Plan developed on Wednesday, approved Wednesday afternoon, executed on Friday. "Team building" activity at Wonderland. The forecast was overcast all day with 60% chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. We were a bit worried about the rain, but when we saw that the total rainfall was only 3mm, the plan was a go.
It ended up being the PERFECT day to go to an amusement park. Due to the forecast, hardly anyone was at the park. The longest we waited in line was 10-15 minutes. Most of the time, we just walked right onto the ride. The weather cooperated too. Overcast ALL day, and the thunderstorms that were suppose to greet us never arrived. Nice for a change that we didn't have to melt under 30C weather.
Started the day off at 10:30am. Group photo with Scooby Doo. First ride, Shockwave. I don't know why we picked this ride as the first one in the day. I was half asleep still, and the ride tossed me around quite well. Unlike a roller coaster, you couldn't really predict which way you'd be turning. Glad I didn't eat a big breakfast. The Bat. The Fly (my favourite ride). Thunder Run (A newbie version of Space Mountain). Bumper Cars. Vortex.
Basketball game - $10 for three shots. One shot in the basket nets you a big basketball cushion. LS went first, and he air-balled all three shots. He claimed that the basket is a lot further away than you expected and you were shooting uphill. He ended up chugging the last shot with one arm (like hammer throw in Ultimate). I knew it was a waste of money, but had to try nevertheless. I fell short on my first shot (basket was further than expected). Caught the back rim on my second shot, and missed my third. JS couldn't believe how pathetic LS and I was, so he forked over his $10. Ended up air-balling all three shots. We gave up in the end, and decided the ROI was not worth it for this game.
12:20 lunch. $15 for Teriyaki Chicken Noodles + drink. They don't allow you to bring food into the park for a reason. Next time, I'm packing my lunch and say that I'm on a special diet. It apparently works.
Ice cream @ Dairy Queen. Drop Zone x2. After the Six Flags accident on a similar ride, some of us were a bit uneasy. But what the heck, what are the chances? KL showed up late and exclaimed "You guys went already!?!" Since there was no line, we went again with him. Some scuba diving show. Tomb Raider - Has this ingenious system to elevate the cart.
On our way to Top Gun, we decided to stop and play some ring tossing game where you have to get the ring around one of the many bottles in the center. $10 for a bucket of 100 or so rings. If you've tried before, you'd know this game is impossible. I've wasted many buckets in the past without any luck. We started off sharing two buckets and in a "moment of perfection", VS managed to hit the jackpot. WTFBBQ. No Way!!! OMG!!!! Ended up winning this GIGANTIC blue gorilla.
They brought out our prize and we all got around it for a group photo. Then we discovered a hole in the gorilla, and asked for an exchange. While the guy went to the back to bring out our replacement, we decided to get another two buckets to pass the time. Not that we wanted to win another one, since we had no idea how we'll be able to take another one home. As luck will have it, KP managed to get a ring around a bottle. TWO gorillas. WTF. BBQ. The guy just brought out our first gorilla replacement was told to go back and get another one. LOLOL. Man, all these years of failures, and we hit the jackpot twice. We decided, just for the heck of it, to get another bucket of rings to pass time. The dudes won't let us play again, saying there is a limit of TWO winnings per day. LOL.
Now comes the part where we had to escort the Gorilla out of the park. We essentially had a person under each arm of the gorilla, and a third person lifting its ass off the ground. Got a LOT of looks from people, some even took their cameras out to take a picture.
We brought them to the Tochi Mobile. Since I had reverse parked the car and my RAV4 trunk opens sideways, I moved the car halfway out of the parking spot to accommodate. These freaking Gorillas were a LOT bigger than I expected, or else my car was a LOT smaller than I thought. We managed to literally stuff both gorillas into the car, but I had to fold down my back seats, and push both my front seats up.
Having gone through the tedious ordeal of stuffing the gorillas into my car, we realized that I still have to back up my car! For a second, I was distraught, thinking, OMG.. NOOOOOO! Then we realized I could put the car in neutral and push it back in. lol. I had to reach down to push the brake, while someone on the other side put the car in neutral. I've never really pushed a car before until now.
