Operation ninja overlord

Full moon + low tide + no rain = 14 young aspiring ninjas on top of a famous Vancouver landmark.

No names shall be mentioned.

The great American vacation

For those of you that follow me on Twitter you probably read a few of my tweets about going to LA. Yup last Thurs a few friends and I drove down to Seattle to catch a flight and went for a 5 day vacation in LA. Some highlights:

• Went to the LA Kings vs Vancouver Canucks game on Thurs night. The Canucks played horrible but somehow walked out with a win. It was really cool checking out the warmup skate. Since it was the “Canadian” night, there were tons of Canucks fans. We sat in front of bunch LA fans and throughout the game we were trash talking each other, it was great fun. As part of the Canadian night ticket package, after the game there was a concert with The Tragically Hip at Club Nokia nearby. Walking out of the arena tons of Canucks fans were high fiving each other and chanting “go Canucks go.” While waiting in line to get into the club a bunch of us began singing Oh Canada on top of our lungs. It was awesome! Never been to a Hip concert before I wasn’t sure what to expect but I’ve heard lots things about how entertaining their concerts are. The Hip did not disappoint! The concert was amazing and they rocked the place!
• After about 6 hours of sleep the 6 of us went to Disnleyland the next morning. It was tons of fun. Somehow though, the roller coasters didn’t seem as scary as they were when I was younger. I almost managed to put my hands up as our log plunged down the Splash Mountain drop. Thunder Mountain was tons of fun so was Space Mountain.
• We spent Halloween in Six Flags Magic Mountain. Man the roller coasters there were sick! I felt queazy just looking at some of the roller coasters. I was too scared to go on some of the extreme rides like Superman the Escape or X2 but managed to get on tamer ones like Colossal, Scream, and Terminator. My favourite was probably either Terminator or Scream. Evan & Colin went on X2 and Tatsu and both said those rides were just really silly scary. At night the park turned into a hunted park with lots actors dressing up as zombies, vampires, etc. It was really funny looking at the actors chasing some scared girls. The hunted houses were very very well done!

• The next two days were spent walking around in Hollywood and lazing around in Santa Monica. I couldn’t believe we were able to lay on the beach shirtless in November! Talk about unbelievable sunny California weather!

Lowlight?

• Eating like a bloody American, tons of fast food and not enough veggies. It was really nice to get home and cook a delicious home-made dinner.

Fuck you Telus

I have had a few rants about Canadian cellphone carriers on this blog over the years. Since I’m on Telus, my rants seem to be more focused on them like my rant about Telus charging money for SMS and me giving middle finger salute to Telus. Today while browsing the internet I came across CBC’s news about Telus scrapping the much hated system access fee.

From the story:

The company [Telus] announced Tuesday that it was discontinuing its $6.95 system access fee, which it said went toward maintaining and upgrading its network, as well as the 75-cent 911 charge.

“Nobody likes surprises. We are listening to Canadians, who have told us wireless pricing can be confusing,” said Telus chief executive Darren Entwistle said in a statement. “With Telus’s Clear Choice plans, the price you see is the price you pay.”

Great news right? Until you read the story a bit deeper…

Telus subscribers won’t see a huge savings though, as the company is also increasing the price of its monthly service plans by $5 to make up for the revenue shortfall. Telus is, however, including its Voicemail 3 service — which lets customers save up to three voice mail messages — with the plans. Rogers also boosted the price of its plans when it dropped the system access fee.

Wait a minute, wait a minute here! Let me get this straight. For the longest time Telus, or rather all Canadian cell carriers, have been telling us that system access fee is an unavoidable charge. This fee is used for are for maintaining the network. This can be found in many old articles such as this one and I quote:

Canada’s existing cellphone companies — Rogers, Bell and Telus, as well as MTS Allstream and SaskTel — are currently embroiled in a class-action lawsuit over system access fees. Regina-based lawyer Tony Merchant claims the companies have misrepresented the charges as government-mandated fees for years and is seeking a repayment of nearly $20 billion. Merchant’s lawsuit was certified as a class action last year and is still before the courts.

