Chris Brooker Rocking it so you don't have to

Have you heard of the Coke Zero Fans first initiative? Maybe you have, maybe you’ve heard about parts of it. Last night I got to experience a great moment when regular people got surprised with a night of their life.

What they did was select a random random mens league hockey game at the Master Card Centre (Leaf official practice arena). Sneak into the dressing room before anyone arrived and fill it with new jersey’s a leaf’s jersey and a coke jersey, coke and tons of other stuff.

When the guys arrived they were totally stunned and confused as to what was going on. It was pretty awesome. Then all of a sudden Komisarek, Versteeg & Armstrong walked in and surprised the crap out of them.

Then a Coke representative dropped all the details. All the guys are going to compete in a skills challenge with the leaf’s for a chance to win the opportunity to be “A Leaf for the day”.

On September 21, 2010 the winner will spend the day as a Leaf, goto press conferences, eat meals and play in an exhibition game against the Senators. From what I understand you can’t buy tickets for this game you can only win them! I might have a couple to give away, so you had better watch out!

Are you sure you don’t want a Coke Zero?

Hanging out in the dressing room before the cat was let out of the bag.

Sean Ward interviewing the lovely Coke Zero models.

Cones set up for the drills and the skills competition.

Here I am with the always interacting Joallore or @ClickFlickca

CityTV doing an interview. I know it’s sad but I don’t know either of their names.

Group shot

I’m at a rink. (Gratuitous self shot).

Media scrum with the big winner of the night. He’s going to be the Leaf for a day!

Leafspace Monika with a K, looked an smiled while interviewing Mike Komisarek.

Mike Komisarek with the great team behind the Coke Zero event.

Pointing at something on the Media wall.

Here I am with the lovely Monika from Leafspace.com

Here is a whole bunch of what I think we were referred to as the “New Media” crew. (re: the nerds who are always on their phones and do stuff with the internet). There was also barely a cell signal in there, which made tweeting and txt’ing near impossible.

Here’s another one of me.

Thanks to everyone there who let me take part in such a kewl an memorable night! #CokeZeroFansFirst

For anyone interested all the photos I took that night can be found here. Video to come when I get a chance to edit it.

Last night I was super surprised to run in to this little guy; the Sony Xperia X10 Mini. It’s almost shockingly small compared to our usually cell phone fare like the iPhone and way smaller than all the new beasts coming out like the Dell Streak and Droid X.

Side by side with an iphone 3GS

Last night was the Gladstone Hotel’s first tweet up and it was a really good one. I do have to give credit where credit is due and thank Jeremy at the Gladstone for hosting the event (@TweetgasmTO) and the awesome crew that put it together Casie Stewart (@cassiestewart), Michael Nus (@MichaelNus), Mark Pavlidis (@mhp), and Rannie Turingan (@photojunkie). Each and everyone of them are amazing and if you don’t already, you should get to know them.

Waiting for the Queen Street car to take us out West. Thinking about how long the damn street car is taking to come. Also, thinking about Ardene and how great I make it look by being in front of it.

The always great Casie Stewart and Loren (I think, msg me and I can fix it )

@PhotoJunkie working on netbook that was streaming his live photos.

The beautiful Carly-Ann Fairlie and the equally lovely Sheldon Levine

Casie Stewart, Jeremy Vandermeij and Michael Nus

I’ll update the names of people in the other photos when I get a chance.

Thanks everyone for a great night with great (and beautiful) people.

Me today in my office with my plant. Ya, we’re chilling. Taken with a webcam.

Looking forward to the weekend.

Hey all, in Canada this past long weekend was Canada in the US is was July 4th weekend! It’s very similar but I think the 4th of July involves way more country. Canada day involves more Justin Bieber. I’m not sure who wins there.

For the long weekend I headed down to Ellicottville again. It’s always nice to go on a trip and relax somewhere else. We pretty much did the same things as seen in the video linked above, except  this year there was a rodeo!

This is my friend James and my brother. You can probably tell which one is which.

See that beer, $4. In fact everyday, every beer, bottle, draft, was $4. That I could get used to.

Would you believe this guy is my brother? His name is Jon and he lives in Guelph, it’s always awesome when we get to hang out.

After the rodeo we hit the bars in town to party it up. It turns out all of these cowbows had the same idea. They all can strolling in to the bars with their numbers still pinned on. The local girls went nuts! It was awesome, these guys are superstars in these small towns. You should have seen the mad line dancing skills they threw down when the “nightclub” played Ice, Ice, Baby. With $4 beer everyone was having fun.

