Discovering Perspective

This is great.

I'm still trying to train myself but for tabbed browsing this is really handy especially when browsing stuff that doesn't require much typing.

I love it when Value Village has no idea the value of the items they are selling. Normally I would say they overcharge but today's find puts me in a very good mood.

A set of 6 (one missing from the set of 7) Rapidograph pens. List price $130-178 (I bought my original set for $90) found today for $9.99. As some of you may recall, I lost one of my precious pens in the Orvietto Well while in Italy two years ago, *sigh*. Buying pens individually costs about $30. So I was finally able to replace the missing green pen and now have a spare yellow, beige, grey, red and orange pen.

Happy day!

Of course the downside is they will need cleaning since they've been sitting with ink in them for who knows how long.

Poor Mekki asked for help organizing his Magic cards. You'd think by now he'd know what he was in for by asking me to organize something. There's no such thing as a little organized. We're going all the way. I get a bit obsessed with such things.

Okay, ten months of abuse and I'm nearing the end of my patience. I thought I would get the summer off once the Sens were out too.

How I figure it...

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a record of thirteen championships in the ninety year history of the Stanley Cup (since it's intro as an annual award). That means the Leafs average one championship every seven years.

Wait a minute... what is the record for the Sens? They've been around fourteen years and not one championship? Wouldn't they need two to tie the Leafs' average? That puts them behind the Leafs doesn't it?

As for the fan base, which is supposedly limited to Southwestern Ontario and the Golden Horseshoe (i.e. what Ottawhinians call the "Toronto Area") totals a population of 9.8 million, nearly a third of the Canadian population! 7.6 million in Quebec are a safe bet for the Canadiens and probably the 2.5 million in the East Coast too (though probably divided francos/anglos for Habs/Leafs).

So we're left with four Canadian teams and about 12 million undecided fans.

Well, three of those teams are west coast. Eliminating the hometown populations of Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary, we're down to about 10 million. So, if the rest of Canada were Sens fans, they would just barely outnumber Leafs fans but that's not very realistic, I highly doubt anyone west of Ontario is routing for an East Coast Team.

So, Sens get a population of under 3.5 million to pull from (giving you the benefit of the doubt with Central Ontario). That's about one third of the Leafs' fan base for those of you keeping track.

No wonder I'd never heard of the Ottawa Senators until I moved to Ottawa and even then I assumed they were the equivalent to the London Knights, not an NHL team. While I was home in London this past week, the news was reporting on fans and the Stanley Cup game that night. The bar owners all said it was great for business having a Canadian team in the final round but not as good if it had been the Leafs or the Habs. Meaning, to the majority of Canadians, there are the Leafs, the Habs and the other Canadian teams.

And even Eric admits Leafs fans are hotter than Sens fans!

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Yes, this is all based on the assumption that geographical region can be directly linked to fan base and that each region produces the same percentage of people who even care about hockey enough to pick a team. It also doesn't take into account age demographics with the older population sticking with their childhood teams, so everyone born before the 70s are back to the classic and true hockey rivalry of Leafs vs. Habs. But I didn't start this argument, I'm just winning it.

The numbers were pulled off wikipedia if you really want to look them up. I'm not in the mood to link to them.

Just realized that I hadn't posted the news yet. I'm working with an architect for the summer.

Mary's a sweety and recommended me to an architect she's been working with. It's pretty ideal conditions for me actually. Pretty casual one or two nights a week at his place and then two or three days worth of work to do on my own at home. So I still have time to tackle the usual unachievable, overly optimistic summer to do list.

He's very helpful and eager to have me learn how to manage the majority of a project on my own so that he can take on more work. So I'm actually involved in a lot of the project we're currently working on and not just acting as a CAD monkey, technologist or secretary (all of which are pretty common work experiences of my classmates). The current project is an atrium/addition to a home in Montreal. Next up is a new high-end house also in Montreal.

Hopefully the summer goes well and I will be in a position to take on some work part-time during the school year while I work on my thesis. Now I just need a "mentor" so I can register with the OAA and start counting hours towards my required 5600 hours of internship. I have a couple of people in mind whom I can ask but if anyone knows an architect (registered with the OAA / retired member) I'd appreciate the referal.

Just realized that I hadn't posted the news yet. I'm working with an architect for the summer. It's pretty ideal conditions for me actually. Pretty casual one or two nights a week at his place and then two or three days worth of work to do on my own at home. He's very helpful and eager to have me learn how to manage the majority of a project on my own so that he can take on more work. So I'm actually involved in a lot of the project we're currently working on and not just acting as a CAD monkey, technologist or secretary (all of which are pretty common work experiences of my classmates).

The current project is an atrium/addition to a home in Montreal. Next up is a new high-end house also in Montreal.

Hopefully the summer goes well and I will be in a position to take on some work part-time during the school year while I work on my thesis. Now I just need a "mentor" so I can register with the OAA and start counting hours towards my required 5600 hours of internship.

Finally got around to making the gameshelf website look snazzier and include the rest of the info we've been collecting.

Shouldn't take long to set up the bookshelf and tradeshelf sites now that I have the template worked out.