morning it was raining so we packed up before it got worse. Back in Surrey we dropped off our stuff at our houses and then went to Delta to play Risk at Rob's mom's place. It was Risk 2210 and it lasted a long time. I was dominating it but I didn't play very smart in the middle of the game so the domination happened very slowly. Eventually we gave up on the game finishing anytime soon.

Hiking the Chief

2010-08-25T00:24:00.006-07:00

Once again this summer we hiked the Squamish Chief except this time we went to the 2nd peak. I had never been there before. We made one mistake though.

Our mistake was eating a whole bunch of food we bought at the grocery store...

...right before trying to hike up to the top of this.

It was a little crazy. My stomach felt like there was a giant stone in it.

We had to stop for a break. Rob's ass was dirty cause he was wearing a leaking camelbak and then I guess he sat down somewhere.

At a later break spot Rob climbed up this rock.

I also climbed the side of the rock but I used my knees which scratched up my legs a bunch.

On the way up the 2nd peak there are a couple narrow parts where some chains offer help.

People were coming down so we had to wait for them.

Here's Adam waiting waaay below.

Here's Rob after hiking through the next narrow section ahead.

The view was just an awesome from the 2nd peak as the 1st.
Also, you can get a good view of the 1st peak.

At the top there were some skinny chipmunks and one
ran right across my back while I was looking down at the view.

Rob and I hiked a little further along the peak to look down from the other end.

Everyone but Adam ran out of water by the peak,
so we hiked down pretty quick to the stream and then took a break.

From there we were pretty quick to get to the parking lot too.
Perhaps next year we will tackle the 3rd peak.

Family events in July

2010-08-08T15:27:00.005-07:00

So as usual I am behind on blogging. One excuse is that my camera just spent a week at Murray's house. Anyways, at the end of July most of my family was over here so we got together.

We went to see the fireworks in English bay when Mexico was putting on the show. As usual the beaches were completely covered with people.

That's why we watched them from the grass. Our area still got quite crowded but not until the hour before the show. I biked to Vancouver from school and it took me a couple hours. They also had all their bikes there from biking around Stanley park during the day. We walked over to a Panago and a grocery store and bought some pizza and chocolate milk.

My youngest sister bugged us for about an hour to go swimming with her. In the end, she went for a swim by herself.

The fireworks were the best I have ever seen. There were many different kinds and they all matched the music. I didn't get any really good photos though.

They had times where they shot up lots of golden ones that joined into a giant cloud of glittery gold dust. Getting home after the fireworks was the usual pain in the ass. We walked our bikes to the van that wasn't far away, but then we waited in a lot of line-ups to reach the highway.

A few days later on July 31st was my mom's birthday.

We spent the day at lake Sasamat, where we ate a picnic lunch and relaxed on the beach reading books, playing cards and playing Robo Rally.

My youngest sister, my mom, and I also went for a swim all the way across the lake. After a bit of a rest we then swam back. It was very good exercise and a good idea before the feast that night.

Back at my grandmas we had a big birthday dinner followed by multiple desserts. Rebecca and Eric brought a variety cheesecake which had slices of New York cheesecake, raspberry cheesecake and turtle cheesecake. I had a piece of the turtle and it was amazing. My grandma made an angel food cake to balance things out.

FBI and Aliens

2010-07-27T23:16:00.005-07:00

Last Saturday was a party at Nate and Erin's with an FBI and aliens theme. The reason for it was that Nate's sister Amanda wanted to have a party while her man from New Mexico was there. He was staying for a week at Nate and Erin's place. Nate chose the theme because the alien landing was allegedly at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

For the party I went and got some toy guns and dressed up
in the mobster style suit I bought last year for Nate's wedding.

I also made a cake to bring to the party. I wanted to make something interesting that could pass for an alien dish, so I made a spicy chocolate cake. It contained cinnamon and jalapeno peppers and it was quite good. Not sure I'd make it again though since I prefer just a straight chocolate cake. It looks messy but lets say that was all part of the plan.

Nate and his brother were both dressed as aliens with these creepy masks.

A lot of us came as Men in Black. We are a pretty cool bunch.

The place was also decorated with some UFOs,
Buzz Lightyear cups and other alien decorations.

There was lots of good snacks there, some of which followed the alien theme.

During the party some of us played Asshole (a card game like Big 2) and I won almost every round until I broke one of Mike's special rules and so lost by default.

Rob wanted to do some more physical activities so he setup this bag on the floor and you had to try and pick it up in your mouth but you were only allowed to touch the floor with one foot and no hands. It was really hard but I eventually succeeded.

At the party Mike broke one of my guns. It was no longer making the noise and lighting up. Even though it only cost $1.25 (dollar store inflation) he wanted to fix it, so he opened it up with a screw driver. Then he fixed it with some tape. It's not as good as new but it works. On the firing mechanism there was a phone number! I wonder if people often call that. Perhaps they make firing mechanisms for more complex things too.

Anyways, it was a pretty sweet party with good company and good food and I look forward to the next one. Nate and Erin have only lived there 3 weeks and I've already been over there 3 times for events. They are excellent hosts.

July So Far

2010-07-11T15:51:00.005-07:00

June was very busy for me with work on the VAST Challenge that was due on June 29th. In July, there's been Canada day on Saturna Island, camping in Osoyoos, a house warming party and a Cranium party.

I was pretty tired at the end of June so I messed up many of my travel plans. On June 30th, I tried to get to Saturna but I should have taken an earlier bus because my bus was scheduled to show up just on time but didn't show up at all because of an accident in the tunnel. So I missed the ferry and instead took a ferry to Vancouver Island and slept at my grandpa's place in Sidney. He was already asleep when I got there but I visited with him briefly in the morning before taking a ferry to Saturna. My brother, aunt, uncle and cousin were on the ferry. When we got to Saturna my dad was driving the bus that brought us to the field by Winter Cove where the BBQ took place.

I forgot to take my camera on the trip but the Canada day was much like the past Canada days on Saturna excepted it rained a little - for the first time since the 1986 BBQ. There was a lamb BBQ of about 15 lambs cooking around a bonfire. There was a used book sale with 3 paperbacks for $1, bingo, and many games including the dunk tank my sister and brother went in, and the ring toss called Hook on Saturna that my dad and grandma ran. I visited with my family and tossed the frisbee around with my brothers. I believe about 1000 meal tickets were sold despite an island population of 350 and the food was quite good. It was lamb with a mint sauce, coleslaw, and spanish rice. All too soon it was time to get back on the ferry and head out. Normally I would stay at least one night, but I had a busy exciting weekend ahead.

I got home around 8:30pm, and immediately got ready to leave again at 7am on a greyhound bus from Langley. I was going to Osoyoos to meet a girl named Toni who I'd met online. She was there for a week to visit her dad who is working there. We had managed to get a campsite booked for a couple nights only a week early because I guess someone canceled. I talked to her online while I packed and planned and I got a bit stressed out because I really didn't have room to take anything to cook or store food. I also realized my air mattress was still on Saturna. So I just ended up packing essentials like the tent and a sleeping bag.

My greyhound travel was ridiculous. I do not want to take greyhound again anytime soon. They failed at exchanging my ticket, they failed at remembering to transfer my luggage and when I was getting back to Langley during the start of the heat wave they failed at having air conditioning working.

So anyways I got to Osoyoos safely and met Toni and her dad Jack. Toni and I had an awesome weekend although I don't have that many photos of it.

Jack gave us a tour of Osoyoos including some good views and we drove up the hill to where these new streets had statues of animals at their entrances.

Toni and I camped here, right next to the lake. The land across the lake is the US and we saw fireworks there on July 2nd and 3rd. During the trip I went swimming in the lake a couple times and it was warmer than I thought it'd be. We ate some dinner on a patio right on the edge of the lake. We also went for a long walk in the sun and sat on a dock splashing our feet in the water.

We went on Jack's friend's Dave's boat and boated around the lake and ate some good food out in the middle of the lake. Then we went to this beach that's on native land where teenagers go and party and make a huge mess. We stopped there for 10 minutes to clean up all their bottles and cans. I'm not sure why the natives don't care about the assholes littering all over the place.

We watched one of Toni's favourite movies, The Lost Boys, on my laptop in the tent. She's seen it so many times but I never have and she fell asleep beside me. We played cards, crib, and Toni beat me by a small amount. We threw my frisbee around on the grass by a beach and Jack and Toni are both quite good with the frisbee. It was pretty windy so that made it tricky to not hit innocent bystanders.

We watched the first Lions football game at a pub as they beat the Eskimos. We had some drinks at a bar where Jack played some pool and Toni taught me a game called hockey using three nickels. I really suck at it.

We slept out under the stars on the lawn on the roof of Dave's house with a clear sky and a view of all the lights of Osoyoos down in the valley. We went inside when it started to rain.

Then, all too soon, I had to catch the early morning Sunday greyhound home. I was so tired I kind of messed up the goodbye in that there wasn't much of one. Fortunately, I saw Toni again for half an hour at the airport on her stop there on the way home to Edmonton. We had a much better goodbye and I am sure I will see her again sometime in the future. I really wish she didn't live so far away.

After saying goodbye to Toni I went straight to Nate and Erin's house where they were having a house warming party. They just moved into their nice new home in Surrey and there were about 15 friends there to check it out and have a good time. They've got a pretty big crawl space under the main floor which is apparently pretty cool for playing games in....except they might as well play games in the living room, since they own the whole house. We played Guesstures and my team lost despite having an extra person.

The next night I met 5 friends at Q and Rob's place downtown for a Cranium party. We won a contest by sending in footage of ourselves playing Cranium and so we moved onto the 2nd round. They wish to make a Cranium commercial featuring real people playing Cranium. For the 2nd round they sent me a brand new unreleased Cranium game, a Flip HD camera, $100 for snacks and 2 8GB memory sticks. We used the $100 at Costco to buy way more food than we needed (don't shop hungry!) and then filled out all the release forms. Then we shot ourselves playing Cranium. Hopefully they will use some of our film in actual TV commercials.

