Miss Universe:

I did not watch the whole Miss Universe, but found out that the winner last year came from London, Ontario! Interesting eh?

Any ways, the reason why I am doing a post about last night's Miss Universe is because more than one contestant came from the United States, thus increasing America's chance of winning.

The second contestant participated under the decoy of Puerto Rico. Since Puerto Rico is part of the United States as an American territory, I strongly oppose the idea of allowing more than one contestant from one country participating in the competition.

Since this is allowed, I hope Canada sends four contestants next year since Canada has three territories. If you think my post is targeting America, do not think that way, I would have made this post if it was another country sending more than one contestant.

Sleepless Nights?

Came up onto this article - thought it was interesting.

Even though the men claimed that they had good sleep, they did poorly on the tests.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5197440.stm?lsm

Washington DC:

On the fourteenth day of July, I headed to Washington DC to visit Kester and Reineck. The bus was a long trip, but sure beats flight prices.

Got there a bit after 22h and was picked up by Kester, headed to his place after picking up his friend and getting some booze and dinner.

We ended up staying up till 6 playing an ASL drinking game with Kester's roommate and ending the game discussing World War II. We had some disagreements, which I have not looked up to verify who's facts were correct.

On Saturday, we headed out to BD's Mongolian Barbeque - that place had a very good choice of food we could select to be cooked with plenty of sauces and spices. Reineck met up with us there and then Reineck and I headed to DC to explore the city and view some mountments.

We walked around and along the Mountment for Washington, World War II Memorial, Abe Lincoln and the Veitnam Memorial. After that we headed to Chiptole's for dinner and I was impressed with the food and service. I hope Chiptole's grows and annhiliates Taco Bell's market share!

After that we headed to Capitol City Brewery and got together with Kester and his roommate - the beer they brewed there was good, but would not say their beer was the best. Headed back to Kester's place and called it a nite.

Got up at 9 and headed to the metro to get to the bus picking up point. The metro system is helluva better than New York City's system! The stations are not hot, stuffy and humid and the trains run very smooth. The interior of the trains are spacier and seating has more quality in comfort than New York's trains. The fare system is different too, I was impressed at how clean the metro was - no fare slips lying all over the place because once there is no value in the slip, the fare machine swallows it up compared to no fare machines in New York that swallow up expired fare cards.

I had breakfast at Subway - the people there did not know what a Western Omlet was even when they had that option on the menu so instead of clarifying what a Western Omlet sub was they put on only veggies. I had to point out the Western Omlet had eggs. The sub did not taste any good, good start for my birthday eh?

Connie met me as the bus was loading up, there was this nice lady who knew some sign language - she helped us out when the bus driver refused to make any effort to communicate with us.

When we got back, Connie wanted to treat me to dinner for my birthday so we headed to an Indian restaurant that served only vegetarian and vegan dishes. The food was very delicous and filled us well!

Later that we had some kind of lite ice cream that helped cool us down. This week has been nothing but hell! I estimate that the temperature feels somewhere between 35•c to 45•c (including humidity). Thank goodness my office has air conditioning!

Last week I started to go out for jogs after work. My distance ducked, but with the crazy heat, I have been covering more distance ecery day. Central Park is a nice place to jog, hopefuly I will accomplish 5 miles non stop before I leave New York City.

Over all had a great time in WDC with Kester and Reineck and thank you Connie for dinner. Also FrecklesFly, many thanks for my bday card! :)

I am more excites now that I am one year older, I am one year closer to qualify for senior citiens' discounts!

Caption Movies in Canada:

www.captionmoviesnow.com

July 17, 2006

Dear individual and organization supporters

Toronto, ON - On November 2, 2006 at 10AM, the movie theatre, studio and distribution industries, including Famous Players, AMC Theatres, Universal Studios Canada, Paramount Pictures Canada, Cineplex Odeon, and Alliance Atlantis Cinemas will appear before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario at 400 University Avenue, 7th Floor, Toronto for final hearings.

After approximately nineteen days of hearings, the Tribunal will be in a position to set down a final ruling on movie theatre access that will have significant outcomes for the Deaf, deafened, and hard of hearing communities, as well as for the worldwide movie industry.

Three Deaf complainants, namely Nancy Barker, a University of Toronto student, Gary Malkowski, Special Advisor to the President, Public Affairs, at The Canadian Hearing Society (CHS), and Scott Simser, an Ottawa Lawyer, along with representatives of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, allege that the movie theatre, studio and distribution industries have failed to accommodate Deaf, deafened, and hard of hearing movie-goers by not providing 100% captioning on movies in theatres.

