Deadly Passage

Saturday night I was invited to a Murder Mystery Dinner in Hudson... DUN DUN DUNNN!!!!It was a really good time.
We were all given characters and had to dressed up. The story takes place on a Millionaire's cruise ship near the Galapagos Islands in 1928. The millionaire got interested in Peruvian Artifacts and had invited a bunch of Guests on board his Cruise. While in the ocean, he made an announcement to marry his secretary who is 30 years younger than him. Then shortly afterwards, he was KILLLED! We then had a book which had questions and answers to be said during the night, slowly unfolding the tale. At the end of dinner, we then discussed and revealed who the killer was.
The players were:


Chris Dye as Captain Scerdilidas Konstantinopoulos (the host)


Arvind as Senor Raoul Alvarado (the Peruvian ambassador)


Nikki as Augusta Bold (the head housekeeper)


Noelle as Simon Decree (the attorney)


Maryam as Amanda Goldman (the daughter)


Ken as Edwin Goldman (the son)


Adrienne as Sarah Jones (the secretary)


Jillian as Camillia Perez (the archaeologist)


Andrew as Arthur Seat (the observer)


Dan Beirne as Dan Beirne (the Dan)

[Both Dan and Andrew were not characters in the actual game. Dont' get fooled like me... Only Andrew came dressed up although he didn't need too.]


And myself as William Cruise (the adventurer)
(I didn't know but Chris had sent out a list of the descriptions for everyone's costumes. I came dressed up as a cross between The Crocodile Hunter and Nick Fury when I SHOULD have worn a light pale buttoned shirt, a straw hat and lots of flashy jewlery. I guess I wasn't THAT off..... yeah....)

The evening was full of eating


shmoozing


and Dan dancing



Fianlly towrds the end of the night, we discovered that the killer no other then....
NIKKI!

Apperently, the nurse did it because she was in love with the millionaire and took care after him when his wife died btu when she foudn out he had fallen in love with the young hot secretary she got extrememely jealous. So jealous, in fact, that she used a Perusian dagger artifact.

The whole night was a lot of fun. I eneded up crashing over but unfortunately needed to get to work for 12pm. I was trying to convince Arvind to drive me since I had no idea where I was and how to leave Hudson. Arvind was trying to get me to call in sick so he wouldn't have to drive me all the way to Fairview mall and back. I just felt uncomfortable with lying and finally convinced him to give me a lift to work. Once there, I discovered that for some strange reason they had asked a lot of employees to work the same day. So in fact, we were like 11 people when we're normally 5 or 6. I totally could have caled in sick and it wouldn't have made a difference in the store at all.

How is school going? AWESOME

Everyone has been asking me lately how everything is going at school, so I thought I'd do a little update on what I've been working on for my various classes and how I've been doing. Basically in each of my 6 classes, we've had small assignments and bigger mid-term assignments or tests. Starting next week, we're alreay moving onto our final projects and we ave final exams in the last week of the semester. There are 15 weeks per semester (3 semesters in all) and we're already in week 10.

Basic Design I:
This is my Illustrator course. Illustrator is used to draw things ont he computer and is widely used for logos. We had a small midterm that involved following the steps and drawing small pictures like the fish I put up in an older post (I did VERY well on it).
I also had a second test where I had to trace logos in a fast and efficient way. I managed to barely finish in time and found it to be one of the more difficult things I've had to do this semester although I'm hoping I did well enough (marks are yet to be handed back).
Right now I'm almost finishing up my midterm project which is compositions. the project consists of taking a logo and then repeating it in a certain fashion. We have to do this with 5 concrete shapes that we trace and 5 abstract that we make up. I promise to put up all of them one I"m finished but for now here is an example of what I'm going ot hand in:

Starting with this image I traced over



I then did a composition known as Gradation In Size where, basically, the worm is getting smaller as you move outward from the top left corner.



Not too sure on all the details on our final project be we were told to bring in a photo of somethign we want to draw. I'm debating over a comic book character and maybe my favorite movie, The Blues Brothers!

Image Processing:
This is my Photoshop course. it's where I'm learning the software used to manipulate photographic images. It's the one used to take your head and put it on a body of a hot model...

I've had 3 small projects which involved adding color to an image and fixing up various images (One of them being the Duotone stuff I put up a while back).

Our midterm project involved making an animation by drawing out our cartoon in Illustrator, adding color with Photoshop and then making it move with another program called Image ready.

I had many ideas but ended up using this one:



It's supposed to move but I'm not sure how to get it to work off this website (try clicking on it or downloading it). Just imagine the head is bobbing up and down and the arms are playing the guitar while the speakers are booming.

I don't have much info on our final project for this class btu we were told to bring a book on a subject we like and will have to make a book cover or something for that subject using pictures form the book.

Creativity:
Probably the most interesting and fun class I am taking, we basically ahve been asked to create all kinds of things and use our head in different ways. We had a midterm project that was my poster that I painted a picture of a King Neptune character in front of his under sea castle. I'll try and get picture of that to put up. I spent a lot of time painting it and ended up with a 19/20 for my effort, original ideas and presentation (we had to show off our poster and talk about it for a few minutes. Luckily I had 4 years of chem presentation experience...)

We have a midterm exam that involves doing a brainstorm session with the class. Basically, the more ideas I have to give to the pot, the more marks I'll get.

Graphic Design:
This class is a non-computer class where I have to draw all layouts by hand. We had a huge midterm project that involved making 16 layouts using cut up magazine pieces. I spent a shitload of time making it (takes forever to cut up magazines and paste them!) but it was worth it - I got 19/20.

Our next assigment is to collect pictures of our assigned color (mine was orange) and we're going to have to make some sort of label.

Edition 1:
This is my Quark Xpress course. It is the program that allows us to do layouts but on the computer instead of by hand.

Our first project was making reproducing a layout my prof created, step by step only using Quark Xpress:



The second project we had to do was make another layout, for a phonecard poster, but this time using all of the 3 essential programs (photoshop, illustrator and quark xpress) with less guidelines to follow and doing most of it by eye. I had to hand it in today but here is what it looks like:



Our final project will involve us making our OWN poster competely from scratch. I have ot come up with concept drawings, a drawing of how I want it to look, find all the pictures and put it all together. We have 5 weeks to do it with a different stage being need to be completed by a specific week. Can't wait to get started on that one.

Computer Techniques:
Probably the least exciting course, but fun non-the-less due to the really cool prof we have. It's a course to learn all the shortcuts on Mac OS-X and have to be fast and effecient on the computer.

We had a few little things to do including a small quiz on the shortcuts (which I aced).

Today we had our midterm. He kept scaring us, telling us it is a test where he will sit with us individually and tell us to do certain things on the computer. He will be checking to see how fas and efficient we are on the computer. He kept telling us that it would be hard to fail but also hard to do really well.

In accordance to him telling us that we should treat it like an interview, I came dressed in a tie (but forgot my buttoned shirt so I went a-la-Avril Lavigne). I was really worried about not doing well, so I volonteered to go first and get it over with. I knew how to do everything he wanted me to do and he helped a bit on the way which I thought meant I'd lose marks. In the end he tallied them all up and showed me my results: 19/20! he told me he was really suprised how fast I was at doing everything in my first semester!

