Ten Things

In no particular order, ten things I've done over the holiday season instead of work on my thesis:

• taught my daughter to play Uno
• made a huge Christmas turkey and then made lots of good things with the leftovers
• played board games with friends
• read several novels
• watched movies with my daughter
• watched "Yes, Prime Minister" with my wife
• converted my old how-did-I-ever-get-a-job resume into a great functional resume
  
• played a lot of "Scrabble" on Facebook
• went to "thesis therapy" sessions at the pub with fellow GLSers
• procrastinated some more by blogging about ten things I've done instead of working on my thesis...
  

Marc Tempé Gewürztraminer Rodelsberg (1998)

For my birthday dinner, to complement the scallops with orzo and caramelized carrots, we had a bottle of wine - a 1998 Marc Tempe Rodelsberg Gewurztraminer.

I've had some really tremendous white wines before, and this one definitely qualified. It's a common misperception that you cannot age a white wine.

This one had a beautiful golden colour, wonderful smooth mouth feel, heady aromas you typically expect in a Gewurz, and on the palate had an extremely long finish and hints of minerals.

A lovely wine. I wish I had 10 more in the cellar.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today's been a truly nice and relaxing day.

For dinner tonight - pan seared scallops finished with lime and dill, orzo with a nice light tomato cream sauce, and caramelized carrots. Paired with a 1998 Marc Tempe grand cru Gewurztraminer from Alsace.

My 40th birthday party

This coming Wednesday, the 12th, I turn 40. Since a mid-week party isn't really reasonable, I had my party last night.

Almost forty people came and wished me well and shared food and wine and laughter.

I am truly blessed with good friends.

Automated Rejection

Yesterday, I visited SAP.com to see what kind of job opportunities they had, and one of them was the generic "please submit your resume so we can keep it on file. So I did.

A short time later, I received an automated email from their site that said:

Thank you for your interest in exploring a career opportunity with SAP.

We have reviewed your background and experience as compared to our position requirements. Upon review, we have decided to pursue other candidates that we believe are stronger matches for this position. We felt it was important to advise you as soon as we made this decision so as not to delay your job search.

SAP is continuing to grow as a dominant leader in technology and further opportunities will develop. Please be assured that we will retain your application in our database for at least six months should a job opportunity develop that matches your background.

Feel free to continue to visit http://www.sap.com/usa/employ for future opportunities.

Thanks again for expressing an interest in SAP and we wish you much success in finding a position that matches your career objectives.

Sincerely,

SAP Talent Acquisition

Nothing like automation I say.

The Pike Brewing Pub (Seattle) Review

On Sunday, one of the Seattle sights we visited was the Pike Place Market. At one end of it is the Pike Brewing Company, and they have a pub... So Gerry and I stopped in for lunch.

The place is nicely appointed with lots of Pike Brewing paraphernalia, and reminded me favourably of other brewpubs I've been to, such as Swan's and Spinnaker's in Victoria, and Wild River in Richmond.

The menu was replete with the usual pub fare one might expect, with a Pacific Northwest emphasis on local cuisine.

I ordered a bowl of the dungeness crab chowder and the "half" Rueben (the full Rueben has double the meat!), Gerry had the chowder as well and halibut & chips. I couldn't decide between the wheat ale and the Belgian style tripel so the waitress brought me tasters of both. Gerry had the stout. I settled on the tripel, though the wheat was one of the better ones I've tried.

The soup came fast, and it was hot! The mains were both ample and delicious. In short, it was nice simple fare, well prepared.

Recommended.

Ratings:
Service: 4/5
Ambiance: 3/5
Food: 7/10
Price: $$

Score: 14/20

Taphouse Grill (Seattle) Review

During my weekend with Gerry in Seattle, as part of the experience was to go to Bottleworks and buy and taste beer, we decided to check out the Taphouse Grill. We visited the location in downtown Seattle. Taphouse Grill's claim to fame is that they have 160 different beers on tap.

Writing a good restaurant review is easy, but writing a negative one is one fraught with a little more peril; it is not sufficient to just say bad things about a place, one has to be specific about what made the experience bad.

The easy rating is ambiance. The place has a nice atmosphere to eat and drink in, and there was nothing wrong with the decor. The pictures on the website paint an accurate picture.

However, everything went downhill from there.

Gerry and I arrived around 3pm, which is definitely the dead zone in the restaurant world. Our waitress was very friendly and nice enough, but service goes beyond ones individual server. My first mistake was to ignore Gerry's sage advice to not order the sampler. I'm used to samplers from places like Swan's, Wild River, Spinnaker's, etc - brew pubs where the samples are beers they brew. The sampler at the Taphouse was a mistake.

It was a mistake because of the four beers in the flight, one was off, one was flat, and one I didn't like. The one that was off had the classic wet cardboard aroma I've experienced with wine, but never with beer. Of course, Gerry's the beer expert, whereas I'm more of a wine guy. Also, none of the four beers in the flight was on the list of regular beers (they do say that some 10 or so taps are for whatever seasonal or special ales they have going).

I told the waitress to please take the flight away and bring me a glass of porter instead. She brought it back to the bar and Gerry and I saw the manager and she discuss my "concerns" and the manager even took a sniff of the off beer and make "that face" and put it down.

So when he came over and told me that all the beers "poured like they should" (i.e. that they were all ok), I knew he was lying. I didn't bother arguing - I just wanted my porter and my lunch.

And that was the other part. It took over an hour for Gerry and I to get out food. What did we order that took so long? I ordered the potato cakes and lentil soup from the daily specials menu, and Gerry ordered a beef dip sandwich. In other words, nothing that should take an hour.

When the food finally arrived, I was disappointed. The potato cakes were a little spongy, and the soup (very good) was only warm.

After the beer complaint, we were basically avoided by our waitress and she looked apologetic when she presented our bill. The faulty flight of beer was still on the bill, and I just gave her my credit card. When she came back she'd taken the flight off.

Too little, too late.

Ratings:
Service: 1/5
Ambiance: 3/5
Food: 5/10
Price: $$

Score: 9/20

A note: Having 160 taps is certainly impressive, but with that many, you're simply statistically going to have some bad ones there - especially since some of them won't be very popular. In contradistinction, as we went from the Taphouse to Elysian Fields, a brewpub right by Safeco Field, they have about 20 taps, but half of them are their beers, and the others are "guest beers", and they were all busily poured.

Seattle

Some six weeks ago, my friend Gerry and I made plans to go see the Mariners play a game and spend the weekend in Seattle. Little did we know at the time that the Mariners, who had a clear 4 game lead in the wild card race, would go on an extended losing streak and be out of the playoffs or that the Canadian dollar would reach parity with the US dollar.

In any event, we had the tickets and the hotel booked, and off we went. It took a little over an hour to get through the south bound customs lineup, and it was probably much longer by the time we finally got through at 9am!

We stopped and shopped a the "Seattle's Best" outlet mall and found some bargains. One of the nice things about "guy shopping" is we know what we want and if they don't have it, we move on. I found some shoes (long overdue to get replacements) for cheap at Eddie Bauer, and a new lasagna pan (Le Creuset, at an outrageously good price) which will last me forever, complete with roasting rack to go with it.

The game was good and featured everything I want to see at a baseball game - the home team winning, and a home run. (Mariners 5-1 over the Texas Rangers). I also didn't know that Sammy Sosa played for the Rangers (as their DH) so I actually got to see him at bat.

Safeco Field is a great baseball venue, and the thing that impressed me the most was that the concessions were a mix of stadium facilities and local franchises (e.g. the Ivar's fish and chip place, and the barbecue place whose name escapes me but had a fabulous pulled pork sandwich). There were also other options available, like sushi.

The most surprising though was that while Bud and Coors were the "default" beers, one in three taps featured a local microbrewery's craft beer. Very shrewd marketing!

The hotel we stayed at was close to the Space Needle so we were able to walk everywhere, including a late lunch at the Taphouse Grill (reviewed separately) and Safeco Field.

On Sunday we had lunch at the Pike Place Pub (reviewed separately) and checked out the market and the Science Fiction Museum.

The Science Fiction Museum was a lot of fun, and most of the collection is from Paul Allen, whose brainchild it is (as well as the Experience Music Project). Notably absent from the collection was anything British (Dr. Who, Space 1999, Blake's Seven, etc), and with the exception of a couple of minor items, nothing Babylon 5. Lots of Star Trek (old and new) and Star Wars, and the queen alien from Aliens. Well worth the admission ticket.

Coming home, the border lineup was a mere 30 minutes, and the customs guy, after checking the trunk to see all the beer we bought, waved us through. Lots of people being pulled over to go pay sales tax at the customs office though.

I really like Seattle, and it had been 14 years since I'd last visited. It won't be that long before I go again!

Jethro Tull at the River Rock

Last Friday (the 28th of September), I went to see Jethro Tull at the River Rock Casino.