Back in the park. Top Gun. Italian Job Stunt Track. SkyRider. Jetscream. Psyclone. 3 pt basketball shooting. AB/GL/KL did the bungee jump/swing thingy. Before we knew it, it was 6pm. A long day, lots of rides, lots of fun, lots of loot.
This weekend, Toronto is hosting its own Just for Laughs Festival. Our hometown boy, Russell Peters, was the host of tonight's show titled "Russell Peters and friends". This was not a show to be missed, so PR and I headed to Dundas Square. Got there at 7pm and it was PACKED. We ended up just standing on Yonge St, with the stage at the far end of Dundas Square.
Russell started off by commenting how they blocked off Yonge Street for this event. This is the first time Yonge Street has been blocked off for something other than a shooting. He was glad to see all the Asians in the crowd. We managed to walk three blocks from Spadina (Chinatown) over to Yonge.
Russell continued on with his jokes, some of which I've heard before. Then he got to the part about Pacific Mall.
A few years ago, I made some fun of Pacific Mall (around 6:30 of this video). So, two days ago, I went back to visit Pacific Mall again. It looks exactly the same, fake purses, pirated DVDs everywhere. I walked into this store, and this Chinese guy stuffs a DVD into my hands. [In Chinese Accent] "Commmeeedy, you like!" I looked down. "Hey! That's my DVD!!" [In Chinese Accent] "Nooo Nooo. Two bucks!" I explained, "Look that's ME on the cover!" The Chinese guy then let out this long GRRRRRRRRRRR. I examined the DVD more closely. "Why the f**k am I packaged with Chris Rock and David Chappelle?" [In Chinese Accent] "I dunno. Coommmeeedy. People like."
On Americans, Russell had the following to say.
People think that Canadians and Americans are so similar. I work in LA now, and let me tell you, we are so different from them. Americans are so ignorant. I was doing some of my Trinidadian jokes, and these Americans asked me what Trinidadian is. I'm like "a person from Trinidad!" "Oh, where is Trinidad?" Just to pull their leg, I tell them it's in Africa. "Where in Africa?" "Just off the coast, just off the coast." They were happy.
Following Russell's act was Jo Koy. Apparently, Jo will be hosting his own Comedy Central show in a few months. From the back of the crowd, all I see is this bald white guy. He mentioned that he was Asian, I'm like.. is that a joke? Only after zooming in with TochiCam did I realize he does look Philippino. The guy started off a little slow, but once he got going, he was very good.
Some of the gems (as best as I can remember):
Mother's day is really special. It celebrates the day girls become mothers. That's a really big thing. Now, I know all you men out there are wondering about Father's Day. Let me tell you, Father's day started with a couple guys in the pub, complaining how come there's a Mother's day and not a Father's day. It's pathetic. If Father's Day is celebrating anything, it's celebrating the day when we dug in too far. That is NOT cause for celebration.
In bed, when we push too hard, we hear "It hurts! It hurts!" But man, that pain is NOTHING compared to the pain in the delivery room. In there, we tell them, "We can do this, we'll pull through together". But there's jack shit we can do. The nurses would tell her to PUSH PUSH! All of a sudden, this head pulls back the curtains of the vagina.... A few more pushes later, this eight and a quarter pound thing pops out. WTF. I never expected it to be that huge. It thought it would just be a ball that rolls out. Not this eight and a quarter pound alien. How the heck do we compete with that thing?!? It has arms and legs! We can never match its size! God really screwed us when he designed our penises. We just can't match eight and a quarter pounds! Especially as an Asian!
Man, I was laughing so hard, until I heard that last line. A quick WTF, then more lololol. I was shedding tears from too much laughter.
Also performing were the Doo Wops, some Italian duo. They sang a few tunes and were quite horrible. I had a hard time following any of the lyrics, and soon lost interest. At first, I thought it was just because I was at the back of the crowd, but in their final tune, when they wanted people to join into the song and wave their arms doing this triangle hand gesture, I saw only two people actually doing it. It must be embrassing for them to see the lack of reception from the crowd.
