I hate been late to the internet party. I pride myself in wielding the internet. My knowledge is bounded only by the knowledge of the internet. So I hate it when I hear about some big meme or internet sensation long after it has passed.

Last week I spent a couple days catching up on things I missed on the internet. I found one called Chocolate Rain.

I found a reference to it while perusing Encyclopedia Dramatica which is basically a wikipedia for the cesspool of the internet. The heart of said cesspool being , which in itself has an interesting history.

So this guy named Tay Zonday is an aspiring singer/musician and has made a bunch of songs with cheesy melodic background music and one of them is called “Chocolate Rain”. Somebody on 4chan decided to tell everyone on 4chan to “raid” the youtube video to make it popular. And when someone suggests something funny, most of 4chan goes along with it. So overnight it garnered tens(maybe hundreds?) of thousands of hits and once something on youtube catches fire, it really explodes and never really dies down, mainly due to the nature of everyone clicking on videos that are already popular.

In case you didn’t get the references, “Chocolate Rain” refers to racism.

Dr Pepper caught wind of the phenomenon and made a properly produced video for a song called “Cherry Chocolate Rain” to promote their new Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper.

Here’s another one called “Explode”. He actually has a bunch of other songs but I think this is one of the better ones.

Today I hit a new milestone in my life. It is indeed quite sad that I’ve had a guitar for over a decade and have never before been able to play a whole song.

I’ve come close though. During high school I learned to play about 3 or 4 entire songs. But only the guitar part. My friends (including Nana) and I had a pseudo band. We played a few times during assemblies and whatnot.

But today marks a new era. I can now play a whole song on my guitar and sing the whole song as well. Yes, I am now a one-song jukebox. A cheap jukebox because my singing sucks. But in time that will come as well.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses in Outliers that it takes some 10,000 hours of practice to master something. I think I’ve chalked up a good 3 hours or so over the last 2 days. Only 9,997 more to go.

The song? Hear You Me by Jimmy Eat world.

There’s no music video for this song so here’s a splendid cover:

It hasn’t quite hit me yet but it’s nearing the end of the year 2008.

Looking back, I wrote a whopping 5 blog posts not counting this one. So much for trying to become a regular blogger. Well, there’s always next year.

The year began with my final term in my undergraduate career. It was one helluva ride. It concluded my 30-week streak for going to every Bomber Wednesday and I wrote my undergraduate thesis: “Risk Factors of Asthma Exacerbation”. I also managed to pass an upper year econ course without ever having attended a single lecture(not even the first one), only writing the first of two midterms, and studying only for the 6 hours preceding the final exam. I actually thought I had a chance of failing. But I ended somewhere in the 70s. I consider it my crowning academic achievement. Closely followed by the 100% I got in my 3rd-year microeconomics course.

It seems like an eternity ago when I was still in school but I suppose it’s been less than 8 months since I wrote my final exam. So what exactly have I been up to since graduating with a very prestigious degree from such a very prestigious university?

(begin side-story tangent)
So back in February or so I was checking over everything to make sure I had everything in order so that I could finish my degree at the end of the winter term in April and to be part of summer convocation in June. I had checked with my Arts undergraduate advisor to make sure I had fulfilled all my degree requirements for a BA so I decided to check with my Economics advisor to make sure all my economics major and specialization requirements were fine so that I wouldn’t get some ugly surprise a month before convocation.

I went to the advisor’s office with my transcript in hand (as required for any consultation, indicated by a note on her door) and asked to speak to her.

She asked what I needed and I told her I just wanted to make sure all my requirements were fulfilled as I was planning on graduating this term.

Her response to me was “You know, you go to a very prestigious university and you will be getting a very prestigious degree and we expect that you can figure out the requirements yourself.”

I was like…uhh ok, not bothering to explain that I had already gone over everything, but just wanted to double-check in case there was some issue I didn’t know about since I transferred from computer engineering. and I left. she never answered my question. but I graduated anyway.
(end tangent story)

The last 7 months have been a blast. I started it off with Power Week. It consisted of Power Days over which Daveed, Michelle, and I did random, fun, and new things. Oh and lots of eating delicious food.

Both Daveed and Michelle have since left me. Daveed embarked on a year-long journey to Japan to teach english. Michelle left a bit later to go to Australia to finish her last term abroad.

