Went with Andrew to the Apple Aperture 2 release seminar at downtown Simon Fraser University yesterday. As a huge Apple fan of course I wasn’t going to miss this one. It was really packed when we got there, and the seminar had already started. We were kind of like sneaking in and blocking everyone’s view by walking around the room looking for seats. Anyway, get right to the point. The seminar was AWESOME. Aperture 2 is AWESOME period. This piece of little software does wayyyy more than I thought it could do. I haven’t used it before so I thought it’d be some kind of noob-ish photo editing software which doesn’t have too many fancy features..etc., but turned out to be wayyyyy cooler than I thought! The presenter showed a lot of stuff in this 3 hours “demo”, most of them being insanely cool. Still remember he was saying that Aperture 2 could extract GPS information from a picture (he demo-ed it to us) and is able to show where a picture was taken on Google map! Also fancy features like, timezone conversion so you can specify in the software the country the pictures were taken, and it automatically does a conversion on the time stamp of the picture with the timezone differences. I was really impressed with this other feature called “versioning”. You can create different “versions” of the same picture, say for example you adjust the brightness on the original picture, you can save this adjustment to “version 1″ of the picture. Do some more adjustments, and save it to “version 2″ of the picture…and so on. Cool thing is that these different “versions” don’t take up any disk space since they contain only the “changes” you made, and when you open say “version 1″ of the picture, the application bascially grab the original picture from the disk, and apply the “version 1″ changes to it on the fly and show it to the screen. So cool! There were lots of other WOW features. Overall I’m very impressed.

Anyway time for bed, have to get up at around 5am. Whistler snowboarding tomorrow! Going to be the last boarding for this year! So stoked to go!

Nothing much to write about for today…got up, ate, work, ate, more work, ate, some work, write blog, did Mixi, sleep.

Oh, going to review an awesome anime “Akira” that I recently watched probably tomorrow

Wasn’t able to hold my cravings for snowboarding >< Went again with friend to Grouse Mountain last night. It sucked a bit since we weren’t able to get there until maybe 8pm since I was trying to buy a pair of gloves as my last pair was already torn up. Went to numerous places like Sport Mart and Coast Mountain / Sport Chek none of them carried them, pretty fricking crazy. Not even sure why since they did carry all the other stuff like boards/jackets/pants…etc. So ended up going to the series of snowboarding stores on the 4th Avenue and Burrard Street. Only 2 out of 4 stores carried gloves, and one of the 2 stores that carried it had pretty crappy ones, so I was forced to grab a pair off store called “PacificBoarder“. Well, it was a farily decent pair of leather gloves ($110 after tax! *cries*) so hopefully it’ll last forever…

Anyway boarding wasn’t as enjoyable as last time. Snow was so hard packed, bascially all icy and slippery. It made it so difficult to turn as I didn’t want to fall as often so I tend to be ultra cautious which lowered my confidence (I think). Fell pretty hard a couple times, and for once I twisted my right shoulder and I’m still in pain now (could barely lift my right arm)….sigh maybe some broken tenden or something? The view / visiblity was awesome though! Could see everything so clearly and of course we went to the top of the mountain and took some really nice nightview pics of downtown vancouver. We boarded till 10pm when the guy at the lift said farewell to us. Wish I could do a couple more runs since my body warmed up late and I still remember I was feeling more confident towards the end…could totally have done a couple more fun runs…

Went to the 2008 “Massive Tech Show” at Canada Place today with Andrew. Was a pretty boring show, as usual, lol….but who cares the whole point of going was to grab the freebies that people usually give away at shows. There were lots of booths, and some familiar names like Yahoo, Marque, Peer1 Network, Cira.ca….etc. We were basically just wandering around aimlessly and scoping for free stuff to grab…lol. I got a couple of pens, a 1GB USB drive (thanks Cira.ca!!!!) and an interesting Yahoo “robotic pen” which folds up quite nicely…and some notepads I think.

Even though overall it was pretty boring there were a couple interesting booths. One of them was selling this funny little robots called i-BUDDY that look 90% alike the MSN icon. You connect them to your USB port and they would respond to your MSN messages by flapping wings or changing the color of their head area. I can’t see a reason of buying it but I just thought it’s a pretty neat little gadget. There was another booth showing off a hugeeee touch sensitive projection screen where you could use their special designed “pens” to draw on. Imagine standing in front of a projection screen and drawing/moving the cursor right on the screen itself. I thought it was really cool…felt like I was in some sci-fi movies or something (I took a pic, lol).

We also was able to check out the all-new Macbook Air at the macstation.ca booth. Jesus it was SO thin… and the screen was SO bright and vibrant. Well guess everyone already knew how it looks but it was just cool to be able to get a hands on experience with it. Guess I’ll have to buy 8 of these guys now….lol. Anyway, here’s a picture of all the free stuff that I scored today…lol