This month I hope to not just have a good time, but also get lots of work done. This weekend I've just been working on some programming to prepare for a user study for my thesis. I hope to get the study all ready by the end of the month and I should be starting an internship really soon.

Gordon's Graduation and BBQs

2010-06-23T22:54:00.005-07:00

This last weekend was an action packed one. Well, at least there were a lot of events and I ate a LOT. This weekend was Gordon's convocation ceremony on Friday afternoon and then a party for him at his place on Saturday evening. In between these two events I went to 2 BBQs.

So I found Gordon right after he put on his hat at the hat station. A moment after this photo a voice announced "Everyone who is not a graduate please clear the area", so I went up above to the AQ gardens to wait for the graduate walk.

It seemed to take forever for the graduates to finally appear and Gordon was more than halfway down the line. He was the first graduate with a BSc (yellow ribbon). Once he got up by the Terry Fox statue the line stayed there for a long time. Some girl volunteered to take our photo together. That afternoon many people wondered if he cut his afro off just so the graduation cap would fit on his head.

So after the long graduation ceremony and the SIAT reception, I hopped on a bus and headed over to my bosses house near UBC. The skytrains were running slow since there was a power outage downtown so I arrived fashionably late. This is what the lamb looked like when I got there. It was already being picked apart. Walter had been cooking it all day since my boss Mark had to go to a conference.

Here's what it looked like when we were done with it. Pretty bare! It was a good BBQ with good food and company. While I was there Rob messaged me to ask where I was and when I said I was at my bosses he asked "She hot?". Uh, not a "she", Rob, and no.

That night I crashed at Rob and Q's place in Vancouver. I slept on some couch cushions on the floor of the kitchen. I didn't want to intrude on either of their rooms or sleep in the entryway, bathroom or outside hallway where I might get stepped on. I also didn't dare sleep in the mystery void behind the closet.

The next day I arrived at Kitsilano beach bright and early at 10am to save a table for the grad student's BBQ at 2pm. Unfortunately I found that around the central area there are no tables, just benches. I walked along to near the end of the beach and found a couple tables near each other. I sat down and did some work on my laptop. There was a few tables taken before I got there by a group preparing for a kid's birthday party.

Between 11:30 and noon is when lots of people started claiming tables. Some people asked about the other table where I had left my bag but I said it was taken because a big group was showing up and we needed both the tables. Despite this, an annoying guy decided his group was going to take the table anyway. He argued that I could not save 2 tables with only 1 person, since they were a limited resource. It pissed me off but he kind of had a point. Anyways, it didn't matter because by the time many people showed up for my BBQ another nearby table was free.

Around 1pm Diego, the organizer of the event, showed up with this food which he claimed was all for me to eat for lunch. I did not eat it all because it was a bit too much but I did finish the burger and tried everything else. The sun was melting the chocolate chips so the cookies were almost as if they were freshly baked.

Ben was one of the first people to show up and we threw the frisbee around for a while. At first he claimed to be terrible at throwing it but once we started he decided that my disc was simply much better quality than what he was used to and in fact he was quite good at throwing.

Eventually many people showed up and Diego created this line
of condiments and pita fillings he had brought.

The BBQ was a lot of fun. Again there was some good food and some good company. I even went swimming in the ocean. It didn't seem as cold as I expected, however it was still a couple days before summer and only Diego dared enter the water with me. We both ran in and then he ran out shortly after. I stayed in for a while and swam way out to the buoy which said that no boats should come any closer than 300m to the shore. Unfortunately I could not climb onto as it kept tipping over.

After the BBQ I took transit back to Surrey and went straight to Gordon's house for the graduation party. There was lots of food there including a couple different types of meat but I had just eaten a ton at the BBQ. I ended up eating a LOT of Mars bars squares that Gordon's aunt made using actual Mars bars. They were amazing. Mars bar is one of my favourite chocolate bars.

Greg showed up to the party later. Q, Brad and Tanya were also there.

All in all it was an awesome and fun two days in the sun. This weekend I really don't care what the weather is like since I will be at the school working like a maniac finishing up a project, but the weekend after it better be damn good weather for the Canada day lamb bbq and camping in Osoyoos with Toni.

The Shearing of the Afro

2010-06-01T19:39:00.004-07:00

Friday, May 28th, 2010 marked the end of era. It was on this day that my friend Gordon had his head shaved to raise money to send kids to camp. It was on this day that the afro disappeared. He grew it for 6 years.

I decided to bike to the momentous occasion even though it was raining lightly and about a 2 hour ride. I biked down the hill and over the Pattullo bridge into New Westminster. Then through an industrial area by the river and up and over Coquitlam.

I went down the other side and into Port Moody. I biked through a park near the ocean and up the hill over to camp Sasamat where the shearing took place. It was their annual dinner on the patio fundraiser. Dinner consisted of burgers and salad followed by some fruit and cake for dessert.

Rob was at the camp with his crazy shoes with the toes.

Q was at the camp and went out in a canoe by himself while drinking wine. Greg, Jon, and Josef also showed up to the camp later.

They had a climbing obstacle course that I raced Q to the top of. I won by a great distance but I was on the left which had a much easier route.

Of course Gordon was there too with his afro and all. We didn't actually get to see the afro in its full glory until after dinner was done since he had to have it contained while cooking. He works in the kitchen at the camp.

I had my last photo with him before the shaving.

Then when everyone was ready, it began. His hairdresser was the camp's executive director who was not exactly skilled at it. Photos were being snapped left, right and center.

Gordon wore a garbage bag to protect him
from the massive amounts of hair that fell to the floor.

In the end he held some of his afro in his hands, no longer attached to his head. I'm not sure what was done with it but there was no going back.

The Meadowlark Festival

2010-05-28T11:20:00.006-07:00

This year on the May long weekend I went to the Meadowlark festival in Penticton. Some part of my family has gone to it every year for the last 5 years, but I had never been. The festival is about bird watching and I am not much of a bird watcher. Every year they always have fun though and everyone else in my family has already gone at least once. Even my grandma took a turn and went last year, so this year I figured it was my turn to experience it.

I went with those who have gone every year, my two little sisters

and my mom and dad.

It takes 4 to 5 hours to drive from Surrey to Penticton and we left Friday morning. I took my laptop with me because these days it's not a good idea for me to completely take a weekend off work. I did most of my work on the ride there and the ride back.

At a road side stop before Princeton there was a whole bunch of fearless groundhogs. They were popping up from a number of different holes and probably get fed way more people food than is good for them.

My mom had looked on the Internet for accommodations in Penticton and apparently she hates looking on the Internet for this stuff. Sometimes my family camps and sometimes they stay in a hotel but either way they've had bad experiences with noisy groups partying on the May long weekend.

So the plan this year was to stay in a quiet place away from all that. She booked two nights at a campground up in the mountains overlooking Penticton. For the third night we would decide where to stay. The campground had a great view.

Unfortunately the campsites were not very good, with rocks spread out all over the place making it hard to find a place to put tents. The sites also weren't very far apart from each other and we had been told when we booked that there were only two sites left to choose from. Mysteriously, when we went to bed almost all the sites were empty.

To get a better view of the valley, my sisters and I hiked down through a little valley and up the other side.
He we could see for miles in many directions over Penticton and the two lakes and many mountains surrounding it.

That evening my dad had his first scheduled festival event, a walk through the dark to look for owls. He left, while the rest of us spent the evening at the campsite.

We discovered it was really cold up in the mountains at night! We played some cards with my sisters both bundled in their sleeping bags and sat around the fire.

I had trouble sleeping for any long period of time during the night. Most of me was warm except my feet which were a little too cold. In the morning we found frost on our tents. We decided it was a little too cold for camping and that we would get a hotel even though we had already paid for a second night at the campground.

We left the campground early in the morning so my dad could get to the meeting spot for his second event, a 7 hour birding tour with an expert.

The rest of us had an event in a couple hours so we ate some breakfast and then hung out at a nearby playground.

The event we went to was a tour of a bluebird box trail on the Blasted Church vineyard. Apparently a long time ago in this area when they wanted to move a church to a new location they used controlled dynamite to knock it down and then reuse much of the wood. If they failed at using the right amount of dynamite they got a blasted church.

The bluebird boxes were simple a set of boxes set up along posts around the vineyard for birds to make their nests in. Every year they are cleaned out and then filled with cedar shavings.

Many of the boxes were empty but a few had baby birds in them or eggs. We didn't disturb the baby birds but here are some bluebird eggs we peeked at.

After our tour we looked for a good motel with a pool. Unfortunately it was colder than usual for the May long weekend and so none of the outdoor pools were ready yet. We choose to stay in the Flamingo motel. Then we met my dad after his tour and drove back up the mountain to take down camp. Afterwards we drove south to Okanagan Falls where my family has a tradition of visiting Tickleberrys for ice cream and kettle corn.

They make the kettle corn out front in a giant iron kettle

They have about 50 different flavours of ice cream and this is the size of their "single" cone. You get to choose 3 flavours for it. I had Banana Fudge, Triple Chocolate Brownie and Rocky Mountain Raspberry. It was delicious!

During the weekend we played RoboRally 3 times. My sister Natalie is addicted to the game. I didn't even plan on bringing it but when they picked me up at my apartment she grabbed it off my desk and took it to the van. We played sort of a mini game on the car trip there (it's not really a travel game!) in which I won. Then we played a game at the campground in which I was last and then a game on a much tougher board in the hotel and I won by a mile.

On Sunday my sisters and I slept in while my mom and dad went to an event involving watching many different species of hummingbirds while eating brunch. When they returned we went out for the day to visit beaches at both lakes and drive a loop out of town doing some bird watching.

