I hate to be all "look how funny I am" but this one was too easy to not pass up.

From: Rich Lafferty 
To: FreshBooks Staff
Subject: mp3s on the public share

Would the person who uploaded a bunch of Eminem to the 
public share please clean up? Please clean up? Please clean up?

  -r.

It's hot inside (29 C or so) and nice outside (24 C), so I took my cello out on the deck to practice. I figured hey, it's late afternoon on Saturday, if there's any time it's going to be okay to practice outside it's right then. It's nice out there, three floors up and sheltered by a big elm tree, with a light breeze.

I was playing through the last three movements of the first Bach suite when I saw someone in the back lot downstairs looking up. I stopped playing and waved, expecting a complaint...

Instead, she explained that she wanted to come down and see where the cello playing was coming from, because she enjoyed listening and played piano herself. And as she's leaving she says --

Bach coming from the trees -- I love this neighbourhood!

Me too, me too.

I noticed that I hadn't looked at my friends page in weeks or maybe months and so I've done a big friends list purge. Nothing personal if I de-"friended" you -- I wasn't reading anyone anyhow and I want to start again so I scaled it way down.

Hey maybe I'll start posting more. (I keep saying this.)

Oboy it's busy lately.

Moving to the new apartment has begun! We got a cargo van today and took over all of the boxes we'd packed already, which included all of our books, CDs and DVDs, and four winter tires mounted on rims (ie, the heavy things). There are 41 stairs to our apartment; I took 44 trips up them with about 20 lbs. (We repacked boxes that were over 40, so I figure 20 is probably a decent average.) That's more than the climb to the main level of the CN Tower. I'm tired now.

Last night I discovered someone had backed into our car while it was parked, taking out a headlight lens, and strangely a 2x3" piece of bumper, which made it worth claiming on insurance, which meant a drive out to Etobicoke to the collision reporting centre.

I was back out that way again today to hit IKEA to return a Roman blind (note: not a blind Roman, we're keeping him) that broke as soon as we had it out of the packaging. On the way back I saw a sign directing people to Mystic Pointe Neighbourhood, which is one of the worst names I've seen, especially since wedged between the Gardiner Expressway and the GO train tracks isn't really mystic, and there's no pointe there. Even better, one condo tower at Mystic Pointe is called The Tides at Mystic Pointe, and even if it WAS a pointe, it'd pointe into a LAKE.

<substitute> maybe someone yelled YOU MISSED THE POINT during 
                a development planning meeting and the secretary wrote it 
                down wrong

And finally I leave you with this ad I just saw on a feed:
You'd think that this guy could find, or even FORGE, something better than a 2002 cheque for $2.48 to illustrate his $11,668 windfall.

The new floors are down in our new apartment, so I went over today and took some pictures. I've put them in a set over on flickr! Click the front door to come in and see!

You cannot find a cuter bunny than this:



There is no such cuter bunny.

Poll time!

Poll #1390465 Moon physics
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

If you are standing on the Moon, and holding a pen, and you let it go, it will:

When the Apollo astronauts were on the Moon, they did not fall off because

(As inspired by this.)

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."

And the student was enlightened.

(from David Chess apparently, via darkstar on MeFi)

Testing Facebook crossposting, apologies for the noise.

Just hit play.

a

HEY MENDEL YOU SHOULD POST ABOUT THINGS YOU FIND INTERESTING and then you can talk about them with your internet friends here!!!!

Alright so Good Magazine (which I love, and whose .is domain I cannot explain, but at least it's not .ly) posted a neat infographic about water usage.


Kottke pointed out that meat sure uses up the water. Wow! There's a popular veggie talking point about how inefficient meat is in turning plants into food, but the water side was part that I haven't seen before. Even though I'm veggie primarily for compassionate reasons, this stuff reaffirms that I'm helping more than just individual beings.

Hell yeah that's enough for a post. Why don't I post more? Augh.

Also I have a cold which is just draining me completely, which sucks because I now feel competent enough to finally take the longboard to and from the subway on the way to work, but I don't feel up to it. Blargh.