Over the winter we, The House, started what we affectionately called “The Stack”. We had gotten into quite the habit of ordering pizza from Twice The Deal Pizza and for some reason or another, we started keeping the XL pizza boxes and started a nice stack of them in our dining room. It soon reached the ceiling and we started a 2nd stack. We then started calling it “Twice the Stack”. And for some reason none of us thought of it until one day Lisa was over and she looked over and said “it’s the leaning tower of pizza”. Hahaha. oh.

The Stack was with us for a while but we decided it was time to part and eventually we disposed of it one warm, spring afternoon.

May marked the beginning of a new phase in my life. The phase of getting jacked, as Mariano and I like to call it. I started going to the gym regularly with Mariano. He didn’t quite believe me at first when I said I’d go everyday but he soon started believing me. It’s been great, it’s like having my own personal trainer. With his new(over the summer) glasses – dubbed the “Trainer Glasses” – he also fits the part.

A summer of gym and all the hilarity (oh yes) involved ensued.

This has now been the longest (7 months) I’ve consistently worked out in my life. I started lifting weights back in first year but the normal pattern would be work out hard for about 3-4 months, then get lazy for about 4-12 then repeat. I think I’m finally at the point where I don’t really think to myself “god, I have to go to the gym today” and instead I think “when am I going to the gym today?” The consistency has paid off. I am now the strongest, fittest, and biggest I’ve been in my life.

Daveed, I know you’re reading this (and probably one of 3 people reading it haha) so I have some bad news for you: We’re getting jacked. You have a lot of catching up to do.

I also spent the summer and fall working on developing my programming and web development skills. Since then I’ve worked on a number of personal projects(uwcourses.ca, Team Jacked, among others) as well as projects for clients(Thai Garden Restaurant, Elite Life Media), and I’ve been working on building up my portfolio (as well as my public image now at www.hirodozono.com).

I’ve come a long way and I’d consider myself a Ruby on Rails expert as well as a CSS ninja.

Some other highlights this summer included going to a Jimmy Eat World concert which was simply the most wonderful experience, a road-trip to Kingston, and taking a picture of myself with David Johnston(the president of University of Waterloo) while I was onstage during the convocation ceremony. I also had a small mohawk for a while which was pretty sweet.

This fall I started teaching CycleFit(indoor cycling/aka spinning) on campus. This was really a random endeavor that came about because in the summer our friend Heather suggested to Mariano that he should take an instructor course and then the day before the course they asked me if I wanted to do it as well. I figured sure, why not, it was only a one-day course.

During the instructor training course the instructor asked about everyone’s involvement in CycleFit/spinning and most people had done it a number of times and loved it; Mariano and I had never been to a class before. And we were about to start teaching haha.

Fast-forward to the fall and we had to start teaching. Mariano and I had “practised” our classes a few times but it was basically just us trying to survive on the bike for more than 20 minutes. Classes are 55 minutes long. Take away about 10-15 for warm-up and cooldown and it’s basically 40-45 mins of intense interval cardio.

My first class was brutal. I was sick. I had yet to go to any class. My cardio was mediocre. But I survived. I learned quickly and by the 3rd week I had mastered it and it was no problem. I remember the first few weeks I could barely yell out instructions to the class while trying to keep my feet pedaling. It’s intense enough as it is to be cycling for a whole class but having to talk and yell while everyone else is gasping for air is pretty damn challenging. My lung capacity has no doubt increased significantly over the last 3 months and now I can run a whole class without dying.

Honestly though, CycleFit has been the greatest addition to my fitness regimen. It’s high-intensity interval training and the benefits are incredible. My cardio has vastly improved, my legs are not only getting really strong but my quads are getting jacked and toned. And best of all, it obliterates fat.

I pioneered a new diet called the “CycleFit Diet”. Mariano talks about cutting and bulking (bodybuilding terms) and the respective “Cut Diet” and “Bulk Diet”. If people ever ask if I’m on a diet I tell them I’m on the CycleFit Diet: I do CycleFit twice a week. and then eat whatever the hell I want.

So far so good. I haven’t lost any weight but considering I eat so much garbage and haven’t gotten fat I consider it a success. Although, I can only imagine how cut I’d get if I combined CycleFit with a proper, healthy diet. I’m thinking about it for a few months in the new year.

I got a new unibody Macbook Pro a few weeks after it came out. Greatest. Laptop. Ever.

So the Athletics department of UW launched a new branding campaign this fall and they chose the slogan “Engage.” This is hilarious and awesome because back about 3 years ago in 2005 Mariano started saying [dis]“engage” ALL THE TIME. As a result, our entire social circle start saying [dis]“engage” ALL THE TIME. (Yes, it comes from JLP of Star Trek). To have it turn into a slogan for Athletics is quite fantastic. But it gets better. They made a shit-ton of t-shirts that boldly display the word “Engage.” We of course had to get our hands on them. And a few more for our friends.

