Adrian's Scrapbook

2008 Aug 27 Wednesday

Adrian Cho for President

2008 Aug 19 Tuesday

Gal's Sushi

Tonight I had the most wonderful meal at Gal’s Sushi in Markham (suburban Toronto). This was truly an unexpected treat for me. I was cruising around after a visit to Chapters (a Canadian bookstore chain) and thinking that I would love to have Japanese food. Lo and behold there’s this restaurant right next to my hotel! The first interesting thing was that clientele was entirely Asian - a good sign if you’re eating Asian food - Japanese and Korean in this case. Super prompt and friendly service and some of the best Japanese food I’ve had in a while. The only bad thing for me was that I ate way too much. The appetizers (I ordered Age Dashi Tofu and the Vegetable Tempura) were huge and then I also had a Tempura Udon and the tempura served with that dish was also very substantial. I highly recommend this restaurant if you’re ever in the area.

2008 Aug 18 Monday

Aussies at the Olympics

As usual, the Aussies are racking up an impressive medal tally at the Olympics; one that is disproportionately large given the population of the country. Compared to the Aussies, the Canucks are not faring so well (and that’s ignoring the 50% greater population they have over the Aussies.)

2008 Aug 14 Thursday

And now for something different. Alice Babs with the Swe-Danes (Ulrik Neumann on guitar and Svend Asmussen on violin). Get a load of the “Swe-Dane Symphony.”

The amazing Alice Babs singing part of “Heaven” from Duke Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert. This is from a performance in Stockholm in 1969, the year after the Second Sacred Concert was presented in New York City. That’s the superb Johnny Hodges on alto sax.

The amazing Alice Babs singing part of “Praise God and Dance” from Duke Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert. This is from a performance in Stockholm in 1969, the year after the Second Sacred Concert was presented in New York City. That’s the fabulous Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet.

2008 Aug 4 Monday

Zenphoto

After years of running the Gallery web-based photo management package, I’ve decided, like many other people have, to dump it and move to Zenphoto. Gallery has become a dog - a very sick dog. It’s slow and prone to breakage and the installation at the IJO website was so broken that we couldn’t upload to it anymore nor configure it.

Zenphoto, like Gallery, is an open source package. It’s fast, lightweight and simply works. At least for now anyway. The other great benefit for me is that my hosting service handles all maintenance of Zenphoto so I don’t even need to waste time on the upgrades, etc.

Check out the IJO photo gallery running on Zenphoto.

2008 Jul 28 Monday

Impreza Redux

At the beginning of this year I posted about our purchase of a Subaru Impreza for Duffy and how we had become a two-Subaru family.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to let my Subaru Outback go to the big scrapheap in the sky. It has done over 300,000 kms and it’s time for a replacement. After much pondering, I’ve decided to purchase a - yep you guessed it - Subaru Impreza. We’re now going to be a two-Impreza family! In my book, if you want an affordable, all-wheel drive, standard transmission vehicle, there is simply no better choice. Over the last six months I’ve gotten to know Duffy’s Impreza quite well and look forward to having my own. This is a simply great vehicle. It’s got the feel and the ride of a big car in a small package. The wonderfully torquey engine puts out 170 hp which is a good 20 - 30 hp more than most cars in the same class. As a bonus I can fit the bass and a passenger. In fact it is more convenient to carry the bass in the Impreza than the Outback; it’s easier to load and unload and there is greater visibility once the bass is in the car.

To avoid too much confusion my car will be Newport Blue in colour so we can quickly distinguish it from the Lightning Red of Duffy’s car. I should have it in a few days.

Lightning GT

If you thought the Tesla Roadster was something, check out the forthcoming Lightning GT. 700 hp with one motor in each wheel. No axles, no driveshafts, no differentials. Can you imagine what the world will be like with predominantly electric vehicles? There are entire industries built around internal combustion engines.

RoboCup

I hope I am around long enough to see this happen…

2008 Jul 27 Sunday

Jott

For at least a few months now if not longer, I have been using Jott, a service that transcribes your spoken words into text. Swing dance extraordinarie, Byron Alley referred me to this service and I must say that it has proven to be extremely useful. One of the things I use it for a lot is to send myself a reminder about something that I may think about while I am driving. Jott transforms your spoken words into text not by using software but instead with a team of people. As a result, the accuracy is a lot higher. It’s usually 100% accurate as long as you speak clearly and spell out complex words or names. You can also say grammatical things like “comma” or “new paragraph.”

One of the nice things about Jott is that it can interface with all kinds of services such as Tumblr, so I can dictate a blog post and Sandy, the anthropomorphized e-mail-based personal assistant.

In addition to Jotting things to yourself and interfacing to a variety of systems, one of the basic things you can do is send e-mails to one or more people. If you have a group defined on Jott, it makes it really easy to send that entire group an e-mail while you are driving along (such as “I’m running late, please feel free to start without me.”) To interface with Jott, you simply call the Jott number (they have local numbers for most cities in addition to toll-free numbers). Of course I have “J” setup as the speed dial for Jott.

Now Jott also has applications for BlackBerry and iPhone, allowing you to reply to e-mails using your spoken words. All very cool stuff.

2008 Jul 22 Tuesday

Open source software

I wrote a while back that I’ve been using Pidgin as my sole instant messaging client. It handles every protocol I need including MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Google Talk, Skype (although you still need the Skype client installed) and Jabber for anything else (like Meebo).

Nowadays I’m also using Inkscape which is a vector drawing package like Adobe Illustrator and GIMP which is a bitmap editing packaging like Photoshop.

These are all great open source packages. High quality, full-featured, freely available, and constantly being updated.

2008 Jul 20 Sunday

I just watched the movie Flawless starring Demi Moore and Michael Caine. Set in London in the 1960s, this is not your usual heist movie. I think this went straight to video which is a pity because it’s an gem in my opinion. I loved the retro theme and the story and the performances by Caine and Moore are very strong.

2008 Jul 19 Saturday

Relief for Hardworking Hands

Playing bass especially on gut strings is hard on your hands. Over the years, I’ve been using various products including Burt’s Bees Hand Salve and then later their Beeswax & Banana Hand Creme. I recently lost my jar of the latter and in looking for a replacement, I stumbled onto the Badger line of products and specifically their Healing Balm. This is good stuff! The formula seems to be just right - not too greasy and it really penetrates. I like the smaller canister too.

2008 Jul 17 Thursday

How many cell phones does Nokia sell in one day?

According to Matt Hickey writing for Gizmodo, the answer is 1.28 million. Holy crap!