At the end of the show, I was super hungry, so I didn't stay for the pryo-technical light show from Germany. I heard it was very cool afterwards, but filling the stomach was more important.
I might have mentioned in the past that there are some pretty nifty custom license plates where I work. Two of coolest ones were CHOCOBO and TARUTARU. Really tells you how geeky some of my lab mates are. I've wondered for a long time who owns these license plates, half curious to see what they looked like.
A few weeks ago, as I was leaving a team picnic, I noticed CHOCOBO was parked beside me in the parking lot. So apparently, someone on my team owns this plate! I meant to ask around the next day to find the true owner, but the matter slipped my mind.
So today, as I was driving to work, I noticed CHOCOBO was two cars in front of me! My heart skipped a beat, as I was on the verge of determining the secret identify of the mysterious CHOCOBO fan. I switched lanes, sped up so I was side-by-side with CHOCOBO. Turned my head and voila, it's my coworker who sits in the cube right BESIDE mine. I was so shocked. How come it took me so long to figure this out? This coworker isn't that geeky, totally breaking my perception.
I was talking to him afterwards, and he mentioned that he doesn't like to drive. Whenever our team goes out, we never take his car. I jokingly asked if he was "ashamed" of his license plate. It's such a cool license plate!
On a semi-related note, new Ontario license plates are of the form "ABCD 123". They finally got to BXXX, and the most interest four letter sequence I've seen so far is "BAKA 123". :-)
Tutti Matti. Summerlicious stop. A block away from MEC. This Italian restaurant is located in a single story rectangular building wedged between two high-rises. The exterior really reminded me of a shoebox. As you enter the restaurant, you immediately notice two things: 1) the restaurant seating is essentially the front area and one long row of tables down the length of the restaurant, and 2) the open concept kitchen emanating the most wondrous of aromas.
Our reservations was for a party of 8 for 6:30pm. Two peeps ended up bailing on us last minute. When we told the restaurant staff that only 6 people will be coming, they were not very pleased. I bet they turned away some Summerlicious reservation requests. To make matters worse, D came late and did not arrive till 7pm. We sat around for 30 minutes without ordering anything. The waiters must have been annoyed even more that we were holding up the table.
Anyway, moving onto food. Summerlicious has two flavours - a $25 dinner and a $35 dinner, depending on the restaurant. Come to think of it, I have always attended the $35 variety, so Tutti Matti would be my first $25 sample. The food from the kitchen smelled so good, so I had high expectations.
I settled on the following three course meal:
Carpaccio di Trota
cured rainbow trout carpaccio served with fresh red onion and beet vinaigrette
Talapia
oven roasted talapia wrapped with potatoes and served with seasonal vegetables
Bubu
warm chocolate cake with caramel and vanilla ice cream.
The appetizer was Carpaccio di Trota. I was told the name just means slices of raw trout, which was exactly what was served. I have never had raw trout before, unless it was part of some sashimi that I was fed. The trout was fresh, but quiet bland. I liked the red onions and vinaigrette. However, after my disastrous effort at making vinaigrette once, any vinaigrette that tastes half decent earns high marks in my books.
The main entrée is Talapia - its main ingredient is a fillet of talapia. Yeah, that's the name of the dish. Who names their dishes so simply at a fancy restaurant?!? Despite the shortcomings in its name, this dish was damn awesome. Very thin strips of potatos laid on top and below a huge fillet of talapia. The potato wrapping was roasted till it was almost crispy (aided by a flame torch, I'm sure). The potato somehow held the flavour and juice of the fish intact. As you cut into the fillet, a strong fragrance just envelopes your senses. I can almost taste the fish before eating it. I eat fish quite a bit, and I have not had such a FRESH, well-prepared fish in a long time. I'm not sure if they spiced up the fish in any way, but if they did, they only brought out and fortified the richness of the Talapia. Everything was almost perfect with this dish, the texture, aromas and the flavours most of all. I don't know how else to describe it. You have to try this dish to understand.
