Being Nicholas

Here are some exerpts from a book my son is writing, called How to be an Effective Nicholas. Nicky is generally in one of two moods — Joking and Upset, which the book describes as follows:

Joking Mood

When you're in a joking mood, everything is funny. Mommy or daddy (or Ryan) saying "No" is funny. Squealing at the top of your lungs or punching your brother (or anyone else) is funny. Getting told not to squeal or hit people is funny. Inventing a meaningless word and then immediately asking what that word means is funny. Sitting or standing in the same place for longer than 3 seconds is not funny, so don't do it. When someone asks you a question, it's funny not to answer, or if you do, it's funny to give a meaningless answer or one that isn't true — here's an example:

Daddy: "Nicky, what do you want for a snack?"
Nicky: "Grapes"
Daddy, approximately 15 seconds later: "Here are your grapes"
Nicky: (yelling,crying) "I didn't want grapes!"

Note the immediate switchover to the upset mood. Also, having something taken away ("No, you can't watch Scooby Doo because you've been hitting Ryan"), or being given something that you didn't want (even if nobody knew that you didn't want it) instantly switches to the upset mood. This is particularly important for critical decisions like what colour of straw to drink your apple juice with, or whether to put your shirt or shorts on first when getting dressed.

Upset Mood

When you're upset, you can either ignore questions or simply answer "I don't know" — make sure you don't move your lips when you say anything, so that your voice is unintelligible. You must always pout and hang your head as low as possible (should you be sitting at the table, make sure your head actually hits the table, and ignore any pain). If standing up, you should immediately sit down, lie down, or walk dejectedly out of the room. Crying is not required, but encouraged. If your brother is nearby, hit him, even if he had nothing to do with the reason for your upset-ness. Nothing is funny, unless you're being physically tickled (as an attempt to get you out of the upset mood) — in that case, you may laugh during the tickling, but the pouting must return upon cessation of said tickling.

Of course, every now and again, Nicky is looking at a book or playing with a toy and is having fun without jumping around and squealing, so there do exist other moods; we just don't see them often.

Let me give you some good advice, young man, you better learn to play guitar

It's been almost a year since I started my weekly guitar lessons. Still no Grammy award, but I'm certainly better than I was a year ago. Favourite songs to play: Blackbird by The Beatles and The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin (though you have to retune the guitar for that one, which is kind of a pain). The lessons have certainly been helpful, but more because I'm forced to get the guitar out at least once a week and play it. I'm getting some instruction in my technique, but according to my teacher, that's good enough that I don't need much instruction there, just practice. My problem is music theory, and while my teacher does go over it, I'm not retaining much of it. At one point, he was explaining relative chords and stuff, and suddenly a bunch of stuff made sense — I even understood why the guitar strings are tuned the way they are, and not simply to a chord. Of course, a couple of months later, I don't remember any of that now. It's not my teacher's fault, though, I just have to get off my ass and put more time into learning that stuff.

It's my son's birthday! Nicky turns the big '4' today. I can't believe he'll be starting school (JK) in the fall. We got a package from the school just yesterday about it - his teacher will be Mrs. Tilton, who is new at Greenleaf. We were hoping Ms. Urfey would be his teacher - she's taught JK at Greenleaf for at least the past 4 years, and is really good. She, however, wanted to move over to teaching grade 2, so they had to bring in another JK teacher. Nicky is looking forward to school, though I don't think he has any clue what's in store for him; then again, does any kid starting JK? Probably not. I think the teacher might have her hands full with him, until she can (hopefully) tone down his joking moods, when he loses control of himself, and "no, Nicky" doesn't really mean anything. Hopefully Mrs. Tilton will have more luck doing that than we have, since she presumably has more experience in dealing with small children than we do. He's also got three full months before he starts, so maybe he'll grow out of it by then.

