I am a Mac Virgin - Day 6: Odds and the End.

Well that's pretty much a wrap on my intro to the new Mac. While I did have some growing pains and what seemed to be a lot of crashes, the inertial dampeners seem to fully functioning, but I still have my fingers crossed.

Just a few closing comments to end my Apple geek week.

Sexy As Hell

One of the things that sets anything Apple apart from the crowd is the design - it's simple and sleek. I know I've mentioned it before but I have tons more desk space. It's a good thing it comes with that cleaning cloth because you'll spend more time than you'd want to admit cleaning fingerprints off of it.

I was a bit pessimistic when it came to the keyboard and mouse but after using them for a week they're very comfortable and I'm getting used to the new shortcuts. Although I'm not an accountant I don't really miss the numpad and as for the Magic Mouse it's still amazing.

One of the other things about it is that that it's quiet. Almost too quiet. Like a sexual predator in the night, it barely makes a sound. You don't get that computer hum you're used to with PC fans and I now get annoyed when my external hard drives start writing.

It kind of makes you wonder if the thing is going to over heat because it does get pretty warm to the touch and you never really hear any fans kick in.

As far as I can tell, the temperatures seem fine but I also have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to that. Ignorance FTW!

While there isn't much you can do in terms of upgrades the life span should be longer than a PC (at least I hope so). You have up until a year to pay the $199 for the extra 2 years of Apple Care in case things go fail sauce on you.


OS X is Easy

It really is. While I did have some growing pains (mostly centered around the keyboard shortcuts) and crashes, I haven't had them since.

OS X does a really good job at keeping the interface clean and simple. Settings are all organized together and (for the most part) kept pretty intuitive. System Preferences are more like descriptions and this is great because I think 90% of Apple users have no idea what UNIX is or the fact that OS X is based on it.

If they had to use Terminal I'm pretty sure they would probably spill their fair trade coffees all over their plaid shirts and canvas shoes.

While I'll admit that I haven't really played with any AppleScripts or used Terminal as much as I thought I would, I really didn't need to. Most of the anything I wanted to do were right there, and unlike Windows they're not buried behind menus and you're not warned 50 times a day that you're going to change something.

While I am using a lot of applications I've never seen before I can't really get away from Microsoft. While I know I can use Open Office I won't ever again. The jump from MS Office Windows to Mac seems a lot like the jump from Office 2003 to 2007 - you've basically got to find everything all over again. I guess because there isn't as much software available for OS X they could charge a little more for it, but most of it is priced reasonably (I guess).

One thing I have yet to do is setup my printer, but unless it transforms into a Decepeticon I think I'll survive.


External Hard Drive Issues

I think a lot of that I though were crashes were related my external hard drives unexpectedly ejecting mid backup, copy or install. This was especially a pain when it would bail on Time Machine running backups. While I don't know this for sure I've read about the open ticket around this issue and waiting for it to be solved because they still eject when the computer sleeps.

On the other hand, swapping the USB cables for the hard drives seemed to at least reduce how much they randomly eject, so at least Time Machine is going strong.

The Screen!

One of the reasons I decided to buy the iMac was the display.

I love it. With the glossy screen even next to an open window with the sun shining in it's bright, super sharp and except for the whole dead pixel fiasco (fingers crossed) it's been great so far. Instead of having my old 22" + 17" I just have the one and use Expose. This is what a 1080p video looks like on it - it doesn't even fill the screen!

Dell has a 27" display as well and its about $1250, so throw a computer on top of that and it seems comparable to the iMac price wise.

Well that's it for now, I'm sure I'll bore you with other Apple posts down the road, but Men love their toys after all.

Overall I think selling my liver was a good decision.

I am a Mac Virgin - Day 5: Tragedy strikes! Apple's return policy.

Kids,

When you buy something that isn't exactly cheap its probably a good idea to keep your receipts. On top of that, if it's big and awkwardly shaped enough that you might need 2 hands to carry it then keep the original packaging.

In my experience with electronics things will go wrong right away or not really at all. Believe me when I say that I almost pooped a chimpanzee today when I found a dead pixel on my monitor. While I don't suffer from any of those other problems with the 27" display, I was not pleased to discover that I had a Shakespeare style spot.

I promptly put on some pants and marched right back to the Apple store carrying the 30 pound monster through the falling snow and slush (remember what I said about boxes?).