I forgot to bring my camera for this part of the day! Natalie and I had a lot of fun tossing a frisbee back and forth on the first beach on Okanagan Lake. I was working on my forehand throw to improve at Ultimate and unfortunately I hit a little kid in the head. Apparently his mom didn't seem to mind. It helped her get him off the beach and off to some lunch.

Natalie and I went for a short swim at the second lake, Skaha Lake. It was really cold but not as cold as I expected. I guess I'm more used to the ocean.

In the evening there was the Lost finale but I only watched part of the recap hour before we got in the van to drive to our last event at an observatory. I used my dad's ticket while he went to bed early.

The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory has a huge 26m dish and many small ones.

We weren't there to learn anything about the observatory though. It was just the location for our talk about the earth, the moon, the sun and the stars. The presenter used what he called "high tech" devices to explain the phases of the moon, eclipses and the layout of the milky way galaxy. Really he just used spheres and his head represented the earth. The phases of the moon happen because of the different angle the sun shines on the moon from compared to the angle we see it from, not due to the earth casting a shadow on the moon! That's called an eclipse.

We talked about star charts and part of the presentation was supposed to be to go outside and look up at the stars but unfortunately it was too cloudy to see much.

The next morning we drove back to Surrey taking the scenic route down through Osoyoos to do more birding. The weekend was a lot of fun and luckily it wasn't all about the birding. It was good to get away from the city for a while. I hope to find more weekends this summer to do a lot more camping, hiking and swimming.

The Relay for Life 2010

2010-05-18T19:39:00.006-07:00

Last Friday from 7pm to 7am Saturday I participated in the Relay for Life to raise money for cancer research. We had a great time and looked good doing it although it was a little chilly this year.

As we have for a few years now we dressed up as the Justice League, a team of superheroes battling cancer. This year it also fit with the theme of the relay campaign which was to fight back and to give courageously.

The Flash along with Batman were far more recognizable than me. A lot less people have heard of or can recognize the Green Lantern. I'm sure more people will recognize the Green Lantern after the movie in 2011 staring Ryan Reynolds. I may add a photo of me here later if I get a good one from someone else who was there.

We had a ton of stuff to eat at the relay and most of it went home with whoever had brought it. I brought some muffins but I don't think anyone had any. When I got there someone had brought pizza and subway. There was also a lot of candy, nuts, chips, ritz crackers, other muffins and that was just the stuff we brought. At midnight there was a free midnight snack, sandwiches from Baron of Beef and in the morning there was some food from Tim Hortons.

The food kept us going and I also kept track of how many laps I jogged around the track and met my goal of doing 25 laps which is 10km. This is the first year I've kept track and done many jogging laps. It was kind of warm jogging wearing the costume but everyone else was really cold and bundled up.

The relays we have done in the past have been in June at Bear Creek park. This year there was no Bear Creek park relay so we went to the relay in Delta. There were a lot less people than we're used to but apparently more people than the Delta one usually has.

While there was more free food than usual, the entertainment was really badly planned or not at all. The karaoke stretched on way longer than most people could put up with. In order to do some races that were originally planned we had to round up all the people ourselves and really bug the volunteers about running them. Then the volunteers participated in the two races we had and kept the prizes for themselves. I know it must be hard to find volunteers willing to last 12 hours in the middle of the night, but these people were just ridiculous.

See my blog posts about the relay 2 years ago, 3 years ago, and 4 years ago. It is interesting to look back on past relays. I wish I kept my blog more active last year.

Sun Run 2010

2010-05-12T11:33:00.004-07:00

So this year I decided to do the Sun Run. It was my first time doing it and I signed up just a week before the run. You have to put yourself in a category based on how fast you will complete the 10km. I ran 5km near my house to figure that out and it took me 24 minutes. I knew that to do 10km my pace would be slower and that the Sun Run has a ton of people so they might get in my way too.

So I put myself in the 1:00-1:15 category, which meant I got a white bib when I went to pick up my gear on Thursday. The numbers start at 1 with the fastest group the blue group and then theres the yellow group, the green group, and then finally the white group starting at about 23000.

There were 51419 runners on Sunday and to keep track of them all they gave us a race timing chip. It gets attached to your shoe and then records your time across the start line and across the finish. This is how they can publish official run times for everyone in the Vancouver Sun. I heard that in the past you had to return your race chip or pay $40, but this year they were disposable.

There were a ton of people filling Georgia street for about 8 blocks. This is looking back from my spot about halfway along the start area. At 9am there was a countdown and then they blew a horn and the first wave was off.

Of course none of us in the white group could tell this since they were too far away to see. This is looking forward towards the start line from my spot in front of the art gallery. It wasn't until 20 minutes later after a couple more waves that I could see people moving. Then we got moved up and then stopped and then moved up again. Finally after about 50 minutes I crossed the start line. By then I'm sure all the fast blue group had finished the run.

I ran the Sun Run with an official time of 52:11.8. Since I started in the white group I passed a lot of people. I was still really surprised though that I came in 4607th place. Actually now it says 4629th. I keep getting pushed back for some reason. There must have been many people who underestimated the time it would take them to finish, since otherwise you'd expect me to have a place similar to bib numbers in the green group, somewhere between 9000 and 23000.

After the race I met up with Adam and we got some free juice, fruit, chocolate milk and red bull. We hung around for an hour and then I went home to take a much needed shower.

Well it was annoying waiting so long to start, the run itself was fun. It was a really nice day out, there was some music playing all along the course and some people dressed in some weird costumes. I think I'll do it again next year except I'll put myself in the green group, 50-59 minutes.

BarbeCURE

2010-05-05T11:09:00.003-07:00

On Saturday, we had a BBQ as a fundraiser for cancer and the Relay for Life. My relay team is the Justice League and the relay is May 14th at 7pm to May 15th at 7am. I think this is my 4th year doing it and we always have lots of fun. We dress up in superhero costumes and many people want to take our photos.

Anyways, the idea was that everyone pays $10 for a burger and then we all brought snacks for everyone.

Many of my friends are on the relay team but also many that are not showed up to support it.

The first game of the Canucks' second round of the playoffs was on during the BBQ. They destroyed Chicago 5-1.

We made a lot of money at the fundraiser!

We're still way below our fundraising goal though. If you want to help us out, you can do it on my donation page.

Bunny Killing

2010-04-12T10:35:00.005-07:00

Last weekend I got a strange email from my Swiss coworker Walter, entitled "Kill da' Bunny!". He was inviting friends to his place to consume chocolate bunny. He had a link to his website where he took many photos of his Swiss bunny around Vancouver, including removing its wrapping at Wreck beach. He said to bring our own chocolate bunnies or wine to go with bunny. I brought some little Swiss bunnies to go with the big one.

When I arrived I found we were having chocolate fondue before the bunny. It wasn't Swiss chocolate (or melted bunny) but it was still quite good.

We dipped pieces of apple, banana, orange, pineapple, and rice crackers in the chocolate.

His landlord brought a plate of ham and pickles

and one guy actually dipped a piece of ham in the chocolate.

The fondue set which was brand new apparently had a flaw in it, because out of nowhere the bowl of chocolate split right down the middle and fell off the platform.

Finally it was time to slaughter the bunny. We considered a few different ways to go about it and turned all the little bunnies away so they couldn't see.

We decided to do the classic beheading with a quick chop through the neck.

My boss had brought some ice cream that we ate with the chocolate. Also, Walter had some egg liquor which I've never heard of before. We poured it over the chocolate and it was very delicious.

Close ups of food always look weird.

We barely managed to eat the head between the 7 of us that were there. It didn't take long to feel like I'd had enough chocolate for the night. Walter gave me a bunch of pieces to take home though and I still have one.

Easter 2010

2010-04-07T01:00:00.014-07:00

So for Easter weekend I spent Thursday night to Monday afternoon on Saturna Island where my family lives. It was a fun and relaxing weekend.

Thursday, April Fools, was my youngest sister's birthday so we had a cake for her.
She's now 13. I can't believe my sisters are in grades 7 and 8 already.

Around dinner time on Friday there was a power outage on the island. Ferries were not running to it for a short while (due to large waves) so some friends of the family never made it over. We played a French card game called Mille Bornes by candle light and it took a ridiculously long time to finish because everyone was being ruthless. The candle we used was only about a quarter of this size by the end.

My sister made a person out of candle wax.

In the morning my mom made some pancakes

by putting the frying pan on the downstairs stove.

The power came back on around 10am in time for the Easter bake sale. We took part in the cake walk many times like we usually do. My mom donated a cake to it.

We ended up winning two cakes. My sister picked a double decker one with oreos, nibs, and chocolate eggs on it. Here it is mostly demolished.

During the weekend we also played lots of disc golf at the course my dad made up on the school grounds. We played 5 times and I had an average of 0.4 above par with my best score of -4. It's the best score I've ever gotten on any disc golf course. Perhaps all the Ultimate frisbee play has increased my throwing abilities.

My brother managed to get a hole-in-one on Monday which is referred to as an eagle since it's two under par. During our first game on Friday though there was an actual eagle in our way that was hurt and could not fly away.

I took lots of photos of it and some video too. My dad phoned some animal care people and one of them came over with the coast guard the next morning. By then the bird had wandered into someones garage but they got it into a cage and took it over to another island to get fixed up. When it's good to go they will bring it back to Saturna and release it.

We also visited the SEEC outdoor site where they are still working on building the cabins for groups to sleep in.

They're on a crazy angle but the floor is level inside.

The windows look like old fashioned TV with circles at the bottom. The windows are going to have glass and only the little holes at the bottom will be able to slide open to let air in.

We came back to the site later in the weekend

and roasted some hotdogs and marshmallows over the fire.

This little frog hopped right through the fire.

While I was on the island we also played RoboRally at least once a day. I brought it with me and one of my sisters is addicted to the game. I just had to make sure that Triscuit didn't mess it up.

