graemebunton.com

How i miss the days when you weren’t evil.

I discovered the other day that the creation date for my hotmail address can be found within my account settings. My dear old punkaroo (embarrassing, i know) address has been around since October 20th, 1997. I’m pretty sure that was my first personal email account, and it served as my primary until I started at U of T, so at least 2 years, probably 3.

Hotmail at the time wasn’t owned by Microsoft, and I seem to recall was the coolest of all free email providers. I absolutely had to get my own account, as having personal email (you know, the 3 messages a month i received at that time) shared with my parents in our idirect.ca address provided with our 33.6 dial-up account was just not good at all. 17 Year old me demanded privacy.

Graeme Everyday Errata email, history, hotmail

I hear/read these three expressions on a near constant basis and i hate them all. They appear to be symptoms of some sort of verbal laziness. Either that or perhaps a lack of anything worthwhile to say coupled with the social pressure to respond or comment.

It must stop. Please, really, stop. I’m not saying everything out of your mouth and/or keyboard needs to be made of the purest wisdom, but can we at least try for a hint of something worthwhile? Not just these verbal ticks that add and offer nothing.

Graeme Everyday Errata

Hey Brah, Sup?, originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel.

I took this while over at K-smeats place playin with his new puppy. He’s got this awesome exposed brick wall in his kitchen, and i found the dog toy’s expression hilarious. As such, i was compelled to take a silly photo of a swimsuit wearing rubber chicken chillin.

Graeme Everyday Errata

Is both a humourous and poor choice of hold music. Thank you, service desk.

Graeme Everyday Errata hold, Music, waiting

Sara found a nifty article in the NYT last week that got my colleague Jeff and I thinking. A good number of people in the office are carrying a bit too much winter weight that we could really stand to lose, so why not set up our own office weight loss pool?

After a few tasteless and combative emails were thrown around we came up with a set of rules and a list of participants.

We’ve got 12 people in, at $50 each for a grand prize of $600, winner take all. The person who has lost the greatest percentage by the end of 8 weeks wins. It doesn’t matter how you get there.

We had our official first weigh in yesterday at noon. Our 12 members tip the scales at a combines 2267.8 lbs. The highest approx BMI in the group was 30.8, so while no one is grotesquely obese, there’s lots of weight to be lost. I’ll be sure to update on our progress.

As for my porky self, I figure i’ve got about 20-25lbs to lose. Shocking, i know, but too much warcraft and computers and cadbury mini-eggs have made me chubbsy. Sara and I are trying to be pretty hardcore for the next 8 weeks so that we can then relax into a holding pattern. No sweets, pop, fat or flavour and lots of working out. Now that its light in the morning its less arduous and painful to get up for a pre-work sweat-fest, so we’ll see how this goes.

Oh, and we’ve also done the before photos, so we’ll see what i can get out of the after ones in 2 long, effort filled months.

Graeme Everyday Errata bet, diet, exercise, pool, weight

Trillium?, originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel.

Allen Gardens really is lovely. I do prefer it remains unpopular so that my visits are untarnished by the slavering hordes with their constant demand for more beautiful foliage.

Graeme Everyday Errata

Richard and Lillian 2, originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel.

I took a wander in the lovely spring sun today around Cabbagetown to play with my Camera. I took in some lovely scenes at Allen Gardens, Riverdale Farm and the Toronto Necropolis.

Young families were all over the first two of those stops, keeping the day bright and loud. The Necropolis certainly gets less traffic and kids, but its a fascinating place to wander around.

Lots of fascinating graves, intensely ornate and reaching for the sky. Conversely, there are many like in the photo above. Quiet, unassuming and largely forgotten. Which we’ll all be one day. Mooooorbid. On that note, more than one grave made note that life is short and that time will always take its toll. Wise words me thinks.

I did run across the grave of Cpl. Dyers, a young man who was killed with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. It was clearly well visited. But i thought i’d leave it alone with my camera.