So I walk up to the counter and the lady asks me if I have an appointment. WTF? I say no but proceed tell her about the problem. She says that since I don't have an appointment I'll have to wait for the next Genius to become available. How do they determine that? Well, you look at this stupid TV on the wall which scrolls through some advertisements and eventually (like 2 mins later) gets to a screen that shows current appointments and next available time slot...which would be in 2 hours. MANG.

Anyway, I worked some Emperor style magic and ended up getting some help right away.

Here's what Apple's return policy looks like. In short, you have 2 weeks to make exchanges or returns (which you may have to pay for) and anything outside of that you're pretty much screwed and have to deal with the machine you have now.

Like most other display manufacturers there's a tolerance for the minimum number of pixels that must be dead to warrant a repair. The Genius said it's about 5 for iMacs but I just have one. Right when I'm about to rip my shirt off and go Hulk all over the place, he says that since you only bought it a few days ago we'll just go ahead and exchange it for a new one. Sweet.

Talking to the guy a bit further, after 14 days this would definitely not be the case. Even if I paid the extra $199 for the Apple Care you can't get an exchange - you get the default 1 year warranty but the situation is the same. On a related note, here's a pro tip for shopping at Apple: if you know someone who is in school you can get an education discount if they buy stuff for you. At the way they're priced, every bit helps. It even applies to Apple extended care (which you have up to 1 year to buy).

Drama seems to be avoided (for now). I better put this thing through its paces for the next week before I hit that 2 week limit.

Say hello to Time Machine

Luckily one of the things I did after cleaning up the other iMac was re-install Snow Leopard, burn some old files and then get Time Machine running. Don't be fooled, there is no such thing as factory restore like Acer or Dell PCs have, so when you follow the instructions on How to factory restore my Mac, don't be surprised that it tells you to format your HD and then re-install OS X.

Now that I have a brand new computer, I wanted to get back all the stuff that I lost. Luckily OS X makes it relatively easy with Time Machine. Ever since the Great Fail-Format of 2009 I have some external hard drives lying around, so I dedicated one to Time Machine. So when we did the computer swap at the store I didn't have go through any trouble with the so called Apple Genius backing up any files that I wanted to keep so I just high-tailed it out of there.

Setting up Time Machine is pretty straight forward, you basically select which folders you want to exclude and then the program backs up everything else.

Time Machine keeps:

• Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
• Daily backups for the past month
• Weekly backups for all previous months

It actually saves copies of the files and folders to an external hard drive and you can either restore specific items through Time Machine or do a full system restore through the OS X installer. If you actually look at the backups, it just copies the files and folders to your external drive and you can actually grab them that way as well. Here's what it looks like.

Mine's pretty much empty but the idea is you can scroll back and forth and see snapshots of days past and restore stuff from then if you want to.

That's enough for now. I think the score somehow became Apple: 1 - Emperor: 1

The plot thickens...but probably not.

I am a Mac Virgin - Day 4: Apple vs. Adobe

Yeah, I know I missed day 4 but I took a break from the old new iMac as my cos and I took some time to shoot the breeze over some delicious veal and a couple beers. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled program but first a word from our sponsor.

I'm not going to lie, I have no idea how to use Photoshop and I don't really have any desire to learn it right now. I'm not huge into post processing but I do believe a little goes a long way.

Back when I was a primitive and used a PC, the only photo editing programs I used were MS Paint and Nikon Capture NX to do curves and color adjustments. They're quick and they do the trick.

Now that I own an Apple, the door somehow opened to a bunch of Apple software that I couldn't previously use on a PC. Since I bought my Mac because the idea is that it would be pretty good with media, I've decided to check out some of the most popular media editing apps. Luckily most companies give 30 day trials. First photo editing.

OS X by default comes with iPhoto which is actually pretty cool, but like Emeril, they kick it up a notch and make you pay for it with Aperture. I don't know which one came first but Adobe has a similar product called Lightroom. They both pretty much do the same thing which is help you organize your photos and do some basic editing through one application interface.

Because I'm a shallow personLike some things in life I'm going to choose which apps I'll use based on first impressions. Here's a look at Aperture vs Lightroom.

Aperture 3.0

Right off the bat, Aperture seems to run a lot faster than Lightroom. It previews faster and makes adjustments instantaneously as your move sliders back and forth. Plus it's really slick.

Lightroom 2.6

Lightroom on the other hand runs pretty sluggish, I'm not sure why or if it's just me. While they offer a lot of the same functionality, the interfaces are a bit difference but I actually find Aperture slightly more intuitive.