The fee began as a government licensing charge in the 1980s to cellphone providers for using public airwaves. In 1986, the government transferred the collection of the fee to cellphone providers, who were to incorporate them into their monthly charges. Instead, the carriers opted to keep them separate.

The cellphone companies say the charges, which no other carriers in the world break out separately, are for ongoing maintenance and investment in their networks.

So by scrapping system access fee you need to increase all monthly plans by $5 to cover falling revenue? Hmm looks like Canadian cellphone carriers’ little white lie has been uncovered. System access fee had nothing to do with network maintenance and network investment costs! It’s just another method to squeeze more pennies out from Canadians. Hmm I wonder how much Rogers, Bell, and Telus made on so-called “system access fee” since 1986…

(cue Dr. Evil) ONE BILLION DOLLAR!!!

I’m pretty sure we’re talking in the many many multiples of a billion dollar. Sure you can argue that scrapping the system access fee is a step in the right direction but charging an extra $5 on all monthly plan is like taking a 3/4 step backward!

I guess this is what they meant by tough economic times call for tough measures.

Favorite things

I can’t stop listening to this song. This band is seriously talented! Enjoy.

 

Just another photowalk

Hmmm seems that I’ve been posting a lot of pictures lately. It’s probably because I’m too lazy to type stuff up, so here’s another picture related blog post!

This past Sunday I attended my 1st No Compacts Allowed photowalk and met up with some local photographers like Tyler Ingram, Jeremy Lim, and John Biehler. I went into this photowalk without meeting any of them in person previously, only knowing them from blogs & twitters. The original plan was to meet up and wander around the island. However 3 models tagged along and the photo session quickly went from “photowalk” to a full on strobist session. Since I’m still learning how to shoot models using off-camera flash setup,I wasn’t complaining!!! This was my first time shooting outdoor portraits at night with a group of people. Faced a few challenges along the way and I found the session to be a great learning experience. Here are some pictures from that night:

It was really cool to final meet up with these fellow photographers/tech nerds I’ve known for a while through blogs & twitter. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend the next photowalk!

When pillow fight goes wrong!

As described in my previous post about pillow fight goes wrong. Now with some pictures to show how vicious it was!

Pictures courtesy of Ran

VOC Longhike

Unlike the name suggests, UBC Varsity Outdoor Club Longhike has nothing to do with a long hike. I think back in the days it used to be a trip involving some sort of hike. In the modern day it’s THE club kickoff event that involves a day of rock climbing school and an evening of wicked partying.

In the past few years I’ve always taught complete beginners how to rock climb by showing them how to put on their harnesses and how to belay. This year though, I ended up teaching Rock 2, a more advanced course which involved teaching people how to set up top rope anchor system, how to rappel, and how to clean the route after you finish. Colin and I finished up our “mandatory” teaching materials early so we taught the students how to lead climb as well. Surprisingly all of the students learned a lot from the two dummy instructors and had a really good time.

The real fun of longhike comes in at the party aspect. We had 2 DJ’s with full on record turn-table and lots booze. Of course VOC longhike wouldn’t be longhike without all the stupid games.

Couple of my students enjoying Squamish slabby granite.

I thought this is called human horse but apparently it’s called Buck Buck

Candy necklace eating, you can’t eat your own, someone has to eat them off your necklace, without hands of course.

Table bouldering, basically climb underneath the table and come backup using different variations

Me tabling and pulling a Verizon Wireless “Can You Hear Me” imitation

Reaching/Penny placing game

I swear to gold I don’t know these guys lol

The party lasted over 7 hours. At the end of the night a large number of people even went for some skinny dipping and then danced around the fire naked. Some of the new members, especially female members, were completely shocked about the amount of nakedness in the club. Well that’s the VOC for you!

Needless to say the next morning I was quite sore. Bunch of us did go climbing but not on anything hard.

