haha this was pretty well done.

Nana, you will enjoy this.

On Wednesday, for the first time in my life, I started keeping a daily journal.

I guess you could consider this blog a form of journal but I think it’s quite different, at least in content.

I started writing a journal the old fashioned way: pen and paper. It’s actually in a sweet, sweet fake-leather bound book that my mom gave me for my birthday. At the time I was thinking “what you doin’? what am I supposed to do with this?” but time has proven me wrong.

Not to be confused with a diary, I’ve been writing more about things I’d like to accomplish, things I did accomplish, ideas I’ve had, and writing down thoughts on various things.

I’m a techie to the core and yet ironically it seems much easier to keep a journal on paper. I think it has to do with worth. I guess I feel there’s more worth to something tangible, something that I can hold in my hand, and probably sometime in the far future something that can be found and read. Contrast that to a text file that can be constantly revised, that gets buried and lost deep in a bunch of digital folders. It feels good to be creating such worth.

Unlike this blog, I also find the flow from my thoughts to the paper much less restricted. I find it interesting that as much as my perfectionism holds me back from writing something on this blog, it doesn’t interfere at all when it comes to writing trivial thoughts in the journal. I attribute that to the fact that while the blog is public for the world to judge, the journal really isn’t up on display so I’m not concerned with it being “perfect.”

I’m hoping that by keeping this journal it will let me organize my thoughts better, help me reflect on things, and ultimately keep me focused on my goals.

Maybe it will help me write more blog posts as well.

A month or so ago I was lucky enough to meet the recently-crowned Miss Universe Riyo Mori.

No really, I did. It’s the Japanese connections obviously.

Anyway, she was over at my house back in Belleville and she was visiting some of her friends there since she hadn’t been back to Belleville since winning Miss Universe. She and her friends hung out at my house acting like any other high school girls would when their friend wins Miss Universe. You know, standard stuff. Lots of screaming and happy dances and hugs ensued. Oh and lots of pictures of course.

So what did I get from this experience? It’s kind of a big deal to win Miss Universe. I think. Oh and Riyo’s totally down to earth. She’s not some crazy celebrity type. Not yet at least. Hopefully she stays cool.

This past weekend I went up to Ottawa and it was my first time back since I lived there over two years ago.

It started a week ago when Rob W suggested we go on a road trip to the capital to experience the Stanley Cup fever in person. I had been wanting to go back to Ottawa ever since I left because I love the city and all my friends from back home live there as well. Daveed was down for my birthday and it wasn’t hard to convince him to come with us so the plan was set. My friends in Ottawa were all available for the weekend and last Thursday I also found out that Meghan was going home for the weekend so it was shaping up to be a great trip.

Rob came down to Waterloo late Thursday night and we stayed up pretty late. I was working on a new feature for Delilah and Rob was doing something a little less productive. Morning soon came and I had a pretty hard time getting up. We were planning on leaving by noon to pick up Daveed and Rob’s friend Dave in Toronto and it was now 11 am. I ran downstairs to wake Rob up. His words to me were something along the lines of “I’m not getting up. I’m going to sleep in til 2 pm.” After some physical threats he agreed to get up and we managed to leave my house by 12:30 so we weren’t too far off target.

Rob drives a Prius. It’s like from the future or something. I’m quite certain of that. We used the sweet, sweet GPS to guide us to find Dave and Daveed in Toronto while listening to Sirius satellite radio. I’m starting to sound like a commercial, but travelling in a car like that is pretty damn pleasant. We quickly realized it was going to be confusing with two Daves so we took to calling Rob’s friend Mark-Dave instead (Mark being his middle name).

Leaving Toronto was another matter. Given that Rob’s future-car couldn’t actually fly, we were bound to the reality of traffic jams. At 3pm. What the hell? Driving was painfully slow. Daveed repeatedly screamed out the window “What are you all doing?! Why aren’t you at work?!” to no avail. Nobody was listening. Damn commuters. Why don’t they take the Go Train? Seriously, it was ridiculous seeing all the single-occupancy cars. What ever happened to car pooling? We are hopeless.

