I Pod You Pod, We All Pod for iPod

My birthday is coming up at the end of the month (gah!) and my parents have insisted on buying me a portable mp3 player as a gift. So much so that my dad has the money all ready to be spent this second. Unfortunately I've been so busy with school I haven't had a chance to research what's good/bad, new, or actually what's even out there. I've never owned an mp3 player and am unfamiliar with even the common features. I have been told that although an iPod is the most popular it's not necessarily the best. I do know there are two main times - smaller ones that are flash memory and larger ones that are like hard drives. Right nowI can say that I'm not too crazy about being able to watch movies on my music player but the advantage of getting a big hard drive one would be being able to store some of my homework on it.

Anyone recommend a certain brand or model? Or even a good website to check out for reviews? Any suggestions can help point me in teh right way.

I Like Rocks A.K.A My Trip to Ottawa

Many months ago I had met Owen Hewitt through the McGill Improv Summit. Carlton University had come all the way from Ottawa to compete. I had again met Owen a month later during Vaganza 6. Since then he'd been inviting my out to Ottawa. I finally took up his offer and went out there this past weekend to celebrate Canada Day.

Friday evening at 5:05pm I was on a VIA Rail train headed to Ottawa. The whole ride was under 2 hours! I read a magazine half of the time and fell asleep for the second part. Once I reached Ottawa, Owen was there waiting for me. The two coolest guys in Ottawa were ready to party.

We reached Owen's lovely home where I met his parents and had a nice chat with his mom. She was very pleasant and had left us an amazing turkey dinner to eat. The highlight of the evening was when during our conversation, Owen's mom commented that I had to most elegant hands, to which embarrassed Owen. Also, him and his parents talked a lot about politics and history and religion - all subjects I"m not too knowledgeable on - which spawned our inside joke of "I like rocks..." Which one is to say when you are completely lost on the topic of a conversation.

After dinner, we had our first beer of the weekend. Well, Owen had more than one, but I'm a slow drinker and I had almost one. He showed his book collection and when I commented on how I always wanted to read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, he gave me his copy! He even wrote a note. That means when he becomes a famous poet I may have in my hands a one of a kind item. I can't wait to read it.

The evening was spent at his long time friend's Tina's house. She was turning 22 and to celebrate her birthday had a few friends over. I met a few cool people and we all chatted in the kitchen which was the tiniest room in the house (see Andrew, it's not just at your place that this happens...). Tina was having a fun time drinking and I got to watch her play this checkers game where each piece is a shot glass and when you lose your piece you drink it. It was fun to watch because she started to drink all the pieces, the ones she lost and the ones she moved and just anyone she felt like drinking. Her boyfriend Steph showed up and he was a cool guy. Owen and I got him cracking up so hard. The highlight of the night had to have been when Tina fell on the ground and withered like a fish behind her couch.

Around midnight I think, we called it a night for we had a big day ahead of us.

I got woken up at 9am and headed down to the kitchen for soem of Owen's world famous pancake mix pancakes. By 10:30 we were out of the house and on a bus to the downtown area. Already I was starting to sdee red and white everywhere.

Once we reached downtown, there were already tons of people outand about. Owen was dying to go see one of his favorite performers, Buck 65, who was to perform twice that day, so we headed immediately to his stage. Unfortunately we showed up near the end but I got to witness one of the coolest things. A bunch of performers - Buck 65, Kinnie Starr, some guy who played amazing accoustic guitar and this group called K'Naan, were all sitting on the tiniest stage just listening to each othet while a bunch of spectators like myself and Owen were able to just relax and listen. It was the chillest thing ever. I really admired how the other artists bobbed their heads to the one that was performing. We had only come in on the last song but I was told that each artist played 4 songs and they each took turns. We had missed Buck 65 but shortly after the show got a chance to talk to him while he was selling/signing cds. Owen got him to sign his lucky hat and had a nice chat with him.

Right next to the cd table was a both with this special guitar called the Six String Nations Guitar which was handmade from a bunch of historical pieces aof wood and what not including a piece of Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle and gold from Maurice Rocket Richards' gold ring. I even got a picture taken with it and will have it sent to me by e-mail. There was even a suggestions ballad for a name for the quitar to which I could only come up with "The Canada". I know, original...

It being the hottest time of the day, we headed to the Highlander, a Scottish pub that Owen traditionally goes to every Canada Day. There we listened to soem duo play classic rock tunes while we eat great pub food and had some beer.

After lunch Owen was kind enough to give me a tour fo the city and talk about all the historical sites and buildings. He really knows his stuff especially since h's studying history and wants to be a librarian. Once our tour ended, we hit the grass and I dozed off enjoying the cool breeze. When I had awaken, the sky had begun to get grey but thankfully no rain. We walked off our haziness (I think the sun/beer mix had hit me) and we had a quick dinner just after finding out that France had kick Brazil out of the World Cup.

By 7pm, we were back at Major Hill's Park to catch K'naan, Kinnie Starr and Buck 65 perform ful 30 minute sets. When Buck 65 came on, everyone rushed the stage and really got into it. He put on a great set and Owen was rocking out.

After the show, we had bumped into thsi girl that Owen had been playing phone tag with and had a bit of a liking to. I only later found out he had met her only once before but we were going to try and hang out with her and her 2 friends for a bit. As we followed them, I noticed then and all day rather, that someone had been writing on the ground with chalk stuff about "Bring Peace and Justice" etc. I think i even made a coment to Owen. Then suddenly his friend stops and starts to take out chalk and write the same thing to which I immidiately thought "oh...".

Nothing much was going on so we ditched that group and were about to head home until I rememebered about the fireworks and convinced Owen to let me stay and watch them. He knew the perfect spot to view them and they were AMAZING! Some were SO big and loud that you could feel the ground vibrate and it looked like they were going to fall on you. It was spectacular.

On the way to the bus, I could tell that all the families had left, leaving behind tons of drunken people read to fill up the bars since it was only 10:30pm.

Once we got to his stop, we debarked and somehow ended up walking right in the middle of a group of 14-15 year olds since teh sidewalk was narrow. Figuring we;d split directions at any moment, Owen and I made no attempt to pass the first half of the group. Unfortunately this went on for what felt like TEN blocks.

The night ended winding down in Owen's basement watching a hilarious episode of South Park to which the gang goes to Canada and it is all done in the style of the Wizard Of Oz. My favorite part being on "French Canada being the Best part of Canada".

Sunday morning I managed to sleep in until 11am. Really needed that. Thsi time I had Owen's world famous pancrepes because they came out kind of thin but tasty none the less. To kill time, we went and caught Superman Returns. My brother didn't like it that much but I thought it was pretty good. The effects were crazy but the bad guy plot could have been a bit better.

We returned back to Owen's and had a delicious BBQ with his parents and his brother Andrew who had come from Edmonton to stay with them for a week or so.

5pm came and it was time for me to say my goodbyes and head to the train station. Owen left me off and I got inside just in time to board the train. Almost an hour and a half later I had returned home to Montreal.

All in all I had a great time and a much need break from school.

Sushi Party!

After a couple of weeks of craziness, I decided to drop all homework related stuff and focus on having fun. And fun I had.

Thursday morning I drove down to schol with the ol' van. I knew parking would be a bitch so I had planned to park in teh underground parking at in the building of my school. Unforunately I had a hrd time finding it and accidently drove down this incorrect very narrow, very curvy and VERY steep driveway to which I had to reverse out of (how I didn't crash the car I don't know...). Afterwards I found the parking lot and found a spot close to the elevator (with trouble getting into the spot. How I didn't crash the car I don't know...). I spent all afternoon fixing my menu project and I think it looks great. Sometime soon I will post the final edition of the menu of the made up restaurant I created called Bracha's (after my mom's hebrew name).

At 5pm I headed over to the rendez-vous point at Amin's (while almost breaking my dad's side mirror while exiting the car lot. How I didn't crash the car I don't know...). There, Amin, Norm, Lauren, Kevin, Mariana and Ian were there ready to hit the West Island. We took 2 cars and eventually met at my place. We decided on supplies and went shopping for food. Back at my house we spent the bulk of the evening making sushi using chopped cucumber, peppers, carrots and cooked smoked salmon.

Yes everyone got in on the fun:








Here's how most of sushi turned out:



and here's how my sushi turned out:



Once done, we did what you should always do after eating sushi - go play at a park! Yes, we relived our youth for a short while until we returned to my house to watch the Daily Show and the Stephen Colbert Report.

Then we literally crashed. Everyone basicaly mass slept on the pullout couch or occupied one of my spae sleeping areas. I wisely took my bed because in the morning the only complaint I got was about the house cuckoo clock which happens to go off EVERY 15 minutes.

Lauren had work at 9am so everyone save Ian and Kevin left at around 7am. I went back to bed however and only really got up at 10-10:30am. After cleaning up and eating, I brought the guys downtown.

