Veronica Mars (is back)!!!

Wow. I loved this series when I was younger. The movie was pretty cool also. So glad to see it back!

*Note that when this series was out, there was no such thing as streaming!

My N64 Quest

nos·tal·gia

/näˈstaljə,nəˈstaljə/Learn to pronouncenouna sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.
"I was overcome with acute nostalgia for my days in college"

synonyms:

wistfulness, longing/yearning/pining for the past, regret, regretfulness, reminiscence, remembrance, recollection, homesickness, sentimentality "there is a nostalgia for traditional values"

something done or presented in order to evoke feelings of nostalgia.
"an evening of TV nostalgia"

Nostalgia has hit me and it has hit me hard. It's coming in the form of the Nintendo 64. I had a lot of great memories with this system. It came out while I was in high school but I didn't get it until after I graduated and in my gap years before I went back to University.

Such good memories. Hanging out with the boys and having golden eye/slap battles with Odd Job. Playing Starfox 64 4 player battles. 

Sad part of this story is that I had a great list of titles and then I lent the system to my wife's sister for her kids to play. Now that I asked for it, they don't know where it is. My best guess is the niece or nephew gave it away :(

The fun but also pricey part of this story is that I'm going to start the collection up again from scratch. I started it yesterday by buying a funtastic blue N64 system this time off of Facebook on a local video game collectors group that I have recently joined.  It came with matching controller and and Golden Eye.  I found an older 13 inch LCD TV that has AV inputs so it looks good and not severely stretched and pixelated. If you put it on a bigger (more current) wide screen, it gets stretched and the graphics output for the N64 isn't enough so it looks like a blurry mess. There is a hdmi upgrade kit that is available but it's a bit price at about $200 USD (before install fees) that I might look into in the future. But right now I'm very happy with the setup (already spent an hour playing Golden Eye!). 

My new RARE Funtastic Ice Blue N64 with Golden Eye!

Here is what I am looking for....

N64 WANTED List

• Perfect Dark
• Shadow of the Empire
• Rogue Squardon
• Starfox 64
• Banjo Kazooie
• Smash Bros
• Wcw vs NWO world tour
• Mario Party
• Mario Party 2
• Mario Party 3
• Mario Kart 64
• Star wars episode 1 pod racer
• Jet force Gemini
• Harvest Moon 64
• Conker's Bad Fur Day
• Diddy Kong Racing
• Worms Armageddon
• Doom 64
• Memory pak (to save games)
• 3 funtastic ice blue controllers

Mm-hmmm

AI is just getting ridiculous now! Check out this real conversation that Google Duplex has with another human being! It's seamless and the real person can't even tell that they are speaking to a machine (a smart one at that)! The conversation is a lot less awkward than some I have witnessed between human and human!

This I would assume will be a game changer for Google Assistant. I love my Google Home Assistant as I find it super useful. I love not having to pull out my phone just to "Google" things up, I love the ability to play almost any song/album/radio station upon request and adding events to my Calendar/Keep, I use it to cast movies/shows onto my other devices, I use it to set timers, tell me recipes, convert units and do so many other simple things around the house.

The most impactful thing I have used Google Assistant for was when my wife was away at a business conference and my son Cooper was running a fever. I was holding him and he wouldn't let me put him down for me to grab my phone. I needed my phone so that I could search for "the normal temperature of a toddler (in Celsius) should be", so I just asked the Google Assistant that we have via a Google Home in our room and got my answer right away. It was simply amazing. Simple but revolutionary.

I can't wait to get to use this new one!

To read more about Google Duplex, and it's conversation AI, go to the Google AI Blog here

P.S. Remember that girl name Siri? Yeah, I don't either.

Childish Gambino: The Artist the World Needs Right Now.

What an incredible song and video from Childish Gambino.  It truly captures the state of America and the world in 2018. It captures the violence of today's world, the strange obsession with the 2nd amendment in the USA, the oddball political theatrics happening in the US, terrorism, etc. 

You could feel the fire from Childish Gambino with his first album "Camp" back in 2011. It wasn't something you would expect from him especially if you were first exposed to him through the TV Show "Community". It left some wondering if he was just a "try hard" or if this was his true self. What I can say now is, that he is growing as an artist exponentially and what he puts out is always genuine and incredible. 

If you haven't listened to any of his stuff yet I would recommend to start off with this one and work your way up. I'm also loving his "Kauaui "Album too. Also if you want a darker comedy to watch with him in it, go have a look at Season 1 of Atlanta. 

6 years later.....

....wow time flies and remnants of myself are scattered all over the "net". 

My boy!

This is one of those remnants of my youth! Silly posts that mean nothing really but a quick snapshot of my life adventures/experiences. 

Where am I now? 

Happily married with a 2-year-old boy, working at a bank as a Speech Analyst and still volunteer my "spare time" with Training Hockey! 

It's going well and I can't complain. 

Part of me has grown up but part of me still hasn't. Do we ever grow up? Should we? It doesn't sound fun at all to do so. I think the balance I have right now is just right. 

