幾鬼秘的部落格

Ever since I started following Strobist recently, my interests in photography got a new life.  This summer I bought a new lens, body and flash bracket, which is very unlike me since I am far from being an equipment junkie (I’ve been using the same body for 3 years).  The release of Nikon’s D90 (first DSLR capable of movie recording) no doubt helped fuel this recent (and hopefully temporary) addiction.

As I continued to read equipment reviews, I ran across this very interesting article (and also this one).  It should be a good site to revisit now and then to keep my wallet in check

As a result of my parking mishap 2 weeks ago, the front left fender of my car was left
with some major scratches, chipped paint and paint left on from the wooden frame with which it made contact.  From the "before" and "after" photos, perhaps you’d agree that I’ve done a pretty darn good job of undoing my own damage.  I felt pretty hopeless at first when I couldn’t even remove the paint left on from the wooden frame of the garage.  In desperation I used a few drops of Vim to remove the paint.  Most of the scratches were removed using a polishing compound that costs $4.99 from crappy tire.  While I did use touch-up paint as the final step, the operation was far from "touching up".  I was practically painting the fender with the tiny brush.

If you look hard enough you can see a minor dent.  But hey, for $4.99 + tax I can live with that

Last month I made a $300-mistake by ripping apart Chris’ Lancer bumper in a snow bank while backing out of my driveway.  I blamed it on the cars that filled my small street.  But of course, I also could’ve shoveled my driveway more cleanly

Well today, I got no one to blame.  Through pure inattention, I rammed my Miata against one side of my garage.  I’ve always bragged about the width of my garage.  So to do this, especially with a tiny car like mine, is embarrassing.  And of the four corners, I did this to the front driver side, arguably the easiest corner to judge.  Arrggghhh… I am pissed!

My experience with windshield damages:

Sometime between 1998 and 2000 - my very first stone chip on my very first car (MX-3).  I tried to fix it with some DIY kit that did not help a bit.  Luckily the chip did not spread before I traded the car in.

2002 - two years after getting my new MX-5, I got a stone chip that was repairable.

2004 - two years later, I got hit by a fist-size rock falling from the top of a truck
traveling on a different lane ahead of me on the highway.  Needless to say, that wasn’t repairable.

2006 - another two years later, I heard a pop while traveling on the highway, but did not notice any chip on my windshield.  Turned out that the chip was hidden behind the rear view mirror.  By the time it was noticeable, the crack has spread too much for it to be repairable.  I tried to live with the crack but had to eventually replace it in before I traded the car in.

2008 - two days ago, I heard a loud pop while going to work.  This time I actually got a double whammy - I don’t know how I could’ve gotten two chips when I only heard one pop.  I had them repaired today.

Looks like I’ll be due another hit in 2010

February has been quite an eventful month so far.  We had a very snowy start to the Chinese New Year, which coincided with my birthday day this year.  Chris and my sisters treated me to Cfood that night, then a bunch of my friends celebrated with me at The Sultan’s Tent, complete with a belly dancer, later that weekend.

The cold and snowy weather continued to the following week, but apparently that wasn’t enough to stop a guy from riding his motorcycle!  I wish I’d taken a pic.  That week I was invited and then uninvited to the Eason Chan concert, which I heard was pretty good.  For V-day Chris and I decided to go out for dinner the day after to avoid the crowds.  That night she surprised me with a homemade steak and lobster dinner! Very impressive and delicious.  I had more seafood the following night at The Doctor’s House in Kleinburg.  We walked into a virtually empty restaurant and was seated right by the window with a beautiful view of the adjoining chapel.  I had tiger shrimps which came with Oreo-sized scallops!  Even in the cold and dark of night Kleinburg looked quite nice.  It’s only 20 minutes from my place so it’d definitely make a good destination for a bike ride there.  I can’t wait until the weather gets warmer.

This past weekend I accidentally took a chunk of my middle finger off with a putty knife.  Yes I screamed like a girl.  Yes I need a letter opener.  Luckily that was with my right hand.  Because days later, I used my other hand, with all fingers intact, to bowl a 223 at our weekly league.  I can’t quite remember if that was my personal high - it was either 218 or 238.

I hope it was just a coincidence that the lunar eclipse happened that night, cause I don’t want to wait for 2 years before breaking this high score.  I took my first attempt at photographing the moon and have noticed 2 interesting points. 1) It is a lot brighter than you think so you don’t need a good fast lens to photograph it, which is a good thing because 2) its movement is very noticeable when you’ve zoomed up close to it.

The last time I used the short term parking @T1 @YYZ, it was $2.5 for half an hour.  This morning, I drove my parents there for their flight to HK.  I got their boarding passes for them from the supposedly "express" check-in machine, only to be told to line up with the rest of the people even though we only need to check in 2 bags.  I’ve never waited for so long to check in.  More than one hour later, I got a $12 bill for parking!  @$4/half hour, that’s a 60% increase!  I ddin’t hear of this price hike on the news and couldn’t find anything online about it.  I’m very curious about how they justify such a huge hike.

And it’s even better than the cell phone lot idea.

I’d known for a while that one of my tires was under inflated.  But being forgetful, lazy and always in a rush, I’d neglected to visit an air pump station until this evening, when I haphazardly turned into the Petro-Canada at Bayview and 16th.  I almost passed right by the air pump station as it was smaller and different from the usual pumps.  I wasn’t even sure if it was an air pump even after I got out of my car to look at it.  On its face was a large numeric digital display, above four buttons.  You use the "-" and "+" buttons to set the desired pressure (I didn’t bother to read what the other two buttons were for).  And that was it!  Plug in the hose and it’ll automatically come on and pump air until the selected air pressure is reached, signaled by a loud audible beep.

