Manual Transmission Blues

For those of you who don’t live in Calgary, it’s been blizzard conditions since about 8 or 9 this morning…which means the roads are in terrible shape and anyone making the commute home from work has a long journey ahead of them. Thankfully, I was able to get away from the office at about 1:45 this afternoon in the hopes of beating most of the traffic. However, I think a lot of people had the same idea so it still took me about an hour and half to get from downtown Calgary to McKenzie Towne in the deep southeast. This includes a train ride from the downtown core to 39th Ave Station and then a drive from the train station home. I got a very timely call from Brei just as I was getting into my car at the train station letting me know that southbound Deerfoot Trail was closed south of 130th Ave, so I think I saved a bit of time by going the back way home via Ogden Road/Barlow Trail/52nd St.

Back to the title of this post…I drive a Mazdaspeed 3 with a manual transmission which is totally awesome 99% of the time. But in the winter when the traffic is stop-and-go, it’s so freakin’ annoying to have to be like, “clutch out, bit of gas, clutch in, apply the brake, clutch out, bit of gas, clutch in, apply the brake” for 45 minutes! I think I got the best left-leg workout I’ve had in a few months on the drive home this afternoon.

So, be careful out there tonight. The roads are in pretty bad shape and there are plenty of bad drivers out there. Buckle up and don’t follow to close. Be safe.

-yycofee

Stars Revisit Famous Roles

I stumbled upon this a couple of days ago and thought it was pretty cool…for their 20th anniversary, Empire Magazine invited a bunch of celebrities to participate in a photoshoot where some of the biggest stars of today revisit their most beloved roles. Would Christian Bale still look as dapper (and creepy) as ever as Patrick Bateman from American Psycho? Can Mel Gibson still pull off the war paint he made famous playing William Wallace in Braveheart? Here are a couple of the images:

You can check out the rest of the photoshoot here.

-yycofee

Than vs. Then

Alright friends. As some of you already know, I’m a bit of a stickler about spelling and the correct usage of words. By no means am I an expert, but I like to think I have a good knowledge of the English language and how words are spelled and how they should be used. Recently I’ve noticed a surge in the misuse of THEN when people should be using THAN. For example:

Correct Usage: I’m better at spelling THAN you are.

Incorrect Usage: I’m better at spelling THEN you are.

If you’re having issues with this word usage you may find this book or this book helpful.

-yycofee

Coolest Chess Set EVER

I’m not much of a chess player, but I would probably start playing a whole lot more if I had one of these:

Looks like Bowser and Mario play the part of the Queen…which I guess makes sense, but Birdo as a knight? Interesting choice…

-yycofee

The End of Movember

Well, it’s been a long journey folks, but the end is finally here. My moustache growing adventure officially ended yesterday after work…and thank goodness. I was getting a bit sick of the upper lip hair and had definitely had enough of the ridicule about my feeble attempt at growing a moustache. I was getting it from all sides…people at work, my family, my girlfriends family, my friends…the most popular line being “Really?? I didn’t even know you were participating!”. But it was all for a good cause which is what it’s all about. Personally, I was able to raise $295…not bad for my first year. My team at work was able to raise a whopping $6,000 in total which placed us 171st in the Canadian rankings. Canada was second only to Australia (the founders of Movember) in dollars raised with just over $6.6 million in total. Great job to everyone who participated and donated! This month has gone a long way to providing much needed research and general funding dollars for Prostate Cancer around the world. We should all be proud of ourselves. In closing, here is a picture of me taken mere minutes before I shaved my month-long growth:

And yes, that is nearly a full month of growth.

Happy Movember!

-yycofee

I Love My Home Theatre

I’ve had my current home theatre setup since around Christmas time last year and I still absolutely love it. Why am I bringing this up now you ask? Well, last night I picked up Star Trek on Blu-ray…and it’s movies like this that really bring out the best in any HD home theatre setup. There’s nothing better than watching an unbelievably awesome sci-fi/action movie in full 1080p high def paired with true HD surround sound. What a fantastic experience. Here’s a trailer for Star Trek in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year:

If anyone out there is wondering whether they should make the plunge and get themselves a Blu-ray player to go with their HDTV, I would highly recommend it. I was a bit skeptical to begin with as well. I thought, ‘how could they possibly make the picture a DVD offers any better?’. But they did. The Blu-ray medium is fantastic and the difference will be noticeable to anyone who spends any time in front of their television set. Soooo….do yourself a favour this holiday season and go buy yourself (or a loved one) a Blu-ray player, they will love you forever. Oh, and if you don’t believe me about the difference HD makes, feel free to come on over to my place to watch Star Trek…or Watchmen…or any other bad-ass movie of your choosing on Blu-ray, you won’t regret it.

