Boulderz - a fun new bouldering gym in Toronto!

Last night I went to Boulderz, a great new climbing/bouldering gym that recently opened up here in Toronto. I was fairly excited as I tend to stick mostly to my home gym, Oasis.

Boulderz is run by a friendly gentleman named Andrew.

He started Boulderz after having to move and take down his home climbing wall (of course the story's a bit longer and more involved than that...). Congratulations Andrew -- building and starting a climbing gym on your own is a significant accomplishment you should be proud of.

Consulting with Vertical Solutions, Andrew built Boulderz over the course of about 8 weeks. Some 4000+ holds pepper the walls of the gym, which is primarily oriented towards bouldering, although a few short top-rope routes are also available.

There are a variety of different overhangs and angles to try out. What was particularly fun was topping out -- climbers can finish problems by going over the top at the end of problems, and then take stairs to go back to the ground floor.

The problems were a solid mix of beginner, warm up, moderate, hard and insane. What I liked was that Andrew was soliciting qualitative feedback about the problems, as well as the fact that the boulderers there were taping up their own. It just means that attention is going to be paid to make sure the problems are fun and that there's a mix for everyone.
The facilities are decent too. A/C in the summer. Changerooms, washrooms, lockers, a shower. And a drinking fountain!!

I wound up getting a good workout, though I definitely felt out of climbing shape. Add a couple of requisite bloody knuckles (the wall friction and all the holds are sooooo new!), and it made for a fun climbing session.


Boulderz is located east of Dupont and Landsdowne. (I took the subway to Landsdowne, then the bus up to Dupont.) It's a little bit hidden -- from D&L, walk west under the bridge and then turn right at 1444. You won't see the entrance from the street - you have to enter the parking lot to find the specific building.


More pics here. Tell your friends!

LIFE Magazine photo archive on Google. Amazing.

Despite my ongoing antipathy towards Google (having to compete with them for talent tends to bias my perspective), periodically I have to admit they do cool stuff. Like this.

Google has arranged to make available LIFE magazine's photo archive, online via image search. The collection spans over 10 million photos. And you can view them in large size instead of some crappy web reduction. Try it here or just enter

source:life

as part of a normal google image search.

The political spectrum - where are you?

I came across this test while surfing the net. It's a simple survey that plots where you fall politically onto a grid; in addition to the usual left-right axis they added a vertical authoritarian/libertarian axis.)

The results were predictable (in the sense that I scored exactly where I thought I would.)

Economic Left/Right: 6.00

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.85

It's disheartening to know that there really aren't any mainstream politicians who serve my particular leanings. It's lonely in Ayn Rand territory. Haha.

Try it out and see where you wind up!

Your Call Cannot Be Completed As Dialed...

It finally happened. I canceled my home phone line.

The customer service representative gamely tried to upsell me on a bundled internet service. The gall! But the fact is, I had stopped making or receiving calls on my home line. In terms of usage I had switched over to my mobile long ago. A lot of my friends have done the same already.

Fare thee well, ebony northern telecom rotary! Godspeed, 416 204 9357! May you go to someone who cherishes your dial-tone.

Now I have to decide what to do with the savings. Skateboard apparatus? Subscription to the Economist? Upgrade to an iPhone? Suggestions welcome...

Why is Dolly Parton against use of white space spectrum?

Are wireless microphones so important to Dollywood? Thank goodness the FCC made the right decision and allowed unlicensed usage of the spectrum. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Ants are awesome.

Yay ants.

Watched the Toronto Marathon today...

Actually it was more like portions of the half. Normally on a Sunday the routine calls for a late morning snooze but I wanted to get up and cheer for two different friends of mine who were participating. I was going to do up a sign for them but surprise surprise, I was too lazy. I need to get a cowbell for these occasions!

It was a great day, if a bit chilly to start. I stationed myself a bit past the 10k mark just before the downhill Aylmer/Rosedale Valley Road chunk, to catch the 1:40+ group. Most people looked pretty strong at that point. There was one guy dressed up in a Captain America suit.

After the ~2:15 crowd passed, I then ambled over to the finishing stretch at Queen's Park. People were a lot more stressed there. Some people would say thanks when you encouraged them; others would merely grimace and glare at you. My one friend I surprised a bit unfortunately, I think she was trying to concentrate on maintaining form over the last kilometer and I distracted her when I yelled out her name.

