February Air

LIGHTS - February Air official music video

Lights+Calgary+2009=AWESOME!

Lights is coming to Calgary this January 13, 2009. She will be performing at The Warehouse (Boo). I already got my tickets for me and the boys, woohoo! I can't wait.

P.S. Who will drive my soul?

P.P.S. I leave you with a better quality of Drive My Soul.

LIGHTS - Drive My Soul (official music video)

Halloween 2008

For Halloween this year I was a....Stormtrooper! I haven't been out for Halloween these past few years due to exams but this time all my exams were done and I partied it up! We hit up the Students Club Crawl that started at Crazy Horse and went to Tangerine, HiFi and ended up at Tequilla (Booo!). It was a lot of fun! Probably one of the best nights I've had in a long time!

The Pros about the costume:
-Everyone loved it
-Looked sweet dancing in it (such a hit on the dance floor)
-Guys/Girls bought me drinks because apparently it was "so sweet"

The Cons
-VERY HOT
-Difficult to see in
-Difficult to sit down in
-Sharp edges cut up the back of my knees and wrists



P.S. I think our group of friends had the best costumes that night!

Obama!

Beat Boxing whut?

First F1 Night Grand Prix in Singapore!

This looks damn sweet! 1600 lights are going to be used to light up the course. You can check out the demo of the course from this youtube video. Don't miss it on September 28th, it should be amazing!

Niceeee!

25th Anniversary New Balance Metallics! I like the Gold ones :P

Canon 50d

Canon's new DSLR. Seems fantastic. Would be a great upgrade from the XTi (higher sensitivity, full size camera, great vga screen). But 15.1MP seems overkill. It's being released at the end of September. Check out the review here.

Kukodo Bunnies

I want this Jersey! It's a team in Tokyo I believe. Perhaps Michal can hook me up!

Top 100 Books...

So I was just at Michal's site WWM and came upon one of his recent posts in regards to the top 100 books. According to the The Big Read BBC most adults have never read more than 6 books on this list!

Books I have in bold and italics are the ones I have read.
Books with a * are ones I have but haven't read yet.
Books with a + are ones I have seen the movie version of.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens*
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown+
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding+
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert+
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding+
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens+
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker+
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad*
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams+
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Note:

I think I only made it pass the "6" due to a lot of them being read while in school (junior high/high school). Only a few of them have I read that were out of class. I think this list would be great to go through once I am retired. It would definitely give me something to do, heh :P

Bending over backwards...

Bo yo!

Indian Superheroes

Back!

What an intense course Biol591. I have never worked so hard. It seems like a microscope should be attached to my face. Though it was a lot of hard work, the experience was definitely worth it and if anything the friendships that were created from it were great!

Kananaskis Field Course

I signed up for a summer course this year and thought that it would be cool to not be stuck in a class at the U of C campus. So I opted for a graduate class in the field regarding Entomology (The Study of insects). Though my major is not in this direction I still thought that it would be a great experience. The class started on the 6th of August out at the U of C Biogeoscience Station out by Barrier Lake (Formerly known as the Barrier Lake Field Station) and ends on the 15th.

Initially I really didn't think about the course load and just thought that it would be great experience having a class outside of Calgary that was hands-on learning and finished in 10 days, without a final test to boot! Well I was partially right in my expectations...except for the course load. Being outside is great, and having little day hikes to catch insects is cool too. But waking up at 7AM-> eating at 8AM->having a lecture at 9AM-> then going on a Day Hike until 3-4PM (for the past 2 days)-> having super at 5:30PM -> Another lecture at 7PM -> then from 8:30PM and onwards you are in the basement lab sorting/classifying/pinning insects for your collection (worth 45%) that you have caught (which is probably 12-1AM). On top of that you are either studying for a quiz or writing a paper (I have had a quiz and a paper due in the last 2 of 3 days). But in the end I suppose it is a cool experience, definitely not a "vacation" class though.

Today's hike was pretty cool though, we covered aquatic insects, so we went to a beaver damn, a creek, a lake and a few still ponds. My favourite catch today was a Dragonfly nymph (~1.5-2 inches) and a huge Dragonfly Adult. The only crap thing was being in the 29 degree weather, gross.

7 more days, 4 more days until my collection is due...ack!

P.S. The inset picture is that of a Dragonfly Nymph

I also thought this picture was kind of funny...for an Entomologist.

Crazy Summer!

Wow have I ever been busy this summer. I didn't take spring classes this year and just focused on work. For May, June and July I worked as the Junior Athletic Therapist for the Calgary Junior Maverick's Rugby Club. They are the elite developmental Rugby team here in Calgary and only 1 of 2 teams in Alberta (Edmonton has the other team). It was a great opportunity since I got to work along side the Senior therapist and learned a lot of things from her. I really enjoyed learning how to assess and treat soft tissue injuries (hamstrings, IT bands, etc.) and learning athletic taping was great (especially from someone that was so experienced at it).

At first I didn't think I would be busy with this at all, but in the end it ended up consuming about 3-4 nights a week and at least every other weekend. Add this to my schedule of covering other Rugby teams as a back up AT and covering the Junior Rugby teams as an on field medic and it proved to be quite a demanding schedule for these past few months. However the Jr. Maverick's ended up losing the Western Finals vs. the Vancouver Wave mid July and my schedule since then has really eased up. Now I am just prepping for a Biology Field Class that I signed up for the Summer Semester (I'll talk about it a bit in my next post).

An interesting opportunity has come up recently. The U16 Alberta Rugby team is heading out to Ottawa in the middle of August (right after I'm done my field class) and needs an AT. So I put in my application for that and am awaiting for the response. I have worked for them once (just last week) and it seemed like they liked me. And hey, a free trip out to our Nations Capital can't be that bad.

Backstreets Back... Alright!

They are coming to the C-spot on September 2, 2008. I can't wait!

My New Toy!

Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM
 
 

Do it again

Busy!

Hockey season was over at the end of March and since then I haven't had a training job to do until the beginning of May. Now I'm covering Rugby. Apparently I did so well with hockey (and received good reviews) that I got the junior athletic therapist position with our local elite team! My first day with them was on Monday and I was super nervous, but pulled through. Tomorrow I'll be traveling to St. Albert to cover a Division 1 game (not with the elite) team. I didn't feel like traveling for this one, but oh well, it's a favor. Hopefully I don't come back too late, I have more rugby to cover early Sunday morning! I'm a busy man!

Changes

Well I haven't written in this for AGES. I want to get back to doing it. I think I will have to do a whole new look though. So Good bye to this look and time to find a new one!