So we did the Queen St walk yesterday, from Roncesvalles to Fallingbrook Rd (a little east of Victoria Park). The 14.2km took us five hours, although we did stop for breaks and I took a few pictures.

We caught the streetcar out west at 11:45am, and arrived at Roncesvalles around 12:30pm. I haven't been out in Queen West west since I moved out of my condo. The area reminds me a bit of Leslieville. Heather wouldn't mind returning to check out all the vintage clothing stores. Roncesvalles isn't that far west; we were surprised at how quickly we reached the Drake. Passed by Dufferin where the construction project to tunnel Dufferin under the tracks and remove the Dufferin jig is well under way.

We were getting hungry and stopped in at The Prague, a friendly little sandwich place at 638 Queen W. Heather had a turkey sandwich, and I tried the perogies. Both were excellent, although after seeing other people's food I had a hankering for the chicken schnitzel.

Back on the walk, it got really crowded with pedestrian traffic between Spadina and University. East of Yonge the foot traffic really dropped off. By the time we got to the Don Valley (which is about the halfway point as we later looked up) there was hardly anyone else on the street.

We stopped in at F'Coffee for a washroom break (and had a beer while we were there). The place has a very nice vibe. We usually only walk by later in the evening, so it was one of the few times we've had a chance to try it out.

Decided not to drop in at home along the way because we wanted to stay on Queen St. Pedestrian traffic picked up through Leslieville, and then got very busy again once we crossed Woodbine into the Beach.

Once out of the busy central part of the Beach, it becomes a nice little neighbourhood again (although too far from downtown for our liking)

I had though Queen St ended at Victoria Park, but it actually continues three side streets east until Fallingbrook, where it ends / starts unceremoniously (there is a nice apartment building called Queen's End though).

We walked back to Quigley's which has a large outdoor patio and had a beer to celebrate. It was starting to get cold, so we caught the next streetcar back home.

I took pictures of all the independent coffee shops on Queen St. There were more independents than chains through most of Queen St, except in the Beach where chain stores abound. Most of them were on the north side of the street (23 out of 31), I guess to take advantage of the sun. I tried in include only coffee shops that were primarily about coffee (and not a bistro or pub for example), but we didn't stop in at them so it was more a guess. I was also surprised that there weren't more people sitting outside sipping their coffee (which would have made the pictures look better).



Now we need to look up another street about 10km long to do another tour.

This has been one of the best Easter long weekends weather-wise that I can remember. In fact, it's better than most summer long weekends.

Yesterday Heather and I walked up to Little India for lunch. We've had too much of Lahore Tikka for our lifetime, and were looking for something less heavy. Ended up at Lahore Paan Centre, one of those places on Gerrard E that spills out onto the sidewalk. We both had the grilled corn on the cob (with a spice and lime rub) (lots of times after eating at Lahore Tikaa we've seen people wandering down Gerrard eating the corn, and it's always looked good except we were stuffed just having eaten); I had a pani puri and Heather had a chaat puri. After, we had some sort of sweet treat (nuts, spices and stuff in a leaf wrapper), and then split a kashmiri tea. It was all really good, and only cost $23 in total. I tried to take a pic of the place and send via SMS to Twitter but for some reason it didn't show up. Today I'll try using Twitterrific and see if that works.

Today we're planning to walk all of Queen St, from Roncesvalles to Victoria Pk. According to Google Maps, it's 13.9km and 2hr 50min. We'll likely take longer, because we're planning to stop along the way for lunch and browsing and maybe a patio. It will be a good test for Heather's back for when we go traveling again.

I downloaded a GPS tracking app (MotionX) which I want to test today on the walk. Unfortunately it's not the best demonstration because we're just walking a straight line, but at least I can see how it works. I don't know how it will handle switching out to the background if I want to use other apps, but I'll find out.

My blog is now iPhone-friendly! All that means is I've created an iPhone icon, so if you have an iPhone and find the need to save my blog to your home screen, it will actually show a nice little picture of me. (Did the same for my travel blog too).

I have to get ready for Ultimate so don't have much time to write. It was a very busy week this past week. Yesterday evening went down to Doaner's and we had a nice bbq'd steak dinner and played Scrabble all night. We ended up splitting four games, two wins apiece. We didn't have very many seven-letter words -- I think only five over the whole night. Usually we have about four or five in a game.

Yesterday afternoon Heather and I walked up Yonge St from the Star building to Bloor. Had some errands to run -- Heather and I both needed walking shoes (Heather has new orthodics to fit into shoes, and my old shoes are pretty worn out). Also was looking for a case for my iPhone, and for our new digital camera. The Apple Store was crazily busy at the Eaton Centre so I'll likely just order a case off the web. Did find a nice case for the camera at Henry's.

Last week bought a new digital camera, a Panasonic Lumix ZR1. Ordered it from amazon.ca on Monday, and on Wednesday morning it was delivered ($100 cheaper than any other price we saw). My previous camera was almost eight years old (I bought it before Lloyd and Mina's wedding), an impressive 1 megapixel at the time. My iPhone is a better camera so we figured it was finally time to get a new digital camera.

Well I should get ready for Ultimate.

Dwiggin AllStars 1986

Here's my first video posted to youtube:



You may be wondering where this little vignette came from. There's a guy at work who I've known work-wise for a few years. His brother was transferring some old VHS movies to DVD, and so he asked him who was in the movie. He said Eric and Lloyd D'Souza. The guy from work said, I know an Eric D'Souza, I wonder if it's him. So he emailed me at work. Turns out he was our next-door-neighbour (Jim's brother), although he would have been around 3 years old when they moved away.

