Mark, Gord, and I headed off to Horseshoe for some snowboarding yesterday. Mark and I wanted to get a ride in before Whistler on Monday. So many hotties there.. Like this one!

mMmMmm Snow Bunnies :)

And then there was us!

Oops! (I wiped out, right infront of a hottie too!)

Catching some air.

Mark riding like a pro! :P

Gord's first time out!

So yeah, on the drive back. Mark decided to whip out the camera for some "driving" footage. When this RETARD wasn't paying attention to the road and totally ran over this "thing". A Piece of it went flying off, hitting my car, causing me to run it over. We caught the whole thing on tape. You can see the quicktime version here. This link is especially for Andys (or anyone else who is lame to not have Quicktime installed ;)^*).

Only two more days until whistler! Yay! Can't wait. Not the ideal of riding conditions though. Only 10 runs (out of 200) are open :/. You also need to take a chairlift to get DOWN the mountain, as there is no snow on the lower levels. I guess we got screwed this year on conditions. Whistler/Blackcomb is known for its excellent early season riding. Let's all pray for a shitload of snow to fall in the next 72 hours.

^* Don't bitch at me if you dont have the Video For Windows MPEG4 V2 Codec ;)

Wednesday: Work, than dinner with Sarah

Thursday: Prepare snowboard, take care of loose ends. Clean room, do laundry, then have dinner with Gord (and possibly drinks with Mark as well).

Friday: Snowboarding at Horseshoe. Followed by bday dinner in the city, followed by drinks with Gord and Mark.

Saturday: Tour at Q9 (thanks Jon!), Work, then maybe Computer Fest with Laura. Party at Barts place in the city. Most likley crashing at Barts place (lives 3 min away from work).

Sunday: Work, then packing up for whistler. Sleep early.

Phew!

I got my pack today! Yay! It's a MEC Brio 60. The guy at the store wasn't too helpful, but I already had an idea of what I wanted. I came home and stuffed it with towels and stuff, then adjusted it for my body size. Fits like a glove :) I really wish there were 'instructions' so I knew how to use each strap, loop, and harness :) I really do like MEC. Their store is pretty awesome.

I am starting to notice little mini regions in the city. Not regions of culture (chinatown, little italy, etc..) but of similar interests/stores. For example, King street between John and Spadina are "travel equipment" stores. Like MEC, and Europe Bound, and Outthere. College and Spadina is the "computer zone". This is good, because you can shop and compare prices to other stores near by. Chances are you will get a good deal on stuff :)

My room is a mess again :(

I'm still at work (shift ended 1.5 hours ago) killing time before dinner with Jon at 6pm (or so) at east sides.

About 9 days before trip to Whistler. I still need to get a pack. I went to the Mountain Equipment Co-Op on King St just before now - the place was packed. I am going to pop in again on Monday, before my shift (Mark, maybe you want to come along?) and pick one up. I'm not quite sure what i'm looking for though, $200 is my limit. Once I have that, i'm all set :) I'm also bidding on some Goggles on ebay. Doubt I will win, but if I do: BONUS!

I went to Charlies last night with Arden and Michelle. Bouncer had some trouble matching up my new look, with the picture on the drivers licence. Moron.

Speaking of which. I take it you heard that one of the Prime Miniters cabinate members called George Bush a "Moron". So funny! Whats even funnier is that she went to resign, but the PM refused the resignation. Stating that she didn't do anything wrong and he didn't receive any complaints from the Bush Man. Classic.

I am going to be returning the CPUs I got for my Mac. Talking to the tech support guy at Sonnnet, he said that its probably a defective CPU. He also said that the single 800mhz would have been a better choice. I dont see his logic there.

I really, really, really need to rebuild my desktop at home. It hasn't been used in months. I want to install FreeBSD on it, but it doesn't seem to want to detect one of my scsi drives :/ I will play with it tomorrow or Monday. If freebsd works nice on it, I will (hopefully) be able to get both my webcams working on it again. Well I know the parallel port one will work nicely, but not to sure about the USB one. Thats also where I am going to back my personal data up (from my laptop and mac). I think I am going to put the wireless connection back on the internal network (behind NAT) and tell ACI that I only want 1 ip address again.

I've been missing Lisette a lot lately. Must stay strong. Maybe I will call her later tonight? The last I talked to her (late last week) she was spending a lot of time with her ex-boyfriend (the one before me). *shrug*

Christmas is close. I haven't started my xmas shopping yet :/ I don't even know what I want for Christmas. I might just rehash my birthday list.

