...but a cougar has been spotted in Brantford.
First off, I'm glad I don't live in that part of town (actually, I'm not in Brantford at all for a few days).
Secondly...I've gone through this before. In summer 2006, Kitchener was terrorized by a bear. This was a little scarier, as the bear was spotted at least once in a forest five minutes away from my house. It was also a little funnier, as the bear tried to get into a Domino's Pizza.
That said, I think I'd rather run into a bear then a cougar. I think they're slower.
--Ryan
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
My regret
Last spring, Stephane Dion came to Laurier Brantford to give a brief speech to a gathering of students and staff. This speech was followed by a Q+A period. This being a school without any real political science program to speak of, most of the questions asked of the Liberal leader were about the environment, the minimum wage, tutition costs - things that the average non-political student would care about.
My one regret is that I had, but chose not to take advantage of, the chance to ask Stephane Dion how easy he thinks it is to make priorities.
--Ryan
My one regret is that I had, but chose not to take advantage of, the chance to ask Stephane Dion how easy he thinks it is to make priorities.
--Ryan
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Tout le monde aime Marineland !
Anybody who has grown up in this area - and possibly people from further out - in the past twenty years will recognize the following clips, and be able to sing along with every single one of them.
Now, I've read that Marineland runs these commercials in Ontario, New York, Pennsylvania, and Quebec. The problem with the last one - many Quebecers don't speak English. As easy as it would have been to simply paste French lyrics over the same tune - as I did in the title - the fine folks at Marineland went a different route.
Remember that walrus-looking thing in some of those English commercials? Apparently his name is Roi Waldorf (King Waldorf), and he features far more prominently in the French commercial. Enjoy!
--Ryan
Now, I've read that Marineland runs these commercials in Ontario, New York, Pennsylvania, and Quebec. The problem with the last one - many Quebecers don't speak English. As easy as it would have been to simply paste French lyrics over the same tune - as I did in the title - the fine folks at Marineland went a different route.
Remember that walrus-looking thing in some of those English commercials? Apparently his name is Roi Waldorf (King Waldorf), and he features far more prominently in the French commercial. Enjoy!
--Ryan
Friday, February 8, 2008
Head in the clouds
When I made my New Year's resolution to watch CBC more often, there was something I was forgetting. Namely, TVO. Ontario's public broadcaster airs a show called 'The Agenda' weeknights at 8:00 (commercial-free), during which host Steve Paikin and various guests talk about political, cultural, or informational issues of the day.
Today was the first I had ever seen the show, and they were discussing Microsoft's attempted purchase of Yahoo!, 'Web 3.0', and the future of the Internet in general.
The main piece of practical knowledge I got out of this show was the revelation that the Internet (as in where all the Internet's data is stored) is now referred to by cutting-edge scholars as the 'cloud' (and if this post's title now seems groan-inducingly bad, you should have seen some of the TVO subtitles). This has prompted me to start referring to the Internet as 'the Intercloud'. I suggest you do the same; maybe we can get this to take off.
The main piece of practical knowledge Dan got out of this show was that goatees are awesome. I'm worried about him.
There was something else I got out of the show, though. One of the points reinforced most often was that this 'cloud' is essentially replacing personal computers - ten or so years ago, PCs were thought of as the new way to store personal data (and in the case of e-mail, correspondence). As it turned out, the 'armchair IT guys' using PCs at home didn't have either the knowledge or the time to keep that data safe, and viruses were constantly posing a serious threat to that data. Now, the data is stored in the 'cloud', which is maintained by people who work for Google or Amazon - in other words, people who know what they're doing, and know how to keep the data safe.
If you don't understand how this applies to you, think of it this way. If you use a web-based e-mail provider, such as Hotmail or Gmail, your e-mails are in the cloud. If you work for a business which uses Amazon's S3 platform, your work is in the cloud. If you use online banking, your financial information is in the cloud.
Or if you're willing to stretch the definition of 'cloud' a little further, most businesses, institutions, and organizations today have all their information stored on a central server. Although the person maintaining said server is generally part of the group in question, it could still be considered part of the cloud.
So as the TVO panel kept talking about this cloud, and how so much of our information is moving towards it, I was struck with a realization - information is the new food.
As ludicrous as that comparison may sound, at least hear me out on it. Once upon a time, humans were responsible for their own food - hunter-gatherer societies who would fend for themselves. Then somebody invented agriculture - and while these small-scale farmers were still forced to maintain their own sources of food, it was far more reliable than the troubadorian hunter-gatherers. Then came the invention of cities, and that leaves us with today's situation - while there are still some hunters and some farmers, the majority of people simply purchase their food from a grocery store, which has in turn purchased it from a manufacturer. The actually cycle of events is a little more complicated than that, to the point where the average person likely could not tell you exactly how food gets from its original source to their pantry.
