The one thing that I have learned about Chantelle over the years is that she loves to sleep. No matter what time of day it is, she can fall asleep on a moments notice. This is a complete opposite to myself, where, I do fall asleep lying on the couch every night, but no matter what even like this morning when I’m on vacation, I still wake up after 8 hours of sleep. Now Chantelle, with her love of sleep has one of the most comical routines every morning. You see, her alarm clock is on her bedside table, but inbetween her and the alarm clock, she places as much stuff as she possibly can to attempt her from actually waking up and hitting her snooze button… and falling back asleep. I’ve determined this is the sequence of events that flows through her mind each and every morning:

1. Place as much crap on your night side table in order to fool your mind of where the actual alarm clock actually is. This may include such things as a fan, tylenol bottles, cell phones, glasses, cups, etc. The more objects on the actual table will help in fooling your mind to where the alarm clock is and then you hear the actual alarm longer, which might fool your mind into waking up.
2. Change the actual time on your alarm clock to be 20min later than the actual time in order to fool your mind that it is actually later then it really is in order to get yourself up to go to work.
3. Set your alarm to go off multiple times, the first at 5:45am, the second at 6:15am. Both times do not actually correspond to the time that you actually wake up, but it’s safer to set it off twice in order to fool your mind to start trying to wake up. Regardless of sleeping beside anybody else, who even though does wake up at 6:00am, the alarm is obviously set to a frequency that you can hear, and the other person sleeping next to you won’t hear this anyways.
4. When the alarm does go off, navigating through all the crap on your bedside table, repeating the word ‘damn it’ after each individual object falls is manditory, as at that point you begin to have some sort of idea the person next to you may hear these objects falling and wake up.
5. After knocking over all the crap from your bedside table, it is then understood that your cat will at that point realize that you are up and come over to investigate said objects on the ground. If any of these objects are small enough or loud enough when played with, this may fool your brain into waking up from the repetitive playing of said objects.
6. At this point your cat becomes bored and then begins to walk over your face, meow in your ear and walk up and down your stomach in order to gain attention, because it naturally thinks you are awake and you must give it attention. After 5 minutes, it will get bored and either walk away or sleep on your stomach, side or head.. which ever it feels is necessary at that particular time.
7. It is now your brain has been fooled enough and survived the onslaught of attempts to be woken up and then drifts back into a peaceful sleep. For atleast 10 minutes.
8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 until it is 5 minutes before you actually have to wake up and throw some clothes on to meet your fellow car pooler in the driveway. This is the most important step, as delaying the inevitable as long as you possibly can will produce the maximum amount of sleep.

Whether or not this is actually going through Chantelle’s head, it sure seems funny enough from my perspective. My alarm clock usually seems to be Chantelle’s, followed by Chuki. The other morning I guess I didn’t wake up soon enough, as I awoke to him with 2 paws on my head, 2 paws on the bed and his tummy fur tickling my nose and him crying. He’s sort of a natural alarm clock.

So if you feel the need to fool your brain into sleeping, please consult the list above for guidance and direction.

Here is a blog post taken from Dwight’s Schute-Space. Apparently he is all against photography and cameras! The best part is how he says no baby should have it’s photo taken six thousand times.. which will most likely happen when I have kids!

Good June to you, or as we say on Schrute Farms: Guttenjuni!

There is a topic I’ve been meaning to bring up and this appears to be the appropriate time. I have noticed many more people taking photographs of things now that the true start of summer is nearly upon us. Photography is an “art” that I do not endorse. If you’d like to see how something looks, go see it with your own eyes. If you want to see a representation of something, then go look at a drawing or painting. Grandma Mannheim was especially adept at illustrating Strullpeter stories, so don’t try and tell me that photographs are better than drawings. Photographs merely replicate the human visual experience as a frozen moment in time and that insults the eyes and the memory.

When I was a tyke, my family did not have a camera. The general belief was that if a camera were introduced into our lives, our eyes would revolt, leaving us all blind and unable to operate our farm. Now that I’m an adult, I realize that this is unlikely. The eyes are very rational and I think they would adjust to sharing their optical duties with a camera, if a person chose to use such a device. I, however, still refuse to use a camera out of pure ocular respect.

The rise in popularity of so-called “digital cameras” is a direct affront to human biology and it angers me to no end. Traditional film cameras at least have a built-in limit. You can only take photos as long as you have film. When the film is used up, you’re out of luck. On top of that, film is fairly expensive, as is photo development. These costs made liberal camera use cost-prohibitive. Not the case with digital cameras.

Digital cameras allow the amateur photographer the freedom and ability to take six thousand pictures of a baby. Babies should not be photographed in the first place. They never grow up to look anything like they did as a baby, so what’s the point in having a picture of them? You might as well take photos of a small pony because that’s about as close a resemblance as babies have to their future selves and ponies are at least attractive creatures. But I digress. Digital cameras have all the negatives of traditional film cameras with none of the limitations. They’re like a mutated virus – attacking humanity without an antidote.

The biggest problem that I see with digital cameras is that they cause people to place so much less significance on a single image. If Leonardo Da Vinci finished the Mona Lisa and decided he didn’t like her barely detectable smile, would he have just thrown away the entire painting? Of course not. If the Mona Lisa was a digital picture, however, he easily could just pressed a button and the masterpiece would be lost forever. This is the plague of digital cameras. What once was permanent is now digitally expendable.

