I met Neil Katz and his wife Asako for dinner last night. They're in town for a week. For those who have lost contact, Neil finished his graduate work in Bonn and is now on a two-year fellowship programme in Japan. He will wrap that up next year and will subsequently be looking for a job. He and Asako, a professional violinist, have no idea where they'll be after that but may end up back here in Toronto. Let's hope! I have a snapshot of them which I'll post real soon now.

I'm keeping a beady eye on the BlogVoices feature. So far, it seems to have slowed my pages to a crawl. If it doesn't speed up soon, it's toast.

Not much else to report; I'm looking forward to my trip out west this weekend: 3 1/2 more days at Whistler! Ciao for niao...
posted by Tom at 1:20 PM | link | (0) comments

I've added in the photos from the New York trip. Find them here. I've also added in BlogVoices to allow you to give me feedback on specific posts. Click where it says 'discuss' below any post to try it out!
posted by Tom at 2:48 PM | link | (0) comments

Sunday morning. Kelly's off rehearsing for her church service (where I will be going in a few minutes), and Paul's at work. Crazy guy worked all day yesterday, too.

Tosca at the NYC Opera last night: a good production, not in the definitive-performance category of the Met, but at the kind of level the Canadian Opera Company achieves most of the time. Well sung, well played, simple but effective sets (fascist 30's Italy as the theme) and very enjoyable. It capped a day in which Kelly and I wandered around MoMA and trekked over to a Barnes and Noble to raid their collections and kill a couple of hours. We then had a very frustrating time waiting to be seated for dinner--the restaurant rudely said they wouldn't seat us until the third member of our party arrived, although we said we would order for him--and we eventually bailed out and went next door. (The rude maitre d' showed up next door, as if in search of us, but no confrontation ensued... more of a surreal moment, though.)

I got back and switched on the cell phone and had a terse but effective e-mail message waiting for me from Dave: 'u left cat in closet cat now out and fine check corners on return! cheers dave and robyn'. The silly cat seems to have decided that it's a game to try and sneak into the closet when I'm not looking, which has now TWICE resulted in her getting trapped inside and unable to get to her dinner (or, and I'm trying not to think about this part too much, her litter box... ew.) I spent the last 15 minutes before I had to leave for the airport searching for her all over the apartment, without success, including looking in the closets... I guess she'd dug her way under some things so I couldn't see her. Irritating animal.

Last note: beautiful sunny day here, but it looks ccccold. Apparently Toronto had snow yesterday morning, so I'm happy to be here!
posted by Tom at 10:03 AM | link | (0) comments

I'm in New York! Just had a great Baxter Golding® stir fry, and we're checking out the new Visor Edges on the web. Covet, covet. Paul is working long hours and isn't home yet, poor guy. We're plotting activities for tomorrow. Stay tuned...
posted by Tom at 11:24 PM | link | (0) comments

The presentation is over, and went well. Roll on the weekend!!! It's a beautiful sunny day outside, but it looks like New York might be cloudy. Still, spring is definitely around the corner, and I'm almost over the cold, so hooray!

Happy weekend everyone.
posted by Tom at 4:22 PM | link | (0) comments

I've been working pretty hard the last week, but my workload is starting to level out again so it's time for a quick update. My project has been going well, and the client seems pretty happy with the work and the results. We've finished the first round of analysis and are presenting our findings to the executive sponsors tomorrow morning. I'm procrastinating on getting the full report updated, partly because we decided we didn't need to present it tomorrow, partly because I haven't received feedback on it from the team lead and many of the other team members yet, and partly because I'm lazy. Such is life...

I came down with a cold last Thursday, and it's still with me today, although I feel much better than I did last week and on the weekend. Friday night Kelly, Julia and I went to Christopher's house for a wonderful evening of home-made pizzas, home-brew bog (Swedish concoction, highly alcoholic) and some attempts at music (we tended to forget the words, the tune, or both). Saturday morning was consequently kinda slow.

Saturday evening, I got together with Mary Lou, Dejan, Tony and Lily for dinner. We walked up to Baldwin Street and had lots of great chinese food at the Eating Garden. I hadn't been to the Eating Garden since I don't know when (university?) but it hasn't changed a bit. There's still the same sense that the english-language menus are missing half of the 'special' dishes available in the chinese-language version. Sunday morning was again kinda slow. I played some more of Deux Ex before getting back to the report.

On Monday I felt good enough to go to the Pax Christi rehearsal. Dream of Gerontius is a huge work, with some tricky passages (low-born clods of dirt?) that didn't go much better for me Monday than they did last week, so I'm going to have to find some time a study them properly.