The concert venue at the River Rock is fabulous - it's very intimate, and I can't say that there's a bad seat in the place, although I had a truly premium seat in row three.

The seating is part of an elaborate $10 million system (so said the promo guy who came out to tell us about the lineup of artists coming soon) that lets the room be configured pretty much any way they liked - from music, to boxing, to a cabaret, it's all possible through automation. On my way out after the show I got to see the inner workings as the crowd filtered out through the exit corridors.

The last time I saw Jethro Tull was during their 1991 tour (at the Orpheum). I was pleased to be able to see them live again, and I expect that it will be the last time I get to see them in concert.

Ian Anderson was in fine form, cracking many jokes, and poking fun at their age. They opened their show with "Some Day the Sun Won't Shine for You" from their first album (This Was, 1968) and then joked their next one would be from "their more recent album from 1969".

I wrote recently about Al Stewart's musical talent, and I need to make the same comment here. Everyone in the band can play multiple instruments, and play them well. I know that Tull's music isn't everyone's cuppa tea, but there's not denying their musicianship.

Ian Anderson's voice isn't what it used to be, but he's adjusted his singing style and his passion for his music is still apparent. Their playlist did feature more instrumental pieces than one might normally expect at a rock concert, but for the better part of two hours, they provided great entertainment.

Here is the set list from the show...

Someday The Sun Won't Shine For You (Ian & Martin only)
Living In The Past
The Donkey And The Drum - from their new album, "to be released some time in 2012" [joking]
Thick As A Brick - from the eponymous album, a rather lengthy excerpt and very well done
Pastime With Good Company (King Henry's Madrigal)
Mother Goose
My Sunday Feeling
Bourée
Sweet Dream
After You After Me - from one of Martin Barre's solo albums
Aqualung - a new arrangement with lots of flute (Ian noted that this song, probably Tull's most famous work, features no flute in its original incarnation)
America - From "West Side Story", an arrangement by Emerson (of Emerson, Lake, & "the other lawyer in the firm")
My God
Budapest
Locomotive Breath (the obligatory encore finale)

The Mathematics of Finance

When I look back at my undergraduate days and do a mental inventory of the courses I took, a select few really stand out.

One of them, which was an elective, was a second year mathematics course called "The Mathematics of Finance".

Of all the math courses I suffered through (calculus, linear algebra, statistics), this one was by far the most useful one I've taken. Mortgages, declining balances, amortizations, simple and compound interest, stocks, bonds, coupons, strips, and so on.

Over the years, this course has been worth its textbook's weight in gold (probably literally) in helping me make smart decisions about money. It has saved me literally thousands of dollars on my mortgage (a tale unto itself).

Recently, I've begun working with a professional financial planner. I know about stocks and bonds, and to avoid mutual funds like the plague, but there is simply too much inherent complexity in the system for a retail investor like me to deal with intelligently - at least if I don't want to simplify my life with just investing in an index ETF.

My financial planner calls me about once every two weeks or so and he's been educating me about the markets on the whole. Jim educates me about the markets for two reasons - one so that I feel confident in his recommendations, and two so that if he's feeling bullish on a particular investment idea I have to be able to understand what the idea is. Because as he says, if I don't understand it and he can't explain it to me, then it might not be such a good idea after all.

Thanks to that math of finance course, I can make intelligent decisions with Jim's help. That is an amazingly useful tool.

On Making Sausage

Today I made sausage for only the second time ever. The first time was at the tail end of the Dubrulle "serious amateur" 6-day advanced culinary class.

My cousins Anita and Karlheinz from Germany are visiting my parents and so I took the adorable granddaughter to be doted upon and took up Karlheinz's offer of showing me how to make classic German bratwursts (his rendition of them naturally). He'd made a batch before our trip out there last weekend, and they're really awesomely good.

I brought along my KitchenAid stand mixer as it has a stronger motor than my dad's, and after lunch, we set to work.

First is the meat (all pork) - the ratio is 8 parts shoulder to 2 parts belly. If you want slightly moister sausages you can go 7 to 3. You want the meat ground coarsely - I learned that commercial ground meat is actually twice ground, but as a general rule for sausage you just want it run through once.

Then after mixing the secret seasoning recipe (secret = I'm not going to post it) you sprinkle it over the ground meat (we had 6.5kg of it), you knead it. Like bread dough. Aggressive, hard, making sure you mix in all the seasonings well and thoroughly. And you know what - if you want to see how the taste is, to make sure the seasoning is right, you taste it. Raw.

Now, I'm sure lots of people will freak out - but that's because we've been conditioned to avoid raw meat, especially chicken, as if it were radioactive waste. But let me tell you something - it was GOOD. So good in fact, that last week I spread some of the "we ran out of casing" sausage meat straight onto bread. Mmm mmm mmm. It's really no different in any fundamental way from steak tartare.

Once the meat has been worked, it becomes quite firm, very much like bread dough when it's ready. The proteins in meat have the same reaction to the kneading as the glutens in flour.

We let the meat mixture sit for about an hour to let the flavours infuse (that, and we went and had lunch). After lunch, we went down and set up the KitchenAid with all the attachments and got to work.

Slipping sausage casing onto the end of the nozzle where the meat comes out suggests and looks exactly like what you think it might, and no doubt contributes to the notion that those who love the law and sausages should watch neither being made.

Once the casing was ready, you need two people - one to feed the meat into the machine, one to deal with the extrusion of meat into the casing. To process 6.5kg of prepared meat took us about 40-45 minutes. I joked at the start that I would probably get the hang of it about the time we were almost done, and I was right.

It was interesting to me that we did the links only after the casing (about 2m long) was filled. At Dubrulle we made the links as we went along (using artifical collagen casing), but Karlheinz did it after the fact and showed me the easy technique to do it - at least it looked easy, kinda like how an old Italian grandmother makes fresh pasta look easy.

After the sausages were in links, they were hung to dry. The sausages "settle" into the casing, and also change colour. The sausage recipe we made is very flexible. You can cook them as bratwursts of course, but you could also let them dry out in a cool room and in about eight days they'll go from fresh to coated in white (salt) to turning red (cured). You can also cold smoke them (aka Mettwurst) and then cook them or spread it raw on toast (sprinkled with a little bit of onion, mmmm...).

The local JN&Z deli said any time I want sausage casing I can just book ahead, and that if I like they'll make me 50lbs of sausage to whatever recipe I like. I might just take them up on that, especially as I'm not getting a side of pork this fall.

Nostalgia for Sale - SOLD!

In my last year of high school, I became best friends with "the new kid". Mark's step dad was the manager at CKDA, 1200AM, the local rock station. AM radio was still cool in those days, albums vinyl things you had to flip over half way through and came with covers with cool artwork and liner notes. CD's were on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and mp3's and iPod's weren't even a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye - heck, he and Wos were still selling Apple IIe's.

One of the perks of being the manager of the local rock station was free concert tickets. One of the perks of being best friends with the son of said manager was getting to go to the concerts with him (until he got a girlfriend, but then that's how these stories go - I still remember her breaking up with him just before Dire Straits was in town the day "Money For Nothing" hit #1 on the charts, so I got to thank her for that ticket).

It was March of 1985, and Mark said "Hey, my dad got me some tickets for the concert this Saturday, wanna go?"

"I guess so. Who's playing?"

"Al Stewart."

"Who's he?"

"I dunno, never heard of him."

"Ok!"

I need to mention that this was the first "real" concert I'd been to - ever. I loved music, had tons of LP's, but I'd never been to a rock concert.

That Saturday, my musical landscape changed. Al and his band totally blew me away - and Mark too for that matter. I didn't stop listening to the bands that I'd always listened to before, but something had definitely changed - an appreciation for the sense of musical craftsmanship was born. It was a musical epiphany, the like of which I did not experience again until I heard the Comedian Harmonists (through the biopic The Harmonists on New Years Eve 1999).

As Fate had it, I was looking on eBay yesterday and I stumbled across ... the promotional poster for that 1985 concert. It was being sold by one of the guys who was on stage that night, Steve Recker.

I bought it. It was obviously meant to be.

Book it Danno

We've been planning a trip to Europe for a while and we've finally booked our tickets. We used Aeroplan points to do it - 180,000 points and $849 later, we're all set for next April/May.

$849 might sound like a lot, but the regular fare would have been $3187.78. We can spend some of the over $2K savings on good food and wine while we're over there.

Pumping Iron

Well, for the past four weeks I've been working on Lisa's "100 program", and today I did 5 rounds of sets of 20, or 100.

Yay me!

So, because it's nerdy, and annoys people who know that it doesn't work that way, I rowed 4,000 lbs, pressed 3,500lbs, and squatted 23,900lbs.

The 2007 First Annual Slow Food Cycle Tour

This past Saturday, the Vancouver Slow Food folks organized a cycling version of the Circle Farm Tour in Agassiz.