Of course we had a good family game night too. We played Probe which is like a multi-player version of Hang-man where you take turns guessing letters in each others words. I won the game!

On Sunday morning my little sisters hunted for Easter eggs around the house. They're still not too old for candy.They definitely don't feel too old for the annual large Easter egg "hunt" at Winter cove. It's not much of a hunt because the chocolate eggs are scattered all over the grass. My sisters got so many eggs they later walked around and scattered them near searching toddlers or kids that came late.

We also walked through the nearby park and out to the point

where the waves were quite big.

They looked a lot like waves you'd find on the west coast of Vancouver Island at long beach or Tofino, not here in the Strait of Georgia.

The ferries were back up and running fine though by the time I headed home on Monday afternoon. Now I have lots of work to do and it's time to get back to the reality of school.

Sledge Hockey

2010-03-23T23:37:00.004-07:00

On Friday I went to the Sledge Hockey match for 5th place
with a group from my work at the hospital.

The Czech Republic was playing

against Korea.

When they met before in the preliminary round, the Czech Republic won 4-2, but this game went rather slow with very little scoring. Korea was controlling the puck most of the time during the first couple periods.

Korea scored the first goal. Here is the puck on its way to the net on the scoring shot. Korea did some pretty fancy passing where one player shot it under their sledge and across to a teammate.

The Czech republic played really hard in the 3rd period and the game was a lot more exciting. They more than made up for having less shots in the first couple periods. They managed to score to tie the game up at 1-1.

Then a couple minutes into overtime they scored again.
The whole team skated around the ice waving to the fans.

There were photos of the teams taken before there was an announcement basically telling us to leave the building as fast as we could since they had to get ready for the Canada vs Norway game for the bronze medal.

Walter was the most enthusiastic one of us but unfortunately he happened to be out when we got on the big screen. He had a ticket to see the Canada game afterward and said he'd be cheering for Norway.

Sledge hockey was fun to watch, if a little slow, but the third period was a lot better with both teams playing harder. It looks pretty dangerous when players basically ram into each other on their sledges and knock each other over. Sometimes it can take them a while to get back up and collect both their sticks. It's quite different than normal hockey but still very entertaining.

Wheelchair Curling

2010-03-19T11:54:00.009-07:00

On St Patrick's day I went to a wheelchair curling match in Vancouver.

After the pre-game practice a few bag pipers played

and the teams rolled out with mounties holding signs for each country.

Wheelchair curling is much different than normal curling since they use a stick to slide the rock along the ice and stay in one spot while they do it. To keep them in one spot one or two of their teammates sits behind them and holds their wheels. There is also no sweeping involved so they have to be more skilled at using just the right strength.

The Great Britain team differed from all the others in that most of their players like to release the rocks from way back behind the circle. It seems like that would make it harder, but perhaps that's part of the rules in Britain.

Four games happen at the same time so I got to watch them all. On sheet D, farthest from me was Switzerland vs. Korea.

On sheet C was the USA vs Norway.

The Norwegian curlers wore the same crazy pants that
their country did during the Olympics curling.

One of the American players wore sunglasses, I assume just to look cool.

On sheet B was Sweden vs Great Britain.

On sheet A, closest to me was Germany

versus Canada.

At first none of the games were very close. After Germany got 1 point, Canada got 2 and than 4 putting them way out in front.

The 6th end was the most interesting one of the game with both teams somehow sending rocks all the way through the center of this without hitting anything.

Germany did make this nice shot though to knock out two of Canada's stones. In the last two ends they scored 4 points.

Ultimately though Germany didn't come back fast enough to catch Canada who won 8-6.

The first game to finish was at the other side where Korea dominated Switzerland. Not only did Switzerland concede after the 7th end, but the end was finished before some of the other teams had even started the 7th end.

The other 3 games were all a lot closer with the teams that were down working hard to catch up. On sheet C they had to measure how close the rocks were to the center at the end of the 8th (and final) end. If Norway had the closest rock than they would tie it up but they didn't so the US won 9-8.

The Great Britain vs Sweden game also needed a rock measured in the 8th end. Sweden successfully got 5 points in the last two ends to tie the game and force a 9th end.

The 9th end was intense with a lot of stones sitting in the house (rings). Sweden successfully curled this shot in behind some guards to place it closest to the center.

Great Britain hit a rock into the center in an attempt to get one closer.

Great Britain also had the hammer (last rock) and made one final and close attempt to grab the point but didn't make it. Sweden pulled off the win which helped them get a good enough record to face Italy in a tie-breaker today. They won that and tomorrow they face Canada in the semi-finals at 10am. When the teams met during the round robin Sweden won 8-4 but Canada had a record of 7-2 in the round robin while Sweden's record was 5-4 plus the tie breaker win.

Mt Baker Trip

2010-03-15T22:42:00.008-07:00

A week ago I was on a ski trip to Mt Baker with coworkers from my work at the hospital. We went down to our rented vacation home Sunday afternoon and drove back up to Canada Tuesday evening.

Here's one side of the place we were staying...with a hot tub! It was about a 30 minute drive from the ski slope.

Joanne, Erin and I were there hours before anyone else so we just chilled out and had a snack. The others were bringing all the food for dinner after hitting the Costco.

Here's the view down from the loft.

Where there was a futon and a TV that didn't work properly.

Two bedrooms were also on the 2nd floor. I slept in a bunk bed. Oh, and yeah we brought some dogs with us.

The two larger ones are Ella and Finn, Joanne's dogs and the smaller one is Maggie, my boss' family's dog.

They are pretty well behaved but went crazy when we arrived back from the mountain after skiing. They were jumping all over Joanne. Too bad they can't ski...as far as I know.

The weather was pretty great for skiing. It just got snowy for the last hour of the first day.

It had also snowed a bunch the night before so there was lots of fresh powder. Unfortunately it's not a big mountain so we had to keep looking for untouched places to find some. A third of the mountain was closed due to it being weekdays with a cheaper price.

One place we went was in the canyon right up between these two hills.

However if you stopped it could be slow to get going if you're on a snowboard...or ski without poles like me.

We went mostly on black diamond runs which is not what I'm used to but it was a good workout.

We saw a lot of people hiking up passed the end of the top chairlift to ski from the peaks over to the side. The tiny dots at the top on the left are people walking up. (On the right, those are trees).

She said "He's taking a photo!"

Clarisse Leaves

2010-03-10T22:53:00.004-08:00

So way back on the 27th the day before the Olympics ended we had an adventurous day to wish Clarisse a farewell as she has moved to Paris to be with her boyfriend Jerome. This post is pretty late due to me being really busy working after the fun of the Olympics and then having some technical difficulties with my computer.

Anyways the day started with some rock climbing in the afternoon. We went to a local place called Vertical Reality which is just down the street from my place.

It was lots of fun although it was really quick to get your arms stretched out and really stiff and tired. Then you had to wait a little bit before you could do anymore climbing. The time limit of 2 hours is more than enough to get too exhausted to really go on. I'm sure some people can last a lot longer, but I hadn't rock climbed in many years.

Gordon showed up after the first hour but still took part in the rock climbing fun.

After rock climbing we were somewhat indecisive about what to do. It was too early to go to a restaurant and watch the bronze medal hockey game while there. We tried to see if we could go curling somewhere but couldn't find an open place. Then we decided we wanted to play some pool so we went into the nearby billiards hall. There was one guy in there behind the bar on the phone. The place was creepy and had no atmosphere so we quickly changed our minds and left.

We went over to Brad's and then decided to go get some food at Montana's because everyone agreed on that restaurant. Unfortunately when we got over to the Montana's in Langley it was really busy so we ended up driving across Langley to East Side Mario's. In our car we had a lot of fun along the drive with Gordon and Clarisse laughing at Q and I arguing over the directions. He drives way more than I do these days but we both had some slightly inaccurate directions and we ended up driving around in a round-about manner. It was fun though.

At East Side Mario's the cool end of the table got smoothies to drink.

This included Clarisse of course. I let Q have my camera and he took lots of photos before I managed to get it back.

This wasn't one of them. I took this and I can't remember what Rob's finger was for.

I also took this one of the tomato and the fro. East Side Mario's was delicious and I took home some of my pasta to eat the next day. As we were leaving we saw the end of the Finland vs Slovakia game which Finland won but it was still the best finish Slovakia has ever had.

Nate had to run off to a gig but the rest of us went back to Brad's to hang out. The four of us in our vehicle stopped at Dairy Queen for some dessert. At Brad's we ended up watching The Neverending Story which Clarisse had brought and playing some associated drinking games that Murray looked up online. At the start of the movie there were very few drinking times but none of us kept it up until the end because according to the rules there was an insane amount of drinking in the middle.

Now Clarisse has been in France since the weekend and hopefully she's having a great time. She's currently working for the same people, just in a new location.

Granville Island

2010-03-01T20:55:00.009-08:00

Friday was my third day in a row in Vancouver checking out the sites and my last visit during the Olympics.

I went earlier than before to try and see the medals at the Royal Canadian Mint but the line up snaked up and down the block. Shortly after I got in line a lady that worked there walked by and someone asked how long the wait would be. She blurted out "All day!" and continued on her way. Luckily I think they will be offering this medal viewing during the Paralympics too. I switched to the much shorter line for just looking around the gift shop and seeing all the fancy coins. I was inside in about 40 minutes.

Inside they had many display cases of specialty coins.

This coin is 5 dollars instead of 5 cents.

This is the only playing card coin I saw but I wonder if they make a whole deck.
At $15 a card, it'd be an expensive deck.

They also had some kids games on touch screens that involved the Olympic mascots and a video on how the coins are made.

Next stop was Canada Northern house which had a decent sized line-up but it moved fast. The wait was about half an hour. Inside they had a few stuffed animals like this one, a wolf and a polar bear.

