Today I was going through a bunch of old pictures, trying to find a baby picture to give to someone at my work for a baby picture mystery game we're playing, and I came across my favourite picture from when I was jumping on our old trampoline.

The picture is from a web cam video recording that I took while my brother Tom was "double jumping" me. The trick is to have 1 person jump lightly right before you're about to land to tighten up the trampoline. The result is that it launches you really high up in the air.

For context, the guy standing at the bottom right side of the picture is my buddy Greg who is 6 foot 7 and 3/4. This was probably the highest I had ever jumped on the trampoline, and it was extremely scary if you don't go up straight, because you could end up landing on the edge of the trampoline or even worse, on the hard ground.

Labels: trampoline

This city has many hidden gems that I could talk about, but today I'm going to tell you about the 192 Airport Rocket bus from Kipling station to Pearson airport.

Most people who are traveling for business will take a taxi or airport limo to get to the airport, since it's on the company's dime. But no matter where I am traveling, I always try to use public transit to get to the airport (This doesn't always work out as planned; last year I almost missed my flight in Vancouver because I took public transit)

On my way to Calgary earlier this week I took the subway and I was very impressed with how quickly I arrived at the airport. Here is the breakdown:

6:54PM Left home
6:59PM Got on Ossington bus
7:09PM Arrived at subway station and got on subway
7:27PM Arrived at Kipling station
7:34PM Jumped on the 192 Airport Rocket
7:44PM Arrived at airport
7:50PM Cleared security and arrived at my gate

That's 56 minutes door to gate over a distance of approximately 24KMs via public transit, all for a mere $2.10. That's why I love this city.



Photo courtesy of MartiniBoys.com

Labels: 192 rocket, airport bus, public transit, Toronto, TTC

If you've been watching the news over the last couple weeks, you are aware that 416 children were seized by police in Texas from a Polygamous sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In Canadian news, the British Columbia attorney general Wally Oppal will be making a decision soon on what to do with a polygamous community in Bountiful, BC.

The 416 children seized in Texas are currently being held while the 3 mothers and 1 father are being investigated for abuse. The third wife's 22nd child made the original complaint and the father was taken into custody while obtaining a loan to pay for all the diapers for his children. After being taken into custody the children were fighting over who would inherit the father's savings after he died (They decided to split it 416 ways). One child commented that he was extremely happy to finally have a bed to himself after sharing his bed with his 8 brothers for most of his life.

Reports also indicate that Michael Jackson was spotted escorting the children from Fort Concho, where they had been held since being taken from their ranch earlier this month, to the local coliseum, where some children have already been staying. He's apparently writing a new song called "It doesn't matter if you're the first or the 33rd".



Image courtesy of Fox News

Labels: children, flds, polygamists, ranch, texas

Last month (March 10th to be exact), I left Toronto just as a major snowstorm was approaching. We had a substantial amount of snow on the ground and it was very cold. When I arrived in Calgary Alberta that day, it was 15 degrees Celsius and the ground was completely bare.

Tonight I returned to Calgary over a month later and it was a gorgeous 25 degrees Celsius in Toronto today; that's almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit Americanos! To my surprise, when I arrived in Calgary it was -10 degrees and -20 with the wind chill.

I'm amazed that these two cities can be so opposite, but at the same time I was really enjoying my weekend in Toronto. I guess all I can do is show off my nice tan to the Albertans to rub it in.

Labels: calgary, Toronto, weather

Ontario has taken a great step forward by overriding a ban that prohibits many Ontarioians from hanging their clothes to dry outside. Most new home developments sign a contract with home buyers prohibiting them from hanging their clothes to dry outside on the grounds that it's visually unappealing. According to the Star article, 20 to 30 percent of the province's subdivisions have this prohibition.

I can appreciate that hanging clothes outside doesn't look great (Just go to Hong Kong and look at any apartment building), but I think the environmental impact trumps the aesthetic appeal and I'm fully behind the government's decision on this. This is another one of those situations where supporters of the ban argue that the value of the home will decrease as a result (The good old Economy vs. Environment argument).

The lift on the ban doesn't include apartment buildings or condos, which is fine by me because I would hate for apartments in my city to look like the aforementioned Hong Kong apartments. But there are alternative options for condo dwellers:

Hang your clothes to dry indoors. I've been doing this for over 5 years now. It's actually a lot less of an inconvenience than you might first think. You simply do your laundry, hang everything on an indoor rack, then when you get home from work the next day, everything is dry and you can fold it up. It really doesn't take me much more of my time than it would to use the dryer. If you're one of those people who needs the dryer because you always wait until you have no clean undergarments left, sometimes it feels good to "let it all out" and go commando once in a while.