It compels me to set a personal running resolution for next year. This fall I was thinking about a 10k or a half but I have been lackadaisical in the training. I think the right goal is to go for my
favorite race, the Around the Bay 30k. And then depending on results and ambition I might go to Ottawa, likely for a half. I just have to get a consistent training regimen in place. And pop the 10k mark properly. Wish me luck!

the banana split

A banana board push race October 5, 2008. The rules were simple -- you had to race on a banana board. No street decks or longboards. We did fudge the conditions a bit and permitted participants to swap in modern bearings and wheels.

 

Sweet!

Cody Jarrett > the Joker

I saw the seminal gangster film, White Heat, starring James Cagney. I couldn't help but compare it to Batman: the Dark Knight. Both flicks feature homicidal crime-lords who ruthlessly slay their own gang members as casually as they do innocent bystanders, and who revel in their manic impulse to destroy.

Cody Jarrett: the original Joker?

Structural similarities abound: Unrelenting violence. A prison break out. A hero who must assume a false identity in the name of good. The use of technology to fight crime.

Yet Cagney's performance as Cody Jarrett is thrilling and disturbing, where Ledger's portrayal of the Joker is to me, fairy inscrutable. And to be honest although the action sequences in Batman were spectacular (particularly in IMAX), I was significantly more engaged and stimulated by the plot in White Heat. The dialogue was crisp and memorable - I'll certainly be quoting Cagney, whereas I can't recall a single line from Nolan's opus.

I have to say that I think White Heat made for a better film than Batman.

White Heat movie poster

What is it about crime movies that make them so intriguing? What does their popularity reveal about our inner nature? Do we secretly yearn for a world where the strictures we live by may be broken with impunity?

The Conversation - a film for our times

Last night I watched Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation again for about the third or fourth time. I love the film's stunning, open-ended conclusion and its foreboding atmosphere of secretive paranoia.

Replete with an understated but stellar cast -- Gene Hackman, John Cazale (was there a movie he was in that wasn't an Oscar contender?), Harrison Ford, Terri Garr, Robert Duvall! -- The Conversation was made during the height of Coppola's emergence as a major director, in between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II.

Several aspects of The Conversation resonate keenly with me in the current context. Although the analog equipment of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman)'s trade as a wire-tapping expert seems primitive and quaint by today's standards, their application by Caul presages the modern dalliance with surveillance technologies and the panopticon state. Caul's techniques were state of the art in the Watergate era - to what level have they advanced 35 years later? And to what degree do they infiltrate our lives?

In the information age, bits are easy to track, easy to process via computation. What would have been a gargantuan task of data collection, collation and analysis can be automated and accelerated. Google, that colossus of information retrieval, actively amasses a plethora of profile data so it can target relevant advertising at you. It does this as a public corporation. It really does not take much imagination to blithely wonder whether other players with different motives and different analysis endpoints are doing something ... different ... with the rainbow of data extant about you on the net.

Harry Caul is a hacker. He builds all of his own equipment. He is lonely and socially isolated from his peers and community. And yet the film cleverly draws us into his world, lets us see and hear what he does. Lets us watch him as if he were the surveillance target, allowing us to witness his humanity. Lets us experience the same revelation of horror that he does. His descent into madness is gradual at first but progresses exponentially, leaving us with a shattered view of personal privacy at the film's denouement (Though denouement is technically not the right word here, in the sense that a resolution of his essential dilemma fails to occur after the climax).

The elements of audio repetition in the film are used extremely effectively by the famous sound designer, Walter Murch. Fragments of the eponymous conversation are replayed again and again as Caul struggles to decipher and interpret the meaning behind the dialogue of the couple he has been tracking. Meanwhile the wandering piano score by David Shire is expertly woven into the texture of the scenes.

While The Conversation might prove to be too slow-paced for someone adapted to the au courant frenetic editing style, it continues to strike a relevant note and is definitely one of my favorite films. The unsatisfying nature of the ending is what makes this film Art.

ps. and nevermind Enemy of the State! That was like watching a feeble counterfeit.

google chrome the next new browser?!

