I happen to come across the ThinkGeek site and figured I would check out what was new.

HTTP Panties (I can bet which time of the month she'd wear the 401s)
1up Jacket - plain, simple, cool
Geek Poem - I chuckled when I read it.

Melissa and I went snowbaording on Friday. She's doing well for her second time.

I didn't go with the boys today, because i'm not feeling good and I want to be healthy for work on Monday.

I was bored so I ran some readability stats on all of my journal entries:

Number of characters : 654378
Number of words : 119723
Percent of complex words : 6.75
Average syllables per word : 1.4094
Number of sentences : 9203
Average words per sentence : 13.0091
Number of text lines : 4715
Number of blank lines : 2019
Number of paragraphs : 2450

Easiest Entry : Mixup City (Fog: 3.61)
Hardest Entry : The Last Supper (Fog: 14.18)
Longest Entry : Damn You Telstra! (Words: 1,438)
Shortest Entry : It was broke, but now is fixed! (Words: 8)

READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 7.9046
Flesch : 74.3980
Flesch-Kincaid : 6.1141

Not very surprising numbers. So what does all this mean?! Well, according to the Fog Index (I dont really like how the Kincaid index is calculated) you need to have a grade 8 (7.9) level education or higher for you to fully understand my journal entries.

Glad all my readers are public school graduates ;)

When it gets cold, people always tend to complain about it! Why is that? Live someplace else then.

I was cleaning up my DNS server and noticed that quite a few people have their own domains now! (some may or may not work):

gordwall.ca
markholtze.ca
brentinnes.com
brynacorcoran.com
blakecrosby.com
magdajaros.com
jasonprini.com

I'm sure there will be more to come too!

I came across a new audio codec the other day, called aacPlus. It is the same codec that is used by XM Radio for their satelite radio. It is supposed to provide CD quality sound at bitrates as low as 48kbps. Ideal application for streaming at CBC (especially CBC Radio 2, where most of the music is classical and sounds like poo at low bitrates). I still think it is a little too new to adopt just yet (not enough players, and only a handfull of encoding).

The two courses that I took on Thursday and Friday have to deal with "Communication" and "Time Management". Both were interesting. Specifically the communication one. It taught us how to deal with sepecifc types of people and how they communicate. It also mentioned that communication also deals with how the person you are talking to interprets what you said (they called them filters). The typical conversation (between person A, and person B) goes something like this:

idea to convey -> person A's output filter -> person's B input filter -> interpretation of idea.

The course identified 4 different communication types (of which I cant remember off the top of my head right now) which can be identified with a test similar to the Myers-Briggs personality tests. You can then use this knowledge (of knowing the other persons communication type) to alter your "output filter" such that "person B" will better understand what you mean. They also talked about how do use this knowledge to your advantage (ie, manupulation, or "influcing" as the course calls it).

I've also started taking some of the Time Management points to practice. One of them touched on something I do all the time: Put things in there place when you are done with it. I *always* just put things down when im done with it (clothes, books, computers) instead of putting it away (where it is supposed to go). This saves you so much time in the end, because then you dont have to spend time cleaning things up, or having to look for it because its in a pile of stuff someplace on your floor.

Very interesting indeed.

So I bought a Cholestorol test that you can do at home. I just did what I needed to do and waiting for the results.

Why you ask? My mom challenged me! She said she wouldn't be surprised if I had high cholesterol. I doubted that claim since I was pretty young and active (hello... GYM?!?). In anycase, according to the manufacturer, this test was "reviewed by the FDA and is considered to be 97% accurate when compared to the clinical laboratory methods used by doctors and hospitals." I am, however, still taking this with a huge grain of salt.

*15 min later*

Results are in.... *drum roll* 2.8mmol/L (110mg/dL), thats total cholesterol. According to a few websites I checked, this is normal for someone my age. w00t, go me!