Hanging your clothes is one of those things that rubs on the most skeptical of people. My brother Tom was a skeptic several years ago when he first moved in with me, but now he's regularly hanging his clothes to dry because he realizes that not only is it easy, it also helps your clothes last longer.

With Earth Day approaching on Tuesday April 22nd, I challenge my readers to buy an indoor rack (if you don't already have one), and try hanging your clothes to dry at least once.



Image courtesy of jupiterimages

Labels: ban, clotheslines, ontario

For years, I have passed by the newsstand of the reprehensible Toronto Sun newspaper and its absurd headlines. This sorry excuse for a newspaper, known by most as a "tabloid written at a Grade 5 level", constantly contains fear mongering headlines in large dark print, such as "RECIPE FOR TERROR", "DEADLY CHASE", "2 CORPSES IN FARM FIRE", "GIANT KILLER", "TOT'S HARD FALL", "TERROR IN PARADISE", and last but not least "LEAFS ARE BACK!".

My first impression of the Toronto Sun after reading its cover is that the editors are obsessed with crime, murder and the Toronto Maple Leafs. A person would most likely feel like they were living in a war zone if they were to judge the city by the Sun's headlines.

So I decided a few weeks ago to do some investigation and really get to the bottom of the Toronto Sun Headlines. I wanted to know if it was purely my bias or my imagination, or if this newspaper is really obsessed with terror and hockey. I collected all of the cover pages for the last 362 articles of Toronto Sun newspapers from April 13th 2007 to April 12, 2008. I then manually extracted the main headlines and then my buddy Bob and I built a string parsing tool to extract the words used in the headlines, count the number of occurrences of each word, and generate an HTML representation (Tag cloud) of the words and each of their occurrences.

What I discovered was no surprise to me. I've posted the words below so that you can judge for yourself whether this newspaper is really newsworthy, or simply a proxy of fear in one of the safest cities in the world. Hover your mouse over each link to see the number of occurrences of each word. I've also generated a collage of the 362 articles I collected.

The top 2 re-occurring words are (not surprisingly): "Leafs" and "Murder":





You can see that this newspaper has a fairly narrow-minded agenda when it comes to the news. It's apparent that the things that really affects most people's lives are nonexistent (at least on the covers). Thankfully I live in a relatively large city where there are other good newspapers that focus on real issues that affect us all.

Labels: leafs and murder, newspaper, toronto sun

The other weekend, when Han and I were in Alberta, we stayed for a night in Hinton, Alberta. I didn't realize it at the time, but this town has some significance to me, but I couldn't quite remember exactly what it was about this town.

On the morning of February 8th, 1986, a VIA passenger train collided with Canadian National Railway freight train, killing 23 people in total. This train collision has somewhat haunted me since I saw a special on it on TV a while back. They interviewed a survivor who desperately wanted to save a little boy who was burning alive, but he couldn't get to him through the flames, so he had to watch the poor kid die. I can only imagine how the image of that boy would haunt him forever.

The other intriguing part of this train collision is the simple question about how this could have happened in the first place. After a thorough investigation of the accident, it was revealed that there were safety measures that were frequently bypassed by CN employees, and this was simply part of the culture. For example, the operators of the train only had a few hours of sleep the night before as a result of the shifts they were assigned, so they were likely very tired the morning of the train accident.

Another safety measure that was typically bypassed is that the locomotive engineers would wedge a lunchbox on the pedal to hold it down to effectively put the train in "autopilot" mode. This was to prevent the train from going into an automatic emergency brake if the engineer fell asleep briefly. So it was likely that the CN train engineers were using this "deadman's pedal" that day, and engineer Jack Hudson and brakeman Mark Edwards had most likely fallen asleep at the front of the train.

Another problem was with the communication between the front of the train and the caboose. The only survivor of the freight train was the conductor, Wayne Smith who was riding in the caboose at the time of the collision. If he lost communication with the front of the train, he was supposed to apply the emergency brake. With the train traveling much faster than the maximum speed allowed, Smith should have known to stop the train. When he testified, he appeared to be lying to the panel. The most likely scenario is that he fell asleep as well and didn't know what was going on until the train collided. I think the panel was correct in blaming CN management for its safety practices instead of laying the blame on Smith, since he already had to deal with losing 2 of his friends, living through life knowing that he might have been able to save them.

Labels: hinton alberta, train collision