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if a pretty girl talks to you, you don´t want to check your back, right?
 ;);)
sunny
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I also live in Toronto, but you seem to have a much brighter view of this city than I do, that's for sure. WHY on earth did you ever leave Australia??
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jpercival wrote:
WHY on earth did you ever leave Australia??
For Code Project. For us.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
Everybody just wants to be naked and famous, Paul.
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Paul Watson wrote:
For Code Project. For us.
ROTFLMAO  I love the way you put that 
Regards,
Brian Dela 
"There should be an amendment to the constitution, that every president must be examined for paranoia before moving into office." - peterchen
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Paul Watson wrote:
For Code Project. For us.
Hu? But we live in the World Wide Web!
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funkycoder wrote:
Hu? But we live in the World Wide Web!
Yes but servers and sponsoring companies do not.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa
Paul Watson wrote:
"The Labia [cinema]... ...was opened by Princess Labia in May 1949..."
Christian Graus wrote:
See, I told you it was a nice name for a girl...
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What's it like being in a snowy city? Wonderful. Wonderful tending to slightly inconvenient.
I'm sitting in a cafe sipping a coffee, listening to Louis Armstrong and munching on some sugar and butter thinly disguised as a muffin. Outside the snow is dumping down covering the grey pavement, the potholed roads, the trees, the squirrels and the SUVs. Pickups with snow plows attached to their front cruise around like eager puppy dogs looking for the perfect place to do their morning ablutions. The sky is grey - but not a dark oppressive grey of a drizzly day, but rather a light, bright day. Everything else is white.
If you've ever seen the movie 'A better life' there's a scene in the Angel Gabriel's office. Everything's white. The stairs, the floors, the furniture and the clothes. It makes an area look bigger, cleaner, and slightly surreal. That's what Toronto is like at the moment. There are no shadows since the light is reflected from everything.
It's the first real snowfall this season so everyone's kind of excited and kind of unprepared. Drivers slip around the icy roads like little cartoon cars and taxi drivers haven't yet become bored of finding piles of slush to drive through in order to spray as many pedestrians as possible. At least I know enough now to wear dark pants if I'm going to be walking outside. The people are walking around with a 'at least it isn't raining' kind of demeanor mixed with what seems like a little suppressed excitement. Maybe it's my imagination, but when there's 6 inches of snow on the ground, Santa Clauses are out and about and Christmas lights start to appear then you know something's up.
I also find the snow insanely romantic. I'm as incapable as the next guy of getting in touch with my caring, sharing side but on a day like today all I want to do is curl up in front of an open fire with a bottle of wine and know that regardless of how warm and cozy I am inside, it's still reassuringly cold and white outside. Couples are walking along hand in hand, kids are throwing snowballs, parents are dragging babies along the footpaths in sleds and clumps of snow are falling off awnings and burying little old ladies.
The thing that amazed me is the sound that snow makes when it falls. I remeber reading a David Edding's novel where an old story teller was so adept that he could even mimic the sound of falling snow. Sound? How can something so light and soft make a sound? I finally heard it about a year ago. Imagine a large still pond on a very quiet day with a light drizzle falling. The rain as it hits the water makes thousands of tiny 'plinks' that together form a quiet kind of white noise. Snow is just like that, but replace the 'plink' with a 'tink', make it a little quieter, notch it up one octave, speed it up a little and change the lighting from grey to off-white. Now just stand still and listen. It's magic.
And then there's the slightly annoying bit. When it rains it usually runs off pretty quickly. Snow doesn't. It piles on your head, gets caught down the back of your neck and covers the paths in a layer of slick ice. Stepping off the path onto a road means a quick decision about the state of the anow on the road. Is it snow? Or is it a deep puddle of icy cold water with a thin layer of snowing floating on top? It can make a big difference to the rest of your day. The paths become narrower, traffic slower, and the snow on the roads quickly becomes brown and horrible.
And you know what's weird? I know I'm going to be sad tomorrow morning when I wake up and find it's stopped snowing.
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I love snow. I would like to live where it snows more but then it would be cold more often too. I would like to live in the happy medium 65-75 degrees (F).
How much snow do you get up there every year? Here in central Illinois I'd say we get about 20 inches.
Jason Henderson
start page ; articles
henderson is coming
henderson is an opponent's worst nightmare
* googlism *
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Hi Chris,
This is so not fair. I am just about to count my blessings and brag about how we had a great outdoor soccer game (football for the rest of us) at 9 PM last night here in the medical city in Riyadh. And how artificial grass gives you carpet burns  .
YOU HAVE TO make the white side greener, Don't you!!. 
Cheers dude.
It is Illogical to define an inventor by his invention
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The best thing about snow is that when you see snow, you know that somewhere....
somewhere...
someone...
... is playing ice hockey.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Or that somewhere it is summer......curses.
In sunny ol england we don't have seasons, we have a climate. one that is is both crap and never changing.
We brought out this new and very similar version of our expensive software because the old version was......old....It's a good enough excuse for Microsoft so its fine for us.
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Chris Maunder wrote:
What's it like being in a snowy city?
Cold....
Sorry. I wish it snowed more often over here. At least we'd have an excude for the bitterly cold weather. As a (younger)kid I had 2 experiences of *real* snow. I claim now to have had a wasted childhood.
Its cold enough here now to freeze the knackers* off an eskimo.
* balls
We brought out this new and very similar version of our expensive software because the old version was......old....It's a good enough excuse for Microsoft so its fine for us.