My darling wife and I packed our car, put the bikes on the rack and after leaving our delightful daughter with her doting grandparents in Chilliwack, arrived at the starting point and were on our bikes by 9:30am.

It was a splendid way to spend the day - we visited the eight sites on the tour and had a pleasant spin through the pretty countryside in Agassiz. It was almost completely flat too. Five hours later, pleasantly sated and with pannier bags full of goodies (mostly fabulous cheese from Farm House Cheese), we headed back to my parent's place.

The finale on the tour was the Valedoorn Farm dairy, the twelfth largest dairy in BC, with 400 cows, half of them milkers, the other half everything from new born calves to pregnant cows. They produce about 14,000 litres of milk a day.

Every cow has an ear tag, and the tags use RFID chips to talk to the milking machines, which in turn provide all manner of data to the farmer; and the daily report gets sent to his Treo.

Three people run the farm, and it's a 24/7 operation. Our "tour guide" told us he's up every day at 4:30 and by the time the last rounds are done, he's up until midnight.

The weather was mostly nice, though we did get caught by a little drizzle, but it was a fun experience. I'm definitely going to do it again next year.

Flatlining

I took this week extra easy. I did go to the Y on Tuesday morning for spin class, but that was mostly to help me recover from the Saturday ride. I'll make up the missing pieces of my 100 workout next week by going every day I'm not doing the spin class.

I took my bike to the shop this morning to repair my broken spoke, which they said would run me about $25.

I took a look at my fitness "spreadsheet" which mostly keeps track of my weight and after 27 weeks, the graph looks pretty flat. It's down from where I started, but to misuse an analogy, if it were a stock in my portfolio I'd sell it for under performing.

Of course, all the good food and beer and wine I've been drinking can't possibly be contributing to my lack of weight loss progress *koff*koff*. Ironically, it's not escaped my attention that in the past, when I've taken weight off, it's been in the fall or winter, when summer's party's, my summer preference for beer, my love of ice cream, and so on, are much more easy to forgo.

Oh well. As a good friend of mine says, fit comes in all shapes and sizes - and a good thing that's true.

The 2007 MS Vancouver Scenic City Bike Tour

For the second year in a row, I signed up for the MS Bike Tour here in Vancouver. They changed the route from last year, no doubt in part because of the mess that Stanley Park is still in, so instead of 60km it was 65km. It was also a LOT of hills. A lot of them. Fortunately, on the whole, they were not as nasty as the steep monster down Slocan.

For the record: 3h 13m to do the ride this year, and my heart rate monitor claims I burned 3,102 calories. I didn't eat that many calories at the best event bbq ever after the race, which is put on by the Terminal City Club.

My company's team came in 2nd for overall fund raising, at a little over $6,000, of which $2,188 was me (not including the extra amount everyone on the team received for group activities like the 50-50 draw we ran last week). If I were a "team", I would have come in 7th.

My darling wife and beautiful daughter were on hand at the finish line, and my daughter rode her tricycle alongside me through the finish line, wearing the "Club 1000" cycling jersey I received for my fund raising effort. She looked really cute and many photos were taken.

I'm definitely signing up again next year. :-)

The 100 Plan

Today's personal training session with Lisa featured two things. One, that she's taking the month of August off, and two, since it'll be about five weeks before I see her next, that I get to do the "100 Plan".

The 100 plan is deviously good. You start small and work your way up. To wit, my new regime is:

• 10 standing bent over rows
• 10 ab crunches on the exercise ball
• 10 chest presses on the bench
• 10 squats on the leg squat machine

Repeat 5 times, or a total of 50 each.

Each week, add 2 repetitions to each individual exercise (i.e. 12, 14, 16, 18, 20). By the last week in August, I'll be doing five rounds of 20 each, or 100 of each per workout.

Scary. Cool. Very cool.

The 2007 Vancouver Folk Music Festival

After a week of being on the Sunshine Coast on a lovely vacation, we returned just in time to spend Saturday and Sunday at the Vancouver International Folk Festival.

The Saturday was amazingly hot and I managed not to get burned, but I sure did get a lot of colour... Sunday was nicely overcast and being right by the water, it was lovely and cool.

I have to freely admit that while I always have a good time at the Folk Fest, pretty much none of the artists at the show are on my normal music radar. The music they play there is the kind that is really enjoyable live, especially when two or three different bands/artists are in a collaboratory set and jam together, but for the most part doesn't really translate well as something you'd listen to at home. In part it's because at a concert venue, you're actively engaged with the artist and the music, but at home music is often relegated to the background.

My wife had a lovely definition for folk music, that goes something like this: folk music is music that is consumed by the people who create it. It's a lovely definition that works on several levels.

I was talking to one of my good friends who has been volunteering at the Folk Fest for over a decade now about how the festival runs and learned some interesting things. For instance, the festival does not pay its performers (one of the few if not only major festivals in North America to do so), and as such, they usually don't know until about May what the final lineup will be. Hence why, unlike say Mission or other festivals, they don't post the schedule/lineup until June. Of course, the few "big name" groups/artists are usually booked as much as a year in advance, but until the whole lineup is known, the schedule can't be published.

Anyways, to cut to the chase, I had a lot of fun at the festival this year, and we bought three CDs:

• The Carolina Chocolate Drops: old time music from North Carolina. Fiddle, banjo, percussion, and very fun.
  
• Tapia eta Leturia: a Basque ensemble encompassing accordion, fiddle, keyboard, and tambourine. The tambourine player is unnatural - I've never heard or seen it played like that before. Has to be seen to be believed.
• Ndidi Onukwulu: This fine Torontonian has an amazing voice and an incredibly fun stage presence. She spans all manner of genres, and has endless energy.

Progress

My personal trainer has been working with me for about four months now - we meet every three weeks or so, which has felt like the right amount of time. She refreshes my workout plan, and then I execute the plan just long enough to feel comfortable with it and ... I do something else.

So what's the prognosis so far?

Pretty good I have to say. When I started, I was doing an indoor cycling class twice a week. Now I'm still doing that but adding two Lisa-designed workouts, and now that the weather is finally nice, I'm cycling once a week - if only to prepare for the 60km Ride for MS in mid-August.

So let's see... in four months I have...

• distinctly improved my overall fitness level.
  
• distinctly improved my posture.
• strengthened my back and abs (those core muscles you always hear about).
• almost doubled the weight I can lift/push/press/pull around the weight room.

One thing that has not been cooperative is the scale. While I've lost a little over twelve pounds so far, it's definitely been a case of three steps forward, two steps back. Averaged out, it's a little over half a pound a week. While I know logically that losing weight and more importantly, keeping it off, is a long and laborious process, emotionally it can get quite frustrating. And as someone whose reaction to stress or feeling blue is reaching for the munchies...

However, onward and upward - all progress is good! It's summer and fresh fruit and veggies about, and I'm getting enough sleep and sunshine to get me to the gym four times a week, and that's all very positive for me indeed.

My current workout, for anyone interested is...

• Three sets of 8 each on the rowing, chest press, and hamstring curl machines.
• Three sets of 12 each lunges with weights (front, back, and side), or 108 in all.
• Between all of those, in sets of three to coincide with above, crunches and obliques working out to about 115 crunches and 120 obliques all told.

In under an hour.

I'm looking forward to what Lisa has planned for me next time.

Red Burrito

I'd heard good things in passing about Red Burrito, on the southwest corner of Commercial and 1st in Vancouver, but finally had the chance to try it out today.

There's a joke about fast food that you can choose any two of fast, good, and cheap. Red Burrito is a place where you get all three.

The place is small, but very functional. Lots of nice small bar height tables as well as eating bars along the windows.

The service is excellent - the two people behind the counter worked harder than the entire line in any fast food place you'd care to name.

The menu is nice and simple too - burrito & burrito fajita (with peppers and onions instead of beans) are the main two items. They also had taco bowl salads and a couple other items.

In order to keep their business model simple, what you pay depends on the meat you choose. You make your choice of item, decide which meat you want (chicken, beef, veggie, etc), and then you get your toppings/fillings.

And how is the food? Excellent. I had a burrito fajita with chicken and guacamole (extra charge for guac - and here a sidebar rhetorical question: why is guacamole always extra? It's not like avocados are that expensive). It was very big and left me quite stuffed.

Ambience: 3/5
Service: 4/5
Food: 7/10
Price: $

Total score: 14/20

Nerd Games

I've been an avid board gamer for over a quarter century. I played the usual games when I was young, my dad introduced me to chess when I was only three or four, and when I was a kid Monopoly and Risk and Clue were the games that ruled my household.

Then in 1980, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons (the old Basic set in red and the added Expert set in blue), and not long after moved to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. That was also the year I was introduced to Ogre and it's been an unrelenting succession of board, war, and role-playing games ever since.