The Caption Movies Now Coalition’s website www.captionmoviesnow.com is sponsored by ONESTOP Media Group. The ONESTOP Media Group is Canada’s premier private digital signage network operator for the mass transit, hospitality, conference, and retail industries. The CMNC and ONESTOP Media Group www.onestopmedia.group.com are working together to organize fundraising activities in support of the objectives of CMNC to ensure 100% captioning in the movie theatres across Canada.

CMNC will gratefully receive and acknowledge on their website (with permission) letters of support from individuals and organizations, contributions either in- kind, or monetary gifts, business sponsorship, and volunteer assistance. All support will be greatly appreciated.

Cheques should be made payable to Cavalluzzo Hayes Shilton McIntyre and Cornish LLP in Trust, and sent to the address below to the attention of Wendy Balaban with correspondence referring to re: Donation to Captioning Case Legal Costs Ref. No. 050775. (If you have time, email us at CMNC to advise us of your donation, in order that we may acknowledge it on our website and send you a thank-you!)

Address for donation cheques:

Attn: Wendy Balaban
474 Bathurst Street Suite 300
Toronto, Ontario M5T 2S6

Ph: 416-964-1115
Fax: 416-964-5895

Please send your letter of support to Lori Archer
Chair, Caption Movies Now Coalition
E-mail: larcher3471@rogers.com

Your support will be greatly appreciated and thank you for your time and consideration in supporting our cause.

Yours sincerely

Lori Archer
Chair, Caption Movies Now Coalition

For some laughs:

Gopher Broke

Credit goes to FrecklesFly for finding this clip.

My Ride:

Just felt like sharing one of my observations on my ride.

On the opposite side of my row, there is a couple sitting together. The dude was well built, seems like he works out and the woman seemed to be in her late 3o's, but she may be younger - New York City's air seems to cause more wrinkles (that's my theory, but not proven).

I noticed the dude seemed drunk or high on something and sitting beside the window. Things seemed to be normal until the dude started grabbing and holding the woman tightly.

The woman clearly did not wanbt to be held, but the man kept on grabbing and trying to kiss her. At one point he started trying to suck her tits with hjer shirt on, that clearly made her pissed off. She kind of shoved and pushed him away.

After the bus stopped for restroom break and snacks, the woman got some pop corn for the dude. The dude was clearly pissed off and started throiwing pop corn around the bus and mainly towards the woman.

The woman was clearly irrated by the man's attitude and made attempts to ignore him. I could tell that the man was constantly talking loud by the way everyone around me kept on looking at the couple.

now it hjs become dark, but the man has shown no sign of cooling down.

I guess I am doing this post because I have nothing else to do, but document what I am observing.

As I type this post, I am pondering how differently I would have described my observation if I could hear what that asshole was saying all the time. Is his behaviour appearing worse to me than it does to people who can hear, or is it the other way?

Besides DC's crime rate has gone up lately, will one of them show up in the paper wanted by the police for murder tomorrow? Let's see...

Eastern States' Checklist Completed:

I have visited every Eastern states except one - Delware. I just crossed the Delware-Maryland border.

Remaining states I have left on my list:

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
California
Hawaii
Kansas
Louisana
Mississippi
Missouri
Olkahoma
Oregon
New Mexico
Texas
Utah

Will need to check the map to verify I did not miss any states.

It is a Circus in the Middle East now:

One can wonder where Israel gets the absurd ideas that bombing the Arabs in Lebanon will solve the problem and recuse the two kidnapped IDF troops.

I am pretty sure everyone knows where Israel got the idea. However when analyzing the logics. There are three soldiers being held by the Arabs while the Jews are holding more than 4,ooo Arabs. The Arabs are demanding their Arab fellows be released in exchange for the release of the three Jewish troops. Do this exchange and no one gets killed.

Israel's choice was not this way, but to "Shock and Awe" the Arabs! This "Shock and Awe" has some conflicts with Israel's goal. Israel is literally dropping bombs and raining bullets every where causing the death of more than 75 civilians - does that mean the Jews do not even care if one of their bombs or bullets kill the Jewish troops they are trying to recuse? I hope they are blown to bits so the Jews can shit their own pants and realize their bombing campaign was fruitless from the beginning.

Sanitary Efforts are Moot!