Ian had wanted to be dropped off somewhere so he could watch the world cup. Fortunately a wicked spot opened up in time fo rme to grab it right in front of Carlos And Pepe's on Peel. Then when I went to pay for parking, Ian noticed a giant sign saying the place we were standing in front of was showing the game. We walk upstairs only to find a really fancy lounge with several T.V.s, couches and people wearing suits and dressy clothes, while I was wearing my cowboy hat and Ian was wearing a hoodie. Although we seemed out of place, no one cared and we stayed to watch the Argentina play Germany during overtime. Germany lost, but I thoguht it was a cheap win because they only won due to penalty shots. It was fun though, since Ian told me a lot about the World Cup that I had not known.

I then went home got soem errands done and got ready for my trip to Ottawa.

Small Break

I've been SO busy lately with school. It's just been project after project. Actually, the way it works, I should be able to multi task but it hasn't been happening. I've been working countless hours to finish somehting just in time and right after handing it in, I'd have to START the next project which in the last case, was the next day. This week, I've also got the house ot myself since my parents are in Toronto watching my nephew, Charles, while my brother and his wife are in Vegas for his 40th birthday trip (even though it's in August?!) so it's been quiet in the house and with staying up late all alone working on stuff, I started to go a little crazy... I hadn't something in today half assed btu got an extension and on top of that instead of actualy having ot redo my stuff due to the mistakes, all I have to do is write a note stating I understand what I did wrong and what I would do to fix them. My teacher rocks!

Thankfully, I'm at the end of the hump for a short while since all my next projects aren't due for a few weeks. I was totally dying earlier in class and was totaly about to fall off my chair. Things are going to get crazy again but in the meantime I'm taking a break starting tonight. I'm gong to go see Nacho Libre with my bro. Tomorrow night is a sushi party at my place which should rock. Friday I'm off to Ottawa to hang out with Owen and celebrate Canada day. Nothing beats his e-mail I recieved the other day:
Dude before you come i need to know a few things: 1. Is there antyhing you can't eat besides pork? 2. What time are you do in? 3. Are you afraid of titties? We'll be seeing plenty on Canada Day 4. When is your train back to Montreal?
Oh Owen, how much we'll have together.

I better get back to work since i"m still in class but a quick blurb: We use a program called Quark that basically is a text editing program (for layout in magazines, books, panflets, etc.) and a feature in it is called Jabber Text. It basically fills the area with random text. I had apractice example to do in class and this is what came up in the jabber paragraph:

The Klingnons fight Quark. one Jabberwokcy marries two.

Holy Crap I'm screwed....

I don't understand what I did wrong but school is just going crazy. I've been trying realy hard to keep up to date with things but today felt like it was all for nothing. I have this assignment due tomorrow. We basically only had a week to do it plus we have all kind sof assignments for our other 5 classes. The prof made a special class today to realy break into the assignment. My whole plan was to get most of it done during class and finish it off tonight for tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, the 4 hours of work I spent this morning was all lost. When I was transfering my file from my computer to my USB, I accidently transfered the file from my USB to the computer, thus erasing my new file with my old file. I tried cancelling the transfer once i realized my error, but upon doing so my new file diappeared completely. I t was frustrating but I kept my cool and realized I'd have to stay up late tonight to finish it.

There are 5 parts to the assignment and I was halfway through the first part this morning. Once the first part is done, the other 4 are the smae thing in different variations, thus would take less time to do. I finally finished th efirst part after a few hours and then flew through part 2. Things were looking good until I came to part 3 and was unsure what to do. Not to worry, I decided to just take a chance and get through the work, since it was already after 11pm. Then all of a sudden, what I was doing stopped working. I couldn't understand what was going on. Everything was fine and then it just stopped working. I then realized somehow I accidently changed one of the modes in the computer program. Unfortunately for me, I must have done it at the beginning for I noticed that both part 1 and 2 which I finished, were all set in the other mode. WhenI tried switching back to normal mode, all my work disappears meaning everything I did may be wrong.

Now I am frustrated and tired.

It' snto really a big deal since if I hand it in late I only lose 10% and now i cna really make sure i get everything right. It's just that I have another huge project due wednesday which I also have not finished and was planning on working on that tomorrow. Now that I can't I may ahve to hand that one in late too! I feel totaly swamped with work and don't understand how it happened all of a sudden.

I know I'll get through it all eventually but I just had to rant. It's shitty being in shitty situations.


It's 12am and I'm goign to be exhausted tomorrow which won't make getting my work done before deadlines any easier. I may have to become a hermit for a the next couple of weeks if this keeps up.

I could really use a hug right now...

Manhunt 5: The Return Home

Yesturday was the 5th edition of manhunt. This time it was held back at where it all began, Carre St Louis (crack park) at the end of Prince Arthur and St Denis.

This time, instead of it being from St Laurent to St. Denis and Pins to Prince Arthur it was Prince Arthur to Sherbrooke. For added bonus, it WASN'T raining AND we had the St. Laurent street sale to help for cover.

For the first game the hunter was Marc D. Rowland, he's the real version of the character Robert Patrick portrays in Terminator 2. I ended up at Sherbrooke and bumped into Jason whom organized Frosh with back in 2002, so that was cool. Afterwards I hit up St. Laurent and saw no one so I thought i was safe. I was wrong. I turn onto Prince Arthur and was spotted. I ran back through the crowd and turned into a parking lot which led to a dead end. In the end Andrew caught me. The rest of the time I spent hunting people and got a couple of victims.

Round two was a lot better. I ended up staying incognito for 20 minutes. I was walking aorund the streets and then due to a scare, ended up at Carre St Louis and didn't notice anyone with the orange arm bands. I walked around, sat on various benches and hid behind numerous trees. Ken was standing behind one tree the whole time but I ignored him for he was definitely not caught. Some bystanders were kind enough to give me the heads up of hunters hidden in the grass on teh other side of the park. A couple of 11 year old girls walked by me as I peeked out from behind a tree with my hood up and said somethign rude to me in french and placed their hands in my face like I was thinking of molesting them or something and them showing me I was way out of their league. Finally I decided to make myself comfortable against a tree, glancing around every now and then. I kept that up for about 10 good minutes until out of nowhere Andrew comes and gets me. I was so confused as to how he found me until he pointed out to me that literally 15 feet directly in front of where I was standing were all the hunters who decided to quit a few minutes early, relaxing by a bench. I can't believe I didn't notice them. Admitting my fate, Andrew and I decided to get Ken. As We chased him, the two people who were hiding in the grass, Adair and Rebecca, thought they were going to get caught and jumpped out of their hiding place. I saw this and immediately changed my course for them. In a quick effort to escape, Rebecca jumps into the fountain and gets soaking wet. Apperently it was both her and Adairs plan the whole time but Adair chickened out last second.

Fun was had by all and we got to converse about it over great bbq food and some beers. Can't wait until the next one. Unfortunately I won't be around for the immediate next one since it's on Canda day but for those who can, I highly suggest it!

Rocking out with your block out!

Friday night I went to see We Are Scientists and The Arctic Monkeys at The Medley. I had an extra ticket and was looking for someone to go with. In the end I went with Rachelle. I met her at Lauren's birthday party and she's Lauren's coworker at Starbucks. She's probably th emost positive enthusiasitic person I've ever met and never heard of either band but was really excited to go.

As for the show itself, I think I enjoyed We Are Scientists more than The Arctic Monkeys. I never heard of W.A.S. before buying tickets but I downloaded their cd and it wasn't bad. However, at the show, I really gotinto them because a) I knew all the songs and b) they had great stage presence. Their last 3 songs really rocked. The way the stage was set up, rather then take away the first band equipment and replace it with the second's, they had both drum kits on stage,one behind the other. Durting my favorite song on the album, I notice some guy walk on stage and take a picture of the crowd. At first I thought it was some roadie but then he sits down at the second drum kit and I immediately knew it was the Arctic Monkeys drummer joining in! He totally started to rock out with them. It was awesome to see TWO drummers do this kind of drum roll accross their kit at the SAME time!

After a great set, the Arctic Monkeys came on and they looked SO bored. The music was good but at this point I was farther away from the stage (we went for a bathroom break and lost our spot) and would have enjoyed myself in the mosh pit for I couldn't really jump around since it was so packed on the floor. When the singer did speak, you just couldn't understand him.

After the show I bumped into Dave Kolin. The last time i saw him was at the Franz Ferdinand concert. He STILL has to walk on crutches and he's going to rock concerts! He's truley crazy.

In the end, I did enjoy myself for having discovered a new great band, hanging out with Rachelle and buying a sweet Arctic Monkeys t-shirt (for almost the price of the show)

Celebrating Birthdays In Style Since 1998

Today is Aussie Lauren's 19th birthday! Happy Birthday! To celebrate a bunch of us had dinner at Le Taj a fancy Indian Cuisine restaurant. Norm had told me it was a dressy night for us, so I wore my blazer, shirt and tie all day since I couldn't go home and change beforehand. All day people at school were wondering why I was dresed so nice. After the twentieth response of "to impress you!", I got bored and decided to tell the truth.

After a long and frustrating day (actually week) in front of the computer and not getting good sleep, I felt totally at ease (and tired) at the dinner. The food was great (I had butte chicken) and the company was even better. I had bought Lauren two Canadian tank tops at Old Navy and she appreciated them (or is really good at lying, haha), while Norm and Amin bought her a wicked dark red cowboy hat. Now I have a partner to hit the streets with in our fancy shmancy cowboy hats. To check out photos of the night click HERE!