The other day I was in Imperial Hobbies in Richmond buying Chicken Cha Cha Cha for my daughter to try out, and the guy behind the counter made a comment about getting kids hooked on "nerd games". I thought that was a great term.

Over the decades, my interest in games and gaming has waxed and waned to various degrees. At the moment, it's in a waxing state - for the past six weeks I've had a lot of board games hit the table. Hopefully that will continue all summer.

Organic vs Local

It's been in the news a lot lately.

Now that "organic" groceries have become "mainstream", more and more companies are busy slapping the organic label on their products. A lot of the time, those same products come in conveniently pre-portioned pre-wrapped pre-packaged portions; let's also not forget that they come from thousands of kilometers away too.

As much as I disdain the "100 mile diet", the authors have a good point, one that I still think Nabhan is better at making, that you should know where your food comes from.

It makes no sense to buy "organic" strawberries from Mexico, when conventionally grown local ones are available.

Here's something the pro-organics movement doesn't want you to know - farmers hate using pesticides. You know why? Because it's expensive. Even when they do spray, they use as little as possible to keep expenses down.

My local farmer's market had a survey last summer and people overwhelmingly said they wanted to see more organic produce at the market. I don't. I want to see stuff I can't get at Safeway, and stuff that's fresh. Organic doesn't really matter to me.

So here's a radical idea - buy local produce. Don't worry about the organic label (but hey, if you prefer and can afford "organic", great - go for it).

The truth is that if it's local fresh and seasonal, it'll taste better than that imported from Mexico organic stuff.

Facebook

I recently was invited to join Facebook by a friend of mine, and I decided I'd give it a try.

Like most new users, I quickly invited everyone I knew, checked to see if some old lost friends and acquaintances were "out there" and experienced some of the obsessive-compulsive feelings I had when I was a kid collecting hockey cards. Look at how many friends I have! Collect them all!

But Facebook has a bit of a darker side too. I scoffed when my friend quipped that he refused to sign up because he didn't want to be on it when the stalkers came, but now I'm reconsidering that. My boss joined a work related group, and quickly jumped off because he didn't want to read all the rants and negative comments some people were leaving. (Making comments about your workplace online in a public medium is naive at best). I've had colleagues who I don't really know, except that they're on the employee roster, add me as friends.

My wife is on Facebook and she told me to make sure to check my privacy settings. I've pretty much locked my profile down, and I've even limited a bunch of people to only have access to my limited profile. I think though that what will ultimately happen is I'll be dropping people - the acid test will be, "would I invite this person over for dinner?"

If my answer is no... poof!

A Random Haiku

My poppies are in bloom in my garden (and I saw fields of them at van Dusen Gardens last weekend), and while I was at home today, this popped into my head.

Orchid's only rival
Poppy's red origami
Blooms make me happy

Phases of a Thesis

Tell me why I want to do thesis papers again?

My darling wife, who's been through both a MS and a PhD, told me that by asking that question I was at the "it looks like an insurmountable peak" stage.

I asked what the other stages were.

Apparently, next comes the "work like a demon" stage, followed by the "I don't care anymore" stage.

The weirdest one is the "I can't believe I got away with that" stage. That's the one that happens after convocation.

In between the "I don't care anymore" and the "I can't believe I got away with that" stages comes the "I'm too blotto to form sentences stage"...

... that's the one that happens after a successful defense.

I have lots of good wine in my cellar for that!

Fencing

No, not the fancy footwork kind with epee or rapier, the more banal kind with posts and cedar panels with latticework.

When we bought our place in 2003, the fence was given "a couple more years" by our realtor. Our neighbours to the north who own several properties in the neighborhood concurred.

Over the winter, our fence finally showed its age and one of the board kept popping out of its panel. I finally did some makeshift repairs to hold that in, which prompted the stress on the fence to show in another place and soon the side was sagging and looking disorderly.

We conveniently had a Home Depot flyer in our newspaper back in April that said they would come and give us a free quote, remove the old fence and dispose of it and then install the new one.

A brief digression - we have debated many a time to push the fence out closer to the sidewalk, but several things made us decide to replace the fence exactly in place:

• the Telus box that was in front of our fence was nice and small, but in February Telus came and replaced it with a huge box (for Telus TV among other things) about three times the size, which meant any previous plans for fencing around it would have to be redone.
• we would have had to move the garden over.
• any space we'd gain would not really be a net benefit. Notwithstanding that we have essentially a postage stamp sized back yard, we have several parks and playgrounds close to us, including one literally half a dozen houses down the alley, so any theory that the back yard would be a good play space for our daughter would not be fulfilled.
  

So we had AIM Cedar Works come out and give us a quote. We were technically too small a project (they wanted a minimum 60' of fence, ours was 54'), but they said they would do it anyways, and gave us a quote. 10% off if we booked by the end of April.

Well, we thought about doing it ourselves, but the price was very reasonable (much lower than we expected) so we booked it.

Yesterday, they came and installed the fence. It took them all day, as they hit a snag. The owner before the one we bought the place from had poured concrete in the back yard (torn out by the previous owner, and further reclaimed with a grass installation last year by us), which meant they had to jackhammer out and dig a trench to remove the gate posts. Lesson learned, aside from relief that we'd hired professionals, was that it's easier to install a new fence from scratch than to replace an old one.

The new fence is a thing of beauty. The old one was 4' tall and had a bracework of crossed bamboo poles for the Japanese hops we had to create privacy in our back yard. However, the hops are aggressive plants that in the spring grow as much as 6" a day or more, and further go to seed in the fall and die off until the spring, so there's always a mess to fix.

The new fence is 5' tall, and it's just the right balance between giving us more back yard privacy and less maintenance. I expect more back yard time this summer.

As a final comment - AIM Cedar Works rocks - they came when they said they were going to, did a great job of removal of the old fence, installing the new one, and cleaning up before they left. On time, professionally done, and on budget. I would happily recommend them to anyone.

$1.234

I bought my fuel efficient Tercel in 1998. At the time gas was $0.399/litre for regular gas.

Yesterday, I filled up and the price was $1.234/litre. It cost $42 to fill up, the most I've paid for a fill up on my car since I've owned it.

I'm glad I have a gas sipper rather than a gas guzzler!

Missing the Point - Incandescent Bulbs

The minister did not reply to me, but my MP did. Her reply was:

Thanks for your message about the proposed phase-out of incandescent lightbulbs.

The most common replacement for incandescent bulbs currently is the use of Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs). I recognize this is not always the perfect replacement for the phasing out of incandescents though.

I also want you to know that Paul Dewar’s Bill to phase out incandescent lightbulbs, as it is being drafted, does not specifically recommend the replacement of incandescents with CFLs. We recognize the new technology is being developed all the time, and hopefully we will soon have a solution that addresses all our concerns.

The phasing out of incandescent light bulbs is one of many alternatives that can help place Canada on the path towards ensuring environmental security and sustainability.

Thanks again for taking the time to write and share your concerns.

Sincerely,

Libby Davies

I did send a reply:

Dear Libby,

With all due respect, the point I was making, and which bears repeating, is that banning incandescent bulbs does not generate a desired result.

If the desired result is to reduce the power consumption of light bulbs, then the answer is NOT "let's ban incandescents", but rather "light bulbs must not consume more than x watts per y lumens".

To once again use the example of California, they did not ban internal combustion engines, instead they set emission standards.

THAT is what I am advocating our government do.

So don't ban incandescent bulbs, set power consumption standards. THAT will achieve the stated goal.

Thank you.

Will keep all y'all posted...

Risty's Redux

When I first moved to Vancouver back in 1998, I took a lovely one bedroom apartment in Marpole. It's a great neighborhood and between 64th and say 72nd on Granville, you can find pretty much everything you need - doctors, dentists, banks, grocery and produce stores, and last but surely not least, restaurants.

One of my first pleasant discoveries was a classic family diner called Risty's. It became one of my regular haunts and I'd go there at least once a week. Even after I moved near the Drive, since I worked in Richmond, a former colleague and I would go there regularly for lunch.

A couple of years ago, the family who'd owned it when I first moved into town sold it. The new owners were very nice, and the food was every bit as good. They even kept the original menu.

However, and this is not meant in an unkind way, the new owners had, for the kind of restaurant it was, poor English. I have countless times been in eateries in Richmond like at the food court Yaohan Centre where I've pointed at what I want, or been to a hole-in-the wall place where I've had the opportunity use what few phrases of Cantonese I know to order dim sum.

But for a classic diner, a burger and fries place with endless coffee, where the regulars are as white as the Wonder bread they make toast with, having to point to the menu to order a club sandwich is bad for business.

For me, having been a regular since 1998, loving the food, and being a little more flexible about language barriers, I was willing to put up with the minor inconveniences. However, as time went on, I did see fewer regulars, and for that matter, business seemed to be slow.

Just recently, someone else bought the restaurant, and they've now been open for a couple of weeks. Today was the first chance I'd had of going there.

