If you asked me what my second-most prized posession is I would tell you it’s my passport. This little document has been my only completely reliable and constant companion on all my travels and adventures. It gets me into countries and out again safely. A Canadian passport is an amazing thing and worth a hell-uv-a lot. Internationally it’s one of the most respected documents out there and even though I didn’t do anything more than inherit the rights to own one and fill in a bit of paperwork I definitely don’t take this for granted.

This is on my mind recently because:

1. My passport is up for renewal and more importantly….
2. I lost it.

I lose just about everything: glasses, keys, files, passwords, socks etc. but one thing I don’t think I’ve ever misplaced is my passport. When I’m travelling it almost never leaves my fingers and when I’m at home I’ve got it stashed in that safe place where it waits for my next adventure. Until yesterday I thought I was more likely to misplace my right arm.

But this time I really lost it. I can’t say I’m too surprised, having moved houses 4-5 times in the last year AFTER returning from another continent but that’s no excuse.

“So what do I do now?” I thought, as the waves of panic spread outward from my stomach in nauseating undulation.  Before I could think rationally about it my imagination immediately went to work. Clearly this was the doing of an evil moustachio’d villain named “Hornwit Foulsprocket” who had snuck into my home and stolen it (but nothing else apparently) so he could illegally export otter meat to Denmark using my name.  DAMN YOU HORNWIT!

Considering how many hoops and delays I had to jump through in order to just get one the first time I was NOT looking forward to explaining to a Canadian passport official why I needed to replace the single-most valuable piece of paper a person with my relatively low clearance could posess….. and by the way could they then renew it for me as well?

Sweep mode!

I decided to do a baryon sweep of the house  (Why isn’t TNG on netflix btw?) from east to west . It started out fairly calmly, carefully displacing then replacing boxes, books and bags from my two storage closets. Nothing. Oh well, on to the living room. Nothing.

By the time I got to my kitchen I was seriously concerned. I couldn’t think of any reason it should be in the kitchen but I couldn’t leave knowing it might be there.

When I started on the bedroom I was getting frantic, ripping clothes from their hangers to search pockets and pitching already-searched items into a “searched” pile.

Nothing

One room left: the bathroom. I was captain Picard, pushed up against the bulkhead of Ten Forward with nowhere left to go as my baryon sweep ran its course. There was nothing in the bathroom but toothpaste and towels. All is lost.

It was only the hopeless completionist in me that forced me to search the towel rack. I knew it wasn’t there. I was just going through the motions.

Then, sure enough, behind the last towel I noticed a first-aid kit that I’d had in Tanzania.

Could it be?!? YES!!! Turns out I had hidden it so well that even I couldn’t find it. Typical.

My house is in complete shambles now but my passport is safe and I will be sleeping well tonight with it nestled under my pillow.

Time to get this sucker renewed and then it never leaves my side again.

Then again, it says “Live Music” underneath which is a bit ominous. Maybe if they didn’t do that people might try ordering a “3 Row Barley” on the rocks or something.

Maybe I over-think everything.

I woke up last week with a case of the Sunday-morning blues and decided I needed a deeply spiritual experience. We all get spiritual in different ways and my way is a luxurious breakfast in the grand style.

Coincidentally (but not fortunately as it turns out) an IHOP has recently opened half a block from my house. I had never been inside one and suspected it of being sort of a poor-man’s Denny’s, unless of course the poor man were told he needed to pay (but I’ll get to that later).

IHOP’s menu advertises “healthy choice” options sparesly nestled between their sugar-y, gut-busting bacon-wrapped breakfast options. These “healthy” menu items perform the same function as the plastic kale you sometimes see between feeding troughs at an all-you-can-eat buffet; that is, they’re present to make the menu greener but you’re not really supposed to eat them.

As I pondered the menu I imagined an IHOP regular doing the same. Even though he doesn’t order the heart-healthy omelette and instead opts for the baconated bacon bacon pancakes with extra butter his mind is soothed by the fact that IHOP cares enough about his health to offer restraint suffocating between two family-sized mega-meals.

“Hi hon what’ll it be”, whoa. I must have drifted off. The waitress before me looks bored and just slightly preoccupied. Still, we’re off to a roaring start. I love diners where the waitress calls me “hon”.

“I’ll have the lean egg-white platter” I anounce. Suddenly her face isn’t quite so cheery.
“You know that’s made with egg whites right?”
“yes. It’s right there in the title.”
“I mention it because most people don’t like egg-whites”
“Well I do.”
“Did you want artificially sweetened syrup?”
“No thanks”
“I only mention it because people who order the healthy choice….”
“nope, regular syrup is fine”
At this she stops writing, cocks her eyebrow at an impossible angle and turns away as if to say “I get all the weirdos”.

