Vancouver 2010 Opening Ceremonies
The opening ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics just finished. Overall, I'm impressed.

The first few minutes of the show were a little slow and had me quite worried, but when things took off, it was a great presentation. Most memorable was that the music was an amazing, continuous, live soundtrack; I will be very interested to find out more about that. The performances were well choreographed, and I really liked the lighting projection system.

While I'm not a fan of k.d. lang, her performance of "Hallelujah" was a highlight. I thought the aboriginal theme was overplayed and a little to focal considering the other things this country has to offer, and the French-first irked me. I thought driving Gretzky across the entire downtown of Vancouver, in the rain, with the torch, was a little silly.

The biggest annoyance was that the HD broadcast was in Purtuguese on Omni1, and in Mandarin on Omni2. If I wanted to understand and actually anjoy the show over the commentary, I had to watch on cruddy rabbit-ears CTV. I found myself switching back and forth to take advantage of picture quality. Why would they do that?!

A proud Canadian moment.

Sunny California
Um, Happy New Year. It seems I haven't been writing much lately. January flew by in the blink of an eye, and February is threatening to do so as well.

I do like to document my travels, so it's strange that I forgot to put up a photo and some words about my recent trip to San Diego late last month. Blame it on the economy, blame it on business model, blame it on plain old circumstance, but I just don't get to travel as much lately as I've had the pleasure to in the last couple of years.

All of that made the San Diego trip a very enjoyable mid-winter diversion. Sunny and relatively warm. I can see why people are flocking to that part of the world.

It was quite a contrast walking around at sunrise, with palm trees and an ocean breeze, and coming back to Ottawa to a brisk thirty-below evening.