Dr. Horrible is fantastic!

Thanks to my friend Sharky (not his real name), I stumbled across a totally awesome musical/comedy/comic book style online mini-series called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". I have addicted to it: I've had it running in the background at work all day long. Anyway, I gotta get back to listening to it! Here's a link.

A couple notes: it's not really for kids (even though it sounds like it might be), and Kristin (yes of kristininberlin fame) tells me you can't use the link outside the U.S. (although,I'm outside the U.S.... I suppose it's probably the usual confusion of all of North America as the U.S.)

Elevator Etiquette

The other day I got in the elevator after locking my bike up on P1, there was already someone in the elevator who has pressed their floor (I think it was 4), so as usual, I pressed my floor (higher than 4) , the doors closed and we were merrily on our way. We got to the 4th floor, the doors open... and no one moves. I sort of glanced over at her in a "I'm not leering" kind of way, but got no reaction. The doors close, at which point I assume that she's forgotten something in her car and needs to head back down to get it, so she's just going to stay in the elevator and go back down. But just as the doors are opening at my floor, I see her snap back to coherence and press 4 again.

Should I have alerted her that 4, the button she pressed, was probably where she wanted to get off while the doors were open? Should I have coughed to get her attention? Or should I have just assumed she knew what she was doing (as I did)?

-kdh

How to waste a day 20 minutes at a time

Warning: don't follow this link unless you have some time to waste: ted.com. I don't remember how I ran across this site, but I know that I had seen it before without exploring the whole site. Basically, the site is a collection of talks and performances taken from a conference that brings together 'experts' from the worlds of "Technology, Entertainment, Design", although I think it covers more than just those categories.

I particularly like watching the talks that cover the areas where have an innate interest in the subject (admittedly, it's often anything to do with numbers or the environment), but I haven't really run across any that I didn't find fascinating.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Benjamin Zander talks about music and passion.
• Hans Rosling plays with world statistics in a really cool way
• Erin McKean (a lexicographer) talks about the history and future of the dictionary
  

-kdh

44th!!!

Well, we've returned from Nashville where my quartet finished 44th. We were pretty happy with out performance although we were singing in a pretty tough spot, first out of the gate in between previous champs "Realtime" and this year's eventual winner "O.C. Times". As for the scores (76.9%), I think we had hoped they would be a little bit higher, but we're not really worried about them all that much.

I always find internationals has a strange ambivalent effect on me. On one hand, watching great quartets is inspiring and motivates me to get better at this hobby. On the other hand, I watch the top 10 (or even top 20) quartets and think that I'll never be that good, no matter how hard I work. Oh well, such is life, I guess.

Scotland

Sorry for the long absence... May was "no blogging month", right?

I spent the last week in May in the UK on vacation. I was there for two singing engagements with the Northern Lights that fell on two successive weekends, and the week in between was spent driving up to and around Scotland with my friends David and Jordan. The singing stuff went really well, it's always an amazing experience to sing for such an appreciative audience.

I didn't take any pictures of the singing events, but i do have pictures of the trip to Scotland.

Elevator fun

Susanna and I were heading up to our apartment from the garage last night, but realized after already having pressed "10", that we needed to get the mail, so we pressed "L" and got out at the lobby, where someone got into our elevator as we got out. We got our mail fairly quickly and didn't wait long in the lobby for another elevator to take us to 10. When we got to 10, the same guy got in the elevator as we got out! He must not have realized that 10 had already been pressed, and automatically got out when the elevator stopped only to find out that he was on the wrong floor probably only after the elevator doors had closed and it had zipped away to his floor.

When we passed him as we were getting out of the elevator on 10 he probably would have recognized us as the cause of his problem (it was late and there weren't many people around), but we made it safely to our door.

-KDH

Nashville Bound!

I was outted by Karen on her 'blog, so I guess I'd better post here... it's been a long time.

This past weekend my quartet,"Chameleon", qualified to represent Ontario District at the international convention in Nashville, TN this coming July. It's pretty exciting and will me more than a little nerve wracking. I've sung in front of 10,000 people before at these contests, but always with the safety net of a chorus behind me and 8 or 10 other guys singing the same notes that I am singing. This year will be different: I'll be the only person singing my part... and I'll be one of four on stage, not one of 40.

The experience of going to "internationals" will be different on a couple of other fronts too. First, my chorus (TNL) is not going this year (as we decided to take a year off and we are going to the British Association of Barbershoppers' annual convention, in the U.K.). It will be strange not competing in the chorus competition, and not having rehearsals all through the week... it will be strange, but nice! Besides the extra free time, it will be strange not having a whole bunch of guys (and their families) to hang out with all week. Another chorus from Ontario (the Capital City Chorus from Ottawa) will be going, and they are good friends of our quartet, but it's still not quite the same.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about the opportunity to sing at internationals... should be fun.

-KDH

Toilets (part 3: gender ratio)

At my workplace, we occupy two floors of an office building. On each floor there is one bathroom for men, and one for women. In the men's room, there is one toilet and two urinals, in the women's room, there are three toilets. Now this seems reasonable... the problem is, our office (as with many offices in our industry) is populated with mostly men. I don't know the exact numbers, but my guess would be that in total, we have about 40 men (maybe 50) and 6 women. So, as you can see, each woman at our company, has her own personalize toilet stall (I've never been in the women's washroom... but I wouldn't be surprised if they had name plates on the doors to the stalls).