What the heck, I often find firefox to be poky anyway. I bet the dev teams at mozilla and IE aren't too pleased to learn about the release of google chrome. Despite significant advances for FF in market share it looks like the mighty GOOG decided it had to own and control a browser... Now I can complain about having my favorite web sites munged by yet another browser. Hooray!

Highlights from the comic (drawn by Scott McCloud! The Tufte of comics!):

• fully open source
• separate processes for each tab (no more entire browser crashes from crufty javascript on one of your 18 open tabs!)
• new v8 javascript virtual machine - with hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation, and my personal favorite, precise, incremental garbage collection
• goofy 'tabs on top' user interface
• creepy omnibox
• new tab page = home page based on your most used/trafficked sites
• 'incognito' porn surfing mode
• some other random security stuff that bores me, but which will be another strike against malware etc. Sandboxing - i'll believe it when i see it.
• Windows only right now, of course (sigh). C'mon, OS X is where it's at! What about platform independence!?!

shoot, i bought the wrong bolts.

Check out the hangar to board width ratio on my waterski longboard...

Went to Canadian Tire today. As usual it was a classic demonstration of the paradox of choice. I have been reading (on wikipedia) about polyurethane varnishes. I want to clear coat my Mermaid waterski/longboard to protect the retro graphic pattern from all the grotty dirt and crud that lies on the streets of Toronto. Of course when I arrived it was a smorgasbord of gloss, semi-gloss, satin, matte, etc. wood finishes, none of which I really know anything about.

(Obviously different wheels/trucks in this pic)
Photo: S. Nuttall

I'm not sure if a polyurethane varnish is the way to go anyway, due to the flex of the board. I'm afraid the coat will delaminate. Paralyzed by the array of multiple finishes I went to get some bolts instead.

Machine screws, rather. A topic regarding which I know roughly the same as I do varnishes. When I clear coat the Mermaid I will be removing the trucks etc., and then switching out the bolts when I remount everything, with some washers to spread out the load because my current bolts are flat heads which are biting deep into the wood.

I got some 2 inch and 2.5 inch pan head Robertson screws (the ones with the squares in the head -- invented by a Canadian. The Phillips (the cross head ones) screws are around because GM started using them). Close, but no cigar! It turns out I bought #8-32 screws, instead of #10-32 screws. i.e. they are a little smaller in diameter. So the self-locking nuts I have are too large. Argh. I just want to get the Mermaid totally perfect forever!!
Ahh, ignorance. Where's the bliss?

*Olympia* re-imagined

Lacking a television I've fallen somewhat behind on the sporting extravaganza currently occupying the world's attention, namely the 2008 Olympics being held in Beijing. Nevertheless I finally got around to downloading a copy of the opening ceremonies.

What a stupendous display of nationalist puffery! I'm a huge fan of Leni Riefenstahl, and the whole thing felt like a modernist Asian homage to her. Tell me you didn't think the fireworks/lightshow over the Bird's nest stadium wasn't incredibly reminiscent of the closing 'cathedral of light' sequence in Olympia? And you could just as easily have substituted any of the rally montages from Triumph of the Will for the tai-chi, the dancing, the drumming, etc.

Cathedral of Light sequence from Olympia

Something looks familiar...

All you needed was a little goose stepping and it would be straight from Berlin 36. I read that the ceremonies were planned and coordinated by Zhang Yimou, (ooh! Raise the Red Lantern!) a director who clearly must have studied Riefenstahl's work carefully before embarking on his own cinematographic planning for the event.

I also watched Usain Bolt's demolition of the competition in the 100 meter final. It's fascinating to compare how it was shown on NBC with Riefenstahl's coverage of Jesse Owens' amazing 100m heats and finals (in Olympia). Riefenstahl was truly a pioneer of film (err, Nazi propaganda notwithstanding). Her influence on sport photography is undeniable.

woo hoo kahas!

an extra set! yippee!!!

awesome vintage cellphone commercial

The Also sprach Zarathustra in the background is classic. oooh i want one!!

 

the coldest place in the universe?

That this might actually be a product of human agency is kind of thrilling.

Ohio declares selling crack is a job; no benefits!

Apparently in Ohio crack dealing is considered 'sustained remunerative employment' and consequently is sufficient cause to terminate total disability compensation.

Those stingy Ohioans!