This is all to say that, even though I savor the taste of victory, I have interest in keeping the digital camera that I won by calling into Froggy 101. If you want to buy this worthless device, go ahead and make me an offer.

That. Is all.

Yours Truly,
Dwight Kurt Schrute

VIA

Well, another year has come and gone and the show was just as amazing as the weather. I was at work for a sales project the Saturday night, so I had a chance to see most of the rehearsals that day, then back in for noon on the Sunday to start my day of photography. During the rehearsals for Flo Rida, I was up on the 5th floor here where he was hooked up to the rip line and sent down to the main stage.

A shout out to Dad for father’s day!

It was pretty cool to see the whole thing from a different perspective. I was also up on the roof of the building awaiting to take some photos of the Ill Skarlett rehearsal, but a blown fuse held things up and I ended up missing them play.

Some more rehearsal pics:

The weather during the morning and rehearsals was pretty decent, but as the day went later and later the clouds became darker and darker.. I had planted myself in the main stage pit area waiting for the show to start after the red carpet arrivals when the rain started. I had the advantage of a security guard giving me a rain jacket, unlike the hundreds of fans there who were soaked to the bone when the rain came down at about 8ish or so.

I did have the advantage of being able to leave and go stand in the back stage area while the brunt of the storm blew through! At that time the security had rolled out some huge blue tarps onto the stage crown, as well as handing out garbage bags too, but the majority of the people were already soaked at that point. I wondered what they were going to do if the rain didn’t let up, BUT by 9pm, the rain had stopped and the show was on! A rainbow came out just before, so I guess it was a sign that the night was going to be great!

I had the opportunity to use a Canon EF70-200/2.8 L IS USM Lens! Which is pretty amazing in general and produced some amazing clear images. I just wish i could find the way to justify spending 2 grand on a lens. If anybody is thinking of and idea for a birthday or Christmas gift.. just click on that link above! The show was great, It didn’t really rain that much during the show, but I had my rain coat on to keep me warm from the previous wind and rain storm (I was soaked from where the rain coat didn’t cover me)

Below are some of my favourite photos I took of the show, with a whole lot more info and other photographs over at muchmusic.com!

The after party was pretty wild too. Where I work, we are on the 4th floor of the CTV Building here at Queen & John. A majority of the celebs green rooms were in an open area where the former Star! set was, all sectioned off into little, or big (depending on how big the celeb was) curtained areas. So after the show, I changed into my fancy clothes and began the rest of the night. After meeting up with a friend, we ended up hanging out on the 4th and watching the Celtics/Lakers game in Sum 41’s green room, minus Sum 41. Instead of those guys, it was Akon, Kardinal Official, Hedley, NKOTB and Rihanna.. all huddled over a 13″ tv trying to watch the end of the game. It seemed pretty bizzaro for myself to be standing there having a conversation about the Celtics with Rihanna, and talking it up with Joe from the NKOTB. I did also accomplished half my goal for the night, I walked past Rainn Wilson from The Office! I was too shy to say hi to him, but I was a mere foot away from him!

It was a great show, wild weather and a very tiring weekend, but well worth the photos! All images shown in this post are © MuchMusic. For more info about the show, jump on over to MuchMusic!

Check out all these wonderful photos right now in my flickr site! It’s been a while since I posted about all my photos, I’ve been trying to post from flickr to here, but since upgrading my wordpress backend, I can’t seem to post directly from one to the other..

Anyways, Enjoy!

Alexey Titarenko’s “City of Shadows” is a series of photos with long-exposure shots that turns the pedestrians of St Petersburg into ghostly like images.. very cool

via http://www.boingboing.net

From what I’ve heard of the new Coldplay stuff, it’s gonna rock my socks off..Lovin’ the new Apple ad too:

This won’t be that kind of epic story that you write home to the kids about, but it’s a story about one of the reasons why I love my mac and Apple so much. I seem to have the worst luck with my laptop, with me having to replace the whole screen from a cat’s claws.. then I had to get the top plate replaced due to the power button being sunken in, and soon I’m going to have the bottom plate replaced due to some unsightly bulging of the edge right near lid latch. My latest problem was with my battery, and it’s some what disappointing charge levels. I for some reason, could only get a 45-1:15 min charge with my battery. I’m no expert, but it was annoying to try to use my laptop with such limited charge. I had enough on thursday night and decided to give Apple Care a call. I did pay for the service, so why not use it?!

I got through with out a problem and started to talk to the representative and he then realized my restarts speeds were a bit sluggish as well, so he ran through the gambit of tests to improve that..before I even got to my battery problem. He didn’t even question my poor battery performance, had me read off some numbers and then started up the process of me getting a new battery sent to me. He mentioned that since it was past the 1 year since I had purchased my mac, that it might not be covered, but he put me on hold and 5-7 min later he was filling out my mailing address. The whole reason why I’m writing this is because this was at 7:00pm on Thursday night. By 1:00 the next day I had the new battery in my hand, after it had came from Pennsylvania through Ohio into Toronto! Quite the trip, and needless to say I was very happy with the service Apple gave me. And now I’m writing this with my 3 hour battery life left. Huzaaahh!