Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Some people who know me think that I eat a lot. I certainly do enjoy eating, and I have a pretty healthy appetite. Despite this, my bizarre metabolism has meant that I’ve been a scarily lanky person most of my life - at carnivals and the CNE, I could regularly beat the ‘Guess Your Weight’ by a good 40 lbs.
The rapid metabolism had to main impacts on my body - I could never gain break 125 lbs and I always had the default abs. Default abs is the six pack that shows not because you’re in good shape, but rather because your body lacks any fat whatsoever, so those abs just stick out.
Growing older, and the working lifestyle has changed my metabolism somewhat. I’m not sure how it happened, but all of a sudden I’m cracking 145 lbs, I have a little more meat on my bones, but sadly I’ve lost the default abs.
My brother and dad have always assured me - be happy with being skinny now because once I hit 30 everything just falls apart. It’s already started, and only five years early. Time to do a thousand crunches…
Presto Card - Carte Presto The government of Ontario is moving transit to a universal fare card system. Neato!
Students invited to triple up Okay this is stretching it me thinks. First years will be offered bunking up at Ron Eydt Village at UW. That’s 3 people in a room not big enough to have chairs at your desk. For one!
GOOD Magazine I checked this magazine about social activism out at my sister’s place. It looked really interesting so I subscribed. They donate the subscription fee to a cause of my choice. I went with WITNESS - a group that gives local groups video equipment to capture human rights abuses to be used in international court.
I love magazines too much…
There is now strong scientific evidence that the eldest child has a higher IQ than is siblings. That means that my brother is 4% more intelligent than I am, being the third born.
The study supposedly indicates that family dynamics was the cause and not biological factors.
Originally, I supposed that the maternal age could be the cause, but the study correct for other factors “including parents’ education level, maternal age at birth and family size”.
I guess it’s hard for me to say how my elder siblings’ upbringing differed from my own as I don’t have the best memory of the 6 years before I was born, but it’s probably true in my family - my brother and sister are smarties.
The NYTimes article goes on to give the youngest this interesting tidbit:
This kind of experimentation might explain evidence that younger siblings often live more adventurous lives than their older brother or sister. They are more likely to participate in dangerous sports than eldest children, and more likely to travel to exotic places, studies find. They tend to be less conventional than firstborns, and some of the most provocative and influential figures in science spent their childhoods in the shadow of an older brother or sister (or two or three or four).
Charles Darwin, author of the revolutionary “Origin of Species,†was the fifth of six children. Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish-born astronomer who determined that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the planetary system, grew up the youngest of four. The mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, the youngest of three, was a key figure in the scientific revolution that began in the 16th century.
Now I have an answer for when my friends ask me why I’m so weird… I’m unconventional because I lived in the shadow of my brother and sister!
Does setting up a fixed weekly schedule work? I’m going to try this checklist starting Monday.
Monday
* 4 hours of GMAT studying
Tuesday
* Weekly bowling meetup or driving range
Wednesday
* Personal research day
Thursday
* Go for a jog
Friday
* Recreation day
Saturday
* Work on jumpshot
* Read 100 pages of something
Sunday
* Cook something new
I’m an optimist! Happy AND go-lucky. But some things still get to me, and make me jealous, envious, anxious and sometimes just plain sad.
1) Facebooking friends who are not on the same continent as you. And realizing I probably will never see Maccu Picchu.
2) Finding a “100 Things to do before you die” and being unable to check of 6, maybe 8.
3) Learning about World Heritage sites… from Wikipedia
4) Coming the the slow, half year conclusion, that I can’t even keep up with a simple blogging promise.
5) The ever growing stack of unread books on my bookshelf
6) Being so out of shape I’m losing my default abs.
7) Comparing my bank balance next to the growing average house price in Canada
8 ) Seeing people less fortunate, and still being so damn incapable of really doing anything about it.
10) Not knowing whether and how I want to leave a legacy.
11) Would people come to my funeral?
12) Worrying that my bad knee will keep me out from being active the rest of my life.
13) Statistics on colon cancer
14) Being unimpressed by my own resume.
15) Dying alone.
16) Trying to convince myself I am _not_ having a quarter life crisis
Now that I’m done with that, I’m going to go eat some ice cream.
When I was maybe 6, I told my parents once that I wanted to be a garbage man when I grew up. From my suburban window, they worked just once a week in the mornings! Talk about sweet hours!
To this day I’m not sure why, but I find waste management really interesting.
The Toronto City Council has voted in favour of a new garbage plan. The $209 garbage fee is taken out of the property tax tax and is a separate fee now on the water bill (starting last 2008). But if you throw away more than one 75L bag a year every two weeks, you are charged between $41 for half a bag more to $151 for 3.5 bags more.
Bonus: Toronto will have to finally start recycling styrofoam or residents will go nuts over not being able to fit it in the trash. Bennymoto’s sage financial advice: Invest in trash compactor companies.
Garbage plan gets green light - thestar.com
Bizarre Toronto Sun opinion column - torontosun.com
The Escapist - Cthulhu: Why so difficult? Outlining the gaming industry’s several attempts, and lack of success at turning Cthulhu into a popular videogame. Bonus sidenote: Pokethulhu
Watching the Office while eating… Cleanup in aisle 3!
