It snowed quite a bit here recently.
For some reason at 2am last night while talking to Andrew and Sanya I failed to purge the idea of really wanting to go out and go for a walk in the snow.
Sanya has mentioned that I may be more crazy then she is. We’ve also created a theory that I might really be a bear.
Andrew just thinks I’m insane.
Here’s something for you to listen to while you browse:
If you’re into very nice vocal, Puccini - O Mio Babbino Caro or if you’re more into electronic/dance, Armin Van Buren - Serenity.

Taking a look outside it was snowing and rather cold, but since I couldn’t purge this idea I may as well do it right…

Ok feet, I hope you like your lack of winter shoes. Good thing it was below zero so nothing was wet or melting. Let’s get walking!

Lights of the fast food plaza. No thanks to that. I do like the tracks in the snow — I always wonder who left that.

I also really like pine trees. Probably more so then deciduous trees. Especially, obviously, in winter. I really liked this setting. If maybe someone was around that bench could make a fun seat.

This is what I really love though. There is a path here. There is also a road here. There is even a train track here. But you can’t tell can you? Neither can I.

More of unknown tracks. Ok I lied, I saw one of the cars that made them. It was amusing because I was walking in the middle of the road and it’s hard to hear cars in snow with a hood on. True story.

Sup. One of a few pictures of myself that I don’t want to go POOF!

Since no trip is complete without snow art and I wasn’t in the mood for snowmen; I give you the alternative. Have some <3 from Moo. In case you're into that whole angle and position thing you get two pictures.

Are you joking me? You actually thought I wasn’t just going to flop into the snow? LOL, please.

I was walking along, then I decided to just take off and fly.

The night must have at least one artificial sun.

Interesting looking pictures or me getting snow into the pocket where my camera phone was. You decide.

What do we leave behind?

This is where I started. Probably some 30 minutes ago. I guess to answer the last question in about another 30 minutes, not much.

There was an elaborate drawing on that paper there. Which was really my Economics project. But since none of it came through to the picture I improvised quickly and badly.

Early Gray and a Mint Tea from the foothills of a volcano, beat that!

That was fun!

Tell me what you think. Tell me if you’ve had any weird ideas recently? Did you do them? Why not?!

I’ve had a variety of marks on different projects and assignments in university. I won’t go back as far as high school because then this rant would cover my complete disgust with certain teachers, my love of others and comments on situations which really at this time have nothing to add to this one.

I got a mark back today for a presentation I did in my Science Fiction English class. It was 74%. I was sad
It’s weird that I was so disappointed because I’ve been completely apathetic to marks like this before, to higher marks, to lower marks. However this one has been the first one where I was really expecting it to be higher, and I mean like 80%+ higher. I guess maybe I set myself up too much because I knew the marks and comments of other presenters and tailored my presentation to fix on what the negative comments were in theirs and what the teacher mentioned as points of improvement when I talked to him about it. So it was a bit of a surprise for me that I got 5% lower then one of them and 8% lower then the other.

The presentation was on Kino no Tabi by the way. A fantastic and beautiful anime series that I would recommend anyone who can find some spare time uses it to watch it. It doesn’t matter if it’s all in one go. There are some unifying messages and concepts, but it totally doesn’t require you to remember anything from previous episodes to appreciate, understand and like each individual one. can you tell this was maybe one of my presentation questions that I had to answer?

So anyway — I really just wanted to rant. I’m arranging a meeting to talk about this amongst some just for fun things sometime this week. I’m going to try and scrape an 80% out of this yet. I think I pretty much did the opposite of what he said not to do (”Don’t make it a show and tell”) and got hella screwed compared to those that did a “Show and Tell” =/

Show and tell is the process of showing an audience something and telling them about it and usually done in a classroom. It is an elementary school technique for teaching young children the skills of public speaking. Usually, a child will bring an item from home. They will explain to the class why they chose this item, where they got it, and other relevant information.

Ticket design. It was made for an event in residence. Mimics the official WPT design. I vectored the card logo as all originals were too small to work with.

I have a desire to visit that place called Sweet Dreams Teashop. I have it in my memory that they make these delicious drinks there that range from bubble tea to fantastic slushies that I think I could live on. They also have board games and we can play some cards! The point is, I’m looking for anyone who wants to come along. Leave a comment or send me an email. I’m looking at all of you commenters/lurkers/etc!

Second. I am feeling another dinner and a movie thing coming on. Someone pick a movie (or two), someone (maybe even the same person) pick what I should make for dinner (feel free to help out) and someone pick some date. You can see how this absolves me of almost all decision making, which is awesome! Do it!

To add a picture that has nothing to do with this, but since I was catching up on my cell phone pictures. Have my stats class evaluation:

So, you may remember my post about the first midterm in this class.

Here’s the one about the second one. I couldn’t have it any other way.

I pretty much studied for 3 days straight for this thing. There was a slight boo on the first one — I guess it could have gone better. I am feeling that this one went a lot better, which is good, but I’m cautiously optimistic only. I’ll find out for sure when we get the marks, but there were only a bare few spots where I may have been entirely making things up in a kind of sort of know it in an unrelated way approach.

