I’m uploading today’s batch of pictures but wanted to get this one out as soon as possible:

Mount Baker as seen from the Top of Vancouver restaurant.

Until we were at the Top of Vancouver restaurant this afternoon, I had never even noticed Mount Baker on the southwest skyline of Vancouver; we’d always been more or less surrounded by buildings, except when up at Cypress Mountain and the visibility wasn’t great up there. From the 553 ft / 167 m height of the slowly-revolving restaurant, we got a terrific aerial view of the city and surrounding areas and I was surprised and shocked at the sight of this huge mountain dominating the horizon. I couldn’t tell how the picture would come out–it looked good on the D60′s tiny LCD screen, but you never know until you get it home–but once I saw this I knew I had to share it as soon as I possibly could.

So enjoy. Click the image for a much larger version. More soon.

So much for the daily updates. I have been taking an awful lot of pictures and video (with my Flip mini) but various events have conspired to either prevent or discourage me from actually posting.

Fireworks followed lighting of the Olympic cauldron at Canada Place.

We attended Ladies Moguls on Saturday and Mens Moguls on Sunday at Cypress Mountain. There’s more to say about Cypress Mountain but I’m not going to go into it here because it’ll only raise my blood pressure. Do a Google News search for “Cypress Mountain” and you’ll get the gist.

Canadian Moguls star Jennifer Heil prepares for her silver-medal winning run.

We’re persevering, though, and have replaced most of the canceled tickets with other events in town. Mostly hockey. We’ll be seeing a lot of hockey, both Womens and Mens. Speaking of which, why are the skiing events for women called “Ladies” but the hockey events are called “Womens”?

Face-off near the end of Womens USA vs. Russia hockey at UBC Thunderbird Arena.

The aspect of this trip that’s making all the ticketing troubles fade away is the restaurant and bar scene here in Vancouver. The Gastown area, where we’re staying, is almost nothing but pubs, restaurants, bars, etc for several blocks in every direction.

View Larger Map

Not to mention many, many more places in the downtown area and other neighborhoods. We’ve been here six days, have been to a minimum of two different places per day (no repeats) and there’s no end in sight. At some point I’ll list them all here; I have saved all the receipts both for reference and to apply for GST refund when we get home.

The lights of Gastown as viewed from near the Gassy Jack statue.

There’s plenty to do outside of eating, drinking and the occasional Olympic event, of course. VANOC has set up two “LiveCity” locations, one very close to us in the downtown area and one a bit further away in Yaletown. We found ourselves near the Yaletown location on Tuesday night and stuck around for a while to watch some event coverage, medal ceremonies and a musical act. One of the songs they played might be familiar to longtime Disneyland fans…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3txwe0oH_54]

Today is an off day, with no events scheduled (or canceled…) so we’re doing some more exploring. Vancouver is much like San Francisco in that it’s very walkable, but unlike San Francisco the hills are merely “hills” and not “nearly vertical summits”. Public transit is free to visitors during the Games and we’ve used that a few times, but are mostly walking from place to place.

I’ll continue adding pictures to this photo album every couple of days, and do blog updates when I can. You might be interested in following my Twitter feed at least for the duration; most of what ends up in blog posts is Tweeted live as it happens.

After two years of planning and two days of traveling, we are finally here, and the Games start tonight!

Jennifer standing in front of the Molson Canadian Hockey House

We flew from San Jose to Seattle on Wednesday morning and took the Amtrak Cascades from Seattle to Vancouver yesterday. We’re staying at a condo rented by someone Jennifer found on a Web site set up for Vancouver residents who planned to be out of town and wanted to rent their homes to visitors. The place we’re staying is in between Gastown and Chinatown and just a couple of short blocks from BC Place, the stadium complex where most of the in-town events will be held.

The torch relay passed right in front of our place!

Vancouver has a ton of great restaurants and so far we’ve visited three:

• SteamWorks Brewing Co
• Lamplighter Pub
• Smart Mouth Cafe (where this entry is being written)

We haven’t made any dining reservations, instead relying on the great likelihood that with so many places available, we’ll surely get in somewhere.

The opening ceremony is tonight! No, we didn’t spend upwards of $1000 each for tickets, but there will be lots of public spaces to see it live.

There will be many more posts and pictures in the next two weeks.

The “comments” section under every SFGate.com article is a cesspool (I’m not the first person to say this but I can’t immediately find where it was said first) filled with hate, bigotry, trolling and various evil. Sure, you don’t -have- to click through to the comments but SFGate helpfully shows the three highest-rated comments below each article–and the worst, and most prolific, commenters have hacking scripts that artificially inflate their comments’ ratings. Here’s another view on SFGate’s comment section: link.

Feeling that “out of sight, out of mind” is a good policy, my first UserScript hides several DIVs associated with comments on SFGate article pages. Here’s the source:

// ==UserScript==// @name SFGate-NoComments// @namespace http://www.userscripts.org// @description Hide comments on SFGate.com articles// @version 0.2// @include http://www.sfgate.com/*// @copyright 2010+, Andrew Rich (http://www.project-insomnia.com)// @license (CC) Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/// ==/UserScript==

var commentsDiv = document.getElementById('commentspage');commentsDiv.style.display = 'none';var commentslinksSpan = document.getElementById('commentslinks');commentslinksSpan.style.display = 'none';var commentBoxWrapperDiv = document.getElementById('articlePageCommentBoxWrapper');commentBoxWrapperDiv.style.display = 'none';var recCommentsDiv = document.getElementById('sfgate_recommended_comments');recCommentsDiv.style.display = 'none';var commentsListDiv = document.getElementById('commentslist');commentsListDiv.style.display = 'none';var commentsContainerDivAttrs = document.getElementById('Comments_Container_viewall').attributes;commentsContainerDivAttrs.getNamedItem('class').value = '';var commentsContainerDiv = document.getElementById('Comments_Container_viewall');commentsContainerDiv.style.visibility = 'hidden';

I hope this is useful to you and thank you for reading. You can install it easily from the UserScripts.org link above. Tested in Safari 4.0.4 (5531.21.10) with GreaseKit 1.7 on Mac OS X 10.5.8 Build 9L30. Should work in other UserScript-supporting browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome “Dev Channel”) without issue.