Aperture gets the win on this one just because of the performance difference. If I'm going to be using this thing to view and edit all my photos I don't want the software equivalent of a squeeze honey bottle of honey when I can have that ribbed stick thing in a honey jar. Awesome analogy.

One of the other things I planned to do was make more videos. So I'm in the market for some video editing software as well. OS X comes with iPhoto but I couldn't figure out how to use it it didn't seem to offer as many features as I'd like - it was all flash and no cash (I made that up btw...).

Jon and I are pretty newb when it comes to Macs, and from the ski trip we have roughly 72 gigs of helmet cam footage that we haven't started editing yet. Premiere isn't anything new to me but I've heard a lot of good things about Final Cut from my so called friends. Here's what they look like.

Final Cut Express

The text in the option menus and also the buttons are small...real small. I had a hard time reading them on my screen. I'm sure you can enlarge them but that's how it looks by default - I'm a huge fan of things working right out the box. Also, videos didn't playback properly in the editor until I changed some applications settings to not get a nice blue screen that says Unrendered instead of actual video playback. Great.

Premiere Pro

Nothing new here, they're pretty much work exactly the same as Windows and I'm a little biased when it comes to these two because I've used Premiere. I'm not too sure if FCP offers better filters and effects but I guess that's good reason to have a second look. It did seem to playback video smoother than Final Cut but once again it could be it's probably not me. I'm stubborn so I'm gonna go with Adobe to avoid what would probably be a pretty shallow learning curve.

On a side note neither of these programs could open and edit MP4 formatted videos, which is what the GoPro HD cam takes. What up with that? I need to find the updates or plugins or else we're screwed.

Didn't have too much time today so nothing too exiting, just some application choices. Now that the weekend is upon us I'll have way more time to play.

On another side note, today was my last day at my job - it was a real tear jerker and I'm going to miss those guys. I move into my new cubicle on Monday so no rest for the wicked(ly awesome) apparently. I also have a lot of clothes to iron...

I am a Mac Virgin - Day 3: Where the hell is MS Paint?

It's funny that the first thing a Windows user like myself wants to do when he starts using OS X is get Boot Camp running, but since I'm trying to determine whether the grass really is greener on the other side I'm totally resisting (because the only game I play is Tetris Friends which is a flash game that I can play on OS X anyway, lol).

So one of the first things I've noticed is there isn't any default paint program included with OS X. What up with that? How am I supposed to draw pictures of myself and make clever paintings of Tiger Woods?

So now I'm onto the stage where I need applications like Steve Jobs needs his plain black mock turtlenecks.

To tell you that I'm currently trying out a few different apps would be an understatement. There's so much junk installed on my computer right now it went from overflowing with awesomeness to don't let water touch them, they multiply!

Installing applications is definitely different from Windows - some applications come as DMG files which mount like hard drives while others come as actual installers. You open most up and all that's usually required is that you drag the application icon into your Applications folder. All the files copy over and you are able to use it. Simple.

To uninstall it you throw that application into the trash just like your day old sandwich. As far as most users can tell the story ends there, but if you know a little about programs you'll know that a program probably isn't really just an icon. Looking into it a little further you'll see some of the associated files.

For most people dragging the application to the trash means out of sight out of mind, but after some investigation you'll find out that just like pets applications can leave a lot of shit behind. And when you're into anal like me you don't want that shit lying around.

Luckily there are apps for that. Things like AppZapper, AppDelete and AppCleaner (FREE!) seem to really help out. Drag the unwanted app to one of those apps...?...and it tries to find associated files and gives you the option to delete them as well.

Anyway, here's a list of basic apps that I've gone with that I think are pretty essential, if you have any other suggestions let me know.

• Firefox (I love my Greasemonkey and Google Toolbar)
• Gmail Notifier (shows you incoming mail and calendar events)
• Messenger for Mac (only messaging program I use outside of Google Talk)
• Seashore (Makes me realize that MS Paint in Windows 7 is da bomb)
• The Unarchiver (handles rar and other zip files)
• AppCleaner
• VMWare Fusion (is this considered cheating?)
• Cyberduck (s/ftp)
• Transmission (turns out utorrent for OS X is the worst thing ever)
• VLC (although it has some problems playing subtitles and skipping for MKV files, tried Perian but it sucks)

You do get a few freebies: ssh, scp, vi are built into terminal!

On a side note cut & pasting files around in Finder is a little weird, I almost find it faster to do it in terminal rather than open up a new finder window go to the location you want and command + move the items over. Delete doesn't actually delete either you need to right click move to trash or click the trash button. If someone knows a quicker way to do these things I'd love to know because I haven't found out yet.

