Found at King and Portland, Toronto.

Excuse my lack of updates for September. It was a month monopolized by being on trips and recuperating from trips, and then going on more trips.

In early September, I ventured to the steady-weathered California and visited San Francisco with a side dish of Mountain View. Free Google food was had by all, as well as fun. This trip was well-documented on Facebook with plenty of incriminating, yet inspiring, photos and videos.

As I write this, I am in Italy. I departed on Sept. 30th, and so far I’ve lodged in Venice, Florence, and Rome. I’ve also spent enjoyable hours in Milan, Siena, Pisa, Pompei, and Naples for pit stops, wine tastings, and guided tours.

Many pictures were taken and further documentation will be presented on this here blog upon my arrival to my beloved Toronto. I miss you, Toronto. I miss your delicious food with reasonable prices and free washrooms. I miss being huddled by immigrants — at least they usually shower (unlike the throngs of tourists here). When I get back, I’m going to go out and hug somebody.

For now, you may indulge in this lolpigeon:

I went to the Metropolis showing at Dundas Square on Tuesday.

Metropolis is a silent film from 1927. The showing was accompanied with the beautiful live Trip Hop beats DJ’ing of Andrew McPherson.

I’ve never seen a silent film before, but it was absolutely amazing. The acting was passionate and expressive, despite not having a lot of dialogue (some dialogue was narrated in captions, but not much). The music was a perfect addition to it. It’s a whole new genre opened up to me, and I highly recommend it to anyone else.

My favourite act, by Pete Sweet:

Hilarity was ensuing like a barrel of monkeys tumbling down a silly-shaped hill.

More Buskerfest photos here.

To whom it may concern,

The first episode of the second season of The IT Crowd aired this week.

To everyone else,

Watch this show. You will be quizzed on it at a later date.

Ever since I popped by Booster Juice with some coworkers, I’ve been in an insatiable fruit smoothie mood. For all those blessed with abundance of fruit, here’s something you can do with them.

1. Throw various delicious fruits into the mixer. In this case I used my leftover blueberries and some raspberries. Strawberries also make for great smoothies. Pretty much any fruit will do, even if it’s a little too ripe.
2. Add a few scoops of cheap vanilla icecream, and a bit of milk (depending on how liquidy you want it), and a teaspoon of sugar (depending on how sour the fruits are).
3. Blend, pour, and drink. Remember to remove the blade before pouring, or else it will slide out and precious smoothie goodness will escape onto your floors.

And I bought a new camera. Yay.

After eight years of having my MSN alias as “shazow”, it has now been changed to “Andrey”. Many of you wont notice, some of you may freak out — like the illustration of Misko freaking out above (no, it’s not a girl with poor bladder control, whose bad perm caught fire).

This monumental event is for many reasons. Partly because I’m tired of having people ask me “who are you?” after adding me. But for the most part, I’m trying to embrace a wave of change that has been building for some time now. “Going off my beaten path,” as Maria put it. I’ll still be retaining my shazow.net blog and various instances of said alias on various services, but changing my MSN alias is a big step for me. Eight years. Hard drives don’t even last that long. I must have used MSN on half a dozen different computers, and the same number of different IM clients.

Identity is overrated.

People allergic to seafood can eat whale and shark and various other foods that live in the sea. Turns out that the seafood allergy only applies to shellfish, scaly fish, or crustaceans. Sure, that pretty much eliminates most legal choices, but where there is a will, there is a way.

Eating more than four saltines at a time is not easy because they devour all your saliva and you end up chewing on a hard concrete-turning paste. Highly recommended for a good time at the office.

i18n is a numeronym where the 18 is the number of characters omitted from the word internationalization. There are various other ones like L10n which stands for localization, and S12n for Scherpenhuizen. Here’s Mr. Scherpenhuizen’s story:

According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of [this] kind was “S12n”, the electronic mail account name given to DEC employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. Colleagues who found Jan’s name unpronounceable often referred to him orally as ‘S12n’. The use of such numeronyms became part of the DEC corporate culture, with “i18n” being spawned there in 1985. (Source)

As a wacky penguinite, I’ve paid for my sins to our saviour by using an ATI videocard for the past three years. Now that I have a full time job, it’s time to buy a real videocard.

I’ve been a loyal customer of PCCanada and had three Sushi dinners’ worth of credits saved up. Now that I live in downtown Toronto, this will be my last trip to this wonderful store, with competitive prices and excellent service. I set out on my first bike ride since a decade ago, onwards to Ghettobicoke. All along Queen’s Quey, and onto Lakeshore, with various detours.

Overall, the mission was a success, with lots of gorgeous scenery indulged in the process. The only casualty was my buttocks, which felt like what Owen Wilon’s nose would feel like if an angry bodybuilding plastic surgeon had its way with it. *Rubs posterior*

Drawing without using reference is one of my favourite hobbies. Struggling to pull an image out of the depths of my mind, like a fierce fish fighting for freedom. Reeling and reeling, until the moment when the fish bursts out of the still surface of the water, when the splash from the water blankets me as a sign of impending success. The rod sways unbalanced from the weight of the catch. The line could snap now, so I’m careful as pull it in and release it onto the paper. I look at the art of my creation as something new, something I haven’t seen before… but the image feels familiar. I conjured this from my mind.

Getting something in your mind onto paper is a difficult process. You can’t really focus on parts of the image in your mind. It’s like imagining a line between two points, and then trying to focus on that line… but you can’t, because it’s not really there.

The frustration that you feel when you’re trying to imbue your imagination onto reality, but just can’t get it to look quite right. The relieving catharsis when you achieve a sense of familiarity with your creation. That is what stuttering is like.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Are there certain things that make you stutter?
  There are many factors, with a large grain of randomness. Getting too little or too much sleep makes it worse. Who I’m talking to makes a big difference — large groups or people who I spend a lot of time with will rarely hear me stutter. If I spend a lot of time talking, I will stutter less over time. If I spend a lot of time not talking, I will stutter more. Some words are more “high risk” than others, in particular hard sounds like the C in Computer Science.
• I know what you’re trying to say, but you can’t get it out… should I say it for you or does that offend you?
  By all means, speak up. Be my autocomplete. In fact, it’s easier for me to say a word after hearing someone else say it.
• What causes stuttering?
  There is no conclusive answer. There are also various types of stuttering, most of which people grow out of after some years, and some of which you can train yourself to circumvent. There is definitely a large psychological factor, since I can speak to myself completely fluently. But there could just as easily be hard-coded physiological or neurological factors.

More questions are welcome.