Paul Henman at henman.ca

Apart from my race notes and the odd auto-posted bookmark, I’ve not done an update since the Spirit of Toronto two weeks ago, so what’s happened since then?

• I took a day off and tried to make a dent in my never-ending To Do list
• There was the annual badminton competition – Mark & I were knocked out at exactly the same point as last year, so still no medals for us
• Most of Sunday was taken up with moving my stuff from one (work) laptop to another – most of it went well but my Outhouse configuration wasn’t copied over so I’m still trying to get it to behave the way I like I’ll tolerate
• Monday was Victoria Day, which is a stat day in Canada so we borrowed a friend’s car and headed down to Niagara. A friend’s mum & aunt were over from England so we took them to a few wineries (listed below), on to Niagara Falls (photo) and then had dinner at the Pillar and Post in Niagara-on-the-Lake – we finally made it home just after midnight.
  The wineries tour included:
  • Featherstone – an early start (technically before they opened, but Kerri works with them so that wasn’t a problem); the Topaz was a favourite
  • Stoney Ridge – we joined a tour then sampled a couple of wines before checking out the cheese shop
  • Henry of Pelham – lunch was the first order of business and then a few more samples; I recall the purchase of an expensive bottle but I don’t recall which one
  • Crown Bench – we picked up another bottle of the Hot Ice; the Wild Ginger Ice and one more (I think)
• Tuesday was back to work – it may have been a 4-day week but it felt more like 9 days’ effort!
• Thursday night we had dinner with our English visitors and another friend – we took them to The Nose (Gio Rana’s Really, Really Nice Restaurant) and everyone enjoyed it. Hopefully Kerri will post more details, but basically the food, wine, service & company were great.
• Yesterday I nipped downtown to CompuSmart‘s closing down sale and picked up a hard drive enclosure, then went out with Andy in the evening (a pint of Denison’s Weissbier at the Auld Spot then more wheat beer & dinner at Allen’s).
• After watching the race this morning I had a look at my tax assessment – apparently I owe them the (large) amount I calculated but somehow Kerri’s rebate is a lot less than I thought. Hmmm
  Other fun activities today include a huge pile of washing, an equally large pile of dishes, and then some reading for work. Hopefully I’ll get time to make progress with Black (gun porn on the Xbox).

In no particular order:

• it was my company’s Christmas party holiday banquet yesterday – good fun and Kerri even won $100 HMV gift certificate for singing a song!
• we saw the latest South Park – the World Of Warcraft one – excellent!
• I left an article (from Network World Canada) on my desk to remind me to post about it: just a snippet about Google, but a profound snippet nonetheless:
  

  Google Inc. wants to make the information it stores for its users easily portable so they can export it to a competing service if they are dissatisfied, the company’s chief executive officer said this month. [...] “If you look at the historical large company behaviour, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users,” he said. “The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better.”

  Excellent philosophy – giving the users the freedom to change service provider means the company has to work at keeping their customers happy. Kudos, Google.

• I missed a badminton session last week – I think it’s the first one I’ve missed in 6 months or more! Last minutes changes in plan meant a late night trying to reschedule a mass of meetings – I know not everyone will like the new plan but it’s the best that we can do, I believe.
• I replaced the server’s power supply – I knew the old PSU was getting quite noisy but now I’ve replaced it it’s evident that it was really bad – now there’s just the gentle gurgling of the liquid cooling system
• I need to upgrade the BIOS on the (Win2k) games PC as only sees ~170Gb (I think) of the new 300Gb hard drive. I’ve downloaded the updates [protected LJ entry] but the floppy drive doesn’t appear to work (it’s enabled in the BIOS, the light is on but there’s no activity and it’s not seen by Windows) and I can’t seem to convince it to boot from either a USB Flash Drive or CD/DVD … so how to get it to run the BIOS updater?
• It’s time to liven up our website – I think the blog will become the main part of the site (i.e. the main page) but I also want to update the layout a bit. See the next post (which I’ll be writing in a minute) re: a request for suggestions.

Mark and I took part in a local badminton competition (held at the University of Toronto athletic centre) yesterday – my first competition in … well, a very, very long time! We entered in class C (as did most of the people from our club), despite a few suggestions that we should have gone in B.

The morning started with an open warm-up session from 8am-8:45am – way too early if you ask me, but it was our only chance before our first match. The morning round was a round-robin, where each team in our group (C2) played everyone else, but we only played to 11 points (and no setting) because of time constraints. We won our first game, which was a relief for us both. Unfortunately we beat ourselves in the second game, against a pair from Montreal – they were good, but I could feel myself tensing up when I missed shots … and tensing up meant I missed more shots, and so the downward spiral began. We pulled ourselves together before the end but it was too late to save that game. We did, however, win the other three games.

