April 2008

There is a chill in the air, remnants of frost on the ground. It certainly doesn’t feel like April, or maybe it does. It is hard to remember what the weather was like from year to year. Especially if you move around a lot. At least it is sunny, which is a small consolation that makes you smile as you stand waiting for your bus. As seems to be a disturbing trend, the express bus mocked you again today by growling by mere moments before you reached the stop. Fine, the regular bus it is, seeing that it isn’t the warmest of mornings, it is better to linger a bit longer on the inside of the bus than on the curb.
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Unfortunately I am not in Bruges at the moment, although I will take this opportunity to plug my Bruges photos from my trip a couple years ago before starting my Masters project. No, what I am referring to is the movie with Colin Farrell.

I saw this movie on what must have been its second last day playing in Vancouver and the theatre was quite full, for a Wednesday night. And justly so, the movie was quite enjoyable, and if the Internet can be any indication, a generally good movie all around.

I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I had been to Bruges before, or just the story telling of the screen writers, but I was really drawn into this film which surprised me with a considerable amount of humour and charm. It had it’s fair share of oddness sprinkled in there are well, but that just added to the overall appeal, at least from my perspective. There are some startling scenes in it, especially toward the end, and it isn’t for anyone who offends easily, but for the rest of you out there, I’d recommend renting it when it hits DVD, because I’m not sure whether many theatres are still carrying it.

Only 6+ months late, that isn’t too bad. For those of you who bugged me about it, I’m sorry it took so long. Things have been busy lately. But now I have a relatively robust RSS generation class, which means in the future I won’t need to take so long to implement interesting feed features. As the links at the bottom of each page state, you can get a feed of all the entries:

http://www.colinbate.com/feeds/rss/entries

or all of the comments:

http://www.colinbate.com/feeds/rss/comments

and if you are interested in following a particular tag, you can get a feed for it alone with:

http://www.colinbate.com/feeds/rss/entries/<tag>

where you replace <tag> with the actual tag name. Like if you wanted a feed for only my Vancouver related posts.

I have also made the decision to provide the whole article in my feed so that if you want, you don’t need to visit my site at all any more. :)

If you are a Mac user than this post is for you. If you aren’t, well, perhaps this bundle will tempt you over. I’m not saying that it will blow everyone away, but the current bundle from MacUpdate has some nice apps which you can get together for one low price.

The flagship app of this bundle is definitely Parallels. If you are running an Intel Mac, this program will allow you to install and run Windows and Windows applications along side your Mac programs. Unlike Apple’s Bootcamp, this doesn’t require you to choose between Mac OS X and Windows, it allows the two to co-exist at the same time.

Beyond that, there are some applications for helping you organize your files and documents, edit audio files, maintain global keyboard snippets and rip DVD content to your iPod or other format. For the full list and a much better description, visit the MacUpdate Promo site.

Oh, and this is a time limited offer, going until April 29th. Spread the word, the more they sell, the more applications are available.

Since the iPhone isn’t officially available in Canada, those of us with strong Apple ties need to express our allegiances some other way. If you happen to have a BlackBerry, then you can do your part to make the experience more iPhone like with the bPhone theme. The site itself really shows what it is that you will be getting, but basically it is a theme which will make your BlackBerry resemble the iPhone. You still don’t get a touch screen, but it does make your icons nice and shiny and tweaks your colours and fonts to look nicer.

Thanks to Kevin DaCosta for planting the idea that there might be a theme like this, and my apologies for stealing your thunder with this amigo.

Although I knew the weather in Vancouver wasn’t going to compare with Bermuda, I really wasn’t expecting this, especially during the second half of April. I don’t think anyone else was either since it seems to be all everyone is talking about.

Some areas were worse than others, for example this photo was taken on Oak near Broadway, where there seems to have been more snow than downtown. I suspect there are other areas with more. It is really wet, slushy snow too, the kind we get in the maritimes a lot.