Tomorrow is work and The Arctic Monkeys show. Yay!

This One's For Norm

Been working all on an assignemtn that's due tomorrow. The assignment was to take something out of it's context. I don't how my crazy mind cam eup with it but I decided to take the poster for the Usual Suspects and replace them with characters from Looney Tunes. I drew all the characters by hand, then scanned them and traced it in Ilustrator and finally added color and text. I ran out of time and couldn't make all 5 characters so settled with 4. I'm totally exhausted and have a big day ahead of me tomorrow but promised Norm I'd post it before bed.
So here it is, enjoy:

Stupid Rain

So the weather has been really crappy lately and I think it was starting to get to me. Thursday I finished one of my assignments but jsut couldn't get into the next one. I finally gave up and headed over to Amin's where he was having a "dye your hair" party. Well sort of. Him and Norm dyed their hair the other week (his a blue mohawk and Norm,s head was completely purple save a bright red exclamation mark on the side) and wanted to redye their hair again to make it more vibrant. Lauren decided to add red streaks to her hair and due to peer pressure decided to let her bleach a few streaks in my hair. She did it pretty randomnly. You can't notice it but I could tell that the hair where it was done looks all frayed and thin. In fact whenI was thanking Lauren on my cell phone and explaining what had happened to my hair, I was in the car with my mom and upon hearing the words "dye in my hair" my mom stops the car, put it into park, turned on the inside light and started to examine my hair. It's a good thing I didn't dye it bright red...

Friday I worked all day and for the first time in a long time had a headache. At the end of work, one of the employees (a girl still in high school) comes and gives me a hug and says "that's because you look so sad today". See how much the weather affects me!

Saturday was no better, I tried working on my MP3 panflet, right now it looks good but I wanted to move on and add thigns to it and just couldn't come up with anything that looked good so I gave up. Thankfully I had something to take a break from it for saturday night I headed over to Lauren's apartment to celebrate her birthday. In fact it was the first event of a week of things involved to celebrate her birthday (lucky suck...). We had desdert, some drinks and even some skipping in the rain. I ended up getting home and going to bed at 3:30am.

Bright and early this morning I got up and went to work (well only at 10am but still that was 5 and a half hours of sleep) and actualy had a lot of energy. I realized that outside it was sunny for abit and maybe thats what changed my mood. In fact I was so good I asked a coworker if she wanted to go to a concert together (I have an extra ticket) but things got awkward because I then realized that all the other staff memebers were around us (we were all exiting the mall) and I think it toally looked like I was asking her out which probably isn't the best since a) we're not really supposed to date co workers (not that that is my attention) and b) my boss ended up being right next to me and overheard. I lost my cool and hid myself in my jacket. Once outside I said goodbye to everyone and forgot to get my coworkers cel number so I could remind her about the show since it was like a "that sounds cool, maybe I'll come" kind of answer. I don't know when I'll see her next since the next time I work is friday which is the day of the concert. Oh well, at least I didn't pull a Budman and actually asked her to join me. Baby steps.

Portfolio Update

I realize it's been a while since I've shown my progress in the work I've been doing for school so here's a few treats for my fellow friends and family.

For my image processing course, our assignment was to find a picture and make 7 copies. To each copy we had to make a drastic change like change the texture and color. Once that was done using this tool funciton in Photoshop called the History brush, where I was able to paint on top of the original using my 7 versions as if they were 7 different paints. It sound complicated but it's not at all.

Here is the original photo I used, a pictre of Sydney, Australia:



and here is what I came up with. I quite like it.



For my Visual Communication class, I have 3 small excercises I have to complete. I already finished the first 2. The first one was to make a self portrait without using your photo. In other words, to show something that represents you, soemthing that someon can look at and go "from this I can totally understand it's Josh". Wanting to be a little creative, instead of doing my first idea of making a collage of items that are meaningful to me and arranging them to look like a face or body (it's been done a lot), I decided to compile a bunch of words that represent me and arrange them so from far it looks like a picture of me.
Here is my result:



If you save it and then zoom in on my face you'll notice that my hair, mouth, contour of my face, glasses, etc. (basically everything except my clothes) are made up completely of various words. It took me a while to do but was more tedious than difficult.

Finally, the last new thing I have to show you all is the second excercise for the same class, which was to create a coin that has on the front some sort of image that represents my view on the economy. I don't really have a view but ended up somewhat choosing a view and came up with this.

More cool stuff to come, I promise.

Manhunt 4 et al

This morning on the way to class, I was sporting my cowboy hat, my shades and was listening to INXS - Guns In The Sky. I'm the coolest guy ever.

in other news, I went to Manhunt on saturday and it rocked. As usual, it was raining off and on but was enjoyable none the less. This time it was played at Parc Jeanne Mence. There was a lot more open space and less building and pedestrians (especially due to the shitty weather) than the other times we had played.

During the first round I was walking with Adair, figuring out our strategy on how to play at the new region, just as we turned the corner to see the first hunter. Adair used me as bait and quickly disapeared as I was hunted down. I cheaply tried my open umbrella trick ( at the guys face - I know I"m an asshole) but it failed and I was caught. I spent the rest of the round running after everyone one and got tired fast. I did manage to tag at least 3 people.

During round two I decided to try something different. I was tired of running and thought if I pretended i was a hunter the whole time I wouldn't have to run as much. I was wrong. Fortunately it kept me untagged for 20 minutes. I fllowed Amy for a good 15 minutes pretending to hunt her and she just kept walking ahead. To keep up my facade, I kept stopping to breatj like I was out of breath (for the most part I was) and at one point I even deliberately dropped my umbrella to give her a chance to run away. Then I spent the next little while chasing after everyone I saw. It totally worked until Emily (who had known I was not a hunter at first) had since become a hunter and saw me and came to gave a high but when I jumped out of the way and ran, my gig was up. Out of nowhere appeared Norm, and I was a dead duck.

After the game we headed to Phil and Adair's for the usual beer drinking, hot dog eating, resting party. This time they were kind enough to let us throw our socks in the dryer. Thanks guys.

On another note, last night I saw X-Men 3. I liked it and totally needed to disappear into Movie Land for a while but if I had to rank the 3 movies from favorite to least favorite it would be X2, X3 and then X1. This movie definitely had a lot of action but they killed off a lot of people which should have brought a shock factor but it lacked something, and they also introduced a lot of cool new people but again did it in such a way and didn't use them so much that it lost it's appeal. Plus there are like a billion characters in the comics that I don't see the point in making up new characters for the movie.

The Advetures Of Budman - Weekend Edition

My mom rushed me out of the house this morning, telling me we were going to be late for the bus. Then the metro broke down and she was worried I make my 8am class on time and sent me off to get breakfast on my own. So here I am in my class - all alone - just realizing class got moved to 9am on Wednesdays as of last week...

On the bright side, I finally have the time to write about my weekend which, as most weekends, was packed with fun.

Friday was my day off school and I was at Old Navy working from 3pm to 10pm. After work, my friend/boss Mike and I went over to my high school buddy Mike's house ad watched Hart's War. It's an older movie but I had heard good things so was iterested in watching it. It stars a pre-"I'm a hollywood bad ass" Colin Farrell and a "I'm starting to get too old to play bad asses in movies" Bruce Willis. In the end it was an ok film but I thought, being a war movie, it'd be more lke Savign Private Ryan, but instead the whole movie focuses on the racism that was going on in a POW camp between 2 african american soldiers and the rest of the camp. Not a typical war movie.

I had about 5 hours of sleep friday night for I had to get up early to meet Lauren downtown. I can't remember if I had spoken of Lauren before but a quick intro: She is from Australia and is travelling across the world. She is currently living in Montreal until the end of the summer. She only got here a few weeks ago, where by chance on McGill classifieds, met Norm and has since joined our circle of friends.

She had told me she bought a matress off of someone and needed help picking it up and moving it to her new apartment (which is not furnished). So I made my way downtown and we headed to pick up the matress. About 1 minute before we get there, I find out she had bought the matress for 10$ and had never gone to check it out. When we got it, it was old looking covered in all sorts of stains, but I'm sure really comfortable. Lauren didn't care, she said she'd wash it with disenfective and it beats sleeping on the floor. we carried it by foot to her new place that was just a few blocks away but unfortunately, we turned right instead of left and walked a few blocks in teh wrong direction before noticing our mistake.

Once we found her new place, her new roomate, Amy, let us in and we chatted for a while. Turns out the world is tiny. Amy just happens to be Norm's ex-girlfriend's best friend [Spaceball's quote: Lonestar - "What does that make us?" Helmet - "Absolutely NOTHING!"]

The rest of the day was spet helping out my Aunt. She's also moving into a new place. By far the funniest moment fot he day was when my mom asked me how the matress moving went. When I told her how dirty it was she screamed out in concern "That's DISGUSTING! She's going to catch AIDS if she sleeps on that!" Oh mom, how much I love you, haha.

