Grace in NYC

My sister, Grace, has not only moved out of the house but even away from Toronto! She recently graduating from Queens in Concurrent Education and started to look for a job in the Toronto area. Unfortunately, there seems to be a glut of teachers in the Toronto area and she wasn't able to find a placement. I suppose Toronto is not a growing area for new schools.

On the other hand, NYC is a growing area for schools. I hear that NYC is a city that more people are rasing their children in, hence the demand for teachers. She got an offer from the New York Board, the largest school board in the USA, and decided to go. They are training her during the summer months and provide residence, so she had to leave quite abrubtly. I sincerely hope she gets placed at a decent school.

It feels strange with my sister in such a faraway location, but I wish her the best of luck! It must be scary and exciting at the same time. And now we can't play Animal Crossing together :( (A retarded game, but addictive nonetheless). But there's always wifi :)

So have fun in NYC sis, and I hope you find a good placement. Hopefully I'll be able to visit soon!

Convocation

It's the time of the year for Convocations!

I recently attended one at Queen's for my sister's graduation with a Bacheleor of Education. This entry is a bit of a rant, since I'm comparing it to my own crappy Convocation.

First, my convocation was almost 2 years ago (wow, has it been that long already???). Convocations at Waterloo are held in the PAC (Physical Activities Complex). For our year, they graduated everyone in the Engineering Faculty, including grad students, which totalled around 800-900 people. This meant that the whole floor area was filled with graduates and the stands were filled with families. Since there were so many people, they had to restrict guests to two per graduate and made available extra tickets by special request. On the actual day, the PAC was completely packed with people.

This led to the first problem: noise. This was compounded with the fact that I was in the very back row. I had to strain really hard to hear anything and even then it was difficult. The seating area was flat and the platform for the presentations was not raised very high, so we couldn't see very much either. Eventually, we all resorted to talking amongst ourselves and adding to the noise problem. This meant that the speeches were hard to hear and they didn't seem very engaging, but I really couldn't say either way. Because of the large number of graduates, the ceremony lasted a long time. So long in fact, that graduates were leaving mid ceremony to exit the premises. They also happened to present the Masters and Ph.D students last, and by then, the auditorium was half empty.

In contrast, Queen's graduation ceremony was held in an old hockey arena. Not as large as the PAC, but it felt much more intimate and inviting. They were also graduating similar numbers of people, but I suspect a lot of them didn't show up. Their acoustics was much better and this meant that I could actually hear the speeches. The speeches also happened to be pretty entertaining and inspiring. One of the honourary degrees was given to a chinese imigrant who reports/photographs for a Kingston newspaper and he talked about his interesting life. Then Masters/Ph.D graduates graduated first, followed by the undergrads. When the undergraduates were recieving their degrees, it got a little more rowdy, but not to an unacceptable level. It was a little boring when they were going through all the graduates, but luckily I had brought my time machine (as Victor likes to call it) along with me. No one left the building until it was all done. It felt like a relatively short and efficient ceremony. There was a reception with lot's of (free) food afterwards. Bonus!

Overall, the quality of the ceremony was obviously better than Waterloo's, which my parents and my sister agreed to as well. From what I hear, they've improved the graduating cermemony since my graduation (they even had Malcolm Gladwell speak at the Waterloo Arts Convocation), but I still think the level of professionalism and quality is much higher at Queens. Oh well, maybe the moral of the story is that I needed a time machine for my own ceremony.

Getting a new Computer

My computer finally broke down this week. I opened it up to investigate a little further, and from the burn marks on the power supply PCB, it appears that the PSU has failed.

I'm going to get a new power supply and see if that fixes it. I've basically decided to get a new desktop computer by components instead of getting a Dell. I figure it'll be a little bit cheaper, since I don't have to buy a hard drive. I'll also hopefully be able to get a discounted video card from the AMD folks at some point.

I will try to go by Canada Computers and pick up an Antec NSK6500 today. For my last case, I bought an ultra cheap one, ($35) and regret the decision a little bit. I frequently accessed the insides, and this cheapo case made it difficult. It was also really noisy, which meant I never had the computer on overnight. I'm not too concerned with the look. I definitely don't want a flashy one, I don't want a see through one (dumb), and I want a minimum number of external LEDs.

An alternative I'm considering is the Antec Sonata III, which just came out. It has an external eSATA port, which would be a definite advantage over the NSK6500. Unfortunately, I can't find any Internet reviews for it yet. If anyone has some computer advice for me, please share.

