Tochi's Hut

Here's last Wednesday's Lotto 6/49 draw.

23 40 41 42 44 45 Bonus: 43

Notice, 40->45 (including the bonus)!!! You might think, who the heck would buy 40 to 45? Well, 239 people did.... enough to dilute the 2nd prize per person payout, which ended up being $1k less than the 3rd prize.

Here are the numbers:

What can you say?  $1.2k ain't that shabby.... 

P.S.  Windows Live Writer does not have Find and Replace. It's sad when I have to copy my HTML table to NOTEPAD to do F+R, then copy it back.  What a crappy product.

TVB made this awesome 5 episode series on a trek to 玉珠峰.   It's a snow capped mountain in 青海省, western part of China, near one of the stops on the Tibet railroad.   Peak elevation is 6178m (20,269ft).  To put things in perspective, Vail's summit elevation is a meager 3527m (11,570ft).

The series totally captures the beauty, the challenges and hardships of such an expedition.  The commentaries from the 3 celebrities are so genuine and down to earth.  I just cannot appreciate enough the ordeals and suffering that they had to go through, and can only imagine how rewarding such an experience must have been.  From my experiences, I've been stuck in blizzards, have gone on long hikes, have been in situations where I can barely take another step, have wanted to just stop, sleep and drop dead.  However, the crew in the series had to put up with all of that in a single trip.  Just unfathomable.

My favourite comment from the show is that, when you get to the top, you realize that being at the top is really insignificant.  It's the shared journey and friendships that you build that become forever memorable.  When you get down to the basics of life and extend yourself beyond your typical limits, you'll realize how much more there is to the world.  The little things that bog down our daily lives are really, truly inconsequential. 

Highly recommend this series to everyone.  You can watch online here  (First 5 links).  Jaw dropping, fascinating, breath taking.  Gives you a sense of why I love these wild and crazy excursions. XD

Better to blog them than to never blog at all.  It's March, so I'm due for some updates:

• Made my Jelly Bellies debut.  3 on 3 mixed floor hockey.   Got placed on the "first" line with AP.  We had some good chemistry, 2 man cycles, crispy passes and shots.  My best chance was when I got a pass from AP in front of the net.  I faked the lone defender out and in trying to stop me, she dove/slid into the net knocking over their goalie.  I gathered the ball and put a high shot into the empty top part of the net.  The goalie somehow managed to get his glove up to rob me of a sure goal.  All in all, had many great opportunities, but didn't end up scoring.  Went -1 on a night after giving up a fluky goal.  Lost 1-6.  Lots of fun though.
  
• I still cannot do moguls. :(
  
• Played the most intense squash game of my life with YW.  Both of us were "in the zone", which set up some amazing rallies (one of which must have been 30+ shots).  I could feel my heart beating, my heat hurting and my arms and legs aching.  I've never had to do this in a squash game before, but between points, I leaned over with my hands on my knees, huffing and buffing.
  
• Got a chance to go up ScotiaBank tower in downtown.  Quite a pretty sight looking down into the business district from high up.  Next up is TD Bank tower in a few weeks.
  
• Last year, everyone in our lab took part in a group photo.  They finally released the photo, which set off a massive Find Waldo search.  I spent 10 minutes starring at the photo trying to find Tochi.  Two coworkers joined the search too, but couldn't spot me.  I ended up asking one of the two tall guys I stood beside to pinpoint my coordinates.  sigh.
  
• 農家菜館 - the official "dim sum" go-to place now.  Across from Markville Mall.  All dim sum @ $1.80, 7-days a week, 9am-4pm.  The food, for the most part, is very good.  The ones that are only so-so are written off as "It's only $1.80, what can you expect?"  The place is always jam packed.  And check out these Siu Mai:
  
  

  

  Little pieces of abalone!! lol.  After you stuff yourself full, the best part is when the bill arrives.  About $7-$8 per person including tax and tip.  The price and value amaze me every single time.  I cannot stop going back, even though it's quite a drive each time.  Good food, unbeatable prices!
  
• Got the HyperDrive case for TochiCam on Europe trip.  Still debating which HD to get though. 
  
• Canada recorded another year of federal surplus of $12.6 billion.  $10.2B of which will pay down our national debt (currently at approximately $460billion).  Some critics have complained that we have better ways to spend the 10.2 billion, but I really don't mind our government paying off some of the debt.
  
• Daylight savings starts on March 9th?!?!?!  ugh.

Tallied up my fuel consumption to date on my RAV4.  Total 208 gas station trips, spending just under $4k CDN plus $1k USD.  Burned 6030L of fuel over 53788km.  11.21 L/100km (~21MPG) average.  On highway, I get about 9L/100km.  Both are lower than the advertised statistics, as expected.  However, I was hoping for better numbers than what I got.

Will have lots of fun mining this data.  Would be interesting to see how my mileage differs between winter and summer months, or what percentage of the kilometres I racked up on long driving trips.  Wonder if there's some way to calculate my carbon footprint.

Anyway, the one sure result I concluded is that I need to drive less... too expensive!

Since I had written quite a bit already about last night's lunar eclipse experience, I thought I'd throw everything together for the benefit of Tochi Hut readers.

Lunar Eclipse on February 20th, 2008.  Toronto was blessed with crystal clear skies, so I was more than happy to settle with the -12C temperatures. Everyone is posting these beautiful photos of the moon eclipse, so I'm doing the same.   This photo was taken around 10pm, almost to the point of complete eclipse - cropped a lot. :)

In the following shot, I noticed two bright stellar objects, Regulus (star) at 12 o'clock and Saturn at 8 o'clock to the moon.  I zoomed out a bit to catch them into the frame.  Looking through the viewfinder, it seemed like I was staring at some distant planet instead of the moon.  It was quite a cool extraterrestrial feeling.

After a while, I was getting a little cold. BlueOrca had linked me to a site showing a very cool super long exposure shot of another lunar eclipse.  Since I was going inside anyway, I decided to leave my camera out for an hour to capture the following shot.

The original photo was shot at a pretty wide angle, since I didn't really know the path of the moon. The noise reduction processing on the camera took over 30 minutes. The sky colours came out very redish, almost pink. I didn't really know how to fix it, so I just played around with various settings until I got the sky darkish again. I also cropped the photo to "zoom" in on the trail.

It's quite cool to see the moon streak go from almost all red to all white as the lunar eclipse began to unravel.  :)