Chan's Personal Blog

One of my new interests has been rock climbing. A group of us Yahoos try to go once a week. This week marked our seventh expedition. We've been gradually cranking up the difficulty of the climbs.

The rock climbing gym that we go to use the Yosemite Decimal System Class to rate the difficulty of various climbs. The climbs that we do are class 5.


The gym has climbs that range from 5.1 all the way to 5.13a. We all generally started with 5.6-5.7 climbs. 5.9 seemed very difficult and 5.10a seemed unattainable. After going this many times, the group I climb with can do 5.8 and 5.9.

Today I ventured out to do a little shopping during the infamous "Black Friday" which is the day after American Thanksgiving. Supposedly they have insane sales at stores during Black Friday, so a lot of people try to do a good chunk of their Christmas shopping that day. I happen to live near one of the biggest malls in the area, so I decided to go there for shopping. It's also pretty close, about 2km away. Stupidly, I took the bus, and it took almost 25 minutes to get there because traffic was so bad. It would have been faster just to walk.

When I got to the mall, I saw many police officers directing a huge line of traffic. Finding a parking spot was almost impossible. When I finally got inside, there were more people that usual, but I wouldn't call it crowded. In my mind, I was expecting massive lines of shoppers and many rabid bargain hunting shoppers, but I didn't see that. Maybe it's because I went in the afternoon and the hardcore shoppers already did their pillaging in the morning.

Walking around, I really didn't see any jaw dropping deals. A lot of the sales were fairly typical. Other stores like The Gap didn't even have any specials. Electronic stores had some better deals for big ticket items, but I'm definitely not in the market for big ticket items at the moment.

I bought a few clothes and that was it. Hopefully the fashion police back in Victoria approve of it. In either case, not really impressed by Black Friday.

Oh, and I was asking around why they call it "Black Friday." It's called that because retailers sell a lot of stuff that day, and their finances go back into the black (ie make money), so that's why they call it Black Friday.

My guess is that Black Friday wasn't huge this time around because there's recession talks, so people are probably more careful about their spending. On top of that, the whole sub-prime mortgage problem, and people making higher mortgage payments probably means less disposable income.

Ever since my move down to California, I have been without TV. There are two reasons for this. First, I actually have to get around to buying a TV, but that's not exactly the #1 thing on my needs list Secondly, I can't really justify getting cable since I don't spend a lot of time at home these days. When I am home, I'm usually busy with work, cooking, or cleaning.

Cable TV down here is expensive as there are no competitors, and the cable company is evil. They somehow managed to pass a law that made Comcast the exclusive TV provider to many apartment complexes. Satellite TV is far cheaper, but it's not an option for my apartment complex. In either case, I hate the idea of paying for a ton of channels that I don't watch.

Surprisingly enough, I don't really miss cable TV as much as I thought I would. A lot of networks are now putting their shows online for free, so it has softened the blow. In particular, I'm still able to catch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report each night. The channels I do miss is the Discovery Channel and The Food Network. If cable would offer some a la carte experience where I only pay for channels that I want, that would rock.

In either case, there has been an unexpected side effect with having no TV.