Making the most of the first snow of 2008 by going skating with Trinity-Anne (unfortunately, at the poor ice Nathan Phillips Square) and then sliding at Hogg's Hollow.

We were watching Futurama -- Bender's Big Score -- this morning and Trinity-Anne asked me "Is there really an Al Gore?". Answer: "Nobody knows, Trinity, nobody knows".

If you're looking for poster art for your band, give me a call

I've now exactly quantified how rich and famous I want to be.

Via NASA, for further perusal when I can find Trinity-Anne's 3D glasses.

I'm just watching The Godfather right now; I watched The Godfather: Part II last week and I had a few thoughts I wished to record:

• Marlon Brando is amazing (and I'm only 15 minutes in); I'm really going to have to make an effort to watch some of his early material to see what that's all about -- my memories are mainly of the corpulent joke Brando, but there's a lot more going on there
• Robert De Niro is amazing too; I'm glad I watch these movies in the reverse order. He did a fantastic job of capturing Brando's character. Sadly, another actor who has lapsed into parody
• • contract to Ewan McGregor and Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. McGregor got the motions, but never the character.
• My wife Joanne's Italian and it's funny to note that they had a "fixer" character too in their life. When they moved to Canada, only one lady could speak English and she took charge of all things dealing with "the English". As necessary, she would be the mother, the sister, or whatever was needed for the circumstance (such as going to the doctor). [I'll update this with her name when Joanne gets home]
• Everything you know about Italians from the top-tier mob movies is true, except for the mob part. Really (or at least they're not admitting to the mob part, though I do step lightly). The first time I saw The Sopranos, it was "hey look, they have our bedspread ... and our bedroom ... and our kitchen cupboards..."
• (update) the soundtrack is totally over the top. Is this a time-ism thing, or did it suck also when the movie came out? Rick McGinnis would know...

I got in on this, taking a one way flight from Montreal to Toronto in July to return from The Police concert (I'll take the train down with friends):

It's a good time to book airfare in Canada, with rival airlines Air Canada and WestJet offering competing promotions in a bid to win over consumers.

Air Canada on Tuesday dropped its prices on select routes to $11 one-way to match bargain prices offered by rival airline WestJet, said Peter Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for Montreal-based Air Canada.

On Tuesday only, an $11 ticket could be bought for flights between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal

More padding content, so Mike doesn't have to see the crazy astronaut anymore!

In January, we bought Trinity-Anne a pair of skates and 3 or 4 times a week (basically whenever the weather was nice) we went skating over at Ledbury Park. From our first night in late January till when we finished in early March, TA became quite a good little skater. No pushing around chairs for her! She just fell and sometimes cried, but always got back up and kept going. By the end of the season, I actually had parents stopping me saying how good she was and where did we take lessons.

We bough a new digital camera, the Canon PowerShot SD630, which is tiny and takes pretty good movies and an all-round awesome camera. Using the services of Hey!Watch, I've converted these movies to MPEG4 so we can all enjoy them:

• Late January
• February 19
• February 28 (1)
• February 28 (2)
• February 28 (3)
• March 8

We've also been doing a little skiing. Here's videos of me chasing Trinity-Anne down the big hill at Earl Bales park -- this is her first day off the bunny slopes!

• Skiing (1)
• Skiing (2)
• Skiing (3)

And in other personal news, here's BlogMatrix's latest project blog: Onamap. We'll have a lot more about this soon.

Just very very busy enjoying (most of the time) or suffering through (rarely) life.

Here's a set of photos I took in St. John's a couple of winters ago. Click here to see them all.

I'm playing right now with Google/Picasa Web Albums. So far ... it's cool that it's integrate with Picasa (my desktop photo album), but beyond that it's somewhat craptastic. It's ignoring my crops, clicking on the "view" link is bringing me to 404 pages and there doesn't seem to be very good control over what the size or dimensions of the uploaded files.

It's not the fact that your g*d damn car alarm has been going off for the last 30 minutes that bothers me so much as the fact that your car alarm is on an early 90's Acura that's probably worth about $2000.

I think Santa was just here!

I just saw my first ever Iridium Flare from my office window at 5:51:43, exactly on schedule. Notes:

• it was a few degrees clockwise of where I was expecting it (N rather than NNW). Must be the geographical vs. magnetic north pole issue.
• I used this tool to give me the exact time
• It was bright, very bright: magnitude -6; the best you get is -8
• I didn't wake up Trinity-Anne because she's feeling a little ill (aren't we all these days?) but next time for sure. We were looking at Orion, the Plaides and the heads of Gemini last night at midnight when she got up for a few minutes.

Trinity-Anne shed her first baby tooth today. (Backdated post).

Seeing what an exceptionally clear night it was, Trinity-Anne and I went to the back porch, turned off all the lights and lay down under a big blanket and watched the stars. Due to the time of year, time of day, the position of our house and city lights (and perhaps lack of knowledge on my part) the only consellations we could make out at first were Cassiopeia and the Great Square of Pegasus. When our eyes adjusted, we also saw Delphinus. The highlight of the night (and the main reason for lying out there) was to look for satellites; we saw one going north to south speeding across the sky. Very very cool.

Apparently there's also a Comet Swan hanging about, but I could make no sign of it.

Here's a few photos from the other night. Alas, some of my favorite shots never worked out, but there's always next year!

Saturday Morning: light snow, about zero degrees. The wind was so calm when you looked at the lake it looked like it was snowing up. We hit four pickerel and kept three (now in the fridge for dispersal to relatives).

Saturday Afternoon: snow/rain mix, 1 degree with a bit more wind. Not a bite on my line, Dave caught and released a pike.

Yes, we probably are crazy but it was a good time.

From the Independent (via Hit and Run):

Women in England and Ireland are officially the world's biggest binge drinkers, according to a unique study of global alcohol consumption.

One in three 17- to 30-year-olds is now classed as a heavy drinker, bingeing on four or more drinks in one session at least once a fortnight.

These disturbing figures are 11 times higher than those of Germany and Italy, prompting warnings that record numbers of women face liver damage and premature death unless they curb their alcohol consumption.

4 drinks in one "session" once every two weeks? The women I knew from University must have been sort of super nuclear ninja drinkers.

But in the meantime (in reality, one might say), Biosingularity reports an entire different result about alcohol consuption ... for men:

Even as studies have consistently found an association between moderate alcohol consumption and reduced heart attack risk in men, an important question has persisted: What if the men who drank in moderation were the same individuals who maintained good eating habits, didn’t smoke, exercised and watched their weight? How would you know that their reduced risk of myocardial infarction wasn’t the result of one or more of these other healthy habits?

A new study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) helps answer this question. Reported in the October 23, 2006 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, the findings show for the first time that among men with healthy lifestyles, those who consumed moderate amounts of alcohol – defined as between one-half and two drinks daily – had a 40 to 60 percent reduced risk of heart attack compared with healthy men who didn’t drink at all.

“This latest research speaks to how robust the link is between moderate drinking and heart attack risk,” explains lead author Kenneth Mukamal, MD, MPH, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Definitely moving into a baroque phase here...