What i really want to do, is get a total blood work up done. Everything, CBC (Complete blood cell count: hemoglobin, platlet, white blood cell counts), Chem-7 (measures carbon dioxide level, glucose, potassium, sodium, chloride, creatine, urea/nitrogen), blood pressure, etc. Just for my own curiosity. I wish I could do all this my self. Alas, no lab in the basement ;)

Watching The Amazing Race tonight was a bad idea. Looks like the travel bug is back!

Sue surprised me today by sending off an email to me. She only usually does that when she wants something ;) It was nice to hear from her regardless. Hopefully we can catch up on MSN sometime.

Finally got our new washing machine. Pretty spiffy! So quiet, uses less water, energy efficient, blah blah. Can hold a lot more clothes too.. only problem is: our dryer is still the same size (ie, smaller). It has an ETA clock on the front so you know when its going to finish washing your clothes.

I'm slowly migrating all of my photos from the old photo album to the new one. The end goal will be to have a unified search engine on the site. That way you can type in a search query and you will get results from both the journal and the photo album in one result set. NERD ALERT!

Plans for this weekend are going to include snowboarding (I hope).

It's amazing what you can find by looking at your webserver logs!

I was looking to see who visited my website because I was bored but mainly because I was curious. So what did I discover?

xtreme-15-69.dyn.aci.on.ca (thats me!)
d211-31-101-249.dsl.nsw.optusnet.com.au (my friends in Australia - Sue?!)
durace.com (John!)
relay.bausch.com (Bryna, from work)
toronto-hse-ppp3729062.sympatico.ca (Mark)

I also take a look at the referrers to see which website people have visited mine from. To no surprise many users just go directly to my site. However I did see a referrer from my ex girlfriends website.

Im still at work, about to go home though. The concert wasn't as big of a sucess as we had hoped. The bandwidth never exceeded 500mbit/s. boo!

This past weekend was filled with Drugs, Alcohol, Gambling, and Sex. What more could you ask for?

It started with Snowboarding with Kara on Friday at Blue Mountain. Stayed in the park, hit the jumps, and a few fun boxes. *rubs tailbone*

Friday it was a night of poker with the Aurora Poker crowd. Good times.

Saturday was spent with Missy (she doesn't mind me calling her that). She promised Arden a few weeks ago that she would chill with him. So we decided to head up to Tom and Jerry's to get some eats and alcohol.... $180 later, we decide to go home. We played some video games and hit a few B's.

(Missy also got into an accident on the way to my house on Saturday, front end of her Protege 5 gone)

Sunday was spent at the casino. It was the first time that I played poker in a casino. Was a little nervious, but loosened up after about 30 min into the game.

Work today was great. I got a lot of stuff done. We are prepping for the concert (Canada for Asia) which will be streamed online (audio only so far, still figuring out rights for video).

Going to a taping of Monday Report on Friday which should prove to be amusing.

No plans for the rest of the week other than the usual work, gym, sleep.

Back from Lake Tahoe! The trip was great. More stuff happened than I care to write - however. You can take a look at photos in the gallery.

The car is currently in the shop to get its sched maint done. If it is done in time (hopefully today or tomorrow morning) Kara and I are going to head up to Blue for some riding. I was supposed to meet Suzanne there, but she doesn't know how to explain how we met (online) to the other friends she will be riding with. Lame.

Some ideas that I have in my head include a "Year in Review" with a month by month break down of 2004 and the events (with photos) that I took part in. The other one is my snowboarding journal. I've already started the database design for it. Just need to populate it. Still lots of work to do on the site as well.

Washing machine is broken. Parents say the new one wont be here until Jan 17th. That's almost 2 weeks! What better time to break down just before I have to wash all my clothes from the trip. Poo.

Plans for this weekend are already filling up. Here is what I had in mind.

Friday: Ride with Kara at Blue
Saturday: Spend time with Melissa. Mark is going up to Blue (probably with the rest of the gang) and riding with Susan (who I really want to meet). I might be able to get melissa to come out skiing that day! She still has to call me
Sunday: Casino with Arden, or Snowboarding with the gang.

35 Days until Kicking Horse!