Kid1 has started to display her proclivity for science. Her favourite activity of an evening is to figure out, set up, hypothesize about and complete a science experiment. For example, the other day, we set out two little basins of water with food colouring in them, then put a paper towel between them to show how capillary action works. We did the same with a piece of standard white paper, after trying to guess if standard paper would go faster or slower than paper towel. That experiment is still going; it is making some fantastic blue / purple / red art in excruciatingly slow fashion.

Kid2 is a baby and does standard baby stuff. It's hard to drum up a whole paragraph about her.

Kid1 is also deeply into fantasy books right now. We have completely The Hobbit and have started The Lord of the Rings, both of which she loves. My wife just finished reading the first Harry Potter book to her; witches, wizards, ents and elves, orcs and hobbits and magic! There's never enough to satisfy. I read LOTR for 45 minutes out loud tonight (including the songs, which she tries to get me to sing) and she was begging for more when I was done. Oh, and just the other day, she came home and very seriously said, "Dad. Some time soon, can we watch Star Wars together?"

Being a Geek Dad is amazing.

So I emailed the operations department for the city. Within what I would call "one business hour" (I sent the email one evening, and got it returned the next morning by 8 am), I got an email back telling me that they'd read my email and sent it on to the specific person for whom this was pertinent. I was pleasantly surprised that they'd made the effort to get back to me so quickly.

About an hour and a half later, I got a second, very polite, email addressing my concerns, apologizing, and saying they would take it up with the organizer of the event. I was again pleasantly surprised that they would make the effort to get back in touch so quickly. They addressed each of my concerns, and told me that local access was a priority during events like this. I figured that this was probably the end of my contact with the city over this issue, so I thanked them (because I was 75% satisfied) and forgot about it.

About an hour later, that same person got back to me, telling me that they'd checked up with the organizer of the event, and heard that there had been other complaints similar to mine, and that they would address the issue in a variety of ways before the next event happened. They also again thanked me for my feedback.

I'm so happy to live in the City of Guelph, where a complaint (even a fairly minor one like mine) gets heard and addressed within a day. What a great city!

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I live on Hamel Avenue. The Walk for the Cure always goes down London Road. And, in case you didn't know, Guelph has been torn apart for Guelph Remastered where the city is (thankfully) doing about 5 years worth of road maintenance and upgrading in 4 months. One of the roads that is currently closed is Westmound Road. If you look at the map, you'll see that if both Westmount and London are closed, I cannot drive anywhere from my house, and this is indeed what happened on Sunday morning. It was not possible for me to legally drive away from my place of residence and get anywhere.

That morning a lot of "What ifs" ran through my head before I tried to lodge a complaint. What if one of my elderly neighbours (or my pregnant wife!) required a trip to the hospital? What if the people on my street wanted to head out for 9am Mass? What if I had a contractor coming in to do work on my home?

I got answers to at least two of these three questions. If you wanted to go to church on Sunday morning, you were out of luck. If you had a contractor coming in that morning to work on something, you were similarly out of luck. There was no detour or workaround to get to my home. I'm thankful that we didn't need to find out what would have happened if a trip to the hospital was required.

Trying to lodge a complaint with the organizers was not particularly productive. Each person that I talked to made me feel as if I were being unreasonable. I admit that this is subjective, but I was made to feel that it was unreasonable to complain about an event to raise money to fight cancer. Then came the rub; one of the gentlemen that I spoke with told me that they had already had to change the course of the event to account for some of the construction. This means that someone looked at the route and reviewed it, and changed the route because of construction but they didn't consider the two streets that were cut off from the rest of Guelph.

Nothing really bad happened. Some of my neighbours had to stay home from church and the work that I'd scheduled to start early in the day started later. Couldn't we move events such as this into some of Guelphs amazingly well maintained parks or through the downtown core? Residential areas don't need to have this kind of event blocking them off from the rest of the city. As frustrating as it was for me, it must have been even more frustrating for those who lived on London and couldn't even leave their driveways. 10 minutes of playing with Google Maps and it's easy enough to devise a route that brings people through the downtown core instead of through residential areas.

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The phone is beautiful. The screen makes iPhone 3 screens look pretty bad and in my opinion, it beats the iPhone 4 in a side by side comparison. The Samsung is slick and gorgeous, responsive and vibrant; from a purely aesthetic standpoint, the phone is downright sexy. The call quality matches that of my previous phone (which was a real phone, not a handheld with a phone added on like many smart phones seem to be). I do not experience reception loss from holding the phone in a particular way. Using this device as a phone is easy and pleasurable.

The place where the device really starts to shine is when you start to dive into Android. There are a ton of apps and many of them are free, or under $1. Some of them suck; I have deleted 15 or 20 apps that I just didn't enjoy using, but there's no real downside to downloading paid apps because you can get a refund. Android market is pretty awesome. There are a ton of apps, some more useful than others; the barcode scanner is pretty cool and a Blizzard authenticator for WoW, I use just about every day. The google maps app works really well as a GPS which is beneficial since someone broke into my wife's car and style ours. There's a good selection of decent educational games for kids and, of course, a pretty decent app for wordpress which I am using right now.

I'm a big fan of how intuitive things are. The other day for example, my four year old daughter managed to record new ringtones and set them for events on the phone ("ooo your phones ringing. Blah blah" is now what I hear when someone calls me). The fact my kid can do that without any help from me is pretty impressive. It is true that she is a little geek in training, but it is still great to see how easy it is for her to manage fairly complex tasks.