Reason 47 I love summer - ribbbfessssst
June 29th to July 2nd, 2007
Toronto Ribfest
Centennial Park in Etobicoke
July 13th to July 15, 2007
Markham Ribfest
Markham Fairgrounds in Markham
July 20th to July 22nd, 2007
Mississauga Ribfest
Mississauga City Hall in Mississauga
August 3rd to August 6th, 2007
Scarborough Ribfest
Thomson Memorial Park in Scarborough
August 31st to September 3rd, 2007
Canada’s Largest Ribfest
Spencer Smith Park in Burlington
This is not a complete list… I missed the Brampton Rib and Roll in May! And Oshawa, London, Sarnia, Guelph, Barrie, and Quinte all apparently have ribfests too!
I bought the hard drive half a month ago. Waited two weeks to get my T8 Torx screwdriver from Hong Kong, spent 2 hours delicately taking apart my laptop, using two ice trays to keep track of the near 40 screws of all shapes and sizes, and she lives! Here is the guide I used (it wasn’t pretty).
I’m pretty happy - I’ve been flirting with a packed 40 gig hard drive since about 10 minutes after I first brought home bennybook, and slowly deleting songs from my music library as time moved on for about two years. Now I have a 120 gig hard drive in there - I can hear it purring along!
Opening up the motherboard side of bennybook for the first time, I was super impressed with the engineering here. One tiny fan does double duty cooling the CPU and the hard drive through the genius of a sort of curvy heat sink race track thingee.
the best part? Now that the drive isn’t full, my Mac is about 10x snappier. Yay for not having to reinstall the OS!
Especially on warm summer days, it’s not unusual for me to have a strong craving for beer. And when I do, and I’m at a bar or on a patio, I usually order me a Steam Whistle beer.
I’ve been chided before for liking Steam Whistle, but it has been my favorite Canadian beer by far. I enjoy a cold pint, and I make a serious effort to try something new regularly, but I always find myself coming back to Steam Whistle. It’s not for everyone, but I love it! Yum!
To all beer drinkers, right now at the beer store the 12 bottle suitcase comes with a free bottle opener! Usually I’m not sold on free beer stuff like tshirts or replica Stanley Cups, but look at it! It’s a retro bottle opener!
(Or send a self addressed stamped envelope and get one for free! Score!)
This week’s NYTimes magazine poses an interesting question. Given studies which show relatively older kids perform better in the early years of school, would you want your child to be the youngest or oldest in the class? Would you hold them back one year?
The concept makes a lot of sense - let your child’s mind develop a while longer and when they begin the school curriculum, they’ll be able to pick up reading and math much faster than their peers. And if you can afford the $10,000 for that extra year of daycare, it just may be a worthwhile investment.
The practice is called redshirting, and much like in college sports, the intent is to give your child an advantage over their peers.
For competitive parents, or parents that never want their kids to experience failure, it appears the practice is getting more popular. But as we go down that path, kids become the weapons of an academic arms race. According to the article, kids these days are expected to be able to write two complete sentences by the end of kindergarten, and the ‘No chile Left Behind’ grade 3 and 5 national testing on math and English means other ’softer’ skills usually get treated as second priorities.
While studies that claim that relatively older kids get more value out of each grade, that means compounded over a few years, and you are left with a large performance gap - the month you’re born in all of a sudden can indicate future success.
In the end, the real question should be how do we want kindergarten to prepare the next generation? Do we want it to evolve into a grade 1 curriculum under a different name? We shouldn’t be trying to ready our kids for kindergarten - instead figure out how to ready kindergarten for our kids.
It’s too bad I can’t remember too much from when I was five. I wonder if I had any redshirted kids in class, and how they’re doing now?
Everyone is talking about Sarah Silverman on Paris going to jail.
Earlier today I shared a link with Simo on these New York Magazine profiles on how people make profit in NYC. It’s a really interesting piece. Here are some tidbits:
- Established diners suffer from menu-bloat. They can’t remove items because people come back asking for old items. (Burgers are money makers. Steak not so much).
- The soup kitchen gets more annual revenue than the pizzera (but the soup kitchen doesn’t make a profit).
- There are so many taxis in NYC because parking is too expensive - it’s cheaper to take a cab. In downtown Toronto, parking is either incredibly underpriced, or painfully overpriced.
- Nobu can turn twice as much profit than most restaurants because of cheap rent and crammed table spacing.
- It costs the MoMA $50 for each patron who visits - $20 comes from admission and $30 from the endowment fund.
- A meth dealer with the right connections can turn $200k into $1m a year. Jail is inevitable - someone will rat you out.
- New York is a place of astonishing extremes of wealth and poverty, but the city doesn’t make people poor. It attracts poor people because of its economic opportunity, social services, and car-free living.
Personally, I couldn’t really identify any of the 21 profiles. Apparently the only options in NYC is to work in small family business or in some mega corporation. And they say nothing about the hot dog vendor! Or the fake purse retailer! Is there any occupation more New York than that?
