Weekend Wedding

I will be away at my cousin's wedding this weekend, so no updates for a few days.

The wedding is about 1.5 hours to the southwest of Chicago and we're driving there...so about 10 hours....one way.......driving all day friday, driving all day sunday.....in a sedan......with 5 people....with Kitty....squished together with my wacky family.... Yeah, so that'll be interesting.

I'm actually hoping I do a lot of the driving, so I won't be squished as much. We'll see how it goes...

The wedding itself has something like 400 guests! It's Italian/Chinese, so I think it'll be fun, or at the very least interesting. So I may post about it after I get back.

Updated Links

Well I finally updated my blog. I have a new layout...the old one was gimmicky and I have updated my links.

For the past year I've been using a rss feed reader (www.bloglines.com) and I'm loving it. It's my one place for personalized information that I can hit up anywhere. Originally I thought that this would save me time, but I think it has ended up wasting me more time. I suscribed to a few new feeds that seemed interesting and now I'm addicted. So now I spend more time overall time reading stuff on the internet, but I guess it's more efficient. I divide it into three main groups, the personal blogs of friends (under blogroll), my "regular feeds" that I try to keep up daily and my "secondary" blogs if I'm bored or evaluating whether to include them in my regular feeds. I've only exposed my regular feeds and blogroll for your perusing pleasure.

I'm looking for more photoblogs, so if anyone can recommend any, I'd appreciate it. DDOI, is a classic and I love the photography he does...especially good because he's based in TO. Hot Photatoes is one that my friends started and it looks really promising as well. I'm really impressed with their photo skillz.

The gaming blogs, joystiq and kotaku are very entertaining (at least for me). I started following them quite closely only recently and that's perhaps why all my posts are gaming related...the best links come from those sites!

Dear Margo is like a guilty pleasure for whatever reason. It's like peering into other people's (usually messed up) lives and then getting a slap of reason.

I follow a bunch of food blogs, but obviously from my previous post, I don't do much about them after reading them. I really like the format that cooking for engineers presents their recipes.

I suscribe to Word of the Day feeds, which are suppose to build my vocab. The wordsmith one is run by someone with a sense of humour...or someone that just enjoys really strange and wacky words. It's also funny when you see word of the days being used on various blogs on the internet...obviously they suscribe to them too!

I don't know why the weather feeds don't work as links, but whatever.

I have only two sports feeds, but I read a lot more. Bill Simmons is literally the best sports writer ever...no joke. Steve Kerr is really good too, and surprisingly, he writes exclusively for Yahoo. Yahoo also happens to be my first source for sports news, so I guess they are doing something right.

I have a bunch of tech blogs, standards like Slashdot and Ars Technica. Two great software bloggers are Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham.

So I guess I'm trying to update my blog more consistently now. I feel a bit out of touch with friends with the start of the fall and the school year (for those in school). This summer was a blast for me, hanging out with friends every weekend and I kinda miss that...so I guess blogging is my way to keep in touch. Unfortunately blogging is very one way, so please leave me some comments

Theme Song

Typically for a couple nights a week I log onto battle.net to chat with my buddies and play DotA. Like I said before, I like the social aspect of it.

We recently had enough people (minimum, 10) to form a clan named "boop". (Stands for boop owns other people, it's recursive, like GNU). So it's been fun having a clan and now we regularly get 6-8 people playing every night. We are often playing games with just friends instead of random people on the internet.

I think even Keith will be starting to play with us! He recently quit WoW and is looking for a new addiction. I told him that this addiction wasn't a good way to pass the time, so he should join us on b.net instead!

Well anyway, I came across this song, and this should be our theme song. The main chorus goes like this:

We're sitting here in Ventrilo, playing some DotA,
We push on and we're owning, with the opponents we're toying,
Running around creeping, the opponents we're sleeping

If you watch the video, it's hilarous, because there's all these music video girls dancing in the video. When I play DotA, there aren't girls dancing around me, wtf!!!

And the funniest part is that supposedly the song is #2 on the Swedish pop charts!

Gas Prices

I'm pretty obsessed with gas prices. I will put in $5 dollars day after day to wait until the prices go down. This article makes a good point that you don't actually save that much. Looking at other alternatives will save you much more...and for young people like us, probably not pharmaceuticals.

The number one for me is probably eating out. Let's see, starting on friday:

• Friday lunch: Metro, gypsy schnitzel (Best schnitzel restaurant ever)
  
• Friday dinner: Just Greek, pork souvlaki (the one on bloor...not very good)
  
• Sat lunch: Carol's super lunch picnic
  
• Sat dinner: Biftheque, T-bone steak with free onion rose
  
• Sun lunch: 2nd City, sweet potato fries & fries
  
• Sun dinner: Sushi Time, chirashi
  
• Mon lunch: Work Caf, salad plate w/ tuna
  
• Mon dinner: McD's+hotdog vendor, junior chicken+polish sausage (Kev, the vendor was not a chinese female... 0/6. I confirmed that the other two weren't asians female either on the other side of the road)
  
• Tues lunch: Work Caf, hungarian goulash
  
• Tues dinner: Wendy's, chili+junior burger
  

That's 10 meals in a row. That's sad. I spend money wastefully for unhealthy food. I should cook more. And not be lazy. Someone inspire me.