They also had a small stage where a girl told of some legends from the North and then let the kids play with some drums.

This tusk of a narwhal was pretty cool. They are like the unicorns of the Arctic ocean.

Downstairs there was a lady giving a presentation on diamond cutting and polishing. The only thing hard enough to cut a diamond is more diamond. Also she has a stressful job because if she makes a mistake of 5 mm the diamond can lose thousands of dollars in value. They were also playing cross country skiing on a screen since a couple of the men on the Canadian team are from the northern territories.

My third stop was the small aboriginal exhibit at the Pan Pacific hotel lobby within Canada Place.

There was a really long canoe there.

The aboriginal group there were Métis and they performed a number of dances that were from their Scottish background. It wasn't what I was expecting at an aboriginal exhibit but they were talented.

This man was also talented at carving out a pattern in the wood.

Next I hopped on the Canada Line and then took the Olympic Line over to Granville island. This group, Teatro Tatro Slovakia is (I assume) a theater group from Slovakia and they were setup just passed the entrance to the "island". It was a pretty funny show, very slap-stick with little dialog. Painted on the doors of their truck were images of sports in the Olympics, each with a number. Then they had a wheel that they let a kid spin to determine which sport routine they would act out. When I got there they were doing this ski jumping routine in which the skiers keep getting attacked or into conversations with birds while in the air.

The next spin was for hockey which was fitting since Canada was playing Slovakia that night. They started with a scene where people are going through the security check to get into the arena.

It turned out the hockey game was one of those small ones with the plastic players that you move along tracks. They weren't even playing that excitingly. Instead of just going at it full speed they took turns moving one man at a time and hitting the timing clocks like you do for chess. They started to hit each other though and soon broke out into a fight.

After watching the teatro for a while I went in search of the Place de la Fracophonie. Inside the building there were some booths on different French organizations. There was a stage nearby but it wasn't open yet.

Also on Granville Island I stumbled across CODE Live 2 which was way too artsy and completely weird. It was just a dark room with a big screen at one end showing a video. The video was of a sheet of glass breaking slowly into pieces with loud noise. That's it. Bizarre. CODE Live 3 was way better.

My next stop was the Come On In! production at the Atlantic Canada place. Ideally I would have gone to the food tasting, but I got there after the line was already at capacity. To see the show I waited in the lobby for an hour while I ate some food from the nearby market. The show was alright. They had one musician from each of the four Atlantic provinces and they were fairly talented as they told some stories about growing up there. It was Newfoundland and Labrador day of the Cultural Olympiad and the premier of that province was in the audience along with some other politicians.

On my way off the island I stopped a short while by the Slovakia show again. This time there was a guy unicycling while juggling basketballs. Then he threw them into the hoop. For at least one of them the guy holding the hoop had to move it to catch the ball but it was still far beyond anything I could do.

I made my way to Robson square and got there way before game time. The women's gold medal curling game was in the 7th end. I met Gordon and we watched as they gave up their lead with their last rock in the last end and then in the overtime end they screwed up again and lost it. They got silver which is awesome unless you compare it to the men's team or either Canadian hockey team who all got gold. At least it turned out we didn't need this gold to break the record!

Next up was the mens semi-final hockey game against Slovakia. Q joined us for the 3rd period. It poured the whole game and the steps we were sitting on were wet but it was an intense game. Canada dominated except for the last 10 minutes. I take the blame for that. At 9 minutes I used my amazing math abilities and said out loud "They have no chance, they'd have to score a goal every 3 minutes!". Slovakia scored. At 6 minutes I was stupid enough to say "They'd still have to score a goal every 3 minutes!" They scored again. I stopped making comments like that. No more goals! Canada won 3-2 and moved on to the finals.

Afterwards Q led the way over to a pizza place where Gordon, his brother James, Q and I had a quick bite to eat. We said goodbye to Q and walked towards the skytrain. The crowds on Granville street were going crazy. People were giving high fives all over the place. James went up on his brother's shoulders and got a ton of high fives.

I also saw one of the green men. Not sure if it was Force or Sully or someone else completely.

So now it's hard to believe the Olympics are all over. The gold medal hockey game on Sunday was super intense and will probably be remembered a lot longer than if it hadn't gone to overtime. Unfortunately I watched it by myself at home, but I was feeling crappy and I still am. I've come down with a cold after all the fun of the Olympics followed by Saturday's adventure. I'll have to blog about that next. At least now I have a use for the Ricola I was given at Swiss house way back when.

Olympics - Pavilions

2010-02-27T13:07:00.009-08:00

So on Thursday it was back to Vancouver for some more Olympic pavilions.

My first stop was Ontario pavilion with their 4D theater. Even though I got there just 20 minutes after it opened the wait was still about 40 minutes and the movie is only about 7 minutes long. It was a pretty cool video though. I would say the 4D effects are better than those of the 4D theater at the aquarium. They timed and directed the water hitting you so that it's like it came right out of the splash on the screen. You also go on a roller coaster briefly and the vibration of the chair feels like you're on it.

Inside the pavilion after the movie I got a sample of some sort of apple dessert with caramel. I then got in line for the booth for using your brain waves to control the lights on the CN tower, the parliament buildings or Niagara falls, but then I thought it'd be better to do that one at night when you could better see the light. I came back later.

Next I visited the Saskatchewan pavilion which included this dome which lights up when it's dark with images of the province.

Inside the dome there were some booths about the province. One booth let you get a photo of yourself in the province using a green screen. There was actually a line-up! I suppose it's much faster than actually going to Saskatchewan. I was given a pin and a little packet of yogurt lentil clusters, which just tasted like yogurt.

In the other tent where they have a stage and food for sale there were samples of lentils salad. It just tasted like bean salad. Apparently it's power food.

Next I walked over to the BC Powersmart village over on the other side of BC place. There was a tent with comfortable wooden seats where you could watch the Olympics.

Then in another tent they had the sustainable dance floor.

As you dance on it you generate energy that is saved.

Inside the building they had a timeline of BC hydro's history including these quotes, one of which mentions Dawson Creek, where I grew up. It was interesting to see how Vancouver used street cars on rails before buses took over everywhere. BC hydro's predecessor used to handle the transit too.

Next I popped over to the Bell Ice Cube where they give you a pair of earbud headphones you can keep. Inside there were screens all around showing different live Olympics coverage. There were also some videos you could watch about the history of the Olympics. In either case you just plugged your headphones into the display or the dangling connections to hear the audio. The history video pedestal things were not very well designed though with a sensor that would only keep the video going if you were standing on one side of it. Plus you had to look down at the video which isn't great on the neck.

At the Bell Ice Cube there were some past Olympics medal winners being interview by other past Olympics winners. Charmaine Crooks (a past Canadian track and field Olympian) was one of the interviewers. She first interviewed Johann Koss (a past Norwegian speed skater and current coach of the Norway team) about the Right To Play organization. Then they had Clara Hughes there for a bit, who is the only winner of multiple medals in both the summer and winter Olympics, and she's Canadian.

They also brought out Catriona Le May Doan, another Canadian multiple medal winner in speed skating, and a torch bearer at the opening ceremonies. They asked her how it felt to be the torch bearer and she said "Which part? The part where it didn't come up?". She was the one who's "ice spier" did not come up so she didn't have anything to light with her torch because of the malfunction. So together the people on the Bell Ice Cube stage at this point had won 15 Olympic medals. Clara had to leave shortly after to get to some other event.

I left the Bell Ice cube before the end of the interview so I could find a place to watch the women's hockey gold medal game. Along the way I saw Batman!

I went to Robson square to watch the game hoping that perhaps someone I knew would be there but I couldn't find anyone so I found a seat near the front of the lower area. I watched the first period in which Canada scored the only two goals of the game. Around the time that they scored the second goal Gordon entered Robson square and walked up the back of the lower area to get a seat in the upper area. I didn't know he was there and I left after the first period.

I went back to the Powersmart tent where I got a comfy seat 5 minutes later to watch the rest of the game from. The second period had just as many penalties but no goals. The Canadian goalie played amazingly, surviving 5 on 3s twice. In the third period there were no goals and no penalties and so Canada took the gold for the 3rd Olympics in a row. I just hope they keep this event in the Olympics despite Canada and the US destroying everyone.

After the game I went over to the library to see CODE live 3, a digital art exhibit. Here they had a net with hundreds of paper airplanes. Except they weren't airplanes. Instead the paper was folded into the shape of maple seeds. Even when I went down and made one myself it still seemed to look a lot like a paper airplane.

What they have is a pneumatic tube that shoots the paper a few stories above the net and then it falls down down down onto the net to join everyone else's papers. Each piece of paper has a blinking LED light attached to it.

Here's my piece of paper with the battery and light. First you write a message of how you bring peace to the world on the paper. For the Olympics countries agree to be peaceful, so this was ideas to make the whole world peaceful all the time.

Here is the tube attempting to shoot a paper up it. This paper and mine which went before it both needed a couple of attempts to work. My paper got stuck partway up because the air didn't catch the pocket well. Then we had to let it fall and then try again. I guess my message for peace was not strong enough.

So, the last thing I did in Vancouver was revisit the Ontario pavilion and control the lights of Niagara falls with my brain waves. It sounds cool but it wasn't. The lineup was about an hour but went by quickly because they were playing the ski aerials on the big screens there. I watched as the Canadian who had the best score going into the last jump ended up getting 5th.

Anyways so when I got to the front of the line a guy had me sit in a chair and put on a head set that touched my forehead. On the screen there was a meter that had a baseline and went from smilie face to concentrating face. He told me that the meter would go up and down depending on how relaxed I was and then told me to focus really hard on something. The meter moved a bit but he declared that the machine was still broken and I'd need to wait for another one.