The coffee was bitter, tasteless and watery stuff but I really didn’t mind. Like a true Vancouverite I can talk coffee snobbery with the best of them but secretly, terrible diner coffee is a nostalgic teleport that whisks me back to unforgivably long, care-free and lazy breakfast conversations in Kingston Ontario with Mr. E.

In short order the meal was unceremoniously dumped on my table. As I was about to take my first bite of the eggs I felt eyes and glanced up to see my waitress across the room. She had found a spot far enough away so as not to be hovering but still, obviously, maintaining a direct line of sight; Steeling herself for a moment of ultimate I-told-you-so victory.

Sure-enough the egg-whites were terrible. That’s not a property of egg-whites though. I’ll have you know that I make a very decent egg-white omelette; No, these were just done terribly. The pancakes were undercooked too and didn’t hold together at all. It was like eating a bowl of soggy oatmeal. At least the coffee was still terrible.

Afterwards the bill for my runny egg-whites and pile of barely sufficient pancakes came to $15+Tax. Unbelievable.

Somebody tell the dutch: The international pancake market is ripe for the taking.

fishman v100 with custom mount

Now that I’m playing at least a few times a month I’ve been anxious to learn how amplified fiddle works and how it could work better for me.

There’s nothing wrong with the fishman v100. It’s pretty much the cheapest pickup you can buy and it delivers all its value. I even created a custom mount for it so it looked better than the zap-strap mount it came with.

fishman v100

That being said, I’ve been a bit frustrated with the tone it’s been giving me. I compare it to the sound of angry bees. Everything I play using this ends up coming out sounding over-cooked and frizzled.

Also, as you can see, the pickup uses a mono TRS connector which is flimsy and hard to deal with on stage. That’s when I heard about The Band.

The Band, by Headway

The Band is a new kind of pickup made by Headway Electronics.  The first thing you’ll notice is how it looks. Dorky, in my opinion but definitely really different from other pickups out there. It Wraps around the entire instrument, presumably to pick up a more authentic sound.

When a violin string is plucked or bowed the vibrations are translated from the string, through the bridge to the top of the instrument and then, again, through the soundpost to the back of the instrument. The sound you hear is mostly from the front and back of the instrument vibrating together with a resonating cavity, like a drum.  It sounds amazing (or not) because every component that transfers the sound was specifically designed for its acoutstic properties.

This is why I’ve never been a fan of bridge-mounted pickups. If you’re just taking a sample from the bridge you’re really missing out on all the wood-y resonance your instrument has to offer. You can try to make up for it using reverb and effects but I prefer the real thing when I can get it. The Band supposedly picks up vibrations from the top of the instrument itself so you’ll notice right away that it sounds better.

I’ve been told that professional fiddlers very often only play with external microphones or combine the sound of a pickup with that of a microphone. I am not a professional fiddler but maybe someday I’ll give this a try.

I’m going to get really nerdy in a future post and do a audio spectrum analysis of the two pickups vs. an external condenser microphone but for now let me say that I really REALLY like the band, for what you get it’s really not expensive at $145 CAD (Long and McQuade).

If you’ve tried it and you have your own opinion, let me know.

The challenge was this: Ride your bike clockwise around the city limits of Vancouver by tracing the ocean and using boundary road.

By the end my right knee was acting up like crazy but it was still fun.

My heart pounded as I thought “IT HAS BEGUN!!!” and I began to recite steps 1-10 of the zombie-survival guide in my mind like I’d done a hundred times before. The first moments of survival are critical as this is when most people get eaten. I reached for my serrated, sharpened shovel. Just breath. Let the training do the rest. Zombies are dangerous in numbers. One is manageable. I can do one.

False alarm. It turns out that she wasn’t the undead or even one of the minor signs of the apocalypse. She gave all the signs of being a crazy zombie-person because she was wandering around, bathrobe-clad in a frizzled, angry rage listening at people’s doors and trying to find the source of the thumping that had been keeping her up for two straight nights.

Urban living at its best

I must admit that I really enjoy these odd little non-sequitous peculiarities of urban living. It’s like last week when a wheelchair-bound man was riding the skytrain in a gorilla suit, or when I saw a business man in a business suit walking backwards down the street with a briefcase for no apparent reason. Two weeks ago there was a guy riding the seabus with a a raccoon tail that I could’ve sworn I saw move all on its own…..