Another thing I've noticed is that applications don't really close when you close them. There's CLOSE but there's also QUIT. Unlike Windows when you close an application in OS X it exits the current instance but sticks around and you can see it there in the dock. Here's what Apple has to say:

To quit an application, choose Quit from its application menu (for example, choose Quit iTunes from the iTunes menu if you want to quit iTunes). Keep in mind that closing a window (by clicking the round, red button) will typically not quit the application. Either choose Quit from the application menu or use the keyboard shortcut: Press the Command key (the one with the Apple logo) and the Q key simultaneously (Command-Q).

I'm not sure why its built this way but I figure they think if you use an app, you're likely to use it again real soon so we might as well cache it? I've had no problems with this setup, its easy enough to quit applications - just command + q that or right click.

That's the basic stuff, time to move into more interesting territory.

And an update on the hard drive situation, I'm running into hardcore Error -36 (I/O error (bummers)) problems with one of them, I think it's just about ready to buy the farm. Time to do some more shopping I guess.

I am a Mac Virgin - Day 2: Lightning isn't the only thing that crashes

It just works right? Wrong.

I'm not exactly sure what the OS X equivalent to the Blue Screen of Death is so I'm not sure whether or not I've come across it yet. From what I can tell the closest thing it could be is the multi colored ball that just spins and doesn't let you click on anything - I've found out that this is called the rainbow ball of doom, awesome.

I'm not going to lie, after I did the initial setup and finally started using OS X it crashed...A LOT. Or at least I think that's what's happening, but to be fair I didn't really have any idea of what was going on or what to do when that ball started to spin. Realizing that ctrl + alt + del meant nothing I tried to click around (and failed), tried to force quit running applications (and failed) and tried to bring up the restart options (and double failed). Although I could move the mouse the keyboard didn't seem to respond...or did it?

What's frustrating is that I don't know whether I can't get anything to respond because OS X was having problems and the Bluetooth connections were bailing out, or if OS X was just straight up frozen. At this point I just held down the power button and forced the shutdown.

This has happened about 6 times in one day - what up with that?

I'm not really doing much when this happens - installing some programs, surfing the web and poking around, but I actually suspect the problems are coming from external drives. I somehow believe this became my one way ticket to Crashville. Time to poke around the System Preferences (which are intuitive enough and involved way less clicking than Windows to get where you want).

I have 2 external hard drives with all my media on them and they're both formatted NTFS Windows styles. Ever since what I like to call The Great Fail-Format of 2009, I've been taking backing my shit up pretty seriously. So anyway, I was copying over data from one drive to the other and to my Mac HD because I wanted to set one up as a Time Capsule and the other one for porn general use.

But then strange things started happening: the computer would sleep, drives would eject/stop copying and OS X would otherwise crash. I'm not exactly a computer square, so using my not so inconsiderable computer knowledge I determined that the most logical thing to do would be to check the Energy Saver settings.

The options here don't exactly go into great detail so I selected what seemed to be sensible. Like most things in life I forced my way through it and managed to get it done...my computer just can never sleep or turn off hard disks now but that's besides the point.

After that I reformatted the drives to OS X Extended (Journaled) format and moved things around once again and the random copy fails actually seemed to stop. I still don't know if Windows will recognize this type of file system, but at least I have the stuff shared over the network anyway. At least since doing that I haven't had any crashes and I put the settings back...but it's also only been a few hours.

Things are much better but one drive still has ejection problems when the computer goes to sleep, but really who doesn't? Unfortunately, it also wake's the computer up from sleep so I'm not sure if it is 100% compatible with OS X. One way to get around it is a unmount script but I'm just going to veto that idea and not let the computer sleep at all (or at least unmount before I do)...energy savings fail.

Jon said he encountered similar freezing problems when he first got his Mac and ended up doing a full re-install. On the other hand, at least Apple has some decent support pages to help you out along the way (although they seemed to be geared to non-technical people).

Lose Control, Gain Command

OS X Shortcuts for lamers

I think I've just leveled up.

I am a Mac Virgin - Day 1: Things that go click!

So my desk now looks like this.



Yes, I took the dive and became a fanboy. I can honestly say that I've never used OS X before or owned a Mac, so when I say that I'm new to this stuff I'm serious.

And because I'm serious I have to blog about it.