You might be, I was certainly, glad to know that we didn’t have to sit through another 10-15 awkward minutes. The test would start at 7:05, it was still supposed to start at 7:10, but I think the prof finally figured out where that direction was going.

That girl. Oh, that girl.

Professor: “Here are the midterms, make sure your books are away, don’t start writing yet. Just put your name down and count the pages”
Girl < gets exam >
Girl < flips the page and starts to write >
Maybe a minute later.
Professor: “So as I mentioned, don’t start writing”
Girl < oh sigh, hair throw, hissy fit, stops writing, opens her notes and starts going through them >
Sergey < o.OWTF! >
Another minute maybe.
Brave Girl in the back: “Ok, I thought you said close your books. So maybe like she can stop reading”
Professor: “Let me repeat again, close your books, put your notes away”
Girl: “But…”
Girl < defiant sigh, hair fling, sigh, hair fling, closes book >
Sergey < Bravo Brave Girl in the back, bravo. If I could stand up and bow to you I would. But the thing is, I'm too chicken :( >

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It amazes me to no end what extremes the human body is capable of. This is just mesmerizing to look at.

I felt like writing some rants. Why? Because they’re short and they’re usually fun to write and I don’t actually have to think much about them.

I ended up in Toronto again, that’s twice now within less then 2 weeks. Adam Hewgill, Greg and me went to a Microsoft TechNet Security conference. It was a pretty cool experience, but I don’t really have too much to say about it, except it’s the source of 2 of my rants.

Most of these were from the Q&A session that happened at the end of the presentation. However the first one was from before we got seated. We decided to go to the balcony seating of the theatre like room. And you have to go through these 2 doors to get to the seats on the balcony. But here’s the catch, there are also stairs all the way up and down right next to the seats on the sides of the balcony, but they have bars, literally, every 2 rows that stop you from going up and down them. The hell is that? What sensible purpose is there from making people go back out through 2 sets of doors and go in through 2 sets of doors and you better hope you counted right how many doors you should have gone down, or you’re going to do it again.

Answer: we just jumped over the seats, yep, betcha they didn’t see that one coming at all =P

So, back to the Q&A session.
There were 3 guys, probably around my age, that played on their Nintendo DS systems through pretty much the entire day. I had my DS with me, but I didn’t play it Then at the end, they asked a question about Linux that was a very thinly veiled attempt at a dig at Windows. Then, when it got answered, they pretty much repeated it again. Shut up, k, thanks. If you’re going to go down this path, at least think through your question first. I hoped they would join my PictoChat session, so I could elaborate, but they didn’t

Then someone behind us stood up with another question. He was definitely older and seemed more mature, I was prepared to be impressed and educated. “Hi… uhm… so I came here to see the latest and the greatest from Microsoft” — it’s a security focused conference, not a product showcase — “and I have to say I’m greatly disappointed” — oh fuck me — “because BLA, BLA, BLA” — answer from the presenters — “Yeah, I’m going to talk over you now and start an argument” — presenters try to answer again — “But, but, but, but, if you did this” — Adam Hewgill: Dude, shut up! — Presenters: *sigh* — “I’m still not done with my completely annoying talking” — Presenters: you know, that’s great, come down here and we can discuss this more, but we have to move on for now. Thanks — “I’m so angry, I’m going to storm out of the room!”. Seriously now, please follow this easy pattern: if the rest of the audience, including the presenters are looking at you like you’re a complete idiot, you are. Honestly.

On the GO Train (by the way, absolutely no one actually came around to check our tickets on the way there or back) there were some sick people. Some of them made an effort to try and not get others clearly infected with whatever it was they had. Others didn’t. So the lady next to me was definitely sick, and after a while she would cough and cough on her jacket on her arm and then casually take her newspaper and wave it towards me. I’m not sure I could have given her a more unimpressed look then I did, but I didn’t say anything, thank you lady, I now have a sore throat. Thanks!

East Side Mario’s doesn’t let you change the number of people in your reservation. Yep, that’s right, they had to ask the manager to do it. They seemed to not be able to answer my question of what happened if I canceled the first reservation and just made a new one.

More as I think of them.

Welcome back from the intermission and in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the first part that you’re looking for.

I actually had to do a double take on the closing of part 1 since I couldn’t remember where it was exactly that I stopped. So, with that done, here we go!

