Monthly Archives: November 2012

Cirque Sublime performs the 15th Annual Wishes and Dreams Fundraiser

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Last night Cirque Sublime performed at the Starlight Children Foundation‘s 15th Annual Wishes and Dreams Fundraiser in the Allen Lambert Galleria of Brookfield Place.   The Starlight Children’s Foundation celebrated receiving nearly $2 million in donations from Brookfield Place’s tenants and suppliers.

Opening the show and performing the Holiday Lighting Ceremony was Ariana Shaw (my silks coach!) as the Starlight Princess.

Les Vitaminés (Cbastien Tardif and Vincent Dubé) next did a funny and skillful clowning static trapeze act.

Amy Neumann, in her first professional performance as an aerial artist, wowed the crowd with her aerial silks skills.

Jean-Francois Martel was next on stage where the large man entered a very large Cyr Wheel.

Next up, Les Vitamines returned to the stage for their Balloon Ballet.  (No video as my hands were full of kids instead of a camera).

And to conclude the acrobatics for the evening Duo Voltart (Damien Boudreau and Geneviere Cliche) do some astounding Hand to Hand (not my video as again, I was holding a kid instead of a camera).

Toronto is a great place for seeing Circus Arts!  If you’re interested in trying it out recreationally, check out the Toronto School of Circus Arts.

You can have YouTube play all the above videos for you together using the playlist.

Our adventures this week in pictures and video 2012-45

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We started the week with some slightly crazed kids thanks to Halloween.

We also hadn’t gotten a lot of good video and me in my freaky tall blue creature halloween costume so we spent some time on the weekend putting it back on and trying things out.

Our circus school was closed last week so we missed our regular classes.  It didn’t stop my son, as I found these videos he took of himself practicing the silks.

We stepped in to Kimberly Jackson on Queen Monday after our drop-in and we saw some really nice handcrafted wooden tables that they are having a sale on atm.

Tuesday I was trying to get the kids out of the house to play, but they just seemed to want to stay in.  We ended up building some bridges out of Kapla blocks (beam and cantilever), and then put it into practice as I became a human beam bridge, and my daughter was the load.

They got some exercise by playing on their homemade trapeze they have in their bedroom.

We did get out of the house in the afternoon though and started raking our leaves — mostly to have a pile to jump in, and a few to add to our compost.  Poor tree not getting fresh soil.

We discovered Richard Wiseman‘s Quirkology feed on Youtube and we proceeded to duplicate some of his puzzles and challenges.

Game wise we’ve been playing a lot of Mastermind.

Thursday we headed down to The 90th Royal Agricultural Winter Fair.  We started out in the Spirit of the Horse area and watched the Toronto Police Mounted Unit, Elaine Ward demonstrate Western Style Dressage with her horse Maverick, and a Thoroughbred horse too.

We continued the horse theme as we ate our lunch in the Horse Palace watching some of the competitors for the horse jumping warm up.  My son spotted a horse he liked the look of and we followed them into the Ricoh Coliseum to see them compete.  It was Onisha and her driver, Olympian, Reed Kessler as they were competing in the Brickenden Trophy International Jumper Class.

The highlight of the Education Barn was the pig truck.  The kids watched, fascinated, as the dozen or so piglets nursed from their mother, and as the two, 6 week old (and much larger), pigs cuddled each other.

I’m always interested in the over-sized vegetables.  This year the corn-stalk was over 21 feet tall!

What did you do this week?

Powerlevel Warcraft Battle Pets

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I was looking for ways to improve the leveling of my World of Warcraft Battle Pets now that I had a couple of pets in their 20s.  I had been struggling with spreading the XP out among pets, vs having one pet do all the work in a single battle, swap him out for the next battle and hope no one died before the 8 minutes heal was up.

I found a middle ground where I can level a pet from 1 to 10 in only 8 battles, or go from level 22 to 23 in just 5 battles.

Let me introduce you to Stable Master Risera at coordinates 61,54, the east side of Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight.  She is steps away from a group of level 22 Dragonbone Hatchlings found at 64,53 in Dragonblight.  You can battle the dragonbones and not worry about having health enough to fight again, because you can just fly over to her and for 10s heal and revive if necessary your battle pets.

Your primary enemy will be the Dragonbone Hatchling, which is a Flying pet.  He’ll be joined by Strand Crab, Arctic Hare, and/or Tundra Penguin.  Of my existing pets in their 20s, I used Jean, my Phoenix Hatchling for she has a good self-heal and she also has an alternate attack, Peck, which is strong against Aquatics (the crabs and penguins) and you also don’t have to worry about her Burn which is weak against the Hares.  Now she is Elemental which makes her weak against a couple of the attacks the Aquatics have available so keep an eye out for those and time your heals well (PetTheory will let you know with a hover over during the battle).  Another suggestion is the Onyxian Whelpling (if you have it from the 5th Anniversary and have him leveled already) (or any of the rare Whelping drops), as he has a similar heal as the Phoenix but doesn’t have the elemental disadvantage.

