In a friend’s short film, Berlin, the main character states that, “adventures are as common as rooftops.” – I definitely like an adventure. Perhaps that’s why I like being on the roof so much. Actually almost anywhere up high where I can get a good view and a different perspective. This includes mountains, airplanes, tall buildings and, of course, the roof of buildings. Mountains and airplanes are more difficult to come by, however, buildings and rooftops can be had almost anywhere.
Toronto and New York rooftops.
Sometimes even the rooftop isn’t high enough.
My rooftop set on Flickr. Click on the larger image to advance to the next one.
Yes, it is the same person. My neighbour shared this with me recently. On this CD, Céline Dion sings in French and it sounds basically the same as the material she sings in English now. I’m still not a fan.
Here’s some vintage Celine Dion from the 1980s on YouTube.
I managed to get most of my data copied to my new hard drive in my computer after the hard drive upgrade last week. However, to my astonishment, in my pictures directory, I had over three hundred thousand files – more than 302,952 files. The counter kept going and I had enough time to take this picture before it actually started copying files over. The actual amount was just over this number. I’ll need to do some clean up.
I also learned how to use Final Cut Express today which was relatively simple despite having tons more functionality than iMovie and likely too much functionality for what I need. I wasn’t able to load any audio into FC, because I needed to extract audio through iTunes – which I haven’t restored yet, so I just reverted to using iMovie which is able to use MP3 files. The result is the same nonetheless.
Here is the time lapse video of my hard drive replacement; two hour compressed into 15 seconds – started with Final Cut and completed with iMovie.
The summer solstice, one point in time was at 11:58pm last night. However, the last three days were the longest days of the year. Sunrise was at 5:35am each day. Today, Stef and I watched it from the western beaches. We woke up just after 4am to do this – a bit mad but worth the lost sleep.
Here’s a time lapse video of the start of the morning.
For the past year, I’ve been taking photos in raw image format with my camera. On one hand, raw format is great because images are a higher quality and one can manipulate the image more than a jpg image; however, on the other hand they are big – about 15mb an image from my camera! Lately, I seem to be taking more photos than normal and it is filling my hard drive rapidly. When the hard drive becomes more full, I find it slows the computer down significantly.
To combat this, I recently purchased a 320GB hard drive for my Mac. They’ve come down significantly in price to about $100 because a 500GB hard drive designed for portable computers was recently introduced. Last night I installed my new hard drive and everything worked out well! It took me less than an hour to replace the hard drive, but it took over an hour just to reload OS X and that is to the factory state. I still have yet to migrate my data or applications – I only have the browser working at the moment. Last time I did this, it took about six hours before I got all my data and applications loaded.
Here is the operation, images uploaded with the not so good Flickr uploader. I took enough photos to make a time-lapse video – but it will be a while before that is ready!
Update 6.22.08 – The time lapse video is available here.
Update 9.16.09 – I now have the 500GB hard drive installed!
“Less meat, less junk, more plants. Eat food, eat real food.” – Mark Bittman, during his talk,What’s wrong with what we eat. Mark Bittman is the New York Times food columnist of The Minimalist.
Rescued hens enjoying a dust bath at Farm Sanctuary in upstate NY; August 2005.
I sometimes joke with my friends that if I ever started eating animal products again, it would be Popeye’s chicken. However, I’m quite sure I will never go back to eating animals again because the pleasure of being vegetarian is far greater than the immediate pleasure such a thing could ever provide.
For people looking to go vegetarian, Erik Marcus believes that the first food to give up should be eggs. A strange choice to many as cows, pigs, chickens, fish, etc. require the killing of these animals to be turned into food. However, many do not know certain types of chickens are bred specifically to produce large number of eggs; unfortunately a byproduct of this process are male chickens. They grow too slowly to be profitable to raise for meat so they are immediately put to death. In the US, I estimate the number of male chicks killed each year is pegged at 300 200 million male chicks and 50 million in the UK.