Engineering Joke

For engineers, the following joke will be funny.

Leafs Game

I've never in my life been to a Leafs game before. But that's changed - I was lucky enough to catch a preseason game last monday!

My mom does the purchasing of leafs/raptors tickets and her boss gave her tickets to the very first preseason game. I was really excited since I'd heard so much about how fun leafs game and how much energy there is at the ACC. Kitty was even more excited than me, because she actually follows the Leafs, whereas I don't follow hockey at all (Leafs included....so shoot me).

Anyway, I drove all the way in from Waterloo to Kipling so we could subway downtown. There was a baseball game as well going on that day, so we figured the traffic would be unmanageable. After picking up a couple of junior chickens we headed in.

I've been to the ACC many times, so this wasn't new. Something new was that we had Air Canada Club Access seats, which meant we went up to a level right above the main level gates. Up there was a bar and various foods for sale, with couches and bar tables. The seats were at the top of the lower bowl along the side, so they were really good IMO. The tickets says $179.50, so they are pretty decent.

Onto the actual game. The Leafs suck. They were playing Buffalo, who made it to the finals last year. It wasn't a sellout crowd, only 18,000+ (I thought all Leaf games sellout! Even preseason! guess not...) and they were pretty quiet. It didn't help that the leafs were constantly outplayed and outhustled. Buffalo players were skating circles around the Leafs and there wasn't anything that the Leafs could do to prevent it. Then the Leafs started getting a bunch of penalties and then Buffalo started scoring. That really killed the energy in the building and made for an unexciting game. The final score was 4-0, so we didn't even get to celebrate one goal.

Wasn't as crazy as I expected, and there were several times I had to boo the Leafs. The only time the crowd got excited was when there were fights. Two fights occurred and it looked like the Leafs won both of them, and they were kinda exciting, but not something that really got me going.

Anyway, I was disappointed with my Leafs experience unfortunately and I'm the type that really enjoys live sporting events. So....Go Raptors!!!!

me???

Jeopardy clue:

"He is a male. He is connected. He is very, very used to going online for community. He's probably played PC games online. He's part of a "War3" clan and has been for two years. That comes from him playing "War3" in college--so he's 23 or 24--with his buddies. He still loves to go out on a Wednesday night with them, even though they're spread all around the U.S. But they all come together Wednesday night to relive the days in the dorm room."

Answer:

Who is Nelson???

Seriously, this is the response that Peter Moore of Microsoft gave when asked "when you look at ideal Xbox consumer, who is that person?" Except subsititue war3 with Halo. That's kinda scary.

Male Restroom Etiquette

Most (males) will know of the unspoken rules of male restroom etiquette, but if you don't (or if you're female), please watch the following (sims2) machinima video.

Punch in the face

I'm not a violent person, but on the rare occasion I just want to punch people in the face. People like the following.

Wii

If you haven't heard of Nintendo's new console, it's called the Wii (pronounced like wee). The innovative thing about it is the control scheme... you can move the controller about in space and the actions will corresponds to actions on the screen.

It's something that is really different than the norm of gaming, and they are aiming to get people from all backgrounds/ages/sexes to play and have fun with it. Hopefully it'll lead to more intuitive game play control and appeal to all sorts of people. Plus it should be a blast as a group activity. I think it's really brave for Nintendo to push the boundaries like this, and I as a consumer wish to reward them (plus i'm a bit of a fanboy).

Therefore, I will be purchasing a Wii system the first day it comes out, November 19th. I'm still undecided which games to get, so maybe you can help me out. I plan to invite a bunch of people to play with me when I get it. So message me for an invite and keep the date clear!

PS Tell me your suggestions for which games I should get...

PPS also, you should also get one, so I don't have to buy so many controllers ($60 a pop). The idea is that you can bring your own remote with files and just plug in to your friend's console and start playing with your personal information (Mii). So let the buying begin!

Ann Coulter

I was reading Slate as I often do, and came across an article about Ann Coulter. If you don't know who she is, she's a crazy extreme conservative. Recently while I was waiting in the airport bookstore, I picked up one of her books and flipped to a random page and started reading. It was about evolution, but her arguments and conclusions were so funny that I was laughing out loud in the airport bookstore. I have to admit that it made for an entertaining read and apparantly her books sell quite well. One of the links in the article linked to this site of some of quotes, if you wanted to get a feel for what she's about. Good stuff. I don't understand how she can write this stuff, but in the Slate article, she mentions that they are "self-parodying best sellers". So maybe that explains it...