Well I really hope I can keep up this trend. Stay tuned for me to add pictures and comments on more thigns I'm working on in the near future.

Adventure #6735 in a series

Well this morning was interesting. Interesting enough to write a blog post about it at least. This morning, like every weekday morning, I ook the bus and metro to school. Like always, I was listening to nice relaxing music (Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brngs the Flood - HIGHLY recommended) and taking a nap so squeeze in some more sleep before class. Usually I wake up when we reach Lionel-Groulx since I need to switch in order to get to Atwater. This time, however, I opened my eyes just in time to see the stop move away. No problem, I calmly waited until George-Vanier and then swapped sides, waited 5 minutes and returned to Lionel-Groulx. I got out and crossed to the green line. What felt like an hour later, the metro finally shows up. I anxiously enter and sit down. We take off and all diorder has now been claimed to order... until I hear on the speakers "Prochain station CHARLEVOIX"!?! So then I got off and swapped yet AGAIN direction to get back to Lionel Groulx. Once there I was JUST about to get off when I glanced at the subway map and realized I was now on the right line in the right direction and sailed on through to Atwater. So if anyone wants to know if the metro system is running well, yes it's working fine...

I Survived Vaganza 2006

Vaganza VI was AWESOME! I had SUCH AN AMAZING TIME! We all put a lot of effort getting this thing to work and it was such a success in the end.

We charged 3$ (5$ for non-students) and had a bake sale with REALLY good deserts and snacks. Our good friends from Ottawa, the Carleton Improv Association came all the way down to give us a helping hand. In return, we gave them a couple of full hours for them to perform alone. Montreal's Without Annette also had a full hour doing their famous UNO long form show. After every hour, we got all the performers together for a group photo. Each photo was the reenactment of a different book. During the middle of the night, those that were still around, had the opportunity to see us all dressed up for our ANIMALS theme.

In the end, we ended up raising 300$ and because I work for the Gap Inc., the Gap Inc, will match what we raised and make it a total of 600$! All of which is going to the Juvenile diabetes Research Foundation.

Once Vaganza was over, I got a lift home by the Carleton guys since they were going my way, which I was grateful for sine I had visions of me passing out on the metro and riding the car back and forth for hours. Once at home I had passed out for a solid 2 hours, slept again a little bit later, went for dinner and finally called it a night at 11pm. This morning I woke up at 10am feeling great. I had asked for the day off work and probably could have worked after all but am glad I now have a day to relax and remember all the fun times I had the last couple of days.

Ona personal note, I don't know why but I find that whenever I am thrown in a situation where there is maximum fun, it is like being on a high, and when the fun is over, I feel a bit sad or lonely and it takes me a while to get back to normal (Is this normal?).

I've been with McGill improv for 3 years now and have really gotten close with everyone on the team. I have the best time when I hang out with those guys, such a good groups of people, and it saddens me that by next year we will all be split up and spread all over the place. Not only did this Vaganza mark 24 hours of improv, but it also was the last big event that all of us will have been together. It was a pleasure performing and hanging out with all of you!

For pictures of the night, click HERE!

24 hours is a LONG time and from being so tired I don't even remember everything that went on but here are some highlights of my Vaganza 2006 experience (in no particular order):

-I show up at 12pm to help setup and drop off my stuff. 10 minutes after opening the room with Andrew and Adrienne, a bunch of construction workers come in with all these tools and things trelling us they have to fix a window. Thankfully it was only for an hour that they would be making such repairs.

-Having heard from Andrew that the total costs for the event were cut down to only 70$!

-I show up just in time to perform for the 4pm hour and started performing well from the beginning.

-A lot of my friends had shown up including Norm, Caitling, Shing, Joe and Katherine, Nadine and Sophie!

-A few people I knew but didn't expect to come were there as well including Dave from chemistry and my brother Lorne!

-I learnt that my brother is just as crazy as I am. When he was asked to give suggestions for the game "Choose Your Own Adventure", his suggestion for "How to dispose of the Ewok" was to "Boil it in it's own mothers milk"...

-Carlton Improv showed up on time and didn't get lost! They also put on an excellent show at 7pm.



-Without Annette came and also put on a very funny show.



-For one round of 187 the object was Moose Heads and seeing my brother in the audience inspired me to say "187 Moose Heads walk into a Russian Bar and the Bartneder says "What, no Squirrel?". I think only my brother got that joke.

-For City Slogans, we got Chawanagen. After a few jokes, asked for another place and was given Chicoutimi... Also, City Slogans is now my favorite line up game.

-Everyone had brought really awesome props and we had used a lot of them. Most of them were weapons.

-During Ilya's hour, he decided to try really crazy stuff and made our performers do a rendition of Puppets where the puppet master couldn't move as well which basically resulted in an actor who couldn't move being moved around by someone else WHILE having someone on their back doing nothing.

-Ilya and I were doing a scene about a boy and his Bar Mitzvah making lots of Jewish jokes. Him and I were the only Jews around...

-For the book suggestions for the hourly photo, A Tale of Two cities was ALWAYS suggested.

-During the hour I hosted, I decided to try different games. While introducing the first game, Story Tell or Sing, Mariana got SUPER excited until she realized we were going to play Story Tell or SING and not Story Tell or DIE and looked completely disappointed.

-Joe was picked for Family Dinner and it was probably the BEST skit for that game that I have EVER seen.

-I gave Shing prize for participating in one of the games I picked. Only later on did I realize the prize was an electronic game that needed a TV to work. Shing has no TV...

-The celebrity that I had to guess who I was portraying in the manipulation game Celeb Cafe was Jim Morrison.

-By the middle of the night I finally realized why everyone was wearing jackets. The window to be fixed was in fact only removed and boarded up (badly) with wood, causing gusts of extremely cold air to enter the room slowly (Yeah it took me like 10 hours until I realized there was even wood in the room...).





-I got to play Dolf Lundren in a Party Quarks game

-It took an EXTREMELY long time to get Merav to say "Making out" while trying to guess that Andrew was a French teacher who like to make out. Ilya's reference to both "first base" and my saying "kissing him is like a party in my mouth and everyone is invited" didn't help...

-Arvinds costume for the Animal theme was pinning several sheep to his clothes.



-Both Andrew and I decided to wear an Animal from the Muppets T-shirt for the Animals theme...

-Noelle had to guess "Elated Slinky" was what Arvind wanted to buy in Shop Keeper. After my first attemp, which was coming on stage, saying I my buddy Ted and I were driving to L.A., purchasing a map and then screaming "We're going to L.A, TED!", didn't work, I came back on as a kid needing to purchase a My Little Pony doll because my friend Elle, ate ming. Arvind and I had to repeat "Elle, at it" like 10 times until she finally got it...

-Going down to Gerts for a beer with Carlton people.

-Having a conversation with a few girls about thier breasts.

-Constantly being bugged about my mom making sandwiches.

-Carlton having performed 2 shows. The first show (at 7pm) being packed with audience members and Improv members. The second show (at 1am) having the same exact people minus the audience memebers...