This takes the "check" right out of the "check and inflate" procedure, making it 10 times faster, not to mention a lot more accurate.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m one of those people who don’t check my car’s tire pressure as often as one should.  Now I can definitely see myself doing it more often.

Can you guess what the sign means?  I’m not sure how long they’ve been up, but I saw them all around YYZ for the first time last weekend when I went there to pick up somebody.  At first I didn’t know what they meant and simply ignored them.  Like the many cheapskates who tried to save a few bucks on parking, I was cruising around the airport waiting for the cell phone call to summon me for the pick up, when I saw the electronic road sign warning that parking is prohibited on the shoulders, followed by the notice "free parking in cell phone lot".   I immediately followed the said signs to arrive at what looked to be an abandoned parking lot.  I mean, there were probably fewer cars in the lot than on the shoulders around roads of the airport.

One would think that by doing this the airport is probably losing potential income from drivers who would otherwise go for the paid parking.  But I guess the "park on shoulders" situation is really getting out of hand, and it’s an indication that if people are determined not to pay, they’ll find other (illegal) ways to avoid it.

The free cell phone parking lot is not only free, but very close to terminal 1 (~2 min drive away).  But from the number of cars still parked on shoulders, they probably need to be advertised a little bit more.  Hopefully this blog will help.

With my first new car 7 years ago, as well as my latest one, I’d broken them in by simply trying to avoid driving them at a constant RPM.  I didn’t baby them as some people suggest, but drove them as I normally do.  A few months ago I came across this article that suggests something really different for the break-in procedure.  In short, run it hard!  Considering that I probably won’t keep my new bike for long, as well as its relatively low cost, I thought this was probably the best specimen that I’ll ever have for this experiment.

While the suggested procedure is not particularly difficult to follow in theory, it is not the most comfortable thing to have a single-cylinder machine buzzing under your butt at redline all the time.  I had to look down at the tach whenever I shift to make sure that I’m at least hitting close to, but not over, the redline.  People say that the bike will come "alive" after the break-in this way.  I’ve now put almost 1000km on the bike and admittedly the engine has become noticeably more willing to be rev’ed to the redline more freely.  While most sources quote the bike’s max speed at ~120km/h, last week on the 401 while "cruising" home, I haphazardly looked at the speedo and saw 140+km/h, with the tach needle well into the red zone at 11+K RPM!  I doubt that the bike can go any faster however, unless I lose a lot of weight

For the past few months before I got my bike, I’d been spending ~$270/month on gas driving my car.  For the month of June, having the bike for only half of the month, I’ve reduced my car’s gas bills to $200, plus $17 for the bike!  Even with the aggressive style of riding for the break-in, I averaged 2.7L/100km on the bike, just a little over the quoted rate of 2.5L/100km on paper.  The gas savings paid for the insurance ($28/month) with change!  And not only am I saving the environment, I even get free parking

Last weekend didn’t have a good start as I spent all of Friday working on performance issues of our application - not fun.  I was the last one to leave work, heading home for a quick dinner before going to the ACC for the Show Mi concert.  I borrowed an 80-200mm lens from MK and was promptly stopped and questioned by the security at two different gates.  I managed to sneak it in but didn’t use it until the latter part of the concert, afraid that I’d be kicked out

The concert was ok, but neither CL nor I liked the sound system.  If you didn’t already know the songs, you’d probably have a hard time making out the lyrics.  Except for the part where Sammi gave 2 guys a chance to make fools out of themselves on stage, which was pretty hilarious, the concert was rather ordinary.  But she definitely showed what she was capable of during the upbeat dance numbers, which I enjoyed the most.

Saturday morning CL and I joined MK+WL on their "shopping" trip to a kitchen/cabinet store.  They’ve just moved into a big house and will be adding cabinets to their breakfast area and laundry room.  I, on the other hand, was just there to get an idea of how much it’d cost to put some valance under my cabinets.  It would be an affordable and small job that the salesperson recommended that I do it myself.  We’ll see…

After a nice lunch at Michi, CL and I drove all the way to Etobicoke planning to get some motorcycling gears, only to find 2 of the 3 stores closed!  We spent almost 2 hours at Parker Bros trying on jackets and helmets, but came out empty-handed.

We were pretty dead tired by the time we went home.  I took a quick nap and had a quick dinner before heading to the Level 7 concert to help out as a photographer.  I still have to process half of the photos - hope they’ll turn out ok.

Sunday morning we met up with MK+WL to drive up to King Township for some
hiking.  We picked hike #0; we wanted to start on Sideroad 16 but couldn’t find the "entrance", so we ended up starting on the east side of Keele, just as the map shows.  I was quite surprised by the number of photo ops the hike offered.  Lucky that I brought my full gear with me

Holiday Monday was the most relaxed day of the weekend.  I spent the morning surfing the net, processing photos and watching Wimbledon at home.  After lunch with DF+MJ, we went to World Bowl for the first time since I don’t know when.  I was pretty consistent, even scoring 200+ in the final game.  I hope the spare ball that PT gave me will help boost my average when I get back to league play, because I was starting to lose motivation last season with my average stuck at 150.