But I digress…

I live in a noisy building. That’s not to say that the building itself makes noise;  any spoooky freeloading apparitions are the polite kind that keep their moaning to themselves and just occasionally steal one of your socks. No, I’m saying that the floors, walls and windows are extremely thin and so every whisper and conversation comes to you in hi-fi surround sound.

I know a lot of people that would simply move after finding this out. Break the lease, give up your damage deposit, bid a beautiful historic building goodbye and go find a crappy thick-walled concrete condo where you could be attacked by rabid hyenas alone in your apartment and nobody would hear it. I won’t say it didn’t cross my mind. We, in the western world love our peace and quiet.

I do admit to complaining a bit about it, but mostly because I like attention and sympathy. Secretly I kind of like the daytime bustle of the apartments next door. When I hear people cooking, cleaning, playing music, watching television, flushing the toilet or even copulating enthusiastically at 4pm with the windows open (that was not a hypothetical statement) it reminds me that I live among people.

My apartment is not a hermetic vacuum where society stops, and even when I’m sitting on my couch with the blinds drawn reading a book I’m connected to my world. If I want solitude I have a nice set of headphones and enough unaccompanied Bach to get me through my neighbours’ thorough page-by-page study of the kama sutra, or possibly korean opera, I can’t tell.

nosce te ipsum

My first week in the apartment I got a knock at my door from an irate neighbour who told me I had ruined her life with my unpacking and moving furniture around. I was devastated. Of course, I would later find out that the same neighbour was the owner of the howling dog that had kept me up for several nights that week so my sympathy would wane somewhat.

I did feel somewhat responsible I was causing anyone grief so I started being more aware of the noises I was making. I bought a rug for my living room and drapes for the windows.

Two days later I hadn’t set foot in my living room in that long and was eating out for every meal in mortal fear of a clanging pot or a dropping fork. I realized I had found a way to live in an apartment without touching the floors. Talented, perhaps, but utterly ridiculous.

My lesson here: people in paper houses shouldn’t complain loudly. Be respectful but do not change your pattern of living because you’re worried about offending people.

That being said even I draw the line at random thumping at 2AM. My heart went out to this poor woman I mistook for the living dead in my hallway.

Well, at least I’m meeting my neighbours.

 Image courtesy of Pikola on wikimedia commons

This is part of a “Matt gets un-fat” series of blog posts. Fitness is today’s topic. See, I’ve had this YMCA membership for a while now but I haven’t really been using it apart from a few leisurely strolls on a treadmill and partaking of the smoothy bar in the lobby.

Today I decided to suck it up and join a proper class. Originally I was hoping to do early morning yoga but as it turns out, I’m not (yet) a morning person. Boot Camp after work seemed like a nice compromise/punishment for failing to attain my early rising goal.

Goals

When choosing goals in a fitness regime, as with anywhere else in life I try to follow the SMART goal-setting system. That is, goals that are (S)pecific,(M)easurable, (A)ttainable, (R)elevant and (T)imely. Yoga was out and Boot Camp was in but I would need to revise the “get up at 6am and bike to yoga” goal. Factoring in elements like being my first class and also what I knew about what to expect I came up with the following SMART fitness goals based on my own core principles:

1. Stay conscious.
2. Don’t throw up.

Laugh if you want but at least  one of us achieved their goals today. Well, almost. Actually one of them I achieved only by a sliver and the other I gave to myself mostly on a technicality. I won’t tell you which is which and leave the rest up to your imagination.

Maybe a sane person would have taken the hint when he pulled a muscle in his knee just getting dressed in the changeroom. A smart man would have questioned his logic while being out of breath climbing the stairs to the gym. Not this man. No sir.

Survived!

Actually I didn’t do too badly. I only had to bow out on three separate occasions: once when my lungs decided that my windpipe wasn’t wide enough and twice more when the floaty amoebas started line-dancing across my vision. Next time I’ll do better. For now though, everything is in pain.

At the end the instructor said something I’ll never forget. I’ll use caps because he said it in his shouty voice:

IF YOU WORK AS HARD AS (some of) YOU’VE BEEN WORKING YOU WILL ACHIEVE YOUR FITNESS GOALS.

Well now, who feels like a winner?!? ME, that’s who!

p.s. for those of you who will inevitably tell me something like “Oh, I took that class and I didn’t think it was that bad“, you’re lucky my mom reads these posts.

187

A number in itself, devoid of context has no real value though. 187 is a full 20 pounds heavier than I was at the end of January. It would seem that my sedentary lifestyle and appalling eating habits have finally caught up with me.