Thus, this week will document my first few days with OS X and my iMac. I've been using Windows for as long as I can remember so I was pretty surprised that I dropped the cash on something I've never actually had any experience with.

So where to start?

How about with these. They're the first thing that comes out of the box and seem familiar enough.

Contrary to popular belief there is some setup that you need to do (other than plugging the one cable in) because Justin Long doesn't actually come over to your house to show you how to make love to a mac. So the OS X tells you to turn the mouse and keyboard on, type in your name and then you're off to the races.

After the default setup and registration, OS X automatically installs some updates and I decide to surf the web in Safari. This is where things started to fall apart.

Just to give you a little background, I exploit use people computers for a living so I'm not exactly in the same category as your Grandma or even the guy trying to sell you a PC at Future Shop. I'm straight up better than them and have great hair. I use Linux on a pretty regular basis so OS X seems pretty similar and I somehow convince myself that I can handle this.

But where it all went wrong is with this thing: the keyboard - Have a good look at it.

My first concern with it was whether or not those tiny arrow keys were going to affect my Tetris play. But I soon found out that Tetris would be the least of my worries.

Let me tell you that I'm all about shortcuts and jumping around the places with both hands on the keyboard but the shortcuts are different. Real different. You would be surprised with all the shortcuts you don't know about in Windows.

Have a good look at the keyboard again, there are a lot of buttons missing. fn + control + option + command, what are those? I tried to substitute the full keyboard but they don't do that at the Apple Store (but you can do it online).

For example, where the backspace button is there's a button that say delete. You press it and what does it do? It deletes one space backwards. But I want to suck characters into the cursor like in Windows. You know what that command for that is? fn + delete.

And you know jumping back and forth between words highlighting them? Well that's shift + option + arrow.

Since there's no home/end button you use command + left/right for that too. Page up/down work the same way as well.

For a guy who's so used to Windows keyboard and automatically reaches for certain keys it seems that I have to get comfortable with this new one because my typing has gone to shit and learn some serious shortcuts. I need to learn how to max/minimize, tile and if possible snap application windows to the edges of the screen ASAP. I use a laptop at work and an ergonomic keyboard at home and this thing feels much different from either of them.

Where I did not find any trouble was with the Magic Mouse. While using something like a deck of cards for a mouse seems counter intuitive it's actually pretty swell.

Unless you've been eating honey garlic wings the whole touch sensitive mouse thing works out pretty well. I did have to enable right click though because for some reason its off by default but I have no problems with this thing. To tell you the truth it actually seemed pretty awkward out of the box but the more I use it the more comfortable it gets.

I'm still trying to figure out whether of input devices is giving me carpal tunnel syndrome and the idea of switching back to my trustworthy mouse and keyboard has crossed my mind a couple times, but I'm resisting.

On the other hand Expose is pretty cool and I now have like 4802830% more desk space.

Things seem good so far.

Benecio Del Toro is not a good wolfman.

So I just had one of the longest nights/days evar.

It all started well enough at the always delicious Memphis Smokehouse, but quickly fell apart about half way into the movie: The Wolfman.

That poor quality movie suffered from what I like to call the Jeepers Creepers effect - which is realizing how much the movie sucks once you actually get to see the monster (and it didn't help that the guy Benicio Del Toro is somehow really ugly). Yeah it sucked but the worst part of the night had yet to come.

After sticking around uptown for a bit I had to pick my sister, who arrives at Pearson at 1:50am. But because of ridiculous delays it somehow turned into 3:30am. After she went through immigration/luggage we didn't end up getting home until around 5.

Now fast forward a few hours to the Sunday morning dim sum wake up call. No rest for the weary? Anyhow, after that I somehow got roped into shopping all day long. Give me a break.



Pringle Stix are a rip off of Pretz, FYI.


I think they got it wrong...or so right.


Anyway, I'm closing the day off by eating some experimental chicken hearts in chili honey sauce (thank you Jack Astor's). Here's a poor quality picture of it.

I won't lie, it looks kind of over sauced and gross interesting but but it actually tasted sweet/spicy finger lickin' good.

Yesterday was dramatic, today is ok

Kids,

When you were in high school a lot of things seemed cool back then that really were not.

For example some people used to think that wearing sweat pants out in public looked stylish or gave you that devil may care kind of look. But when you got older you realized that you are not a vagabond, can afford proper pants and sweatpants should only be worn at home or going to the gym. This mostly applies to guys as I don't see anything wrong with (all) girls (except my daughter) wearing lululemon pants all the time *cough*cough*.