Indecision. It’s sometimes awesome, and sometimes it’s kind of annoying. Our plan was to walk somewhere, and do something. Which basically resulted in us talking and walking up some street just to do a u-turn because we’d realise there was absolutely nothing in that direction. There were several aspects of Toronto that I suppose are worth mentioning at this point. The taxi drivers are out to hit something, or someone, no exceptions. If they can’t accomplish plan A, then they will do their best to drive with a vendetta as plan B. There are a lot of homeless people who need some of your change for whatever reason they give you. I sort of like the ones that just don’t give me a reason at all, I want to believe them more XD

We found ourselves at the movie theatre, we actually came to this decision after Andrew insisted on us going to see the Much Music building because he hasn’t been there himself. I actually think I have. It was closed, and dark, and disappointing. We were going to make an effort to see Elizabeth, but since we lacked the power to traverse through time, and the last show was more then 4 hours ago, we opted for the only available option in American Gangster. Interestingly enough, someone has leaked a DVDrip version of this movie earlier last week and it seems that just about everyone had it before the movie was even out. We bought some drinks for the movie and bought our tickets, both of which made Andrew’s recent post on the value of entertainment that much more painful to our bank accounts

I won’t spoil the movie, but it was good. It is rated 18A and does live up to that rating in covering just about everything that those labels talk about as far as bad material. What was annoying is that there was someone’s car outside for large parts of the movie that was blasting music and it was really annoying! We joked about asking for refunds, then actually tried to find the customer service desk and failed =/
On the way out, there were a lot of flashing police lights, lots of police cars, lots of police on horseback, and eventually even 2 trucks from the special task force. A couple of guys were “spread” over the hoods of the cruisers and there was a large crowd. We didn’t stick around, but it was like the movie we had just seen continuing for real. It was based on a true story after all!

After getting our north/south direction (no seriously) figured out again. We went off towards Andrew’s place of residence. All the public transport had stopped, even though we felt since the clocks were brought back an hour the subway was technically still open. I guess the operators didn’t agree with us on that one. It was a pretty cool walk and it was around 2-3am, but we did visit Andrew’s campus, which he was so proud of, dodged some light posts in an apparent game that I’m awesome at, figured out what another building on campus was and finally caught a cab for the rest of the trip.

My name’s Bond, James Bond

Sometimes I like to think that I’m totally normal. And every second that I don’t have those thoughts something happens to prove otherwise. Since Andrew we couldn’t invade Andrew’s private sanctuary (I heard that he has an Apple tree there and keeps a caged Steve Jobs under it) we got a room for actually really cheap. The catch! The room was for one person, and for some reason having a second person stay in it was more then the room in the first place! So with a cell call initiating our dastardly plan and synching the timing I went to get the keys while Andrew and Alice snuck in through the back door. It was actually amusing because the person at the desk has all these camera monitors and he turned to check them out and I got his attention again by asking something I can’t even remember. Turned out the guy working the desk also spoke Russian. Mission accomplished and we were in the building safe and clear.

I guess we haven’t had any pictures yet, ok, here we go:

In the morning we discovered the TV had a choice of about 6 channels, which were really mostly static, but at least 2 of them were those channels where one guy sits in front of the camera and talks about something religious.

We actually examined the room in an effort to find something shady and wrong. But we were pretty tired so that didn’t last long. That brown blanket thing is a static making machine, it hurts!

The floor was nice and uhm, nice. It actually wasn’t too bad, except it was pretty cold. Also I snore, it was described as sort of like a “machine” that might be a “lawnmower”. That kinda sucks! XD

Andrew had left to perform at a church service, so we were on our own, and after sleeping in for a bit we finally made some plans. After having to unplug the alarm clock because through joking around about it having a USB port to charge a BlackBerry, Alice somehow set it off and we couldn’t find the off button!

We mostly just walked around and looked at things like tourists. It was Sunday morning and a lot of everything was still closed. Our only real goal was to get some breakfast somewhere, pickup some cakes for someone’s birthday and then catch the bus.

We finally decided on this nice, small place called who’s name I have now forgotten. It was “Samantha’s Place” or something like that. It was pretty nice and we got some breakfast there. One of the reasons it stood out was because I actually realised they had the Food Channel playing on the big LCD TV they had hanging above the counter area. I thought that was really clever and interesting.

It was seriously like $10.00 for that. I ate the pickle :p

The bread was the best part, but the chili was good.

Sorry for the bad picture, I chickened out when one of the people working there started to walk towards the screen. But the lady on the Food Channel was wearing this really low cut shirt thing, and it was probably not the best thing for a cooking show where you know, they show your midsection and what you’re doing with the food.

We walked around a bit more around the fancy and expensive part of Toronto where we found ourselves. I think I saw a lot of over $100,000 cars. Alice took me to this Italian style boutique food shop she found earlier. Everything was really fancy and pretty and expensive. I only got one picture off before we were informed that they were so exclusive that we actually weren’t allowed to take pictures there. So here you go sweet tooth lovers, rejoice:

At this point it was pretty much time to wrap it up. The cake lady opened her store on time at 11:30, we grabbed the cakes and made our way to the subway. I can actually say I’ve been on the Toronto subway now, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t before. The bus back was at 12:30 and was absolutely full. We grabbed a bus that headed to Kitchener instead and was almost empty, it even got there an hour earlier, I take that as an overall win.

Well, as they say all good things must come to and end, and so must this one. We were on our way home, tired, but happy about the weekend. Pretty much slept the entire trip on the bus. So here’s one for closing time (it turns out neither one of us has been to the CN Tower).