The new owners, as with the previous two sets, are also Asian, but speak flawless English. Hopefully word gets around and business builds back up quickly.

Little seems to have changed at Risty's in terms of decor, which probably hasn't changed since the ... 60's? 70's? Certainly unchanged since 1998!

The menu has changed though. Gone are the salads, which were always a weak spot in the line up, and sadly, gone are many of the breakfast options (like the Denver hash and the famous Risty's omelette!). However, they have streamlined the menu and played to their strengths. A strong lineup of sandwiches and burgers, including the new "super burger" that has cheese, mushrooms, bacon, and... a fried egg. The soups are still home made and delicious.

The service was diner efficient - never did my coffee cup see its bottom, and the food was fabulous - hot, fresh, well prepared.

Risty's still strongly recommended by me!

Ratings:
Service: 4/5
Ambiance: 3/5
Food: 8/10
Price: $

Score: 15/20

Kal Tire

I take my car for routine service to the Toyota dealership, and I have nothing but nice things to say about how well my car runs and the service I've had there.

But for little things, the Kal Tire near my office is ideal.

Last fall, I managed to get a flat tire, and the Kal Tire folks fixed it for free (under the Michelin warranty), even though they didn't sell me the tires.

Today, I drove in to replace the dead headlight bulb, and again, no charge for the installation, only the bulb.

They'll definitely be getting my business when I finally get around to replacing my shocks and struts...

On the Stupidity of Banning Incandescent Bulbs

This morning's Globe & Mail (online) had the following headline - "Ottawa Moves to Ban Incandescent Lights"

I will spare you the diatribe, and instead share the letter I wrote to the right honorable John Baird, minister of the environment. Please write him too!

Dear Mr. Baird,

I am writing to you about the government's announcement that it intends to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012.

While I am all for conserving energy, the specifics of the ban are highly problematic.

It would be far more reasonable and progressive to instead require that light bulbs, regardless of type, produce a certain level of light per watt. While this won't get you the same spectacular headlines as "Ottawa Moves to Ban Incandescent Lights", it will solve the problem.

As a convenient example, GE recently introduced something they call a high-efficiency incandescent bulb, and according to their press release "[t]he target for these bulbs at initial production is to be nearly twice as efficient, at 30 lumens-per-Watt, as current incandescent bulbs. Ultimately the high efficiency lamp (HEI) technology is expected to be about four times as efficient as current incandescent bulbs and comparable to CFL bulbs." GE has set their target to be 2010 for these bulbs. I'm sure other companies are working on similar ideas.

It seems that it should be possible in the forseeable future to have incandescent bulbs that are, for the purposes of reducing energy consumption, on even par with the current crop of compact fluorescent bulbs.

The government's role is not to ban certain kinds of goods, but to set the standards by which manufacturers will compete. Just as California has demonstrated that stringent emissions standards will cause manufacturers to innovate and create more fuel efficient vehicles, hybrids, and electric cars, this is an opportunity for your government to show environmental leadership and encourage technological innovation.

Thank you.

I'll let you know if I hear back...

Tosca!

If ever one were to say to oneself, "I'd like to see a good opera, one that would definitely let me decide if it's something I might like", then one need do little more than to go see the current staging of Tosca put on by the Vancouver Opera.

Even the usually critical reviewer from the Vancouver Sun called it a "tour de force".

In its splendid season-closing production, Vancouver Opera gives us the goods with this nasty thriller, set in a stunning stage design from the Milan-based Scenographie Sormani-Cardaropoli, which is spacious but feels close with dread.

Cynthia Lawrence, a soprano praised for her work in this role at the Met, is the real deal. She is fiery in a plot that is fueled by Tosca's jealousy, yet in her one great aria, Vissi d'arte, raptly removed and soliloquy-like with a feeling of being intensely caught up in a world not of her making.

This is tremendously difficult to sing, holding the high notes dramatically and for a long time, as Puccini wanted, then making a proper diminuendo -- also observing most of the grace notes, showing a firm cleanness on the marcato notes and a focus in the lower half of the voice. It was all there and thrilling to hear.

Singing actors is what Tosca must have or it's just a recital. There isn't a less than fine voice in the cast or one singer who doesn't act persuasively and naturally.

The Italian tenor Renzo Zulian as Cavaradozzi was impressive just minutes into the opera with an effortless Recondita armonia, though he didn't start it softly. He much later gave an even finer E Lucevan le stelle with fine control, power and resonance at the climax and the image of a man lost in reflection.

That's two of the three leads, which we saw early, inviting speculation as to what Scarpia would be like. And he, baritone Yalun Zhang, was wonderful too, applying extra weight to his voice to suggest bestial authority. He was very firm and consistent, though he might have changed his tone at key places to show that Scarpia can also be mellifluous and oily to get what he wants. This would only have enhanced the sense of his loathsomeness once the gloves come off.

But what a production. The minor parts were cut from the same cloth as the leads: Nicolae Raiciu as the sacristan, John Arsenault's Spoletta and John Conlon's Sciarrone.

Act II, where Scarpia interrogates Tosca, was a killer: suspenseful, dire with atmosphere and top lighting that made Scarpia look very sinister. Director Stanley Garner spares nothing and it's just what it should be. For once there's no hokiness to the moment when Tosca hurls herself from the parapets. She falls backwards, letting gravity do its work.

The chorus is terrific too, and conductor Robert Tweten gets nothing but beautiful playing from the Vancouver Opera Orchestra.

This is a dream closing for an opera company, something that should get the subscriptions going for next year.

My New Macbook

My new Macbook arrived yesterday, and I have a few first impressions I thought I'd share.

First, for the propeller heads, I got the white Macbook with the 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive - in other words, I took all the default options. ALso comes with built in iSight camera, Bluetooth, wireless, firewire, USB, and a DVD burner. Full specs at the Apple site.

Second, I bought a Macbook both to complement my iMac and to have available to take with me wherever I go so I can work on my thesis papers. It will also allow me to surf the internet when my wife is using the iMac.

I would have bought a refurbished one because they're cheaper, but since none were available when I ordered, I used my student discount (there are some perks to being a grad student).

In strictly aesthetic terms, the laptop is very attractive. The white housing is made of a slightly opalescent hard plastic that looks like it will be quite durable. The unit is very light (a bonus for carrying around), and small - less than an inch thick! The 13.3" screen doesn't feel small and looks great.

One of the things Apple does well is think about what their end users need and therefore they put a lot of effort into design. The keyboard has a really nice tactile feel to it, and the touchpad is pretty nice although I prefer using an external mouse. Speaking of mice, Apple still uses the single button mouse concept in its design, so the touchpad only has a single button. Since I use a two button scroll-wheel mouse on the iMac, I'll be using one with the laptop whenever reasonable.

A cute and useful design feature is that the power cord connects with a magnetic clip - if the power cord is tripped over, it'll merely pull off without either destroying the power connection or hauling the laptop to the floor. Another nice touch is that there's an AC extension cord for the power adapter, although it requires pulling out the flip down power plug, which I could see losing.

The pleasant surprise came when I turned the laptop on. During the inital "welcome to your new Mac" process, it asked me if I had and existing Mac and if so if I wanted to synch it up with my current one. Well, yeah!

A few minutes later, after borrowing my existing iSight's firewire cable, my Macbook was busily transferring everything over from my iMac - applications, user accounts, music, photos, etc. This is the point where I discovered that I should have spent the extra money on a slightly larger hard drive. Once the initial transfer was complete about two hours later, I had to do some judicious file editing and another synch to get the rest of my applications over. On the other hand, there was a lot of data transferred over that I just don't need on my laptop! In the end, I have about 10G usable left on my 80G drive.

However, since the laptop was now synched and everything was transferred over, it behaves exactly like my desktop does and I didn't have to set up any preferences since that work was done a long time ago on the iMac.

On the whole, I'm very pleased with my purchase, and I think I'll be getting a lot of mileage out of the new laptop. All I need now is for the iSkin laptop case to arrive (UPS says tomorrow).

Feeling Great

I mentioned about a month ago that I was going to work on my fitness goals, and I'm pleased to report that things are going well. Down 11lbs so far in about six weeks, only 24 more to go to where I was two years ago, and then a lot more to where I was nine years ago. Go me!

I decided not to do MetSyn and instead leveraged my membership at the YWCA since it's a first class facility and more importantly, easy for me to get to and from home given the other constraints that real life has for me, like the commute to work, day care, etc. So now in addition to my two spin classes, I've added two mornings of weights. This might become three times a week, although once the weather improves and more importantly, the sun rises early enough, I'll be cycling on weekends again.

I've been working with the absolutely brilliant, talented, and fabulous Lisa Wagner and she has put together a cracking workout for me. This morning while I we were chatting she was talking about her long term plan for my fitness goals and said she would start me on a program where, I would do "100 pushups, 100 crunches, 100 rows, and 100 step-ups, in an hour, and we'll start on that in about, hmmm... 4... 5..." and in the pause I inserted "months?"