-Having paid money to eat bagels from Tim Hortons before realizing that in the morning we will be serving free bagels. I being the one who suggested free bagels in the first place...

-The last hour ended up being a giant line up game fest with 15 performers on stage!

-Giving away all the gifts last minute because we forgot to during the night...

-Hearing from the audience member who one the Old Navy gift certificate for 25$ (Neale) that he really needed new clothes and was really appreciated to have won that gift card.

-The fact that for some reason, the first and last picture I took at Vaganza involves Mariana looking dead on the floor...

-Hearing my mom tell me on Saturday once I was home at 1pm that she wanted to come down the night before and bring sandwiches for everyone! (But couldn't because she didn't have the car...)

The coolest Gala that never happened

I havn't had the chance to update my blog on a regular basis so I"m trying to catch up on things I missed out on writing about even though they happened a few weeks ago.

Back in february, my brother called me up and informed me that he won tickets to a Gala event at the Ritz-Carlton hosted by MIKE FM 105.1. MIKE FM is a radio station that plays rock music but is broadcating only a few hours a day on a Greek radio station channel. My brother likes them quite a bit and was excited to win these tickets. He had told me that it was going to be a party with food and lots of people and there was goign to be a chance to win all these crazy prizes: A trip to Cancun, a car, a diamond ring, or 50 000$ shopping spree at a diamond store. It sounded like a really cool party. I was really excited to go. I even dressed up all nice at work for I had no time to change in order not to be late.

However, the night wasn't as cool as is COULD have been. Yes, it was at the Ritz, but the room was quite small. Yes, there were people, bu everyone stayed in their own group. Yes, there was food, but only 3 kinds of Hors-D'euves. Yes there were prizes to be won, but only 1 of the 4 prizes was given away. We played a reverse draw where everyone had a card and if you're card was picked you were OUT of the game.The last card holder then had to choice to win ONE of the 4 big prizes. He/she had to pick cards out of bags and when 5 of the same card was picked, the prize on the card was won. Of course, the woman who had the chance to win one for the big prizes got the least expensive prize (diamong ring) but it was still a nice gift. Just seemed kind of like a jip.

All in all, I thought it had potential to be a really cool party, had it had more food and more people and a more livelier atmospehere rather than the cramped, jagged feeling I did have.

Here are some highlights of the night:





"This is going to be the coolest party ever..."











Dan, Rachel and I - Enjoying the free wine












They had a Mountie officially count the deck of cards











Which is the lucky card?











"Five of Diamonds. It's a sign of good luck!"

VAGANZA VI - THE UNDISCOVERED IMPROV

This Friday (March 3rd) at 12pm all the way to Saturday (March 4th), McGill Improv will be having it's 6th annual 24 Hour Improv show!

This year we're pulling all the stops! There will be prizes (from a 25$ gift certificate to the COMPLETE 6th season DVD set of Dawson's Creek). There will be special guests:

All the way from Ottawa (and the third place winner of the Montreal Improv Summit), the CIA - Carlton Improv Association (I tried searching them on Google and only my OWN website came up...) will be entertaining us from 6-7.

The Montreal famous Without Annette will be following the CIA afterwards at 7-8pm.

On saturday at 11pm, The SSMU president will be joining us on stage AND there will be free bagels to munch on!

Every other hour there will be some crazy theme! After 3am, there will be LOCKDOWN! No one comes in and no one comes out.. and all the performers become ANIMALS! (No really, that's our theme this year). There will also be a bake sale going on.

The whole thing costs 3$ (5$ for non-students) and entitles you to come and go a much as needed within the 24 hours. All the money raised will be going to charity. AND, for every dollar raised, the ever kind people at Gap Inc. (Parent company of Old Navy, where I work) will match every dollar!

So if you missed out on Nuit Blanche last week, here's another chance to be entertained ALL NIGHT LONG, get NO sleep and free breakfast!

Here's the poster I made for the event:

I Don't Like That Duotone Of Yours Mister!

I havn't had a chance to show some of the things I've been doing in class, but I found todays pretty interesting and have an easy example to show what I learnt.
Today's topic in Digital Image Processing I we were taught Duotones. Basically, it's a way to color a black and white (and grey) photo using only 1 (mono), 2 (duo) or 3 (tri) colors (tones). You start by analyzing the original photo. Our first example was the following photograph:



Looking at the photo, you can see three main different parts - the flowwer petals being white/slightly grey, the leaves beings shades of grey and the shadows in the background are almost completely black or dark grey/black. Therefore, you can distinguish the different parts by applying a color to the amount of grey each part has.

Then you choose your colors. In this example we used three (therefore, it's a tritone) colors - yellow, green and black. The values are set on a graph of Quantity of Color by Amount of Grey. The petals look like they are ~20-30% grey, the leaves 40-60% grey and the backgroung 90-100% grey. Therefore, all you do is set the yellow to "color in" only the regions on the photo that are 20-30% grey. The same concept is used to set the green and black colors. After tweaking the values, you end up with:



Pretty cool, eh?

Our next big project in that class is to make an animation. I thought of a pretty wicked idea for a crazy animation so hopefully I'll be able to use it for the assignment. Look out for that one in the future.

This is SO cool

Yesturday in my Creative class, th eprof told us to take out a piece of paper and draw an abstract object. Then we had to take that object and turn it into a cartoon character. She then made us write positive and negative things about the character purely on how it looked (happy, sad, mean, etc.). We also had to make up a story to go along with the character. Finally we were given 10 words (garuantee, free, money, etc.) and 8 items (batteries, beer, diapers, etc.) and had ot make a slogan up for eahc item using each word (so 80 slogans total). She finally told us that we have a 20% project where we have to take all these things and make a movie poster that will have the character I made up, based on the story I have and use the best slogan I made up. We have to drawe it and use paints and everything. It's going ot be wicked. My character ended up being a King Neptune kind of character and my idea for my poster will be a take off on the first Star Wars poster. It's going to be wicked!

I HEART (the new) PORN(ographers)

I've known about these guys for a while and have had their albums for some time now but lately I REALLY got into The New Pornographers. They are a "super group" from Vancouver and members include A.C. Newman and Neko Case as well as 2 guys from Limblifter. My buddy Glen introduced them to me with their second album Electric Version. It's really good. After that, A.C. Newman released a solo disc, The Slow Wonder, which is actually as good as the New Pornographers albums. TNP released a third album last year which I think is excellent and was rated one of the top albums of 2005.
As for the music, it's very pop rockish but with really good harmonics and nice little riffs and stuff.
I highly recommend them to listen to.

Oh lucky lucky me!

I just finished my Shortcuts for MAC OS X for my Computer Techniques class. Literally. I'm still in the classroom right now. We were given a sheet in class of useful shortcuts to use on the computer. basically i had to memorize the two columns - The actual shortcut keys, and what they do. I think I did really well. I answered all the questions, looked over it twice adn was still the first one to hand it in. I don't know how anyone could fail such a quiz for not only did the prof put a few answers on the board right before the quiz, he also repeated the 2 of the questions twice on the same page. Plus most of the time the only word I had to fill in for the shortcuts was 'command'.