This coming weekend (tomorrow evening, in fact) I'm off to the big apple to visit Paul & Kelly, see some opera, and hopefully catch up with Andy, Heather and new kid Morgan. Next week should be pretty relaxed at work, and the following weekend I'm going with my family to Whistler. Can't wait...
posted by Tom at 11:53 AM | link | (0) comments

Department of Unintended Truths:

"If you're convinced your talents deserve a captive audience, why not make Singapore the next stop on your resume."


posted by Tom at 1:54 PM | link | (0) comments

Monday morning, getting in to a busy week at work. This week I'm preparing the final report for my project. Today is data crunch day.

My best intentions to scale back on the choirs and try some other hobbies seem to have been partially foiled by my friends. Stephanie and Kelly invited me to join Pax Christi Chorale for their upcoming concert of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, April 28th and 29th. Rehearsals are Monday nights. And I'm now singing at St. Thomas's (Anglican) on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. I'm hoping I can squeeze more squash games with Sean in between. I guess Wednesdays will be my work evening!

I had a quadrant 3 and 4 weekend. (Terms taken from Covey's 7 Habits -- Quadrant 3: urgent but not important. Quadrant 4: not urgent and not important.) These are the kind that I'm supposed to avoid. Getting my finances in order for tax season was not done. Laundry was done. Sitting in bed reading the paper with a purring cat was done. Basically, a pretty good weekend.

Upcoming trips: New York (March 23-26), Whistler (March 30-April 1 or maybe April 3).
posted by Tom at 9:47 AM | link | (0) comments

I'd be interested to hear from anyone reading this site whether there would be interest in me setting up an interactive blog page, where you could write entries as well. I'd have to set up each contributor manually within Blogger, but if there's any interest I'd like to try it. I'm not sure what the topic should be... Suggestions?
posted by Tom at 5:46 PM | link | (0) comments

Played squash with Sean Morley this evening... He creamed me 9-1, 9-3, 9-1, 9-4, 9-5. I definitely need some practice. We're going to try and play regularly once he gets back from vacation in a couple of weeks. I also need to join the club (the University Club of Toronto) again.
posted by Tom at 9:31 PM | link | (0) comments

You know, you might imagine that since I'm not travelling I would have more time to update my web log on a regular basis. So far, nix. Work's been pretty busy, and there are a ton of projects backing up at home.

This weekend I went home to Guelph to see my parents and pick up my cat Hoover. Mom & Dad are both in good form. Dad is very happy that his new book Infinite Minds has been picked up by Oxford University Press for publication next fall, and he's just finished working a stressful couple of weeks to get it reformatted and split up into chapters per their requests. In typical form, he's now starting to plan for their trip to England for the summer, which ought to be premature in anyone's book since they're not going until June and they're there often enough to have made the bulk of the details routine by now. Mom is in the middle of preparations for a trip down to Guatemala to visit her friend Janie, who's there for a semester with her husband and some of his students on a study exchange. Mom's going through a Spanish book and reading up on the sights to see, and Dad frets about her getting mugged.

Hoover took one look at me coming in the door, and knew that the cat carrier (most hated instrument of cat torture) could not be far behind. She spent the next 36 hours under my parents' bed, and in the end we had to gently but firmly push her out with a broom. She quickly resigned herself to her fate, though, watching the trip back to Toronto silently with big frightened eyes. Once reintroduced to my apartment, she chilled out almost immediately and within a couple of hours was walking around as though she'd never left. She's already made a significant dent in the fur deficit of the apartment (she sheds like a fiend) and this morning was gracious enough to allow her belly to be scratched in a very familiar manner.

Robyn got back on Saturday from visiting her sister in Ireland, and has already got her pictures developed. There is a certain c-c-c-cold theme that comes through, but it's still a nice shock to see grass that rich, warm colour of green. They seem to have spent a minimum of time looking at towns, and a maximum amount of time frolicking up mountains and down cliffs, taking outdoorsey shots of rocks and ocean spray and ruined castles. I'll have to plan a trip to Ireland... some summer.

On the gaming front, Dave and I continued our Starcraft feuding yesterday. Dave's success last week tailed off quickly after I realized that I could produce units about twice as fast as I actually was. Since then he's had great difficulty in building and defending a second base, although he's getting quite good at building a layered defence of his first base that is extremely difficult to attack. Pity the game doesn't allow you to win with a defensive-only strategy: all I have to do is build up an overwhelming resource advantage on the rest of the board, and then assault his lines with a fleet of cloaked carriers, and it's all over.

In addition to Starcraft we started a networked game of Diablo II yesterday as well. So far, so good...

Back to work: big meeting this Wednesday which may involve a lot of fireworks. I'm not either the marksman or the target in this one, but more of a neutral observer... or maybe a UN peacekeeper in Kosovo would be the better metaphor.
posted by Tom at 9:52 AM | link | (0) comments