4:30PM – Leave office and walk to Toronto General Hospital

5:00PM – Arrive at Toronto General Hospital. Exterior construction keeps me searching for an entrance for five minutes.

5:05PM – Inspect the multi-stage process for seeing someone in emergency.
Stage 1 – sign out form at triage station
Stage 2 – wait in triage waiting area
Stage 3 – consult with triage nurse
Stage 4 – wait for registration in triage area
Stage 5 – register
Stage 6 – wait for doctor

5:15PM – Waiting for registration. Several people here. “Jeffery” is inibriated with a swollen and probably broken left hand which he announces to everyone in waiting is a result of punching a locked door.

5:20PM – “Rodney”, inibriated, is brought in by EMT team strapped to stretcher. He is being told to behave.

5:25PM – Women asks EMT why her purse is humming. (Purse is not humming. There is a humming noise in the room from the ventelation system).

5:30PM – See triage nurse.

5:32PM – In response to my “I’m alergic to nuts” answer I’m branded with a red wristband that simply says “NUTS”. I’m hoping the staff know this is an allergy and not my assessed mental state.

5:35PM – Register after a brief stage 4.

5:40PM – Jeffery believes Rodney is talking about him and he starts yelling explicatives in Rodney’s direction.

5:50PM – Now at stage 6 waiting to be called. Rodney has been moved in and Jeffery leaves hospital obviously perturbed he had to wait so long. Hand is presumeably still broken as he did not see anyone.

6:00PM – Called by triage nurse to go in. Yes!

6:01PM – Arrive inside emergency room area only to be told that triage nurse made a mistake and there are no waiting rooms. No!

6:02PM – Waiting in hallway chair. Hey, Rodney is nearby sleeping it off! 20 something patient, Grant, waiting with his mom next to me.

6:10PM – Waiting. Realizing there appear to be several more stages to this game.

6:10PM – Rodney is awoken by nurse who is clearly not happy with the prospect that she has to clean him up as she announces to her colleagues that he’s soaken wet.

6:15PM – Rodney protests but she eventually gets his wet shirt off (yes, I thought something else too) and gets him to put on a hospital gown and blankets.

6:20PM – Rodney continues to sleep it off.

6:25PM – Rodney wanders off to the bathroom.

6:30PM – Rodney returns.

6:35PM – Nurse asks me for a urine sample.

6:36PM – Bathroom was one Rodney used. Not pretty.

6:37PM – Realize that the name on top of the now complete urine sample is not my name. Hopefully it’s the doctors?

6:39PM – Confirm that I was confused with Grant 20-somthing next to me. Now know Grant’s last name. Sorry for stealing your sample bottle!

6:40PM – Let Christie know via text that I will confirm the nurses know who I am before accepting needles and medication.

5:50PM – Confirm with nurse that they’re just busy and have not forgotten me.

7:00PM – Rodney now trying to steal medical supplies and disrupt things by dropping a medical waste bin on the ground. Nurse are oblivious to this and seem to be confused after I tell them.

7:05PM – Receive panicked tech related email from work. “Help to retrieve a deleted file!” Sorry, busy in emergency, please call our IT support firm.

7:10PM – Curious to see if I can read the eye chart bottom line from the required ten feed distance. Check!

7:15PM – Cell battery running low. Boot laptop to juice cell phone from laptop battery. Have to keep Christie informed.

7:20PM – Laptop battery now low from leeching cell phone.

7:30PM – UHN – Wireless Guest Network. Score!

7:31PM – Password required. THIS is how you treat your guests?

7:35PM – Waiting. Writing.

7:45PM – Waiting.

7:50PM – Start working on code. No wireless will make this less productive.

8:05PM – Noticing that even with all the signs, charts and process, nurses still seem to be confused as to who is in what room at what stage for what reason. Not inspiring confidence in the process. It seems like a busy night.

8:07PM – Now past the three hour mark.

8:15PM – Starting to think about the dinner I’m not having.

8:20PM – Laptop battery almost dead. Cell phone battery at 80%.

8:25PM – Nurse asked if I’d seen a doctor yet. Nope. Thinks perhaps my chart was misplaced after a doctor picked it up. Great. Checking to see who’s got my chart.

