hexstatik

last friday, i met up with some friends at the vancouver art gallery to participate in my first critical mass.

Critical Mass is a grassroots reclamation of public space — a bike ride and skate — held the last Friday of every month. You are invited to enjoy the safety and comfort in the car-free space that we create by simply riding together! Bicycles, skateboards, rollerskates, self propelled couches, and any other form of human powered locomotion are all welcomed!

although i’d seen a few critical mass rides before, this once was quite large, with several hundred people. we rode through much of the downtown core, around false creek, along broadway to burrard street, over the bridge and around downtown some more. i’m pretty certain we did an excellent job of clogging traffic and causing chaos on the streets of vancouver.

it was very interesting to see the reaction of some drivers. while most took it in stride, enjoying the show as the hundreds of bikers streamed past, a few drivers got quite irate, some even getting out of the vehicles to yell at the “corkers” blocking traffic. they were always outnumbered and soon retreated to their vehicles once they realized the scale of the mass and the futility of trying to move their vehicles.

all in all, it was a great experience and a lot of fun. i do wish however that drivers would turn off their engines while they wait for the mass to go by - it seems a little pointless to protest against oil and our dependency on it, but then cause drivers to burn even more while they idle in traffic.

anyway, you can find a few photos on andy’s flickr page.

i recently started listening to another podcast from merlin mann. merlin is hilarious and has always been one of my favourite guests on TWIT and MacBreak Weekly, two other podcasts i listen to regularly. now, he has teamed up with two of his buddies and has his own new podcast called “You Look Nice Today - a Journal of Emotional Hygiene“. This one isn’t G rated like TWIT and MBW, so it’s hilarious to listen to Merlin go on about more “mature” subject matters. Give it a listen, I’m sure you’ll like it.

after 7 weeks of training at the deep cove rowing club, my corporate rowing team participated in the 11th annual vancouver community corporate rowing challenge at the UBC john lecky boathouse.

after finishing 1st in our first heat, we were ranked 6th overall after the first race, which put us in the worst lane for our next race in the semi finals. in our semi final race, we got off to a good start, but not as clean as the boat next to us in the faster lane 2. in order to win, we would need to work hard and have a clean race. we managed to fight hard and were making a come back, but ran out of room and finished just shy of first. luckily for us, close competition allowed us to clock the 4th fastest time for the semis, and was good enough to make it into the 4 boat final.

again, we ended up in the dreaded lane 1, right next to the team that had just edged out. our start was better this time and we managed to get in front of our competition, who ended up having to make a small course correction. again, we were in a very close race and both teams were rowing as hard as they could. as we got close to the finish, our cox was yelling hard, both teams were digging down to give it one final push, but as i looked over, i could see that we had the edge and were keeping it. we ended up crossing the finish line in 3rd, just barely out of second place.

still, it was a great day of racing, and placing 3rd out of 10 in the ‘defenders’ category was definitely rewarding.

today was our 4th delivery from green earth organics since signing up for their service at the end of last month.

so far, everything has been great. the quality of the produce is fantastic and there definitely isn’t a shortage of fruits and veggies around our place. in fact, it seems that crystal and i aren’t keeping up at all, mostly i supposed because neither crystal nor i were really around very much last weekend. we’re drowning! i have a feeling we’re going to be eating a lot of salads and stir-frys for the next week.

I’ve also met “steve” our delivery guy, twice now. last week, steve went to great lengths to contact me after i missed a few of his calls because i was riding my bike home and didn’t feel or hear my phone in my pocket. he was standing at the gate of our building on the phone with crystal when i arrived to finally let him upstairs, and today, we arrived at the building at the very same moment, exchanging smiles over the coincidental timing of our arrivals. he even remembered my name.

i can’t say enough good things about the service, and highly recommend it if you live in either vancouver or toronto.

starting with killing napster and ever since, the RIAA has done everything in it’s power to squash any sort of innovative service or method of discovering new music, making it quite difficult to find out about new music and up and coming artists.

well, a new service is fighting back. taking us all the way back to the time before napster (or even the internet for that matter) to a time when the best way to profess your love for a girl was to make her a mix tape and the walkman was the device to have, is muxtape.

muxtape has been around for a while now (at least in internet terms), but today, i really came to appreciate it when i stumbled upon thegetupkid’s mix at http://thegetupkid.muxtape.com/. i thouroughly enjoy the completely random nature of “popping in” a new mixtape and being surprised. i’m also digging the super simple interface and simplicity of using the site - it’s as easy as a tape deck in your car, but without all the rewinding.

try it out, i’m sure you’ll like it too.