Saturday night I went out dancing with Lauren, Norm, Amin, Kevin, Neil and Norm's friend Jetendra. Norm and Amin had just returned from NY and had dyed their hair. Norms is purple with a red exclamation point coming out the side and Amin's is shaved into a pseudo blue mohawk. I was sporting my new cowboy beach hat that I bought at Simons earlier that day.

We headed up to Jupiter Room in hopes of a packed place filled with dancing. Instead we found a dead place with hardcore porn on the TVs. Not just regular hardcore porn, either. Gigantic breast porn. Thankfully, they turned off the porn, replaced it with Caillou for a few minutes and stopped on Terminator 2. The place did get sort of packed and my friend Mariana and her friend were in town this weekend and decided to join us. It was great seeing her again!

After a while, the music got boring so we moved to Cafe Campus minus Mariana and her frien Rachel since they wanted to get up early and take full advantage of Museum Day. Cafe Campus was a lot better but packed. Highlights of the rest of the night include some random guy sticking his finger in my mouth while I was posing for a picture, and this random chick who decided to join our dance circle. Afterwards when we had left the place, Norm comes up to me and was like "You know that chick was totally into you but then you moved to the other side of the circle." Oh? "And then she gave up and went back to her friends who all gave her sympathy hugs for trying." Oh....

Norm was kind enough to drive Lauren and myself back to my house. No I didn't pick her up. On sunday was the Amazing Race 2 event organized by Hillel West Island and was supposed to be a race similar to the one on TV. To make things easier, Lauren crashed at my place. (That's for clarification for my brother Mark)

Suday morning, we got up around 11am and I got to make Lauren breakfast. Thankfully she wanted her eggs scrabled since it's the only thing I know how to cook! 12pm came around and my buddies Simon, David and David came to pick us up for the race.

The race was intense. I promise to write a full description of it in another post. My team ended up in 4th palce and Lauren's team bailed the race at the halfway point and she went home early, but had a lot of fun.

Sunday night I went back downtown to hang out with the gang and caught the last 30 minutes of Spaceballs (love that movie).

Freakin' Excited!

Since coming home I had to go into my room and relax a bit. I startd off with Thievery Corporation's Cosmic Game (highly recommended). I have since moved onto Pearl Jam's new album but it's started to get me excited again so let's see... Ah yes! Bonobo Live Sessions... Starting to feel chilled.

Wh was I so excited earlier today you may ask? Today was the deadline to submit your version of next years agenda cover. The winner gets his/her's version printed but even if it's not picked it's a great start for a portfolio.

Here's what I submitted:



I spent tuesday afternoon and all of today working on it. My idea was to do something similar to that IPOD commercial where all the CD albums are going into the IPOD. So I went outside and draw the school by hand and then drew it on the computer. Then I got pictures of items that represent the 3 programs that my school offers (design, beauty, and 2d/3d imagery) and traced them to give that logo look I have througout the poster.

I had to hand in a printed color version of the cover and since the store tht did the printing was open until 7pm, I had until 7pm to finish. being me, I finished at 6:55pm. I had about thirty minutes left when I finished tracing my last object and then had to figure out hw I wanted to lay them all out. The color background and the bottom green part I winged last minute. I also ran into a small problem in trying to cut part of something off which started to get me frustrated. Finally, I was done (i.e. ran out of time) and bolted upstairs to get it printed. Unfortunately my energy levels only increased because the printing wasn't working. Turns out it was just due to not having chosen the proper printer (we use the computer ourselves to print) and the guy working there didn't help at ALL. He looked totally lost and then walked away! So I waited a few minutes and then approached him talking to his coworkers and convinced him to try and help me again! it then printed and I handed it in. I felt SO MUCH better. It's truley an awesome feeling to hand in something you feel proud about. It's rewarding.

--

To get me even more excited when I got home, I confirmed things and it's official: Sunday I am participating in The Amazing Race 2.

No it's not the REAL Amazing race but its an event similar to the real show where we are in groups of 4 and we drive around the west island solving clues and doing physical tasks in order to reach the finish line. Thee are supposed to be great prized, a meal included and the weather is predicted to be really nice. Plus, Australian Lauren showed interest to participate and she will be joining the event but will be on another team (You're going down!).

Sunday's going to rock!

Ninjariffic

I don't know if this is some crazy coincidence or it wa menat to happen but lately I've been discovering these hilrious ninja related things on the net.

First it the really cool and funny Dr McNinja (http://drmcninja.com). Owen introduced it to me and I quite like it. The art is really cool and it reminds me a lot of Batman mixed with Deadpool.

Owen also introducedme to another comic featuring a ninja - White Ninja Comics (http://whiteninjacomics.com). This one however has nothing to do with ninjas and doesn't realy make much sense but I just love the creators wacky humor.

Finally, I was bored one day and stumbled accross something called Ask A Ninja (http://askaninja.com). It's great. It's kind of like Strong Bad e-mails (www.homestarrunner.com) except he's a ninja and it's live not cartoon (well not all of it). I also can't get over how muc the guy acts just like Gil. It's almost scary. And to add to that they had a videa called Ask A Samurai, some fan made a while back, and that guy sounds just like Jeremy.

I look forward to watching you read a ninja related comic before I kill you! (To uderstand that you need to go to one of the above links, but which one? Muhahah!)

Manhunt 3: Hunted by Men (and women and kids)

Today was the third meet of the Montreal chapter of Manhunt. As has been the case lately, it was raining all day. And like the last time I went, the rain stopped for the duratio of Manhunt only to continue once we were done. However, having rain led to an advantage for me for I had an umbrella which proved quite useful (more details below).

This time the game was held in Vieux Montreal. Our starting point was the Centaur theatre and we had a small within invisible boundaries to run frantic within. Lot os fun and interesting things happened today:

-Right before we began, a mother showed up with her son and his friend (both probably 10-12).

-During the first game I walked through a pay parking lot and the worker came up to me and said soemthing about a car. I responded yes to ensure he wouldn't yell at me for walking through the parking lot. The he responded with me following him to pay for the parking as to which I replied I had no car...

-After successfully staying not caught for 15 minutes of the first game, I got cornered in a small street with 5 people on one side and 3 on the other. As Maryam came up to tag me I thrusted my close dumbrella at her, pushed the button and tried to block her with the open umbrella. I failed misreably but it was worth the shot.

-Two guys decided it'd be fun to hide up a fire escape which led to them scaling accross a legde on teh second floor almost all around the building. Not cool...

-During the second game, Norm volunteered me to be the first hunter.

-My plan as hunter was to walk around with my umbrella up. First I noticed a guy hidding behind a dirt mound that after circling him and with the aid of a girl, cornered him and tagged him.

-I noticed a group of 3 people walking down the street and walked completely hidden under my umbrella. I kept getting closer and closer and they never noticed me until I gunned it too quickly and close dmy umbrealla and jumped accross an interesection, thus scaring the shit out of some tourists. I ended up scaring my prey away but caught up to the girl in the bunch only because she dropped her cell phone.

-Kevin Anderson got stopped by the police because they saw him running and thought had stolen something.

All in all, manhunt was great but can't wait to play it in nice hot weather.

After Manhunt, we walked to Phil and Adair's and had a BBQ. It was fun talking abotu the game to others and just plain meeting new people.

Cab't wait until the next one!

Budman in 2D!

I was playing around with Illustrator the other day and ended up tracing my face. Basically, I used an actual photo as a template and then used the Pen Tool to draw lines and filled them in with color.

Here what I got:



Thanks for all the good compliments (I've had it on MSN since yesturday) but really it wasn't that hard to do and it's nothing fantastic. However, I am learnig through experience that simple things can go a long way.

Moving a Step Backwards in Technology

So it finally happened, my portable CD player died. It put up a good fight. I bought it super cheasp near the end of my time in Australia due to my then portable CD player dying. I didnt' expect a lot outof it for 60 bucks but I didn't expect it to just die like it did. First a few of the buttons stopped working some of the time. Then the screen started to spit out chinese characters, which soon turned to pure random garbage and then finally a blank screen. Then there was a trick where I had to turn it on with the remote and then try again on the actual device to get it to start, kind of like a secret sequence of buttons to unlock a code (the Da Vinci code it ain't). Until finally nothing worked.

Being totally addicted to music, I started to go crazy after a few days until I found my old walkman which I carried around all day. Yes that's right, everyone is replacing CD's with MP3's and i'm replacing mine with crappy old cassette tapes. I don't have that many either. Out of my old collection running from the early 90s to mid/late 90s, excluding the old school white rap of House of Pain and the gansta combeback album of Run DMC, I've got Blink 182, Fastball, Radio Head - The Bends, and some hard NU metal mix I copied off someone that has Korn, Limp Bizkit, Tool, Rage Against the Machine and Marilyn Manson, among others.