Mariano had some friends come visit us from Ottawa and Kingston for Oktoberfest. It was then decided that we would all wear the Engage shirts to Oktoberfest. Greatest decision ever. It was epic. We spent the whole night yelling “engage” at people. and pointing at our shirts of course.

2008 was a fun year. It was also a very laid back year and a nice break considering I was in school for 9 consecutive terms. I look forward to greeting 2009 with renewed ambition and intensity. I just read Outliers (a splendid gift from RC-W) and I now realize what I must do.

Anyone that watches Canadian media have recently been hearing a lot of Listeria and Listeriosis and the knee-jerk reaction against Maple Leaf Foods.

The long story short is as follows: some foods produced by Maple Leaf Foods were contaminated with Listeria, a bacteria that can make you sick. Some people died. More got sick. Maple Leaf recalled a shit-ton of their foods. People stopped buying Maple Leaf products.

I’ve been reading comments on news articles from people saying that they would stop buying anything Maple Leaf and “let other people be the guinea pigs.” My alma matter, University of Waterloo, has stated “Since the initial recall announcement, our chefs have discontinued purchasing any Maple Leaf Foods product and will continue to buy our deli meats from other sources, like Piller and Olymel, going into the Fall term.”

Seems like a normal reaction. But the “normal” reaction is just that: a reaction. It’s not proactive nor does it protect oneself from future harm. It’s emotional and counter-productive. If people think that other food manufacturers are infallible to Listeria(or any other bacteria) contamination, they are living in a dream-world.

Ironically, Maple Leaf Foods has the most incentive to tighten up their production and be as pristine as possible. They’re spending millions on the recall and likely millions more cleaning up their plants.

If anything, the safest bet on a source of uncontaminated foods in the coming months and well into the future is from Maple Leaf Foods themselves.

The 2008 nationals just took place this past week in New Brunswick.

It’s now been 2 years since I left the karate world. My last official competition was in the fall of 2006 when I competed in Japan for the SKIF World Championships. In terms of the WKF/NKA circuit, my last competition was the 2006 National Championships in Newfoundland.

Karate has been a part of my life ever since I could walk. Since I was 14, the Ontario Karate team has been like my extended family that I would see 4-5 times a year, culminating in a week-long bash that is the National Championships. I miss my karate family. I also miss the rest of my karate family that spans the whole country. I’ve made so many great friends from the rest of the country over the 8 years that I competed at nationals and the two times I competed at the pan-american championships in Venezuela and Chile.

2 years ago I made the difficult decision of ending my karate career. Or rather, putting it on hold. I hadn’t trained at all during my 5 years in university and I was having the time of my life and karate just wasn’t a priority. Simply travelling to Toronto 4 times a year for the provincial meets was a hassle for me. Between not wanting to embarrass myself with my slowly deteriorating karate skills and wanting to give the younger up-and-coming stars an open road, I stopped competing.

I think it was the right decision but now that I am done school I feel it was such a big part of my life that I should give it another chance. For the last few months I’ve been thinking about returning to the karate world. Since the 2nd week of May I’ve been doing intense physical training with Mariano and I’m already in the best physical condition I’ve ever been in my life after 7 weeks.

Tonight I had a moment. I saw pictures of all my old karate teammates on the podium. They are cleaning up. The young kids that used to look up to me have far surpassed anything I ever accomplished and have more than filled my shoes. I am so proud of them. Trevor Sheppard, whom I have so much respect for, finally took the national title for Men’s Kata. He has deserved it for so many years now and he finally did it. I’d like to think Arjun and I are his biggest fans.

This moment reaffirmed my desire to return to the karate world and compete at the national championships in 2010. I want to medal for Men’s Individual Kata. I want to perform the best Shotokan katas that have ever been performed at the Canadian National Karate Championships.

I have a a year and a few months before I need to begin competing at the provincial level to qualify for the provincial team and I have roughly 2 years before the 2010 nationals.

Two years to get bigger, stronger, faster, jump higher, and more flexible.

Two years to hone my art.

The journey begins.

Today I bought a 1 gig stick of A-Data ram for my 12″ Powerbook G4. I gave up on the idea of upgrading my ram over a year ago when Canada Computers had them for about $180 and didn’t even have them in stock.

