I’m sure we all “know” that internet in Japan must be hella fast – but how fast is it really? Well from the speed test results above, at least 50Mbit/s! This speed test was taken from the internet in my hotel room – but we’ve been told that lots of users in Japan city centers are running 1GBbit/s (125MB/s) lines! sheeeeet.

Imagine downloading a DVD movie (4.5GB) in roughly 30 seconds! That’s just ridiculous. I hear torrents are not as prevalent as it is in North America – which makes me wonder what all that speed is for. Anyway, I just got into Osaka – so I’m going to head out for some night life.

Hello from TOKYO! I’ve been in Japan for the last 5 days, and I’ll be here for about 10 more. I’ve got a lot of awesome content coming in the near future! I’ve been on a mission to drink every single vending machine drink, eat the most delicious ramen, and snap photos of the most beautiful districts in Tokyo.

Tokyo at night is absolutely amazing.

I will also be visiting Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Kobe in addition to Tokyo – and a few other cities along the way. If you have a suggestion – hit me in the comments! The picture above just a small preview of my adventures in Japan… so stay tuned!

Oh, and Canon s90 – I heart you. so much.

Ohhhhhhhh Google.

Remember them about 10 years ago? Fighting away at Yahoo, Altavista and AOL with their simple, clean and speedy search results? Yeah well, man they’ve come a long way.

Anyway, back to the point – I finally decided to make the switch to Google Chrome. Okay fine, I made it sound a little bigger than it really is. But the truth is… you really get attached to your browser! Well at least I did. My firefox is customized to the brim! Skinned, and with so many quality extensions/plugins that I’m not quite sure how people stay productive without em.

So why the switch? The big reason? Speed. And also just slightly because Firefox was starting to get a little glitchy/buggy for me. Open 3 windows of FF, and load about 20-40 tabs in each – and let the glitches begin. Chrome handles my 4 windows with 30 tabs so well it always feels like I just started a fresh session. There’s absolutely no indication I’m on my 100th tab…

Aside from that – Chrome starts up milesssss quicker that Firefox. It generally loads pages significantly quicker, and it’s tab management system is far superior to Firefox’s. Since each Chrome tab consumes a separate process – one frozen tab won’t kill the entire browser – simply pull up the Chrome Task Manager and kill that specific tab. Brilliant. Anyway, I’ve also been hesitant to switch over for the last while because Chrome didn’t orginally support Extensions (custom/3rd-party plugins that add functionality to the browser). The good news – it now does! All the essentials are there – Adblock, Session Manager, Firebug, Gmail Notifier, and IE Tab just to name a few. Heck, I found a neato Chrome-only one called Beautify Facebook! lol.

Anyway. The switch was quick (Google Chrome simply imports all your bookmarks and history from Firefox), and we’re back to Business As Usual. Except one thing. Where in the world is the goddamn Master Password feature? I hate the fact anyone on my computer can view all my saved passwords…

// end tech talk

So I decided to swing by Toronto last weekend to meet up with some friends, but we were a bit early. It was a pretty shitty day – wet, windy and cold – and by the time we got through all the traffic it was already around 6, which meant most fun places were already closed! How lame! Except, well, for the ROM, or Royal Ontario Museum! So after some typical pub food and a few drinks, we went inside the ROM to look at the dinosaurs!

The ROM building is quite a looker! It’s crazy shaped (as you can kinda see from the first picture) and it’s even crazier inside. The hallways are all weird shaped, and you hit dead ends randomly! Also, because of all the dead ends, you feel like you’ve missed random exhibits here and there – what a mess! Anyway, aside from the weird design, the exhibits were pretty cool. There’s a whole floor on animals, then another floor on dinosaurs and other ancient stuff. There’s quite literally 4-5 floors of exhibits, and each floor is reasonably huge – so there’s definitely tons of stuff to see. Unfortunately, we only had about an hour to explore since we were meeting up with others soon. Anyway – if you’re bored in Toronto and it’s raining outside – give the ROM a spin… it’ll definitely kill 1-2 hours. :)

Everyone always seems to be asking me the same questions… how’s life in waterloo, or as I call it, ‘loo? Well, it’s about time I snapped some photos!

Today was bearable! -1 *C.. by far one of the warmest days since I’ve been here, so I stepped outside for a few shots. I had to take my gloves off and I didn’t want to walk too far, but hopefully these pictures give you an idea of the simple, quiet neighbourhood city of ‘loo! Lots of students, but everyone here’s too busy studying – and plus, I’m sure they’re sick of the snow anyway. A good way to think about the weather is that every time it rains in Vancouver – it just snows here! On one hand, no umbrellas are needed, no rainboots, you can’t get hit by a car jetting through a puddle, and well, you can’t jump in puddles either. But on a nice sunny day, you can still get wind chills hitting -20… and trust me, it’s frickin’ icy cold!

9000, 9700, 9520

Say hellooooo to my beautiful Monday -to- Friday’s!  Yes, I most definitely probe, slap, and rub these berries every day, and well, I’m not so sure they love me anymore. :( But hey, it’s strictly business!