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It was a stunning Autumn day on Friday. On Thursday it didn't get above freezing all day, but the next day was 17C, sunny, with a light breeze. I was riding around town marvelling at the huge piles of leaves everywhere. Back home trees are made a little different: instead of making an annual event out of dropping their leaves, they spend the entire year dropping leaves, branches, boughs, koalas etc and occasionally burst into devastating eucalyptus oil fueled infernos. There's never a dull moment.
So anyway, I'm riding around the streets, enjoying the weather and eyeing off piles of leaves taller than my bike. I'm an adult - my latest birthday painfully reinforced that - but the bit of my brain that never bothered watching calendars is whispering "you wanna do it. Don't fight it. No one's watching". I'm thinking that if I was a 10 year old and there were piles of leaves that high in streets that quiet I'd be spending my days jumping in them, blowing them up with fireworks or setting fire to them. Possibly all at the same time. OK - maybe too much information about my misspent youth but it seemed a crime to let such a bunch of leaves remain untarnished. So I took a runup and jumped my bike right into the middle of the largest pile on the street.
And some bastard even more childish than I had created what looked like a huge pile of leaves, but was in fact a huge pile of dirt and rocks covered by a very thin pile of leaves.
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How old are you again? 
Jon Sagara
If you think of wheat fields as questionable metaphors, you can think of me as the state of Kansas.
-- Mike Blaszczak
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Question for you?
Do you play Aussie Rules, and are you looking for a team to play for next spring and summer
Any one that can ride into a piles of dirt and rocks and keep on going is the type of guy we're looking for, check out www.broadviewhawks.com
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Well the team to play for is the Mississauga Mustangs of course..
http://www.ontariofooty.com/mustangs/home.html
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I've been told that if I train hard and really put my mind to it the Mustang's have promised to allow me to tryout as team orange peeler. 
I barrack for the Hawks back home but Ed Worsfold buys me beers over here, so my loyalties are torn
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Ok so Ed buys beer, but they do not provide free beer after games,hawkettes and kickass hawks jumpers, not to mention the fact that they are not Hawks,
whatever the outcome, come out for a kick this year.
cheers
Richard Mintz
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You know, I like jumping in leaves too. I have a large wooded lot and I always make a mountain of leaves about 6+ feet (2 meters for you metric people) tall for the "kids" to play in. Of course, I have to play in it with my kid too. 
Jason Henderson
start page ; articles
henderson is coming
henderson is an opponent's worst nightmare
* googlism *
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Why do people water their lawns (and footpath, and roadway) at night when they know it's going to be -7 overnight?
I decided to do something really stupid this morning - namely ride to the office when the windchill was -13C. Probably not the smartest thing to do all things being considered, but it seemed like it would be good fun at the time (ie when I was safe and warm inside my apartment). So I'm riding along the footpath along side a busy road in peak hour and notice the path ahead appears a little wet. My brain is thinking "Hmm - that's funny. How can a path be wet when it's -7 degrees?" Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer at that time of the morning I figured I'd just ride over that wet patch and continue on my merry way. It was just about the time my bike folded up on itself and launched me onto a concrete block and itself into oncoming traffic that my brain finally found the word it was looking for: ice.
Scary scary scary. Nothing broken but I think I took a few years off the driver of a poor SUV driver. You'd think I'd have learned by now. Ah well.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
It was just about the time my bike folded up on itself
By that do you mean you have a *folding* bike? My old maths teacher used to have one of those - it was pretty nifty.
You'd love it here in Cambridge - bikes are the main form of transport around the town etc. and it's pretty nice to ride round, if sometimes a bit dangerous .
--
Andrew.
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Last week David (a Canadian for all his natural life) and I (an Australian) were in Redmond. It was a cold, foggy morning and we had an hour to kill so we headed downtown (which sounds so much more impressive than it is. Downtown Redmond makes even my hometown look big) to get some breakfast.
We stopped at a petrol station to fuel up and so while Dave tried to work out how to fill up the tank I wandered into the cashier to ask where the closest good eatin' establishment could be found. Earlier that week I'd seen the movie 'Deliverance' for the first time and the guy behind the counter looked a little familiar. Anyway, he pointed out the nearest place and wished me luck. (no - not a good sign). I wandered back out.
Most petrol stations I've seen allow you to fill up, then pay. It was the morning after my birthday so neither of us were the sharpest pins in the packet and it took a while to realise that the sign 'prepay before filling up' meant we had to - get this - pre-pay before we filled the tank. So Dave wanders over to cashier and hands him a piece of plastic.
"What's that" says the guy.
"It's called a Visa card" says Dave.
"We only take cash or cheque" the guy replies.
"Hmm - you guys certainly make it a difficult to give you money". Dave was a little grumpy. Sugar levels and (more importantly) caffeine levels were dangerously low.
"It's as difficult as you want it to be" the guy drawled, reaching under the counter for a banjo (OK, so I made the banjo part up).
So Dave points out the car we'd hired and the guy brightens up. "Oh - you're with that other guy who was just in". "Yeah" says Dave, possibly evasively. "Yeah" the guy continues, "I thought you two sounded the same".
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Now I know the reason for these personal forums: Chris' own personal blog. I thought there had to be some reason for that...
Funny story by the way. Don't worry...here in America, it doesn't take much to sound different (aside from live in the South) so all you foreign people sound a little bit alike...especially to the gas station attendents.;P
You will now find yourself in a wonderous, magical place, filled with talking gnomes, mythical squirrels, and, almost as an afterthought, your bookmarks
-Shog9 teaching Mel Feik how to bookmark
I don't know whether it's just the light but I swear the database server gives me dirty looks everytime I wander past.
-Chris Maunder
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