Meanwhile, I've been playing Online Tetris with my DS, and surfing the internet with my Wii and finishing Tuesdays with Morrie. I'm also searching desperately for my MCBCSL softball jersey so I can get my third badge. It is nowhere to be found after searching both my Waterloo and Toronto homes for several hours. :(

DS Flash Cart

If you read my lengthy entry on my New York City trip over the long weekend, you'll know that I bought a Nintendo DS. It's a great device, especially when you only have a few minutes and want something quick to play. For example, while waiting in line for my free Harvey's Original Hamburger this weekend, I pulled it out and play a few quick games of Tetris.

It's also great for multi-player. Yesterday, I had a Wii party in Waterloo, and had more than 4 people show up. The other people played multi-player Tetris DS instead. One of the best features of the DS is the ability to quickly get a wireless multiplayer game going.

Anyway, the whole point of this entry is to find out if anyone wants to get in on our order for a DS flash cart. A lot of people recommended the DS-X, but I think we're going to go with the R4 instead. We're up to 5 people already! So let me know ASAP if you want in!

Weekend in NYC: Part 2

If you want a pictorial version of this long boring entry, Kevin, Ben and I have uploaded a bunch of pics on Facebook.

Day 3 "Let's Roll"

After getting up late at 9:30AM, our sleepy room was out by around 11AM, two hours late. Once again Kevin and Pauline had to wait for us. At least the shower was working after a call to the front desk the previous day. It was sunny and warm, in stark contrast to the previous day. We hit up the PATH and went directly to the WTC subway stop.

At the subway stop, Victor wanted to play DS together. He let us know his desire by saying "Let's Roll". That became the running joke of the weekend along with Richard packing more stuff than the girls combined, and Richard and Victor sleeping together.

The WTC site is a big construction area. There was an informative display with a timeline and photos. After taking a few photos, we came across Century 21 and went in. Century 21 is like a larger version of Winners with more brand names. Kev and Richard got bored quickly and left to explore the surrounding area. Ben went crazy and spent $400. The girls had a good time too, but bought very little in comparison. I picked up a pair of running shoes and a few shirts. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try the running shoes extensively before purchasing because there was a plastic tie keeping them together. After I tried it in the hotel I found that there was not enough arch support and it felt like my knees were coming together unnaturally. Hopefully it'll be better when I break them in.

After extending our time shopping we headed off to wander some more. We headed in the direction of New York City Hall. Someone suggested Burger King for lunch, but I quickly vetoed it, since I've never in my life eaten anything decent there. We ended up at an Eatery, called Olivia's. I had a light lunch of a panini sandwich because I knew I would be having some Katz Deli soon. We began to walk around the park and the surrounding area. Ben soon got tired of carrying all his stuff so he had to head back and drop it off in the hotel.

From there we walked to NYC Chinatown. NYC has the largest concentration of Chinese people in the Western hemisphere. This was reflected by their large Chinatown. And like all other Chinatowns, it was dirty, smelly and full of garbage and good deals. We bought a few oranges and Kitty and Victor hunted around for some bbtea. They eventually found a place selling smoothies with real fruit. It was very tasty.

We passed by a small section that I was told later was Little Italy. The section we went through consisted of a few blocks of furniture and lighting shops. We were getting close to Katz's, but early for the rendezvous time with Ben. We decided to walk west on Houston for a bit and came across an Adidas store. We went in for some comfy seats and AC. The Adidas store conveniently had touch screen monitors with games. We spent a while there, watching Victor and Richard try to beat the German's high score at snake. They were unsuccessful.

We headed out back toward's Katz's deli. On the way, we heard some music playing, so we headed in that direction to find out what it was about. We were in the Bargain District of NYC. The neighbourhood had a bohemian feel to it, especially when we discovered the source of the music. It was just some dude blasting (very loud) music from his apartment and people had congregated outside on the street. A lot of shops were selling their wares as well. A little dissapointed, we headed back to Katz's.

When you get into Katz, you are forced to take a ticket to record what you ordered. Think Marche for an equivalent analogy. From what I could tell, their most famous sandwiches were the pastrami, corned beef and salami. After waiting in line (or budding in front to where my friends were), I ordered a pastrami. The meat cutter first gives you sample to taste and then you wait for him to cut up the meat. The sandwiches were quite expensive, going for about $12-13 a sandwich, but they are quite large. The pastrami on rye was excellent and I thought it was better than Schwartz's in Montreal (although 3 times more expensive). At Schwatz's, there were chunks of fat in the sandwich, that I didn't enjoy so much (I ordered a medium fat Montreal Smoked Meat Sandwich), but at Katz's, the fat was more evenly distributed. After washing it down with a Dr. Brown's root beer, we were off to see Rent.

Kitty had ordered tickets the previous week to see Rent, so we didn't have to use TKTS, which was recommended by so many people. Richard and Victor didn't want to see Rent and ended up at TKTS and watched Spelling Bee (according to Victor not as good as Spellbound). We met up with Joanna, Judy and her friend Steve and proceeded to enter the theatre. In yet another strange coincidence, Judy's friend Steve knew Kevin because they lived in V1 (Waterloo dorm) together.