You might have also thought that smoking was pretty cool, but when you got older and all you could do was snow plow down Lake Louise with the lungs of a 60 year old, you realized that skipping class to stand by the fence or under a bridge to smoke cigarettes was pretty dumb.

I'm awesome and did neither of these things but I thought it would be a good opening to a blog post.

Similarly, when you get older and you think things are getting into perspective and you're finally figuring life out, you're probably not. You probably won't figure it out until you're about to buy the farm and have collected all the evidence. I think that this is where I am right about now. The whole transition from student into real life from one job to another has gotten a lot tougher than I'd want to admit. But that's life I guess.

Here is a picture of me kicking my cousin in the nuts from a much simpler time.



TGIF. Time to meet up with Clinch for his 31st birfday.

Figure skating has me so ANGRY!

At the risk of turning this blog into figure skating central I have to comment on the men’s free skate I am watching at the moment. Actually, I will comment on all figure skating I have watched during these Olympic Games.

At the Olympics you are supposed to be at your best. You are the only one who turned up for tryouts BEST your country has to offer. You are supposed to pull out all the stops and blow away the judges. So far at these Olympic Games that hasn’t happened. Well I shouldn’t group all of the skaters into the “choke and fail” category, the Chinese Pairs Gold Medalists and Evgeni Plushenko are exempt because they are straight up awesome and possibly robots.

I am no figure skating expert, but I know what I like and I don’t like to watch almost every skater falling on required elements. I don’t know how hard it is to land a double axel or the dirty sanchez Russian splits, but don’t you think these skaters would practice them until they were doing it in their sleep? Shit, I would practice a quad with twenty pound weights tied to my feet just so I know there is no chance for error.

Prime example? Patrick Chan. Dude has been portrayed by the media as the second coming of Christ. I expected this kid to come out riding a unicorn and to cure the cancer of those poor souls watching him to get some kind of motivation to battle through their chemo and live a long and happy life. What did he do instead? He shat the bed. There was no unicorn and he potentially killed hundreds of cancer patients. THIS IS ALL YOU DO, PATRICK! Did you not set your alarm clock FOUR YEARS AGO to wake you up to the fact that the Olympics were coming? Or did you get too caught up in designing your damn costume? And GOD DAMMIT, he just fell AGAIN! That’s it; I wash my hands of this whole situation. Next time, Patrick, you are on your own because Canada won’t soon forget this most EPIC of failures.

Here are some figure skating accidents to laugh away your anger.

Figure skating is manly, but not too manly...

When the Olympics are on you watch everything and it's awesome - I watch curling and it's awesome. Since it's the Olympics, when someone asks you what you're watching you don't say cross-country skiing ladies individual sprint classic qualification you just say Olympics. So when you're actually watching pairs free skate you can tell people that you were watching the Olympics last night and it's alright.

But let me tell you something about figure skating: it turns out that it as well is awesome. Take it from a guy who lifts chicks over his head with one arm all the time, it's not easy. When you consider that the girl's got knives on her feet then it gets pretty intense.

Same goes for when they spin these knives at each other's face or the guy throws the woman into mid air and she's expected to do like 3 rotations and land on one leg. It's impressive and when things go wrong they cry constantly (and damn their partners to hell) - I love the drama.

I don't know how else to describe it but man when those pairs skate and they skate well I want to say that I witnessed something beautiful. What up with that? Is my man card going to be revoked?

Men's figure skating, on the other hand, is something different. I'm pretty sure most of those guys wear makeup and while it's a known fact that wearing sequined blouses isn't the manliest thing on earth from personal experience, at least in pairs you have a hot chick looking just as ridiculous as you and your hands are literally all over her body and all up in her crotch (like constantly).

When you're a guy your on the ice wearing makeup, doing jazz hands, crying and looking ridiculous all by yourself. There are regulations to clothing and the length of the skirts, etc. but I think these guys wear sparkles by choice. Apparently you can get deductions for inappropriate clothing so I'm assuming every man starts in the red and has to work their way out.

And I don't care what Patrick Chan says, landing a quad does make you a man. I do it all the time.

An unexpected plot twist: trading in my jeans for dress pants.

Have you ever stared at an email, completely nervous and wondering what the effect of clicking that SEND button would be?

Well that's me recently as I have just submitted my first ever letter of resignation. I've never resigned from any position before and let me tell you, it's not easy. I've lost a shitload of sleep over this and have come up with the conclusion that leaving a job by your own decision is hard. It's not like leaving a summer job, it's genuinely hard. That is unless you actually hate your job but I'm lucky enough to not be one of those people. All I can say is that it is tough. Especially when you've spent the past 2.5 years getting to know and becoming friends with some serious hip cats...and not to mention doing some amazing work and having some fun along the way. Really really tough.