Update: Nicky's teacher will not be Mrs. Tilton. We requested that he be moved to the A stream (i.e. Wednesday, Friday, and every other Monday rather then Tuesday, Thursday and every other Monday), and they have already done this for us (Gail being chair of the school council may have had a hand in this), so his teacher will be Mrs. Tyrosvoutis. I think that's the right spelling, anyway - the kids call her Mrs. T. I pity da fool who pronounces her name wrong.

Technorati tags: guitar kindergarten

Killing time

I have some time to kill before I play baseball at 9:30 (!) tonight. Since I live so far from work (~70 km one way), there's no point in my going home and then coming back — best case, that's an hour and a half of driving — so I'm hanging out at work. What better way to spend that time than blogging?

We'll start with 24, which Gail and I have been addicted to for the last 5 seasons. The season finale was this past Monday, and it did a pretty good job of wrapping up what was actually a rather boring season, by 24's standards. Oh sure, several main characters died (Michelle, Tony, Edgar), so that was exciting, but the whole gas cannister plot went on too long, and I didn't like the way the writers handled the traitorous President — I think it would have been better if he was a strong man acting indecisive and weak, rather than actually having him be indecisive and weak and manipulated by some bald guy (who they never explained, now that I think of it). The only thing that we know about him is that his name is Graham. (I'm just assuming that it's spelled that way, not Graeme. Call me pessimistic.) Maybe they're keeping him as next year's villain, though one thing on this show that you can never do is figure out who the real bad guy is — as soon as you think you do, they bring out another guy who's giving the first guy orders. They also kind of abandoned the whole "real-time" thing at the end, where Jack is is knocked unconscious and abducted (in LA) by the Chinese, and five minutes later wakes up in the middle of the Pacific on (quite literally) a slow boat to China.

Let's move on to baseball now. Barry Bonds hit home run number 714 in his career the other night, tying Babe Ruth for 2nd on the all-time list. Big freakin' deal. Well, I suppose it is, but I just can't get too excited about it, firstly because it's not a record anymore (Hank Aaron surpassed it over 30 years ago), and secondly because we all know that a good number of those home runs (at least all the ones hit in the last 5 years) were done while Bonds was juiced up on steroids. The evidence is painfully clear. Bonds played 14 seasons with the Pirates and Giants, and averaged 32 homers a year in that time — he hit over 45 home runs only once. He also averaged 33 steals per season. Then 2000 rolls around — the year Bonds turned 36, and for the next 5 seasons, he averages 52 homers (over 45 every year, maxing out at a major league record 73) and only 9 steals per season. His batting average over those 5 years was .339, while his career average before that was only .288. Then MLB announces that they will begin steroid testing in 2005, and lo and behold, Bonds sits out almost the entire season with an injury. But he's not on steroids. <Dr.Evil>Rrrrrrriiiiiiight.</Dr.Evil>

On an unrelated baseball note, the Jays finally demoted Josh Towers to AAA Syracuse yesterday after yet another dismal outing. He didn't lose the game because the Jays came back to tie it (and then lost it later), but he didn't even last 2 innings. It's about damn time. I have nothing against Towers — he pitched really well last year — but he's 1-and-freakin'-8. For a second-year player, that's at least 2 losses too many. It's not like he was going 7 innings and losing 3-2 games either — he was getting shelled almost every time out. His one win was very impressive though - he went 8 innings in that one, so maybe John Gibbons figured he'd found his groove or something. Obviously he hadn't, so they've sent him down to try and pick things up there. In 2001, Roy Halladay was sent down all the way to single-A ball to "re-build his delivery" — essentially learning how to pitch again. By the end of that year he was back in the majors, and look how that turned out — a Cy Young award in 2003, and he might have won another one last year if he hadn't broken his leg in July and missed the rest of the season. I don't know if single-A ball is the answer for Towers (heard someone on the radio this morning refer to him as "Fawlty" Towers), but staying in the majors isn't working for him at this point, and it's certainly not helping the Jays out either.

Well, I think that's all I have to say for now, and I still have an hour before my game. Well, since I'm at work, maybe I should, oh I don't know, do some work.

