American Le Mans

My friend Mike was shooting at Mosport this weekend at the ALMS race. He was really close to this huge accident which took out one of the cars against the barrier. Debris went everywhere. Great shot.

Gotstyle, the menswear store, is moving. Their new location is at Bathurst and Wellington.

Update: The opening is delayed until Tuesday

I got linked to this infographic from Information is Beautiful. It highlights the fact that many organic food companies are owned by the large packaged goods companies.

A few months ago, the Canadian Black Book debuted an online website for used car values. Previously this was only available to dealers or through a backdoor. This new site makes the information available to all consumers – a good tool to value your trade in or price out a used car.

Canards first Victoria’s Secret store opens tomorrow, Thursday August 26th at Yorkdale. A few of their Angels are on hand for the grand opening.

Lights made an intro to MuchMusic, it’s pretty awesome:

An important thing to know as a photographer is some basic color theory. This article on Lifehacker goes into quite a bit of detail and even offers some great Photoshop tutorials at the end. Recommended reading for anyone with an SLR.

Bloor Street Market is the new Loblaws store that arised from the ashes of the Valu-Mart that was below the Manulife building at Bay and Bloor. The new store design does not really change the layout, but the store has gotten a fresh fascade with some stone facing, and new cabinets and counters. The butcher and fishmonger areas are much more approachable and there’s a large focus on convience foods (pre-cooked foods at the deli, salad bar, prepackaged ready-to-heat meals.

There’s quite a concentration of grocery stores on Bloor. With the new Market by Longo’s , a larger Rabba’s, the exclusive Pusateri’s and Whole Foods all a block away from this location. At least I have a lot of choices. What I like is that these are grocery stores, not supermarkets. There is no pharmacist, there is no 1 hour photo lab, no consumer hard goods – pure grocery. If they can concentrate on good, fresh product, they may get a lot of loyal customers who prefer to walk than drive to get groceries.

(pictures to be added shortly)

I posted earlier about Onkyo’s new 2010 receivers, and the specs impressed me so much, I bought one. I’ve had the Onkyo TX-NR808 for about about three weeks now and it’s been a positive experience so far.

There’s a lot to like about this receiver. What pushed me to buy it over the other receivers I’ve seen in the past two years are these features:

• Graphical Overlay over HDMI – high end models had this feature but this is one of the first for a $1000 receiver
• HDMI Upconversion to 1080p – earlier models did not upconvert HDMI, only analog
• 7 HDMI ports including one front port – useful for my cameras
• USB input for iPod/iPhone control – can switch between iPhone control or using receiver GUI
• Ethernet port – for playing music found on  your PC

Like most receivers, it has a ton of features I will probably never use. This includes support for HDMI 1.4 for 3DTV, second subwoofer out and Dolby PLIIz height channels.Installation was a snap, and I finally got rid of all my optical/digital coax cables and use a complete HDMI setup for PVR, DVD and XBOX. I haven’t hooked up my PC yet – I haven’t felt the need to since the receiver can play the music on my PC using it’s network features. A great feature is the ability for the receiver to find new remote control codes using the Internet. The manual had no code numbers for the XBOX but when I used the receiver it quickly looked it up.

There are a few nuisances that take getting used to. The most distracting is a “click” sound when the receiver switches between 5-channel sound to 2-channel sound, and back. Normally this doesn’t happen often but some poor HD channels on rogers have the main show in 5.1 but switch to 2.1 during commercials. The workaround is the force the receiver into 5.1 for all inputs. I think the volume control is a little too finite, I could use a bit less control there – it takes too long to turn down a loud commercial. It’s also a very large unit, small cabinets may have trouble fitting the 808. Lastly, the remote control cannot be my only remote, it doesn’t replicate the “list” key on my cisco PVR which gains entry to the recorded shots.

A firmware update was available two weeks after I received the unit. Trying to do the firmware update over the Internet cause an 35-1 error. Luckily, some helpful people on AVSForum pointed out that the solution was to do the update while the receiver was in the USB/NET mode. Selecting that mode allowed the firmware to be successful.

Overall I recommend this receiver, however the 708 is $200 less and doesn’t lack any of the important features. If I were to do my purchase over again, I’d probably stick to the cheaper 708. If you are looking for receivers, I recommend Electronics For Less which does free delivery for most receivers but also has a storefront in Markham.