I posted a comment on FrecklesFly's blog about 111 Wall Street being sanitary - well unfortunately the efforts have become moot!

As I packed up to head home, I found a cockroach crawling around the corner of my desk! More reasons to reconsider living & working in New York City. :)

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Murder Capital of New York State: Rochester

I hope I do not cause fear for my buddies who still live or attend RIT.

Yesterday, I was skimming through the daily Metro news on the subway. One page focused on how crime was increasing in NYC. But at the bottom right corner of the page, I noticed the title "Murder Capital of New York State: Rochester".

My first thought - that's where I studied, but after reading the article, I am pretty sure they put it there to make New York City readers feel a sense of relief.

Now to instal some sense of relief into my buddies, RIT is located in Henrietta - I am sure none of the statistics came from Henrietta so you are safe. Just do not move or spend time in Rochester. :)

The article said more children under 8 year old have been shot and killed than members of the Rochester Police Department to date ths year.

I cannot remember exact number, but it was two more children than police officers and the number was between 3o to 4o.

The report cited the dwindling economy, the city serving as a major drug hub for drugs headed to Toronto, NYC, Houston and Buffalo, and a high drop out among high school children (more than 3o%) as reasons for the high murder rate.

Interesting eh? I just hope the mayor of Rochester starts to stop the drug from getting to Toronto soon.

Remember that Red Paper Clip?

Here is an update:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5167388.stm

World Cup: Photos

So you say Canada is not Deaf friendly?

Want to know more about the health facts and the West Nile Virus?

CLICK HERE

Challenges @ Work:

I am a Finance Analyst at work and one thing that has started to frustrated me more is the people who have tasks assume I know all the formulas or concepts of analyzing numbers and identifying where things went wrong during a period.

It makes me wonder why they hired me to do financial analysis when I am studying management. I have not had an opportunity to apply my management skills at work and fail to see any possible opportunities in the future if I continue to work where I am right now.

This does not mean I hate what I am doing right now. I am learning helluva a lot here, but I just hope I will have an opportunity to apply my management skills someday.

The reason I am doing this post is because I have been working on this simple project where I have to figure out where the big changes were in several financial centres. At first it seemed simple, but after three days I am finding this "simple" project to be more mind boggling.

I am being told to do this calculation and that calculation and then figure this variance then subtract this and get the absolute value, then check there and add these numbers up, then divide them and subtract this with the variables you got after looking there, then pick out the big changes.

I seem to understand all this, but the problem is I have no friggin clue where to connect the numbers or find the values. Plus when I ask for help, the help I get comes with bizarre calculation that I never saw in my math courses, including calculus! This totally makes me feel lost.

Hopefully I will pick up and become comfortable feeling illiterate from now on. :)

Italian Weekend:

My weekend started with attending a tour being done by a Deaf person at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The tour docused on art that symbolized violence toward women, viewpoints on slavery, political allegiance, and the concept of "Ideal American Art".

The guy was very good at describing and narrating the meaning or objectives behind the art work. I never realized there was that much behind the surface of art, however I have no plans to start analyzing the depth of art work.

After the art tour, went home and met up with Chantal and Connie to go out for dinner before attending DPHH. On the way to the Asian place we were going to have dinner, we met several friends of Connie who decided to join us for dinner.

After dinner we headed to the bar for DPHH. The number of Deaf people there was low, but I had a good time hanging out with several guys who are working at Citigroup for the summer. For some reason the bar decided to close early so a bunch of us who wanted to have some more drinks went to another bar down the street.

I had a bit too much to drink and ended up having a bad headache so I did not join C&C for a morning jog. Later in the afternoon, Connie showed us around NYU, we walked through some kind of festival near NYU, but there was nothing "special" about that festival. Walked around a little bit and looked at food to make sushi and got some drinks.

We picked up sushi stuff and headed home. Our first attempt to cook the rice seemed like failure so we started another batch which looked slightly better than the first batch. We ended up making rice pudding with the facked up batch and plenty of sushi. After the sushi, we started watching a movie, but 0.125 way through the movie I was falling asleep so I went to bed.

Got up early since I told Chantal that I would jog with her. I did poorly - ran no more than one mile. Obviously I am out of shape! Around noon we departed to Little Italy to grab a good spot to watch the World Cup (Italy was playing against France in case you did not know who was playing). We arrived there and the entire street was packed with Italians and wanna-be Italians! The bars were charging between ten to thirty USD for admission. We ended up walking around until someone said there was a bar that had room for us.