James is an old friend of the family and I’m so happy we finally got to really hang out. He’s an awesome guy and I just found out he lives really close to me in Toronto. So we’ll definitely have to hang out again soon. He’s also a great musician and plays in the band TEDD.

This was by far the most insane thing they did to the calves, we were all a bit up in arms at how violent they were with them. See that calf that just got lassoed, well, when the horse puts on the brakes, that rope snaps back really hard and the calf get launched in the air, does a flip and slams back on the ground. See the above picture of them all looking sad at the top of this post.

A bull after bing ridden. Also is the worlds most annoying reckneck joke spewing rodeo clown.

June 21, 2010 – A friend mine was having a keg party, asked if we’d come along. There is no way I’m turning that down!

The guests of honour. Mill St Organic and Mill St tankhouse.

Lee-anne made Jello shooters, a wonderful addition!

Keg stand!

June 20, 2010 – I looked outside and the east side of Spadina all the way up was completely blacked out. Looked really crazy.

Hey-ho, let’s pretend that I wrote this a few weeks ago. Picture the day June 19, 2010. It was a Thursday, I believe, myself and some friends hit the Wine and Spirits Festival in the historic Distillery District.

Started out with pre drinks in a friend’s back yard.

Some hot dancing girls.

$1 shots. Things went way down hill from here. Think we did 5 each at this sitting.

This is the Mount Gay rum girl, she was awesome and kept listening to our ridiculous drunken stories while keeping our glasses full.

The constant mixing of Wine, Beer, and hard liquor was a deadly combination. Let’s just say that someone (that wasn’t me) threw up in the cab. The hallmark of a good night.

I haven’t posted in a long time but I’ve been busy. So it’s time to just start dumping back logged stuff on here. Enjoy.

This was back on June 1, 2010. We have a huge turf field out behind our condo which is actually pretty awesome to run around on. Krista and I went out and throw around the Aerobie for a while.

Such amazing posing skills.

PS: those are my get dirty, I don’t care what happens to them shoes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately. Not really if it’s feasible (it soon will be) or how precisely it could be accomplished but more about the ethics involved. I feel very strongly that one day very soon a sentient being will be create and I fear our human nature will ultimately destroy it or force our own extinction.

Let me elaborate. First, the term Artificial Intelligent is very derogatory. Artificial, fake, imitation, counterfeit, not real, right off the bat it devalues the life of this new sentient being. AI describes a sentients created by man but the creator has little relevance to the life that has been created. Every woman has the ability to create life but these aren’t Artificial Intelligences. An ovum is fertilized in a petri dish then re implanted into a women to mature until birth. Is this life artificial? Are birthed lives more valuable because they are the “natural” way? Who are we to say life only has value if it was created in a particular way.

We keep talking about creating all sorts of rules that these beings will have to follow. Most famous the 3 laws of robotics offered by Isaac Asimov that state;

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Which he himself explored and concluded could not account for every possible situation. If a being disobeys these laws I presume the punishment would be death. However, now what we’re doing is creating an entire class system essentially for what is another race (I’m going to call this new race “Race 0″). Us humans also have rules, we call them laws. The laws allow us to have order and things generally work. However, we are allowed to make mistakes. Making a mistake does not sentence us to death. To err is human after all. In fact most or our laws are based on a person’s intent rather than an outcome. Humans are allowed to make mistakes but Race 0 is not? Possibly; To err is to be alive?

Let’s try this from another direction up until now we’ve been talking about Race 0 as if they are a computer program or robot that’s been created by man and proven to be sentient. What if the first Non-human intelligence is created though biological engineering? Someone in a lab is able to create a mass of neurons that come together and create an intelligent, sentient being. Would this change how you’d look at it? Now it’s not metal vs. meat. Now it’s another biological organism, would it be required to be created with rules from birth? Or like us would it be expected to learn our societal rules and values? Why would this be different than creating life in a computer? Life is life no matter what package it comes in.

If we keep out current attitude and opinions based on fear, can you not see how this can and will lead to oppression of another race? In fact human history is filled with just such events. If we teach this new intelligence all of our bad traits, hate, fear, indifference to life, it’s almost a certainty that it will, like us, rise up and become the oppressors, commit unthinkable acts of genocide and possibly lead to the extermination and extinction of the human race. Race 0 could be stronger, faster and more intelligent than us. We wouldn’t stand a chance. (ie. The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, I, robot, etc.)

Already we are treating a possible new intelligence as if it has no rights. We need to change this view before Race 0 is created and we start down the wrong path again. Respect and trust go a lot further than oppression and imprisonment. Have we not learned anything?