Outdoor Rock Climbing in Downtown Toronto

I like climbing on rocks, that is to say I enjoy the challenge of rock climbing. I can't say why really, there are lots of other sports out there that I could participate in. I guess one part of it is the intense personal challenge it places in front of you. You are not there to compete against others, although that happens sometimes, you are there to do your personal best and improve yourself. The other part of it is I like the physical and mental challenge that it presents. It's like putting together a puzzle...while balanced on your toes on tiny pieces of rock while gripping desperately with the tips of fingers to other tiny outcroppings. OK, maybe that glorifies it a bit but you get the idea it makes both your mind and body work and it makes them work together and hard, and I enjoy that.

Lately I have been rising early on a weekday morning and making the trek to my local indoor climbing facility, The Rock Oasis and partaking in an offshoot of rock climbing proper known as bouldering. I waffled when typing that last sentence as it could be argued that bouldering was really around first and that rock climbing proper is an offshoot of it, but enough semantics and back to the point at hand. I love bouldering! It distills the essence of what I like about rock climbing into a awesomely potent form.

For those of you not familiar with bouldering it is basically a style of rock climbing undertaken without a rope and normally limited to very short climbs over a crash pad so that a fall will not result in serious injury. Now that is a very bland straightforward answer which I actually stole outright from the first line in the description of bouldering in Wikipedia. What I have discovered, and those of you that boulder will know what I am talking about, is that bouldering takes the crux moves, the most difficult part of a climb, and makes that into what you are focused entirely on. It takes the most challenging part of a normal rock climbing route and places it front of you to work on over and over until you unlock the proper sequence and poof! The problem is solved! ... or you give up because the problem is too damn difficult!

This new found love of bouldering has drawn me to think a lot about it in my off time...like right now. Usually, when I have off time I am some where in the vicinity of a machine that connects me to the internet and this has led me to a site some of you might of heard of...YouTube. On this YouTube I stumbled across all manner of different bouldering and climbing videos but one in particular caught my eye. Check it out at the top of the page if you haven't already. It is a short sort of documentary about two massive boulders that were moved from Cornwall to an area in London England and set up as an urban bouldering area.

This has got to be the best idea I have ever heard of! It was done as an art instillation but also a place for people to boulder in an urban centre. Now I live in the lovely city of Toronto and I thought to myself why can't we do something equally as cool?

So here's my the link to the Facebook group I created in order to drum up some support for this project: Urban Bouldering Installation Toronto
If you think its a neat idea sign up and let us know! Show your support, who knows maybe it will become a reality.

Predators!

I am so stoked to see the new Predators movie! It looks so good! Words fail me at the potential awesomeness this movie could contain! I have tried to collect as many videos and trailers about the Predators movie in one place for your viewing enjoyment. Check out the main trailer below.

Main Trailer -



I especially like the little character spotlights they have been putting out. It gives you a glimpse at individual characters in the movie and a little background about each one. My personal favorite is Hanzo, the Yakuza but I am a sucker for anything remotely samurai in nature. I am really rooting that Hanzo will survive through the movie but my guess is he won't. Check out his featurette as well as a few of the other characters below.

Hanzo played by Louis Ozawa Changchien



Did I mention that Predators also has Danny Trejo in it! Yes Danny Trejo that guy that plays the scary Mexican in... well anything that ever had a scary Mexican in it! Check out his character featurette below.

Cuchillo - played by Danny Trejo



I've never been a big fan of female characters as mercenary assassin types, they just come off as unbelievable and forced to me. I hope it turns out other wise for Alice Braga's character Isabelle in Predators because she definitely brings some hotness to the screen!

Isabelle - played by Alice Braga



I find Topher Grace's acting to be unconvincing and mediocre at best so I am hoping his character Edwin doesn't stick around too long. However, with Edwin being the odd man out, he is a doctor while the other characters are warriors, I think that something special is in store for this character which means I will just have to put up with Topher's acting!

Edwin played by Topher Grace



I think the casting of Laurence Fishburn as Noland was a great choice I have liked everything I have seen him in.

Noland - played by Laurence Fishburn



This next clip just blows my mind it looks so good and gives a little insight into Fishburn's character, Noland.

Noland Clip -



Royce played by - Adrien Brody - a mercenary who reluctantly leads a group of elite warriors who come to realize they’ve been brought together on an alien planet… as prey. With the notable exception of a disgraced physician, they are all cold-blooded killers – mercenaries, Yakuza, convicts, death squad members.



another Royce clip!



We are still waiting on character featurettes for the following characters:

Stans played by Walton Goggins


Nikolai played by Oleg Taktarov


Mombasa played by Mahershalalhashbaz Ali


Without giving too much away the jist of the story is that a group of the most deadliest men on earth have been gathered together and placed on the predators hunting planet to act as game for the Predators. Check out the video below which gives you a glimpse at a bit of the set used in the movie as well as a hint from director Nimrod Antal about the possibility of a sequel!

Set Tour -



I can't wait for this film to come out! I hope you are all as excited as I am! See you all opening night, July 9/2010!

To learn more about Predators check out the following links:

IMBD - Predators

Rotten Tomatoes - Predators

Predators-movie.com - This site has some awesome little games and features built into it, including one where you can build out a human or predator team using your Facebook friends and pitt them against the other side! So cool!

document.write()...do not want

So checking my email this morning I noticed a broken ad displaying.

I usually notice the ads on the page more now than I notice the actual content. I work in advertising and it seems my brain has made this switch without my knowledge or consent.

Now not only is this ad not displaying properly but it is using an outdated way of displaying. These two factors drive me crazy, especially when being used by large online entities such as Hotmail or Google...yes, Google uses this method still.

Now the first part of this problem makes me mental as an ad guy for obvious reasons. A large organization serving broken ads for an extended period of time... this should have been caught and fixed a long time ago. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being though. Let’s say that this ad is served by an affiliate network and only displays occasionally and in rotation with many other advertisers which would make the issue much more difficult to troubleshoot. This places the onus of QAing these ads back on the organizations that are providing the tags in the first place, the affiliate networks.

I have worked with a number of affiliate networks in my time and not one of them has proper checks and balances to catch these sorts of problems and for the most part they don't seem to care. This means extra diligence and headaches for publishers...yay.

Now the second part of this whole document.write issue is why is it still being used at all? It is a dirty way of inserting content to be sure and has a few known issues:

- content being added using document.write may not appear in the page’s DOM so no access to accessibility APIs

- document.write does not work properly in XHTML when pages are served as XML

Now a nice fix for this was proposed over at Sitepoint by James Edwards.

However, the boat was missed slightly when we talk about who is to blame for this issue. It most definitely is not the publisher (site) for the most part. Usually you have to look no further than the affiliate networks. There seems to be little to no regard for the ads that they load up or allow their clients to load into their network and distribute far and wide across the web.

So if they don't care, how do we make them care? Well I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that advertising is driven by revenue. So let’s hit them in their pocket books. If every publisher that experiences a problem with their ads stands up and says we will not run your advertisements until you deal with these problems we might get somewhere. Ya... when pigs fly this will happen. Even the very thought of losing revenue is a big no no in advertising. So where does that leave us? Back at square one...with broken ads.

A couple more interesting articles about document.write() can be found at:


Why document.write() doesn't work in XML
Accessibility1
Accessibility2
Accessibility3
Accessibility4