We had to pay ten bucks and I was disappointed because someone paged me and said they had a table. The drinks were also too facking expensive so a while after the game started Chantal and I decided to go look for something to eat. We ended up looking for places that had falafels. We ate at Chickpea - their falafel was not the best I had, but satisifying and the place had the soccer game on so we were able to sit down and watch the soccer game.

We headed back to the bar when the game was almost over to go where ever Connie wanted to go after the game. Italy won in the kick out so Connie and Debra (Connie's roommate) were so excited that they wanted to be part of the celebration in Little Italy.

So the bunch of us headed back to Little Italy to celebrate. The street was packed with more people, Italian flags were flying all over the place, women were being hoisted up into the air and people were spraying booze and water all over the place. I became Connie's photographer for most of the time. Hopefully I will have a chance to post some of her pictures here soon.

The celebration showed no dying down, but we saw more police officiers enter the crowd so we decided to head home and look for a place to eat. Connie wanted Italian pizza to celebrate Italy's victory over France. We found a nice Italian place with pizza on Amsterdam avenue and 11oth street.

After that we had some chocolate ricotta cheese while watching the movie "Bee Season". The movie was okay, each family member was sorta facked up in the movie.

This post was done with my Blackberry™. It feels like this is my longest post.

July 4th

On July 4th, Kester, his girlfriend and I headed out to Coney Island early to watch the traditional Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition. We got there alittle bit after 1o3o and the street was packed already.

It was very sunny and humid, there were fences along the street making the crowd more crowded.

We decided to try out Nathan's Famous Hot Dog (yes, I am a vegetarian, but wanted to taste their beef hot dog to understand the whole excitement of eating their "famous" hot dog).

After eating our hot dogs, we decided to work our way through the crowd - it was literally crazy! We had to go far to the end so that we could see at least two or three of the competitiors sitting due to the most facked up sport layout in history.

The table where the competitors were eating was located right in front of a sloped stage where the cameras for tv channels were. The camera stage was located between the crowd and competition table, making it almost pointless for the crowd to be present.

We had to stand for approcimately two hours until the competition started. The contestants came up and gave the crowd their show while freebies were being thrown out.

The contest was dominated by the defending championship who is from Japan and an American guy who ate 5o hot dogs during the qualifying round. The Japanese guy ended up consuming 53.75 hot dogs while the American counterpart did 52 hot dogs. All that was over in 12 minutes!

After the competition we walked along the beach - the beach did not look as beautiful as the one near Christine's place. We went through some carnival rides before heading to the Apple cube store. We had dinner at a Vietnamese place along the Korean street near Penn Station before Kester and his girlfriend headed back to New Jersey.

I headed back home and decided that I had been in enough crowds that day so simply watched the Macy's fireworks on TV.

Coming soon... The weekend and the World Cup.

My Weekend:

My weekend went by very fast! It actually felt like it was only one day instead of a weekend of Friday night to Sunday night.

The main day of my weekend was Saturday July 1st, I took the train down to Point Pleasant Beach to meet Buzzair and Christine. We spent most of the day at Christine's grandmother's place.

We also had a chance to relax out at the beach and go for a swim. I got a sunburned making my arms / hands half white, half red.

After celebrating Christine's nephew's birthday we headed out to meet Kester and Sherry for some drinks and fun.

We ended up having a bit too much to drink, but who cares, we were drinking to celebrate Canada's birthday!

Taking the train back to New York, it felt like forever and the headache I had from Saturday afternoon did not go away so literally I felt like crap for most of Sunday.

I also finally installed Connie's AC so at least I got to enjoy sleeping in a cold bedroom for two nights before she gets back.

Overall, it was great to get out of New York and the scenery in New Jersey was a pleasant view for a change, but it was still crowded and if you ever decide to visit the coast of New Jersey, expect a lot of traffic jams.

Tomorrow I will be heading to Coney Island to catch a view of the famous hot dog eating competition that is hosted there annually on the 4th of July.

Hopefully some pictures from the weekend will be posted on Buzzair and/or Kester's blog soon.

Happy Birthday Canada!

Wanted to wish all my friends (including my American friends who I know secretly wish they were Canadians) a Happy Canada's Day!

Am diasppointed that I will not be in Canada to party, but at least Canada wil be in my thoughts today while I visit Buzzair and Christine in NJ.

Have a great weekend! Party hard as if there is no tomorrow!