8:30PM – Doctor sees me in the hall and performs brief examination. Examination reveals little. Possibly muscle related based on symptoms related to movement. X-Ray and blood work ordered

9:05PM – Four hours!

9:35PM – Brought to exam room. Confirmed they know who I am.

9:45PM – ECG and blood work.

9:50PM. – Gown for X-Ray.

10:00PM – Waiting at X-Ray. Now five hours.

10:15PM – X-Ray lady returns.

10:20PM – X-Ray lady leaves for the night saying “someone will be with you as soon as possible.”

10:30PM – X-Ray dude shows up.

10:35PM – X-Ray taken. Dude apologized for wait. Busy night.

10:45PM – One hour since blood work.

10:50PM – Rodney is awake now. Laughing his ass off. Go back to sleep Rodney.

11:00 – 6 hours! Doctor says 10 minutes to diagnosis.

11:20PM – Diagnosis, muscle pain. Not through an injury, could be stress  Wait a few days.

11:22PM – Discharged! Night Rodney.

It seems Apple has yet to launch the premium section but to my delight when browsing the App Store last week I saw the banner ad I was waiting for and promptly purchased the game I had waited almost a year for $9.99. It did not dissapoint.

I’ve only played the Need for Speed series on a console a few times but the iPhone version comes as close as possible to simulating the console experience for such a compact device. The graphics are fantastic, includes a story arc to give the game a fun direction and provides levels challenging enough to hold you back long enough but not so hard as to force you to give up.

As you would expect there is a progressive series of street racers and exotic cars that become unlocked as you progress through the game from a Mazda MX-3 to a Viper, Porsche and Lamborghini.

Need for Speed Underground is a definite five star iPhone game and a must buy for racing game fans.

We were suddenly exposed to a world of a thousand flatscreen models and several add-on options. I decided to try to use my eyes to discern the possible differences in models with a quick trip to Best Buy.

Plasma or LCD

The debate starts at a rather large fork in the road. LCD or Plasma? Plasma has traditionally been heralded for its price, larger size and great contrast or rather, keeping the blacks really black. The downside is ghosting and screen burn in. LCDs traditionally have poor contrast ratios, suffer from a trailing effect and have been more expensive, but all that seems to have disappeared based on my research. My wife and I decided that for the size of our place a 42″ would be the largest size we could accomodate, so we thought we’d lean towards LCDs.

120HZ

The first thing we noticed when looking at LCDs is that the cheaper models (below $1,000) suffered from digital artifacting or jaggies around the edge of fast moving objects. What seemed to be the difference? Refresh rate. Or to be more specific, 120HZ.

At 60HZ fast motion in a scene seems to manifest itself in the form of jaggies around objects. At 120HZ the digital artifacting disappeared. I figured if we were going to spend a significant amount of money on a television that we would have for years we should spend a bit more to make sure the image looked clear.

Reviews

Once we narrowed it down to an 120HZ LCD we did some online research using Amazon.com reviews. Fortunately 120HZ is a big selling feature. So much so that Amazon lists it in the title of their LCDs so it was easy to search for “LCD 120HZ” to get a rather wide selection of reviews. Being a guy I of course wanted the largest TV I could get so I was concentrating up around the 40″ and 42″ range. LG, Sharp, Samsung and Sony seemed to consistently get between 4 and 5 star reviews. The LG Scarlett series which is LGs 120HZ models seemed to have some of the highest scores. So it was back to Best Buy with my wife to validate the reviews.

Image Quality

In the end, it’s your eye that does the talking. We honed in on 120HZ LCD models for the side by side test. I was surprised that for me the LG Scarletts did not appear to have the best picture but it came down to the  Samsung versus the Sony Bravias. In the end, for us, the Sony Bravias looked the best.

Price

Since we were at Best Buy we decided to fan out to the other nearby box stores to get the best price. Trying to get big box stores to match on price is crazy because if it’s not on the competitors website they won’t believe you can get the lower price. Also, if you’re looking to buy a Sony, the Sonystyle store won’t be able to match prices.

I decided to call G&G Electronics out in Scarborough. I had purchased equipment years ago from Gary who owns G&G and got great prices. Gary did not dissappoint.