Dad's old Volvo is on the street, and all the trees look pretty small. Check out our old 1980's glasses too.

I had to figure out how to convert a DVD to .mp4 to post it. I ended up downloading Handbrake, which was pretty easy to use.

I got an iPhone at work on Thursday and have been trying to figure it out since. My favourite app so far is the Apple Remote, which allows me to remotely control iTunes on my Mac. The iPhone address book syncs properly with my car so I can now dial from my address book from the steering wheel. I'm amazed at how many places have free wifi (which means I'm not racking up data charges).

It took a while to figure out how to save my songs as ringtones. There's a 40 second limit on ringtones on the iPhone (you could save an entire song as an .mpa on the BlackBerry), so I had to figure out GarageBand. But I now know how to save clips, and so Heather's ringtone is when the guitar starts in on the live version of Back in Black.

...

Last weekend it was really nice, and Heather and I walked over to Cabbagetown to explore. Heather sees it riding on the Gerrard streetcar, and thought it would be nice to walk around. It's surprisingly close to us, only about a 20 minute walk from our house. We had lunch at Gourmet Burger, which was pretty good (I liked it better than the Burger Shoppe). We walked up and down the residencial streets, and then down to the Distillery. We were hoping to have a beer at the Brew Pub, but it was packed. So we walked back to Leslieville and had a beer at Prohibition. We walked about 10km, which was a god test for Heather's back.

Monday it was still nice weather, so we walked up to the Danforth. Heather had googled around for Greek restaurants, and we tried out Pantheon. It was really good, with huge portions. We split the calamari appetizer, which filled up both of us, and we still had our mains. A 1L carafe of house wine was only $15, which is really reasonable. Next time we'll likely just split two appetizers and skip the mains.

Heather's been having reactions to red meat, so I've been looking for different recipes. We tried out grilled veal chops with artichoke-arugula. I didn't realize, but veal chops and arugula is a classic pairing. Anyways, it turned out really good. It took a while to eat because both the propane tanks were empty (luckily there's a number of 24hr gas stations near us).

Yesterday was a rainy day, the kind of day that's nice to have lunch in a pub. So we headed back to Cabbagetown to check out the House on Parliament. It has a really nice vibe. I had the liver and onions, which were a bit overcooked (Allen's was better). Heather had a mince meat pie with a side salad, which was excellent. The place has a nice patio, which I'm sure is packed in the summer.

Anyways, I should get ready for Ultimate.

There's an app for this

I traded in my blackberry for an iPhone on Thursday. I've downloaded a bunch of free apps, and just bought my first paid app, BlogPress. This will allow me to enter a post, and then publish when I have access to wifi. This is more important when I'm on vacation and have roaming data turned off. My typing is still pretty slow, although in landscape mode it's better. Plus it's supposed to take a week for the iPhone to learn my typing.

Location:Toronto

The $10 plant I bought at Home Depot is still alive, so I bought another one this past weekend Brassaia arboricola Hawaiian Schefflera. The tag says it likes warm houses (21C - 25C), so this one may not make it, but it's a $10 gamble I'm willing to take.

Wonderboy was a couple weekends ago. I finished on the trophy in 3rd, with eight points. I should have had ten points, but lost in the ping pong semifinals to Doaner's team. We were up 20-17, and his team came back to win 23-21. I also got a point from two-man log saw for the 2nd year in a row, finishing 2/100ths of a second behind the 3rd place team. The highlight once again was hockey on the lake. There was about a foot of snow on the lake which took a while to shovel, but the lake surface was perfect for hockey in boots. It was slightly pebbled, so wasn't too slippery. In fact it would have made a nice curling rink. Oh yah, I won the poker event (I guess that was a highlight too).

Roach was in town the week following WB (last week), so we headed out to Fionn MacCools for wings a couple times.

Heather and I watched Canada win the gold medal hockey game at home yesterday. I had an Ultimate game in the evening, so didn't think going to a bar mid-afternoon to watch the game would have been a good idea. Saw about half the closing ceremonies before I had to leave for Ultimate.

We won at Ultimate, 33-12 (the other team didn't have the same concerns about going to a bar to watch the game, I think most of them were a little drunk). I couldn't stretch out my legs fully after Ultimate, so I booked a massage this evening (it's 2010 so my benefits are full again).

I did our taxes on QuickTax again. It was a little less intuitive than in previous years (a few double-negative questions with yes / no options). Also it wasn't straightforward on how to transfer Heather's medical costs to me. QuickTax wanted to assign them to Heather (being in the lower tax bracket), but it didn't factor in that she couldn't use the tax credits as she had no income in 2009.

Lloyd and Mina had their 3rd kid on Feb 22nd. We found out from Mom. I would have found out from Lloyd's facebook, except I rarely log into my account. Good news is he's updating his blog again, so Heather and I can keep up with the Jiang-D'Souza household. It's a private blog so you'll need an invite from Lloyd to read.

I checked the facebook notification settings, and it's all-or-nothing if I want to get email updates from friend's status updates. I was hoping the settings would allow me to specify lists, but it's not that granular. Now that I reached my goal of 100 friends, I was thinking of cutting the list to those that are actually friends, and not just people I've met in my life. Work people could be moved to LinkedIn (that would be a funny message on the LinkedIn invite You are being relegated from a Friend to a Contact...) I started thinking about security after signing up for a foursquare account, and then reading about the Please Rob Me site. So my foursquare checkins are not public, and feed only my facebook status (which only friends can see), and not my twitter account which is public. I'm trying not to specify my location in my Twitter updates. This blog is public, but is generally historical.

Well that's it for now.