We coped by listening to the wonderful commercial-free radio and dancing to classic 80’s music. I also successfully executed the decades-old maneuver of the air-honk. You know, trying to get truckers to honk their horn by motioning them with your arm out the window pretending to pull the horn. The trucker had a cowboy hat so I thought sweet, this guy’s old school. He’ll do it. I stuck my arm out and busted my move. He looked at me with a sad look on his face and shook his head. I think they get in trouble nowadays because it distracts drivers. But then a look of “what the hell” came over his face and he blew his horn. I was pleased. I think it’s a dying tradition. But I’m keeping the dream alive.

We were a little past Pickering when Mark-Dave suggested we take back roads to Ottawa. Less traffic and more direct and shorter route towards Ottawa. But we’d definitely go faster on the 401. We weren’t sure what to do so we designated Daveed as The Oracle. He chose the back roads. The Oracle had spoken. We stopped by a McD’s soon after we got off the 401 around Peterborough. I calculated my meal out to 1500 calories. I figured that’d keep me satisfied until we reached Ottawa.

We were greeted with a damp, wet rain as we arrived in Ottawa and after dropping Mark-Dave off at his house and then our things at Arjun’s place, we went up to the market for food and drink. We checked out Heart and Crown but there was a line-up so we settled on going to the Aude Dubliner and chilled there for a while. Arjun and Tony joined up with us and then we visited Zaphod’s for a bit.

At Zaphod’s we met up with Arjun’s roommate Mark who referred to Rob as Rob Zombie. We tried to get Arjun to bust some moves but he was being all shy and boring. Beat It came on and we forced him to do some MJ dancing which lasted 10 seconds. Daveed challenged him to a dance battle but I think Arjun was afraid.

We spent the rest of the night hanging out at Arjun’s apartment and we were up until the wee hours of the morning. We all got up around 11 on Saturday and sat around all tired and lazy. We had a good breakfast at Cora’s to get things started.

Daveed, Rob and I headed over to Elgin to visit Tony, Nana and Uzo and proceeded to wander down Elgin to watch the Sens game. The streets weren’t too busy but every table at all the bars were taken so we decided to test our luck in the Market. We ventured back up to Heart and Crown and to our surprise there was plenty of room so we took our time scoping the place out and settling on a good table.

The next 6 hours or so was spent eating, drinking and watching the game. It was one helluva game. We also ran into a bunch of people from Belleville and some of my dad’s old karate students.

Meghan didn’t end up coming out with us because the lucky girl ended up watching the game from a box, for free, with free drinks and food all night AND with The Trews. Ahhh so jealous. I won’t bother getting into details but Meghan wrote an account on Delilah.

After the game we went over to the Brig where I was supposed to meet up with my friend Andrea and her friend Lori. We worked across the street from each other back when I worked at NRCan during my Ottawa days. I told the guys to go inside and start drinking while I waited outside for Andrea. So there I was, waiting around, and I was about to call Arjun to give him an update since he didn’t come out with us when I was attacked from behind. It was a sneak-attack hug from Andrea. My ninja senses failed me. I thought I’d be prepared but I clearly haven’t been training enough. I blame it on the alcohol.

The rest of the night was spent drinking at the Brig and I made it home around 2 am. Actually I have no idea when I got home but 2 am sounds good as far as this story goes. Although Daveed had headed home almost an hour before I did he wasn’t at Arjun’s place. Rob was missing too. I tracked down Dave and he had apparently taken the bus back to Arjun’s but missed the stop (at Lees) and ended up way out at the St. Laurent mall. He eventually made it back safe. As always when he’s drunk.

Sunday we slept in a bit and confirmed that Rob Zombie had gone to Mark-Dave’s place and crashed there. Rob, Dave and Mark-Dave left just after noon and I stuck around in Ottawa. I spent the afternoon hanging out with Andrea and then later visited Nana, Tony and Uzo.