In the sae class, I actually had a tiny assignment for today which I completely forgot about and had to rush to complete it throughout the course of the day. I came in today feeling good, sat down and Amelie next to me says "did you finish the pictures?". Realizing I had no idea what she was talking about, I later found out we were supposed to aquire 15 photos for 5 different catagories (nature, cities, textures, people and objects) for a grand total of 75 pictures! I crammed it in during all my breaks. When I was told that it took others over an hour to finish I was worried I was done for. thankfully (and luckily) I finished my work in the previous class early and was allowed to leave, so I had well over an hour to finish what I had left (I had already comepleted 3/5 of it during my 30 minute lunch break).

Well class has started again...

Happy Hallmark Day

Hooray it's Valentines Day (boo!). Actually, I woke up feeling bitter but realized there is no reason why I should feel that way and it wouldn't do any good to be mean to others. If anything, I'd just look like the bad guy. So I changed my 'tude and decided to go about it like any other day. I worked today and discovered that Valentines Day is a lot like Christmas. People run to the stores to get gifts for their loved ones at the LAST minute. At least during christmas the last minute is christmas eve since all the stores are closed on christmas day. For Valentines, however, you can by gifts until 9pm the DAY OF!. Nothing says "I love you!" then something bought on the way to seeing you! The gifts women usually get on this day are roses and chocolates, but apperently, for men it's boxer shorts with hearts on them. Well thats what the girlfriends think their boyfriends want since every second person I served at cash today bought a pair. Attention ladies, your boyfriends want SOMETHING else! (Oh Right - Giggidy Giggidy!)

When I was first put on cash I thought the cash I had was dying. First it was making a lot of weird noise (which I later found out was from a jammed paper), then it was spweing out 10% discounts left, right and center. See, every once in a while, the cash randomnly beeps and then prints out information for access to an online survey which as a reward for filling out gives the customer a 10% off coupon to be used in the store. Normally, I'd get 1 or 2 in a 9 hour shift. Today I got 5 in 30 minutes! One person even got the 10% off while RETURNING something! Turns out the company incresed the chances of getting it and now almost every second customer wins 10$ off. Hooray for the customers (boo!) because now I need to repeat the same schpeel all the time!

For those of you inrelationships I hope you get smothered in gifts. For those not in trelationships I hope you get smothered in gifts (bought by yourself of course) and got out and meet other people! Since i have school early in the morning, I can't even go out celebrate being single, so if your in the same position of not being able to go out, read my blog and drop me a line!

Franz Death 2006!

This morning, I got up and put on my long johns, thermal socks, 2 long sleeve shirts, ski sweater, 2 pairs of gloves, winter coat, scarf and ski hat. However, I wasn't going skiing. I was getting ready to stand in line outside in the cold Montreal weather in order to get tickets to the upcoming Franz Ferdinand/Death Cab For Cutie conert. Being that they are two great bands and that the venue is small (Cepsum - U de M) I figured they would sell out REALLY fast. My plan all along was to get to Club Soda at 10am and wait until 12noon when the box office opened.

As I was walking down the street, just before I turned the corner to Club Soda I was expecting to see a huge line. Instead, I saw nothing. I was the ONLY one there. I sat down on the blanket I brought and started to wait. Only 2 more hours to go... Then around 10:15, 4 girls came and asked me if I was in line. They told me they to were waiting for tickets but decided to wait inside the Burger King across the street since they were the only one. Then at 10:30, the lovely Mariana came and waited with me for she too was excited to get tickets. I was getting anxious to see that the line would surely get humongous any time now.

It never did.

In fact by 11:15, Mariana and I decided to go warm up and get coffee. We got back at 11:45 and only 2 more people came.

By the time the box office opened I think we were a total of 10 people. On the bright side I did manage to get the correct amount of tickets I needed.

I may have waited in the cold for no apparent reason but I'm GOING TO SEE FRANZ FERDINAND AND DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE! WOOT WOOT!

Wacky Inventions

Yesterday during my Creativity class, we were split into two groups (so happened to be French versus English...) and were handed each a bag with various items inside. Our goal was to invent a functional object using all the items supplied. In our bag we were given:
-A martini glass
-Black Bristol board
-2 Green plastic leighs
-A flap jack flipper
-2 red clip magnets
-A sheet of thin insulation
-2 copper wools
-5 chop sticks
-A bunch of plastic ties (the ones that you put one end through the other and pull until tight and can't undo them)
-A bunch of paper clips
-Scotch tape
-A knife

After several ideas ( a telescope, a dog toy, a cheese grater) we came up with a Martini making machine. The final project looked pretty damn cool. We basically used the Bristol board body by rolling it into a cylinder and then cut a door out of it.The flap jack flipper was used to place the martini glass in and out of the contraption. The foam became a funnel. We used the chop sticks and copper wool to be the base to place the flap jack flipper and also as a filter above where the glass goes. The leighs became the "juice" and we ripped one so it hung out of the funnel/filter and into the glass. The whole thing was to be graded for 10% of our final mark so I hope my team did well.

The other team came up with a less impressive invention. Originaly they got lazy and were going to make a TV antenna out of the chopsticks and Bristol board but were told it had to be something that doesn't already exist. So, they last minute through everything on top and said it was a special machine that oxidized water into oxygen. Later on we had to switch sides and write down the positive, negative and interesting facts about the other groups invention. Boy did I ever have the advantage of having studied chemistry. Yeah right, like water can ever be turned into oxygen. What next? Using the suns energy to power cars?

Happy Birthday Charles!!!

Last Saturday, February 4th, 2006, my nephew Charles turned 1! Boy was he ever the center of attention, and he LOVED every second of it.

For pictures ( a whopping 57!), click HERE

Budman-rific

Didn't know what to title this post since it's just bits and pieces of things from here and there.

After the improv Summit,on saturday, I attended my newphew Charle's first birthday party. It was crazy. my brother invited the whole city of montreal to our house (or what felt like it). Charles lit up like a firecracker when he recieved his umptieth gifts (or the wrapping paper to each gift, rather).

Monday I had another photoshop class where I learnt how to touch up both a black and white, and a colored photo. I have an assignmentin fixing up 2 such photos as well as another assignment in which I turn a black and white photo into a colored photo.

Tuesday I worked. Everything went well except:
-I short changed a woman 10$ and when my managed went to count the cash to see if we were over 10$, he found out we were over 35$! Thankfully, it turns out, my manager miscounted and we were only over 10$ which was returned to the customer.

-A woman freaked out when she tried returning a few tank tops. She didn't have a bill so I could only give her back the value of what the items are worth now (we have a 3 month return policy). AS I did so, they were all ringing in at 4.97$. She started to flip and immediately asked for the manager. Mike came along to help me. She kept saying that all the tank tops on the floor were 16$ and that meant there HAD to be a mistake! The clothing she was returning was no longer a new item and if any remained, would only be in clearence, hence it being so cheap. Still not believing us, she went and grabbed a featured tank top at 16 and still claimed ALL the tank tops were 16$. We have about 20 different types of tank tops all different prices! Besides, she brought a black one with studs and hers was white with a pattern and kept saying they were the same. On top of that she said she worked in the industry! Finally she accepted what she was getting for them and left.