Lots of shit happening lately.

Yesterady I got my hair done. If you havn't seen the photos yet, too bad :P (well ok, i'm not mean: check out www.burntring.com/users.php [copy and paste biatch!])

I have now officially launched Ride West (travel.blakecrosby.com/west/). Thats going to be the website for updates, images, and videos of the great big Whistler Trip. Enjoy. I took a look at the conditions/webcams today.. not looking so good. The past week was rainy and warm. This week is supposed to be cool and dry. Hopefully, just hopefully they can make some snow this week. Everyone pray for Mark and I that they get a DUMP of snow the friday, saturday, sunday before we arrive. 30CM base is not too impressive.

About to head to the gym later today.

I also got some christmas cards, that I will be sending out soon :) Just have to dig up everyones postal address. Hopefully they havn't really changed. I also need to get a packsack for the trip out west (and others). I will probably get that tomorrow or Sunday, after work.

I'm not really in a writing mood. Just a quicky.

In a non-unusual spontaneous move, I decided to meet up with a friend I had met online just yesterday. She wasn't doing very well, and took her offer of having dinner with her and a friend (Girlstar and DaYzY for those of you in the know). Had a great time, dinner at East Sides, then played some billiards. T'was nice to meet them.

I measured how much snow feel on our porch today. 23cm. Excellent! Only problem is: forecast for the next week is super warm.. Bye-bye snow! It's not often we get a white Christmas.

Typical routine today. Get up, go to mailbox/post office, go to Gym, then chill with Mark. This time there is the added: drop stuff off at Bryans place and import Christmas music in the Chinook MP3 player.

I was toying with the idea of sending Christmas cards this year (Gord gave me this idea). Mainly to my friends in Australia, actually. Oh! and I cant forget Toni in the UK.

This is a short entry, sorry. I just got out of the shower and wanted to finish it before I scooted off to do said things.

Whistler in less than 14 days!

Oh yeah, the title of this entry has to do with a plate we got at East Sides. Next time you are there, you will notice that there are street names all along the sides of the plate. Well, this plate was chipped. So that "Canaal Street" had the "C" chipped off. So now it was "anal street". We got a good chuckle outta that.

I went outside to go to work today, and my balls almost fell off from the cold. Winter is coming! 15cm (!) of snow coming overnight. Toronto is not the only place getting snow :) The past 7 days 50cm of snow has already fell at Whistler :) Oh yeah, and it can be too cold for snow to fall.

It's been a pretty uneventful week. But little things to mention.

Project Appleseed is in the final stages. The machine boots up and runs OS X (10.2.0). I am getting some kernel panics though (the Unix Equivilant of "Blue Screen of Death"). Poking around the net leads me to beleive its a memory issue. So I took out a 512 DIMM from my mac workstation at work and I am going to use that memory module in my machine to see if that fixes stuff. If so, then it looks like I am going to have to make sure I get "Apple Approved" PC133 DIMMS.

I really hope its not the CPUs that are casing the problem. Since its going to be much harder to replace. There is a small feeling inside me that blames the CPUs. Infact, I think its only ONE of the CPUs that is causing the problem. Sometimes only half the apps I am running freeze, while the rest of the box remains somewhat responsive. The kernel panic log suggests the problem is with the CPU too:

The Department of Foreign Affairs has issued a rare Global Security travel advisory. Usually travel advisories are issued on a per country basis, not for the entire globe. All in all, its pretty much saying whatch out for terrorists stuff.

Let the car juggling begin! Can't park on the street anymore (well between 2am - 6am). Take a look at some of the other lame by-laws my city has here. I really wish they would accomodate street parkers better. In most cities you usually park on one side of the street for the first half of the month, then on the other side. So why can't you park on the street, you ask? Snow. The snow plows can't clear the roads efficiently when there are cars parked on the road. Yet apparantly every other city can do so, with cars parked on one side of the road.

Those crazy germans! A new world record of the number of domino chain reaction. It took over 90 minutes to complete. Here is a translated page of the event.

Room is clean (yay!), Still need to get hair cut though.

The weather has turned to the worst :( It's been in the low teens for the past two days. Not a flake of snow in sight :( Unlike here and here

However, the snow keeps on falling at Whistler.. yipee!