The Package

Going in we wanted to buy the Sony Bravia KDL-40WL140. Gary offered us Sony’s new KDL-40XBR6 at a substantial discount (still higher than the 40WL140) but with a Rogers HD PVR for only $20 for the first six months (Sony pays Rogers for six months of a yearly rental). The XBR model had 10bit colour versus the WL’s 8bit, so better colour, and the XBR has a better built in speaker. Since we didn’t have a surround system in the budget for this round the better sound was also attractive. The XBR also has a thinner bezel so the TV actually takes up slightly less visual room. We had difficulty comparing the WL140 with the XBR6 as they were running different content. The picture on the XBR6 was running a Blue-ray disk while the WL140 was on HDNet. The XBR6 looked better but I now realize that television runs at 1080i as opposed to Blue-rays 1080p. In the end we decided the XBR6 was probably the better television and the difference in price was worth it. I would suggest if you’re comparing ensure the source content is identical. The 40XBR6 it was!

Blue-ray and the Accessories

Gary to help sweeten the deal was attempting to disway us from purchasing a Blue-ray player to save money and afford the better model. He explained that he didn’t own one himself and watched all his movies on Rogers Pay Per View. Something in my gut, or perhaps just my technolust was telling me to get the Blue-ray. Plus, we have a small DVD collection and since our previous DVD player was integrated with our old TV we needed a new player if we wanted to watch them at all. So it was a Rogers HD PVR and a Blue-ray player.

We purchased the Sony BDP-S550. In addition to playing Blue-ray discs it also plays DVDs and upconverts them to high definition. Not quite as good as a HD movie but better than a standard DVD player. What most impressed me about high definition playback was Blue-ray movies at 1080P. Sorry Gary, I can tell the difference.

Once we got the Rogers HD PVR authorized and up and running I could immediately see the difference. 1080i or 720p are excellent quality compared to standard definition but 1080p movies are incredibly sharp and free of digital artifacts. It’s probably the combination of only 720 lines of interlaced video compared with 1080 combined with additional compression that Rogers puts on the signal that weakens the quality. In the end the clarity of Blue-ray really blew me away. I’m sure when next year’s budget for a 7.1 surround sound system kicks in I’ll appreciate the audio as well.

I purchased The Dark Knight for our first Blue-ray title and the IMAX content Christopher Nolan shot really shines. Now I’m waiting for Contact, the Star Wars series and the Star Trek series to come out on Blue-ray. The Pixar movies I suspect will look fantastic as well.

Sharpness

I think I found out what we liked so much about the Sony Bravias though I would have to return to the store to test this theory. Most of the competing sets seemed to be too sharp. That is, we saw too many of the pixels which seemed unatural to us. The Sony Bravia didn’t seem to suffer from this and gave us a more pleasing image to watch. Upon renting our first Blue-ray we noticed up close an image that was still slightly more pixely than we liked. It quickly dawned on me that this was probably the default sharpness setting. A quick adjustment to slightly dull down the sharpness and we were very pleased.

I suggest when shopping that you access the sharpness settings first and move up and down the dial to make sure the image your looking at isn’t the result of some over-eagar techie thinking the sharpest setting is the best for the shopper. While you’re at it, if the colour also doesn’t look right try exploring those settings. The Bravia by default has Vivid mode which boosts the saturation and provides for some very colourful but very unatural images. We dropped ours to Standard colour when we hooked it up.

Bravia Motion Enhancer

In addition to a Vivid colour mode the Bravias have a Motion Enhancer option that is turned on by default. Both my wife and I noticed that when watching certain content the actors seemed to pop out from the background. I think I’ve traced this back to the Motion Enhancer which we disabled. Motion Enhancer gets the image to 120HZ through interpolation rather than just repeating the frame multiple times but there is some sort of visual effect that we find distracting.

HDTV

What has disappointed me most about this experience has been the lack of available HD channels and programming on Rogers, or rather in general. It has been almost 12 years since CBS first broadcast in HD and I’m surprised how slowly the market has been to react. Unless you’re a sports nut the content lives mainly in prime time. The slow uptake by consumers probably due to cost, the chicken and egg problem and the high cost of HD television sets. I’m hopeful that since we purchased a higher quality 1080p set which has proven very capable by the Blue-ray content that we’ll have this set for a while as shows continue to roll over to HD.