Is it a good decision or is it a bad decision? I don't know but it seems like the right decision right now. Only time will tell. I don't want to sound like my amazing dad, but I'm young (and handsome) and can make tough choices like this and not have to worry about how I'd be supporting my wife and kids or risk putting them in a difficult position if things don't work out. I can rebound if I need to but I don't want to be the guy who regrets not taking that opportunity when he had the chance.

Will the next few days be awkward? I don't know but I hope not.

Looks like I'll be trading one cube for another and beginning the next chapter in my memoirs.

Ode to Canadian Bagged Milk

One thing I learned from being in the states is that they sell milk in jugs. WTF?



"Litres? What? This is America!"

It's decided. This summer I will go sky diving.

Most of everything that I do for fun is driven by the fact that I enjoy doing totally random things. From the places I visit, to the things I buy, to the hobbies I pick up, it's all somehow driven by me somehow convincing myself that I need to do something else other than sitting in front of a computer all day.

Some stuff works out really well like dragonboating or watching drag racing, while others are total epic failures like singing in a live band (I was even embarrassed for myself) or thinking that I could easily bike from Mississauga to Hamilton.

Fail or win it's all part of life and I'm (hopefully) a more awesome better person for it.

Anyway, one of the more recent things I've decided to do is go sky diving. I was just talking about it with a couple of buddies the other day and its been decided. We're not exactly sure where or when but believe me when I say it's going down in 2010...because like Sean Faris I Never Back Down.

Here's a video from what will probably be the second most intense moment of my life after I go skydiving.

Kiss the Olympic rings, bitch!

That’s right; Canada has won an Olympic Medal Gold medal on Canadian soil!

I don’t watch any sports. Well, that is a lie. I HAVE to watch the World Cup. I played soccer for seven years as a kid and I have loved the sport ever since. I also hate the cold, snow and ice. I hate winter. So you would think I would avoid the Winter Olympic Games like the plague. WRONG! I watch every event I can and I cheer for Canada with every fibre of my being.

I love any event when the world comes together to compete. I especially love it when the world comes together to compete and Canada has the chance to bitch slap the rest of the world. Winter is our thing. We freeze our asses off for most of the year and the whole world recognizes us as the “Great White North” so if we didn’t excel at winter sports it would be a huge embarrassment. I know you are going to say “Canada is always kicking ass in the worlds and international events when the Olympics aren’t on” and to you I say; shut the fuck up, know it all it doesn’t matter because no one watches these sports except for when the Olympics are on. Does anyone care about curling in the four years between winter games? Or moguls? Or cross country skiing? No, they don’t. That’s why we have to shine when the whole world is watching.

All of that being said the pressure is multiplied tenfold because we are hosting the Olympic Winter Games. Also, to make it worse we have failed to win a gold medal is the previous two Olympics Games we held. Canada had Olympic fever and the only cure was more cowbell a gold medal. Thank god the doctor arrived quickly and his name was Alexander Bilodeau.

There are so many events at the games that it was anyone’s guess of where our first gold medal would come from, if it came at all. A lot of people speculated it would come from our men’s hockey team or our woman’s curling team, but in the end it came from the men’s mogul team. It only took Alex 23.17 seconds and a couple jumps to make things right and erase years of Olympic disappointment for Canada.

Now that the pressure is off many are speculating that the gold medals are going to fall from the sky like rain. I would love it for Canada to win every remaining gold medal in the games but for now I am going to bask in the glory of the first time Canada got to kick slush in the face of the world on home soil.

Go Canada!

Happy New Year and some other day...

Take it from the guy with the least experience when it comes to love and relationships, apparently life isn't like How I met Your Mother. While I have no shortage of bromances, the Valentine's day celebrations are all up to you guys this year.

In other news... Happy Chinese New Year! Go get your red pocket on!

Year of the Tiger!

iMacs woes and Steve Nash is the most ridiculous man in the world.

Well...here's the problem: I sit here with 72 gigs of video from Jon's GoPro HD cam and it's all shot in 720p 60fps video mode. That's all fine and dandy but even when I shoot video from my Canon SD960 and try to edit/render that, my computer struggles at the best of times. The odds of it being able to handle 60fps may make any sort of editing and playback brain crushingly painful.

