Smart Fill technology

is f-ing incredible these days. Ok, filling in some sky or sand, no big deal. Covering up the time stamp on a photo, pretty impressive when the background's complicated. But filling in a big chunk of mountain? Wow.

Shrunk subsets of smart filled and original images (and this is without even tweaking the settings for optimal performance). Can you tell how much is artificial before looking at the original?
http://members.shaw.ca/sacrawfo/Pano_3_smartfilled_subset.jpg
http://members.shaw.ca/sacrawfo/Pano_3_subset.jpg

Children's Hospital move

Considered making a final pilgrimage down there last night before today's move... It was a christmas tradition when we were young when it was the Crawford's turn to host Christmas dinner, sometime after dinner the dads would take the kids for a walk down there and back... I think it was supposed to tire us out. I don't think it generally worked that way. But it was still fun. I also had my few visits there as a patient, though thankfully never anything serious. Generally a healthy childhood, but it was nice having the hospital so nearby just in case.

The mohawk chronicle

The mohawk days have ended, and I'm mr. fuzzy head. I actually think I maybe looked better with a mohawk, but too late now. Especially should have kept the goatee a while. It is a very different image. Overall the experience was pretty fun. People who knew me were generally amused, as well as kindof surprised that it didn't look too bad, and some encouraged me to keep it, though I'm sure that came with a mixed motives. Outsiders didn't treat me much different, though I did get longer stares from people. The building's security person didn't recognize me at first. But he seemed pleased with the fully-buzzed look (since that's how his hair is). Didn't have it long enough to be in many situations, like formal meetings or dance or other social things.

Now that it's all gone, can't really have much fun with it. I considered having a race between facial hair and scalp hair, but decided not to.

Overall it raised $710. $600 of that was from Intermap, which was the focus of the fundraising. Should've put more pressure on other groups like dragonboaters. And fundamentally, I didn't do anything that significant, it's not something to change peoples minds about whether they're willing to donate to charity or not, it's just encouragement, and a huge step up from just phoning and asking for money.

Kelowna dragon boat festival 2006

Another fun out of town festival, though it was the only one I did this year.

Firstly, for the racing, each one of our races was better than the one before it. In the end, we placed reasonably well, not near the very top, but still decent. I actually never checked on times or positions of any teams throughout this festival.

Other noteworthy things I'll remember... IHOP for dinner friday night. Getting a mohawk by myself saturday afternoon. Hanging out with Karen, Simon, and Marvin after the races and eventually heading to minigolf with Shannon and her friend. We were probably the loudest group ever there, probably annoying everyone, every shot seemed to be "OOHHHH!!" "AHHHH!!" "YEAH!!!" (my roommates happened to be just in front of us and were so much quieter). Dinner at Kelsey's afterwards, hanging with the same people mostly, laughing so hard from the phrase "If there's grass in the field, play ball!" and everything it spawned. Hanging out with people until about 1:40 am. Sunday wasn't as interesting actually. Left really quickly after the last race, though I would've liked to hang out a few more minutes, say bye, be relaxed not rushed. Oh well.

Anyways bedtime, maybe I'll write more later.

Fugro (Netherlands)

Phoned to follow up on the job application, they still haven't looked much at it, but told me to think about where I might want to live. Since for this position, they fly you out to the survey site and back, you don't have to be in the same location as the office, so you can choose to live pretty much anywhere you want in Europe (as long as it's reasonably accessible). Makes sense but was still kindof unexpected. I have no idea where I'd try to live. Some more interesting culturally, others may help me finally get fluent in french. Some places will have better social security while others have lower taxes, etc. Overall Europe is the last continent that I'm actually interested in visiting, but it would still be really cool.

Bus route change

Pretty annoying, I've been riding my bike all the time until today, when I discovered they changed my bus route on me! Now I have to walk 4 extra blocks :(

Two crazy ideas

One will come to fruition this weekend.

Darkness rises

I think even more than the temperatures, which vary like crazy, it's the shortening days that herald the conclusion of summer for me. Yesterday it finally reached the point of riding into work pre-sunrise. Time to start packing on the pounds and prepare to sleep for some months. If only.

Weekend

First weekend in over four months that I didn't do hiking or something else specail on saturday. I even left the house to go by myself, but had to return home for something and decided I didn't really feel like hiking alone that day. So disappointing to break my streak. The worst is that after wasting away at home all day saturday, on sunday I realised there was an event going on saturday that I had originally planned to attend, the U of C 'kickoff' thing which included a Spirit of the West concert. Oh well.

Sunday was fun. For dragonboat we had too many people so we borrowed sisterships boat... there was competition from the very beginning, Arnold noticed that it was three girls who had left for topmade's boat, and we were three guys about to go for sistership's, so he figured we should race them, depsite their head start and our farther distance to the boat. But we did it! Then, during practice, after several short races, Arnold had our 5-row boat do a drive-by splashing against Matt's 6-row boat. They didn't even fight back, they were so stunned! Though it lead to a ~15 minute high speed dragonboat chase, including us switching sides on-the-fly, and pulling a manoeuver behind the island so that we were then doing the chasing. It was really fun.

In the evening, went to Karen's chinese music night thing (met up with Simon there... both dragonboat friends)... it was a whole orchestra, lots of flutes and stuff so not exclusively chinese, but chinese style music. There were lots of erhus and a couple dulcimers, a few things hiding in the back that you didn't really see, but my favorite were the long zithers which Karen plays. Like, it's not really that special of an instrument really, I just really like how the playing of it looks. There were ensemble pieces as well as a few duets and smaller groups. Karen didn't even see us till the intermission, despite us having moved to the front row to be right in front of her during her duet :) But at least we got to chat a bit then and after the end. Quite a nice evening.

Monday

Did a little hike with Geoff&Evelyn&friends. Was a little disorganized though which was a bit frustrating, and took up much more of the day than expected. But it was a pleasant stroll in the woods, got to meet a couple nice people. Some of us met up again at dinner time at Sun Chiu Kee. The highlight was the Fok Kin Fried Rice which gave us a great deal of amusement. Except Chirlene, apparently she's more mature than the rest of us. I was unable to find the volume knob on Samson, but it was still a good time.

End of SoF

oops, this post was for the end of last week!

Friday was my last SoF day. It was kindof disappointing, cause many of the people who I enjoy doing SoF with (including my bro Leiding) weren't there. Also, I didn't like the mission much. But overall I will miss the people, the missions, and the camaraderie, and am glad to have made it part of my summer.

Hopefully I use the time I'm gaining productively.

Temple

Did Mount Temple on Saturday! Kane describes it as "The ultimate scramble." It is the third highest in the southern rockies, at 3543 metres. The scramble itself is about 1700 m vertical, including rests it took about 11 hours round trip. The day was absolutely perfect, no clouds, no smoke, amazing visibiity into the distance over top of all the other mountains. Finally got to use my gaiters for the snow at the top, and was glad I had rented an ice axe though I probably could have done without it (others didn't use theirs). A little disappointed that the helmet didn't do any work, at the end of the hike I considered putting it on one last time and having someone throw a rock at my head, but I forgot. Also discovered that my legs indeed need sunscreen - got my first burn of the season.

It was definitely an accomplishment, something I'm glad I got to do.