Paralympic Athlete Andrea Holmes and the Vancouver 2010 Mascots Visit Douglas College

Last night, Paralympic Athlete Andrea Holmes brought her Vancouver 2010 mascot friends along to a special event at Douglas College, put on by the Douglas College Business Association. The event attracted both business students and faculty members interested in learning about the value of teamwork, goal settings and overcoming obstacles. I was there because someone offered me food to take pictures and you guys know how much I love food.

Andrea represented Canada in athletics from 2002 to 2007, and currently competes as a member of BC’s Disabled Ski Team. She won a bronze medal in long jump at the Para-Pan American Games in 2007 and is a four-time long jump and three-time 100m Canadian champion. She also holds the Canadian record in high jump is also a paralympic hopeful for the Vancouver 2010 games.

Joining Andrea were the Vancouver 2010 mascots. Quatchi, Miga and the official Paralympic Mascot, Sumi all made it down to support Andrea and to spread some Olympic spirit around the Douglas New West Campus. Douglas’ own “Roary the Lion” was also on hand to represent some school spirit.

I caught Quatchi snooping around the buffet table and confronted him. When I challenged him to an eat off for all the glory he ran away.

Andrea spoke strongly about her experiences as an athlete, student, life in general and her work with RBC and Lululemon. She also shared some great stories with us about growing up with a disability and how that made her the person she is today. Saying that she was inspiring is a bit of a cliche, so I’ll just say that no matter how good my excuses are, they all suck compared to the obstacles that she has come across.

Thanks for the kick in the ass Andrea. More pictures after the jump.

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Dot Com Pho – The Sort of Cinematic Edition

Dot Com Pho has always been a low budget, low production value weekly mish mash of the dumb things that we do while eating Vietnamese Noodles. While we’ve always talked about doing a proper higher production value podcast or show, the actual effort to make something like that happen just doesn’t seem to register in our somewhat easy going Dot Com Lifestyles. This week at Dot Com Pho, I decided to introduce a new piece of gear that could possibly bring up the quality of the show while still maintaining the genuinely idiotic things we do and say at this weekly gathering.

The JAG35PRO is a 35mm DOF (depth of field) adapter. What this thing does is allow you to take advantage of the high quality lenses used in CANON and NIKON DSLRs. The folks at JAG35 sent me one of their units adapted to a NIKON mount so that I could try it out and give it a review for Futurelooks. As part of my ongoing testing, I decided to debut it at this week’s Dot Com Pho which features the return of Michael Kwan from the middle of absolutely nowhere, John Chow’s joy over the new shirt he got for free, and Ed Lau’s Yoga bumb fetish that we did not know about.

Products featured this week include the Poken Social Media Token, every man’s favourite Yoga Teacher App for the iPhone and of course the JAG35Pro adapter which films this week’s episode, giving it a very high production value look…

While the JAG35Pro provided some pretty stunning results similar to what you would see in a big blockbuster movie, the device is somewhat cumbersome in tight spaces. The 50mm lens was far to long and the fact that I was filming and manually focusing a flipped around picture (due to the JAG35 having no prism) was a challenge to say the least.

Some grading was done using Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Looks, but I have yet to find a good piece of conversion software that will allow me to convert the AVCHD files into an easy to edit format while simultaneously flipping the picture. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 really didn’t like having to turn the picture 180 degrees, and then having to render adjustments on top of that.

Look for a review of the the JAG35Pro at Futurelooks sometimes in the next while!

PS: We’re also giving away a 128GB Patriot USB Flash Memory Drive worth $359 US over at Futurelooks. Check out the contest details here.

Completely Random Things – Olympic Edition

It’s been a few days since I’ve posted as it has appeared that I have caught the “Olympic Fever”. I’m not really much of a sports watching guy. I’m more of a get out there and do it type of person. However, every four years, for some reason, I find any sport that one of my fellow Canadians are competing in, interesting…even badminton. Here are a few completely random things that I’ve got on my mind…

Why Do My People Have to Pull This Shizzle?

If you haven’t already seen it, the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Beijing were probably some of the most spectacular ever. They better be for a cool hundred million or so. I thought it was a solid 4.6 out of 5.0 though it did drag for me in some section.

If you haven’t heard already, it appears the event wasn’t totally authentic. For example, the 29 foot steps that paved the way to the birds nest: Fake. CGI was introduced into the first 55 seconds of the opening ceremonies to give the effect of footsteps walking into the city of Beijing. Chinese officials say that it was too dangerous to have a helicopter pilot follow real fireworks foot steps so they faked it.

That wasn’t really such a big deal, but the biggest fakery: Lip Syncing Nine Year Olds. The little girl that sang the song that opened the cereomonies wasn’t cute enough to be in front of the camera so they replaced her with a lip syncing double. The original girl was singing live in the background. We like your voice, but your face is fugly. Wow.

I can’t say I’m really suprised. I mean, fake things have been coming from China for years, from Gocci, Prado to Rolax. I just didn’t expect them to perpetuate the stereotype. Oh, my peoples…

Peanut Butter Scooter Time!

After picking up my scooter in June, I’ve been amazed at how useful it has been. I ride it almost every day and its saved me a whole ton of money on gas. For example, a fill up on my Subaru Impreza which costs around $70 to fill up on 89 octane, gets me about 400KM’s. My scooter sucks in about $6.00 bucks of 94 octane for a tank. How many Kilometers you ask?

Well, I hadn’t filled up since Dot Com Scooter Gang so today I decided to fill’er up and put in only $5.61 of 94 octane with the needle at a millimeter or two from the red mark, at 697KM’s. It’s actually my first full 94 octane fill up as I did a half tank before Dot Com Scooter, after finally cluing in that they use a separate hose only for 94 octane while the other grades share the same hose. Though this is not a big deal for a car, the scooter takes far less fuel so I probably got 87 octane when I paid for a 92 octane fill up at 322KM’s.

After Dot Com Scooter Gang, Carl filled up at just over $6.00 for half a tank after riding 5 hours on the Honda Metropolitan that CycleBC rented out. Kwanye was a hair above $4.00 because he never cracked the throttle wide open. I can’t count Gary’s total because John ripped the nozzle from out of his hand and proceeded to fill his own scooter.

I rode out from Port Moody to Vancouver for Dot Com Scooter Gang and back and hadn’t filled up for eight days till today. It’s already over 60 KM’s from Vancouver and back, plus five hours of non-stop scooter terrorism with the Dot Com Crew and I always ride nearly wide open throttle. I think this is a new mileage record but I forget how many KM’s I filled up at last time. I guesstimate that this is just over 200 KM’s on a tank. Let’s see how many KM’s till the next fill up on this tank so we can find out for sure.

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