All hope was lost until today when Ahmed told me that, miraculously, they seemed to have an abundance of them now and at rock bottom prices.

I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated as of yet with my laptop and have been yearning for a new one. Getting beachballs every few minutes every time I switch windows or tabs was getting really annoying. I’ve been lusting after the Macbook Pro but I’ve been waiting until they come out with the newer designs, hopefully by the end of summer or end of the year.

In any case, the extra 512 mb of ram(I had 768 before) has really juiced things up and I can happily say that I’m in no hurry for a new computer anymore.

Yes I’m a computer nerd.

If I could program my camera, I’d add a shooting mode that would take a picture without flash, and then take another picture with flash immediately afterwards.

Pictures always look better without flash because it doesn’t wash out people’s skin and also has a much warmer colour, but unless the lighting conditions are really good you end up with a blurry picture. You can compensate for it with a higher ISO (the digital camera’s sensitivity to light) but the trade-off is a grainy image.

Sometimes it’s worth having a bit of graininess because it still looks far better than a picture taken with flash. But sometimes it’s so grainy that the picture with flash is more bearable. So what I end up doing is taking pictures with and without flash and then discarding the one I don’t like.

It’s just a pain in the ass – to myself and to my subjects – to have to take a picture, change the setting, then take another picture. Why can’t I just do both at once?

The only person that enjoys hearing your ringtone is yourself.

Just sayin’.

Also, I had a funny idea for a ringtone: record yourself coughing.

Rarely would people look for the source of your ringtone!

On Christmas Eve Future Shop started their online boxing week sale. They had a few good deals but otherwise their sales were about on-par with the regular price of Canada Computers. I still don’t understand why anyone that lives in the same city as a Canada Computers would buy anything related to computers from Future Shop but that’s another story…

Anyway, I was interested in buying the Canon Rebel XT from them which was on sale for 399. I’ve always wanted a digital SLR so I figured this would be a cheap way to get into them. The website went down for a few hours “to prepare” for the boxing week sale store. First of all, it’s pretty sad that they actually had to take down their site for hours to do that. It should be a matter of a flick of a switch but somehow they have managed to translate the real-world physical constraints of a brick and mortar shop and let it manifest in an online virtual shop. I’m surprised you don’t have to go back to the home page to “leave” the online store.

The site was then back up at 7 pm in “preview” mode to let people check out the sales before the mad rush began. The sales were set to begin at 8 pm. In anticipation of some rush I pre-created an account and made sure I was already logged in.

Just as 8 pm rolled around I added the camera and an SD card to my cart and proceeded to checkout. I was brought to a checkout “queue” screen where I had to wait in line to check out. Lovely attention to detail I must say, as it was quite like being in an actual store. Although I was rather disappointed that there weren’t any impulse buy items for me to throw into my cart as I waited in line. A minor detail that I’m sure will be remedied in future versions of their online store.

Wait a minute, let’s get serious. How ridiculous is this. It’s an ONLINE STORE. WHY AM I WAITING IN LINE. The bonus feature of this setup was that although I was waiting in line to check out, I didn’t actually have possession of the item(s)! The lovely screen warned me that once I proceeded to the next step of the checkout process, that some of my items may no longer be available. Oh sweet. So this is where they notify me of how utterly useless their “quantity remaining” detail on their product info page is. Cuz you know, some sort of ticket system whereby you get a product allocated for you while you wait in checkout is simply too difficult to implement.

The technical answer as to why they would implement such a asinine procedure is most probably that their checkout servers couldn’t handle that sort of volume at once. Ironically (I’ll get to this soon), they could easily have used something like Amazon’s EC2 or some other type of temporary computing environment to handle large spikes in traffic, as would be expected during a boxing week sale.

Back to my checkout story now. So after about an hour or so of waiting it finally told me I was ready to proceed to the next page. I clicked on the button to proceed. I was staring at the product page for a 500 gb hd. That’s right. A product page. How did I get there? I don’t know. I clicked back and it brought me back to the proceed to checkout screen. Clicked next. Back to the 500 gb hd. Right, that clearly makes sense.

At this point the items were also no longer in my cart so I had to go back and add them again. As I went back to lineup to checkout again, it told me the website was down. It couldn’t handle the load.

I waited 2-3 hours.

The site came back online and I repeated all the steps and waited another 45 minutes in the queue. There were 1000 cameras at 8 pm. There were less than 300 now. I finally got the go-ahead to proceed beyond the checkout queue again. Now it told me I wasn’t logged in. Yes I was. But not anymore. Their website clearly has problems with session management. Over the next 15 minutes I had to log back in about 6 times and hit the back button about 4-5 times to escape from blank screens but I finally made it to the point where I could enter my shipping info.