Technorati tags: 24 Baseball Barry Bonds Blue Jays Josh Towers

The Incredible Shrinking Me

Over Easter, we went to Gail's dad's place for a couple of days and my parents' place for a couple of days. As always, there was lots of food at both places, and being Easter, there was also lots of chocolate. I ate like a pig the whole weekend, and felt like crap on the drive back home. Part of it was physical (I just ate too much), but mostly I was just disgusted with myself. I told Gail when we got home that I was going to start doing Weight Watchers with her - she's been doing it for a couple of years. I haven't officially joined WW, and I'm not going to the meetings or anything (Gail does), I'm just keeping track of what I eat.

The program is fairly simple - every item of food has a number of points associated with it, based on the amount of fiber, calories, and fat in the item. For example, an apple is 1 point, vegetables are generally 0 points (i.e. you can eat as much as you want, within reason), two slices of bread are about 3 points, a Coke is 3 points (though Diet Coke is 0), a cup of milk is 2 points, and a Big Mac at McDonald's is 11 points. You write down everything you eat every day, and count up the number of points for each thing. For my weight, I get 24 points per day, plus you also have 35 "flex points" that you can use per week - you can either split them up (i.e. give yourself an extra 5 points per day), or use them all in one day, or some combination. Here's an average day's food for me before I started doing this:

Breakfast:
Two English muffins with peanut butter (at least 8 points)
Cup of apple juice (3 points)
Lunch:
Michelena's entree or leftovers (anywhere from 8-13 points)
Yogurt (1 point)
Granola bar (3 points)
Dinner:
Anywhere between 8 and 15 points
Ice cream (3-5 points)

So we're looking at somewhere between 38 and 45 points per day. Sometimes we'd try to be healthy and serve raw veggies with dinner, but I'd always take a big dollop of some kind of dip - the veggies are 0 points, but some dips are 4 points per tablespoon. Since I've been watching what I eat, I've made the following types of changes:

• bowl of cereal instead of english muffins (saved 3 points)
• no juice (saved 3)
• Lean Cuisine entrees or soup or smaller portion of leftovers (saved 3-12)
• an apple instead of a granola bar (saved 2)
• a smaller dinner (saved 2-6)
• no ice cream (save 3-5)

Some days I have enough points left over to have the ice cream after dinner, or a snack later on, and I've only max'ed out my flex points once - most weeks I barely touch them. I've been hungry a lot more lately, but I figure that's a small price to pay to look and feel better.

The program isn't designed for rapid weight loss, but I lost about 7 pounds in the first 4 weeks. We went to Ottawa last weekend, and I didn't count any points while there, so I went up a pound last week. But it's summer, so I'll be getting lots of excercise with baseball and hikes and stuff - Gail and I bought bikes recently, so we'll hopefully get out biking now and again too. I'm still working out two or three days a week, so combined with the exercise and better eating, I'm hoping to be in great shape by the end of the summer.

Technorati tags: fitness weight loss Weight Watchers

Technorati

I signed up with Technorati the other day, and I found a way to set up a posting template that includes the technorati tag links, so some of my postings will have these links at the bottom. I'll put relevant tags on an article, and if you're interested in that topic, you can click on a link and technorati will search for other entries in the blogosphere that use that tag as well. I'm not going to go back and update a year's worth of entries to add these tags though, so this will likely only affect new postings. I may add some tags to a couple of recent entries, just to see how it works.

Technorati tags: technorati

More on blogging (or moron blogging?)

A guy at work wrote on his "relaxed slow-moving, occasionally-updated weblog" that bloggers who update their blog multiple times a day are "some combination of (a) well-organized, (b) brilliant, or (c) egotistical". I can't say I disagree with that. (I also know that he's not really referring to me, since I only update my blog once or twice a week.) He then goes on to say that bloggers are "presumptious, almost distasteful" because they publish their thoughts with the implied assumption that they are "worthy" of publication. (Note that he also says that he's decided that "this impression of presumptiousness is wrong".) I certainly don't think that my thoughts as published in my blog are "worthy" of anything. They're my thoughts, and if you want to read them, great. If you think this blog is a pile of crap, well, there are one or two other blogs on the internet, feel free to check them out. I won't be offended. I'm certainly not doing this because I think anything I've written is particularly profound or meaningful - I am quite sure that nobody gives a rat's ass about my trip to Wonderland the other day, or what concerts I've been to, or my thoughts on the important social or political issues of the day (ummm... I couldn't find any such links on this blog) and yet I wrote about them anyway. Why?

