Planning cat is not ready…I can has spare time?

In less than a month we’ll be in the Rockies. This both worries and excites me. I have read no books. I have scoured no websites. I have studied no maps. I feel ill-prepared.

The MBA schedule won’t really afford me a lot of planning time, so I think once I’m done reading this Ibi Kaslik book (which should be any minute now) I’ll begin combing through the BC book we bought.

Our plan, should anyone have any suggestions, is:

  • four days in Yoho National Park, hiking at or near Lake O’Hara
  • two days driving to Whistler, stopping at Kamloops overnight
  • two nights in Whistler, maybe (depending on how well we’ve recovered from O’Hara) some more hiking
  • two nights in Vancouver, relaxing and eating well

[tags]rockies, british columbia, lake o’hara, whistler, vancouver[/tags]

Currently…

reading: The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik and Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach by Charles Hill and Gareth Jones. Eye Weekly and Now Magazine every Thursday. Toronto Life once a month.

listening to: Saul Williams by Saul Williams, though any minute now I’ll move on to Death Cab For Cutie‘s Narrow Stairs or Visiter by The Dodos.

watching: almost nothing. I’m paying only marginal attention to sports (go Pens! go Celts!), The Office and 30 Rock are done for the season and The Shield hasn’t started yet. All that’s on right now is Battlestar Galactica, and even that’s on 2-week hiatus.

scanning: 190 news feeds, averaging about 509 articles per day. Of course, these are only my personal-interest feeds; I have just as many work feeds. I mainly skim the headlines here, and pay attention to maybe 50, flagging 5-10 to read later.

browsing: 6-7 websites per day. I rarely have a need to visit particular websites now (see ‘scanning’, above) but a few are applications (e.g., Google Analytics) or snapshots (e.g., the weather) that don’t work in an RSS channel. There’s also Bruce MacKinnon’s editorial cartoon every day which, despite my best efforts, I cannot wrangle into a Yahoo Pipe. Again, this is personal-interest only; there’re other work sites.

running: 3-4 times per week, 3 miles at a time. On a treadmill. Half flat, half slight incline.

eating: penne with sundried tomato pesto. Well…an hour ago, anyway.

looking forward to: our rockies/BC trip in June; Euro 2008; visiting Nova Scotia twice in August, once to visit with family and once to wrap up the MBA.

wondering: why the hell I started writing this blog post in the first place.

[tags]angel riots, ibi kaslik, toronto life, saul williams, death cab for cutie, narrow stairs, dodos, visiter,  google reader, bruce mackinnon, yahoo pipes, euro 2008[/tags]

Today is April 23rd

One year ago today we moved into our condo. Nellie has dubbed today condoversary. This does not surprise me. She has dubbed Feb 13 engageversary and Feb 16 cativersary. A little part of me is tempted to start sleeping around to see if I can invoke divorceversary.

Two months from today we will be hiking and sleeping at Lake O’Hara in the Rockies.

Four months from today I will be enjoying my first day of post-MBA freedom.

Today is April 23rd.

Big day.

[tags]april 23, condo, lake o’hara, mba[/tags]

One more reason to switch

Well, that was good timing. The reservation desk at Porter called me today to suggest I catch an earlier flight back to Toronto because of the impending storm. They changed my flight over the phone, and I left about an hour an a half before my original flight time. The weather was fine for the entire flight, if quite windy in Toronto which made for a bumpy landing. I hopped in a cab and arrived home around 7:30. Ten minutes later I looked outside: snowstorm. 10-15 cm tonight, supposedly.

Would Air Canada have called me to reschedule because I might have weather problems later on that evening? I think not.

.:.

A study in duality: Starbucks vs Wal-Mart. [via Richard Florida]

[tags]porter air, air canada, starbucks, wal-mart[/tags]

What I've learned today

1) I like Montreal (of course, I already knew this, I’m just reminded of it whenever I visit);

2) After flying Porter, I’ll never voluntarily fly out of Pearson (to a Porter-served destination, anyway) again. It was fast, simple, comfortable and easy;

3) Being a kinda-vegetarian and sitting across from someone eating a Kobe beef burger sucks.
[tags]montreal, porter air, vegetarian, kobe beef[/tags]

Rockies redux

18 months ago, after our trip to the Rockies, I uploaded a ton of pictures to my Flickr account. Probably around a thousand, in fact, because…well, it’s the Rockies and you take pictures. However, I knew that most sane people wouldn’t look at 1,000 pictures taken by someone else, so I always planned to create a “best pictures” Flickr set. I used that approach when we came back from France.

Today, in between work and school and knocking items off the to-do list, I finally picked my favourite 27 pictures and put them in a new set. View the slideshow here to see the ones that really stuck with me.

[tags]rockies, flickr[/tags]

Unmarked helicopters? Somebody call Mulder.

This helicopter’s been hovering around just to the east of my building for most of the morning. Not sure what’s going on. Nellie says that if we see guys with rifles start sliding down any ziplines, we’re locking the door.

.:.

I forgot to post about the Flickr song chart pool last week when I saw it. I lost a good hour one night going through it. Enjoy!

(by the way, this one should make any Buffy fans out there extremely happy)

.:.

I have to fly to Montreal tomorrow, and back Tuesday night. It’ll be my first time flying off the island airport with Porter Air, so I’m looking forward to it. Actually, what I’m looking forward to is to not have to go all the way out to Pearson.

If it’s as good an experience as I’ve heard, I can see us using them for flights to New York, Montreal and even Halifax.

.:.

We have a new picture in the dictionary next to the word “ironic”: the logo of film production company Genius Products, who are responsible for The Hottie And The Nottie. Well done, gentlemen.

