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. :-)