Last few weeks before Christmas countdown starts! Well my Christmas started already.

Posted by Elliswordpress on December 3, 2013

Went to Old Spaghetti Factory in their new location in WEM for dinner. French onion soup. So fatty and salty and cheesy and rich and delicious.

Hunter’s chicken which is like a breaded breast with hollandaise sauce and mizithra cheese/butter spaghetti. This is like my all time comfort food dish.

Thai curry noodles.

Dim sum at Dynasty in chinatown. Everything I love in dim sum- pan fried pork buns and ja leung are my two faves.

Congee was cold and not as tasty as it usually is. Kidn of disappointed. I’ve taken a huge liking to congee since meeting W.

Some sort of organ dish that sounds alien and kidn of revolting to my westernized ears but tastes delicious.

They’re tearing down the old postal facility and apparently putting up the provinical museum here which will be very interesting considering its proximity to Chinatown and the homeless population. Not sure if that’s just going to push out the population.

Lots of snow

Our little buggy taking us around downtown.

Massive snow drift in the parking lot with truck to scale.

Checking out campus with the recent snowfall.

Thinking about getting a gas guzzler to replace our little Fit for winter driving and highway driving. She’s a perfect city car but I just don’t trust a tiny car like this on the highway with the Canadian winter roads.

Dinner with S at the Indian Bistro. Can’t remember what we ordered but it was pretty rich and flavorful.

Had tons of naan bread cause I LOVE carbs.

I love the lighting inside this place.

Looking outside the patio in the restaurant at the forlorn winter neighborhood.

Enjoying the bromantic lighting.

Seriously look at how cool this bar looks!

Local neighborhood in the winter.

Eating at Taipan with M- he always gets this western chinese food dish that I later regret not ordering because it looks so incredible.

Portuguese chicken, my usual comfort food.

W made a nice pasta dish for me

At Southgate eating my two favorite dishes- the Koryo jumbo combo that’s supposed to be for two people

And the Asian Villlage three curry combo – this time I asked for more butter chicken sauce and it was nicely smothered on the rice.

Eating McDonald’s breakfast with my folks

And then getting Arbys for an afternoon snack. These curly fries were really really good and well seasoned- salty and spicy.

The roast beef sandwich was actually really good even though it looked kind of nasty. I haven’t had Arby’s in ages and I was pretty happy with this.

And um this happened on my way out- I walked by teh Microsoft kiosk in Southgate and remembered they had them massively discounted to 199 CDN fromthe original MSRP of 500 USD. After their massive write off and strugglign identity issues of who the RT is for, I wasn’t really surprised to see the cuts.

I really wasn’t expecting to buy another tablet because I kind of got to this point where I have a lot of good deal tablets that become useless after awhile. Like my HP TX1000 tablet that burnt out. However, I was aching for a lighter alternative when I didn’t need a powerhouse mobile station like my Sony. There’s lots of times when I need to go to a seminar or lecture and I just need a little guy to do work on and flick through slides. This happens a lot in my life right now as I run between being a graduate student, hospital employee and fiance. Sometimes, even though I’m a pretty big guy, I don’t want to take 19 lbs of equipment with me everywhere, especially on transit. But I also don’t want to spend a whole lot of coin on something that I am not going to use much.

Take for instance this back flash to like 2007 when tablets were still a confused but exotic item. I picked up the Nokia N800 from Dell for a hug efire sale price of like 170 CDN dollars. This tablet ran Maemo and was kind of exciting with limited app support, really neat hardware features like dual stereo and dual memory card slots, pop out webcam and removable battery, really terrible resistive screen that scratched from the stylus and a feature set of accessories that nobody packs with their products today. I was excited about this but there were major limitations like not being able to log onto my universtiy’s wifi system because of a lack of certain programs. This changed when we switch our WiFi system over but by then the tablet was pretty useless. What disappointed me most about this was the lack of support afterwards and it slowly became a novelty item rather than a useful item.

So I’m really hoping that’s not going to happen with this. Because I can see a lot of potential with this tablet.

Surprisingly it works really well with my peripherals I already have- the Apple wireless keybaord with the InCase origami keyboard case/tablet stand and Logitech MX Anywhere mouse both worked! The mouse was the most surprising- I just popped the wireless dongle in the usb port and it worked. I can’t install the Setpoint mouse control software because this isn’t actually running full windows but the basic mouse features work perfectly. Very happy with that. I don’t need to buy some janky tablet accessory that doesn’t work as well as the non mobile version.

This is the Surface RT compared to the Playbook. Recently, I had decided that I had enough time to sideload some seriously missing Android apps into my Playbook to try to restore functionality- in particular Dropbox and an office suite that doesn’t suck were high on my list. Dropbox ended up working well but the kingsoft office suite was REALLY limited and annoying to use. There’s one major thing I need from a tablet – I need mobile productivity when I simply cannot deal with the massive weight and power my Sony VAIO S15 package requires. This is what sold me on the Surface- full blown Office with side by side windows in apps. That and the excellent magnesium build made me just swoon with excitement- 1.5lbs and full office? Not some janky mobile office alternative? Yes please. And a screen that is big enough for me to do work on? That doesn’t become redundant with my laptop? Its the perfect size in between my Galaxy Note II’s 5.5 inch screen and VAIO’s 15.5 inch screen. I’m really happy with it so far.

I picked up these Everlast grip strengtheners from Walmart- I foudn in my side bends especially, my grip was loosening before my targeted muscle was tiring out. I’m hoping to be able to really push the strength of my grip so that’s not limiting my strength focus. I’m especially excited with how adjustable it is and how strong the last stage is- it really takes a lot of effort for me to close it on this setting.

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