• playing music really loud when I’m in the car alone and trying to sing harmonies to electro-pop music
• taking my road bike out for the first time of the season
• the feeling after you’ve just really cleared your throat.. when you’re sick
• watching Wallace and Gromit short films and noticing all the quirky, ironic and detailed humour inside (claymation figures doing pottery!?)
• getting invited to lunch
• wearing rubber boots

Still trying:

• to heal from getting sick
• to get a contact lens into either eye
• to determine how I will drive to BC this summer and where I will stop
• to dream a little bigger
• to find a little more courage
• to rely on God rather than myself

And for some reason I decided that it was a good idea to pick up my new glasses — new frames and lenses.  Bad decision… now I definitely have a headache more due to the change in prescription.  Apparently my prescription has lowered since 5 years ago.  Result is that everything looks a lot more vibrant and sharp at mid to close distance, the contrast is really high, and I feel like I’m always cross-eyed.

I wanted to switch back to my old pair … such a temptation but it’s not a good idea to keep switching back and forth.

Also, I was typing on Peter’s laptop in QWERTY and it was sooo hard.  I had to look at almost every key as I typed.  I’m not amazing at Dvorak quite yet, but I’ve started to forget QWERTY (unless it’s with my thumbs on my BlackBerry).  What a strange feeling to have started to forget something I’ve spent the last decade or more perfecting (cue spiritual analogy of your choice).

And none of this is even real pain.

- biking in a blizzard

- driving the Limoment (my car, the Honda Element) in a blizzard

- pulling my windshield wipers up so they don’t freeze on overnight

- having clean laundry

- eating maple walnut ice cream

- reading Relevant magazine

Not so like:

- getting really wet while biking through slush

- initiating the doing laundry process

I desire to:

- make someone smile more than they’ve ever smiled in their life

- sleep really late but still get a full night’s sleep before 8am arrives

- drive across Canada but not have to pay for so much gas

Somehow Sarah Brightman makes it into almost every Olympics, somehow!  Hehe.

Can you pick out the commercial?

When I first moved to Ottawa, everything was new and I wanted to experience it all.  Now I’ve seen most everything that I want to, and I’ve grown quite comfortable.  But I need continuous variety and newness or else I will grow demotivated and disengaged.  Do you find you need this or do you function best in an environment that you already are familiar with?

• released to all Gmail users
• friends are automatically followed for you, found through Google Reader, Google Chat/Talk, or your Gmail contacts
• capability to link to Twitter and maybe other social media, so someone can Tweet and allow it to show up in Buzz
• able to mention other people using the @ sign, which will notify them by email of the Buzz
• commenters in a Buzz thread will be notified via email
• Buzz can be hidden in the Labels Settings, you can unfollow people
• Ability to Mute buzz(es) so that they no longer show up in the Buzz feed
• Permalinks to Public Buzz such as my first buzz
• Keyboard shortcut to Buzz within Gmail is ‘g’ then ‘b’
• brings many features from Google Wave to Gmail without going through another subdomain
• Private Buzz allows conversations between a group created in Gmail
• allows for inline photos, links, and videos

Anyway, the iPad.  Everyone has been talking (at least those who are geeky or Mac-loving enough to care).  Some say it was the biggest disappointment of human history while others are holding out for its impending success in some unexpected way.

Well Peter, here are the main complaints:

- not enough hard disk space

- no multi-tasking

- no Flash support

- no USB

- only App Store

- no camera

Before the last few years, before netbooks and MacBooks existed, built-in cameras never even featured in computers.  Now every mobile device has one.  But the general population doesn’t actually use a webcam to do much more than take funny Photo Booth pictures or the occasional Skype conversation (fine, they also take vain photos and put them as their profile pics). But the average user isn’t actually thinking about how to communicate to other people virtually.  Most of them pick up the phone.  Or meet in person.

