hexstatik

so you may or may not know (depending if you wear a propeller hat or not) that jerry seinfeld is the new “spokesperson” for microsoft (even though he used a mac on his show).

anyway, the first commercial starring jerry seinfeld and bill gates has been released. if you can understand it, can you please explain what the hell is going on? i don’t get it.

last weekend, crystal and i got into the saddle of our mountain bikes for the first time this summer (shameful, really) and hit the whistler bike park. it was a fantastic ride, with both crystal and i pushing our limits all day long. i guess the advantage of not having biked for so long is that you forget all your fears, earned by crashing and burning. :)

see below for crystal’s little video of our day.

after reading an wired article about the clover, i did a quick google search to find out if any cafes in vancouver had managed to aquire one. luckily, of the only 250 machines manufactured by hand before the company was bought by starbucks, 8 are located in vancouver, 2 of which belong to caffé artigiano.

caffé artigiano is known locally for bringing in world class coffees and cup of excellence winners that often retail for $130/lb or more and over the past couple of years, i’ve tried a few different winners from the cup of excellence awards. it will be interesting to compare those (brewed in a french press) to the el salvador cup of excellence winner #2 i’ll be sampling tomorrow with my team for our morning coffee break. at $5.95/cup though, it’s not something i’ll be enjoying very often. i’ll report the results back here tomorrow.

Update: so, the results are in. the coffee was pretty damn good, and didn’t have a single tinge of bitterness. now, was it the clover, or the award winning coffee? i don’t know, i would have had to have a cup brewed in a french press and a cup from the clover at the same time to distinguish if the clover machine itself made that much of a difference. either way, it was a nice little treat.

i woke up yesterday morning to find a note from crystal saying that she was gone to starbucks to do some reading. i quickly had a shower and got dressed, but just as i was about to leave to make my way over, crystal walked in and proclaimed “i know what i’m doing today! i am going to take a time lapse video on the skytrain, are you in?”.

“sure!”, i said.

she had after all decided to take my idea of taking a time lapse of the sky train, so there was no way i was going let her go without me. we made a quick trip to london drugs to pick up a USB cable, had a bite to eat, installed the required software, and charged our batteries before finally making our way to waterfront station.

once we arrived, we spent a few minutes on the platform to do some prep work to get ready and organized. i headed to the back of the train, while crystal stayed up at the front. she nodded and we both boarded. since we were at a terminus station, we were able to get on before the train switched tracks to head in the opposite direction. this gave us a few extra seconds to set up the tripod, connect the cable to the laptop, start the software and make some final adjustments.

at my end of train, everything was working perfectly and i was snapping photos in no time. suddently, my phone rang - it was crystal. she hadn’t set up her software, so we needed to get off the next station and restart. this time, we both got everything up and running on time.

immediately, other people on the train wanted to know what we were doing. at the front, i was approached by 3 different people. the first told me he had always wanted to do the same thing. the other was a film student who wanted to know if i had gone to school for film too and wished me luck, and finally an older man returning home from the auto show with his son who told me that i should “put some ghosts and throw some ads” into my movie to make a bunch of money.

after about an hour, our trip around the millenium line was just over. after a brief encounter with a skytrain attendant, we headed home to create the following movie with the resulting 729 images.

thanks to one of crystal’s (ex)coworkers and the power of facebook, i found out that portishead will soon be releasing a new album, called ‘third’. they also recently released their first single from the album, which you can view below. i’ve got to say, that although it’s a bit dark sounding, i really do love it. if this single is any indication of how the rest of the album is going to be, i’ll be waiting in line to buy it on release day.