Apr

30

Big City Broker on HGTV

Toronto

Brad J. Lamb of 'Big City Broker' on HGTVIf you live in the core of Toronto, chances are, you’ve seen his face on billboards around you or at least his name plastered on some new upcoming condo project. He is the man behind the uber-trendy King West, and the man behind the now very successful Lamb Development real estate group. His name: Brad J. Lamb. His show: Big City Broker.

Yesterday I watched my first episode of the show on HGTV and I was not disappointed. I have to say that we’ve been following the Toronto real estate market a little more closely lately, as we are looking for a new place to move in, and this show painted a really good picture of it. What made it a lot more interesting than any other real estate shows was that it gave you a tour of what really happens on the other side of the table, with a twist of glamour.

Here is what HGTV has to say about their own show:

Explosively compelling and addictive, Big City Broker focuses on the angst and joy, the dramas and intrigue that make up Brad J Lamb’s world of property sales and development. Who knew that buildings could be so sexy?

Well, in any case, you can be sure I’ll be watching (or taping… does anybody still uses that expression?!?) this show next Wednesday (at 8pm).

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Jan

10

Busy night in Toronto

Toronto

Every now and then, a huge mass of suburbanites invade our neighborhood for a whole bunch of parties, games, or shows. Tonight was especially weird because of the mixture of the different people in the crowd. The somewhat more sophisticated crowd going to see the Divine Performing Arts, the young (and old frankly) full of energy crowd going at the Rogers Center for the AC/DC concert, and finally the young sporty people going to watch the Raptors kill the Grizzlies at the Air Canada Center. Anyways, it was pretty interesting to see the crazy mix of people downtown tonight. It was kind of a free for all in the LCBO at union station. yikes.

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Sep

23

Pretty big fire downtown

Toronto

As I walked to the living room today, I saw a pretty big fire that appeared to be close to University of Toronto. Here’s the best shot from our balcony.

Fire near University of Toronto

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Apr

06

Toronto’s Earth Hour

Toronto

According to Toronto newspaper The Star, Toronto observed an 8.7% dip on it’s energy curve. Here is a nice comparison of the Skyline before and during Earth Hour from their website.

Toronto 2008 Earth Hour

Another fun source of images of Earth Hour across downtown Toronto is at blogTo.com, where you can see this interesting graph of energy consumption during the day of Earth Hour. Mind you, that graph is across Ontario and so the dip may not look as pronounced as Toronto’s experts have suggested. However, I think we do see a little bit of a change in consumption right later at night. I saw a very different graph earlier today, of Toronto’s energy, but I can’t seem to find it online. Too bad.

Ontario’s Energy Consumption on Earth Hour

For the curious, here is the energy consumption of yesterday, according to ieso’s website. Keep in mind that yesterday was much warmer than on March 28th, and so the comparison isn’t ideal.

Ontario’s Energy Consumption on April 4th

You can sort of see the effects of Earth Hour on the curve, but, to be fair, the real difference is in people’s head, which has always been the idea behind the Earth Hour’s movement. So, in that sense, I think that Torontonians really participated well and even if it didn’t have quite the effect on the energy consumed of March 28th 2008, I personally think it was a wonderful event and am glad we participated as much as we did. I sure hope we do better next year though! The challenge is on!

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Apr

01

Google’s Earth Hour 2008

Toronto

So I first planned on taking pictures of Toronto’s earth hour, and somehow I forgot to. Well, actually, I started by taking a video, which didn’t turn out very nicely, and kind of forgot to take a photo of the skyline in the end. It would have been cool to show the “before” and “after” shots, kind of like the ones I’ve seen on the blog of earthhour.org. I have to say that we didn’t notice a huge difference between the “on/off” states of the city. I mean, we could spot some building that had turned off their lights completely, for example Bank of Montreal was completely out, which is probably the second biggest/tallest building downtown Toronto! I would give Toronto’s Earth Hour a 6 out of 10 probably. Curious to know how well other cities have done.

As for us, I am happy to report that we did turn off all our lights and most of our electronics in the house for the whole hour. However, I must admit that at one point I did cheat and turn on my laptop (using the battery only!) to check something online (okay… my router was using electicity in I guess…), which made me discover just how cool and fun the people at Google are. Check out there version of the earth hour:

Google's earth hour

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