"Weeks," was her reply.

Fantastic.

Luther Wright & the Wrongs

I like a wide variety of music, and what's in vogue on my iPod varies on my mood.

Recently, I was over playing board games at a buddy's place and he puts on an album called Rebuild The Wall by Luther Wright & the Wrongs.

If you liked Pink Floyd's The Wall, imagine it done by a very talented bunch of country & bluegrass folks.

It's both really good and really funny at the same time. Y'all.

Playing With Numbers

It's tax time, or will be soon, and so I've been collecting my stack of information slips.

One of the benefits I have at my company is an employee stock purchase plan. Similar to many companies, the company I work for allows employees to contribute some chunk of their base salary into a fund that is then spent quarterly buying stock for us at a 15% discount.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I sell my shares pretty much as soon as I can. It's usually 5-10 business days from the date of the stock purchase to the time it's in my stock account and accessible to me, so in the interim, the price has fluctuated somewhat.

Now, as everybody knows, when you sell a stock, you're taxed on the capital gains; but here's where the fun with numbers begins.

To contrive the example with nice round numbers, I bought something worth $100 for only $85, but paid income tax on the $15 difference, so the asset, from the tax man's point of view, is $100.

Thanks to this little peculiarity, on paper, for tax purposes, I almost lost money in 2006 on the stock market.

Financial math really appears like voodoo sometimes.

Free is a Very Good Price

I have a KitchenAid stand mixer, one of the tilt-head kinds. I bought it about seven or maybe even eight years ago, and love it. Mostly I use it to knead bread dough, but I've also used it for:

• making pasta (with the pasta roller attachment)
• applesauce (with the fruit/veg strainer - no more peeling or coring apples required!)
• cakes
• whipping cream
• cookie dough
• grinding meat (with the grinder attachment)

It's a great kitchen appliance and while they're expensive, they're incredibly durable and well built.

If I've had a kvetch about mine, it's that the bowl is perhaps a little small for my usual bread dough batch. More often than not, it's fine, but sometimes the dough creeps up the dough hook and I have to stop and scrape.

For years I've been collecting Air Miles. Every once in a while I check to see if there are any rewards I'm willing to be parted from my points for, but a lot of the rewards haven't interested me, and despite the opportunity for "free flights" using points, you're still on the hook for all the taxes and surcharges and booking flights on points is a PITA (pain in the (_(_)).

However, just recently, they had the KitchenAid Professional 600 on in pearl grey. I thought about it and by the time I decided to act, they were gone. DOH! However, I've been keeping my eye out and lo, they now have them in white.

I've ordered one. 4600 air miles well spent! I'm looking forward to using it.

Marcello's on Commercial Drive

Marcello's is an Italian restaurant on Commercial Drive. My wife was working late and so I thought a nice way to spend the evening would be to take my daughter, who's almost three, out to dinner after work. I thought of taking her to White Spot, which is a place she likes, but she wanted pizza (I did offer her the choice - pasta, sausages, or pizza), so I thought I'd try out Marcello's.

Marcello's offers a nice well laid out place, with plain but elegant tables. Along the wall of the open kitchen is an astounding wood oven where they bake the pizzas. It looks like a giant stylized face of the sun, with the mouth being where the pizzas go.

Once we were shown a table, we were given menus and left to deliberate. The menu has a nice selection of pizza and pasta as well as salads and some other main courses. It's obviously meant to cater to family style dining, where orders are shared amongst those at the table.

We ordered a mushroom pizza for her and a gnocchi for me. I also ordered a glass of the sangiovese ($8 was pricey for what I got), and a steamed milk for my sweet pea.

The steamed milk came way too hot and with no spoon. When I asked the hostess for a spoon, none came, and by the time toddler agitation was setting in, my waiter finally came by once more. I waved him over and he said "your dinner's coming!"

I expected dinner to take some time, after all this wasn't Domino's, but all I wanted was a spoon. What we got was one of those long handled dessert spoons. Argh.

Cardinal restaurant sin number one was committed next. My gnocchi arrived, but the pizza did not. Generally speaking, dinner time's pretty easy going, but now the promised dinner was not on the table and there was no way she was going to even try the pasta. By the time pizza finally came, she was past wanting to eat so we pretty much had to pack up and go home (although the leftovers will be delicious).

The food was fabulous though. I'd go back in a group any time. Alone with kid in tow on a week night would be a different story.

Ratings:
Service: 2/5
Ambiance: 3/5
Food: 7/10
Price: $$

Score: 12/20

Restaurant Reviews

I think a lot about restaurants - I like to eat out, and when I do, I like to have a pleasant experience. While it's always about the food, ultimately, service and ambiance are also important.

I've decided that I'm going to have ratings with my reviews. They're completely subjective of course, since they ultimately reflect my likes and dislikes. However, the same rating for two places does not mean they're equivalent. For instance, if I were served a Risty's burger at Bishop's, it would still be a great burger, but for Bishop's it would probably be a 4 or 5 instead of an 8 or 9.

So on to the ratings...

Service: rated from 0 to 5.
Ambiance: rated from 0 to 5.
Food: rated from 0-10.
Price: rated from $ to $$$$.

What I'm looking for when I rate:

• Service - essentially I want the staff to acknowledge my presence, make sure my food gets delivered on time, and if I'm dining with others, that we all get our food at the same time. Relatively speaking, my expectations for a diner are different than for an haute cuisine establishment.
• Ambiance - this spans the gamut: cleanliness; decor; comfort.
  
• Food - this one gets the most points since it's really the most important thing. My expectations depend on the kind of restaurant it is; the chicken noodle soup at a diner is not the same as of the consommé de volaille at a fancy French restaurant, but both could score an "8".
• Price
  
• $ means inexpensive. Most diners fit here.
  
• $$ means about $20-25 per person. Most family restaurants like White Spot fit here.
• $$$ means we're getting expensive. Ironically, most places I end up disappointed in fit in this price range.
  
• $$$$ means bring your gold card. If it's got four $'s next to it, it had better earn a 16 or better.

A rating under 10 means I'm unlikely to eat there again.
10-12 means it's a decent place worth visiting.
13-15 means it's good and I'll go there happily.
15-17 means the place is great and I'll recommend it to others. I'm probably a regular.
18-20 is the creme de la creme. Highly recommended.

Timing is Everything

Late last week, China had a stock market "correction" and took down most of the North American markets with it. This week the markets are still down.

I could have predicted this - after all, I had just invested in an index fund (XIU on the TSX). However, I'm only down 5% so far! I wish I had more cash in my stock account to buy more actually. Market overreactions are always a good time to buy.

Ariadne auf Naxos

Last night we went to see the third production of the Vancouver Opera's 2006/07 season, Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos.

It was a lovely production. The story follows the play within a play model. Two groups have been hired to perform for a duke at his estate - one is for the opera "Ariadne auf Naxos", a tragic tale taken from Greek myth, the other a comedia del arte farce, involving Zerbinetta and her four suitors.

Hilarity ensues as the duke, concerned that the entertainment be complete for the 9pm fireworks, orders that the two groups combine their performance. Surely, his majordomo contents, such a "minor" change should be easily accomplished.

Of the operas I've seen, this is probably my favorite production to date.

Speaking of which, I've seen...

Nabucco (Vienna, 2001)
Die Fledermaus (Vancouver, 2001)
Turandot (Vancouver, dress rehearsal, 2005)
Dialogues of the Carmelites (Vancouver, dress rehearsal, 2005)
Macbeth (Vancouver, 2006)
The Magic Flute (Vancouver, 2007)
Ariadne auf Naxos (Vancouver, 2007)

Soirée Alsacienne

Last night was the annual Soirée Alsacienne at Le Crocodile, one of my favorite restaurants here in Vancouver.

The menu, a very reasonable $58 prix fixe, included the following:

Tarte à l'Oignon
Consommé de Volaille au Foie Gras
Salade Frisée aux Foie de Volailles
Choucroute Garnie au Riesling
Mirabelle Sorbet
Feuilleté a la Poire Glacée Vanille Chaud Caramel

The tart wasn’t actually on the menu, but was served as an amuse-bouche. Onion tart has to be one of my favorite dishes.

The soup was really splendid. A rich full body and the small pieces of foie gras floating amongst the brunoise vegetables were full of flavour.

The salad was a huge hit with me – three beautifully crisp yet tender chicken livers surrounded a mound of escarole with a perfectly poached egg on time, garnished with tomato compote and sauced and dressed to perfection.

The choucroute was a marvel too. We took more than half of it home, as there was more food on those plates than we could reasonably (or even unreasonably) eat. Six kinds of meat atop some of the most subtly flavored and delicate choucroute I’ve eaten, including a Straßbourg sausage, a knackwurst, a smoked pork chop, a portion of pork belly, a very thick slice of smoked bacon, and a piece of pork hock. Steamed potatoes rounded out the overflowing plate.