There were many gravestones i noticed that had two names but only one set of dates. Where one spouse has died and they had the headstone made for both of them. Knowing there’s a grave out there with your name on it, waiting for someone to carve those last few characters in is intensely freaky to me.

I should not post at night after spending the day alone in a graveyard.

Graeme Everyday Errata "Allen Gardens", Cemetary, morbid, necropolis, photo, Toronto

I’d tried pulled chicken and pulled pork with my Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, but as the weather was warming up I wanted to try something a bit more ambitious. We were having our friends James and Dwayne over so it seemed like a good time to try out the cadillac of smoked dishes: the Brisket.

I essentially followed the recipe from the best of all smoker resources, the Virtual Weber Bullet. I tried to document the process nicely with my new 50mm 1.8 prime lens, so the shots are perhaps unnecessarily arty. I think i learned a lot from this first try, mostly in two categories: meat selection and temperature.

I ended up buying two briskets from Cumbrae’s as they were quite small, about 3 and 3.5 lbs each. The brisket in the above VWB recipe was 12 lbs, so I knew i would be dealing with shorter times. They were pre-trimmed of fat however and i think this worked against me. The smaller one had virtually no fat layer and a tiny ‘point’ (as opposed to the ‘flat’, the two main parts of the brisket), so it ended up being quite dry. As for temperature, i need a wired thermometer so that i can tell whats going on inside the smoker. I think the smaller brisket should have come out earlier, though the larger one was almost perfect, I do think the 205deg that VWB recommends is too high.

And now, the pics:

The sealed Briskets:

Side view of the small brisket, you can see how thin the layer of fat is and how small the point is:

Filling the smoker using the “Minion Method”

Firing the charcoal in the chimney:

Smoking away…

It started raining, so i taped an umbrella to a stick to keep it dry

After five hours:

Done and sliced:

You can see some more pictures at the full flickr set.

Graeme BBQ BBQ, beef, brisket, Cooking, smoker

As a guy who spends a lot of time on, in, and around computers and computer related activities, I come across the geek and nerd honourifics/pejoratives a fair amount. Most people use these two terms interchangeably, and I’m not sure if i am being overly pedantic but its my hope that I can explain the differences between them so that they might be used to demean or uplift more appropriately.

Now, i should probably offer up some sort of disclosure here, so that my bias is apparent. I would consider my self a staunch member of the nerd camp, and while I’m not on the corner of Dundas and Yonge shouting at passers-by about the impending return of Nerd, I do find myself correcting people when i am mislabeled, and, you know, blogging about it….

Geek, it seems, is the older of the two words. If one is to rely on Wikipedia (which one must, god forbid i actually go to a library..) it finds its origins in the odd and twisted world of the old-timey carnival. Geekdom at that point had a darker tone than it does today – indeed, geeks could often be found biting the heads off of chickens. That dark tone however has persisted as a sub-text to the term, I would argue it can be used to define the more obsessive members of the nerd-geek cadre. In this way you often find the word hyphenated, simpsons-geek or physics-geek. It’s word born of the strange and freaky,

Nerd, on the other hand has a much shorter history (and perhaps, more ambiguous). It grew in popularity between the 50s and 70s and always indicated someone who was bookish or had an overly intellectual air about them. “Nerd” typically denotes one who spends more time learning and investigating rather than being cool or hanging out. While nerd does share some of the anti-social characteristics of geek, it doesn’t have the freaky background and is thus in my mind, more benign.

Now, I’m not suggesting there isn’t considerable overlap between the two terms. Because there is, lots of it. Heaps even. However, at the ends of the spectrum they are quite distinct, and man, those geeks are effing weird man. Stay away.

Srsly.

Graeme Everyday Errata

Ethereal Aunt, originally uploaded by Bunton & Peel.

I really love this photo i took of my pseudo-aunt. The lighting was just doing lovely things.

Also, i picked up my new 50mm 1.8 prime lens this evening. So expect to be punished with thousands of shots from it.

Graeme Photos aunt, bolton, photo