For dessert, the Bubu (not derived from Yogi Bear) was not really spectacular - the warm chocolate cake was nice, and I liked the fact that it was not too sweet. The name was the best part of the dessert - for once, it was something kind of unique! Though Bubu was definitely the better of the two dessert options (other being some weird looking meringue).
Overall, the meal was better than I expected. The talapia was so awesome - this dish alone makes it worthwhile to come back for a second visit. I am going to go to the supermarket, get some Talapia fillets and try my hand at making Tochi's version of "Talapia". Tutti Matti gets 4.5 / 5 Tochi Stars. Lost 0.5 stars for some stupid dish names.
Smart cars have been around for a few years and have been quite popular. Cute, easy to park, awesome gas mileage, people cannot stop looking at them. Even the Toronto Metropolitan Police got a couple for their parking enforcement officers. Imagine, getting ticketed by a Smart car.
Anyway, one of the major concerns with the Smart car has always been safety; last year, a smart car got stuck like a "rock" in front of a truck, because the truck driver couldn't see the Smart and ended up rear-ending it for miles on a freeway.
I mean, a car that small cannot possibly take any type of contact. Well, it seems like we have nothing to worry about..at least the steel reinforced cage should keep people in one piece.
Smart car survived 70mph crash (or 35mph head-on crash with another 35mph car). :-)
Now, let us compare that crash test with the following crash test of a Chinese car (not sure how fast) :
The cage just crumpled. As one commenter mentioned... let the patriotic Chinese try out their cars for 10-20 years first. If you see one heading your way on the roads, RUN!!!
One of my favourite local photographers has this photo blog, TopLeftPixel. Last month, he posted the following picture showing King's College Circle @ University of Toronto. I've been meaning to take a panoramic shot and create my own "globe".
Original Panorama (Click to zoom):
Without further ado, the Tochi Globe I:
The globe has an uneven crack at the top (must have been either tripod movement or a stitcher issue). The colours totally didn't match due to the sunrise - my wrap around point was in the water there. Nevertheless, I thought it turned out pretty well, considering it is my first Photoshop product and one of the few panoramas I have shot. I'll have to try an easier panoramic shot / globe again.
Some of my other non-panoramic sunrise (5:48am) photos turned out better:
All photos were from Ajax Waterfront Park on July 15th, 2007.
ETA: Added the original panorama for the globe.
Y and I went to Hollywood Restaurant (城市荷里活餐廳) at Market Village for lunch a few days ago. The placemat was kind of amusing, so I decided to take a photo and share it.
My "translation":
The 6 Rules to "soothe a wife" (XD):
- Wife is never wrong.
- If I discover my wife is wrong, I must have seen something wrong.
- If I did not see anything wrong, it must be my fault that allowed my wife to be wrong.
- If it is herself that's wrong, as long as she does not admit it, she is not wrong.
- If my wife does not admit she's wrong, and I insist she is, then it is my fault.
- In any case, the wife is never wrong. This statement CANNOT be wrong.
Husband, please recite the aforementioned rules six times every day, to prevent any errors.
Cheers.
I've been off to a pretty good start blogging this year, 50 posts in 1H of 2007; on track for 100 posts in the year. It seems a lot more than I expected. Unfortunately, I've been rather lazy in the second half thus far. A dismal zero posts until this one.
A miscellaneous post on random stuff.
After J's BBQ party, I took a stroll to Colonel Danforth Park to pick up my first Bouncy Bunny. Stumbled across this frog in the river and spent 5 minutes photographing it, including getting on my belly to capture this shot.
It was full blast of Sunny f/16 setting, and unfortunately, I didn't realize the glare off the top of the frog. I would have gotten a leaf to give him some shade from the sun. Oh well.
Attended COG pub night in Newmarket. I still don't know why I went, or what made me decide to attend a gathering of GPS carrying weirdos. I guess I wanted to see what real geocachers were like. Anyway, the dudes were pretty much what I expected. All the introduction goes something like this:
- Me: "Hi, I'm Tochi. How do you do?"