Today I caught a ride back to Waterloo with Meghan and thus my weekend journey came to an end. This was definitely one of the best weekends of this year and I look forward to going back to Ottawa again.

I find it really silly that whenever I’m at some choose-your-own-toppings burger (or sub, pita, whatever) joint and I ask for everything on my burger, they always ask if I want hot peppers too. And every time I have to say yes, hot peppers too please. Really now, can’t we all just agree that everything means everything?

zombo.com is quite possibly the best website ever.

As a kid I used to read a lot. Well, a lot by children’s standards. I mostly read Fantasy books. Ahh, the good ol’ days of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. My favourite book is still The Legend of Huma (a Dragonlance series book) and it probably won’t be dethroned anytime soon.

Over my teenage years I stopped reading completely and up until about a year ago I honestly believed that the casual reading I did as I surfed to the ends of the web and back provided the mental nutrition that my brain desired.

Last fall I had a revelation. It’s nothing incredible, and pretty common sense, but it didn’t quite hit me until then. I realized that people that I see as “smart” aren’t just born that way. They read! Beyond more than a simple correlation, there’s some degree of causation between reading books and being smart. There’s a tendency to want to write those people off as simply being book smart. But with all of that added knowledge, those people can make better decisions, and more clearly define their views.

Over the last year I decided I should start reading books again but it was sort of an on-and-off relationship. I started off by finishing off Chronicles of Narnia before watching the movie, then I finally read The Da Vinci Code, both of which I had bought about a year before I even read them. Da Vinci Code was indeed as good as people had hyped it to be, and subsequently made me not enjoy the movie. I then moved on to some books that my dad had bought me for either Christmas or a birthday, which were iCon (an autobiography of Steve Jobs of Apple fame) and The Power of Focus. iCon was an incredible read and should be read by anyone into either Apple or business.

When I was in Japan back in November I picked up The Tipping Point and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. The former being an interesting talk about fads and popularity while the latter was a nice, feel-good story.

Most recently I just finished reading the David Suzuki autobiography (which my mom had it signed for me…sweet) and I’ve finally started chipping away at all the books I ordered over the Christmas break. I tried to balance it by getting about half fiction and half non-fiction.

Going along with my worldview that life is like a video game (more specifically an RPG), I feel that reading books is like upgrading your skills. It doesn’t help being a high level if your skills suck.

Up next is The Long Tail, a book about niche markets.

So the other day I went to the cinema to see Casino Royale (which was a great movie but not the topic of this post) and just moments after getting my drink and popcorn, the answer to a life-long mystery came to me in a moment of clarity.

I’m sure others have figured this out too, but it’s not something that is to be discussed and remains a whisper amongst modern-day society. Taboo? Doubtful. Probably just not interesting enough for someone to talk about it. But I am not one to shy away from the uninteresting.

I am a very analytic person. I like to look at things. I like to understand how things work and why certain things are the way they are. One such slice of the delicious sensory pizza that is the world comes in the form of the fountain pop lid. At first glance it is merely a primitive device to prevent the spillage of contained liquid of choice. Yet, the more I think about it, I cannot comprehend the process by which it could have evolved into its current, optimized state.

The property to focus on is the small handful of hemispheres that indicate the contents of the cup. Taken individually, their design and purpose seem simple. If the bubble is associated with diet, then it would be depressed if the drink was diet. If it’s cola inside, then the cola bubble would be pushed in. Simple. Yet, when taken as a whole it seems illogical and absolutely absurd that there’s usually only three of them. Since it is given that at least one of those must be an indicator of diet or regular, that leaves two others to tell the tale of the taste. We all know there are more than two flavours of pop at any given concession stand.

Are they the two most popular flavours? Who gets to decide? Was there an evolutionary process by which it was whittled down to two? Such are the nonsensical questions I have asked myself over the years, having failed to answer any of them.