Kerri came down to watch in the afternoon. The organisers had spent their lunchtime working out the points differences from the morning’s games, and we were moved up to the C+ group. This time the games were to be played to 21, setting at 20 (to 1 or 3 points) as needed.

Our first game started off OK but we were feeling the effects of lunch and playing a lot more points, but we battled on. In the end we lost 19-21, and both us and the other team were exhausted. It meant that we were out of the running for a medal, which was a shame but not the end of the world. In the end we won the consolation game, or “kings of the losers” as Mark put it.

After a couple of pints, I headed home, showered, then we got a lift back downtown to meetup with everyone again for dinner at the Bright Pearl. The new committee were introduced (including me, as the webmaster) and then there were some presents (mostly sports bags) to say thank you to people involved in the event’s/club’s organisation. Out came the hardware – there were medals for the top three pairs in each of the six groups – and Mark & I got a consolation prize (tape for re-gripping racquets). Finally there were a few special awards, and I was very surprised when they announced that I’d been awarded the sportsmanship award! (I got a $20 gift card for SportChek [sic], so I’ll put it toward a jacket I’ve been thinking of getting.)

We finally rolled out of the restaurant about 10:30 – some of the others were heading off to a club, but I was tired and feeling creaky so we headed home. Kerri went running at some unearthly hour this morning so I was up by about 7:30 – I didn’t/don’t ache as much as I’d feared, but I certainly know I was in a competition. I decided to take a little nap about 1:45 this afternoon … and Kerri woke me about 7pm! It’s a good job we’ve got tomorrow off!

I volunteered for the webmaster / email coordinator for my badminton club and I heard yesterday that I won the election. Mine was actually the only position on the ballot – everyone else was unopposed but I was up against the incumbent wm/ec … who I later discovered was also the club’s founder! He doesn’t play any more, so I feel a bit less guilty about beating him, but it’s still a bit odd.

The executive committee (coo!) are meeting next week to strategise (OK, it’s mainly a meet & greet for me, given I’m relatively new) but I’m going armed with a long list of questions & suggestions. The current site is all in Flash, which I will be replacing with good old text so that people can bookmark individual pages, copy information (e.g. date & venue of the upcoming competition) and hopefully get us on Google so that prospective members can actually find us! (I’m considering using a content management system or a wiki rather than cranking out HTML … but I’m not sure yet.)

Of course, given how busy my new job is keeping me, it’ll be bit of a challenge to find time to work on the website at first, but it’ll be fun.

I found some badminton facts on the BBC News website when I was looking up the shuttlecock statues The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO (following a post in the badminton community I moderate) so here they are:

1. Badminton claims to be the second most-popular participation sport in the world. Only football (soccer) beats it.
2. It’s officially the fastest racquet sport in the world. The shuttle is smashed around the court at speeds of up to 200 mph – the same speed as Eurostar!
3. Its Olympic debut was in 1992 in Barcelona. Since 1992 Asian players have won 42 of the 46 Olympic medals.
4. 1.1bn people watched the first Olympic badminton tournament on TV.
5. Simon Archer and Jo Goode won Britain’s first Olympic medal in Sydney 2000 – a bronze in the mixed doubles. Gail Emms and Nathan Robertson went one better in Athens winning a silver in the same event.
6. During an average top-level match ten shuttles are used with players hitting it roughly 400 times each. It’s a tiring business – they can travel several miles around the court
7. The record for the shortest match? Six minutes. Ra Kyung-min (South Korea) and Julia Mann (England) hold the record. Peter Rasmussen (Denmark) and Sun Jun (China) hold the record for the longest match – 124 minutes.
8. In Malaysia and Indonesia crowds of up to 15,000 people regularly fill the stands to cheer on their heroes.
9. The International Badminton Federation was established in 1934 and now has 148 member countries including England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
10. Celebrity fans include snooker player Mark Williams and golfers Padraig Harrington and Nick Faldo. You can even buy Barbie a racquet and shuttles.
11. The Chinese originally played a version of badminton called Ti Zian Ji. They didn’t use racquets though, they used their feet.
12. The Duke of Beaufort held parties at his estate, Badminton House in 1873. His guests were invited to play a game with shuttlecocks – and so the official game of badminton was born.
13. The origin of the shuttlecock is a bit hazy. One theory is that writing feathers were stuck in corks when they weren’t used. During quiet moments the ‘pen’ store would be thrown, or whacked, around.
14. Olympic shuttles are made of 16 bird feathers, string and very strong glue. The Kansas City Museum is home to the world’s largest shuttlecock – 48 times bigger than normal.
15. While most players choose synthetic strings, some still use gut made from the dried stomach lining of animals such as cows or cats.