It has gotten to the point where when the men's stall are full, there are guys who have availed themselves of the facilities in the women's washroom... and were caught by our HR person... who happens to be a woman.

We have suggested that perhaps on one of the two floors we could swap the signs on the doors so that the men's washroom has three stalls on that floor and the women's washroom had urinals, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to happen. For the most part, it's just a minor nuisance but there are times where it moves up to a minor pain when one of the (two) mens' stalls has a problem, so now we are down to 40 men, 1 toilet.

I do realize that a similar but opposite problem happens at sporting complexes all over the world, but unless you are going to a hockey game every night, it probably doesn't effect you as often!

-KDH

Toilets (part 2: due diligence)

Lately the toilet at my work place has not been in as clean a state as I would like. The issue is not really the cleanliness of the seat itself, or really any part of the apparatus that I find myself coming into contact with, rather, it is the results of an incomplete flush. To be sure, they are flushing (likely) once, but it is not completely clearing the bowl of their refuse. I am not complaining of the "streaks" on the porcelain that are difficult to clean short of a toilet brush... we have no toilet brush.

Whoever it is must not be taking responsibility for ensuring that the next user has no clues as to what the perpetrator had for lunch. Personally, when I flush, I take some amount of responsibility for the next person's experience: I will wait around to ensure that I get a complete flush... especially with a toilet like ours at work that does not have a tank to refill. You can flush over and over and over with no hold off period.

As a side note, I've also found that our urinals are often filled with yellow water... I don't think people are flushing properly there either (we don't have automatic flushers)

-kdh

Toilets (part 1: I'm a nerd)

Lately at work, when I find myself on the toilet I have been, to pass the time (no pun intended), picking random five digit numbers and factoring them in my head and then multiplying the factors back together to make sure I was right. Yes.... I'm a nerd. I find I just need something to occupy my mind, and at home I've usually got some sort of reading material... but at work it's a little more difficult to be discreet about it.

The first number I picked, I got lucky and it didn't have any factors higher than 17, so it really wasn't very difficult... the next one though had 1987 as a factor... that was much more work.

Am I alone in this past time? There are several other nerds out there who read this... am I the only one who indulges in this derivation of elementary (and in this case alimentary) components?

-kdh

Happy new year (redux)

Happy Lunar new year! Welcome to the year of the rat, the winner of that lengendary race.

I think the chinese zodiac is really just a trick to help you find out how old people are... there are some people who could trick you into thinking they are 12 years younger or older than they are, but for most people it just gives it away. My brother-in-law is a rat! I mean in the chinese zodiac he's a rat... really. But it got me thinking... I'm going to be 33 this year... I can't pretend that I'm just barely out of my 20s anymore, let alone that I'm not really an adult.

Oh well, at least I'll always be younger than Susanna (okay, so it's only 16 days)

-kdh

Pictures from Carribbean

I've post some of the pictures from our recent trip down south, you can see them here.

I didn't take an awful lot of pictures, I think a part of that was that we were on a boat most of the time, and part was some of the things we did we were too busy to take pictures (like snorkelling).

-kdh

Impatience

Is it impatient to use the door close button in the elevator? I know that in some buildings they are no more than a placebo to give people the illusion that they have some control over it, but in our building they actually are quite functional. Is someone being impatient if the use them to merely to speed up their trip when there is no one else running for the elevator?

Now, when I get into an elevator with a stranger who has positioned themselves near the buttons (such that it's awkward for me to get in to the corner to push the door close button), and they themselves don't push the button, it feels like an eternity waiting for the door to close... think of all the things I could be doing with those 2.5 seconds of my life!

I figure that I might have saved about an average of 5 seconds a day using the door close button. That's about 2 minutes a month! or in the two and a half years that I've lived there, I've probably saved myself about a whole hour that would have been wasted in the elevator! Imagine the time I could have saved by living on the 9th floor instead of the 10th!

-kdh

Welcome, Clare Elizabeth Ho!

I think everyone who reads this likely has already read this news at another site, but Rob and Rebecca welcomed their first child, Clare Elizabeth Ho, into the world yesterday morning just before 3AM. Everyone is doing well... they arrived back home just before sunrise and have already received a good number of visitors (family and friends).

Congrats!

-kdh

Parity

With the Canadian dollar being roughly at par with the US dollar (and a brief stint above parity), it got me thinking.... if the Canadian dollar were to continue to rise in value against the US dollar, at what point would they stop accepting US coins at par in Canada? When a US quarter is only worth 22.5 cents? 20 cents? 15 cents? Would they change the mechanisms in vending machines to accept only Canadian currency?

For a long time when the Canadian dollar was only worth 60 US cents they would not accept Canadian coins in the states... and I would bet that in most places they still don't, but I think that has to do with the fact we are small (in population, and economy) and they are huge.

-KDH

Happy New Year

Happy new year to every one out there... although Susanna keeps telling me that doesn't start until early February!

Susanna and I are back from our second cruise in 6 months (seems really decadent, doesn't it?), this time it was in the Caribbean with stops in Cozumel, Belize City and Nassau. The trip was fun, although for the second half of the trip the seas were a little rough and the air too cool to spend much time outside on the deck of the ship. We managed in our three days on shore to visit a Mayan ruin site, to go snorkeling on a reef and to play on the beach in some big waves (so big that the life guards would barely let us go in the water).

I don't have any pictures up yet (and I don't think I really took that many), but when I do get them up, I'll let you know.

-KDH