Should I Buy?

If you’re not into sports on television and don’t watch a lot of movies at home you may be dissapointed by the poorer quality image of standard definition shows on an HD set. That said, if you’re only watching prime time most of your shows may be in HD. Check your television guide for the HD channels and see if your shows have an HD indicator on them (Rogers shows this for the HD channels in the on-screen guide).

If you’re a movie fan then I highly recommend moving up to Blue-ray for the superior picture.

I recently started using TweetDeck to follow my Twitter stream. Besides separating my public and private timelines, it provides a tagcloud showing trending keywords. Before the news broke over major news networks I noticed something very big in the tagcloud. In a font significantly larger than all the rest of the tags was written one word.

Mumbai.

The next several hours were dominated by that word and variations. Twitter had become not only an immediate source of news but also a means of on the ground communication for friends and loved ones. It served as a jumping off point to other destinations for finding loved ones.

On November 27th, the first mention of #hohoto from ryantaylor (Fair Trade Jewellery Company) with a reference to rhh (Rob Hyndman) appeared on Twitter.

It started as a simple notice, shortly after, that some people were going to get together at The Drake to organize a tech industry related Christmas party. Two weeks later on December 15th a sold out Mod Club had donated space for over 600 tech industry revelers to attend a Christmas charity event that raised over $25,000 and donated food for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

I was blown away by the speed at which a small and dedicated group of individuals were able to spread the word of this event within two weeks. On a daily basis I saw the hashtag #hohoto appear from my fellow Twitterers all providing their support for the Daily Bread Food Bank through their commitment, purchases and donations via the HoHoTo party. It compelled me and I’m sure others to purchase a ticket, make a donation and contribute non-perishable items for this excellent cause. Alexa Clark and Rob Hyndman give a nod to Austin Hill for inspiration and give credit to Twitter for promotion in this video by Mark McKay.

Twitter allowed a small group of individuals to leverage their social network connections and quickly promote an event in a way I’ve not seen before.  Being able to watch the momentum was fascinating and shows that Twitter is both useful as a communication tool and a promotional tool. As Rob Hyndman said when I was leaving the event, “Just think what we could have done if we had more time”.

See you next year!

The AGO Gallery Guidelines are now clearly laid out both online, at reception and within the visitor’s guides. Kudos to the marketing person for trying to inject some positives in with all the negatives. Though this seems a bit patronizing to me as I’m critical of a few of these.

Protecting the Art

Keep a distance of one metre between you and the art.

This is a completely reasonable and understandable. If people are constantly breathing or getting their speech spit all over the art I would be upset as well. here are times I really would like to get closer to admire the details but we need to preserve these pieces.

Food and Drink

Food and drink are not permitted in the galleries.

Same as the distance rule. Plus, I don’t think we want to have the smell and remnants of people’s lunch strewn across the gallery. I would love to spend my lunch hour eating and enjoying fine art but the work comes first.

Cell Phones

Please turn your cell phone to the vibrate setting, and be respectful of other visitors when using your cell phone.

I believe this rule has been updated and I appreciate the AGO’s recognition that their patrons can be trusted with a certain level of audible respect in the gallery. I received a very important phone call in the gallery today and quietly answered it and spoke such that I don’t believe I disturbed the other guests enjoyment of the gallery. I think the policy of quiet should be added to the list if that’s what they’re going for as their was a particularly loud and obnoxious guest today that I tried to avoid.

Bags and Knapsacks

Bags, knapsacks, briefcases and parcels larger than 35 cm x 35 cm x 15 cm (14″ x 14″ x 6″) are not permitted in the galleries.

I suspect this is a security measure for either explosive devices or theft. It’s possible as well that large bags and items such as umbrellas (also forbidden) pose a risk to the pieces as people turn around and may be unaware of their bag’s proximity to the art. A clarification on the website might be helpful though to explain why.

Photography

Photography is not permitted in the Art Gallery of Ontario.