Was a pretty quiet day at work today. NO calls, but took care of a lot of loose ends (replied to tickets, cleaned up some code, etc..). I really want the spare blackberry here, sitting on the desk. It's Davids old one (he got Seans).

I'm meeting someone today at Fairview Mall (she works there). Her name is Rachelle (say it like you do 'michelle' only with an "r"). Met online a few days ago. Spent over three hours on the phone last night. I'm not very awake though, since I didn't get to bed until 1am (and yup! I had to work at 8 today). Hope everything goes well.

My ebay action went well. Got $130 for a 1u case that I got for free. Not to shabby if you ask me. The good thing about it, is that he's coming to pick it up.

Im going to finish cleaning my room tomorrow. I took care of a shitload of laundry, and folded most of it while talking to Rachelle.

Right now, I am at work - just killing time. My shift is over, but I dont meet her until 6:30.

Went to check out another apartment today. Really nice place that's close to work (like 5 minute walk, close). The current occupants are really nice, and the place is available Dec 1. I'm just waiting to hear back from them, hopefully I got the place :D

Also exchanged the boots today. Now i'm wearing a size 10 snowboard boot.

Had dinner with Gordo and Alex tonight at the 'nook. Excited to see whats going to happen tomrrow with the whole "Exposing The Vibe" thing (www.exposingthevibe.com). The website is being plugged on the howard stern show and InfiniteLoop is hosting the website.

I really have to do laundry.

I also hate people who blow things outta proportion. Who waste all their energy on making such a big huge deal out of something that either: a) doesn't concern them, b) have no right to worry about it, or c) something they can't control.

Less than 25 days until Whistler. Mark! Get cracking on that intro!

Yeah, Lisette broke up with me on Sunday. So girls! I'm back on the open market ;)

You can always count on CITY to show nice softcore lesbian porn (I have a feeling this journal entry is going to get more than normal traffic - thanks google!). It's keeping me sane at work tonight. I just hope nobody notices the pink double penetrating dildo go flying by my tv while they walk by ;)

It's raining right now. I really wish it would be snow instead. I can't wait to hit the slopes (thats right guys, i'm excited!). Consider this an open invitation to anyone who wants to come: A bunch of us are going to Horseshoe on the last friday of November for some day skiing. Fire off an email to me if you want to come along!

whoo! Mark just called, i'm going to hang out with him, eric, and damon after work. Walk to Erics old place on King Street.

Sorry for the short entry... nothing really exciting happening. Its quality, not quantaty, right?

It's been a learning weekend for Blake today, specifically dealing with programming.

I now know enough about unix sockets to create my own server/client combo in perl. I also know a lot more about IRC (specifically the protocol) now as well. I pretty much whipped up a pretty powerful, yet simple, irc perl bot. The bot connects to an irc channel and waits for commands from the unix socket its listening on as well. The second component, is the server (botcmd) which is what actually sends the commands to the bot, via the socket.

One example of this set up would be to pipe netsaint messages (delivered via email with a .forward file similar to: "| botcmd.pl NSMAIL") to an irc channel where the admins frequent. This way we dont need to always check our email, or have a web browser open. This can be used for any sort of mail really, just need to code a parser for it.

So yeah, that was fun - i'm hoping I can release the code to the public so that others can use it :)

Less than thirty days until Whistler Trip! Yaay! The website is almost done. Waiting for Mark to put together an intro for the front page. Liz was supposed to come up with a list of songs for the soundtrack, but I dont think thats going to happen (more on that later). I just have some programming stuff to take care of (journal/databases). I plan on launching it a week before the big event :)

It's amazing how much we depend on roads. This whole weekend the DVP was closed for construction. I *think* they finally repaved/fixed the onramp to the DVP from the 404, where they had HUUUBE bumps. Mark and I will discover if they did or not, tomorrow on our way to work. Taking Baview to work sucks, but thats the best route when DVP is closed.

I'm actually noticing some muscle growth, yaaay working out! There are some areas that I need to work on. Specifically the torso region: abs and lower back. All those 180s (and possibly 360s?) is going to involve some heavy twisting :P

My room is still a fucking mess :/ I clean it up half-assed, then a few days later its a mess again. I think I am going to try to clean it up again tomorrow. Parents are getting pissed.

Flu shot on Wednesday, as well, having lunch with Nav. I havn't seen him for quite a while. It's going to be nice to catch up.

Juicy journal entry planned for Monday or Tuesday.