I discovered this on NSMB and originally posted it on Shawn’s blag.

Girls sometimes complain that it is not fair a guy can be called a player for sleeping with seven different girls in a week while if a girl does the same she is considered a slut. Fair enough.

However, to this I must retort: if a single key opens many locks then it is considered a master key. If a single lock is opened up by many keys it is considered a loose or broken lock.

This weekend was the first weekend of racing in the fall racing season. Basically for the next six weeks I will have races every weekend. This last weekend was Head of the Fraser Fours in Richmond and the Deep Cove Classic in Deep Cove.

The fraser fours was a race we had been training specifically for for over three months. On the day of we had borrowed a 4+ from St. George’s high school. Since they are high school kids, the boat was made for smaller light high school kids, so our guys who are 6′ 5″ couldn’t get their full leg drive.

Still we managed to get 92.4% of olympic gold medal standard. For that we were quite happy.

The next day I raced in Deep Cove, an image of the course is below:

We started at the bottom, went around Jugg Island and then raced to North of the Yacht club. It was a 5 km race and there were 8 entries in my category, the Open Men’s Single.

As you can see from the results (I am SFU(A)):

I came second in my category. Only 2 seconds behind the guy from Washington. And he is from University of Washington, the top rowing school for guys in the World, and he raced at World Cup last year on the Canadian National team. So I don’t feel too bad about 2nd place behind a rower of that level.

There is also a good gap between me and 3rd place.

I was playing with MS-Paint when I thought of this idea for a graph.

Apparently the Anaheim Duck fans do not know how to use a cupholder.

Take a look.

And of course this comic made me laugh:

Travel Time Lapse Winter ‘09 from Brad Kremer on Vimeo.

It wouldn’t let me embed this for some reason.

In one month I will be going off to Montreal. I just bought my plane ticket to Quebec for the Canadian University Rowing Championships. I fly from YVR to YUL on the 28th of October where I will have two days to practice in the olympic basin. On Hallowe’en day I have my Time Trials and then on the fridged day of November 1st I will be racing in the finals (hopefully the A final) in the Canadian University Rowing Championships.

The following day I will have to bounce to London as I will be racing there on the 3rd of November for the National Rowing Championships with the 4th being the finals of that regatta. I am going to try and re-do my 2km and 6km erg tests this week so I can make Provincial Development and thus get more funding to go.

I also found out that the military has an option where I can go to grad school right after I graduate. This would mean I would get two more years at university and two more years of rowing. I would not be limited to SFU so I could go to a school with a full rowing team. I would have to decide if I want to stay in BC or go outside. If I went out it would be a school such as McMaster, UWO, Queens, UofT or Brock.

If I say in BC my three choices would be UBC, UVic and SFU.

UBC would allow me to stay in Vancouver, with a great rowing team, amazing academics but I would really have to pull up my socks this school year and study to get in.

UVic would require me to move with average academics but an amazing rowing team that would allow me to move farther in rowing in my future with the potential of the national team for 2012 and the London Olympics.

SFU would be the easiest to get into, with the best CS of the three schools but still rowing would all be self motivated and more importantly, self funded.

So while I think about that I am going to go work on my CMPT-412 assignment on computer vision.

It is steaming in this tiny cell. The walls drip, t he floors perspires, and another bead of sweat rolls down my tattoos. Even they itch, rebelling against the heat and prison ink.

What to do? Go outside anad hang out in the the elbow-to-elbow, dust-caked, dog-kennel of a yard, listen to another man’s drab lies of thug-life grandeur? Or drip sweat on a typewriter while tapping out my own lies. Make no mistake, it is all a lie-the system, who we are, why we are in here.

What is not a lie, this slow burn of incarceration, eating away a man’s life an hour, a day, a year at time?

… Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much-the sweating walls, the deprivation, the hypocrisy, the spirit-squelching confinement-if I thought there was a reason…

(Blau, 2001)

Just a taste of what went down at froshweek:

Props to Jesse for taking the photo.

Let’s see, there has been a bunch of stuff I have wanted to post for a bit but basically was too busy to make individual posts on each one so I will post them all here.

Firstly I had a race today, the head of the river that I mentioned a few posts back. It was pretty solid and I think I placed 3rd in my category but I haven’t seen the official results yet. There were some hard 90 degree or greater turns in the race which really kills your momentum. There was also open water which is rarely fun in a single. I drove my boat out to White Rock on top of Emelia’s car. Just to give you an idea of how long they are, take a look:

For some reason a flag lady got mad at me for my boat. I was at an intersection when it was red and she decided to ream me out because of the hang. I had to sit there for two minutes while she was yelling out random stuff like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!! WHAT IS THIS THING!! PEOPLE LIKE YOU SHOULD NOT BE ON THE ROAD!! LEARN SOME LAWS!!”. All I could do, while not necessarily the most mature response was flip her off as I drove by.

But it was not the only time people were being ridiculous today. After the race I was in Burnaby Lake Rowing Club parking lot, taking off my boat, derigging it and trying to put the racks away. Of course there happened to be a wedding being set up. The people setting up obviously did not want me being there as every five minutes they kept asking me when I was leaving, despite not being in there way. Now I still have the single rack on top of the roof rack and I cannot get it off without a pair of vice grips.

In other news, I got a new colour scheme for this blogs layout, and I have a twitter account, so you will now find me sending in twats.

I use last.fm a lot and I have found some really cool sites that use it’s API. I think I have mentioned it before but I will re-post the links again. There’s bandsintown which uses your last.fm feed to tell you local concerts coming up you might be interested in. As well there is also the last.fm tumblr which generates an rss feed with yahoo pipes from your last.fm account showing the top artists of the week you have listened to. Of course I link my last.fm feeds on this blog so you can see my recent plays if you were actually interested in that.

At school classes have started and most of them are good though I haven’t been to all of them yet. I should make a post on that soon, and I must say now that CMPT-412 is an amazing class so far. Novice recruitment is really good and we haven’t officially started it, and we also seem to have about 10 walk-ons onto the team, a number I have never seen before. Froshweek is also over, that went fairly well in my opinion, specially with a small budget, but now I need to be reimbursed.