Besides those, I also have a tape of Limblifter's Bellaclava. I completely forgot about it and how much I enjoyed it. For those of you not familiar with them, Limblifter where created by a pair of brothers who were in another band called Age of Electric. At first Limblifter was a side project and released an album, but when AOE broke up, they became a real band and released Bellaclava. It did well int eh canadian rock scene I think but then one of the brothers, the talented drummer, left the band with another member and joined the Canadian super group The New Pornographers. Apperently, the other brother recruited a whole new backup band and released a new album last year. I'm dying to get a copy of it even though it got mediocre reviews.

In other news, tonight I had gone to Brutopia to hang out with Improv friends, say goodbye to the lovely Mariana "It's pronounced Vee-Al!" Vial. I'm actually quite sad to see her go. Now that I came back from Australia, all my friends are starting to move away! On the other hand I've been making a bunch of newe friends as of late so it's balancing out but it's still sad.

It was also trivia night and one of the questions had to do with Australia! The question was "what color are Emu eggs?". Having seen them with my own eye's I knew they were green. Ny friends couldn't believe that I was saying the right thing but I insited and we got the point. Unfortunatly I dont' think my team won (I had to leave before the last question was answered) because we got about 4 or 5 out of 10 wrong.

Well next time i"ll memorize some trivia pursuit cars since that's where the questions came from.

Happy Mothers Day!

Today, at Old Navy, I was the Mothers Day door greeter. I had a giant vase with 200 carnations which i had to hand out to all the moms that came into the store. Suprisingly enough it, even by 1pm we still had a few flowers left to hand out. I was sure we would have gotten rid of them faster than in over 3 hours. The mothers loved me though and I was dressed all nice to boot, in a shirt and tie with a nice sweater. Some women were SO excited to get a flower (some even joked it was thir first flower i.e. the hubby didn't get then anything) while others were so grumpy and hated the idea of receiving a nice flower. Weird.

In unrelated news, Manhunt got into The Gazette! Check it out here!. I'm even mentioned:

Mission Improbable

Saturday I stayed home and did some homework. That night thought, I went to see MI:3. The movie itself was pretty cool but how I got to see the movie was awesome. My buddy Simon called me the other day and explained to me that HMV was selling Mission Impossible 1 on DVD for 11.99$ and inside was a coupon to see Mission Impossible 3 for free!. The coupon was basically a cheque of 11.00$ for the cinema. Since the movie only cost 10$ I even got a dollar back! Super deal!

MI:3 was actually a pretty decent movie. Totally far fetched but Tom cruise showed he is really good at playing Tom Cruise. You know, basicaly freaking out over everythign and yelling "WHO'S THE BUYER?! WHATS HIS NAME????????!?!?!?" Kind of like in real life with him getting married and jumping on Oprah's couch.

I even watche the MI:1 movie and remembered how crappy that movie was but I finally understand it now that i"ve seen it 3 times since it aired in movie theatres years ago.

To The Budmobile

Friday night I went got the car and drove downtown. I rarely have a chance to drive downtown but convinced my parents to let me have the car for the evening. As I get downtown, while waiting for the light to turn green at University and Sherbrooke, I look ahead and who else is crossing University, none other than Andrew Ladd! That was a funny coincidence.

I basically spent the night with Norm, Amin and Aussie Lauren. Lauren told us this hilarious story about what happened at Starbucks where she works. Apparently, one of the regulars, a guy in his mid 40's, saw her shopping for underwear in a lingerie shop and decided to buyher a red thong... and gave it to her at work. On another occasion, she was cleaning up and went ot get a broom. While pulling it up she accidently got it caught int he light or something in the ceiling and couldn't get it out. It being the end of her shift, she wrote a note that said "I'm sorry", taped it to the broom and left. Ha ha.

We went driving downtown a bit and I totally scared my friends out with my driving. Especially when we all the leant the hard way that I forgot how to parallel park properly.

Sweet

For school I had to read something from a book called the Photoshop CS2 Bible. I decided to just buy the book since it will prove useful in the future. I had to read a little bit for today but ordered it on Amazon.ca last week and it said I wouldn't get it until later this week. I had gone to my library to see if they had it so I could at least read the part I needed before my copy arrived. I was shocked to find out the verison of the book they had was Photoshop 2.5! (CS2 is like Photoshop 9). Inside, were pictures of windows 3.1! Proving useless, I decided that my only solution was to go to Chapters monday afternoon and read what I needed and leave withouth buying anything. However, yesturday morning, as I was leaving the doorbell rang and it was the postman holding a package for me! I got to read what I needed on the bus. Sweet!

In other news, I had found out recently that Canada Day is on a Saturday. Having never celebrated Canada Day in Ottawa, and the fact that Owen from CIA keeps inviting me out there, I decided thats what must be done. Celebrate Canada Day in Ottawa.

I went to the train station and used my credit I had recieved from having to use the bus rather than the trian due to a protest in Belleville. With the cresit my whole round trip cost me 20$! The counter clerk told me in her 6 years of working for VIA Rail, she has never sold a cheaper ticket. Sweet!!

Also, walking to the metro last night to head home after hanging out with a bunch of chem people I hadn't seen in a while, a young woman walked right by me and had her IPOD placed between her cleavage (not actually touching her breasts but resting on her shirt/sweater/whatevre she was wearing). S-A-WEET!!!

The Hunt Begins

Yesturday I was one of the 25+ participants in the second meeting of MANHUNT in Montreal.

It orginated in Vancouver and there is also one that goes on in Toronto. Dustinl who lives in Vancouver, told people here about it which caused this guy I know, Phil, to start a Montreal chapter of the game. So far so good.

Basically, a everyone is given arm bands and a hunter is selected. He/she then counts for 2 minutes while everyone runs off to hide or get away. After the 2 minutes the hunter goes after people. Anyone he/she tags becomes a hunter as well. The game goes on for 30 minutes and point is to try and remain untagged. The only trick is that you don't know if someone is tagged or not.

The boundaries for the game were between St. Laurent and St. Denis, and Des Pins and Prince Arthur. The starting point being Carree St. Louis, a.k.a Crack Park. We played a total of 2 games and both were intense.

When the first one started, I had no idea what to expect and started to get into it once I deliberatey ran in a direction away from everyone else, turning a corner and then seeing a group of people coming around another corner. My instincts were to just trust NO ONE. I started to put my hood up and kept looking behind my shoulder and trying to feel all incognito which was totally a waste since I had bright orange arm band that clearly pointed me out.

I turned down a driveway into an alley (thats what was cool about this area since there were alleys between each street) and bump into Norm (who was also playing) and he starts chasing me (later I found out he wasnt a hunter at all and just wanted to make me run for nothing). After walking around a bit, I pass a park and this guy starts running at me with another guy behind him. Not waiting to find out if the guy running towards me was being chased or was coming to chase me, I bolt away.

Later as I returned to the same park, I saw another guy running towards me from far away so I start walking faster and see a couple of people walking towards me on the opposite side of the street butthey are talking and wealking casualy until suddenly then start to chase me. I immediatley started to run as fast as I could but my arm band fell off. While I was wondering if that meant I was automatically a manhunter or what, they caught me.

The first game ended with satisfaction, as I found out where Norm was hiding and with the help of Kevin, caught him by having Kevin chase him down an alley where I was waiting in the shadows at the other end.

For the second game, Norm volunteered himself to be the first hunter and had purposely tagged me first so we could double team people. That plan son back fired as we split up hoping to corner someone, instead reamining seperated for the remaining 25 minutes of the game. I however got to tag 3 peoply. One of them being Phil who I saw way down an alley, chased, lost him, walked around a bit and found him again in another alley. I eventually got him because when I had found him he was already tired from running away from others.

The whole itme there was a guy taking notes and another guy taking pictures. I got in the notes and pictures. If I find out where I can find this stuff, I'll try to link on hear sometime in the future.

My mom told me today "I can't believe you're running around like little kids. When I was your age I was married and already had a kid." Can't wait until the next one!

Krazy Kareoke

Friday night I went with a bunch of people to Dollar Cinema at Decarie Square. Dollar Cinema is an old theatre that used to play old Indian movies but has since been converted to a cheap theatre to see 6 month old movies for a buck. Run by a
Jewish guy, I guess he wanted to think of more ways to make money so Friday night was the very first Kareoke and Other Stuff night.

Norm had been talking about it for the longest time so I decided to join him and his friends Lauren, Ameen, Kevin and Lauren. The second Lauren was actually someone Norm had met through McGill classifieds, for she is from Australia visiting our aweseome city and was looking to meet new people. What better people then us!

SO we show up ealy and immediately get cornered by the owner, his lawyer, the security guard and the kareoke guy. They are all excited people showed up. We thought that either we'd be the ONLY people or it would be REALLY busy. Actually, to my suprise, the latter was true. There was a huge line that formed eventually while we were waiting for the stage to set up.

Once everything was ready, there was a kareoke machine on stage plus a live band consisting of a drummer, a keyboardist and the kareoke guy who was also a guitarist.

The show started finally and we had to wait for a few acts before it was our turn. Such acts included not one but THREE guys singing Elvis and two of them singing the SAME song. Only 1 guy was actually good... Besides the Elvis guys, was by far one of my favorite acts, a kid of about 8 or 9 singing in completion, without a pause or any backup music for that matter, Shut Up by Simple Plan. He knew EVERY SINGLE word and didn't skip a beat.