I am somehow led to believe that using OS X on a high end Mac will somehow solve this problem.

Jon has a super baller Macbook Pro and Marcin has a pretty decent Macbook as well and they don't seem to have many problems with the videos (at least watching them, which mine struggles to do). I have a PC that's 2 years old (mid range at the time) but it struggles so much with video and photo editing now that when it hurts, I hurt.

The only problem is that buying the iMac I'm interested in would cost $2099 + tax which seems pretty outrageous. That's like spending $500 a year for the next 5 years for a computer that I can't really upgrade, and it also seems kind of risky with all the problems those models have been having as well. Dell has a pretty good sale going on as well with what seems tobe a pretty powerful machine, but it doesn't have the 27" display or the stability of OS X. Worth it or not?

I'm not exactly sure what direction I'm going to take at the moment, but either way I think some serious coin is going to be dropped this long weekend. It seems to cost a lot to become an apple fanboy.

Anyway, while I sit on this for a while watch this awesome commercial (thanks to theshady) to start your long weekend off right....and to get ready for the Olympics!!! GO JAMAICAN BOBSLED TEAM CANADA!



PS: Cool Runnings was on recently, lol.

News Flash: Japanese people are still very entertaining.

This is sort of like a Matrix: Reloaded moment here. I've been pretty busy getting out of vacation mode this week and being sick is one of the worst things ever, so I'm going to revisit some older posts with some more recent updates because I have nothing better to blog about today.

We'll if you're not prepared for a cuteness overload then close your browser now because Clinch found pew pew a friend.

Ready for this?

BAM! Ok, they may not be Japanese but I don't know how you could not enjoy that.

And of course (for the actual Japanese portion) there's the always impressive Genki Sudo. I'm not sure how this managed to slip past me but there's actually a full version of the music video I posted earlier.

Remember how I said that the first one was highly enjoyable? Well this will just make your poop your pants in sheer enjoyability. I totally have to download buy that album on iTunes.



Anyway, that's it for now. Time to hit he bottle (of NyQuil).

Google has another "thing" coming out.. Go jump in a lake Google Wave because here comes Google Buzz.

Well I forgot about music Mondays yesterday. It was probably because of being hopped up on massive amounts of NyQuil to stop the snot from overflowing out of my face and onto my keyboard all the sex, drugs and rock n roll going on around me...or because I decided to assemble that camera. Yeah my life is wild. But anyway here's some not so late breaking news.

We all still remember (or want to forget) the ridiculous Google Wave fiasco right? Well they're at it again with Google Buzz. This time it actually integrates with your Gmail and gets aboard the whole social media bandwagon and gives you the opportunity to share your life with people you have emailed a couple of times aka your so called friends.

It was set to be released this afternoon and I've been hitting F5 in my browser window every 30 seconds to see the button appear but I still haven't seen it pop up yet. While I wait patiently for this buzz button to appear in my Gmail as I casually check all the fan messages I receive from my loyal readers, I'm wondering if this one is worth all the 0 hype it has received?

This is something that definitely has not been marketed but seems like a pretty bug changes. It sort of sounds like something they could have included in Gmail labs at some point but I guess this will do. I kind of like checking the different sites for the different updates - it gives me something to do at night. Having everything in one place isn't as fun...or is it?

Well I'll wait for this thing to appear and only time will tell how long it will take the first person to abuse it and share pictures of penises drawn on interactive maps (or something like that.

PS that will probably be me.

Gakkenflex: because I always wanted a TLR camera and thought making one would be cool...

So I saw this thing for the first time on the always awesome Minjonju Show. Turns out Gakken is a Japanese publishing company founded in 1947, which also produces totally awesome educational toys.



I impulse shopped once again and bought one off the ebay for $50. Although I knew it was Japanese, coming from Japan and all the instructions were going to be in Japanese I was 100% sure pretty sure that I could assemble this thing using pure Emperor intuition.



Luckily there are fine people on the internet who have assembled this thing before and feel like helping others out. If it wasn't for this guy I would have had never figured it out it would have probably taken me 10 mins longer to assemble.

Anyway, tonight, as my back hurts like hell and my face overflows with snot, I decided to put this thing together. Here are some pictures from my 1 hour journey towards awesome.



Don't lose a screw because you'll regret it (btw, I didn't lose a screw).









Success! You can actually see something in there and the shutter works!



Time to make it pimp tight with some of the included decals.



Now I just have to figure out how to load, advance and rewind film in it....then shoot!