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!

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.

Fast forward to last month. I received another curious email from the University of Connecticut for Dentistry Tim, this time for Oral and maxillofacial Surgery residency. My first thought was surprisingly joyous. After all, it’s nice to know that Dentistry Tim has made it through his first few years of Dental school, and now is moving on to such a prestigious international surgical specialty. I fired an email back to the University of Connecticut letting them know that they’ve got the wrong Tim, and they should notify Dentistry Tim of his missing documents at once so he can continue to be considered for the residency. Admittedly, I was a little annoyed. How can someone be so careless to put a wrong email address into such important applications? Not to mention, twice!

About a week ago, I got another email from Loma Linda University, telling me that they were thrilled to offer Dentistry Tim an interview. By this point, half of me wanted to fly myself all the way to Loma Linda University and pose as Dentistry Tim. Imagine the possibilities:

Loma Linda: So, tell me why, in terms of of your ability and experiences, we should accept you into our residency?
Me: Well, I once knocked a kid over and some teeth fell out!
Loma Linda: … Uh…. wha…. umm… I beg your pardon?

Needless to say, doing so would probably lend me some jail time for identity theft. So I laughed it off and gave Loma Linda University a call, letting them know that they’ve got the wrong Tim.

At this point, even my friends thought it was rather ridiculous, one joked that one day I’ll get a password reset email for an account of some sort:

I laughed it off, and went on my merry way… until today, when another email popped in for Dentistry Tim, except, not Dentistry related at all:

Looks like Dentistry Tim managed to buy custom car parts using the wrong email address. Not only is this guy a Dentist, he also drive nice cars. One would think he still have lots of education loans to pay off, but that’s outside of my knowledge regarding Dentistry Tim.

What I do know though, is his address, and I feel like writing him a post card, complete with a photo of the CN tower on the back, and write something along the lines of “You know that interview? Yea, you would’ve missed it if it wasn’t for me, as well as all those due dates for supplementary submissions. So on those counts, do yourself a favour and stop mistyping your email address!” A better idea — ask my cousins who lives in the same city as Dentistry Tim to order copious amounts of Pizza to that address! Okay, only kidding. Though you must admit the thought of it is awfully tempting. I mean, were you expecting me to send a care package with a “Good Luck with Oral and maxillofacial Surgery” note attached?

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?

Adjusting to the working life has surprisingly been more difficult than expected. I’m constantly finding myself “bored” during the evenings. Not a good thing, bored means unproductive times, and unproductive at the age of 22 doesn’t sound at all appealing. I figured it’s time I started investing more time into self improvement, but I couldn’t quite think of a place to start. There are all sorts of things I could improve on, say, learn how to program again (learn a whole new language while I’m at it), but I almost fell backward on my butt from being dazed and confused when I went to the bookstore the other day trying to find a tutorial book. That’s just say there are a lot of books about programming out there.

Out of frustration, I went back to my favourite past-time — the piano, and started jamming. Half an hour into the session I tapped myself on my forehead and said “duh!”. Clearly, what I needed at the moment was not to learn a new set of skills, but to built upon what I already know, and I was already doing it for half an hour. I decided that for the next few months, my goal is to get my groove on the piano back. Learn a new challenging pieces and expand my repertoire, all the while research a bit into what I would like to work on non-musically.

So that’s the plan I stuck with. I ended up purchasing the “Kingdom Hearts Piano Collection” book (shipped all the way from Japan!). The pieces are quite challenging, yet fun, and will hopefully be enough for me to tackle for the next few months. Currently I’m working on the piece called Kairi. It seemed to be an intermediate piece out of the entire playlist, so I figure I’d start from there and see where it goes.

Until then, if anyone has any great reads in terms of business and marketing, or any interesting reads in general, feel free to suggest them to me. I could use some guidance in picking out some books out of the millions in stores.

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.

Admittedly, there were some concepts that I didn’t present too clearly. In case you were wondering. The “Assist” sequence at the end starts with me chlorinating a pool. When I appear behind the TV at 3:15 I had just fixed said TV, and the last montage of the sequence at 3:44 was me directing my friend Howard on how to do peform an Ultra Combo in Street Fighter IV. Though it should be noted that in real life, he dominates that game (I rarely win a match against him!).