Finally it was our turn. We had denoted ourselves Zombie and sang White Wedding by Bily Idol. We have no idea how was sounded but could all agree that we were the most comfortable at the part where the song goes "White Wedding!" and "Start Again!" but the rest fo the song, no so much...

Later on I decided to sing by myself. For the love of kareoke, I do not know why, but I decided to sing Paradise City by G'N'R. I thought I knew the song pretty well. Apperently not. I got so lost in what was goign on and was almost certain the kareoke version was different from what I have on the original CD because there were parts of the song I just didnt' know how to sing. To compensate, I decided to just thrash around on stage and do air guitar. It worked since the crowd went WILD!

We stook around for a while longer. The following acts were pretty lousy but nothing beat this one woman who was on stage with her husband. She was SO BAD that Norm and I almost died from laughter.

Last but not least, Kevin got up and sang Copacobana by Barry Manilow and he KICKED ASS! He sang it bang on and finished his song by immediately dropping to his hands and doing Capoeira.

After Kevin's fantastic display of having fun, we headed over to the Orange Julep, then the Verdun to play Tetris on Nintendo 64 at Lauren's place and I got home and crashed at 3am.

I've decided to end this post with the most bizarre part of the night. On the way to the Orange Julep I mistakenly mentioned that the juice was made with egg (it turns out it's egg whites) and decided to correct myself by asking at the place. So we get to the counter and the follwing conversation ensued:

Me - "Hi, how are you tonight?"
Orange Julep Worker - "Good"
Me - "I have a question. What's in the juice?"
OJW - "I don't know"
Me - "You don't know?"
OJW (pointing to a sign that says 'May contain allergies')
Me - "But you don't know whats in the juice? Is there egg in the juice?"
OJW - "I don't know" (points to the sign again)
Me - "Does you Manager know? Can I speak to your manager?"
OJW - "My manager is not here."
Me - "Does ANYONE who works here know what is inside your juice?"
OJW - "My manager does."
Me - "But he's not here?"
OJW - "Yes."
Me - "You're manager is the ONLY person who knows and he's not working tonight"
OJW - "Yes."

After that I gave up and just ordered food and a juice. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing...

For pictures of the night click HERE!

14 Year Old Girls Scare Me...

Thursday night I went with a group of people to see Hard Candy directed by David Slade (not to be confused with David Spades). I knew a little bit of what the movie was about but was basically going in clueless.

It's about a 14 year old girl who meets an older guy on the internet and then they decide to meet in person. Everything is la-dee-da. They head back to his place and your supposed to believe something is going to happen to the girl. Wrong. The girl drugs the guy and then ties him up. The rest of the movie is about how she tortures him for she believes he is a pedophile.

NOTE SPOILERS! (I.e. I"m talking about the movie and if you want to see it, DON'T read this or you'll know what happens).

The movie is done in a really artsy way which I liked but I thought the whole movie was really stretched out. I guess the whole point is to emphesize on how much the girl wants to screw witht he guys head. Also, the whole movie is basically just the two actors in the same place so there is not much action. It's a listening piece.

Like I said, though, the idea seems stretched. Basically, the guy gets drugged and he is tied up. You learn that she's in fact not playing with him and has been scoping him out for a while. He keeps confessing he's not a bad guy and has never slept with underage girls. She rumages his house and eventually finds a safe and opens it. Inside are (supposedly, you never ctually see whats inside) naked photos of young girls, and a clothed photo a girl who has been missing in the community. He gives a bullshit story about it and denies having any involvement in her disappearance. Ok so he's tied up and she's going to do somethign to him, we know that... but then he tries to escape, and finds his gun and looks for her in teh house even though he's stil tied to a rolling chair. She emergesd and covers his head with plastic wrap thus killing him...

Or you think so. He wakes up and he's tied to a table where she eventually (after loads of talking) does an operation, removing his testicles and then throwing them in the garbage disposal.He's totally flipping out and she leaves the room to "go shower". He finally escapes and finds out she never cut off his balls btu just made them numb. He then stalks her inteh house with a knife until he goes to the shower where she again comes from behind and attacks him with a tazer in the shower. He again dies...

Or you think so. He wakes up and is now tied in such a was that he is a noose and the only things holding him up is a rope she is controlling and the chair he is standing on. She's tormenting him to just kill himself, which by this poitn of the movie, I really want him to DIE ALREADY! He eventually knocks her and jumps on teh counter, thus removing the noose. She bolts away and he chases after her, following her to the roof of the house. He FINALLY admits to have been involved in killing the missing girl but says he was only taking pictures whiel another guy had sex with her. Then the climax occurs the 14 year old says "Thats what Erin (the other guy) said". Coming to grips with his reality and the fact that his ex-girlfriend (who the 14 year old annonymously called and convinced her she need to come by the house) is about to show up, finally ties a rope around his head and KILLS HIMSELF! YES!

The movie was weird for my taste but still not a bad film. I definitely would avoid Hard Candy 2 is that ever existed.

To conclude such an interesting watching of a film, I head to the metro where I saw a goup of hot 14 year old girls chatting to each other... and cringed.

Back To School

My second semester of school started yesturday and I'm pumped. This semester the classes I have are:

Web Page Design
Image Processing II
Illustration I
Visual Communication
Edition II
Typography

I had my first class of Image Processing II, which is basically photoshop class, and that course is going ot be intense and fun for sure!
we even did this cool thing today where we started with a normal photo



and altered it so it would look more like a painting



Our midterm project will involve tracing the face of a female model to make it look as real as possible, while our final project will involve finding a style setup of a website, keepingthe same exact style, but changing the content.

I hope the other classes will seem as fun as this one.
On the bright side, FRIDAYS OFF!

Spring Cleaning

During my week off from school, I took a stab at cleaning out my room due to the fact that I really hadn't done any intense cleaning since before I moved to Australia.

I decided this time rather than just move things from one end to the room to another, I decided to actually get rid of somethings. I had about a full drawer of t-shirts, long sleeved shirts and sweaters that i just don't wear anymore.

I also have bag full of toys and trinkets that I finally decided is time to pass on. That being said anyone need a water gun, plastic giraffe, slinky or a toy truck (among other things)?

I left my closet alone until last night. Boy did that ever need a cleaning. Now I have all my sports equipment in one corner - a giant bag of tennis balls and baseballs, tennis rackets, baseball bats and the ol' set of golf clubs in a garbage bag (which have I've never used). I through all my halloween stuff in one bag, which I keep for halloween and for those random costume parties I've been going to lately.
The biggest decision I made last night was coming to terms that I no longer need my old chemistry notes. So here's what's left of my chemistry degree:



My 18 binders of notes have now been replaced with shoes.

Business As Usual

My weekend, being the last free time I had before school would restart, was pack with lots of activities.

Unfortunatley on Friday, there was no all you can play laser tag. It got cancelled for lack of participants (but apperently they offer this every week so it will happen one day!) I still got to hang out with Norm, though, which was fun in itself. While walking down the street, I saw a shadow on the sidewalk which totally looked like a boot. I immediately thought it was a boot hanging from a sign to signify a boot store or something. Norm noticed my confused expression on my face and asked what was wrong and all I could reply was "Where's the boot?". After explaining my actions, Norm bursts out laughing until I realized that the shadow was in fact a one way sign that was bent.

We went to St. Sulpice to check out how busy it would be due to it being the last day of exams for McGill students. Busy it was. SO busy in fact that both Norm and I couldn't take it any longer and left after being there probably a total of a half an a hour. Norm then went home but I met up with Madeleine who wanted to know about my adventures in Austrlia since she will be there sometime next year. Starting tomorrow she will be off on her travels around the world start in Western Canada. Have a great time in Australia Mad Dog!

Saturday, is the day I am dubing IMPROV DAY because that's what it was, hanging out with my improv friends. Saturay rocked! It started off with a very enjoyable workshop, which was the LAST saturday workshop for some of us. (so sad...).
Follwing that was food, frisbee, boggle, going to see American Dreamz (which was quite funny) and topping the night off with watching The Transporter 2 at Mike's house while srinking mini coronas (I bought the wrong thing, not realizing they even existed that small...).

Sunday was work work work and my last day of freedom. I feel like I'm obsessed with always wanting something to do. Is that healthy?

Adventure #6474 in a series

I was working tonight at Old Navy and they had placed me in the fitting room section of the store. While I was there, I recognized a customer. Turns out she had attended the Emanuelle Shreikee, shabbat dinner way back in March and had sat with her boyfirend (I'm guessing that's who he was) at the same table as my friends and I. After her and her friend had tried on some clothes and decided to leave, she comes up to me and told me her birthday is saturday night and INVITED me to attend her party. The weird thing is it wasn't an invite to soem house party or a bar it was an invite to a dinner at a restaurant. I don't know a thing about this person except that she is Jewish and he name is Maanyan.

IU'm not sure if I'll go or not. My friends thought she was kind of crazy when we met her at the shabbat dinner, but I'm alway sdown for randomness. I mean, thats how I ended up in Australia. Had I not randomnly bumped into those Irish chicks I never would have looked into SWAP.