-I smiled and waved at a baby while working as a cashier and the baby FLIPPED! She started to cry so loud that everyone in a 2 mile radius was looking in our direction wondering what the heck I did to the kid to freak it out so much...

Wednesday in my Basic Design class, I had my first quiz. I thinkI aced it. All that was required was to reproduce a picture of a fish made out of shapes, and then draw 2 logos, following specific steps given.

Afterwards, I had to make a layout in my Edition 1 class. Our Wired Magazine layout is really starting to look cool since we got to put in text and pictures now. Man, I really wish we had Quark Xpress when I worked on my high school yearbook...

I also studied for a quix which I THOUGH was yesturday but turns out it's next week so that was good and bad.

My wqednesday night ended with a GREAT episode of LOST. I love that show so much I almost fainted from excitement! I'm not so crazy on the direction they're putting the show now but I still really enjoyed it and thought last nights episode was nuts!

Today I had my graphic design class where I was working ona big project that involves not only making layout grids btu actually cutting up magazines and placing items on the page. It's a lot of fun but time consuming. I have to do 16 different layouts where 1 can take about 20 minutes to do since I have to think of where I want to place things, find them in the magazines, cut them out and finally paste them.

The Event, The Experience and The After Party

Friday night finally came and went and so did the 4th annual Improv Summit held at McGill University. It was in my opinion and to all the people I spoke to, a total SUCCESS!

And now a quick flashback on the past three summits:
*DOO-LOO DOO-LOO DOO-LOO!!!*
Summit #1: - Held in 2003, was the brain child of Chris Dye, Maryam, Jerry and I think some other people (I appologize for leaving anyone out). Nine teams from various universities and cegeps (both english and french) from within Montreal had entered as well as Carleton from Ottawa. So many people were interested in being a part of this major event that McGill improv had split up into2 McGill Teams and a Concordia team. The winner of each round was chosen by 3 judges. The event was hosted my "everyone's favorite host" Bryan from Without Annette. The winning team was UQAM

Summit #2: - In 2004, the summit was moved to Concordia University. Fewer teams had participated (I think 6 total) and the winning team was again chosen by 3 judges. The even twas hosted by "The Host Formely Known As" Bryan (I think.. I wasn't even there...). The winning team was McGill (There are rumors a bribe of 1000$ to each judge was involved...)

Summit #3 - In 2005, the summit was brought back to McGill University. All the teams except UQAM had bailed last minute, resulting in a 1 on 1 combat between UQAM and McGill.This time, the style was "Quebec Hockey Tournament Style" and the winner of each round was chosen by the audience voting. The winner, claiming the best 2 out 3 summits, was McGill. Unfortunately, Bryan complained he was not getting paid enough and refused to host that year, so a clone was made and replaced him. To this day no one knew the difference. (Again, I was not present so the above info may be wrong...)
*DOO-LOO DOO-LOO DOO-LOO!!!*

This year we had a total of 4 teams:

McGill

(From L to R: Noelle, Me, Ken, Ilya, Mariana and Andrew)

Carleton

(From L to R: Back - Noel, Chris, Will, Abi, Claire, Eric, Kirsten, Dave; Front - Tim, Owen)

Princeton

(Unfortunately, I never got to talk to any of them long enough to learn their names, although the last name of one of the guys on the team was Weed.)

UQAM


Maryam, Chris and Jerry were behind the scenes making sure everything was running smoothly. Bryan was the host again (we upted his salary - he was happy). The audience had the right to vote for their favorite team. Gil and Miri were the offical vote counters and Adrienne was in charge of the awesome music between scenes.

When I arrived at the location, my team was about to start warming up with Princeton. They taught us a really wicked game that involved: pointing, saying "you", saying someone's name, and saying a state or province.

We then broke up and warmed up seperately. Although I was extrememly tired all day, my energy levels were increasing exponentially. After warm-up, I was ready to tear the summit apart!

Upstairs the place was getting packed. There must have been over 100 people watching. A few people I invited couldn't make it but my good friends Caitlin and Norm showed up (Norm was skipping doing an assignment just to see me perform - dude, you rock!) as well as my chem friends Shing and Melanie. I was especially suprised and happy to see my buddy Joe and his girlfriend Katherine.

Six rounds, Thirty skits and 3 hours later, the summit was over. Everyone performed well and there was high energy held by all. I was very happy with my performances and I was even complimented by a few people after the show (yay!).

By far, one of my favorite skits was between UQAM and Princeton. The scene was a detective manipulation involving both teams. This meant that one player had to leave the room and when he came back, he had to guess the murder weapon, the scene of the crime nad the celebrity who did it. The suggestions were toothpick, Biodome and Tom Cruise. The detective was Rony from UQAM and the 2 other actors, from Princeton, had to get him to guess the words. They started using so many complicated english words that Rony was so confused (since he's french) and spent the whole scene going " I DON"T understand what you are saying! I get it! You're tryin g to trick me!". Then one of the other UQAM guys jumped on and said "Yeah, it's kind of like if we started talking like this:" and switched to french and said a bunch of things. It was hilarious!

After a tie breaker between McGill and UQAM, there was a final round between the two teams. In the end UQAM won by 1 vote! We let them win anyways... It wouldn't have been fair to beat them 3 times in a row.

Following the summit was a crazy after-party at Andrew and Adriennes. Unfortunately the Princeton guys took off because they had to hid the road early. They were actually doing an improv circuit tour! They had drove all the way form New Jersey, stopping along the way at various universities and high schools to do shows. Forunately, UQAM and Carleton rocked the house, although the UQAM team left kind of early to celebrate a birthday for one of the members. I ended up hanging out with the Carlton guys most of the night. Great bunch of people.

At one point during the party (and a few beers later) I decided to just chill in the hallway that lead to the bathroom. I ended up talking to Abi and her friend Tasia, who I had met in the past. I had a good time chatting with Tas (and if it doesn't work out with that guy from that band you see on thursdays, drop me an e-mail).

As the night started wind down I found myself on Andrews bed with a whole bunch of other people, using each other as pillows.

It was as awkward as it was relaxing, haha.

Finally by 5am, 3/4 of the Carleton team that remained and myself crashed all over Andrews floor. We couldn't stop joking around until who knows how long before I fell asleep.

I slept horribly. Alex, who was there to look over Tim, managed to break on eof the foutons and spent the whole night trying to fix it. At one point I hear "CRASH! Augh my head!" I ended up getting woken up by my brother calling me at 9am asking me when I was coming home (for my nephew's first birthday party - read the next entry to come). Noel just refused to believe it was my brother and kept insisting I was lying and that it in fact was my mom asking me when I was coming home because she made sandwiches for me.

By 11 I said my last goodbyes to the Carleton team and ended up home. In about a month we have our other big Improv event, Vaganza - 24 hours of improv, in which we're hoping to have Carleton join us as special guests. Really looking forward to that. Until then, I hope I can come visit in Ottawa some day and catch another show!

For pics of the Summit and the after party plese click HERE!