I have been heavier than this before. Once in university I got up to 210. When I saw my family doctor at the end of the year he took one look at me and with a knowing look said “Lose it. Now!”. I always appreciated his candour in not sugar-coating the issue. To be fair, I was probably sugar-coated enough at that point. The next thing I knew I had a job at a nuclear power plant in Kincardine Ontario, 12Km to work on

bike and 10Km to a food store in the opposite direction. That weight tumbled off so fast it gave me whiplash.

This is me acknowledging there is a problem. Change needs to happen but I’m not looking for a quick fix here. The safest way to become healthy and lose weight is slowly. My hope in all of this is that I can retain some accountability if I write about it.  Keeping a journal of progress is helpful. Keeping it online is hopefully going to keep me honest about it.

Why bother?

Surely if the bathroom scale was the only one complaining I really wouldn’t care. I mean,

my scale has less circuitry than a digital watch so I’m not too worried about what it thinks of me when it’s off. I care what I look like but if it’s not impeding my lifestyle I’m not going to change just because popular media says I should be a certain way….. except that it has been affecting my life and it’s time to realize that very slowly several things have been going wrong.

• Feeling healthy. This is a big one. I get tired more easily, I don’t sleep well and I get out of breath a little easier than I did. Also I’ve noticed that whenever I’m healthier I’m more productive, less prone to couch-potato moments and can focus on things longer.
• Mood. I’ve been easier to irritate lately and this is something I’ve noticed. I can even see myself wondering why in the world I have just gotten so irate about something. Eating well and exercising has always made me feel more positive, optimistic and happier overall. I don’t know why I forget this so quickly.
• Looking good. I wouldn’t be honest if I said vanity didn’t play a part. Also looking like you take moderate care of yourself gives self-confidence which, in turn broadcasts confidence to those around you and this makes life easier in many different respects.
• Clothes. Since returning from Tanzania with essentially just a carry-on suitcase I don’t have a lot of clothes to begin with but now I can only wear a subset of those without looking/feeling uncomfortable. I can either buy new ones for my current size or do something about it. Simple. Recently at a gig I bent over to check one of my cords and heard a magnificent ripping noise telling me I’d now have to play 3 sets with a gaping hole in my pants. I don’t like having clothes I can’t wear, I’m tired of stretching/ripping the ones I have and I’ve noticed that clothes simply fit better when they don’t have to conform to all kinds of little squishy curvy places.

How am I going to do it?

Good diet

My caloric intake isn’t the problem but the number of calories I get from sugar and simple carbohydrates is far too high. I need to cut back on my sugar dependancy and make sure I eat a greater quantity of less calorie-dense foods like leafy-greens and vegetables. Cutting back on sodium probably wouldn’t kill me either (quite the opposite in fact) I’ll write a separate post about all this later.

Just a heads-up to people I know. I’ll probably be refusing to eat certain things when I’m out with friends but with Vancouver’s health-consciousness there’s always something good on the menu if you look hard enough.

Exercise

Data

Choosing a web host is a big decision and amazingly enough, people seem to really undervalue having a reliable one. Your company pays thousands of dollars on print advertising every year but you decide to trust your online store (you know, the one whose address is printed on your $1000 billboard) to a crappy web host because it was only $5 a month? Are you NUTS?!?

Anyway EZP is amazing and I thought I should sing their praises a little:

http://blog.raisedeyebrow.com/2011/07/why-we-love-ezp-hosting/

The problem with that is that you need to make sure you can undo any damage they do to the site quickly. To that end I implement some scripts and plugins to backup and sync WordPress databases and themes to repositories on the web server. Then once a month or so I need to go in and retrieve all these backups.

Transmit is simply the best FTP program I’ve found. It’s not free but its stability has been worth every penny to me.

One of the great features is its ability to be scripted using applescript. Let me preface all of this by saying that, as useful as applescript is I am not a big fan and find it as frustrating and inflexible as it is useful at times.

The laptop I do all my work on is a Macbook Air with a very small SSD drive. I really can’t afford to host separate copies of each WordPress site, and why would I? The code is almost identical across all sites except for themes and plugins.

I have a separate transmit folder where each bookmark has the word SYNCH at the end. Those bookmarks each open to specific local and remote directories all set to backup a specific theme. Then I simply use the applescript to open up each one in turn and do a downward sync of all files.

The Applescript code is pretty straighforward. Get it here: main.scpt

That’s it. Simple and effective.