Something similar seems to be happening with information. At one point, bills, letters, records, and the like were all kept in desk drawers and filing cabinets. The advent of personal computers changed all that - in fact, one of the major original selling points for home-use PCs was their capability of storing information. While people with PCs still had to look after their own information storage, it was now easier than it had been (the agriculture parallel). Now, the experts are predicting (and all evidence certainly suggests that they are right) that all information will move to this 'cloud', the inner workings of which people will understand no more than the food industry. Already, most people who use the Internet have trouble explaining to their parents (or grand-parents) exactly what it is, how it works from a functional perspective.
Another idea which was suggested on the show was that the 'cloud' will make personal computers irrelevant, and a 'computer' will simply be an interface which one can use to access and interact with the cloud. Blackberries and the newest iPods were cited as examples of computers already following a model similar to these 'cloud computers'.
There's a lot more that I could say on this subject (there are parts of the world where the food supply isn't as much of a guarantee as it is here, what would happen if the Western world suddenly experienced a severe shortage of, say, eggs? What if something similar happened to the cloud?), but I'll leave that for another time.
Just remember - and I don't think the person who coined this usage of 'cloud' ever thought of this - people don't like clouds. Clouds bring storms.
That said, there are a lot of really, really good things about the Intercloud.
--Ryan
Today was the first I had ever seen the show, and they were discussing Microsoft's attempted purchase of Yahoo!, 'Web 3.0', and the future of the Internet in general.
The main piece of practical knowledge I got out of this show was the revelation that the Internet (as in where all the Internet's data is stored) is now referred to by cutting-edge scholars as the 'cloud' (and if this post's title now seems groan-inducingly bad, you should have seen some of the TVO subtitles). This has prompted me to start referring to the Internet as 'the Intercloud'. I suggest you do the same; maybe we can get this to take off.
The main piece of practical knowledge Dan got out of this show was that goatees are awesome. I'm worried about him.
There was something else I got out of the show, though. One of the points reinforced most often was that this 'cloud' is essentially replacing personal computers - ten or so years ago, PCs were thought of as the new way to store personal data (and in the case of e-mail, correspondence). As it turned out, the 'armchair IT guys' using PCs at home didn't have either the knowledge or the time to keep that data safe, and viruses were constantly posing a serious threat to that data. Now, the data is stored in the 'cloud', which is maintained by people who work for Google or Amazon - in other words, people who know what they're doing, and know how to keep the data safe.
If you don't understand how this applies to you, think of it this way. If you use a web-based e-mail provider, such as Hotmail or Gmail, your e-mails are in the cloud. If you work for a business which uses Amazon's S3 platform, your work is in the cloud. If you use online banking, your financial information is in the cloud.
Or if you're willing to stretch the definition of 'cloud' a little further, most businesses, institutions, and organizations today have all their information stored on a central server. Although the person maintaining said server is generally part of the group in question, it could still be considered part of the cloud.
So as the TVO panel kept talking about this cloud, and how so much of our information is moving towards it, I was struck with a realization - information is the new food.
As ludicrous as that comparison may sound, at least hear me out on it. Once upon a time, humans were responsible for their own food - hunter-gatherer societies who would fend for themselves. Then somebody invented agriculture - and while these small-scale farmers were still forced to maintain their own sources of food, it was far more reliable than the troubadorian hunter-gatherers. Then came the invention of cities, and that leaves us with today's situation - while there are still some hunters and some farmers, the majority of people simply purchase their food from a grocery store, which has in turn purchased it from a manufacturer. The actually cycle of events is a little more complicated than that, to the point where the average person likely could not tell you exactly how food gets from its original source to their pantry.
Something similar seems to be happening with information. At one point, bills, letters, records, and the like were all kept in desk drawers and filing cabinets. The advent of personal computers changed all that - in fact, one of the major original selling points for home-use PCs was their capability of storing information. While people with PCs still had to look after their own information storage, it was now easier than it had been (the agriculture parallel). Now, the experts are predicting (and all evidence certainly suggests that they are right) that all information will move to this 'cloud', the inner workings of which people will understand no more than the food industry. Already, most people who use the Internet have trouble explaining to their parents (or grand-parents) exactly what it is, how it works from a functional perspective.