I think I will revive this blog....yeah that sounds fun :)

Golfing Late Summer 2012

I have been playing golf off and on since 1998 but never took it too seriously. I would go out once or twice a season or not at all (the last time I golfed was back in the summer of 2010 out in Kelowna). I would rarely go to the driving range to practice or even try to improve my game. Even when Brad gave me a free set of clubs back in 2002/2003 I still did not think much to bring my game up to a higher level...until this year. Why is this year so different? I was invited to play in a game with my co-workers. Not wanting to suck so bad (like I usually do) I went to the driving range a week before our actually tee time so that I could actually break down my swing and practice. Now if you know my golf game then you know I can use my irons without a problem but using my driver was a constant battle (I would slice that sucker all the time). I couldn't figure out for the life of me what I was doing wrong. I have never taken lessons and people who watch me swing are equally as clueless as me so there was never any good critical feedback. So the night before the range I looked up this video

I listened to what he said in regards to FTW (Forward, Tilt, Wide) and coupled that with his "Baseball swing" advice and it still didn't work. I was pissed! I went back to my irons and hit a few again and had a moment where I realized that when I stepped closer to the ball I would hit them straight, but if I was reaching they would slice. So I went back to my driver and stepped closer to the ball, added in FTW plus the baseball swing and BOOM!!!! It went straight and far!! I couldn't believe it. I had to try to repeat this and I set out 10 balls to see what my consistency was and it was 8/10!!! I was so relieved and happy that it worked and it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off of me and I'm actually excited to play and not hesitant like I used to be before because of not being able to drive the ball! Now I think I have caught the golf bug! All I want to do is go drive balls and play a round. Since that day (last Wednesday) I have gone to the driving range an additional 2 times and have a round of 9 holes set up for this upcoming Sunday. Hopefully my practice will have translated over to the real game and I will enjoy it a lot more than I usually do. I will see how this Sundays 9 holes will turn out!

2011/2012 CBHA Bantam AAA Bisons

One of my best years ever for being a hockey trainer. I've been doing it for 5 seasons now and on my 5th season I picked the 2011/2012 CBHA Bantam Bisons to work with. I have never worked with the Bantam age group and wanted a change from Minor Midget. I definitely don't regret switching age groups, in fact I'm surprised I never did it earlier. I worked with a great bunch of kids and a great coaching/management staff. It was the most fun I have had in awhile working a hockey team and I'm glad that I got to experience such a complete team from the kids to the staff to the parents. We didn't win any tournaments but did pretty good in most of them. We went to 3 tournaments this year in Red Deer (2nd place), Medicine Hat (4th place?) and then St. Albert (Consolation B runner up). Overall that was the best that this team has ever done, so it was good. I enjoyed working with this team so much and I even strapped on the skates to be at their practices too. This was a lot of fun and I wonder why I never did it before? From now on I will try to be on the ice with the kids more (for practices). We made a good run to provincials. We beat out the pesky Stamps and then the Royals for the City Championships (both teams that we had a very hard time beating during the regular season) and then we beat out the Airdrie Extreme for the Southern Ablerta Championships. We faced Edmonton SSAC in the Provincial finals but were swept 3-0 in a 5 game series. It was a very memorable season though and it ended up with my coaching staff winning the "Coaching Staff of the Year" award and myself winning the "Trainer of the Year" award. What a great team and what a great year! Go Bisons Go!!!

Kicking Horse Jan 2011

I don't think I have ever posted these pictures. But Dave and I went to Kicking Horse (by Golden B.C.) for a weekend of snowboarding back in Jan of 2011. It was awesome and crazy times. The drive out was pretty crazy since there was a huge snow storm that was made driving out to Golden pretty scary and crazy. Traffic was single file, 2 sets of tire tracks on the road, doing only about 80 km/h and visibility was less than 50 metres (at some points visibility was only about a car length in front). The direct route of Highway 1 West was closed down just after Lake Louise due to avalanches so we had to take the 93 towards Invermere and then head up to Golden. The drive between Invermere and Golden was definitely the scariest drive Dave and I have ever encountered. It was white knuckle driving, trying to keep on the roads while passing semi trucks and barely being able to see if there was any on coming traffic! When we finally reached Golden we had to have a beer and celebrate that we made it there safely! Kicking horse was worth the drive though! Just check out these pictures. The mountain is absolutely gorgeous! It's elevation kept it above the clouds and made for breath taking scenery. I still remember turning a bend and seeing the morning sun hit the clouds that were floating below us...just amazing. Here are some pictures of the first day we were there:

The two days of snowboarding were amazing. The first day it didn't snow, but a huge dump had fallen over night (because of the storm) and so the day was a lot of fun (and where I really learned how to ride in powder). It got tracked out pretty badly on the first day and became pretty choppy as the day progressed...but we were so excited to be on a new mountain that we stayed till it closed. The second day that we went it was dumping continuously throughout the day. The snowflakes that were falling were larger than a twoonie. You could lay a track down a run and it would vanish by the time you got back up to do it again. I tried taking go pro video that day but the flakes were so big and they kept on landing on the lens that it made for lame ass videos. We ended up staying at Golden from Jan 13th-Jan 17 of 2011. Why? Well we headed out at night on the Thursday and then we were planning to snowboard on the Friday and Saturday and then heading back Sunday. However when Sunday rolled around it was still snowing hard (my car would have about a metre of snow by morning) and all the roads leading out were closed due to avalanche. The only road open to get back to Calgary was a very long detoured route that would have us go all the way down to Fernie before coming back up. So we opted to stay another night to see if the roads would open up. It's a really weird feeling being isolated and not being able to leave. It felt like being on a small little island. The feeling was a bit creepy. By Monday morning we decided that we didn't want to be stuck in Golden any longer so we took the route to Fernie and 6 to 7 hours later we made it home to Calgary...what a crazy trip!