I guess it all depends on how I feel on saturday since tomorrow night I'm going to ALL YOU CAN PLAY LASER TAG at Lazer Quest!. It's from Midnight to 6am and I'm heading there with my good buddy Norm and even my friend/boss Mike from Old Navy might show up with some of his friends. As long as there aren't too many people there that we have to wait a lot to play, it's going to ROCK! if I'm not too tired, then I'll hit up that dinner party. Should I go?

Going aways are sad...

Last night I attended a pot luck that was held in honor of the 5 McGill Improv members that are all moving away this summer. Not only are we losing 5 members, but between them and the others who are all busy, and the fact that we don't have that many new members, the team is pretty much falling apart.

None the less. My time with this group as a whole has been fantastic and last night was loads of fun. The unplanned theme was pizza since Andrew made pizzas, Nikki bought a pizza and I brought frozen pizza pockets. Mariana made some really cool vegy foods and apperently King Kevin Casey made an amazing keish. I don't like keish so I"ll just have to take everyone elses word.

After dinner the gifts were passed out to the Leavers, Mariana, Ilya, Gil, Andrew and Ken. Bryan had handed them all copies of their list of shows they perfomed in over the years. I had slaved over 8 hours making a photocollage on my computer which everyone loved and the non-leaves even want me to make a copy for them. Finally Adrienne handing out specially made t-shits to the 5 people going away. They all loved them.

It's sad they 5 more of my friends are leaving Montreal but at least most of them are stil here for a couple of more months.

For pictures of the night, click HERE!

Fun Times in T DOT O DOT

It's been a few days since I've been back but I've been busy (a.k.a lazy).

Friday marked the last day of classes for my first semester of Graphic Design school. WOOHOO! I think I kicked ass in everything and I'm really enjoying it. I had only one class on friday and it ended early. When we were done the prof asked us "So, you're done you're all of your courses. What are you going to do now on your week off?". No one answered, so I yelled out "Lets go DRINKING!" My McGill roots showing wildly. Long story short, I ended up at Mad Hatters with the cool kids in my class.

After a few beers I met up briefly with the awesomely cool Mariana (Gentlemen she's single...), caught up with what was going on until my phone rang. It wa smy mom telling me to hurry to the train station because there was some sort of protest happening in Belleville that could affect the trains. SO I sai dmy good byes and ran over to the train station to find otu my mom was completely right and the train line to Toronto had been blocked by the Native Indians in Ontario as a protest against something. So I had to take a bus to Toronto instead of a train.

I ended up sitting next to some crazy art chick in her 30's. I was just reading amagazine until I notced her reading over my shoulder, which prompted us to talk. As much as it was interesting to talk to her (she even showed me some of her cool art stuff on her mac laptop and even let me show her MY art stuff from my USB), she just souldn't stop talking. I couldn't even take a nap. Even with my eyes closed it took a while to get her to stop (I'm I like this???). Anyways, I could have been next to someone way worse, plus she was nice to talk to and she even gave me her e-mail adress, although she mentioned a husband and I didn't see a ring on her finger so I'm kind of afraid to e-mail her...

I got into Toronto at 11pm (2 hours than expected). My brother picked me up and after a quick bite out I was in his apartment with his ever so lovely wife, Connie and his adorable sone, Charles who is only 14 months old.

The weather was really shitty and all I did when I was there was go shopping and see lots of family , which was both fun and exciting.

Saturday, I went to Centerpoint mall with my bro and then we went to a Procter and Gamble warehouse sale where they had all kinds of things on sale. There was toothpaste, perfume, make up, hair dye, cleaning products and even computer games. I'm not a big computer game kind of guy but my brother convinced me to check out the selstion and I ended up buying XIII for 10$. I've been playing it a bit since I've been back and the fact the it even works on my computer makes it a fucking cool game. Besides that fact, it IS a fucking cool game. It's a Doom, first shooter type game in comic bok style with a Bourne Identity style storyline and the best thing about it... wait for it... is that one of the characters is voiced by ADAM WEST.

Saturday night, we went out for dinner with my cousin Lori and her daughter Corina. I had an amazing plate of linguini in brandy rose sauce with red snapper. HMM HMMM!

After dinner, Mark and I went to watch The Sentinal which was a fun movie to watch but nothing great. It was kind of week in plot especialy near the end. There was a bit of a "He's really a bad guy" kind of story line going on at the end but I figured out who it could be well at the beginning of the movie. Definitely a rental.

Sunday morning I had breakfast with my aunt and uncle who live out there and then went back to my brothers apartment where we grabbed Connie and Charles and headed over to Chapters. That kid LOVES looking at books. He can't read or even understand what abook is yet but he just has a fascination looking at so many books! It was like he found a giant cave loaded with treasure.

The afternoon was spent in a few malls and the evening was spent having dinner with my other cousin Lori from my dad's side of the family. She's getting married in October so it was fun to tlak to her for a while, especially since I hadn't seen her since before I moved to Australia.

Monday morning I actually took the metro to the train station. Tha was funtastic.
Five hours later I was home safe and sound and played XIII for a few hours!

Overall a good weekend indeed.

Franztastic and Deathalicious!

Last night I went to see Death Cab For Cutie and Franz Ferdinand in concert. The show was F(*KING AWESOME!

The night started with me meeting up with my good friend Norm and his friend Ameen (If you ever read this, sorry for the spelling!) at McGill. Marina was supposed to meet us there as well but she kept calling me and telling me she STILL hasn't left her house, so we arranged to meet at the venue, the CEPSUM (U de M auditorium) instead. Norm drives Ameen and I to the school and we find parking. We then walk to the nearest map and realize we are at the wrong end of the street and agreed it was too far to walk. So, back in the car we went and drove down the street only to find no place to park, turning around and parking back in the EXACT same spot as before, and then walking to the entrance. Shortly after, Mariana finally met us and confessed that she was late because she couldn't decide what to wear for the plans she had after the show (you're SUCH a terrible friend Mariana, haha). Then my buddies Mike, Alex and Jason showed up and the circle was complete...

...Only to be broken up once we got inside because and co wanted to relax and sit down in the bleacher seats (the venue was a skating rink) while the rest of us wanted to stand amongst the rest of the crowd.

The standing area filled up pretty fast and by far my favorite moment of the night was when Norm screamed out all of a sudden "FUCK YOU PSYCHO BITCH!!!". Norm had just broken up with his girlfriend. I think everyone in the whole place stopped talking when they heard that. That then became our call if we got lost in the show.

Eventually the lights turned off and the opening band, The Cribs came on stage. I had never heard of them but after a quick intro of something like "Yo we're The Cribs from England" (the acoustics for vocals were not very good for a rock concert...) they just started to rock HARD. Being just a trio, the guitarist and bassist started belting out lyrics in harmony and thrashing while the drummer went nuts and at one point even stood on his drums while continuing to drum. It was a GREAT start and really enjoyed their opening song until I found out that ALL their songs sounded the same and they did the same schenanigans during each song.

After their set, I was dying to go the bathroom and to hydrate myself so I took a chance and squeezed through the crowd towards the washroom. On the way there, there was a line of people moving in one direction and found it odd that there was a girl with crutches and two people behind her was a guy with crutches. What are the odds of that? Then it turned out the guy was Dave Kolin whom I studied chemistry with! Turns out he broke his leg skiing. OUCH!

Up the stairs, there's a huge line to the toilets and there was a guard letting women into the men's room which was now a "Unisex Bathroom". Inside, there is this long line of men and women bending around a wall. I peer around the wall and see there are no guys at the urinals. "Screw this" I thought to myself and used one of the urinals while hot chicks kept passing me to use the stalls.

Back on the floor, I searched and located my friends (thank God Mariana is tall!). I walked along the outskirts of the crowd until I was lined up with my friends and attempted to push my way through. A giant challenge it was indeed because some people thought I was being such a jerk trying to push my way through that they were being JERKS SQUARED! Some just REFUSED to budge even an inch. I was about 5 people behind my friends when every single person around me joined together and said to each other "We shall not let Joshua Bateman pass through!". I started to scream out Mariana's name and she just couldn't hear me. My phone started to ring. I pick it up and it's Mike, watching me from the bleachers and he says "looks like you're having some trouble, eh? Hahaha". Feeling totally discouraged, my hopes came up when finally Mariana happened to turn around and with her armed stretch out, brought me in to the sacred land known as my circle of friends.

And then Death Cab For Cutie marched on stage. The stage had two 7 feet tall white square houses with windows and a back drop of white trees. Their set was amazing. I thought it would be really melow judging from their music but they really rocked on stage. All the musicians were really into it. The coolest thing was during the set, they started to swap instruments or play two at once. For the final song, the groupies set up a miniature drum set and the singer jumped to it and started to do a drum solo with the drummer! For the finale, the bassist climbed to the top of an amp and simultaneously jumped off and hit a note on his bass as the singer smashed his guitar on the stage! Totally not something I expected from that group!