The Mirabelle sorbet was delicious and enhanced by a little Mirabelle eau de vie poured on top.

Dessert was also sublime and simple. Thin slices of pear over a puff pastry base in a caramel sauce that was subtle and delicate, topped with honey-vanilla ice cream.

All of the above was accompanied by a bottle of 2002 Zind Humbrecht Riesling (Turckheim), and ultimately followed with a Siggolsheim Poire Williams as a digestif.

Le Crocodile continues to be one of my favorite dining experiences here in Vancouver.

Cat Surgery

My cat is about fifteen years old, and for the past eight of them, has had a chronic constipation problem. a variety of medications and other nostrums have kept him more or less under control, but every eighteen months or so he needed to be taken to the vet to be, um, emptied.

It was a messy and expensive process, and as pleasant for the vet as it was for my wallet. However, the cat's a part of my family and whatever he needs, he gets.

Over the past ten weeks or so, he's been plugged up three times, the most recent being yesterday when I took him in again, and the vet and I agreed it was time - major surgery would be required, and a bowel resection was done on him to remove his colon.

The operation went well, the cat's in good shape, and he should be home tomorrow or Friday.

I can't help but think that if I were in a similar situation, I would probably have had to wait three months or more to get a similar surgery for myself given the state of waiting lists for surgical procedures. On the other hand, it also wouldn't cost around $3K...

Auction Fever

I'm a fan of the Comedian Harmonists. I own a number of CD's of their music, and probably have most of their repertoire in my collection.

I check eBay once in a while to browse and when I do, I always check if there's anything new under "comedian harmonists". Just recently, the autographed photo below was offered for sale.

Comedian Harmonists
(from left: Robert Biberti, Erich Collin, Erwin Bootz, Roman Cycowski, Harry Frommermann, Ari Leschnikoff)

The photo is well known - it's the one you'll find in Wiki for instance. An autographed copy would be very rare indeed. The photo was being sold through eBay's "Live Auctions" by a company in Ohio. They had a pre-auction estmate of $75-100 with an opening bid of $40, so I put in a modest bid (considering US$ exchange, shipping, my current budget for frivolous purchases, and the 22.5% buyers premium).

Apparently I need not have bothered to strain myself - the winning bid? $380.

Ouch.

Pedalling for MS

Last August, I rode in my first ever bike tour to sponsor multiple sclerosis. It was a 60km bicycle ride, and I did it in 2h49m.

It's an annual fundraiser for MS and I managed to raise just over $1,000.

This year, I've signed up again, and I want to beat both my time from last year, and also beat my fundraising total.

So, if you're willing to make a charitable donation (you get the tax receipt, I get the exercise) to MS, please click on this link to the the MS Bike Tour and consider donating $25 or more.

Thanks!

Appreciating Schoenberg

One of the books I bought as research material for my Kandinsky paper is called Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, which is actually a catalog from a museum exhibit, but it includes five lengthy essays on the two men, plus a bonus CD that has performances of Schoenberg's music that was played at the 1911 concert that enraptured Kandinsky.

I knew very little of Schoenberg up to this point, but I did know that he had a reputation of having music that was cerebral - that is, if Mozart is pleasant and easy to listen to, Schoenberg is something you need to think about. A lot of his music was, at the time, highly experimental, atonal, and he also dabbled with a 12 note scale rather than the standard 8.

In short, I found his music remarkably likable. It is cerebral, but I quite enjoyed it. When I mentioned this to my wife, she expressed mild surprise but once she thought about it, "but then I forget that you really like [Tangerine Dream and other, mostly German, electronic/synthesiser composers like Klaus Schulze]".

And that's when the penny dropped - Schoenberg definitely fits into that mold in the musical continuum, in terms of cerebral sound.

At least for me.

Going from Gold to Silver

So the medico my doc sent me too runs something called a Met-Syn program - short for Metabolic Syndrome. My only risk factor is the weight, all my other indicators (bloodwork = excellent, blood pressure = perfectly normal, cardiovascular response = excellent, strength and coordination = fine, etc etc... I'm the fittest fat man I know...).

Their schtick is they have a very extensive assessment (at $250, thankfully fully billable to extended benefits, it had better be) and then they have you join "the program". Now, the program is, looking at it from a detached point of view, working out at their mini-gym three times a week while they put you through an all cardio workout and keep tabs of everything and monitor your progress with the assistance of a heart rate monitor.

One of the reasons I posted my little comment about time management myths the other day is that I don't see being able to get to the facility (only 10km away, but in about the most inconvenient place you could imagine relative to work, daycare, and my home) without either sucking up that 90 minutes of family time in the evening, or making it exceedingly awkward to get back home in time to take my daughter to her wonderful family daycare; said morning program is from 6:30-7:30am.

So, huzzah, there's a "silver" program that's only twice a week. I said I'd try it, and my first morning's tomorrow - but, and this is a big but, if all the workout at their facility turns out to be is a glorified cardio workout attuned to my key heart rate on ye olde heart rate monitor, then I'm not going to stick with it - I have a YWCA membership, and if all that I really need to do is go more often, then so be it.

After all, I know what all my key heart rate target zones are, I know my food plan works (restarted last week and lost 3lbs already) and my solution of brining lots of fruit to the office to nosh on instead of the endless parade of donuts, cookies, pizza etc works brilliantly.

It's not the money for the program - between my wife and I the extended health benefits will reimburse me for it - it's the time and aggravation to get there, especially when I can get to the Y, work out for an hour, and be home by 7:45am. I can't do that with the MetSyn program.

I'll go tomorrow, but if it doesn't work out in terms of getting me home on time, then I'll have to persuade them to either work out something with me where they can advise and monitor me via the heart rate monitor records and checking in regularly.

If not, oh well. It was still time and money well spent, and knowing what I need to do is more than half the battle. I also know what supports I need, and I can find those as needed (the YW has lots of personal trainers who can advise me, not as well as the MetSyn guys, but a good coach is a good coach).

Time Management Myths

I was comparing notes with my friend at work about so-called work-life balance. We're in similar situations - married, one child, both parents working.

Let me add also that one area that is always highlighted on my performance evaluations is time management, as in, I'm exceedingly good at it (or at least that's the perception my manager has).

So why is it that M and I are both perpetually feeling gassed? Well, I did a time inventory to see what my "time vampires" might be, and here's what it comes down to.

In my house, we get up around 6:30am (I get up at 5 on Tuesdays and Thursdays to go to the Y). By the time we get everyone showered and fed and dressed to go, we're out the door by 8. I drop my daughter off with her wonderful family daycare people and get to the office around 8:30 most days. I'm here until about 5. I pick up my daughter on the way home and if we don't have a quick shopping stop we're home by 5:30. My wife gets in around the same time.

Then we have dinner (I do 99.44% of the cooking in our household), usually around 6:30, and then after dinner until 7:30-8:00ish is family time.

After family time, the bedtime routine starts - story, bath, pj's, more stories, sleep. My wife cuddles our daughter to sleep at night, and if she's lucky, she's out by 9:30. I usually catch up on email or zone out with internet surfing in the interim, although I try to make more productive use of that time (like, reading the Kandinsky-Schoenberg correspondences for my thesis paper).

So, between 9:30 and betime, usually 11pm unless we're really lucky, my darling wife and I are doing domestica - dishes, laundry, lunches for the next day, giving the cat his pills, etc...

I'd manage my free time much better - if I actually had any.

Plus ca change

Once upon a time, about December 2003, I developed what I called the R Food Plan. It worked. In 12 months I'd lost 56lbs. At the peak of its efficiency 14 months after I'd started, I'd lost 60lbs.

Well, I wish I could say that they'd stayed off.

Last week I went for a physical and my doctor read me the riot act. And, well, I deserved it. Of the 60 I'd taken off, 35 had come back in the past 24 months.

But at least I'm still 25 down from where I started. And quite frankly, given the stress of the past 24 months, I'm surprised I didn't put on more. See, when I'm under a lot of stress, I eat. And it's not that I eat more helpings of terrine de foie gras at Le Crocodile or twice as much roast chicken and vegetables at home - no, I reach to the common table behind my cubicle for some of the endless parade of bagels, cookies, doughnuts, pizza lunches and other junk.

Still, last week was a needed wake up call. I've always struggled with my weight, but sticking to my food plan means I keep my weight steady, and if I exercise more than the twice a week I always do, I actually lose weight.

So this is me saying that I plan to get the gut back off. My doctor sent me off to a medico who specializes in putting together programs; I can get professional advice and whatever additional support I need. Knowing what I need to do (stick to the RFP and exercise at least as much as I currently do if not more) is a good start, but nothing beats having a "coach" who can help you keep accountable to yourself.