I don't know if I have an audience. I know that one or two people at work (JP, MC) have read my blog in the past and have even commented on an article or two, but I don't know if they read every article. I've sent links to single articles to a couple of my friends, but I don't know if they've read any others. Even my wife knows about my blog, but I don't think she reads it. My kids are too young to know what a blog is (but I'm sure they'll be LOL'ing and OMG'ing on myspace.com before I know it). So: I don't think my thoughts are particularly meaningful to anyone else, and other than myself and the occasional google searcher, I don't know if anyone is reading this stuff anyway. So again we arrive at this question that I tried to answer before - why the hell am I doing this?

Going back to Tom's description - am I well-organized? Not especially. Brilliant? That's a stretch, though I'm fairly well-educated. Egotistical? Generally no, but I think there has to be a certain amount of that involved - logically, I must want people to read it, otherwise why publish it? If the writing part of it is why I do it, then I could just write it down and leave it on my own computer, but I don't.

I enjoy reading other people's blogs. When I went to DC in January for the CC testing, the validator was a guy named Daniel. I'd never met nor even heard of him before then, I haven't talked to him since (and likely won't ever again), and he probably doesn't remember who I am. Yet I still read his blog, even though he generally talks about his friends who I don't know, and places he goes in LA, where I've never been, as well as his interest in the Jewish faith, about which I know very little. It's certainly not one of my favourite blogs, but I still find it interesting now and again. I've occasionally found blogs from people I've never met nor heard of, and sometimes they can be enjoyable too.

Perhaps it's egotistical of me to think that someone, somewhere, occasionally enjoys reading my blog. I guess the end result is that I find it fun to publish this stuff, and if nobody reads it, then no big deal. I'm too well-organized and brilliant to care about that.

Keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times

We spent Mother's Day at Canada's Wonderland (oops, sorry, Paramount Canada's Wonderland - can't forget the sponsor!). We got season passes last year, and went a number of times. Unless you know you are only going once, the season pass is too good a deal to pass up. It costs a whopping $51 for a single-day pass, but only $69 for a season pass (until today, anyway, then the price goes up), so if you go twice, you've already saved money. The only difference is that the kids' season passes cost the same as ours, although the entry fee for the kids is $30. As a result, they have to go three times before we start saving, but that shouldn't be a problem. We certainly got our money's worth last year, so we got season passes again this year.

The major advantage for us isn't even the cost savings, it's the fact that we can come and go as we please -- if you spend $51 for each of 2 adults and $30 for each of 2 kids, that's $162 in admission -- for that price, you're going to want to get there first thing in the morning, and spend as long as you possibly can at the park. With the season passes, we can show up a little later or leave at 1pm if we want, and not feel like we're getting ripped off. Or, in the summer, we can spend the entire day at the water park and not do rides at all, and then go back another day and skip the water park. Plus we get to park in the special season-ticket-holder-only parking lot near the entrance, which is quite convenient. AND we get 20% off (overpriced) merchandise, and 30% (overpriced) food (at some restaurants). For example, while we were there, we needed another roll of film, so I just went to the conveniently located gift shop, and after the discount, I got a 24-print roll of 400 film for the bargain basement price of about seven bucks. Membership has its privileges!

I used to go to Wonderland all the time in high school - I knew the park like the back of my hand. We'd basically hit all the coasters (except the Ghoster Coaster - lame), and then hit them all again. The Mighty Canadian Minebuster was my favourite -- that was back when there were only five coasters - the Minebuster, the Dragon Fyre (which goes upside-down! Holy crap!), the Ghoster Coaster, the Sky Rider (which we just called "the stand-up one"), and the Wildebeest, which I always pronounced "WILL-de-beast", since a wildebeest is a real animal, and that's how the name is pronounced. Everyone else called it the Wild Beast. They have since renamed the ride as the Wild Beast, and they've also renamed Dragon Fyre "Dragon Fire". Catering to stupid people, I suppose.