The video was apparently a hit with the crew at Freshbooks, and though they never told me, I think it gave them a good first impression before the interviews. So here’s a tip on job hunting — Anything filed under “optional submission”, is really “required submission”.

I feel both very excited and very fortunate to find myself in this spot, and am looking forward to doing what I can to help Freshbooks and its customers have a rocking invoicing experience.

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.

Well, it looks like I’m headed for another trip to my beloved hometown of Taiwan, with a stop in Hong Kong on the way back. My grandpa is turning 90, which is quite an incredible feat if you ask me. I can only wish that when I’m 90 (if I even get there) I’ll be as fun and loving and mobile as he is.

The not-so-fun part about flying standby is that there’s no such thing as “connecting flights” if you’re flying between two airlines that are not in the same “alliance”. Therefore, I spend hours and hours usually somewhere if I fly the Vancouver to Taiwan route. Last time I did that, I spent 6 hours in the Vancouver airport waiting for a flight back to Toronto on a return flight. Thank goodness there was the 2004 summer Olympics, or else I would’ve died from boredom. Today’s journey will see me at the airport from 8:00pm Vancouver time all the way to 1am — a grand total of 5 hours; a thought that has “tired” plastered all over it.

So wish me a pleasant journey! If anything, the prospect of eating a bowl of authentic Taiwanese beef-noodles will make the long hours flying all worth it.

This year’s headliners features some of the best and brightest in Jazz. Tony Bennett is obviously one of the highlight and will be closing the festival this year. If you’re looking for some retro funk, don’t miss Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. Grandmaster Dave Brubeck and awesome saxophonist Sadao Watanabe will be making an appearance as well. So get your tickets today!

Strangely the one performance I’m looking forward to the most (and thus, has bought a ticket to) is the British Jazz pianist / singer Jamie Cullum. I’ve bought his past three albums, and so far they haven’t disappoint. I find his style in jazz so interesting and different (to the point where sometime it offends some jazz crowds) that I even wrote a final paper on his performativity to jazz and popular music in my fourth year course Music and the Body.

I was wondering when he’ll come to Canada again, I told myself I’d go see one of his concert if he does. I estimated sometime next year on his next album tour, but the announcement that he’ll be playing the TD Toronto Jazz Festival at the end of June got me all excited. I’ll be with good company too — Heather, Dan T. and my sister Anna so far has told me they’d accompany me to this performance. If there’s anything to look forward to this summer for me, it’s the night of June 30th.

With that, I leave you with Cullum’s ‘These Are The Days’ from his earlier album titled Twentysomething. Enjoy!

These are the days that I’ve been missing,
Give me the taste, give me the joy of summer wine.
These are the days that bring new meaning,
I feel the stillness of the sun and I feel fine.

Sometimes when the nights are closing early,
I remember you and I start to smile.
Even though now you don’t want to know me,
I get on by, and I go the extra mile.

These are the times of love and meaning,
Ice of the heart melted away, and found the light.
These are the days of endless dreaming,
Troubles of life are floatin’ away like a bird in flight.

These are the days
These are the days
These are the days

I thought you said our love would last for ever
Believing that the tears would end for good.
I told you that we’d get through any weather
Maybe that didn’t work out, but we did the best we could.

These are the days that I’ve been missing
Give me the taste, give me the joy of summer wine.
These are the days that bring new meaning,
I feel the stillness of the sun…and I feel fine.

Well, after saving up for a while, and under the recommendation of my friend Alex, I decided to grab myself a Dell 2408 WFP Monitor. So far, it has been amazing. I have not plug a computer into it yet, but I have plugged my PS3, and it looks fantastic. I’m glad I made the purchase when it was on sale too! ($200 off!)

I haven’t had time to play around seriously with the calibrations yet, and I probably won’t till I have my new computer built. But from the reviews online so far, it’s a great set. The inputs are plenty and 1920×1200 at 24 inch looks so pretty. I pop-ed in Wall-E in 1080P earlier today and just sat there and drooled.

Can’t wait until the end of this month / early May when I have my new computer up and running.

Well, it’s sort of long over-due, but better late than never! Here’s a quick recap of what happened after going south of Seattle to Los Angeles, adding in San Diego and Vegas to the mix.