So a few minutes later I sat down in a different chair and a girl started instructing me, except that the instructions were very minimal and the girl looked to be about 13 years old. Sometimes the meter seemed to move according to my relaxation but sometimes it didn't. Perhaps it was because I was concentrating too hard on relaxing. So then the training period was over and all of the sudden I was controlling the lighting of Niagara falls. It was done by using a simple colour scale where you used a different colour depending on how relaxed you were. I could only get it to move to two different colours near the baseline and it didn't really go where I wanted it to. It was kind of lame. I had expected more instruction on how exactly to think to get your brainwaves to change.

LiveCity

2010-02-25T22:21:00.006-08:00

On Wednesday I went out to Vancouver in the morning to spend a day in Vancouver enjoying the Olympics.

My first stop was LiveCity Downtown. The wait to get in was about 15 minutes. One of the places inside was CentrePlace Manitoba.

Inside there were many videos about Manitoba and some touch screens with info about it. Apparently Winnipeg has the most restaurants per capita and the province has over 100 different festivals a year.

This is their model of the Museum of Human Rights building,

to be complete in Winnipeg in 2012.

The other pavilion in LiveCity Downtown was the Canada Pavillion. There was a half hour wait to get in but this being LiveCity, there were many TV screens to watch with live coverage of the Olympics. While waiting in line I watched the first period of US vs Switzerland hockey.

Inside they had some simulation games, like snowboarding and this hockey penalty shot game. There was no actual puck, you just had to shoot as if it was on the spot on the floor.

The real cool thing about that day at the Canada Pavilion was the Stanley Cup! I waited in another line and got to touch it and have my photo taken. It was awesome! Also, again...kudos to LiveCity for having TVs everywhere to watch the Olympics while waiting. I don't know why every place doesn't do this.

After checking that out I walked across to LiveCity Yaletown where the line-up was surprisingly non-existent. Last time I was there it wrapped around the block. The place is a lot bigger than the downtown site with most of them pavilions belonging to Olympics' sponsors. The first thing I checked out was the Panisonic pavilion with the 3D theater. It was about a 20 minute wait to get a ticket for the theater and then we had to show up 10 minutes before the show.

The show was short but the 3D was quite good. It showed scenes from the last Olympics and then some highlights of this year's opening ceremonies followed by some highlights from this year's sports. I think it's awesome they have been constantly updating the video they show with updates from the days before. In particular there were scenes from the Canada vs Norway hockey game and the 3D, zoom and angle made you feel like you were right on the ice with the players. I've never watched hockey like that before.

Next I went over to West House, a sustainable laneway house worked on by SIAT, Smallworks and some other companies. It's going to be moved to another part of Vancouver after the Olympics and lived in for 6 months by someone to see how it works out.

Unfortunately Rob was not there to show me around, but I know he worked on this wall panel that lights up based on energy usage. There was no demo of it though. The house was a good size for one person to be really sustainable, but you couldn't really entertain many people in it. You'd also have to not keep much stuff, because I don't know where you'd put it, but people own too much stuff these days anyway.

Next I walked through the Vancouver Green Capital building. They had some displays of products made from recycled material and some videos from CEO's and experts who live in the area and are making green choices.

They also had these paper things hanging from the ceiling that lit up.

My next stop was the Samsung building but I took this photo earlier. When I went into it there was no line. Inside they had some cellphone games that had been blown up and put on touch screens. They also had a cross country skiing simulator and a snowboard decorating touch screen application.

You had to do all three games to get stickers of the mascots which then got you a scratch ticket. In cross country skiing I covered much more distance than the little girl I was up against, but on the scratch ticket I didn't win anything.

They also had some entertainment there where they tried to work cellphones into the theme. In this performance by Cirque des Communications they performed acrobatic stunts and balancing acts sometimes while chatting on their phones or taking photos with them.

...and there was a girl inside the moon.

...and a guy who could balance on chairs really well.

The next thing on their little stage were a couple guys who were doing improv and would work any lines into their skit that the audience texted them. They ended up saying things like "I'm pregnant", "Lets learn to belly dance" and "That girl in the red is so hot".

Samsung made my phone and its a piece of crap so the pavillion was better that I expected and there was no line up, just short line ups at the games. Across the way was the Acer pavillion which I popped into very briefly. All they had in there was a crap load of computers for people to play games on or surf the net. It was pretty busy.

The one pavilion in LiveCity Yaletown that I didn't visit was the Coca Cola one since there was a decent sized line up and I wanted to go catch the Canada vs Russia hockey game. Apparently LiveCity Yaletown is not, in fact, live. They play highlights every once and a while and at this point there was a band playing instead.

I watched the hockey game with these guys! Not sure whats up with Greg. He looks half dead. I also missed getting the youngest Brown brother, James, with my shot.

I had said I didn't want to watch it at Robson square again, but when it was about to start it wasn't raining. I put on one of the free ponchos anyway just in case, and because everyone else was wearing one! It was a good thing because it started pouring soon. Then the only problem became trying not to sit in a puddle. I find it hilarious how the ponchos say "You Gotta Be Here" as part of that campaign. You gotta be here...for the rain?...and prepared for it?

The view from the afro!

The game was awesome...but much less close than anyone thought it would be. Canada dominated right from the start. Russia was the leader coming into the Olympics, but Canada easily eliminated them. Now we face Slovakia (who also beat Russia) who beat Sweden in another unexpected game result. Tomorrow's game should be great.

Holland Heineken House

2010-02-25T00:25:00.003-08:00

On Tuesday I was in a meeting for 8 hours going over documentation with my research group at school. Progress through our agenda was slow but I think we learned a lot. Anyways, after this finished I went out to Richmond to meet up with some people that I work with at the hospital.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera! One of my coworkers took this photo.

At the Holland Heineken House, HHH for short, there was not too long of a line. It was about 10 minutes to get in. In the line I found out that the Dutch skater who was supposed to get the gold that day had been messed up by his coach and disqualified....so that's why the place was not as busy as expected. They did however get bronze in the event with another Dutch athlete, Bob de Jong.

Inside there were some simulation games. I tried out bobsledding and then speed skating. I wasn't really that great at both but I think I could do a lot better the second time at the skating if I went back. To buy food or alcohol you need to use a Heineken card so I loaded some cash on one of those and then we all went into the arena part where the food and drinks were.

They have some food you would usually expect to find sold in the lobby of an arena such as hamburgers and fries but then they also had Dutch food so I had a little of both. The Dutch food I had was stamppot with bacon bits and a piece of sausage. It was tasty.

The Holland house is cool in that everyone working there is from the Netherlands. Sure they all speak English but the writing on the walls in the games area was all in Dutch and not translated and the announcer guy talking from the stage was speaking Dutch and not being translated. There seemed to be a lot of people in the crowd there who understood him too. One of my coworkers from the hospital is from the Netherlands so he translated a bit. I just think its cool that they brought so much of their culture with them in its true form.

So this mascot came out on stage that basically had a flame with a smilie face on it for a head. He was an olympic torch or cauldron. He/she/it really got the crowd pumped up and jumping up and down and waving their arms to some Dutch music. Then the flame went away and the bronze medalist Bob de Jong came out on stage. He was interviewed by the host guy (all in just Dutch) and then he too was jumping up and down on the stage and getting the crowd all pumped up. It was fun times.

After this a band setup and started playing Dutch music. They were Guus Meeuwis and Vagant. The music was alright...for not being able to understand the lyrics. At this point I had had a few Heineken and hadn't really drank much of anything else all day so I was getting a bit of a headache. So I started off for home around 10pm even though Armin van Buuren, the number 1 DJ in the world played there later in the night. Oh well, it was still a fun time. The Dutch know how to have a good time.

The bus I took on my way home had a Canada flag plastered across the front of it. Inside there were a number of flags around the driver and above the rear view mirror was stuck a paper with Canada's medal count. I love it when people display such pride in the country and I love how everyone gets into the spirit so easily. It's Olympic fever.

Olympics - USA vs Canada

2010-02-24T00:54:00.005-08:00

So I worked like crazy over the weekend and Monday on documentation for a meeting today but I did take a break from that on the second half of Sunday. I went downtown and met Gordon after we both got off the same skytrain. We walked up to Robson Square to watch the hockey game but there was a big line up.

I went off to find a place to get some food and saw this street performer. He balanced himself up here well putting his body through a tennis racket. It was ridiculous. After grabbing some food I met back up with Gordon and we stood in line.

The security people tried to convince us there was no way we were going to get into the screen area to watch the game because who would leave the in the middle? In fact when we were first walking towards the line a guy was telling us that hockey wasn't even going to be played there. What a liar! Gordon tried to convince them to get the fire marshal so he could convince the marshal that they should put the game on the other screen too so more people could watch it.

While waiting in the line Gordon was interviewed twice by people with big video cameras. The first guy was from somewhere in Europe by the sound of this accent. The second interviewer was a French lady who was looking for someone who spoke French but ended up settling on Gordon. Having an afro really seems to attract reporters.

Shortly after the first intermission they let us in after some people left including Gordon's aunt and uncle. It was funny how security had been telling us the whole time we wouldn't be getting in. We started watching at the back and I could see just fine except after Canada scored because everyone leaped up in front of me!

It was awesome watching with a big crowd of excited fans.

At the second intermission we moved up to sit with a guy Gordon knew from watching the last couple Canada men's hockey games there. Here he is with some other fans trying to get everyone to make even more noise! The game was quite intense especially the last couple minutes where Canada had so many shots on net but didn't managed to put one in. It was ridiculous.

Hopefully they do better against Russia on Wednesday. Unfortunately they're now lined up to play a lot of tricky games while the US can probably breeze through to the finals. US plays Switzerland who they just beat last week in their first game.

After the game we started wandering to find a place to eat but not before Gordon had a third interview, one in which I was included this time. The lady said that people in Europe had expected riots in the streets here if we lost the game yet there weren't any. Also she asked us how we were feeling about the loss. What kind of question is that?