Improv Summit

Here's the poster I made for the Improv Summit. This kills two bids with one stone - I get to show off my ever increasing Illustrator skills AND advertise for the Summit which ALL of you should come to! And since 95% of the people who read this ARE part of McGill Improv YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE!

Smooth...

Man I better make sure I keep up with the exponentially increasing speed we're doing stuff at school. Actual conversation that tool place in Basic Design class yesturday:

Prof: Be sure to study for the exam next week.
Prof: Yes Josh?
Josh: Uh... What exam?
Prof: What planet are you living on?

Why I Ottawa...

Saturday evening, fellow McGill Improv members Chris Dye, Noelle and myself ventured to Ottawa to see the Carlton Improv Association (CIA) perform. We couldn't have asked for better weather. It wasn't cold outside at all and the road were completely clear.

After picking up our ride in Westmount, we made it to Ottawa by 6:30. Chris brought us to Parliment and gave us a little tour around the area. It was pretty cool to see the parliment building looking brand spanking new, since the last time I was in Ottawa (5+ years) the roof was still green, not brown, and the building wasn't as shiny.

By 7:00 we moved on to Carton University. As we entered the campus area, we immediately got lost. The first person we asked for directions just cofused us more. After following her directions and ended up reaching the exit on the other side of the campus, we turned arounda nd asked for more directions. I'm pretty sure the second person we asked didn't know english because she just looked really confused and didn't say anything when we asked "Where is the University Center?". Finally we figured it out ourselves and found ourselves at Mike's the tiny bar where the troup was to perform.

The show itself was good. The team had a total of 11 players at the show. To even out how often a player performed, Noel, the president, actually had a list of who would play what. They played a few games that either McGill Improv don't play or play differently. Don't worry we took lots of notes and are compiling a folder of Carlton Secrets. Now we will truley be ready for them when we compete against them at the Improv Summit. Which reminds me:

Friday, February 3rd at 7pm in the Shatner Building at McGill (SSMU/Student Union building) there will be an IMPROV SUMMIT! What is an IMPROV SUMMIT you may ask? Well a Summit is the top of a mountain (boring) but an IMPROV summit is a competition involving several improv teams. Ths year there are 4 teams - Carlton, Princeton, UQAM and McGill. The teams compete against each other in rounds and the winner of each round is determined by YOU the audience (yes every single person who reads this blog MUST attend!)

More Fun Filled Riddles and Games!

Today during my creativity class, we spent the first half talking about the 3 characteristics of the creative personality. These are:
1. The opening to new experiments
2. The personal, internal source of evaluation
3. The aptitude to play with concepts both physical and abstract

We then discussed each point. We had a 20 minute discussion about things we can do to change our daily routine. Answers included changing type of clothes, listening to different and changing you partner.

Then, she drew on the board


and asked us what we saw. The class saw a house, an arrow, a knife, a boat, a wooden bridge and other things when looking at it in different orientations (sideways, upside down). What do YOU see?

Finally, after the break, she gave us more logic problems! Before I go into them, by request, let me recap one from last week. Starting with nine dots in this formation:




you have to intersect all nine points while drawing no more than 4 lines, without lifting your pencil. Try it a few times. I included the answer below.

New riddles this week were:
Taking 6 pencils (tooth pics, whatever), arrange them in a way so each pencil is touching the other 5 pencils at the same time.

What is an ancient invention used to see through walls?

Starting with 9 dots (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0), rearrange place them in a way so you can make five line composed of 4 dots.

She ended the class with this riddle:
There is a family of with numerous sons and daughter. Each girl has as many brothers as sisters. Each boy has twice as many sisters than brothers. How many children are there and how many are male, female?

As promised, the answer for the above:



The point of that exercise was to "think outside the box"!

Things Are Starting To Pick Up

After another long day at school, things are really starting to roll.

In Basic Design, we had the whole class to finish up with our exercise notes. Basically, using the various Illustrator tools to make th esame shapes as in the notes. Although each are simple and easy to make, they are quite cool looking:






All the above were made using the square and elipse tools, scale tool and rotation and refelction tools.

In Edition I we conitnued with our learning of Quark Xpress. Last week I had to go home and come up with 4 alternative layouts of a sheet our prof handed out.The whole thing was composed of 2 text boxes and 2 images, therefore, there wasn't much room for change except swapping the positions of the items. Out of the 4 layouts, I had to pick one and actually make it on the computer. I spend probably half the class trying to make something smart looking but when I finally showed the prof, he told me he didn't like that I covered one of the pictures with text (which was actually what took me the longest to figure out - how to put text over a picture). That being said, I had not choice but to completely scrap that and start over. On top of that, I had pretty aweful colors. When I was trying to fix things up, I came up with a pretty wicked layout I hadn't of thought of and the prof showed me a cool trick and I pulled off a pretty damn aweseom layout, given what I had to work with. I can't post the image yet since it's saved in a different format but when I have it ready, it's coming up on here!

This week the computers were all upgraded to MAC OS X Tiger. So, in Computer Techniques, we went over how to work with it and use all it's shortcuts. We also learnt something pretty cool. I now know how to change the image for a particular folder. When I get the chance at school, all of mine are going to be homestarrunner.com characters!

Gears

I was checking out pslover.com the other day and decided to try out another tutorial. This one being a step by step instruction on how to create a gear from scratch.
Here's what I got:

Selections and Masks

Today in Digital Image Processing, we had the suprise to show up to class with all the computers having OS X installed! In your face OS 9!

We spend all day going over the different ways to make selections in photoshop. Selections are important because this way you can alter just a portion of your whole image. Using the various selction tools, you can get all sorts of shapes and sizes of the desired selection. The different tools we went over were the Marquee Tools (rectangular, eliptical, horizontal line and vertical line), the Lasso Tool (which allows you to make a selection of any shape), The Polygonal Lasso Tool (which lets you get a more precice selectin then the plain Lasso Tool, and the magic wand (which selects a color and any color similar to the selected color, depending on the setting used), which is great to remove solid back grounds.

The really interesting thing I learnt today, which I was dying to learn properly, was the Quick Mask function. By turning on this tool, you can then use a brush tool to remove or add more of the mask, thus geting a more precice selection to your liking.

Once I have these skills mastered, I'll be able to cut heads off of bodies and put them on other bodies more easily!

Fun-filled Fun!

As opposed to yesturday's very un-fun class, today's class was super awesome!
In my second Creativity class, we were asked to bring a giant pad of newspaper print. We were then asked to take a pencil and split it into 8 boxes. Then the prof said to draw whatever we wanted in box one. 5 minutes later she tells us to finish up and pass it to the person to our right. Then they had to draw something in box 2 and et a story going. After 5 minutes, we had to pass it on again, and so on. Six boxes later, the whole story was complete. Some made sense and some didn't. My favorite being about a horse:
Box 1 - Horse (head only)
Box 2 - Horse is in a fenced area
Box 3 - Broken fence, no horse
Box 4 - More broken fence and still no horse (the artist of box 4 must have had no ideas)
Box 5 - Pick up truck with Horse in the back on its way to a glue factory (my contribution)
Box 6 - Girl making a collage poster using glue
Box 7 - Poster is the center of attention at a party with other girls... and the horse!
Box 8 - They all boogie down!