The lights were back on and it was the last intermission before the big guns. This time Mariana chanced it and took a trip to the bathroom. Meanwhile the floor was starting to really get cramped and I literally couldn't even turn around anymore. The show was going to start any minute and Mariana came into view but couldn't get past the wall of jerks. I then put myself on a possible suicide mission, said my goodbyes to Norm and Ameen and jumped back into the crowd to reach Mariana. Seconds later the lights turned off and the band had reached the stage. Without a thought, people started to rush the stage and Mariana and I followed. The band started rocking out immediately and the crowd went wild! While during the first two groups everyone kind of stood in place bobbing their heads, now everyone was just dancing, jumping and plain out going crazy. I immediately got into this trance and totally let myself go to the music. I just let the crowd direct me where to go. I ended up bumping into Ameen followed by Norm and next thins I know it, I'm at the FRONT of the stage! I remained there the rest of the show, listening to amazing Franz Ferdinand tunes like "Take Me Out, Do You Want To, and Matinee". They were BANG ON the whole time.

For their encore, they played the song Michael which Norm was really hoping they would. While jumping up and down with Norm, all of a sudden an arm wrapped around my shoulders and some guy starts to sing with me. It ended up being Surjit! A really cool guy I met at McGill through all my FROSH involvement. What a crazy way to catch up with a long time friend!

For the final song, there ended up being 3 people playing the drums while the other musicians just went nuts and with a heartbeat it was all over.

We then made our way to the T-shirt stand where I bought a wicked Death Cab for Cutie shirt for only 25$, although Norm was screaming at me from across the way to buy a girl shirt.

Exhausted, we said our goodbyes, made to Norms car, went for a bite to eat and Norm drove me home.

In conclusion, I had an AWESOME night seeing an AWESOME set of bands with AWESOME friends! That was definitely one of the best shows I had ever been too.

Passover That Beer Mate

This post is for Jess. Rather then just a small reply I decided to write a post since I have some time to kill until my father comes home.

So what is Passover? It's a Jewish holiday that happens aroudndthe time of Easter every year. It spans over 8 days and the date always changed per year because the Jewish calendar follows the Lunar cycle. It is basically a holiday to remember the events that happened in the past around this time thousands of years ago. We spend the first two nights celebrating by having the family gather around the table and we read from a book called the Hagada which is full of stories and information to remember the stories of the past. The story best represented in the movie the Ten Commandments, starring Charleton Heston, is about an astronaut that crash lands on a planet filled with talking Apes and... No wait that's Planet of The Apes. The Ten Commandments is the sory of Moses the then leader of the Jewish People.

As for how the Jews ended up in Egypt, going further back in the bible, Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, had 12 sons. One of them was his favorite, Joseph, and the others resented him for it. Long story short, they faked his death and sold him off as slave and he ended up in Egypt. After helping the Pharoh of Egypt decipher some crazy dreams he had, Joseph eventually went up the ranks in Egypt. Many years later, Jacob and his sons came to Egypt for the harvest and Joseph came forward revealing he was in fact alive and well. Eventually Jacob and his extended family move to Egypt and all is well.

I think years pass by and Egypt is full of Jews. The nice Pharoh who let them into the country dies and an Evil Pharoh takes over. He makes all the Jews slaves and they have to build pyramids and cities for him. He also puts out a law to kill all the new born children. One woman takes her son and puts him in a basket and then throws it in the river so he can escape death. As the baby boy is floating along, the Evil Pahroh's sister, notices the basket, finds the boy and claims him her son. The boy is raised as royalty in the Pharoh's household and it looked upon well by the Pharoh which makes his own son, Ramses uber jealous.

Somewhere along the line, Moses discovers he's really Jewish and leaves the Pharoh's estate and journeys on his own. He eventually comes across a burning bush and is spoken to by God. I can't remember what happens next but he eventually becomes a messenger of God and in his name goes to Ramses, the new Evil Pharoh since his father dies of old age or something, and asks to let the Jews out of Egypt. Ramses says no and Moses, with God's help does some fancy tricks like turn his staff into a stick. Then he says something about "if you don't do what go says, you guys will be in trouble" and Ramses says something like "Yeah right!"

After this results the ten plagues where all kinds of crazy things happen in Egypt. I can't remember them all but remember some being water turned to blood, locusts, darkness and all the cattle died. The last plaque was the death of all the first born children. Now the holiday gets it's name from the fact that the angel that was to pass over and kill the first born children was told to "pass over" all the houses that had lambs blood smeared on their door frames, to signify they were Jewish homes.

After this the Jews with Moses as their leader and Joshua as second as command (yes I'm in the bible, and I knew everyone then as well, from Ezeikiel to Schlomo...) marched out of Egypt with the Egyptians following behind. The story goes that in their exodus from Egypt, because they were in such a rush, the women didn't have enough time to let the bread rise and they ended up with unleavened Bread which is signified by the Mathias we eat now during the holidays.

On the way, they pass Mount Sinai where Moses climbed up and stayed up there I think for 40 days and was given the 10 commandments by God (hence the name of the movie). He finally comes down and finds all the Jews doing totally non-jewish things like worshipping idols and what not. They broke all the rules before they even existed!

I'm not sure what happened next but I think that's what spawned another Jewish Holiday, Yom Kippur (day of Atonement) which is when we fast for 24 hours, but that's a story for another time.

I'm sure half the stuff I said was wrong but I hope that helps answer Jess' question. Anyone, please feel free to correct all my mistakes...

Week-END

This weekend was pretty interesting so I thought I'd rant about it.

Thursday (yes in my world the weekend costitutes anyday of the week that I feel like including) I had lunch with the very lovely Nadine Alby. It was good catching up with her after not seeing her for over a month. We go way back to the ol' chem days.

Friday I had a really fun class. For my final project in Creativity, we have to make a self portrait using any materials we want. My prof convinced me to buy a toy and cover it in playdo to make it resemble me. The toy I'm using as a mold is Jack Skeleton from A Nightmare Before Christmas because he is made long and thin (like me). So I basically spent 4 hours playing with playdo and listening to some tunes on my cd player.

Friday night I joined the very lovely Mariana Vial and among other people made our way to St Thomas High School in Pointe Claire to volunteer for the Montreal edition of the Canadian Improv games. The competition which involves high school teams battle it out on stage, was a lot of fun to watch. The little guys have a lot of positive energy. I also enjoyed seeing the poster I created all over the school and finding out that my name was printed into the panflet at "Josh Posterguy" since the organizer, Dave, had forgotten my name.

Saturday was spent inside school working on a project. I finally escaped from my prison and made way to the surface to meet up with Shing. we ended up in China Town and had some good ol' All You Can Eat Chinese Buffet. the food was mediocre but the company was priceless.

Following dinner, I ended up at a house party celebrating the end of the CIG games. It was a party filled with beer, music and Super Smash Brothers Melee! Very interesting indeed...

Sunday was work day but was fun as always.

I guess what I am really excited for is this weekend. On Wednesday, Passover begins. Thrusday, my brother and his family are coming to stay with us. I have a 3 day weekend since I have no school on friday and no work on sunday all because of Easter. Then saturday night is the Franz Ferdinand/Death Cab for Cutie concert!

School Update

Time is flying. I have 3 more weeks of school until I complete my first semester. Then I have 1 week off to relax before hitting the computers again for 15 more weeks. Over the summer to boot!

I have a bunch of really cool projects I'm working on and can't wait to post them online. In the meantime, I handed in one of my midterm projects recently and finally got around to putting on this site.

For my Basic Design class (intro to Illustrator) we had to do a composition project (which I spoke about in an earlier post a few weeks ago). Basically we had to trace 5 shapes (logos) and make 5 of our own abstract shapes. Once all our shapes were done we had to choose from a book what kind of operations we wanted to use on each shape, thus resulting with a pattern.

































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Knights Of the Oblong

Who would have thought - Two dress up parties in one month...
Tonight I attended a Medieval Times party at my friend Norm's girlfriend Hana'a place. We had to all dress up, were given a story and special powers and had to talk to other characters and, if need be, challenge them. If challenged you would have to play a rock-paper-scissors type game of tiger-hunter-hippy, where the hunter kills the tiger, the hippy beats the hunter and tiger eats the hippy.
There were many different kinds of characters and costumes. Hana was King Arthur and Norm was Morgain, Arthur's sister (wig, breasts and all...). I went as a knight/barbarian. I had a vikingsd helmut, a sword, an axe and an eye patch. My background was that I lived in a small village that specialized in Bonzai plants. I was at war with a dragon named Trogdor. I ended up improvising the rest of the night which led to:
-getting one Knight to talk peace to Trogdor on my behalf
-Selling my bonzai plants to a drawf in return of a spell stone
-Giving my spell stones to Trogdor in return of peace
-Joining King Arthur's knights of the round table
-Unvoluntarily seducing another knight and then conceiving a child
-Asking a lady's hand in love only to be rejected
-Killing myself due to said objection
-Being ressurected as a dragon by Merlin the Magician
-Using my seduction spell to bring back the dead Morgain who then became now my corpse bride
-Having my dead bride be turned into a frog by Merlin the Magician

All in all I had a great time.

Here is a pic of everyone:


For the rest click HERE!