[tags]helicopter, toronto, flickr song chart pool, buffy, once more with feeling, porter air, irony, geniuss products, the hottie and the nottie[/tags]

Day three of the plague

Yea and verily, this cold is kicking my ass. I had to stay home again today; even if I could summon the energy and concentration to do my job today, I’d just make everyone else sick. I can still get some more basic work done here this afternoon, but I need to find a way to get functional by tomorrow. Can’t miss three days in a row.

I’m sure some people would think I’ve gotten sick like this because I’m (largely) off meat, but that’s not it. I still eat seafood occasionally, I still take vitamins, etc. If anything I probably don’t eat enough vegetables (ironic, for a vegetarian…) or fruits. The Toronto Star actually has a story today about how easy it is to be vegetarian in this city.

.:.

Speaking of my job, my title includes the word “strategy”, a term used inaccurately and far too often. I take some flak for it — I often get accused of task-oriented people of “not doing anything, just thinking about things” — which doesn’t bother me, but it does start me wondering if what I work on is really strategy.

That depends largely on the role description, I suppose, and I won’t go into that here, but I read an interesting article last week by Penelope Trunk (aka The Brazen Careerist). In it she states that people inclined to think strategically are (Myers-Briggs personality type) typically INTJs.

The best thing you can do for your career is take a personality test to understand your strengths. If you are an INTJ you really are a strategist.  If you are not an INTJ, the fewer letters you have that match that, the further away from strategist you are. So get some self-knowledge before you declare yourself a strategist.

I am, in fact, an INTJ — I was an ISTJ in university when I first took the test but a few years ago came out INTJ — so while this may not mean much in itself, and I would never refer to myself as a “strategist”, it does help to reassure me that I am, in fact, in more or less the right field of work. Which is, you know, nice.

.:.

I haven’t used Schmap.com myself, and until Monday I’d never heard of the site, but whoever they are they decided to use one of my Flickr pictures for one of their new Paris guides. It’s a shot taken in Place des Vosges, for their Marais neighbourhood guide.

Of course, I can’t take any credit whatsoever for the shot; Nellie took it, just as she took all of the best shots from our trip to France. The girl has an eye.

[tags]vegatarian, strategy, myers-briggs, intj, schmap, paris, marais, place des vosges[/tags]

"That was the moment when I fell in love with Paris"

Two more movies down:

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a very interesting look at the MPAA ratings board (you know, the ones who decide whether a film is G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17). The documentary is all about the secrecy around the small group of people who decide the rating, and interviews many filmmakers whose films were rated NC-17. There are lots of interesting angles discussed — bias toward studio films, bias against gay sex, acceptance of extreme violence while sex is considered dirty if it shows too many thrusts, etc. — and the filmmaker even hires a PI firm to track down the identities of the raters. The best part comes, of course, when the filmmaker submits the film to the MPAA for a rating. Highly recommended.

Paris, Je T’Aime (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a collection of sixteen short films about Parisien neighbourhoods. Apart from one or two, they were all quite good. Some were excellent: “Tuileries” by the Coen Brothers, “Père-Lachaise” by Wes Craven, “Faubourg Saint-Denis” by Tom Tykwer and especially “14th Arrondissement” by Alexander Payne. His lone character’s description of what happens in those transcendent travel moments are simply perfect:

“And then something happened. A feeling came over me. As if I recalled something, something that I had never known and for which I had been waiting, but I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was something I had forgotten. Or something I had missed my whole life. I can only tell you that at the same time I felt joy and sadness. But not a great sadness. Because I felt alive.”

[tags]this film is not yet rated, mpaa, film ratings, paris je t’aime, coen brothers, wes craven, tom tykwer, alexander payne, paris[/tags]

I wonder how it would handle DeSagana Diop?

Closed captions are funny. Sometimes when I’m studying I mute the TV, and the captions come on automatically. A minute ago I saw a basketball highlight, Tony Parker passing the ball to Manu Ginobli under the net for a layup. However, the speech-to-text software (or maybe it’s still humans?) must’ve been confused by the Argentinian name ’cause the caption read “Parker to a monitor nobly.” Apparently Philip K. Dick was calling the game tonight.

.:.

Dylan Reid at Spacing Magazine published what must surely be the definitive guide to the rules governing pedestrians crossing mid-block in Toronto. I specifically avoided using the term “jaywalking” as it suggests an infraction and, as Mr. Reid points out, it’s simply not illegal to walk across the street in Toronto.

It is legal for pedestrians to cross the street mid-block anywhere in Toronto as long as:

a) they are not adjacent to a marked pedestrian crossing, and

b) they yield to traffic.

This legal situation is a combination of Ontario law, through the Highway Traffic Act, and City of Toronto by-laws.

I like this. I cross the street away from crosswalks all the time, and I occasionally even do it right in front of a police car, but I assume I’d never gotten a ticket because the police were too busy with more important matters. Turns out I’m not doing anything wrong. It’s not even very dangerous; I’m very careful about crossing mid-block, and any Toronto pedestrian knows that drivers in this city treat crosswalks as loose recommendations, so it’s not like crossing there offers safety.

.:.

Today Nellie did something that made my very happy. She booked the linchpin in our spring trip: two nights at Lake O’Hara Lodge, high up in the mountains of Yoho National Park. We hiked there last year (description | pictures), but we had to take a bus up the mountain at 10 and down at 4. This way we can get a full two or three days of hiking up there. Plus, just look at the view!! Whatever else comes of the trip I’m happy. I’d fly to Calgary just for that.

By the way, it might seem like we’re booking obsessively early (we’re not going until late June) but this place fills up fast. They started taking reservations yesterday and by today they were nearly sold out for all of next season.

[tags]closed captioning, manu ginobli, jaywalking in toronto, crossing midblock, spacing magazine, lake o’hara, yoho national park[/tags]