We had to do the exercise again but this time we had about 1-2 minutes per bx and by the 4th box we had to add a conflict, then solve it and have 2 alternate endings. One story involved someone wind surfing but then gets eaten by a whale. Ending # 1 involved the person getting blown out if the whale's blow hole and was therefore free. I ended up having to come up with ending #2 which involved the wind surfer, still in the whale, finding Pinnochio.

After our break, we then proceeded the second half of the class doing logic games. The first one being you start with 9 dots in a square formation:
0 0 0


0 0 0


0 0 0

Now, without lifting your pencil, you have to run over all 9 dots making only 4 lines. I got it fairly quick but that was because I had done it a long time ago and the trick came back to me.

Another mind question was you have 6 glasses in a row. The first 3 are full, the last 3 are empty: F F F E E E
With moving only 1 glass, how do you make it so the line is alternating (fulle, empty, full, etc.)

Finally, our last challenge was:
If it takes 6 men 6 days to dig 6 holes, how long would it take 1 man to dig a half hole?

(If anyone wants the answers just let me know)

That concluded our class! Just fun and games! No theory, no homework! It was awesome!

Horribly Horrible

Today was the worst class experience I had yet. The course for today was entitled Graphic Design. We're going to be learning all about the processes used to create a graphic design element from client to printing press. Also the basic guidlines used ingraphic design, etc. Unfortunately, the Super Awesome prof who normally teaches this (according to several people I've spoken to who already tok the course) broke her leg a week before classes started. Her replacement came in today for the first class of the semester being last week, class was cancelled. I was so lost you couln't have brought me back on track with a map, a compass and rope to pull along! He seems like a vey enthusiastic professor ready to make sure that the students really excel in school and he's definitely has a master feel on the subject. The only problems are:

1. He doesn't speak english very well. I have nothing wrong with that. We are in fact in a french province but on several occasions when he got lost in what he was saying because he couldn't remember the words, he dropped the subject all together, even in the middle.

2. He loves the subject so much he kept going off in tangents like a blind man driving a car. It's understandable except he did it with such smoothness, we had no idea that he switch topics until he was done talking and then realized we were way off from where we started.

We had an assignment to do for next class. It involves the golden rule, which is a mathematical discovery of where things are placed naturally to catch people's eyes. It took him almost an hour to explain that all we had to do was make a rectangle with a specific contour of margins.

I totally understand that things will get better in the class once we start doing more hands-on stuff, but to ensure everythign is kosher, I went with Erica (girl in my class) to see the Director of the program and just make him aware of the fact that no one paid attention in class. He noted it and said he'd speak to the prof. On the way out, another guy from our class was waiting to talk to the Director about the exact same thing.

Hopefully next week will be a lot easier to follow.

Thats my too cents.

Wednesdays are a BIG one!

So today I have finally had my first full day of classes. I had 3 in a row. The first one was 4 hours and the others were 3 hours each. My total time at school today spanned from 8am until 6:30pm. It was, however, a very packed day of learning.

My first class, basic design, was spent the whole time in front a computer. The prof gave us a handout and we had to follow the steps to learn some basic tools in Illustrator. The goal of the projects was to get used to how things work by making 4 different kind of fish using basic shapes. Here's the result:


(I added FISHBONE myself. Doesn't it look like the logo?)

Once that was done I moved on to the next project which involved manipulating squares and circles. I got as far as the first part which resulted in:


(Slinky, Slinky, Everyone wants a SLINKY!)

So far my teacher says I"m doing a very good job in class and I"m working at a good pace (OH YEAH!).

My second course was Edition I. This is the first class i had in the subject because the original prof broke her leg and they school had to figure out who would be the replacement. Basically, this class is all about learning the electronic layout program, Quark Xpress. It seems pretty simple. You use it to place text and pictures in the way that you'd like it to look when you print. It's what you would use to make a poster, magazine, etc. The prof handed us a sheet of shortcuts that we need to memorize to help us use the program more effeciently. Afterwards, he made us use the program to REPRODUCE the same layout online, which I though was quite clever. My homework for this class is to design 4 different layouts using the same elements. There's not much I can really do but I'm hoping I'll figure out something creative.

Finally, we ended the day with Computer Techniques. I had to fill out a tiny quiz to show my knowledge of computers. Questions included "Describe what is meant by Hardware?" "What is the difference between RAM and Hardware memory?" "Describe upload and downlaod.",etc. I was able to answer maybe 80% of the quiz and probably 50% of the 80% confidently, haha. The prof then introduced the concept of file and folder organization. My assignment for next week is to download a bunch of files from a specific site and arrange them in proper folders. Sounds as hard as counting to 1.

Bling Bling

Today I've been TOTALLY exhausted. I slept on the whole bus ride to school, the whole bus ride home from school and then fell asleep at the kitchen table while studying my notes... and I'm STILL tired! I think it may have to be from the weekend. Saturday night I spent a whole day with my improv bunch. I ended up going to bed at 3am. I didn't care at the time for, even though I had work the next day, it was only a 4 hour shift from 10am until 2pm. Wrong. I misread my schedule and my shift was in fact from 10am until 7pm, with my break at 2pm! Let's just say it was a lot longer a day then I had expected. Also, my boss decided it'd be fun to throw me in the fitting room section all day. It was my first time working there. I was actually suprised since it wasn't that bad. I got to just hang out a bit and chat with the other people working in 'the fits' as we call it. I basically spent the whole day opening up doors with a key. There's a good trait to stick on my resume. Skills - great customer service, knowledge of cash register, experience door unlocker...

Today at my Digital Image Processing class, we did a quick recap on the difference between pixels and vectors. We talked about resolution and it's importance with Photoshop. We also reviewed the different color modes: Gray Scale, RGB, CMYK, etc. The new material we dabbed into were the different types of files you can save your work under. these included PDS, TIFF, EPS, GIF and JPEG formats. It was quite interesting since I didn't know what made them so different and what advantages one format has over the other.

Everything was going great until we were asked to follow by doin gth esteps on the computer. While I wa doing my stuff, I missed a step and everything just collided. I was totally lost and we were just doing really simple things. However, due to that tiny mistake, I was behind on an offbeat. When the prof was saying "OK now close file A and open File B" I would have JUST opened file A. I kept asking Amelie, this girl in my class, where we were and eventually I got the common "Is everything OK Josh? If you have any problems just ask me rather then disturb your neighbour and the class" by my prof. *Sigh* Hopefully I won't be as tired on Wednesday when I have my next class.

On a different note,I've been checking out that site www.pslover.com a lot. I find it's not a very good site in terms of structure since the tutorials don't really teach you how to use photoshop. Rather, it just shows how to do some realy cool things using photoshop. I browsed through a bunch of stuff and came accross a tutorial showing how to make a font that looks like it's diamond encrusted or 'bling bling'. Although I"m not quite at the stage to be able to reproduce the steps without consulting the original tutorial, here is what I came up with by following each step systematicaly:



Also, according to homestarrunner.com today marks Trogdor's 3rd birthday. In tribute, the creators compiled a really cool montage of all things Trogdor. Check it out HERE!
"AND THE TROGDOR COMES IN THE NIGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!