- Geocacher: "I'm Geocacher Geek #1! How many finds do you have?"
- Me: "I'm a newbie, just 30ish"
- Geocacher: "Ahh, I have 800+! Let's see your GPS receiver!"
- Me: "What GPSr? I don't have one?"
- Geocacher: "WHAT?!?"
- Me: "I don't look in forests. Just simple caches."
- Geocacher: "You have to get a GPSr, it makes it SO MUCH EASIER."
- ...so on and so forth..
It was pretty cool seeing some of the latest advances in PDA and GPS technology. I learned that the SiRF III chips fry easily in airport X-ray machines. Some poor guy lost two GPSr before learning to ask for hand inspections.
This guy was showing off his GPS-enabled PDA. He had all the geocaching cache coordinates stored into this GPS program, overlaid with Google Map satellite photos. Most other geocachers apparently did not have this feature. I was interested in how he was getting the satellite photos feed, since wi-fi was not working. He confided in me that he manually took screenshots of google map satellite photos and stitched them up himself. Then he synced it up with the mapping program in his PDA. Man, my only thought was that this guy needs a life. lol.
Part of the gang decided to tackle the hardest geocache in Newmarket area afterwards - the infamous Determination: How Bad Do You Want It? The cache is located on an island in a nearby lake. To get to the cache, one has to swim/paddle/walk across approximately 30-40 feet of muddy, filthy water. Rumors said that someone had brought a canoe! When am I going to get a better chance to do this cache? Got there and saw the crowd gather around the shoreline. Where is the boat? There's no canoe or kayak in sight! Then someone pointed out to a guy in the middle of the strait and said: "There's the boat!"
Apparently, the boat was a pair of hip waders. The water was low enough that it only got up to the waist of most people. However, the mud bed was so soft that people were sinking up to their knees in the mud. It was taking people five minutes of strenuous walking to cross to the island! You tire out very easily, but if you stop, you sink. If you move fast, you tire out even quicker. I ended up not doing the cache, but had lots of fun taking pictures. I'll just wait till winter when the water ices over and sprint across to the island.
I won't mention any names here to save a certain person some embarrassment. A highly abbreviated version of the MSN chat:
MM: "i got conned into buying a 2GB card lol/conned = sweet-talked"
me: "how much?"
MM: "$50"
me: "$50 for 2GB?!? ... wtf"
MM: "apparently it retails for $150 and is the best card out there today"
me: "$50 isn't too much money for rich kids / [but] i think u got ripped off. lol"
MM: "i just found [the SD card from the store site - A Transcend 150x on sale for $99.99]"
me: "i find [the transcend] label funky looking / like a no-name brand / oh well / you are getting $50 discount / lolol"
me: "[Link to another store selling for the identical card for $24!!!]"
MM: "wtf"
MM ended up getting a good discount after calling the guy back. He gets a high quality SD card and everyone (including store salesman) ends up happy. :)
Finally got to try Cooking Mama for a bit. Cutting with the Wii-mote was so much fun. That was really the only fun part of the game. The wii-mote motions were not being registered too well by the game, so it got pretty frustrating. Would not recommend.
Getting my gear in order for the upcoming trips. Got a shutter remote release cable. Vistek had the cheapest price in town, but their store is kind of far from the downtown core, so my friends who worked downtown could not / would not pick one up for me. I went to the Henry's near my home, and the stupid sales guy won't price match to Vistek. Claimed that Nikon accessories are high quality products, they don't make much money from it and they won't give any discounts. WTF. Bogus excuses excuses. I left without getting the cable.
I happen to drive by another Henry's store and decided to try my luck again. Found a female sales lady this time, told her I wanted the cable and asked if they would price match. She was like "of course!" Stupid bastard at the original store. Never shopping there again.
Got the cable. Spare batteries have been ordered. Only filters remain. Almost ready!!
I have been biking regularly since the weather warmed up this spring. Since one of my biking friends has a racing road bike, I have only been able to go on paved pathways around the city. Toronto maintains a surprisingly large number of biking trails, so over the past weeks, we really got to explore different parts of the city.