Whenever I think of Rent, the first thing that comes to mind is the spoof in Team America of Rent. It was fitting that we were in East Village earlier in the day, which I think the play was set in. I had a bit of trouble picking up what the documentary guy was saying at times, but the rest of the cast was good. Ben kept raving about the cross dresser's performance.

After that, Joanna and Steve headed off and we walked through Times Square to the Virgin Megastore to meet up with Richard and Victor. I taught Judy how to play some guitar hero and also walked around Times Square a bit. Some of us wanted to stay in Times Square and others wanted to go to a Cheesecake place. Kevin met up with his friend John and with Pauline, decided to stick around Times Square. Ben, Victor, Richard Kitty and I headed off to the far away Cheesecake place.

Unfortunately it was already pretty late on a Sunday night and when we arrived, at Veniero's, the seating had already closed. We ordered some takeout and decided to head back. On the way, Ben and Richard couldn't resist getting some Popeye's Fried Chicken. We couldn't think of anywhere to go that would still be open on a Sunday night, so with our unhealthy food, we headed back to the hotel.

We got back, unwrapped our food and starting eating and chatting. Eventually we cracked out our DSs (we had four after borrowing Joanna's) and started playing some Team Tetris. I sucked badly (I was tired) and played until 3:30 AM. Kitty had gone downstairs to pack so she could be ready for more shopping the next day.

Day 4: More Shopping

Kitty and Pauline had planned to get up really early in the morning and go back into Manhattan to do some more shopping. They hit up Century 21 and Forever 21. I slept. We eventually got out of bed at around 11AM and proceeded to pack and get out of the hotel. We met up in a mall across from the hotel and did some more shopping. The girls eventually came back and met up with us and they also continued shopping. After a quick meal at the food court (Popeye's for me) and getting berated for leaving my DS in the car we started our drive back.

We were greeted with traffic trying to leave NJ, but eventually made it out. This time the ride back consisted of more C-pop, hearing about Ben's experience being the #1 Street Fight player in Canada, sleep and playing DS. We met up with the other car at the exact same McD's as before and had a leisurely dinner. We discussed our favourite part about the trip, which I have posted below:

Kitty: Rent
Ben: Rent
Richard: Dunno, (sleeping with Victor?)
Kevin: Dunno, (Apple Store?)
Victor: Katz's Deli
Nelson: Nintendo World Store
Pauline: Shoe Shopping

On the way back, we ran into some traffic getting into Toronto. That's when the other car got on the Walkie Talkie and declared "Let's Roll!". So we started playing 4 player DS between the two cars. That was fun, but kinda sucked when it started lagging due to the increasing distance. Eventually our DSs ran out of batteries and the traffic cleared up. We met up in Scarborough Town Center at around 1AM to redistribute the people for optimal home delivery and concluded our weekend of fun.

Weekend in NYC: Part 1

Warning: this entry is kinda long and boring, so you may want to skip it...

Day 1

I spent the long weekend down in NYC. Any particular reason? No. Someone suggested it, we planned it with a shitload of emails and then took off.

Well sorta took off. We wanted to leave Friday afternoon to try to get ahead of the long weekend traffic and get to the hotel at a reasonable hour. I even took a half day off since I was coming in from Waterloo and picked up Kitty (with a quick stop at Christie's Cookie Factory Outlet), Richard (Thanks for lunch, your company sells awesome sandwiches) and Pauline (from Woodlands, my childhood Chinese school), but Ben forgot where he put his passport. We ended up waiting for him at Coffee Time/Dairy Queen/Chuck E. Cheese. We played X-Men, but the red video component was missing and the controllers were broken. By the time we got going, we were into rush hour traffic, but it wasn't too bad, since it only delayed us by half an hour.

Thanks to some fast driving by Ben and Victor (Thanks guys!), it took us about 9 hours to get down to NYC, which was faster than I expected. We only made three stops: once at the border, once at McDonald's and once for gas. The ride down consisted of hours upon hours of Mandarin C-pop between bouts of sleep, messing with the GPS and gossip (I was riding with the gossip queens, Ben and Kitty after all).

We finally arrived at our Doubletree hotel in Jersey City at 3AM in the morning. We proceeded to check into our room for four people, which unfortunately consisted of a Queen size bed, couch, cot, smoke and a dripping shower head. It was still pretty decent! But then again I didn't sleep on the coffee table/couch like Ben did the first night.