So after eating some Subway and having random conversations in the Subway with some teens waiting to use the washroom we hopped the skytrain back to Surrey.

In Surrey we went over to Holland park and checked out the SIAT tent with the weBlimp thing before getting in a large lineup. The lineup was to get into the tent to see 54-40 and the lady at the gate to the park had said the line was 45 minutes long. She was right and we missed the first few songs BUT it also meant the security people by the line who were saying we wouldn't get in at all were very wrong....again. I don't know what it is with security people and just wanting people to not even get in line.

This was the view of 54-40 that you could see from our spot in the line IF there was no tent wall in the way. I thought it might be as close as we got. I mean, how could security people lie twice in one day?

Inside it was a really awesome show. They really got the crowd into it with everyone shouting "Go Canada Go!" for a while, yet it wasn't as packed as the previous concerts. You had room to breathe.

The Sam Roberts band

2010-02-23T00:02:00.004-08:00

On Friday morning and afternoon I helped my brother out by acting in a short trailer he is making for a contest. The trailer is about not using disposable cups and we filmed a stop-motion part where I get devoured by paper cups. It should be interesting to see when done.

In the evening I met back up with my brother and we went to the Sam Roberts band free concert in Surrey along with some other friends. It was a great concert and although there was lots of people there it was less busy then the OLP concert the day before.

After the concert we went back to the theaterette at school and saw the last few minutes of the Germany - Finland hockey game.

The O-Zone

2010-02-21T10:38:00.005-08:00

So on Thursday afternoon after doing some work from home I hopped a couple buses out to Richmond to the O Zone.

It claims to be the largest free celebration area for the Olympics. They do have a lot of room in front of the stage and the Holland Heineken house is quite large but the line up is also very long for that.
I filled out a draw for 2 tickets to the closing ceremonies but found out later that night that I lost. Then I waited in this line to get into the BC Lottery Corporation tent. It moved pretty fast but then there wasn't much time spent inside it.

Inside I chose to try my hand at a simulation of the biathalon. I had to put on little bootys and slide back and forth on a board to simulate the cross country skiing and then there was a short amount of shooting at the screen targets. When I left the place they gave me a scratch ticket but I lost at that too.

After the BCLC tent I went back to the field where a country band was playing on the stage, but more people were watching the first period of the Canada-Switzerland hockey game on the screen beside it. Since the Canada Line is so convenient to get to Vancouver I decided to go catch it at the end of the first period.

I watched the third period, overtime and the shoot out of the game in Robson Square with a whole bunch of crazy fans including Gordon, Clarisse and Murray. The game was intense with Canada winning it in the shootout and the crowd breaking out into singing Oh Canada after the win.
Shortly after that I took the Canada Line right back to the O Zone for the Our Lady Peace concert. I grabbed a quick bite at the mall and then got fairly close to the stage just as the Arkells began playing. Some of there songs were pretty good. The band is from Hamilton. The crowd became quite pushy leading up to Our Lady Peace. Since the concert was free there were some kids on their parent's shoulders. There was also a lady with a stroller squished into the crowd who was trying to stop people from pushing.

While Our Lady Peace was setting up they replayed the hockey shootout on the big screens. This is just before Sidney Crosby won it for Canada.

Our Lady Peace put on an awesome show only playing a couple songs I didn't know. A lot of people were just there to have fun in the crowd. I had a couple people crowd surf over me and a bunch of balls were bouncing around on top of the crowd.

At one point the lead singer Raine climbed up the side of the stage cover.

There was no encore at the end of the show as the announcer said that the city of Richmond had a curfew on the place.

It took me a bloody long time to get out of Richmond mostly because I was waiting at a bus stop that apparently the bus had been rerouted around. Across the street from the O Zone there was a ferries wheel and the outline of Olympics rings and a maple leaf on a field behind a fence.

Zip-line line

2010-02-18T01:07:00.006-08:00

So today I can say that I went on the zip-line over Robson square in Vancouver and damnit I'm going to tell everyone because I can, and so that there may be some reason behind why I waited so bloody long to get on it. So it can be worth it more somehow.

The day started bright and early with my sister Rebecca and I getting in line at 8:30am even though it didn't open until 10am. The security guard near the line seemed to be doing everything he could to discourage people from getting in line. Telling us the wait would be 6 hours and explaining to some tourists how they could drive to the Capilano suspension bridge and spend a few hours there and then drive back and it would still be faster than waiting and going on the zip-line. Note that the bridge isn't free though.

This is where we were in line about the time the zip-line opened at 10am. The line goes up through a bunch of tents and almost to the base of the tower. Around this point we had a few people behind us and some in front of us decide to drop out of the line.

In each of the tents was one of these viewing things that you could look in to see videos of the You Gotta Be Here campaign, basically videos from around BC. Each machine had videos along a different theme.

The wait turned out to be 7.5 hours. We got in line at 8:45am and didn't get to ride until about 4:15pm. It was ridiculous. They claimed that they could do 50 people but at least in the last hour where we were close enough to see the number of people being called up to the tower, they did way less people than that. Some people hesitated at the top and there were many singles, where they let one person go across at a time even though there were two wires.

This is what we could see from the front of the line. Every 15 minutes of so a lady came down and gave out passes to 6 to 10 people at the front of the line who then walked up to the tower with them, signed waiver forms and then got strapped into their harnesses and ready to go.Whenever the lady came down these stairs everyone cheered!

The people on these steps were watching the big screen which you can see as the black in the top right corner. You see, we were standing behind the screen. Practically nowhere along the line up are there actual TV screens facing it. The people were confused by our cheers. When they cheered we knew it was due to a goal in the women's hockey game but when we cheered they had no clue. One guy even got up from the steps and walked over to look at the back of the screen since he thought we were looking at something on it. Instead we were looking under it up at the tower and occasionally yelling "Jump" or "Go" to get the people up there to move along.

In this small building at the base of the tower we were helped into our harnesses. The girl helping me realized her finger was bleeding so she decided she better find a bandaid somewhere first. As a result I got strapped in last in my group and then started up the tower.

It was cool though because Rebecca and I then took lots of photos on the way up and at the top, while everyone else was launching off. This is directly under the launch platform, as you can see the steps off into nowhere at the top of the photo. Also note the large screen in the bottom left under which is the head of the line. The line winds through all the white tents there and then all the way back to the road.

My sister has been on a zip line before but it was in a forest in Costa Rica and the big difference here is that the city allows you to have much more of a sense of scale as to how high we really are. You can see all the little people down below.

This is one of the two girls in front of us, getting ready to go. Any bags that people had got strapped to the same clip as they did and zipped across with you. At this point I put my camera back in my pocket as I didn't want any chance of dropping it and just wanted to enjoy the ride.

At this point I was also quite freaked out by the height. Oddly when I stepped out onto the steps and was waiting for Rebecca I became perfectly calm. I think it was because I felt quite securely strapped in and now the slack was gone and I had also waited bloody long to get here. I also noticed the score on the hockey game on the screen way below. "12-0!" was one of the last things I said before I stepped off the last step. That and "Let's do this thing!". Rebecca took a few seconds to follow me.

The trip across took about 12 or 13 seconds, really not enough to take it all in. I yelled a lot at the people down below me, many of which looked up at me. I also leaned back and put my legs up to hang upside down but a few seconds after that I was at the other end. The whole trip across took about 13 seconds.

When we got our harnesses off and started walking through the city it felt like a whole different world after waiting in line for so long. It was amazingly awesome to finally be walking to somewhere and no longer trapped.

Was it worth it? It's cool to be able to say I went on a zip-line over the city but I'd say unless you really have nothing to do with your day and you've also got lots you can do to keep occupied while waiting in line, don't do it. If you want the shortest line time, try and show up first in the morning. I heard the first people showed up at 6am which means they only had to wait about 4 hours. It's still damn long compared to the length of the lines for most other free Olympic events and what you get out of it is so short.

After stopping at my sister's old workplace, Second Cup for some drinks and getting a couple small sandwiches since we'd missed lunch we popped into the Korea House. Korea is trying to win the bid for the 2018 winter games. The place was not that big or very exciting. They had a multi-touch table similar to the one at the aquarium with some videos on Korea. Unfortunately the tables kept breaking. They also had hand massages and some ladies making patterns to give out to people but both of those had crowds at them and we didn't want to wait in anymore lines.

We walked over to the Royal Mint Pavilion and the Canada's North House but both had lines so we headed back towards Waterfront. Then we went passed it and on towards the Olympic cauldron and flame.

Along the way we got a view of the Olympic rings.

We also passed this crazy big globe thing dangling in the new convention center building all lit up and rotating. We saw Australia pass by.

At the flames there was a huge crowd with tons of people passing by to take photos of the torch or of other people in front of the torch.

They have made a space between the top and bottom panels of the fence so you can take an unobstructed photo of the flames from this far away.

All in all, the day in Vancouver was quite tiring. Afterwards I took the skytrain back to Surrey, stopping at my house for just 15 minutes before heading onwards to Ultimate Frisbee. It has been a looong day.

Olympics Opening Night

2010-02-14T22:21:00.004-08:00

On Friday I was in Vancouver for some work at the Children's hospital so I thought I'd check out downtown to see what I could see on the first day for many of the exhibits. I didn't want to wait in any lines so what I saw was limited.

Casa Italia is where I went first. There wasn't much there. They are selling clothing and have TVs going with images of Italy and Italian athletes. If you come at the right time they may be giving out cheese samples.

Next I wandered over to LiveCity Yaletown but the lineup wrapped way around the block and didn't seem to be moving, so I passed on that. I walked down towards BC place through throngs of people. LiveCity Downtown was closed as it didn't open until Saturday. The Four Nations plaza had just closed, so I walked up to Robson square.

