New FiveFingers!

Well, not-so-new by now. But here’s a photo of them when they were new! (and with my carpet in dire need of a vacuum…)

Coffee and the Enlightenment

An interesting article in the Vancouver Sun, which I can’t seem to find, linked the Enlightenment with coffee. (The Enlightenment was an 18th century movement based in France, led by noted philosophers such as Locke, Spinoza, and Voltaire. It called for the use of reason to reform society and knowledge)

Apparently, the standard “cuppa joe” in the mornings was a boozy one – until coffee was introduced to Europeans and became popular. People thereafter started their days chipper and alert, ready to pursue the kinds of intellectual conversation associated with the Enlightenment, as opposed to being tipsy and belligerant.

Coffee houses also played a large role in the Enlightenment as venues where the exchange of ideas could freely take place. Anybody, whether rich or poor, could sit, drink coffee, and discuss, so long as they could afford the small price of a cup.

Really makes you wonder at what café culture has evolved into, no?

LOL,

Tim

Revolver Brew Bar

BAM! Please welcome the latest addition to Vancouver’s coffee scene. Revolver Brew Bar, located at 325 Cambie, is brought to you by the awesome family of Greeks that brought you Crema.

Now serving: Phil & Sebastien, Ritual, and Coava.

Brewed on: At the far end of the bar, a classy black-and-chrome Mirage and three Roburs. A Malkhonig Guatemala grinds for Coava Kones, Clevers, French presses, siphons, Aeropresses, and V60s. “Revolver” is a little too conservative – “Armoury” might be more appropriate. That tremor you feel in the floor comes from the second-wave shops in the area quaking in fear.

I told Chris to give me whatever’s good and ended up with a Kone-brewed Kenya and the coffee cake (yeah, I know, not paleo). Surprisingly good combination – the tart blackberries in the Kenya tango with the sweet raspberries in the coffee cake, and the cake’s sweet lemon glaze really sets off the smoky nutmeg finish on the Kenya.

This place reeks of chic-ness. Wow, just wow. From the nail map of the world on the wall (literally made of nails) to the perfectly-proportioned combination of relic-ed and shining new, everything just works. Makes me feel like my wardrobe needs an upgrade.

LOL,

Tim

Go Canucks!

Official Canucks trad-cap. ‘Nuff said. Bring home the cup, boys!

LOL,

Tim

Harper Ends Party Subsidies

Ottawa to cancel party subsidies with next budget – Need to know – Macleans.ca.

This means the Liberals are finished for sure. The entire left is being defunded – this has been Harper’s plan for years. Implications of this move include:

• additional barriers to entry for new political parties (e.g., the Green Party)
• a weaker left
• large donations will have more impact (which go mostly to the Conservatives). In other words, money’s voice will get only louder.

Not good for Canada.

LOL,

Tim

Back in Van!

Flew back to Van the 1st of May and I’m glad to be home. I don’t think anybody who’s not from Vancouver could understand this, but I actually missed the rain! It’s just not the same in MTL.

Forgive me for the rambling of this post and the spaced-ness of it – I had my wisdom teeth out on Friday so I’m currently hopped up on painkillers. I think it’s remarkable that I’m actually able to string together coherent thoughts in this state. Speaking of that, I lost a game of Scrabble to my mother by 4 points last night! 326-322, with yours truly playing the part of Buzz Aldrin. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself!

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to put together a map of the third wave coffee industry in Vancouver for awhile and finally got around to it. If you think I’ve left anyone out, leave a comment or tweet me and I’ll add them. Special thanks to my friends over at CleanHotDry for some of the more obscure locations (Solder & Sons, Uva Wine Bar, etc.). You can find it here.

http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=218341888268729687877.0004a357690132a0f66d5&ll=49.282812,-123.099747&spn=0.111402,0.308647&output=embed
View Third Wave Vancouver in a larger map

Lots more to say but a little too drugged to say it, so I’ll leave that for next time.

LOL,

Tim

Great Way to Start the Day

<sarcasm> This is one of the best starts to a day I’ve ever had. </sarcasm>

Course registration opened today at 8am. I got up at 7, logged in to Minerva, and kept the window active so I wouldn’t be logged out due to inactivity. Smooth sailing so far. Registration opened and I must have been the first person to click the link – 7:59am, thank you very much! And who says I’m not punctual?

Then stuff got weird. I submit my course codes to be registered for the fall semester, and it takes ages to load, which is normal because everyone going into U2 is trying to do this at the same time. I accidentally click a link and before I can freak out, a box pops up telling me that my changes have been submitted. How reassuring.

To verify this, I check my schedule. Not registered in any classes? Huh? Then what was the point of that reassuring box? So I try to go back to the quick add-drop section. I can’t. Next thing I know, I’ve been logged out. Huh?

I try to log back in and the system is full. Huh? I see where this is going now…

By the time I get logged back in, every class that I actually WANT to take is full. What sounds more interesting to you: the Underground Economy or 400-level Labour Economics? Guess which one I wanted. Guess which one I’m taking.

I must have been one of the first people logged into Minerva. I was probably the first person to click on the registration link. And still I get shafted.