Day 2

Our room (Ben Joanna, Kitty and I), woke up at 9AM, took some dripping water showers and got out of the hotel by around 10AM. Kevin & Pauline got up at 7:30 and were bored to death waiting for us. We were fortunately located right next to the PATH station to get into Manhatten (Pavonia/Newport). Unfortunately, due to some miscommunication, we were delayed a bit waiting for Tim to meet up with us. He was staying in a completely empty condo minutes away from our hotel. Richard stayed behind and we went ahead and went into Manhattan.

We travelled on the dirty and smelly NYC subway system and came out somewhere in Manhattan. Somewhat atypical for me, I didn't look at the maps and just let others take care of getting around. We walked around NYC for a while looking for a place to eat, coming across some sort of farmer's market. We decided to keep moving and found a TGIF, sat down, ordered water, looked at the crazy menu prices and then got up and left. Damn tourists. We eventually made our way to Grand Central Station, where Tim and Richard caught up with us and we met up with Judy (Kitty's University friend working at EY in NYC). We finally decided on Junior's inside the station and had lunch. They serve representative/stereotypical "New York" types of food. I had a Reuben sandwich and it was damn good.

We subwayed up 5th Ave to the Guggenheim, but unfortunately it was under renovations. We walked down until we reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We split up, with half continuing to walk down 5th Ave while Tim, Richard, Kitty and I stayed to check out the Met. It seemed like it was about to rain, so I figured hitting up the museum would be a good idea. We bumped into some random people exiting that gave us their pin, but the price of admission is just a recommended donation. We went to check out the Egyptian temple first, then got lost in the American section. There was a section for American colonial furniture and I felt like I was trapped in an episode of Antiques Road Show. I looked around to find the famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Kitty really liked the still lifes by William Michael Harnett, Alexander Pope and John F. Peto (I looked that up on their website). We wandering around the Japanese art section before heading out to catch the a tour of Modern Art. Thankfully it was not too modern (the most modern it got was a Picasso) and mostly focused on Impressionist paintings (my favourite). Richard was falling asleep while standing. I found it interesting and even though I was familiar with most of the material already, the Met had a lot of famous pieces. I also found it coincidental how the Impressionist Wing's building design was exactly like that of the Louvre's, except smaller.

We left the musuem and started walking down museum mile (with a quick Starbucks stop). Unfortunately, it started to rain. We deliberated whether to walk or take the subway to Rockefeller and decided to keep walking. I got my shoes/socks wet at this point. We walked by a bunch of stores (Apple, FAO Schwartz, Gucci, LV) without going in so we could meet up with the other group. Judy had gone home for a nap and we met up with her again near North America's largest Catholic Church. We arrived at the rendevous point in Rockefeller Concourse at yet another Starbucks. At this point we learned that Victor had gone back to the hotel to rest because he was sick. We had previously wanted to take a boat cruise at this point, but since it was raining, we decided to split up again and wander around.

I, along with Tim, Judy, Ben and Kitty headed to the Nintendo World Store. We spent the hour there where everyone except Ben and I were probably bored out of their minds - I thought it was the highlight of the trip :) It was a really nice store, with a lot of demo stations all over for Wii and DS games. There was a large crowd at the Tiger Woods game and a bunch of people playing Pokemon for DS. They had a museum of sorts upstairs showing off old systems and accessories. They also had a clothing section where I proceeded to pick up two T-shirts. I was excited to be there and couldn't resist making purchases. Ben tried to convince me to get a DS because it's cheaper in the US with the favourable exchange rate and lack of taxes. I was eventually going to get one, so I was weak and gave in. I ended up saving about $24. Ben proceeded to buy two, a pink one for himself and a black one for his brother. I bought a white one to match my Wii. I also picked up Tetris, because I heard from Keith and Tsu that the multiplayer was fun.



We met up again and decided to go back to the hotel to change and drop off our stuff. Kitty went back to Judy's. We were running late for dinner, so we decided to call for a cab. Turns out that there is no such thing as a cab from New Jersey to NYC and we had called for an "underground cab". It was also a ripoff. We only found out later that the PATH trains to NJ run all night long. Anyway, we met up with Ben's friend William (and his gf) at Virgils BBQ at 9PM for dinner. It turns out that Judy and William know each other because they work at the same company. What a coincidence! After a smokey, meaty meal of ribs, it was off to the club.

We rode a taxi down to the the Meat Packing District for some clubbing. We got there around midnight and left at 2AM. In Toronto, I typically go on Asian nights, but this time in NYC it had a real different feeling. There were a lot of black, white and asians, so it had a different vibe. DJ was pretty decent too (although I think the DJ at Bomber is pretty good as well). The club was also really pricey. $20 USD cover and $10 drinks. After Pauline had a little trouble with the alcohol we headed back to the hotel after a long, exhausting day......to play Tetris DS!