This is the one I hate. Along with the other rules of the gallery there is absolutely no explanation for this rule. First, no flash photography is acceptable. Both because it may have a small deteriorating affect on the art (though this is debatable) but because it’s just distracting. I would prefer if they had no flash photography instead. There are one to two staff members policing each gallery all the time. Surely they could have one or two at the entrance check that flashes are off or perhaps people could get some sort of wearable pass that certifies they’ve turned off their camera flash. Second, this surely can’t be a copyright issue. Most of these pieces don’t have a copyright and it’s not like most people are capable of duplicating the work. MoMa allows you to freely photograph within the gallery and simply asks for no flashes. We captured some really great moments of our trip and now cherish the memory of MoMa, recommend it to all our friends when they visit and will return when we’re back in New York City.

Sketching

Before you sketch, please ask for guidelines at the Information Desk.

This one was new to me and strikes me as the silliest. The portion of this policy I believe I saw elsewhere is that you can sketch in pencil but not pen. I have no idea why you would be allowed to use pencil but not pen. As well, is there more to this sketch policy that they couldn’t fit another few lines explaining it?

Video Surveillance

For the protection of visitors, staff and works of art, the Gallery is monitored by video surveillance.

This isn’t so much a policy as it’s just a notice that you’re being filmed. I’d put security cameras in if I ran the gallery too so I don’t have a problem with this.

And finally, the Security

I went into the gallery not having a camera nor a sketchbook, being fully aware of the rules and finding the staff watching the patrons like a hawk. In one instance, the guard noticed my wife taking out a notebook (she was jotting down the name of an artist) and I thought he was going to remind her about the “sketching” rule. Instead he had spotted the top of a closed water bottle in her purse and told her no drinking of beverages was allowed in the gallery. My wife noted that she wasn’t drinking it and continued to peruse the pieces. But she and I both noted the off-putting nature of art guards hovering and observing your movements for the slightest infraction of the rules.

Some Explanation

There are clearly policies here that protect the artwork and the guests enjoyment of the art but I find a few of these to be downright restrictive considering the nature of the AGO, namely art. The new gallery is beautiful and I would have very much liked to photograph it and some of the incredible pieces in the contemporary wings to write about. So as an AGO member I will contact the AGO to see if they can shed some more light on these policies and provide an update.

10.TimmyMe (Free)
If you are Canadian, Tim Horton’s is an institution. TimmyMe is a free locator that lists the five closet Tim Horton’s to your current location. It will launch the Google Maps app to help you get there. There’s also BucksMe their Starbucks version for $.99.

9. Lux Touch (Free)
Games are plentiful on the iPhone so this may not be in my top 10 by next week but I am addicted to this iPhone version of the popular board game Risk. It pits you against four other computer players for a battle to control the planet without the annoying dice rolling. The only drawback is that it doesn’t yet have a save function so you need to tuck in for about 45 minutes to an hour to win. Just pray you don’t get a phone call in the middle of a game.

8. Google Mobile App (Free)
There seemed to be very little value to the Google search app versus running Safari and typing into the Google search field, however Google has added an incredibly accurate voice recognition feature. I can often search much faster for items that are long to type or hard for me to remember the spelling. 37.2 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit. Boom, 98.96 degrees Fahrenheit. Small, but useful. Plus this is a great demo app.

7. AirSharing ($6.99)
When AirSharing first came out it was free and there are a bunch of substitutes but I use it more often. Air Sharing allows you to externally upload and browse files on your iPhone, which means that when you’re on the go you can view the uploaded documents or share them with others through a web browser on a WiFi network. I use it to store my workout plan when I’m at the gym. I keep losing the paper versions.

6. Remote (Free)
Use iTunes at home to play music? Use Remote to control it. Remote is made by Apple as a controller for iTunes on your Mac or Windows computer. It lets you browse your entire library and playlists. I use this so I don’t have to run back to the computer everytime I need to change the song or adjust the volume.

5. Evernote (Free)

Evernote requires a bit more commitment than the average iPhone app as you need an Evernote account but it is the world’s best note taking system. Apparently Evernote has the majority of its user base on the iPhone and for good reason. The iPhone version is handy and easy to use. It can do text, photo and voice notes. The entries are titled, tagged and uploaded to your online account. If you’ve taken a snapshot containing text their system will OCR the text as well. This gives you a fully indexed notes repository that you carry with your and can also be searched through the web or through the desktop version. It doesn’t seem to translate voice notes but I have Jott and you can hook them together.