Anyway, there are lots more coasters now - they've added Thunder Run (goes around and inside the mountain), the Vortex (suspended), The Fly (tiny little cars on a windy track), Tomb Raider (you lie down on your stomach for that one), the Bat (goes forwards and backwards), Top Gun (suspended) and The Italian Job (awesome ride - you ride in these little Minis which are blazingly fast), not to mention a bunch of other thrill rides like Psyclone, Shockwave, Cliffhanger, and Drop Zone.

We, of course, don't do any of those rides. We did hit Chopper Chase, Swing Time, the Rugrats bumper cars, Kidsville Station, Jumpin' Jet, and Taxi Jam, which is a little roller coaster that the kids love. Nicholas is also big enough this year to do the Ghoster Coaster, and he loved it too. The boys had a great time, and we had a lot of fun watching them. We also saw the School of Rock show, which is basically a 25-minute live concert with some scenes from the movie, and the kids liked that too. Ryan turned to me in the middle and said "Daddy, this rocks!". Knowing Ryan, he might have just said that because he knew it would get a laugh out of me, but I think he really did enjoy the show.

Unfortunately, their security hasn't gotten any better since last year. Actually, it was even worse this year - I pulled the wagon through the metal detectors and they beeped - probably because of the keys in my pocket and my cell phone. The guy just waved me ahead without even asking anything.

The Fab Three and the other guy

An old guitarist's joke:

What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians?
The drummer.

I've been playing an MP3 CD on shuffle in the car for the past few days. It's got both the Blue and Red Beatles Greatest Hits albums, as well as some Aerosmith, all five Max Webster albums, and the Eagles - I guess it's my classic rock mix. Anyway, whenever I listen to the Beatles for any length of time, I am constantly amazed at Ringo Starr. I can think of no band to which the joke above applies more than the Beatles.

Obviously John and Paul were the chief songwriters, and were also great singers and musicians. George was a great guitar player, and while he didn't write many songs for the Beatles, the ones he did write (Here Comes The Sun, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something) are really good, and he wasn't a half-bad singer either. And then there's Ringo. A pretty good drummer, but a lousy singer, and what songs did he write of any significance? Here's the list: Octopus's Garden. The other day I hit Octopus's Garden during my shuffle, and halfway through the song I had to skip to the next track; I just couldn't listen to it anymore. It's the kind of song I would expect from The Wiggles, not from one of the best rock bands ever. The next track that came up was Yesterday, an absolute classic, and one of my favourite Beatles songs. The juxtaposition (what a great word!) was just painful. I also thought that the segue from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (sung by John and Paul) and With a Little Help From My Friends (sung by Ringo) was a little weird, especially given the lyrics at the end of Sgt. Pepper:

I don't really want to stop the show
But I thought you might like to know
That the singer's gonna sing a song
And he wants you all to sing along
So let me introduce to you
The one and only Billy Shears

It's like they're saying "Here's the moment you've all been waiting for, our singer, the one, the only, Billy Shears!" (big buildup) and then Ringo starts singing (big letdown). This is what we've been waiting for? Ironic, too, that the first line of the song is "What would you think if I sang out of tune".

OK, I guess that's enough Ringo-bashing for one day.

What a drag it is getting old

Our second baseball game of the season was last night, and I'm feeling it today. My throwing arm isn't as sore as I expected, in fact it feels pretty good. My legs are killing me though. Getting out of the car after the hour drive into work was a bit of a chore - since my job involves a fair amount of sitting, I plan on forcing myself to get up every hour or so and just walking around the building to try and keep my leg muscles from tightening up completely. I'm going to have to hit the treadmill a lot more in the future.