How many people actually examine the hard disk/flash disk capacity?  Only the most geeky.  More often than not I’m finding that the people I know are choosing the products by colour first, and then possible specs.  That’s why Apple is offering size selection, if you want to be picky, then you get to pay for it.

No multi-tasking.  A lame complaint.  Do you actually do more than 1 thing at a time on your computer?  Like, how often do you actually read two webpages simultaneously, or compose two messages at the same time? There is the odd occasion that I will watch a video while doing something else, or be working on Illustrator or Photoshop at the same time.  But that is what my powerful computer is for, not my mobile device.  I won’t be creating vector graphics on my mobile device usually.  Rather, I will choose to brainstorm stuff on the fly, and then go home and make it awesome when I’m sitting in my ergonomic task chair.

No Flash?  No problem!  The web world is starting to move away from Flash. Apart from Flash video (like what you are familiar with on YouTube), most legitimate websites are built on CSS, XHTML and other clean searchable code.  In fact, YouTube and Vimeo are moving away from using Flash for displaying the videos, instead choosing to move towards HTML5 using h.264 video embedded in their pages.  This is not as resource intensive (does your computer fan start going crazy when you view a Flash video online???).  The only sites that are going to suffer are ones like media-intensive youth-oriented Flash sites.  I do believe those coders are intellectually flexible enough to create sites that are media-intensive yet still CSS/XHTML clean compliant.  They just choose not to, and it’s holding back the whole interwebs. Now Adobe (owner of Flash) is not going to leave this without a fight, but I think the world of Flash has just been given its eviction notice subtly by Apple.  And the intriguing thing is, Apple is still the company that pushes change in the whole computer industry (nixing floppy disks, bringing Firewire to the forefront, MagSafe power plugs, built-in webcams, multi-touch) — I am not saying they invent these things, but they make them mainstream and expected.  And all the other manufacturers still play catch-up.

App Store.  Annoying for developers.  But simple and unbreakable for users.  The standards are high (and picky) so you don’t have unusable crap getting onto iPhones and iPads.  Average user, they bend to such demands.  And it’s user-friendly, unintimidating, and rock solid.  All the apps that are approved are ensured to be clean, secure, and useful.  The ones that are turned away, well, maybe Apple is just picky or protective. But at least you actually need to know how to buy an SDK to develop for Apple’s mobile devices.

Everyone is critiquing the iPad as if they know anything about human-computer interaction, product design, usability, interface design, and software development.  All this, because they have seen the iPhone or iPod Touch and they think they know what they are talking about.  But in reality many complainers (general nerdy public) are just USERS.  They are consumers.  They don’t invest the money in product development and usability.  They don’t look 5 years down the road at what will be viable.

Here’s another way to look at it — if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, your piece of mobile device was the Beta.  You were the early adopters, so you tested out the product for Apple, giving them feedback, complaints, and suggestions.  The iPad is not just simply a large iPhone.  Instead, the iPhone or iPod Touch was simply a smaller version of the iPad.  The smaller devices were released for people who were willing to line up for hours for a product that doesn’t offer HD-resolution video, to see how they would respond to the multi-touch and App Store.  Now the iPad (which they have likely been working on for longer than the iPhone) has come out and it’s going to be inevitably more stable, more secure, and more usable than the mobile devices that were mere glimpses.

The iPhone was revolutionary for early adopters.  The iPod Touch was revolutionary for the more cautious consumers (they still own a cell phone that they don’t want to let go of).  The iPad will be revolutionary for normal people.

Take that, Peter.

See how they respond.

My hunch is that most people are indeed experiencing pain while having no meaning in their lives.  The short end of the stick eh?

I am really wondering what they do now with the canal.  Do they have to wait for another 2 weeks of below -10 C weather before they can let people on it again?

Although on another note, rain is kind of nice at this time.  It is just nice to have a bit of variety in the winter.  It just kind of plays havoc on all the norms in Ottawa during the winter.