Another idea which was suggested on the show was that the 'cloud' will make personal computers irrelevant, and a 'computer' will simply be an interface which one can use to access and interact with the cloud. Blackberries and the newest iPods were cited as examples of computers already following a model similar to these 'cloud computers'.
There's a lot more that I could say on this subject (there are parts of the world where the food supply isn't as much of a guarantee as it is here, what would happen if the Western world suddenly experienced a severe shortage of, say, eggs? What if something similar happened to the cloud?), but I'll leave that for another time.
Just remember - and I don't think the person who coined this usage of 'cloud' ever thought of this - people don't like clouds. Clouds bring storms.
That said, there are a lot of really, really good things about the Intercloud.
--Ryan
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Writing a Bicycle
It's that time of year again! (Actually, it's well past that time of year...) Time to write your grandparents to express how much you love them for the nifty stuff they got you for Christmas!
What's that? You say you can't remember what they got you?
Don't worry; in their senility they probably forgot too!
Fortunately, I do remember one of the gifts my grandparents put in my gift basket. Socks! Overlooking the obvious joke about Christmas stockings, I must inform you that these socks were clad-iron tested on mountaineers climbing Mount Everest. They're hand-knit, and made from kid-hair! (I'm told there were no children shaved for the protection of my feet against the cold) But seriously though, these socks are legitimately of the warmest and best-quality I have ever, nay, will ever wear. I would go so far as to say they are worthy socks for the common man to dry clean.
But back to the point: We are writing a letter to our grandparents. I know we haven't done this in about a year, but once you get started I promise it will come back to you. To get you started, here's mine:
Note, in actuality I have no idea when the trip to France is (or was). I know it's probably around now-ish, but I could be off a month in either direction. To throw them off of my confusion, I overwhelmed that sentence with alliteration. Ambiguous? I think so!
So, get to it! Write your grandparents!
Your letter-writing skills will return, I promise!
--
D. Phillips
What's that? You say you can't remember what they got you?
Don't worry; in their senility they probably forgot too!
Fortunately, I do remember one of the gifts my grandparents put in my gift basket. Socks! Overlooking the obvious joke about Christmas stockings, I must inform you that these socks were clad-iron tested on mountaineers climbing Mount Everest. They're hand-knit, and made from kid-hair! (I'm told there were no children shaved for the protection of my feet against the cold) But seriously though, these socks are legitimately of the warmest and best-quality I have ever, nay, will ever wear. I would go so far as to say they are worthy socks for the common man to dry clean.
But back to the point: We are writing a letter to our grandparents. I know we haven't done this in about a year, but once you get started I promise it will come back to you. To get you started, here's mine:
Dear Grammie and Granddad,
Thanks for those socks you gave me for Christmas! I finally got the opportunity to properly test-drive them, and I've got to say: These are hands down the best socks I've ever worn.
I'm tempted to say they rocked my socks, but I suppose the socks rocked me!
I can only hope you found your fancy for France is well fostered. This is peak-time for my assignments and mid-terms, so I'm especially jealous right now. I'll be expecting some kind of cheese from the trip! (Or a snail... that is what they eat there, isn't it?)
Your favorite grandson,
Dan Phillips
Note, in actuality I have no idea when the trip to France is (or was). I know it's probably around now-ish, but I could be off a month in either direction. To throw them off of my confusion, I overwhelmed that sentence with alliteration. Ambiguous? I think so!
So, get to it! Write your grandparents!
Your letter-writing skills will return, I promise!
--
D. Phillips
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
...and then I ate the bowl!
(You see, 'soup' and 'super' are phonetically similar, and Tim Horton's used to offer soup in a bread bowl, the commercials for which would...oh, never mind.)
So like five million other Canadians, I watched the Super Bowl. And even that was a close call, it nearly lost out to a Wii golf game. (On a tangential note, how is it that I am surrounded by Wiis in nearly every facet of my life yet have only played them twice, with more than a year inbetween?)
Obviously it was a great game, destined to go down as one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time, easily the most exciting I've ever seen - and while we got a great game, the NFL got exactly what they wanted (a record-setting audience while keeping the 19-0 mystique alive). So overall, everybody won (well, except the Patriots).
Nobody will ever forget that play. You know, THAT play. The "there's less than a minute left and the Giants still need to get further down the field. Oh no, Eli's gonna get sacked, they've got his jersey...HEY WHAT'S HE DOING OVER THERE? He got the throw away, good for him! AND THAT GUY CAUGHT IT!!!!" play. Other memorable Super Bowl moments have names like "The Catch" or "The Drive"...it would be a disservice to give this one anything less than "The Most Unbelivably Unbelievable Thing To Ever Happen In A Super Bowl".