It ocurred to me yesterday that although I was one of the younger people in the Stelco league, I'm probably one of the oldest on my team this year. I really need to join a volleyball league or something during the winter to keep in shape so that the first few baseball games of the spring aren't like this. Working out in the basement is great, but there's just no substitute for actually playing a sport.

What else is going on? The Rock fired coach Terry Sanderson the other day. I'm not sure why - he was there for 2 full seasons and most of a third, and here's what he did:

• 2004: Take over a team that was 2-4 and lead them to the playoffs
• 2005: Won championship
• 2006: Start 0-4 and still get them into the playoffs

Sure, one championship win in 3 seasons is a lower average than his predecessor, the late Les Bartley, who won 4 in 5 seasons, but Les is widely regarded as one of the best box lacrosse coaches ever, so you can't honestly expect every coach to have that kind of record. Personally, I don't quite understand the move.

Update: Former Toronto Rock defender Glenn Clark, who played last year with the Philadelphia Wings, was announced this morning as the new Rock head coach. Clark is an experienced player, who was apparently an unofficial assistant coach with the Rock a couple of years ago while he was injured for half a season. He obviously knows the game very well, but other than his unofficial stint with the Rock, I don't think he has any high-level coaching experience. We'll see how that works out...

It's baseball season again!

All winter I look forward to baseball season, but never as much as this past winter. I've played in a Stelco league in Hamilton for the past 10 or 12 years, but this year, I'm playing in a hi-tech league in Waterloo, as a member of the iAnywhere Mobilizers. We played our first game tonight. We had fun, even though we got slaughtered. The other team singled and doubled us to death (with a couple of homers in there for good measure), while we couldn't get much going offensively. I had a couple of singles, one ground out to second, and one line out to second. Actually, my two singles were just to the right of second base as well, so I hit the ball 4 times to exactly the same place. I played OK in right field - blew my first play in the first inning when the ball took a weird bounce right in front of me and skipped by my glove, and I overthrew the shortstop once. Not much was hit to me though, so I just ran around a lot.

This league is a little different from the Stelco league:

• The field is completely fenced in, and not in a public park. No more delaying the game because some old lady decides to walk across our field as a shortcut home from the grocery store.
• You're allowed to slide into 2nd and 3rd. Doubt I ever will though.
• There are five outfielders, though there were still times where it would have been nice to have another one.
• The field has lights! No more playing the last couple of innings quickly so we can beat the darkness, or losing the ball because it's too dark to see it.

One slight drawback of this league is that there are a lot more teams and therefore players, and you don't always know people on the other teams, so there ends up being less camaraderie between teams. In the Stelco league, most players have been playing for years, so everyone knows everyone on all the teams. Not too big a deal though - the people on my team are nice. I already knew most of the team, but there were a couple of co-ops I didn't know, and the twin sister (Teesha) of one of the team captains (Caryn) is on the team as well. I don't know Caryn all that well, so telling them apart will be a challenge, but they're both very friendly, and made me feel very welcome on the team - Caryn actually said that they were glad that I came out for the team. Now, she said that before I blew the play in the outfield, not after... but then again, I think everyone blew at least one play, so I was in good company.

One other difference between this league and the Stelco one is that in the Stelco league, all games were 6:00 on Wednesday. In this league, games start anywhere from 5:30 to 9:30, and any day from Monday to Thursday - some weeks there are two games, other weeks we don't play at all. That throws a wrench into our weekly schedule somewhat, since a lot of our games are Thursday nights, and so I may have to move my guitar lessons to Friday afternoons. Not a big deal though. This league is also much better organized than the Stelco one (it even has its own web site), so that is a major plus. I've officially dumped the stelcoball.com site I was running for the Stelco league - very few people went to the site, and the commissioner wasn't interested in sending me results, so the standings and game results were always out of date. I've even cancelled the domain name - I believe I still own it until August sometime, after which it vanishes.

My arm is going to hurt tomorrow...

