resistance to persistence

Make your images into polaroids

Poladroid makes your images look like desaturated polaroids. If you’ve got some fond memories of the now defunct polaroid cameras, download poladroid for your mac and turn digital pics into something that feels old and familiar.

What a day. Sometimes fun things can happen without even planning them. What normally would have been a quiet Sunday turned into an adrenaline filled day.

The morning started with swim class for my daughter. At 8 months it’s fun to take her swimming and the fearful neck clasping hugs she gives are so sweet. Special times.

After that I rushed home to head out on the next adventure. My buddy Kevin was in my driveway waiting to go see a Chuck Liddell MMA training session. $150 to take part in instruction, $30 to watch. We chose the watching obviously. I got a ton of photos which I’ll be posting soon. It was interesting to watch him go through some of his favorite moves (the overhand right, etc) and even some ground game. After 2 hours of that there was an hour of Q&A. Lots of expected questions -Randy vs Lesner, EliteXC Kimbo fiasco and was highly critical of EliteXC for buying up the smaller leagues and benching them. This came after taking questions from Mauro, one of the announcers on EliteXC. But overall it was positive and informative. We didn’t stick around for the autograph signing session.

Chuck Liddell and Showdown Joe

I then got a call around 5:30. My friend John was in the neighbourhood and he was going to stop in for a minute to show me something. He showed up on my doorstep with a Porsche Carrera 4S. Drool. A coworker lent it to him for the week while he was out of town. He took me for some hot laps around the city busting it open on some back industrial roads but there’s never a road long enough to try out the full speed of a driving machine like that. A good taste of adrenaline to end the day.

A couple of weeks ago, my family went to Orlando for a little vacation and break from city life. Time to unwind. My inlaws came with us which was a great help travelling with a baby and also meant we had some babysitters.

We went the week hurricane Ike arrived but thankfully were unaffected other than an afternoon of thunderstorms. The rest of the week was warm and very humid. Beautiful. Swimming at 11pm was as warm as an afternoon in Toronto.

As this was my first time to visit Florida, I was left with some impressions other than just the beauty.

Wildlife - it was a strange mix of rainforest and forest animals. There were small lizards constantly jumping out of your way, signs for “don’t feed the alligators”, under which a rabbit was chomping away on the grass and a squirrel running past. What a juxtaposition. A medly of animals waiting to get eaten by a gator (which we sadly never saw).

Recycling - I’m not a totally environmental nut (I drive an SUV) but I definitely take steps to help the earth where possible and recycling has been something ingrained since I was a kid. But we couldn’t find recycling facilities at all. The hotel didn’t have any. We had to throw newspapers, glass baby bottles and plastic water bottles into the garbage. My stomach churned. I didn’t notice recycle bins at the mall or on the streets either. Did I simply miss them? Hey American readers, what is recycling like in your city? Leave me some comments.

Litigious - I’ve always seen the lawyer commercial spoofs on SNL and other shows but now I see how prevalent suing is in the US. Every commercial break had lawyer commercials wanting to “get you top dollar” for injury claims cases or suing a drug company. And there were soooo many Judge shows on daytime tv, all sorts of new judges I’d never heard of. Just shocking to see.

But overall, I really enjoyed Orlando. Hot, clean and sunny. I’ll definitely be back again in future years when I’ve got older kids to take to the amusement parks.

Yesterday in Canada was the national election. And this year I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Frankly I was pissed off that yet another election had been called so recently after the last one. The minority rule party just keeps dying the polls looking for a weak point in support for the 2nd party in charge so they can call an election to overthrow them and gain majority power. I know politics is in essence a power struggle but it just seems so inefficient and wasteful to me. Do I want my leaders constantly looking to play “king of the hill” or to work to make Canada a better place?

So this morning I checked the news to see what happened. No surprise, essentially the same result as before the election. Sure some seats have changed hands but no major shift in power. And at what cost? It’s reported that this election cost taxpayers 290 million dollars which I think would have been used better pretty much anywhere other than campaigning for yet another election. And apparently I’m not the only one feeling this way. Voter turnout was at it’s lowest point in a *very* long time.

Leaders, let’s put our heads down and get to work on improving things rather than working against each other.

Windows Automatic Updates can sometimes cause problems and more headaches than it’s worth. It’s no doubt important to keep the latest updates installed for security purposes, so this may not be for everyone. I know of a case where every time a windows update is installed, it stomps all over the internet connection which results in a call to the ISP tech support to get things back up and running. So for this person…here’s how to turn off Automatic Updates.

#1 Right-click My Computer, #2 Select Properties

#3 Choose the Automatic Updates tab

#4 Turn off Automatic Updates

I’ve officially got olympic fever and the only cure is lots of tv. Unfortunately with a new baby, tv isn’t something I get to watch much of the time. I caught some swimming the other night and it’s always exciting. Track and field is good to watch as well. And this is the first year to watch them in high def and it makes such a difference.

This morning I was so pleasantly surprised on my walk to work through the office towers that tvs have been set up in the lobbies to watch the games (it would be interesting to see the productivity decreases during these two weeks and everyone staying up late to watch). One area in the photo even went as far as setting up bleachers for people to sit and watch. Very nice to see. I wish the olympics were every year.

I’ve seen a lot of folding bikes this summer. Much more than I usually see. The same with mopeds and scooters. High gas prices and warm weather combine to get more people out of their cars. I was contemplating getting a scooter but don’t want to pay for a years worth of insurance but only drive it for 4 months due to the weather.

I’ve got about 30 minutes of walking (13 minute walk + 13 minute train + 17 minute walk) each way to work and thought about cutting that hour a day of walking down by having a bike. I can’t take a bike on the train during busy times but I think I could get away with bringing on one of those small collapsing bikes. A compact lightweight bike might give me back 30 minutes a day x 3 days a week commuting (I work from home some days) x 30 weeks per year (won’t ride in sloppy weather) = 45 hours. 45 hours saved!!! That’s some serious return on investment. Think of what your (hourly salary is x 45 hours) - (cost of bike) and it’s a worthwhile investment. Time to go bike shopping.

Another joy of the iPhone. So since my last post I tracked an iPhone down. I was calling everywhere and a local rogers video had just gotten a shipment of 2 in. I drove as fast as I could legally get there and snatched it up. Within 2 minutes the last one was gone by a guy who just happened to walk on and ask. And I’ve been loving every minute of my tech gadget fun. I’ll post more of a review later.

The main point of this post is that it was completely done on my phone - and quickly too. Wordpress (my blogging software) has an iPhone application so I can write blog posts on my phone. This is great. I’d always been wanting to tap out a post when I have idle time and now it’s possible. It’s usually as I’m walking around that I think of post ideas and I forget them by the time I get in front of a computer. Now I can write one anywhere I have my phone.

So hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot more content on this blog in the future.