timylee.com

The past Thursday I had the opportunity to climb the CN Tower for the first time as a part of a fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund. It was quite an interesting experience.

The whole thing started around the last week of May, when I realized that maybe I should get myself in shape once more. I’ve been kind of slacking off at the gym, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to get things started for the summer season.

And what a start it was. I trained twice a week almost every week since then. I remember dying on the Baldwin Steps behind Casa Loma on my first attempt. I never ran stairs before, not to mention running 144 flights (that’s 1728 steps!) in an all-out, do-or-die fashion. Eventually, with the encouragement of Daniel and Levi, I discovered a pace that worked for me. The key to the race was apparently: 2 steps at a time, and never stop.

My goal was to finish the climb in 15 minutes. Admittedly, this was a little unrealistic, but I thought if I gave myself an impossible time, I’d push myself harder. I was pretty nervous on the day of the run, which sounds a little silly, but I couldn’t help it — the anticipation, the pre-race nerves, what if I totally fatigued half way up?

After all the administrative chores, along with all the security check-points, a WWF volunteer registered my timer wristband, and that was it, time to run. The next 20 minutes were a blur. I couldn’t quite remember when, but I think it was around floor 47 when I told myself that I was insanely stupid for signing up for such a task. My legs were on fire. Reading the flight numbers slowly go up by one was a torture, I had to force myself to stop counting. After passing the 100th flight of stairs, my legs were done with 2 stairs at a time, I had to switch to doing 1 steps, I was also tasting blood at the back of my throat — so that’s why they tell you to breath in through the nose.

I ended up getting a time of 00:17:58, and placed 390 overall — all sorts of disappointing. I was pretty sure that I could do it in 17, but alas, I was almost a minute late. A lot of fun was had by all though, so it was all in all, a great afternoon / evening.

I want to thanks all the folks that sponsored me for the event! I ended up raising $420.00, which is pretty amazing! Congrats to the FreshBooks “old-school” team as well, they placed 3rd overall as a team with the average time of 00:12:47!

There are times when we mistype our email address — forget to dot the dot and underscore the underscore. But somewhere out there, is another Tim, who has been taking the whole email typo business a little too far. I’m not really sure how someone can make so many blunders when it comes to their email address, it’s a stretch already for us average folks. That said, when you’re a candidate for Dental Surgery, one would think that the holder of such esteem title could at least type in their email address correctly. We shall call him “Dentistry Tim”.

Back in second year of university, I received an email in my gmail from the University of Toronto, letting me know that they’ve received my application to the Doctor of Dental Surgery Program for the 2006-2007 session, and requires some further documentation from me. Indeed, the thought of going through with dental school myself will make my mother no doubt very happy, but I couldn’t help but think about pulling someone’s teeth out — a rather frequent procedure for a dentist I’m afraid, and to that, I say “no way!”

At the time I felt bad for this “Dentistry Tim”. People make mistake all the time, and the poor guy might miss his deadline for supplement documentation if I don’t redirect this email to the right guy. So I gave University of Toronto a call, and they said they’ll fix it, all was well.
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It’s been a while since I last posted. With twitter so popular, who actually blogs nowadays? No matter. It’s been a busy few weeks getting adjusted to my new life at FreshBooks. It’s been going well. Everyone is so very welcoming and brilliant, sometime, I feel like I’m the one with the least experience in the room compared to everyone else. It’s great though, to be feeding off the energy at work — there’s such a good vibe there, and no days are ever dull. Just take a look at the photo above for example. Who gets to sumo wrestle at work?
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It’s official, starting tomorrow, I will be the newest member of the Support team at Freshbooks. I’m thrilled to be invited to tag along on thier adventures, and ebullient to be meeting and working with a cast of aces, I’ll also be working with my fantastic friend Jon Spenceley again, as he would say — Oh snap!

I also made a little funny/cheesy self-promotion video when I applied for the position (available after the jump). Freshbooks wanted, as an option, a video to be sent in describing why you’re interesting and how you enjoy helping people. I thought the “call for video”-video that they made set the tone for a less serious self-promotion, and encouraged a more fun and wacky submission. So I started brainstorming ideas with some help from friends, wrote the script, shot the footages, and edited. It turned out to be a fun little project for a weekend, not to mention a chance to revisit my media roots from high school and PTS. Special thanks goes to Dan T, Dan K, Amanda, Heather, Howard, Peter, Wilfreda, Alex T, Alyssa, Shanan, my sisters, and my neighbours for either starring in, or helping me in the making of the video.

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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve returned from my glorious Taiwan / Hong Kong trip, and it’s been a while since I’ve updated this place too. I’ve been pretty busy with interviews, friends and family’s graduations, and not to mention photos and all sorts of little ‘to-dos’ here and there. The trip itself was very much an adventurous one. We went along the East Coast of Taiwan, which is something I have never done before. It was all very out-door and non-urban. I was also delighted when I got go on a whale sighting trip. Though no whales ever showed up, we did run into a huge pack of dolphins, they really are fascinating creatures:

Let this image serve as a preview of the photo-set to come. Speaking of photo-set, I’m quite stoked to be finally gutting my dust-collecting desktop and refurbish it with some brand spankin’ new parts tomorrow. Then hopefully I won’t have such a hard time processing photos.

Things are finally looking up a bit, hopefully it will get better as this year unfolds.