When I started with Jean at least 20, she wasn’t winning all the time — depending on crits and combinations of skills the enemy used she’d occasionally die (I’d let her as that means more XP for the leveling pet) and my backup Crab would save the day.  By level 23 she was able to win all the time (but I still didn’t like it when the Dragonbone had the combo of Thrash/Adrenaline Rush/Cyclone).  Special note: the Sprite Darter Hatchling was the only pet I was leveling that could hold her own.  At level 8 she was able to kill one the level 22 Dragonbone herself, and then I’d swap her out for the others.  Impressive pet that one is. Today I spent a while here and leveled 8 pets to 10, which was enough to complete Rookie Pet Group (I already had done 7 it seems) and I only need to do a Magic creäture to get the No Favourites achievement (I didn’t have any rare magic creatures so didn’t bother with one of my greens yet).  For those who like the blues, the RNG gave me 4 blue captures in that time.

For those curious, here is a log of taking my Tiny Sporebat from level 1 to 10.  Elapsed time 21 minutes (with worrying about screenshots and taking a phone call).  Note all these list ‘Difficultly Bonus’ but I haven’t mathed out exactly how that works.  The variation in xp earned from fight to fight seems to come from how rare the pets I was fighting were (e.g. greys and whites are less than greens — but not by much).

  • Fight 1: 361XP brings him to level 4 (my companion got 172XP to bring her from 22 to 23)
  • Fight 2: 413XP brings him to level 6 (companion 143XP)
  • Fight 3: 323XP (companion 109XP (plus a death) plus a capture of a rare Arctic Hare)
  • Fight 4: 431XP level 7 (companion 145)
  • Fight 5: 436XP level 8 (companion 146)
  • Fight 6: 438XP level 9 (companion 147)
  • Fight 7: 437XP (companion 147)
  • Fight 8: 437XP level 10! (companion 147XP)

This spot will of course continue to work past level 10 as well: you’ll have a near in-exhaustible supply (unless too many people read this post) of ‘green paws’ to battle, and the stable master available whenever it’s needed.  A single battle with a single level 22 pet will earn you ~388 XP per fight, so at that rate it’ll take you 5 fights to get from 22 to 23 for example (388 per fight for 1860 per level).  More data: it’s 320xp per fight at 23 as well so 6 fights to get from 23 to 24.

Once you’re comfortable soloing three level 22s a single pet, you might consider putting in two level 1 pets and going from there.  My data says that in the first fight they’ll both get 233XP and your high level pet (in this case a 23) will get 90.  Have fun!

Thanks to Doclariv at Internet Kidz Gaming for his youtube video: Fastest Powerleveling Method for Battlepets! which put me on to this location and style of power leveling wow battle pets.

Pad your Youtube views

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I found a bug on Youtube that lets you inflate your video views.  I reported it to them a few weeks ago and they haven’t fixed it yet so I thought I’d share it with y’all.

I’m sure you know that if you repeatedly watch your own video, the ‘views’ doesn’t increase.  Their system is smart enough to know that the views are coming from the same spot and doesn’t count them.  Except!  When there is an ‘edit in progress’ it seems.  So use the ‘Enhancements’ link at the top of your video and do some small change (trim a few frames, or use the new ‘stabilize’ ability) and save your video.  While youtube’s cloud chugs away at reprocessing your video and you see the ‘Edit in progress’ in your Video Manager you can refresh the video page as often as you like and every view will go towards your total count.  I haven’t yet tried to automatic it, but a simple script would most likely cause the counter to go way up.  The most I’ve bothered with for my little video collection is to get a base 100 views as I didn’t want to actually exploit it.

Toronto Circus Performances November 2012

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If you’re interested in being entertained, surprised, and/or delighted this month in Toronto, check out the following options.

  • Cirque Eloize’s iD is in town this weekend only at the Sony Centre (Video Preview)
  • Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna finishes it’s Toronto run this weekend as well.  If you haven’t seen this superb show yet, see if you can still find a seat before it leaves town forever.  Viktor Kee’s Lizard, Lara Jacob’s Balance Goddess, and many other unforgettable acts await you.
  • Circus Orange will be lighting this up at Illuminite in a free show for the tree lighting at Yonge & Dundas Square on November 10.  The ‘Winterfest’ Downtown Yonge BIA will also be hosting many Buskers over the holiday shopping period as well.
  • Cirque Sublime will be doing a free show at the Brookfield Place (formerly BCE place – 181 Bay Street) in the Allen Lambert Galleria Nov 15 at 5pm-7pm in support of the Starlight Children’s Foundation Lighting Ceremony and Fundraiser.
  • Cirque Sublime (at least the Cube Act) will be performing again on Nov 17 at the Sony Centre as part of “It’s Always Something” in support of Gilda’s Club.