Well, this is kind of neat:

I was going through my Flickr account tonight, and I found this picture, entitled Semi-detached houses in the Annex:



I took that picture when nyxie and I visited Toronto in October 2007, right after I'd left the MBA, to see if Toronto was the sort of place we'd like to live. This wasn't apartment-hunting, just getting a feel for some neighbourhoods, before I'd started looking for jobs down here and before I'd ever heard of FreshBooks.

I captioned the picture, "More 'This is what it looked like' shots. We liked the Annex as a potential neighbourhood a lot."

And while we didn't move to the Annex when we moved here, we're about to move there next month! So I thought it would be neat to figure out where that house was.

I had a lot of hints: In the large version you can see that the house number is 197. The car in the picture is parked with the driver's side door at the curb, which means it's a one-way street. The sun is behind me, so I'm facing east, which in turn means it's a southbound one-way street. And the next picture in the set is of Honest Ed's taken from east of Bathurst, so I knew it was in the Annex proper, between Bathurst and Spadina north of Bloor.

So I just had to find the semi-detached 197 in the Annex that had the unusual five-sided flat-roofed bay windows. Easy enough, right? So, using Microsoft Live Maps -- which gives you a birds-eye view instead of straight-down aerial shots -- I started on the street we're moving to. Here's what I saw:



Yep! The photo is from Howland Ave, our new street, a block north of our new building, which we must have walked down when we were exploring the neighbourhood. So we probably even walked right by our new building a year and a half ago when we were thinking about the possibility of moving to Toronto!

This is a USB flash drive.



It is far more than you ever imagined, per its product description (copied below for your convenience, and don't click that link if you're epileptic):

How to live a dashing life with one’s individuality truly revealed while pursing better life quality and career success has become an important topic for modern people. When you believe in yourself, self-fulfillment is achievable through continuous personal development. That is what we often referred as “Neo Stylism” - a perspective of pursuing nice life style and believing in our own capability.

Featuring mountain-climbing sky hooks, the A-DATA’s S805 USB Flash Drive harmonically blend in delicate craftsmanship with a touch of style - making it the ultimate piece for fashion follower like yourself with great passion in sports.

Embraced by zinc alloy frame, this sporty S805 USB flash drive also incorporated swivel design to eliminate cap-losing problems. The carabiner of the S805 can be easily clipped on a key chain or a handbag as a mobile storage device. Capacity ranging from 2GB to 16GB, the USB 2.0 high speed transmission provides a perfect solution to carry your documents.

Combing the state-of-the-art technology, practical functionality and stylish design, the A-DATA’s S805 is the eye-catching drive for sports enthusiasts, especially for people who practice Neo Stylism.

Well, I'm sold.

... and want to have something here so that the next post can be about something trivial. So have a couple cute images from ffffound today:

I got a new toy!


This is a much-belated Christmas present from my father and stepmother (or more precisely it's what I spent Christmas money on), an Earthwing Supercharger, 44" worth. I bought it at Flood on College here in Toronto, where the staff were awesomely helpful.


I've wanted a longboard for a couple of years, and it'll be great transportation in the new neighbourhood since everything's so close by. The punchline is that I've never skated before. But it's coming along well for the first day:

We have a new phone system at work. It has an audio input for hold music. That audio input is now connected to a Windows server that was in that rack anyhow, which has an mp3 player running on it on shuffle. Ta-da, hold music!

I've decided that the hold music collection deserves some curating. I'm pleased with my first playlist:

• Yu Miyake - Overture from Katamari Damacy
  
• Stompin' Tom Connors - Sudbury Saturday Night
  
• Freezepop - Here Comes a Special Boy
  
• Shuffle Demons - Hockey Night in Canada Theme
  
• Kim Barlow - Waterfall (Instrumental)
  
• Jaymz Bee and the Royal Jelly Orchestra - Safety Dance
  
• La Bottine Souriante - La Tapinie / Le Reel Des Voyageurs
  
• Barcelona - Shell Account
  
• Kate and Anna McGarrigle - The Log Driver's Waltz
  

and, of course,

• Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up

It's a shame we don't put people on hold that often.

ETA: I threw Basshunter's "Boten Anna" in there too.
ETAA: Oh, and the Muppets singing "Mahna Mahna" is in there as well.