There was a choir playing on a stage and down below beside the busy skating rink there was this group doing gymnastic/acrobatic tricks. They made a few mistakes but there's no way I could do many of the stunts they pulled off.

Up above the square people had fun on the zip-line. One of these weekdays I'm going to go wait in the line for that. I'm hoping it's shorter in the morning on a weekday. The zipline is quite short but then when else are you going to be able to zip in the middle of a city.

After this I walked back over to LiveCity Yaletown but there was still a huge line. I'll have to check that one out another day too. So then I walked along the water towards Science World, now called Sochi World since the Russian's took it over for the Olympics.

At the Plaza of Nations there was a market setup with everyone selling their jewelry and souvenirs and lots and lots of food. I bought a snack and then a concert started up. I'm not sure what their name was, but I did hear it was 3 girls from West Vancouver. The songs were good but you had to stand in the rain to watch it. My feet were already quite wet by this point though.

Further along the way was the Quebec house. It looks like a huge cube from outside but it's not a building as there's no ceiling. There was a small restaurant inside and a band that I assume was from Quebec was playing. The people eating were watching but not really anyone else even though there was room. Probably because you got rained on.

Next to the Quebec house is the Saskatchewan pavilion which had this big globe thing that was being projected on. Apparently you could go inside it but I heard that there was another line after the one you wait in outside.

Across the way was the Hockey house where the elite are hanging out with hockey stars and actors.
I went back towards BC place and watched a little of the start of the opening ceremonies on the huge screen on the side of the Ontario pavilion. Then I got on the skytrain and went back to Surrey. Back at Surrey Central I went into the theaterette at school and watched the last hour or so of the ceremonies with some other students.

Then I went over to Holland park where there was barely any line to get into the Surrey celebration site. I had to go around the mall to get there since they wouldn't let me go across the rooftop parking. It turns out this is where they were shooting the fireworks up from a few minutes later.

The fireworks looked like they were falling on the tower.

After the fireworks I stuck around for half an hour and watched some of the Blue Rodeo concert. There was quite a crowd there despite standing in the rain. There was also another concert going on inside a tent with a lineup to get in. Finally I caught a bus home to dry off my feet.

Torch Relay

2010-02-10T16:53:00.002-08:00

So the Olympic torch relay went through Surrey for a couple days earlier this week. I biked over to see it the first night. I arrived at the route and wasn't sure if it had gone past or was yet to come. It was 5 minutes before it should have gotten there but at the same time there were people walking away. I figured I must have missed it and biked ahead to catch up.

I caught up to this thing and a couple other celebration vehicles with speakers blaring. These guys were passing out small coke bottles, either containing coke or light. Anyways, I didn't see a torch anywhere and the vehicles were followed by traffic and still no torch.

I figured it must have been before the vehicles. So I biked off again and got way ahead of it near Holland park where it was ending the night. When the vehicles got there the first one had a sign that said the torch would arrive in a few minutes and still no torch.

After more traffic and 5 minutes or so the torch finally arrived. There was an exchange of the flame from one torch to another in the middle of the intersection, very close to the end of the night's route.

Holland park was swamped by people I couldn't even get close with my bike. People were going crazy to get photos of the torch as it went by.

The next morning the torch was traveling closer to my house and I biked over and saw it before heading to school for meetings.

On my way to school I found that once again there were some vehicles waaaay ahead in the convoy probably confusing the hell out of people who saw them in the distance and ran to the road too late to see the sign that said the torch would be there later.

House of Switzerland

2010-02-06T16:32:00.006-08:00

I plan to go to many of the free events and exhibits that will be taking over the city as part of the Olympics. Friday I went to my first one with some coworkers.

We traveled on the temporary Olympic line between the Olympic village and Granville Island. It is really quite slow and travels right alongside the street the 84 bus goes on, which I took all last term to UBC. But hey, at least it is free.

The inside is pretty narrow.

It was the opening of the House of Switzerland in the Bridges restaurant on Granville Island.

At the doorway was a Inukshuk made out of chocolate although it looked like some glue had been involved.

Inside there was a demonstration of making Swiss chocolates although it was hard to see what was going on because it was so packed.

Although we got there around the time it was supposed to open it was quite hard to get a table. After standing around for half an hour we managed to grab a table.

We bought a plate of Switzerland style appetizers that were alright and we had some Red Wine from Switzerland, although my Swiss coworker claims that the region of Switzerland that the wine came from doesn't get much sun. When he was ordering the waiter said "Dude, you'll have to speak in English", although I think my coworker was just saying the name of the dish. There didn't seem to be many Swiss people working there. When we ordered bread they immediately brought us a new bill with bread added on, $1 a slice. It was ridiculous.

People came around and gave out little tiny Swiss chocolate bars, packets of Ricola, and some packages of healthy tasting Swiss crackers. I also got a pin.

On the way out I got a small box of Lindt chocolates that were a limited edition milk chocolate with inner white chocolate.

After leaving we went to the Granville Island tap house for some much cheaper alcohol and then after that some of us went to a fish cafe near the entrance to Granville island which was pretty good. It was my boss' birthday but he had shown up just as we were leaving the packed Switzerland house. The place was alright but I hope to visit some exhibits in the coming weeks that have more entertainment and perhaps less people, if I go during the day on the weekday and more than just the Swiss house is open. This place opened quite early.

Aquarium trip

2010-02-06T14:35:00.005-08:00

On Wednesday was my sister's birthday, but since she lives on a small island and has school during the week we celebrated the weekend before on the mainland. So 6/8ths of my family went and visited the aquarium. I gave my parents and sisters 4 passes to the aquarium for Christmas so we were using 4 of those and then paying for two other people. Except when I got there the girl working at the front was a friend of a friend of mine who recognized me and let the other two in for free.

It was Emily's birthday. She's in the back.

...and now she's trying to make the jellyfish mad.

We went to the 4D theater show which was playing a planet earth under the sea show. It wasn't that long but it included bubbles floating around the theater, mist and air being blown on us, things rubbing up against our ankles, the chair vibrating and at one point being poked in the back. All of these things were timed with what was happening on screen. When we got poked everyone briefly thought it was my brother Ben who did it.

We also visited the tropical jungle room.

There were some very blue birds there that looked like they were making out.

We also had to look waaaay up to find the sloth, sleeping up by the roof.

I think this is an electric eel floating by Natalie's head.

Most of the dolphins were hiding from us.

We walked a lot that day but here we took a break by the beluga tank.

They had a multi-touch table that could be used to move, resize, and rotate photos and video clips of the animals at the aquarium.

We also visited the frog room where you could put your head inside the action. Unfortunately we couldn't find the frog in this tank. All of the signs in this area had different ways of saying how the frog species are all dying out, except for a few species that were brought over to North America and are now eating all the native frogs.

Weekend Biking

2010-01-20T13:41:00.005-08:00

I spent most of the weekend reinstalling two operating systems and trying to get all my programs to work again and my computer setup the way I like it. This was because I wanted to reinstall Parallels, ended up getting a virus on Windows, and Time Machine did not work.

Anyways, before all that I went for a bike ride because it was nice and sunny for once.

Here's my route through Surrey and Delta. I like tracing routes on maps. I once walked through Delta Nature Reserve after walking over the Alex Fraser bridge and it looked like a great place to bike so I wanted to check it out.

Unfortunately once I got there I was stopped several times by giant puddles or expanses of mud which made me turn back and find another route. I guess biking through woodland in January is not a good idea.

Another thing that's not a good idea: Biking on wet boardwalk. This section is where my bike slid completely out from underneath me and I almost slid right off the boardwalk. I ended up on here because it was the only way to go unless I wanted to backtrack completely out of the park.

This is how I ended up leaving the park. It wasn't really ideal for biking but it was either carry my bike up here or slowly bike back along the boardwalk. I almost always prefer going onward over backtracking when I'm exploring new places. This park area will be much better when it gets drier although that won't happen for a long time, knowing Vancouver.

Victoria Weekend

2010-01-11T18:59:00.006-08:00

So this weekend I went to Victoria for my dad's 50th birthday. My parents had a timeshare right by downtown but it didn't have room for everyone so my brothers and I stayed at my aunt's house. I traveled over to Victoria Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning we all got together and went to the beach strip between the lagoon and the ocean by Royal Roads University. We played a game of log tag even though the logs were pretty slippery. Log tag is like normal tag except you can only walk on the logs.

Later we went to Beacon Hill park. We were riding everywhere in the new bus my dad just got for his school. It was useful because we had nine people, but it was often hard to find a spot to park.

In the park we went to a park bench and my brother got out his laptop to show my dad the birthday present we made for him. My siblings and I created a video where we play our younger selves and were thanking him for all the fun times. It mostly focused on all the amazing vacations we've been on, traveling and camping across the province.

After the park we went back to the time share which has this view of the shore of the city...not usually with a bird.

That night we went to the Sticky Wicket for dinner. It wasn't that far away so we walked there.

The food was pretty good. Some of my dad's friends were there.

My whole immediate family was there too.

We walked back to the time share along the water by the lit up parliament buildings.

We had some delicious black forest cake at the time share and everyone
watched the video we made.

On Sunday we went for a walk around the park near my aunt's house.

My sister found a tree fort and climbed up into it. Shortly after we all drove to the ferry in the bus, some of us headed for the mainland and some for Saturna.

It was a pretty relaxing weekend and my dad quite enjoyed the video we had made. We all did a good job thinking up interesting scenes for it and my brother did an excellent job editing it.

New Years

2010-01-07T10:50:00.006-08:00

So my New Years was not super exciting this time around. I hung out with my little sisters and my brother. We played some board games and the gift game. It consisted entirely of gifts my grandma bought which were all edible and only one did not contain chocolate. At midnight we blew some noise makers.

My sister did a good job of being annoying in this video taken at midnight. Unfortunately it is somewhat anti-climatic as you can't see what Farley is doing at the end. Use your imagination.