The next screen just blew my mind. It asked me how I wanted it shipped. It gave me two options: Ground (14.98) and Air (13.25). Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that they’re actually charging me for shipping. Their distribution centre is somewhere in the GTA. And they want to fly it to me. In Belleville. Well, I guess there are some regional flights that flight into/out of Trenton. Maybe that’s how it works. No wait, maybe it’s just that total idiots designed this website. Why Air is cheaper than Ground is a mystery to me. Why they don’t even tell me what the hell Ground vs. Air means is a mystery to me. Why they don’t tell me which is faster is a mystery to me.

I think the Future Shop team should try ordering from Amazon for once. Not only is it free shipping for orders over $39, but it also tells me how long it takes (1-2 business days) and it also gives me the option of paying for express shipping and yes, it tells me how long I should expect to wait.

So after selecting Air (It was cheaper. I actually did try to figure out whether Ground or Air would be faster but I could not come to a solid conclusion) I finally got to enter my credit card info. Oh yeah, had to log back in again. As I reached the climax of my purchasing journey I was ushered over to Visa so I could sign up for Verified by Visa. Talk about killing the mood. Now without ranting on too long about Verified by Visa, let’s just say it’s the most useless and annoying “feature” ever. The entire system was conceived to protect the retailers and certainly not to improve the user experience. They spin it as more “secure” but all it does is create a hassle. Now I can understand if some smaller e-tailer wants to implement this to reduce charge appeals but a large company like Future Shop should be most concerned with driving sales through fast with a minimum of obstacles. Amazon knows this.

Already so committed at this point, I trudged through and clicked the final button. And then it took me to a white screen with a simple message saying “An error occurred sending the VBV data”. Cool. Thank you for wasting the last 3 hours of my life.

I did have one more chance at it but as I stared at the credit card page I decided that I would not go through with this. I can live without the camera for now.

So what’s the conclusion of this long story? Well for starters, once Amazon expands their selection of goods at amazon.ca, Future Shop doesn’t stand a chance in the online world. Much more importantly, their business in the real world will die a slow death. Evolve or become obsolete.

The fundamental problem with Future Shop/Best Buy is that they are a traditional brick and mortar store that are used to making killer profits through insane margins. They have done well. But with mass adoption of the internet there has been a paradigm shift. It has only begun and we are only now reaching the tipping point. We are reaching a level of near-perfect competition now that geographical barriers have been all but eliminated. In order to survive this new age of internet consumption, they need to drastically improve their online experience.

I do not think that it will happen anytime soon. They are a brick and mortar retailer. They think and act like one. In contrast, Amazon is a technology company. Future Shop hires teenagers to peddle their wares. Amazon hires programmers. Future Shop most likely outsources their website development. Amazon is innovating the latest web technologies.

Best Buy’s only hope of survival is to leverage the Best Buy and Future Shop brands and partner with Amazon just like Toys R Us has already. That’s their only saving grace.

So I finally took the plunge and dove into the world of dedicated server goodness. It’s so awesome.

Pleasant Interruption is now hosted on a box at theplanet.com on a wee single-core box. But it’s my box and it’s all mine! I love not having to share it with a hundred other people. It’s a P4 2.4 ghz (although the machine tells me it’s actually a P4 3.2 ghz in which case I got lucky!) with 512 mb of ram and 80 gigs of hd. Oh yeah.

The geek inside of me is enjoying this oh so much and I’ve already spent hours setting it up. This is just so nerdy but I love having complete control of the server and being able to consolidate all of my (and friends’) websites into one place.

On an unrelated note, I was really looking forward to getting reacquainted with my Playstation 2 over these holidays (I leave it at home in Belleville and play it only when I go home) and I was also getting really excited about bringing it back to Waterloo along with Guitar Hero 3. A couple days ago I spent half an hour scouring my entire house for it and then gave up. My mom told me my sister had used it or something when she was back home in September. I called my sister today to ask if she knew where it was and that’s when she told me. She took it with her back to Calgary. along with FFXII and my memory card. I was only a few hours from completing the game too. grrrrr.

Edit:
I went back and checked my ticket for the new server and it had this note:

Our goal is always to accommodate our customers  request as quickly as possible. In order to meet our goal, we have taken the liberty of providing you with this more powerful configuration at the same price as your original selection.

Yeah, The Planet rocks.