Pleasant Lifestyle » fun

Visiting the Promenade

samson — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:23:45 +0000

“He is wet, mama!” a little kid said aloud to his mother as I line up at the local McDonalds for an ice coffee within the super warm Promenade mall on Bathurst. The line up is extremely lengthy, boring and tedious that i’ve started this article while still lining up.

It must have been years since I last set foot in this shopping mall, so long that it have completely changed. In my recollection, there used to be a nice amusement park like section within the mall, on the upper-deck. This section acts more like a permanent version of the traveling amusement rides group, with rides, pop corn, and other carnival like booths permanently within the mall. That entire section seems to have disappeared and renovated in to an Old Navy store. The center of the mall is replaced by a restaurant / food court mix, with an outdoor like design.

The mall’s designer have added a lot of natural ingredients to a cement oriented building. Chairs, ceilings and many other designs are of wood base, with green plants popping up nearly every corner.

My personal favorite is the use of skylights in the shopping concourses. It not only reduces electricity cost during the day, but create this warm summer street feeling even on a cold winter day. I believe this is also the designers’ plan, as the concourses are lined with a mix of real and fake windows. Real windows are the actual windows of offices on the third floor of the mall while fake windows separate the inside from the outside. With all of these designs and many others more, it makes the people inside really comfortable while traversing the mall for their own business.

Side note, my ice coffee cost me twenty-five minutes of my life…. T_T

Its exam time!!!

samson — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:06:58 +0000

Hey all, it has been awhile since I last wrote anything on this blog. The reason is actually very simple, I was buried with work. Recently, I had the pleasure of returning to school from a different point of view, one that is of a school support staff.

It is amazing, coming from a slightly recent graduate, I found myself best when working for non-profit organizations!! I am actally considering joining the university’s IT help desk, and be very happy about it than when I was a developer for a financial company!!!

Well, I find myself pretty evil as well, as I am writting this inside an exam hall!! What the heck am I doing practoring an exam, you may ask, well I am not! Nor am I writting it, I am here merely as a technical support, as some of the exams may involve computer file submissions, if a student’s laptop were to seize function, it is then my role to attempt a quick fix, or a quick swap, so their exams can be finish on time.

Where are them Snow Plows??

samson — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:50:50 +0000

Today was a fun day for Toronto. At least 20 cm of Snow fell on the City in a few hours. Another time, in the ‘LONG’ history of the Weather Network, the out come are close to predictions. Almost all Television stations which can afford their own weather forecast specialist predicted somewhere between 20 to 25 cm of snow for good old T.O.. The government contracted snow clearing companies have acknowledged this fact yesterday by appearing on some evening News stating that they are ready for this snow storm.

Yet, almost all roads were not plow this morning, hell they weren’t even salted. Where are the snow plows? Rush hour is between 5:30 am to 9:00am, clearing the roads after 9:00am wouldn’t reduce accidents during rush hour! Didn’t the plow guys just said they were ready? If they knew a storm is coming, and were all prep and ready, why weren’t they doing what they were paid to do?
Maybe if the streets were clear this morning, lots of accidents could have been prevented. It is already too late for the victims of those accidents.