More pictures can be found on my Flickr stream

Another portrait session

I was asking friends & people I know to model for me so I could practice shooting portraits, in particular off-camera flash setup. After going through some of my pictures on Flickr someone I met during a weekend VOC trip volunteered. We’re both photographers so the deal was she’d pose for me if I do the same in return. Somehow I got out of the session without having to pose for her (thank god, it’d have been ugly as I’m not good in front of the camera). Anyway since she has never done any modeling before and I don’t really know her that well, she was quite nervous at the beginning of the shoot. It certainly gave me hands-on practice in terms of trying to make the model comfortable and showing her own personality in front of the camera. Coming from a purely landscape photographer background I think I’m slowly getting better at working with people and capture the moment.

As Richard Avedon, one of the true masters of portrait photography, said years ago…

“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

Such an inspiring quote.

At first the model was quite nervous so I got her to make faces

Then we ran around on the field

Once she became comfortable in front of the camera we were talking!

Suddenly everything just clicked

Ben, Line, Anthony and I went up to Squamish for a day of climbing yesterday. Sadly it was only my 4th or 5th time outdoor climbing this season (and the climbing season is almost over!). While I’m by no mean a hard climber, the recent Vantage climbing trip made me realize how much I missed climbing.

Before I get into what I’m going to say, let me explain climbing a little bit. For those you don’t know much about climbing, there are different climbing methods. The safest and easiest one is called top roping where you set up an anchor at the top of the climb and the rope is always above you as you climb. You usually don’t fall all that far when you top rope. The more dangerous type of climb is called leading where the rope trails behind you and you clip it into protections as you ascend. A fall usually would be around twice the distance from your last protection plus rope stretch. Leading is then broken down into sports and trad (short for traditional). For sports lead protections are already bolted into the rocks, usually placed every 3-5 meters or so. For trad lead you build your own protections as you climb, typically with rock hardware such as cams, nuts, or hexes. Typically protections are placed whenever you can find a rest so they can be placed quite far apart. If you fall on a bad placement the placement would potentially pop out causing you to fall further until your next placement catches you. As you can imagine trad lead is typically more frightening.

Line top roping

I normally sport lead because I don’t have a trad rack with all the necessary rock hardware. Needless to say trad leading is still somewhat of an unexplored territory for me and can be quite frightening to think about it. Yesterday Ben and Line happened to have their racks with them. Since none of us climb hard stuff we ended up sticking to more moderate climbs. At first I was I seconding up the climb after Ben and taking out his gear placement as I ascend the route. I felt pretty good about my climbing and pretty soon I was doing my 1st trad lead of the season. That went without a hitch so I tried another one quickly afterwards. Then a few more quickly followed. It was almost magical, suddenly everything just clicked and I couldn’t wipe the silly smile off my face.

To top off a great day, as we sat in the Squamish 7-11 parking lot we were greeted by a stunning view of Mt. Garibaldi and Mt. Atwell. I can never get tired of staring at those two gorgeous peaks. Still have to climb them one day of course.

When pillow fight goes wrong

The other night Ran had a potluck at his place so a bunch of us VOC’ers gathered for a night of feast. Being a typical VOC event the crowd got a bit crazy. At first we started doing normal chinups with the rock climbing hanging board then some office chair jousting in the dinning room. Eventually the action moved to the living room. I couldn’t remember who started it but next thing I knew the 10 or so of us were in a full on pillow fight while the music blasted in the background with the room completely dark and our headlamps on blinking mode.

Now this isn’t your typical pillow fight. This is VOC style. Basically someone gets pinned down and everyone else would jump on him/her and start the assault. It was pretty rough, so rough a few people were wearing climbing helmets. Needless to say, I was on the receiving end a few times during the night. As luck would have it, Anne happened to know I’m super ticklish so whenever I got pinned down she (and everyone else) would start tickling me while I tried to get out of the pile as hard as I could.

The “friendly” pillow fight lasted about 2.5 hours or so.

I woke up in the middle of the night with pains in my right shoulder that very night.

The next evening Natalie, another VOC’er, had a potluck and all of us pillow fighters who showed up to Natalie’s potluck had some sort of injuries from the previous night. I had a messed up shoulder, someone had a scratched face, and someone had a bruised arm.

Who said pillow fights can’t be rough?