Crack With An LCD

Lots of Orientation stuff this weekend. On Friday it was a Presenter activity, which actually just turned into us going to the Plant and then dropping by the relay at Foote Field. We were going to watch Samuel do improv, however by the time we got to Foote we realised that we weren't going to make it to improv in time. We did get to see Samuel's PSP though. Quite impressive.

On Saturday, we had Presenter training. It sounds like all the groups have exciting ideas for their presentations, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what people put together. Afterwards, I caught a movie (yes, I saw it again). After that, I hit up Whyte with a couple of my classmates, before meeting up with Jones and Roman for some much needed Hack Talk at BP's.

Orientate That

Today was the first game of Orientation soccer I was able to make it for. While we ended up losing, it was a lot of fun. It's been quite a while since I've actually played soccer, so there was a fair bit of rust. Participants included noted Engineering hack Stephen McFetridge. We both agreed that the referee looked eerily like Mustafa. It was also pretty cool to play on Fieldturf.

Q Is Our Queen, It Fills Us With Pride, To See The Queen's Coach, When The Queen Is Inside

There really is nothing like seeing The Sovereign in person. Sitting out in the rain was well worth it (Ian Tyson was pretty cool too), and today was even better. However, I must say that I found it rather frustrating that the CBC commentator they had thought that the "R" in the G VI R stained glass window stood for "Regina".

Wedding Season

Went to my cousin's wedding in lovely Dauphin, Manitoba. It was a long drive out (we left Edmonton at about 5:00 pm, and rolled into Dauphin around 5:00 am, Manitoba time). The lack of late-night gas stations (and gas stations in general) in Saskatchewan makes that sort of an all-night trip more difficult than it really needs to be.

The wedding was quite nice. Unfortunately the weather was similar to how it is here, so they were unable to go with the original plan of holding it outside. It wound up being held in the same hall as the reception (which is apparently the former city hall), so it was still nice. My cousin is the first one of our generation on that side of the family to get married, and it had been a while since we've had a family wedding, so all that combined to make it quite an event. It also made me feel rather old, but there isn't much that doesn't do that these days.

The amount of logistics that must go into planning and organising a wedding is just astounding. For better or worse, it's something that I'm not going to have to be worrying about for quite some time.

Always Two There Are...

Yes, I have seen it, however lest it spoil the movie for any readers, I shall reserve comment for now.

The title could also refer to the fact that I seem to bump into at least two law students every weekday (I saw 4 today, as well as a former AAC). Having said all this, I suppose that it's likely I won't see any tommorrow.

Oh, and the last episode of The Apprentice (while arriving at the correct decision) wasn't particularly good. I thought last year's "ask the audience-fest" (which they thankfully avoided this year) was the low point of the series, so I would have thought that they'd avoid the studio stuff altogether (apart from maybe doing that "pull back from the final boardroom to reveal they're actually in a studio" that they did for the first season). At any rate, after the challenges the only sensible choice was to hire Kendra, and they really made it seem a lot closer than it needed to be (as I've said before, Bill didn't really turn on the jets either until near the end, so I think that entirely too much was made of Kendra's relatively late surge). At any rate, it's good to see The Donald do the right thing.

Return Of The King

Much to my shock and amazement, Ricky Ray has come back. This is big for the Eskimos, who arguably have their best depth at quarterback since 1987 (Matt Dunigan, Damon Allen, Tracy Ham). It should be interesting how it all shakes out as well. The possibility of a trade is also enticing (It would probably be too much to ask for Maas to head to Toronto in exchange for John Avery, or to Calgary for John Grace, but one can always hope). I'm quite excited for this year, regardless. One could also make the case that the league as a whole has its best crop of starting quarterbacks since the beginning of the 1996 season (before Dunigan got hurt). I'm also predicting that at this stage we see a Western Crossover, as the west is just too deep this year. This certainly takes some of the sting out of losing Terry Vaughn!

Palau

Survivor ended as expected. Katie never stood a chance against Tom (or, realistically, against any of the other final four). While a couple of weeks ago the prospect of an Ian-Tom show-down would also have been fairly close, Ian just kept shooting himself in the foot the past couple of episodes, really hurting his credibility to the point where he likely wouldn't have won even if Tom had taken him into the final two. Tom really dominated the game from start to finish anyways, so he's a deserving winner. He won the majority of the individual immunity challenges (which he sort of had to, given he was a physical threat), and when you look at the rest of his tribemates, I think he was a major factor in Koror never losing an immunity challenge. In the final analysis, as much as they talked before the start of the season about how different this incarnation if Survivor would be, it wasn't really that different. How they select the teams at the beginning usually always varies, so how they picked people wasn't really that much of a curveball. Immediately sending two people home was a bit different, but it was sort of a waste as well. All in all, I enjoyed the season nonetheless.

There Must Be More

Well, I'm rather irate that Donald Trump saw fit to cut his episode off before the end. I really don't see how they're going to be able to take up a whole hour talking to the employees. Particularly when this was probably the most one-sided final task I've seen ( I know the editing could have made it seem more one-sided than it was, but it seemed to be pretty clear to me). Of course, I've been known to be wrong about these things.

Survivor is looking to be quite interesting as well. While he is quite good at the physical challenges, I find Ian to be rather inept at "the game" aspect of Survivor. While he didn't wind up paying for it in the end (mainly, I think, because Caryn played her hand too strongly at Tribal Council) taking Tom on the reward challenge was just inviting the rest of them to conspire against the two men (which he should have realised given how he and Tom spent their time when Gregg, Katie and Jenn were off on the reward challenge last week).