How can you not love the Brier? Taking place at the Calgary Saddledome until the 15th, the Brier is the national men’s curling championship of Canada. Once you get past the rules, the game is exciting to watch and watching it live is much better than on TV.

Michelle and I were there on Monday to witness this lack rock by Ontario to win the game. Amazing.

You can still easily get tickets at Ticketmaster for approximately $30 to $50 a ticket, just in time for the finals on Sunday. Go Alberta!

Not a moment too soon: Calgary Transit’s horrendous trip planning system is now integrated with Google Maps, so now you can trip plan using the Google Maps website. Its super easy to use too: enter in your directions like normal (for example, going from Canada Olympic Park to the Saddledome), and select your transportation method from the left. Pull open “Show Options” and you can customize your arrival and departure times. Ridiculously easy and typically accurate, and thats all we ever really wanted to begin with.

If you’re lucky enough to use an iPhone, the benefit of paying for your data plan just paid off. Pull open the Maps application and use your maps like normally, and now select the bus icon on the top (iPhone 2.2 and higher). You’ll get the exact same thing, except now you will know exactly when the next bus will come and what is the best route to take.

This is what technology should do; make our lives easier. Kudos to Calgary Transit for sharing their transit times with Google and letting the information be used in a great way. And Edmonton, don’t feel left out; ETS is also doing the whole public transportation on Google Maps too.

Presuming you didn’t randomly type in my name by chance (because that would be creepy), welcome to the new Jon Lin blog. This site looks pretty much the same as the old Linisus Blog, but when busy season dies down, I will roll in a new theme to mark a change of the times.

If you are using RSS feed readers, please re-subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss a beat. Tim Hortons Roll Up The Rim busy season is coming up, and I’m already prepared.

If you’ve never used RSS feeds, its the easiest way to keep on top of all your favorite sites. Most of your favorite sites use RSS, including sites like The Globe And Mail, Mack’s Edmonton-based Blog, gadget news at Engadget or even Chinese gossip at Batgwa.

To get started using RSS using Google Reader, just press this button and you’ll automatically be asked to subscribe to the new Jon Lin Blog:

Again, thanks for taking the effort to transfer your RSS feeds and bookmarks to this new site.

Links are broken everywhere, oh no! Please feel free to comment and tell me if things are broken in certain places, because I’m sure there are broken links or pictures on content less than a year old.

A broken Bodum Pavina glass on Saturday morning. After buying 6 of these and having only two left, I think I’m done with these nice looking but too fragile glass cups.

Clicking on a specific pin reveals the name, and then if you want more details, click on the area name – you’re thrown into seeing all the pictures you took in the vicinity of the pin. Zooming in does no good, as you still see the distinct pin but still need to go to the “location” mini-set.

Yes, I understand that flipping an individual picture will reveal where you took it. But if you do that, you lose the charm of geotagging – watching your progression on chronologically, from intersection to intersection.

How to fix Places: don’t dumb down the aggregation by affixing pins. Use some computer power and generate thumbnails for those pins. Take a note from Google Earth’s readability of GeoRSS, or even Flickr. Places shouldn’t be a board on the wall; it should be a new way to tell stories.

Faces must also realize my life is so plain and drab, because it acts as great entertainment when identifying people. No iPhoto, Jon doesn’t look like Michelle. No iPhoto, that tire isn’t a face. Not the doorknob either. And definitely not the sushi roll. Facial recognition didn’t improve after training either, as it constantly got confused between myself, Michelle and two others. It was amusing to start, but after awhile rejecting pictures became a chore and lost it’s “wow” moments.

The downside is that iPhoto ties so tightly with Flickr that if you delete pictures from iPhoto, then they disappear from Flickr. This makes sense until you run out of hard disk space – when I run out of space, one of my cleanup spots is iPhoto, where archiving and deleting pictures is a common event. I want to be able to delete pictures without affecting Flickr; the only way to do so currently is to unauthorize iPhoto first to break the link to Flickr, delete the pictures, then reauthenticate. The lack of documentation over this adds to the drama and chore.

Apple, just do these things and iPhoto will be worthy of the 2009 label.

The Nikon GP-1 is a GPS receiver that attaches straight to certain Nikon SLR cameras, and enables photographers to embed photo geotags (longitude and latitude data) onto pictures taken.

In the box is nothing too special – the receiver, cables to connect to the camera via 10-pin (D200, D300, D3 etc.) or the special accessory cable for the D90, and the usual paperwork. The receiver itself is an lightweight plastic module that can be attached to your hotshoe or the strap with the supplied camera strap attachment. There is also a mini USB port on the dongle so you can attach your computer directly to the dongle, and an extra port designed for a remote trigger (MC-DC2).

We took the GP-1 for a spin over at a local ski mountain, and it fared quite well. A cold start (boot time from extended off) took no longer than 30 seconds, a hot start in 3 seconds. It also geotagged data directly on the picture with no hiccups – easy. See the results on the Flickr map of the day’s shots.

Weaknesses of the GP-1 are few but annoying. For example, GPS data is only recorded when the light is either blinking or solid green. This means that when you move indoors, it expectedly loses signal, but it would be nice if the GP-1 retained and used the last recorded GPS for tagging.

Another weakness is the relatively slow timing of the hot start, coupled with weighing whether or not you will keep the GPS always-on, or on-only-when-camera-is-active. If you decide to use the latter power setting, the GP-1 stops recording GPS data a few seconds after the shutter button is released. This means that if you casually put your camera down between spontaneous shots, you risk not recording GPS data since a hot start takes at least 3 seconds. The only way to compensate is to leave the GPS configured to always-on, meaning you have to be more cognisent when moving from session to session, turning the camera on and off between lulls in action. Obviously there is a battery performance hit, but the drain wasn’t significant.

Overall I am pleased with the Nikon GP-1. The near $300 CAD price tag may scare most hobbyists away, but it’s a step up from merging external track data or worse, manual tagging.

Presentation points: the breakfast skillet at Cora’s looks just like
advertised – loaded with fruits and general deliciousness. If you are
not in a rush (2 and a half hours fron start to finish, including an
one hour to wait), I’d recommend Cora’s over Denny’s. Just don’t
expect too much out of the coffee.

As seen at Purdy’s Chocolate Market Mall. Please note that Lychee
Packet sadly does not contain any lychee, and is actually a normal
‘lai see’ red envelope.

We finally hosted the housewarming party on the 30th (New Year’s Eve Eve), and it was a huge hit. Michelle and I whipped up some hot Crab and Articoke Dip, cured Salmon Lox, Zuppa Tosaca soup, and Brie and Cranberry baguette. Connie also prepared a refreshing French-style chicken sandwich. Overall it worked out great, and we have a massive amounts of food leftover to boot.

Thanks to everyone who attended, rocked out and cooperatively took home extra cheesecake as well! See you in 2009!

Note to self and any party hosters: One baguette loaf with either Brie and Cranberry, or Bruschetta, feeds five people well. Trust me.

Photo time lapse: Camera was propped high above the desk, taking a shot every 30 seconds, from 5:00pm until 10-ish (when the battery died).