I have a long ways to being as fit as I was when I moved to Vancouver in February of 1998 (the fittest I'd ever been, but I' was a total gym junkie at the time), but getting back to where I was 24 months ago would be a good start.

Aloha

Last week I was in Hawaii on a much needed vacation. My parents took me and my family on a cruise with them.

Hawaii was wonderful. I got a tan, the weather was gorgeously sunny (I'm obviously heliotropic).

My favorite island was Kauai - there are chickens everywhere - beautiful Bantams. It was very amusing to be splashing around in a lagoon full of beautiful tropical fish and then hearing cock-a-doodle-doo!

We were on a seven day cruise with Norweigan Cruise Lines. While I can't say I'm sold on the cruise experience, it was a fun way to see what Hawaii has to offer.

Applause for Steve Jobs

I love my iPod (the first piece of tech in years that I've been really excited about) and one complaint I've heard from people is tht they don't like them because they can only use an iPod for music they buy off iTunes.

Well, Steve Jobs writes a very interesting open letter on Apple's website on this very topic - here's the link: http://www.apple.com/ca/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Mozart and Well Beyond

I recently ordered Mozart and Well Beyond from CD Baby.

There are a lot of classical discs out there spanning the entire continuum of bad to great, but much of the time you either get a greatest hits compilation or the insert-generic-orchestra-here plays insert-popular-symphony here.

This CD is splendid on several levels.

First, Sweeney is obviously a passionate devotee of his craft. His playing is rich and nuanced and really brings the emotions of his selected pieces to the fore.

Second, Sweeney really did his listeners a service by including some modern compositions along with his beautifully rendered Mozart piece.

Third, it's lovely to see a CD where the focus is on the bassoon; the bassoon has an unmistakable sound, but it's not very often the central instrument.

I would highly recommend this CD to two kinds of people: the first is the classical devotee looking for something different (bassoon Mozart); the second would be those who want to expand their listening experience beyond what is traditionally available (Sharman, Mozetich, Welsh).

CD Baby, I Love You Too

Now that I'm firmly a member of the iPod generation and my collection is mostly on my Mac's iTunes library, I listen to music more than I have in years, but at the same time don't often buy a CD any more.

I usually buy one or two at the Vancouver Folk Festival if there's an act that particularly inspires me; that didn't happen in 2006, but I bought 4 the year before. I'll also always buy the latest from a few select performers whenever they put out something new, Al Stewart for instance.

Beyond that, between iTunes, my increasing interest in classical music (bred in part from my academic pursuits, in part by my taking up bel canto singing) and my general disinterest in the vast majority of what's playing on the top 40 airwaves these days, I might buy a few CDs a year.

Rodney Sharman, my favorite professor, is also a composer - indeed, it is better stated that he is a composer who also teaches at SFU as a sessional instructor. When I talked to him about my papers the other night, I mentioned that through various circumstances I had not yet managed to hear anything he'd done, including missing a premiere of a flute and piano piece on the 12th when everyone in my house was down with some bug or another.

He asked me if I liked Mozart, which for the most part I do, and recommended a CD called "Mozart and Well Beyond", recorded by Michael Sweeney, bassoonist for the Toronto Symphony. In addition to a Mozart piece, it includes three modern pieces, including one by Rodney. Following all the links to purchase the CD took me to the site for CD Baby.

The transaction was completed with the usual internet shopping efficiency and I thought little more of it until I got my email to confirm the order. First off, the from name was "CD Baby Loves [L'Etat]". The top part of the message was the usual transaction log (item, price, net total), but then the rest of it was brilliant:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Thursday, January 18th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
http://cdbaby.com

Well, that was probably one of the funniest things I've read in a long time, and it led me to go back to the site to check them out in more detail.

They have a great collection of stuff based on my idle browsing. I particularly like the Flavor section of the site, which has suggestions based on an astonishing array of fun categories. For instance, under the "Match Your Mood" rubric, they have a category for "Sick of all Normal Music", described as "Sick of music? Tired of verse/chorus pop songs, major/minor keys, 4/4 rhythms, or ANYthing predictable? I know the feeling. These CDs defy any expectations, and blow your mind wide open."

This is a site after my own heart, and I'll definitely be shopping there again. They're also down in Portland, OR, so now I have two reasons to go (the other being Powell's Books).

Focus

One of the features of the "new" version of blogger is it tells you how many posts your blog has. This will be number 100. So, in honor of #100, some meandering chat about goals and positivity.

This morning at the gym, the cycling class instructor asked us about New Year's resolutions, and mentioned she's already broken two. I had to chuckle a little, because I remember the last time I made a New Year's resolution - it was 1978, and the resolution was to no longer make New Year's resolutions. So far, I've stuck to that quite successfully. After all, if something's worth doing, then why not resolve to do it regardless of what the calendar says?

Recently, I took a one-day "How to give presentations" course through work. The instructor, Bruna, was fabulous. She added me to her mailing list and sent out a link to a wonderful article she wrote on the power of thinking positively.

The article brought to mind my "life plan" document, which was the product of a lot of introspection and hard work during a philosophy class I took in the fall of 2003.

My life plan gives me focus. It's not something etched in stone, it's just an electronic document that I've printed out and I carry it with me. Every once in a while, I'll pull it out and have a look - sometimes it's to remind me what I've written down as important, sometimes to make little edits or notes. I update it once in a while as goals I've set for myself have either been completed or have dropped off my personal list of ThingsIHopeToAccomplish(tm).

Now, I'm not going to share my life plan per se, but I will share the elements that put it all together. It's a two page document (one double sided page).

The top left has a photo of me. It happens to be from last April when I was on business trip in Paris enjoying a moment in the sun at the Rodin museum. To the right is a paragraph that I would describe as my global outlook on life - it's quite positive (and for those who know me well, that should come as no surprise).

Following that is a statement of my intrinsic values. What I think makes me, well, me!

Those two things are actually the hardest parts of the entire document. It requires that you do that navel gazing introspection that most of us are absolutely loathe to do. The mirror isn't always pretty.

The next section is the meat of the document. It lists my currently most important goals in a variety of categories. Before listing any goals, one need to do a personal "inventory" for each category. It's quite possible you don't have any specific goals in a given category at the moment.

The categories, briefly, are...

• moral goals - what kind of life do you want to lead, ethically speaking?
• spiritual goals - do you believe in a higher power (like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, say)?
• love goals - are you happier single or in a relationship, and what should that look like?
• friendship goals - what kinds of people do you want as friends, and what kind of friend are you?
• education goals - formal or informal, what makes you want to fire up your brain?
  
• career goals - what kind of work do you want to do? and what's holding you back?
• leisure goals - what do you do for fun that lets you recharge your batteries and gives you a sense of accomplishment?
  
• health goals - super fit or couch potato? Or somewhere in between?
  
• economic goals/consumption level - do you crave endless amounts of money or are you happy with less? are you filling the world with more krap from Wal*Mart or do you have more minimalist expectations around stuff?
• place-of-residence goals - happy with your condo, or do you want a mansion with servants?
• political goals - vote? run for office? speak out about issues you're passionate about?
• autonomy goals - leader or part of the herd?
  

My goals have shifted over time. Some have been accomplished and have been replaced by other things. Some have been dropped as I've decided to do something else instead. Keeping a written list has been an interesting experience. There's an immense satisfaction in crossing off accomplishments, and an equally immense one in saying "phooey! I don't want to do that after all."

The next section is "my rules for sane living". I only have seven, and I should probably edit them down to four.

Finally, I have a long list of things that bring me pleasure, including simple things like eating a ripe pear from the tree in my back yard. I have about half a dozen categories.

It's a great tool. Even I feel like I'm in a rut sometimes. Focus is a good thing.

In closing, a great quote, courtest of Bruna:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?" - Marianne Williamson

I have that printed and posted at my desk at work.

Ready?

Simon Fraser University, where I am a grad student at the moment, has decided to change their crest. The current crest is over on the right.

For various reasons, they are taking out the crosses on either side of the book and replacing them with more books; the new crest will have three books across the top. According to an article on the 27th on canada.com, "Gill [VP external relations] explained the crosses, combined with the fact the university is named in honour of a person (explorer Simon Fraser), has led ''foreign cultures'' to mistakenly conclude the university is ''a private religious university, as opposed to a provincial institution.''

For my part, I don't mind the change. However, while I was dining solo at Risty's yesterday, I picked up the Friday Province and was browsing through idly when I saw a letter to the editor (this is where I learned about the planned change to the crest).

The letter, written by someone claiming to be a current student at SFU, was of the usual knee-jerk reaction to any form of change, with the opening line of "SFU's mandate is as a provincial learning institution, and it has been primarily funded by provincial dollars"; but what amused me the most was the notion that the change dishonored the entire current crest, right down to the latin motto.

This is where I had to laugh out loud. The motto on the SFU crest says "Nous Sommes Pret".

I don't think the writer is "pret" to graduate yet.