1. Warner Brothers Studio Tour
   




It would be such a shame to not visit a studio when you’re in such close vicinity to them! So I picked Warner Brothers on the suggestion of my other cousin, Brian. It was a blast. There’s me, on the preserved set of Friends, which was pretty fun.

2. Seeing family and friends in LA




I haven’t seen my LA relatives since I was like… 6 or something. So it was a blast to finally get reacquainted — American Style! I spend my very first American Thanksgiving, it was quite a blast, not to mention the food. Too bad I didn’t go Black Friday Shopping.

3. San Diego / La Jolla Beach with Dan H.



The sea was just what I needed. Despite being a bit of a cold day, it was still warm enough for Dan and I to go kayaking in the Pacific. It was amazing fun, until I learned that I get motion sickness in a kayak. We ended up getting stuck on a rock when we tried to get back shore, oops. Afterward we went to the gaslamp district of SD to grab some dinner, it was a fantastic day, thanks Dan!

4. Vegas!!!




It’s Vegas, enough said. I ended up only trying the dollar slot machine since I’ve never been to a casino before. My cousin convinced me to cash out when I was up about 45 cents. I ended up betting more and lost it all. It was just a bit of fun, and who actually cash out 45 cents anyways?

Anyways, for the rest of the set, go to my flickr.

Needless to say, I was hooked since.

The series, was about a bored college drop-out girl named Georgia Lass (Ellen Muth), who had died from being nailed by a falling space-station toilet seat. Instead of moving on to the pearly gates, she had unknowingly become the newest member to the grim reaper team. George would be assigned souls to take by the fatherly Rube (Mandy Patinkin), and interact with fellow reaper misfits: Bitter meter maid Roxy (Jasmine Guy), alcoholic thief Mason (Callum Blue), Carefree and adventure girl Betty (Rebecca Gayheart), and vain actress Daisy (Laura Harris). George also has to work at Happy Time, a temp agency under the direction of the motherly Delores Herbig (Christine Willies), all the while spying on her grieving family, dad Clancy (Greg Kean), mother Joy (Cynthia Stevenson), and younger sister Reggie (Britt McKillip). The series was great and well written, drama were intense but not filled with cliché, and the comedic timing were usually spot on. The story had tight narratives and creatively uses subplots to tie it all together.

Unfortunately, the series only lasted two seasons, leaving fans and viewers shocked, hurt, and confused — Dead Like Me was dead, it was so young, and had so much potential.

Enter Dead Like Me: Life After Death, a movie set five years after where the TV series left off. It was a direct response to fans after a demand for a third season was made — If the response to the movie is good, then maybe we’ll see more movies, or dare I say, an new season! Yes, I know, a pretty crappy response, but I’ll get what I can get, especially these days when TV shows just seems to disappear without a trace.

Mostly every cast member returns to the movie, with the exception of Mandy Patinkin and Laura Harris, and the acting is every bit as good as the original show. The new Reaper Boss, Cameron Kane (Henry Ian Cusick) was a bit of a let down, as the writer seem to have just used him for a convenient plot device. We never really get to know Kane, and thus never really feel the threat and the complexities he adds to our reaper friends. The casting of the new Daisy (Sarah Wynter) replacing actress Laura Harris, was a miscast. Harris’ Daisy, had a sense of mystery, and often uses perkiness to hide her true feelings, while Wynter’s Daisy seem to be very melodramatic, to the point where she seemed a bit of a ditz. That said, the writing appears to be fairly consistent with that of the show.

The movie also felt like a long episode, which I thought was appropriate given the original medium for the story. However, it seems to be lacking some of the dark comedy and quirky charms that were so prevalent in the TV series, perhaps due to the lack of involvement from the original writer/producer Bryan Fuller. The story also felt a bit recycled, using themes and lessons from previous episodes that our characters have already been through and learned. The movie also leaves little to no explanation to some of story-lines of the series, and have a less than expected closure to offer. Which, I suppose, could be a good thing if MGM ever decides to revive the series, a thought that sounds more like wishful thinking than a possibility.

Watching this movie made me realized how much I missed this series. Despite some let downs, the movie is a somewhat enjoyable one. If anything, fans should treat it like a small love note rather than a letter from the writers, and be somewhat content that we at least got to see the Reapers on the job one last time.