Creativitivitivity!!!!

The class I had today was Creativity. It's the only one of my classes that is not in a windowless room with a computer. Couldn't have a picked a better day seeing that it's like SPRING OUTSIDE! (WTF is going on? I didn't know there were 6 seasons - Fall, Winter 1, Spring 1, Winter 2, Spring 2 and Summer...)

In this class we're going to be learning several ways of thinking and try to really push our imagination. The required materials include paper, markers, glue, scissors, exacto knives, paints and even clay. We have a project half way through where we design a hat (or something, didn't realy go into much detail). On top of that I have to keep an Inspiration Journal. She wants us to put inside it any creative ideas I get and include what inspired me - a photo, a color, a movie, etc. Her book had a bunch of paper samples, some stamps, a few drawings she did, and even a balloon.

I have no idea how my book will turn out but only time wil tell.

Two Down, 3 More To Go

After a day off from school already (I have no class on tuesdays) I was back at Interdec on wednesday which will be my busiest day in the future. I'm supposed to have 3 classes in a row from 8am to 6:30pm with a 30 minute break between the first two, but the teacher for the middle class broke her leg so it was cancelled this week.

My first class was Basic Design. It's an intro to design techniques using Illustrator. I think it's going to be a wicked class because it's using a lot of the computer. For the first class, we just went over some basic stuff that I already knew from learning on my own. However, I got to learn a few shortcuts which will prove very usefull in the future. Eventually we'll be doing cool projects including making up logos as well as wicked patterns. I can't wait.

The second class I had yesturday was Computer Techniques. Although not as exciting as the others so far, it will be a very interesting class. Basicaly, it's learning all the theory about a computer. What is inside a computer, how to arrange folders, understand the operating system (OS 9 and OS 10 for us since we're learning on Apples), etc. We started with internet connections and whats the difference between a router and a hub. Thats abotu all we got to do before we left. Although the class is 3 hours long, the reason we didnt' get very far was because our teacher went on for about 2 hours about how tough the course will be. He said we'll be eating, drinking, breathing and swimming in Graphic Design. If we have a girlfriend or boyfriend, we won't anymore because we'll never be seeing them. So if one day I just disappear, know that I am still alive! I will be using this blog as a communication device to the world.

A cool thing at the end of that class, though, was that the prof told us we should do at least 2 to 3 tutorials a week to learn a lot of different tricks and techniques. He recommended I check out pslover.com. I checked it out and it is really cool.

First Day of Classes

So it's official, I have returned to school. On friday I attended an orientation for my course. We were basically given the run down of how things work at the school. They want us to work hard and to ensure we keep our place, for every class I am absent from, I will lose 3% off my final mark for that course. Also if I am given back a mark I don't agree with I'm allowed to ask for a reevalutaion. After the reevaluation, if my mark does get changed to something better then everything is cool. However, if my mark does not get changed for valid reasons then I have to pay 10$! If I'm STILL not happy I can APPEAL the mark but fi I'm wrong this time, it's 50$! Hardcore...
After the few speeches, we did a tour around the building. I was given an agenda and I had my ID card photo taken. I was given a locker (#1234 oh yeah!) and an access card to the computer rooms.

Today I had my first class - Digital Image Processing. Also known as Photoshop level 1, it's the first of three photoshop courses. I was given a course outline and although its a lot of theory, our future assignemnts look like they will be a lot of fun. Today I just learnt a bit of basic theory. Mostly what's the difference between pixels and vectors as well as the different color modes that exist (grayscale, RGD, CMYK, etc.)

I have five other classes this week as well but I'm not sure what they are for my schedule was printed in french and some of the words are cut off. I can't wait to see what they are. Unfortunately, the teacher of two of two of the classes, broke her leg so she's otu of commision for 2 months. In the meantime, the classes are cancelled this week until they figure something out for next week.

On the bright side I'm still at Old Navy and have sealed the deal to work there at elast 15 hours a week.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend the Improv shows that are happening on Tuesday at 4:30 at Gerts in the Shatner Building (just incase you were wondering...) BUT GO WATCH THEM ANYWAYS!

Deux Fois du Comedy

The Following is a Paid Advertisement:

For all you comedy lovers, my good friends Without Annette will be performing Not ONE!..Not TWO!.. BUT THR...No WAIT, they ARE only performing two... TWO SHOWS THIS WEEKEND! The first show is on Friday at 10:30pm at the very famous Comedy Nest locate don the third floor of the AMC/Pepsi Forum. The second show is on Saturday at 11pm at the ALSO very famous Theatre Ste. Catherine on, you guest it, Ste. Catherine street.

I've seen these guys before and I can tell you all you won't be disappointed.

Happy New Year 2006!

It's another New Year fresh out of the oven! Many changes are to be expected. My work routine at Old Navy is slowly coming to an end and my return to the educational system will commence. With those changes, my blog will be affected as well. I'm hoping to continue to write about my day to day adventures that you all love to read about (yes you do! You just don't know it yet...) but I'm also hoping to keep a log on my progression through my time at Interdec College. That being said, I decided the new content should also have a new look (I got tired of staring at the same colors for the past 2 years).

This year, my New Years Eve celebration was actually a lot of fun. The night started at Radio with a few friends. It was PACKED and had really good music. By midnight I had already lost my voice. By 1am, Nadine and I decided it was time to leave and Shing accompagnied us out the door. We were on our way to a house party close by. Just as we're nearing the place I bumped into a few guys a knew from high school (havn't seen them in almost 8 years). Next thing I know it I'm at another party with a whole bunch of people I knew from high school, which coincidentally was next door to the original party I was headed to. As soon as I walked in with Nadine, my buddies Mike and Alex come up to us and start chatting. Afterwars, while sitting down, they corner me and start interrogation me about my status with her:

Them - "So, how long has it been?"
Me - "How long has what been?"
Them - "How long has IT been?"
Me - "What...?"
Them - "IT! How LONG has IT been!!??"

After what felt like 10 more minutes of that, I finally realized they meant how long have I been dating Nadine, with the answer being negative infinity, since we're just friends. Apperently they went up to her and did the same thing, possibly thinking she had a different answer. That STILL wasn't good enough and they tried (and failed) to get us to kiss for a photo.

Following my brief high school reunion, I ended up at this guy Mike Bashalder's party. He conviniently lives above where Le Swimming used to be. It was a giant loft filled with people. After polishing off a bottle of vodka (which I hid in the dishwasher) I was totally wired for the rest of the night.

I stayed up chatting with people until 5:30am and decided to call it quits. I cabbed it home (40$) and crash-and-burned in bed. I slept about 6 hours and just was wide awake. The only strrange thing is that I woke up with pain on my lower hips. I have NO idea what could have caused it. I do remember knocking my butt with Nadine's on the dance floor but I highly doubt her buns are made of that much steel.

To view pictures showing how crazy a night I had, click HERE! Jealousy can commence....
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