If they are lucky enough to be female chicks, they can endure the following injustices in their life:
Beak searing or debeaking – removing part of the beak to prevent birds from pecking each other – something that happens in confined conditions;
Confinement – they are confied to a battery cage and get about get about 67 square inches of floor space (that’s about 8×8 inches/20cm square) – less than the size of a sheet of paper;
Forced molting – a process to increase egg production; hens have their food taken away for seven to fourteen days, lighting is dimmed to mimic winter conditions stressing the body in anticipation of spring. This kills the weaker birds.
Most grocery store eggs come from such practices. Free-range eggs are usually derived from chicks obtained from the same source as where the factory farms obtain their chicks. Free-range chickens are usually without a battery cage, but not excluded from over-crowding in a big pen, called yarding. The conditions in Canada aren’t much different that in the US or elsewhere in the world. Food for thought.
Update (6.2.08): Jamie Oliver shows an audience what happens to the male chicks.
I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to have Erik Marcus blog about one of my food photos of vegetable rolls on his website Vegan.com. Erik is an author and advocate of vegetarianism and animal rights. I read his first book, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, when I first went vegetarian. In Vegan, he writes about the three pillars of vegetarianism, health, animal welfare and the environment and the importance of each and how inter-related they are. This was a good foundation and reinforced my decision to become vegetarian and remain vegetarian.
The foreword in the book was by Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher turned vegetarian. Most know Howard as the person that appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and caused her to renounce beef. In the book, Howard also wrote about pesticides and chemicals in farming that caused him to become paralyzed (he eventually recovered). This caused me to read another book, Silent Spring that investigated pesticides and the effect on health, life and the environment of plants, animals and the planet.
Years later, when I became interested in animal advocacy, I read Erik’s second book, Meat Market: Animals, Ethics and Money. He wrote about the animal agriculture industry and the negative treatment of animals in factory farms as well as the peripheral industries such as slaughterhouses. He wrote that all people have compassion for animals and that education about their condition was the key to the reduction of consumption of animal products and the dismantling of the factory farms.
For me, any one of the reasons on their own are compelling enough for an individual to become vegetarian, however, when one thinks of the combination of all three, it is staggering to me why someone continues to consume animal products. By doing so, they advocate the harsh treatment of animals in factory farms, the overuse of resources to feed animals destined for slaughter and the negative effects animal products have on their health. When one goes vegetarian, everybody wins.
The Feist show last night was a moderate success – her voice was definitely better than in December. The show was sold out, but the crowd wasn’t really into it – a typical Toronto audience. She was trying her hardest, but just couldn’t get us going. She even performed Fucked Up Kid and that didn’t do it either. I thought the Hamilton show in December was better despite her voice being not up to par.
Feist has a very distinctive singing voice. It’s not as powerful as I originally thought – not like Annie Lennox or Neko Case – both who I consider to have very powerful voices. It will be interesting to hear how Feist will sound in a larger venue like the Air Canada Centre.
I also noticed that her second song, When I Was a Young Girl, was also one that Nina Simone also sang in the 1960s. Feist does a great version also. Here is a video from a recent performance in France.
Tonight I’m off to see Leslie Feist or Feist as her ensemble is better known. Before last summer I did not know who she was until I heard her cover of a Nina Simone song, Sea Lion Woman.
I saw Feist perform in December in Hamilton with Meaghan – it was in her car that I first heard the Feist cover of Sea Lion Woman. The Hamilton show was just okay (6/10) because her voice wasn’t as good as it should have been. We were lucky the show was not canceled because Feist was stranded in Newfoundland due to a snowstorm the on the previous day.
I’m glad I will have an opportunity to see Feist perform tonight as she is becoming quite popular and will play larger venues in the future – she’s booked at Air Canada Centre in November 2008. Tonight, however, Feist is playing at the Sony Centre (formerly the Hummingbird Centre and O’Keefe Centre) which is a smaller venue (capacity: 3,187).
Blogroll, Couchsurfing, Culture, Environment, Film, Neighbourhoods, New York, Photography, Recreation, Toronto day by day, Travel, Video | Garry August 5, 2008 | 
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