4. Shazam (Free)

The party trick favourite, Shazam is like magic. When a song is playing on the stereo, launch Shazam to sample the song for 15 seconds and it will tell you the song name and artist. It then lets you purchase the song right then from iTunes. I use it at restaurants, watching television, parties, clubs and bars to figure out what that song is and to impress the hell out of iPhone lookers.

3. Ace Tennis Online ($2.99)

My top game at the moment. Ace Tennis is a deceptively simple game that I crave whenever I have a few moments. You control your tennis player with your finger or thumb and control the angle of your shot by tiliting the iPhone. You can even play online against other Ace Tennis players, though so far the experience is a little bit sluggish compared to the computer opponent experience.

2. Twitterrific (Free, Premium is $9.99 with an extra theme and no ads)

I may get a lot of alternative suggestions for iPhone Twitter apps from readers but Twitterrific is probably the most popular Twitter client and gets the job done for me. Twitter is just plain addictive and Twitterrific cures the cravings. The iPhone still lacks background push notifications so until then apps like Twitterrific need to be checked regularly to get alerts. Probably best though, otherwise my iPhone would be beeping every 30 seconds.

1. NetNewsWire (Free)

The first application I installed and also the most used. NetNewsWire syncs with the original Mac version through NewsGator’s free online service. It’s a great way to catch up on my news feeds when I’m away from the desktop.

I had recently downloaded Flash Player 10 (10,0,12,36 at the time of this post) and noticed a slight improvement in playback and performance but still not what I would consider acceptable for video. Ars Technica published an article in October benchmarking Flash Player 10. On a Mac Pro, Flash 10 used between 25% and 75% of CPU resources. On the same hardware running Windows it used 6% CPU. On my MacBook Pro 2.33GHz I see between 30%-45% CPU usage watching YouTube. The difference in performance here is enormous and I assume is the result of a product coded for Windows first and then ported to the Mac.

I haven’t been able to find any peformance tweaks that would improve video playback but I did find a bug reported against Flash 10 for poor performance on the Mac in the Adobe Flash bug tracker.  Register a bug tracking account and vote it up please.

I gladly realized after a day of listening to Podcasts that episodes appear in the order they were downloaded. This means that you can start at the oldest and not have to skip backwards to listen to the next episode in the sequence. A minor update but very welcome.

The most widely covered new iPod feature is the ability to download new Podcasts over the air directly to the iPod. Unfortunately it seems to have one critical flaw. If you don’t have at least one episode of your subscribed podcasts left on your iPhone it doesn’t list the show preventing you from checking and downloading new episodes. I subscribe to MacBreak Weekly but it’s not listed as I deleted the shows from iTunes after having listened to them all.

I’ve checked the iPod settings and tried to figure out someway to access empty shows but it seems I’ll have to conciously keep at least one episode around for each of my subscriptions for now.

These occur in metro Toronto (at least) with full 3G signal strength. I am sometimes actively using the phone either with data or an application but more often than not the phone is simply sitting idle.

I know that the phone has not received the call as the “missed call” list remains unchanged but I receive the infamous Rogers missed call SMS usually followed by a voicemail.

I thought that this was just me but Jay Goldman had indicated that his wife was having this problem with her iPhone and he thinks that perhaps it’s happening to him as well

I wanted to poll the Rogers subscriber base to see if they too are experiencing this and if it’s only iPhone related or all phones.

Please comment or tweet me if you’ve experienced this as well.

It’s been been almost a year since I’ve been coding as part of a project and since that time I’ve felt something missing from my work life. Coding helps to round out my daily routine and brings out a youthful memory.

I’ve always found a great deal of satisfaction in building things. As a child I found playing with wooden blocks or Lego to be far more facinating than pre-designed toys. When I received my first computer I quickly tired of the one game that came with it and started learning how to program my own simple games.

Software allows you the freedom to build because it’s very accessible but also extremely open. Programmers can easily get themselves into muddled code because software is so free form but we love the flexibility it offers.

Managing software development generally precludes you from being too involved in the code but it’s nice to dip your toes in the water from time to time.