This post is coming at you from my new phone. I created myself a new mobile post interface and even a lower bandwidth version of the site for anyone reading from a phone or similar device. The URL for the mobile version is:

http://www.colinbate.com/?m

I’m on a mobile computing kick since getting my BlackBerry. So to that end, I have written a mobile friendly weather site. I know that there must be a dozen good weather applications which push weather info to the device, but being a web geek, this is my entry. It only works for Canadian regions covered by Environment Canada, and I only have a few listed, but in theory any of the EC stations should work.

http://m.colinbate.com/weather/

In case you were wondering how much duck tongue is in fact too much, the answer is any. Today I had lunch with a number of my colleagues at the Fortune Restaurant just downstairs in the mall connected to my office tower. It is actually a seafood restaurant, or claims to be on their sign, but in fact have many dishes which are not seafood. Really, perhaps the best name for it would be a Dim Sum restaurant. Those who know me can attest to the fact that I can’t eat seafood. And while I really enjoy Chinese food, I am not a fan of Dim Sum. Lunch today was a bit of an experience for everyone involved. The problem with mixing vegetarians and people who may or may not eat seafood is that unless you are experienced with what you are ordering there can be much confusion. We were not experienced.

And as it turned out sometimes you don’t always get what you ordered. We definitely ordered a couple portions of spring rolls which didn’t show up at any point. And there was one dish which no one recognized when it showed up. It looked like some kind of meat, but no one could place it. Well after a few rounds, we determined that it was duck tongue. And for some reason we had ordered two portions of it. It didn’t taste too bad, it was in some nice sauce, but it had some hard cartilage like piece in the middle. That made it quite awkward to eat and required a bit of oral dexterity to separate the tongue meat from the cartilage. I can’t believe I actually just said tongue meat.

Not a bad meal in all, I ended up going away fair well sated, but I guess I could have done with a bit less duck tongue.

In my duck tongue excitement, I forgot to mention my trip to the Aquarium on Saturday. Unlike our previous attempt, Jordan and I managed to make it to the aquarium and into the doors without waiting for the rest of our natural lives. I think we actually caught the end of the line that was there from Easter.

After paying our entrance tariff, we started to explore the depths of what the Vancouver Aquarium had to offer. I’ve said it before, but I have a real affinity towards aquariums. I don’t know why, I’m not particularly nautical in any way, but there is something about sea life that I find fasinating—as long as it is not swimming with me. I had heard some pretty good things about the aquarium here, that it was an impressive size, with an impressive array of displays. I definitely wasn’t disappointed by my first visit, but I will say that I wasn’t hugely impressed either. They had a nice diversity of animals, with the sea otters and seals being popular in my books. I also really liked the seahorse and jellyfish. They also have an “Amazon Jungle” display which is definitely interesting with it’s large fish exhibit.

This is definitely something interesting to see when you are Vancouver, and if you can, I would recommend going during the week to avoid the bulk of the crowds—and the kids. Kids definitely love their fish. :)

Although beat to the punch in mentioning it by my brother Adam, I will make a cursory note that according to MacRumors, Apple has forged a deal with Rogers to bring the iPhone to Canada. It has been almost a year since the iPhone first released to much anticipation in the US, and it has been available in the UK for a few months now as well. As the article mentions, Apple is rumoured to be planning a release of a 3G iPhone in June. I also know that Rogers is rolling out coverage of HSPA (referred to as 3.5G) in urban areas in Canada. I’m not sure what will end up being available with the iPhone, but it being Canada I imagine that the plans will be pretty expensive.

Articles were recently written about Apple turning a smiling, blind eye to all of the statistics about the number of iPhones being purchased in the US, unlocked and then sold elsewhere in the world. There is some hope that Apple will soon offer iPhones available in an unlocked state for use with whatever network suits you.

I have never really looked at myself as much of a music aficionado, but for some reason, I am very picky about my headphones. And my primary metric for evaluating them has always been comfort. I have had a number of different headphones throughout the years, some worked out, some didn’t.

Instead of simply saying that I bought a new pair of incredible headphones both from a comfort and audio clarity perspective, I am going to regale everyone with a trip down headphone memory lane.
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