That wonderful night at the cinema led me to a profoundly simple conclusion. You see, regardless of it being a Coke or Pepsi product, the two flavours are almost invariably Cola and Root Beer. Since all other drinks (on a per brand basis) served from the fountain pop machine are of differing colours, one can simply visually discern the flavour of pop contained within. Only Cola and Root Beer pose a potential ambiguity through their common colour. Thus, they are the only ones that require the decisive domes.

Such emotionless powers of time and random variation could never have produced such a wonderfully perfect lid to marry the fountain cup.

Indeed, it had to have been intelligently designed.

Picking up from where I left off in my last post…

The competition went great and it was an incredible experience. I can’t describe how awesome it is to be among 1600 competitors from 70 countries all in one place. I guess that kinda goes along with being a world championship.

I competed in one division – Men’s Individual Kata. Kata is a performance of a karate routines. Fighting, or kumite as it’s called, is the other type of competition. This was the biggest division in the whole tournament with around 150 competitors. We were divided into four rings during eliminations and even then it took half a day to go through. The competition format for the elimination rounds was single elimination with 5 flags through simultaneous performance of a randomly chosen kata. So a pair of competitors would go up, the head judge randomly chooses one of four katas (Bassai-Dai, Kanku-Dai, Enpi, Jion), both competitors perform at the same time, then 5 judges vote for the winner with flags.

I had a bye the first round and was supposed to face a guy from Hungary for the second round. I was pretty confident I could beat the him but as I waited to be called, I saw my opponent get called up against a guy from Venezuela. They’d added a number of last-minute competitors so they squeezed in the Venezuelan guy ahead of me. This kinda threw a wrench in the plans as I wasn’t so sure I could beat him. I saw him training earlier before our division was called and he looked pretty solid. Looking at the draw sheet, I was sure that if I could just get past him I wouldn’t face very strong competition for the rest of the elimination rounds.

I wasn’t about to go back home having performed once and losing. I was pumped. I stood by the edge of the ring waiting to be called in, ready for battle. My heart was racing. I stared across the ring and stared at my opponent. A mere obstacle. They called us in and we bowed to each other before stepping into the ring. We turned to face the head judge. We walked to the centre of the stage. I was ready. The judge shuffled some cards then drew one and held it up. Bassai-Dai, it said. Bassai-Dai, we declared.

I became a spectator. My body was now moving on its own. It was automatic, as a heart beats without thought. I’ve trained this kata hundreds, if not thousands of times. My bread and butter for so many years in my younger days. I could see my opponent in my peripheral vision. He was a couple moves ahead of me. He was rushing. I maintained my pace. He probably spent most of his time training the flashier katas, preparing for the later rounds. He had neglected training the simpler, basic katas. He lost his balance.

Such a minor mistake yet so grave an error when you only have one chance. We were barely into our performances yet the writing was on the wall. All I had to do was finish without making a mistake. I took my time and it was over a mere minute later. We waited for the decision. But I already knew. The head judge blew his whistle. The flags snapped as the judges raised them decisively. I looked around. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five white flags. My opponent was red.

I later found out that the Venezuelan guy had faced me 9 years ago at the world championships in Italy. He beat me then. I guess this is payback. I asked him how he remembered…he told me he watches the tapes. Now that’s hardcore.

Having overcome the Venezuelan I continued on to soundly defeat a Kyrgyzstanian and a Slovenian both 5-0. I made it to the semi-finals where I was in one of two groups of 8 competitors. At this stage we were allowed to perform a kata of our choosing and we performed one at a time and were ranked by points. I performed one of my favourites, Gojushiho-Dai, and I was quite pleased with it. Alas my journey would end there as I barely missed the top 8 by 0.1 points.

My roommates now introduce me as Ninth.

I went to Japan just hoping I’d win at least the first round so I’m unsurprisingly very happy with my 9th place finish. Looking forward, the next world championships are in 3 years hosted in Greece. I better get training. And watch the tapes.