Checksum Arcanius

Represent!

Dan, Scott and I arrived in Toronto today. We stopped at Niagara Falls briefly right after passing customs into Canada, and while very impressive, the falls would be a lot better in a nature preserve instead of overly commercialized as they currently are. Nevertheless, I’m still glad we went — it was pretty cool.

At the moment, we have only 15 of the 40 tickets we asked for; the balance we have in the form of vouchers that we have to find movies for. Thats crap; never come to the Toronto International Film Festival because they RAR you: as it currently stands, we paid about $50 per ticket for movies the bottom half of the list of movies that we wanted to see. Awesome.

At any rate, its nice to be in another country again, even it it is “just” our neighbors to the north. And we’ll make the most of it. Scott and I went on a run tongiht, and tomorrow we have two movies. Should be fun!

It has been a long time since I was in an honest-to-goodness lightning storm. Today, on my way home from Bellevue where I enjoyed food and entertainment from the Morettis, I stopped a while to listen to the rain fall, watch the flashes and bolts, and hear the thunder roll. Majestic, enchanting, and awe-inspiring. I would like more.

Major recent events thats I would like not to forget:

• Presented a poster about my CREE project at the UW’s Summer REU poster session at Mary Gates Hall on Thursday, September 16, 2007
• My brother Ben and his wife Kaylee came to town last weekend. I got to play ultimate with Ben and eat dinner and watch Serenity with the whole family
• I’ve been spending about one day a week testing Cochlear implant users with the Rubinstein lab at the Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the UW Medical Center. A lot of their stories are truly incredible — cochlear implants have had huge positive impacts on most of their lives. Its great to talk to the subjects between tests and learn about their stories
• Today (Tuesday), was the final “required” CREE event, the third BRI lecture
• Also today, I got to run a major software package at work that I built. After a little debugging, it is working well, and it is an incredibly fulfilling feeling to have it working so well at this point

…is happening right now. Its spectacular!

I’ve had some time to think
So now I’ll put it in “ink”
Canon’s 40D
is the camera for me.

A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets.

The four girls were born at a US hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units.

Yay socialized medicine!