-yycofee

Movember

What better way to re-enter to blogosphere after a couple month hiatus than with a post about a great cause like Movember. For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Movember is an annual event that takes place each November in which men grow themselves a moustache to help bring awareness to men’s health issues – specifically Prostate Cancer. All funds raised in Canada go towards Prostate Cancer Canada who will use the money raised by Movember for the development of programs related to awareness, public education, advocacy, support of those affected, and research into the prevention, detection, treatment and cure of prostate cancer.

In the name of this cause, myself and my good pal Rob (you can find his blog here) have created a team to help fight the good fight against Prostate Cancer. If you feel like watching our progress or making a donation, please head on over HERE and take a peek. I’ll try to keep updating my profile picture to capture my feeble attempt at growing a moustache on a regular basis throughout the month.

For more information regarding Movember you can head to the official Movember Canada site here.

Theatre Trip – 9

Alright people, 9 officially came out on last Wednesday (09/09/09) and Brei and I took in an afternoon showing this past Saturday. My verdict? Not as awesome as I would have liked, which was quite disappointing. For a couple hours after seeing the movie, neither Brei nor I could figure out exactly what we thought was lacking but we knew there was something. It just felt like a piece of the movie was missing. We discussed it over dinner, and I started to realize that it was a lack of character development that was missing. The characters were all very unique, but the audience didn’t get to learn enough about each of them to really make a valuable connection…which made the movie seem a bit impersonal. I felt like I wasn’t really emotionally involved with any of the characters, which is a shame because it was such a cool concept for a movie. Visually, the movie was pretty spectacular. The detail in the animated post-apocalyptic world was very impressive…and very dark which is fitting for a film produced by Tim Burton. The 9 were also very well produced and each had their own very unique look. All in all, this was still a pretty good film and I’ll definitely have to give it another watch once it’s released on Blu-ray. If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, here it is.

-yycofee

Settlers of Catan

Have you ever heard of this board game? Me neither…until a few weeks ago when a couple of friends told me how much fun it was. They reassured me that despite its nerdy name and gameplay, it’s a lot of fun…so this past Friday, Brei and invited said friends over for the sole purpose of playing this game. Here’s the Coles Notes version of the concept:

Players are adventurers who have settled a new island. This island is made up of a series of hexagonal pieces (hexes) joined together. Each hex represents a type of resource: lumber, ore, brick, wheat, wool, or desert. A number between 1 and 12 (each number combination that can be rolled using a combination of two six-sided die) is placed on each hex. To begin the game, each player gets to place two “settlements” and two “roads” on the game board at intersections between the hexes…like the spots circled in green in the image below.

The dice are then rolled by each player in turn, and if the number on the dice matches the number on any of the hexes your settlements are touching, those hexes will “produce” one unit of the underlying resource. In the above example, if a 5 is rolled, the red settlements will produce one unit of lumber each, netting the player two lumber cards. The game continues in this fashion with players accumulating resource cards as the game goes on. These resource cards can then be exchanged with the bank to purchase more roads, settlements, development cards, or to turn settlements into cities. The ultimate goal of the game is to accumulate 10 “victory points” through ownership of settlements and cities and various other challenges (eg. longest road). If you want some more detail, you can visit the Wikipedia page here.

This game sounds kinda dorky…and it definitely is. But we had fun nonetheless. Combined with a few alcoholic beverages, it makes for a pretty fun evening.

-yycofee

P.S. Rob: I’ll get you playing this eventually…

Garage Building: Days 3 & 4

So I’m sure you’re all sick of me blogging about my stupid garage, but it’s what has been taking up most of my weekend time for the past little while. But don’t worry, it’s pretty much done now so there shouldn’t be too many more posts about it

This weekend we were able to make some really good progress on getting this thing looking like a real garage. We got the big door installed and it’s working great (growing up I never had an automatic garage door opener, so having that functionality is pretty awesome). Brendan and I managed to get the entire roof shingled with only a couple minor mistakes, and the dads got our small door and windows installed. All that’s left is to finish the soffit and fascia, get the siding installed, and run electrical from the house to the garage. I’d say we’re about 85% complete. We even cleared enough room to allow my car to fit, and my Mazdaspeed 3 spent it’s first night covered and locked up last night…very exciting.

With any luck, we’ll have this thing polished off in the next couple of weeks before it starts getting too cold. I’ll try to post some photos of the almost-finished product in a couple of days.

*Update* Man, I almost forgot to mention all the super hard work Brei put in weed whacking all the gigantic weeds that had infested our backyard. Her dad bought a brand new gas-powered industrial strength Weed Eater for us to use for this exact purpose, and it worked great. Brei was destroying weeds and raking/bagging them for a few hours while we were up on the roof getting the shingles finished. The backyard looks waaaay better now…almost like it’s ready for a deck and some sod! Great work sweetie!

-yycofee