I don’t get another shot at taking these classes. I won’t be able to take them the year after because I’ll need to be taking mostly 400- and 500-levels in my final year. These are classes I really wanted with professors I know. I was one of the first people to get in today, and still I get screwed.

I am completely befuddled as to how such a prestigious and well-regarded institution of higher learning can be so comprehensively incompetent.

Surely McGill has realized, after years of online registrations, that there will be a massive registration rush at this time of year, every year! You could set your watch to it and it would be as accurate as an atomic clock!

So why do Minerva glitches persist? Why is performance so low when the university knows that the system will be heavily strained at this point?

How about adding some additional capacity around registration time and getting some more bandwidth so things don’t take forever? How about ensuring students won’t have a year ruined by Minerva glitches? How about ensuring students aren’t forced to fill their schedule with classes that don’t interest them because of said Minerva glitches?

How about throwing students a bone now and then? Or would that ruin McGill’s reputation as a hard university?

LOL,

A pissed off Tim

PS – and to top it all off, I haven’t slept, my throat feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades, I can’t really turn my head, and my lymph nodes are so swollen that you can probably see them from space. I feel great.

Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek, and The 4-Hour Body

I’ve been quiet for a while, something I hope to remedy shortly. In the meantime, here is a rant. Feel free to tune out.

Many of you may have heard of Tim Ferriss’s two best-selling books, The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body. Some of you may have even read them. I’ve read both of them, and enjoyed both of them. They are both full of useful information and entertaining tidbits; I encourage you all to read both of them if you get the chance.

Now there are a lot of bloggers and other social media types who have put up posts saying things along the lines of “Tim Ferriss’s books are scams and he is a fraud; he doesn’t have any of the credentials he claims to have; he doesn’t really work only 4 hours a week; he was on steroids when he gained all that muscle; etc.”

Here comes the rant!

Most of these are ridiculous posts. Common themes include: “the books don’t come close to living up to the hype around them,”  “it’s all lies!” and “you can summarize the entire book into X and X, so you shouldn’t buy them because you just learned everything in them.”

Okay, first of all: most of these authors haven’t even read the books. Some of them took time from their busy lives to read summaries. Some of them have only seen the marketing material. I repeat, most of these authors haven’t even read the books.

Point one: It is dishonest post a “review” of a book, especially ones that personally attack the author, without having read the book. End of story.

But what about the hype around the books? Will reading the 4HWW really make you go from 9-5 slave to $40K a month entrepreneur with no effort? Will the 4HB really make you put on pounds of muscle with little gym time?

If you are willing to put in the effort and effectively use the actionable items that Ferriss provides, I say yes. To the people who use the hype around the books as a basis for calling Ferriss a scam artist, I say grow up. Name me ONE such book that lived up to all the hype around it. I dare you. Chances are, if a book has any significant amount of hype, it won’t live up to it.

Point two: Marketing hype is never lived up to. Never. Grow up and get over it – didn’t you learn that lesson when you were 10?

As for the summary argument, you can do that with every book. The entire Lord of the Rings saga can be summed up into a single sentence: Bilbo found a ring of great power and great evil and passed it down to his adopted son Frodo, who had to destroy it to save Middle Earth. Sorry to ruin it for you, but that’s exactly what happened.

The reason to buy any book is that you will enjoy reading it and hopefully learn something in the process. I did both with both of the books.

Sure, the biggest productivity secrets from the 4HWW may be outsourcing and the 20/80 principle, but the rest of the book is thought-provoking, inspiring, and entertaining. You’ll get more out of the principles if you read the entire thing, IMO.

Point three: Any book can be summarized. This does not mean they are scams, or lies, or not worth reading.

Sorry, I just had to get that out there. If you’re going to try to rip an author to shreds, at least read the damn book first, and at least use actual arguments.

LOL,

Tim

Paleo – The Way to Go. IMHO.

paleo- : combining form. Older or ancient, esp. relating to the geological past : Paleolithic | paleomagnetism.
ORIGIN from Greek palaios ‘ancient.’

The way I’ve been eating for approximately the last three months is called the paleo diet, or the Primal Blueprint (Sisson, see below), or the hunter-gatherer diet, or the Stone Age diet, or a multitude of other names.

It’s based on two ideas: a) over the course of more than 2 million years of eating a diet solely consisting of fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and all parts of animals of all kinds, the human digestive system genetically evolved to process these food groups in an optimal fashion, and b) the “neolithic” foods, such as grains, legumes, added sugar, etc. have only been around since the Agricultural Revolution at the earliest – 10,000 years ago – and thus our digestive systems are not evolved to deal with these food groups.

In short, many foods that now make up much of the standard Western/North American diet are actually poisonous to us

#Jan25

Great music video, great lyrics (politics aside). If you’re impatient, skip to 3:40 – that is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of mainstream coverage now, Egypt is still protesting. I don’t know what will happen, but I care about these protests both on an academic and personal level – some of my friends are Egyptian and have family living in Cairo.

Positive vibes to Egypt – may your fight be fruitful.

LOL,

Tim

PS – you can find Al Jazeera’s very good live blog here