Also, the referees frantically trying to get everybody off the field before the last play was funny in a surrealist sense.
One problem I had, though - back when it was first announced that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would be performing at the halftime show, I was ecstatic. I made a post on this blog saying so. But to be honest, I was kinda disappointed by his show. Not so much the performance levels, or the song selection (as much as I was hoping for "Refugee", I realize they have about a million different hits to choose from), but the form. Every single song seemed to follow the same pattern - first verse, chorus, guitar solo, chorus again, another guitar solo, done. It was a good way to squeeze in an extra song, but surely there had to be some way they could have mixed it up?
Anyhow, at least we didn't see a Tom Petty wardrobe malfunction.
In closing, "no, the cone is MADE of chocolate!". I mean, "...and then I ate the bowl!".
--Ryan
So like five million other Canadians, I watched the Super Bowl. And even that was a close call, it nearly lost out to a Wii golf game. (On a tangential note, how is it that I am surrounded by Wiis in nearly every facet of my life yet have only played them twice, with more than a year inbetween?)
Obviously it was a great game, destined to go down as one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time, easily the most exciting I've ever seen - and while we got a great game, the NFL got exactly what they wanted (a record-setting audience while keeping the 19-0 mystique alive). So overall, everybody won (well, except the Patriots).
Nobody will ever forget that play. You know, THAT play. The "there's less than a minute left and the Giants still need to get further down the field. Oh no, Eli's gonna get sacked, they've got his jersey...HEY WHAT'S HE DOING OVER THERE? He got the throw away, good for him! AND THAT GUY CAUGHT IT!!!!" play. Other memorable Super Bowl moments have names like "The Catch" or "The Drive"...it would be a disservice to give this one anything less than "The Most Unbelivably Unbelievable Thing To Ever Happen In A Super Bowl".
Also, the referees frantically trying to get everybody off the field before the last play was funny in a surrealist sense.
One problem I had, though - back when it was first announced that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would be performing at the halftime show, I was ecstatic. I made a post on this blog saying so. But to be honest, I was kinda disappointed by his show. Not so much the performance levels, or the song selection (as much as I was hoping for "Refugee", I realize they have about a million different hits to choose from), but the form. Every single song seemed to follow the same pattern - first verse, chorus, guitar solo, chorus again, another guitar solo, done. It was a good way to squeeze in an extra song, but surely there had to be some way they could have mixed it up?
Anyhow, at least we didn't see a Tom Petty wardrobe malfunction.
In closing, "no, the cone is MADE of chocolate!". I mean, "...and then I ate the bowl!".
--Ryan
Saturday, February 2, 2008
I can't do restaurant reviews
At some point in your life, you will find yourself in Brantford. This is an unpleasant yet unavoidable fact. While there, you may be tempted by hunger, and start looking for a restaurant to satisfy that temptation. Now, many people will be content with a Kelsey's, Boston Pizza, Swiss Chalet, or something else of that ilk - all of which Brantford has - but others will be more adventurous, looking for something they've never had before.
If you're willing to venture downtown, there are many good choices - however, they all have their own drawbacks. Kel's Diner is never open past 3 PM, Pizza Spot has, as far as I am aware, never gotten an order right, and anything more than a milkshake from Admiral's will significantly shorten your life span. Besides, you might not even be downtown. If this is true, I would humbly like to suggest the Oxford Circus.
From the picturs above, you might not think that the Oxford Circus looks particularly glamourous - and if so, you'd be right. In fact, if anything, I would say the restaurant looks less impressive in person - maybe because it hides behind The Keg, I'm not sure.
But what the Oxford Circus lacks in exterior visual appeal, it makes up for in culinary delight. I have now been there on three or four separate occasions, and enjoyed each one immensely. The menu is both huge and diverse, containing everything from standard British pup fare (Yorkshire pudding stuffed with roast beef!) to a decent selection of steaks.
On my visits, I have had 'bangers and mash' (sausages and mashed potatoes with a LOT of baked beans, which I enjoyed immensely), fish and chips (very good fish, above-average fries), and a variety of appetizers which I can no longer remember (but they were good, too). If there was a fourth visit, I had a hamburger (anyone want to help me out on this one?).
Never had dessert, and can't comment on their alcohol selection, but it's great food, more-or-less reasonable prices, and a solid atmosphere. Proximity to Lynden Mall makes it a prime destination via bus. Highly recommended.
--Ryan
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