I had always wanted to revisit some awesome mountain biking trails by Bayview and Stouffville. I used to bike on these trails a fair bit back in high school days. However, ever since they built the Bayview extension through the Oak Ridges moraine, I thought the forest along with the trails were obliterated. Apparently, parts of the trails are still around.
Today, the guy with the road bike no-showed, so AR and I decided to give these trails a try. Parked at Lake Wilcox and headed back down Bayview to the trail head. The entrance to the trail was all sand. WTF. My bicycle cannot get any traction in sand. Heading in, the trails were still more sand than dirt... sigh. After some minor climbs, we came out to this open area with some really wild sand dunes and hills. Peering in, we see some dude on a motor bike impressively tackling these dunes. No wonder there are so much sand! The thought about bringing TochiCam to catch some photos of these bikers in action crossed my mind, but that will have to wait till another day. We were here to bike, so we headed back into the forest. In any case, our bicycles stood at a disadvantage in any collisions with a motor bike. :)
Now, I'm gonna describe one of the most baffling events of my life. I've added this little hand drawn trail map to aid in my description.
We started off heading east along the BLACK path and came across this really steep hill heading NE (incline at 30ish degrees). We had to walk our bikes up the hill after which, we decided to take left branch (heading NW). We rode quite a distance through these orange-tree-like groves (I remarked how it felt like we were riding through some guy's farm). At the entrance back into the main forest, AR remarked how it seems like we should be heading West, but the sun was to our left. Since this was early morning, the sun MUST be coming from the east, so "in theory", we were actually heading south (not north west).
Adjusting our orientation, we continued down the (BLUE) path (heading real-south), which veered off the to the right (west) a bit later. We had both expected to be somewhere to the north or west of the motorbike area, denoted by the end of the blue squiggle above. All of a sudden, we returned back our starting location with the motor biker. WTF. The path (RED) we just came down was actually further east than our initial NE incline. Somewhere along the way, we must have looped clockwise and ended up east of our starting location, instead of looping counter clockwise as I thought. I'm usually pretty good with directions. I've never felt so disorientated or baffled in my life. The weird thing is, AR was also fooled too. It's really confusing...
After this, we picked another trail which took us to the forest area up north. We finally hit pay-dirt, as these dirt trails were more suitable for mountain biking. A lot of twists, double backs and turns, climbs and descents. We also came across the fabled abandon Chevy truck! A relic from a decade or two of abandonment.
I had a lot of trouble going up hills. I essentially had to push my bike up most of the more serious inclines. The sand and bike pushing really zapped a lot of energy out of my back. The downhill parts were really fun. It is really exhilarating to speed down hills, steering only the front wheel, and letting the back wheel bounce and fishtail behind you.
I almost wiped out once when I came across a section with multiple roots sticking out in close succession. I handled the first couple roots fine, but came into the last root at a bad angle. The front wheel got jammed and I barely bailed out in time. My right foot got caught between the handle bar and the bike frame (front wheel was twisted sideways). Good thing I was not going too fast, or else I might pull a Rich (ankle sprain) and McGregor was in serious jeopardy!
Near the north end of the forest, we came across a branch in the path. One path went down the ravine at a 45 degree drop. The other looked normal, but as we found out later, it dead-ended at some farmer's corn field. We weren't going to trespass through a corn field, so we were left with two options. Tackle the 45 degree drop down into the ravine, or go back the way we came. Ended up taking the 45 degree path (walked the bikes down). Once we got down to the bottom, we realized the paths out of the ravine all had similar 45 degree climbs up! Man. This was really bad. What ended up happening was AR scrambling up to the top. I went up as far as I can pulling each bike behind me. Handed off the bikes to AR halfway up. I was literally on my hands and knees trying to drag our bikes up. I'm really worried about McGregor now...
We biked a total of just over 15 km. My entire body is sore, I have bruises in several places and half my knuckles are scrapped. I also acquired a mosquito bite in the middle of my forehead. The journey was strenuous and the battle injuries are telling, but since I made it out in more-or-less one piece, the experience was well worth it. :-)