Book Review: IPv6 Network Programming

I bought a book on IPv6 from amazon.com recently, and received it today. (I actually bought two, but the second hasn't shipped yet.) IPv6 is still fairly new technology, and the one book I have that mentions is doesn't have enough details -- If I'm going to be the IPv6 expert at work (which I suppose I already am - scary), I think I need to have a better knowledge than I currently do.

Anyway, I looked over this book, and the first thing I noticed was the typeface - it looked like the book was written on a typewriter. I quickly discovered that this was because I was looking at an appendix - an RFC describing some aspect of IPv6. RFCs (Request for Comments) are written by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and are used to decide on standards, like the "official" definitions of various network protocols and stuff like that. Four different RFCs relating to IPv6 were included in the book, and it looks like they took the RFC text directly from the web site with no reformatting. There are five other articles included as well, all of which are also freely available on the web. Once I got to the actual meat of the book (i.e. stuff the author actually wrote himself, I was very disappointed. There are only 80 pages of actual content in this 361-page book, for which I paid (OK, Sybase paid) $50 US. Actually, in the end, nobody will have paid for it, since I'm returning it.

It looks like the content itself is fairly useful, so I wouldn't mind ripping out the first 80 pages, sending the rest back, and asking amazon.com to refund 78% of my purchase price (80 pages out of 361 is 78%). I doubt they'd go for that. I did write a review on amazon.com, giving the book only 2 stars out of 5. We'll see if they post my review.

The other book I ordered is from O'Reilly Press, which has produced a lot of good computer books in the past, so I'm a little more hopeful that it will be a keeper. According to amazon, it's expected to ship sometime in June (the order was placed on March 17), so I'll post a review of that book when I get it.

Update: My review has already appeared on the amazon page for the book.

Do you feel the way you hate? Do you hate the way you feel?

I used to hate the Montreal Canadiens. Just hated 'em. There were two teams that I always wanted to lose — no matter who they were playing, no matter whether it was playoffs or early in the season, I wanted them to lose — the New York Yankees and the Montreal Canadiens. I still hate the Yankees (watching Boston take them out in four straight after being down 3 games to none two years ago was just awesome), but for whatever reason, my dislike for the Habs has waned in recent years.

I can't tell you why this has happened. There isn't a particular player on the Habs that I like, nor any that I really dislike (other than Mike Ribeiro, after his exceptional acting performance during the playoffs 2 years ago). Maybe it's because of Saku Koivu's battle with cancer. Maybe it's the fact that they really sucked for a few years, while the Leafs were making the playoffs every year, though that's what I used to wish for, so I don't see why that would be the case. Or maybe it's just because I'm older and more mature, and so hating a team for no other reason than because I always have just doesn't make sense to me.

But I still hate the Yankees.

More lists

Making lists is fun! Here is a list of all the airports I've ever flown into or out of:

Pearson (Toronto)
Prestwick (Scotland)
Heathrow (London)
Ottawa
Vancouver
Seattle
San Francisco
Logan (Boston)
O'Hare (Chicago)
Miami/Ft. Lauderdale
Orlando
Reagon National (Washington DC)
Newark (NJ)
La Guardia (NYC)
Pittsburgh (stopover on way to Orlando)
San Juan (Puerto Rico)
Edmonton
Montego Bay (Jamaica)
Kitchener
Baltimore/Washington

And all the countries (and provinces/states) I've visted:

Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, BC)
U.S.A.(Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands)
Scotland
England
Jamaica
St. Lucia
Curaçao
Aruba

Note that Curaçao belongs to the Netherlands Antilles, while Aruba is a State of the Netherlands. Both technically belong to the Netherlands, so neither is really a country by itself.

Performancing

I'm trying out a new blog posting extension to Firefox called Performancing. It lets you compose blog entries right inside Firefox, drag and drop text and images and stuff into the compose window, things like that. I'll see how this entry turns out and let you know.

Update: Seems to work rather nicely!

Another Update: Or not. I tried to add the above update through the extension, but rather than updating the existing entry, it added a second one. Seems convenient for new entries, but maybe I'll stil with the blogger.com interface for editing existing ones.