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Another Saturday has come and passed. As usual not much exciting has happened, although I did spend the majority of the day polishing up on my design pattern skills. I’ve forgotten most of that stuff from the OOAD and Advanced OOAD in C++ courses in the past couple years at Acadia.

We went out for lunch to the Mandarin Cuisine in the food court across the street. Then for supper we went to the Pho 88 again. It’s become a weekly tradition. They must put some addictive stuff in that beef noodle soup because I can’t get enough of it. It’s just so good!

Also, just got off the phone with Erin (and Matt who was heard talking in the background). It’s always good to hear from ol’ Acadia folk.

It’s been 11 years since it last happened and it’s going to happen again tomorrow. That’s right, I’m going to be a palindrome. Well atleast my age of 22 will be a palindrome.

That is the only exciting news to post on right now. We have been having apartment woes during this week. The power has gone off several times which wasn’t too bad since we were at work but that also means our web servers go down. Also, we were supposed to get our apartment sprayed for cockroaches today. They posted a note on our door last night at 10:00pm. Plenty of notice to remove everything from the cupboards! As I arrived back to the apartment, another notice donned our door. The spraying was postponed until tomorrow. So, all of our dishes, pots, pans, and food are now spread throughout the living room until atleast tomorrow evening. Oh yeah, and tomorrow they are testing the fire alarms here again. If anybody is looking for a place to stay in Toronto, I can hook you up with a great apartment building!! Atleast we have an awesome Vietnamese restaurant across the street.

I took another trip downtown today, but this time I took my camera to document the trip. The main reason for the trip was to get more use of the camera and to buy another memory stick for it.

I headed out shortly before 2:00 and made it to the Eaton Centre just after 3:00. I stopped by the Sony Store and picked up a 128MB Memory Stick since I only had a 16MB stick which held 16 pictures at 2.0MP, so this multiplied my storage by 8 times.

I also stopped by the HMV and ended up purchasing Johnny Cash - At San Quentin for $10.99. Awesome deal!

The rest of the trip is documented here in the Toronto - Downtown in January album.

For those of you who are interested, here is a picture of the Toronto Software Lab where I’m working. It was still under construction in this picture from 2001. Thanks to Justin for letting me take this image from his page, although he doesn’t know yet. I wonder if he’ll ever find out.

I received the Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison album for Christmas and there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t listen to it. It’s just awesome, especially seeing how it was taped live in front of 2000 inmates of Folsom Prison back in 1968. The album doesn’t only contain songs but also prison announcements and joking between Cash and the prisoners during the concert. I’m not a fan of country at all, but this is awesome!

Anyways, last week I went down to the mall to hunt for the Johnny Cash - At San Quentin album from 1969 when Cash performed in front of another audience of inmates. I found it but it was $18.99, and being the cheap kind of guy I am, I knew that I could find it cheaper elsewhere. My search lead me to Amazon where it’s priced at $10.99 US + $5.00 shipping. This is a great deal, even though it’s in American dollars, because I have $26 of credit with Amazon after selling about $650 worth of their merchandise through my Beastie Boys site that has been accumulating for the past few years. I decided that I could spend this “free” money and get another great Johnny Cash album. I went to redeem my $26 in the form of an Amazon Gift Certificate but was then shocked to see how long I’d have to wait for my certificate to be emailed to me. Apparently, Amazon only sends out referral money at the end of each yearly quarter. So now I have to wait until the end of March until they email it to me and then another week or so before I can actually have the album in my hands! I was an affiliate member of CDNow a few years ago and I was able to get my referral money whenever I wanted it. Too bad Amazon doesn’t operate this way. I headed down to Walmart and Future Shop today but the album wasn’t to be found. I might as well wait a few months anyways, unless I can find it cheaper somewhere else before then.

In other news, I headed to First Choice HairCutters for a haircut. It was the first time that I was really impressed with the service of getting my hair cut. The woman seemed to give me a play-by-play commentary while she cut my hair. “Ok, now I’m going to just take the clippers and go around your ears. Don’t worry, I’ll clean up around there with the scissors. And I’ll just straighten that up right now for ya.” I’ll be sure to go back there in a few months for my next haircut.

I have setup Coppermine Photo Gallery for my gallery. It has many more features than JAlbum, the program I was using before. You can now add comments, rate, and search for pictures.

I used to be a faithful WinAmp user for the past several years but back in October, I decided to try iTunes and haven’t looked back since.

If you aren’t familiar with iTunes, it’s a great piece of software for playing and organizing your music. About a week ago, I decided that I needed to leverage (can you see my corporate talk coming through?) the full power of iTunes, in particular it’s XML Library which stores pretty much any information you’d want for a song. I looked into several parsers but none of them did what I was looking for, plus some of them were full of nasty bugs. This past weekend I wrote my own iTunes parser in php from scratch.

I’m still working out a few bugs but here are some good examples (updated every minute) of what kind of info it can retrieve. I’m trying to make it as automated as possible in case new attributes are added in future versions of iTunes. Currently, my php script only parses through the XML file and inserts all of the info into a MySQL db. I’ll continue to work on it in the next few days and hopefully post the source code here for anyone else who may be interested in iTunes parsing.

This morning I did something that I haven’t done for nearly 6 years. And even back then I was required to do it for gym class. I have ignored the fitness centre/gym here at work for the past 8 months, so last week as part of a “New Year’s resolution”, I signed up.

I just came back from a 25 minute workout consisting of riding a bike and lifting a few weights. If I can keep this up for the next 4 months, hopefully I will accomplish my ultimate goal of going for a run at 6:00ish every morning during the summer before work. There couldn’t be a better opportunity for me than here in Toronto. First off, I can get back in shape at the FREE gym at work. Secondly, we live on Bamburgh Circle. It’s a freakin’ circle! So I can just run around it to my heart’s content with the furthest distance away from home being about 1km.