Swype is impressive. This lets you glide your hand over the on screen keyboard and "draw" the words that you are writing. It does make for some interesting automatic corrections [Edit: Like version one of this article, for example], but significantly increases my (mostly) understandable wpm count. Look for a video of it on youtube and have a look, if you are unfamiliar with it; swype is certainly worth checking out.

Overall I would give this new phone high marks across the board. I have never seen a phone that I like as much. The iPhone 4 comes close, especially the overall aesthetic, but the responsiveness of this little machine and the slightly larger screen along with Android help it win out as far as I am concerned.

[Edit: I've got Hello World done in an Android App, and it took almost no time to do so. App Development is easy and fun.]

Photozone Lens Reviews has a boatload of reviews, that seem to be spot on - they've reviewed all the lenses that I've used for my XTi, and we seem to see eye-to-eye on all of them.

Check them out if you need to buy a lens!

For the entire first half of regulation, I thought the United States was going to win. They showed a remarkable drive that was let down only by their inability to finish plays. Almost all of the action was in Austria's half, where I was sitting. The Americans had some of the best footwork I have ever seen in soccer players; Adu, the American captain did a quadruple scissors(!!) at one point, which had people cheering. The US also managed to pull a lot of cute passes that were mostly redirecting the ball behind them to a player they weren't looking at. The entire first half was a testament to the fact that cute plays can confound a more traditional method of playing.

The second half started and Austria came out strong. They shut down almost every play that the US tried, and almost all of the play was in the US end of the field, which means that my seats were glorious. The US managed to fend of Austria's blitz and push it into extra time (which you always want to see right? Except that it was a rainy and bugfilled afternoon. I was exceptionally wet and covered with blackflies). In the end, the US was undone by a star player that scored 4 minutes after being subbed into play in OT. That was pretty much the end of the game - the US was unable to mount a steady game afterwards. Focusing only on offense, they let a few breakaways happen, including a crazy 2-on-0 that went off the post.

I was thoroughly impressed with both teams, and happily surprised at how much fight both teams had. I think the US could have won if they focused more on finishing plays instead of making plays, or if they hadn't squandered almost every corner kick they had.

I certainly recommend catching a game, or seeing the Toronto FC play in the new soccer stadium. It was awesome.

Man, do I ever not regret going to see the movie.

I think part of why I loved this movie coming out was because of how absolutely low my expectations were going in. Michael Bay has, in the past, been a ridiculous train wreck of a director. He makes terrible Hollywood tripe of the worst order; take Pearl Harbor for instance. I think it may be the worst movie (yes, I'm including Battlefield Earth. No, I'm not sure if I can back that up). When I heard that Michael Bay was directing Transformers, I was hurt in a way that is difficult to describe. It was as if a good friend of my childhood, one that I loved and cherished, but hadn't seen in years, had come back into my life, but was now dating a bully that used to beat up on me at the same time. And that bully beat them. And had herpes.

I guess you can see how low my expectations were.

So, there I was on opening day. I didn't even know it was opening day - I told my brother and sister that I'd go see the movie with them, assuming it had been out for weeks. I shoed up, and we hit the theatre. I sat, knowing that I would hate that Bumblebee was a goddamn Camaro, that Starscream wasn't voiced by Cobra Commander (RIP, Chris Latta) that... that a thousand things that Michael Bay had taken away from the original.

The ads finished. The lights dimmed. The movie started.

I was 5 years old again, and it was a Saturday morning.

That would be enough of my review, right there, but there was more than that. In addition to being 5 years old again on a Saturday, I was 27 and it was late on a Wednesday night, and there were things in the movie made for that person, too. Michael Bay poking fun at his own pop-schlock crappy movies. Michael Bay taking little pot shots at the government of the United States. Throwbacks to the original series. Ridiculous, ludicrous stunts that only work because of my willing suspension of disbelief. This movie has it all.

My name is Andrew Phoenix. I'm 27, and I love robots that transform. Thanks for listening.

Writer / Director Bruce A. Evans

Pros: Screenplay of Stand By Me.
Cons: Every other movie he's been affiliated with (Cutthroat Island, Jungle 2 Jungle, Kuffs, Assassins, etc.)

Leading Man Kevin Costner

Pros: Actually a pretty decent director
Cons: He's not directing. And, generally, he's made out of cardboard.

Demi Moore

Pros: Off the top of my head, the only thing I like that she's been in is a bikini. Wa-oh!
Cons: That was 15 years ago.

Dane Cook

Pros: N/A
Cons: He's Dane Cook. Dane frigging Cook.

The only thing that made me think, "Oh this could be all right," was William Hurt, who is awesome in everything. I only went to see the movie because of other positive pre-reviews that I had read.

They were not wrong.

The two most surprising things to me in this movie are the performances by Costner and Cook. Costner is famous for his inability to act anything other than laconic, and Cook is famous for being a complete and utter jackass. This movie requires much more than that from both of them, and they both do extraordinarily well. I would not be surprised to see a nomination for Costner for acting this year, and those are words I never thought I would say. Demi Moore is also pretty good and William Hurt is amazing.

Good acting will only get you so far, though - you need good direction and a good script to read. In almost all ways, this is a great script, with great direction and I'm not using that word lightly. . The pacing is great. Dialogue: great. Story, action, suspense, mood, execution of ideas, lighting, art and set direction: all great. I'm trying to think about one part of the movie that I don't think was great, and I can't. There isn't a single part of it that I would classify as "bad". The only thing, and this is a stretch, the only thing is that if you don't like a well thought out thriller, then this isn't the movie for you. Yes, the worst thing about this is the ever-so-mild inaccessibility of the genre.

I recommend putting this on your list and seeing it.