Awesome Vegetarian Restaurants in Downtown Toronto

Posted on January 4, 2012 by John Rockefeller

Staying at the Hotel Victoria in downtown Toronto for the last week with my girlfriend Amy has opened us to a ton of new, fantastic vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Google has helped us find them all, but I wanted to take a second to put together a small list in case you’re downtown Toronto for a while and are looking for great places to eat.

I’ll separate them by category.

Pizza

Pizzaiolo
http://www.pizzaiolo.ca/
There are probably 15 to 20 of these around Toronto, but the one we went to was just a few doors down from our hotel on Yonge St. It was amazing. In fact, it was so amazing, we ordered pizzas there two days in a row. They have a ton of vegetarian and vegan choices and each are made fresh right in front of you. It’s amazing.

Take-Away and Fast Food

Urban Herbivore
http://www.torontoeatoncentre.com/EN/Directory/Stores/Pages/UrbanHerbivore_F018.aspx
Like most food places in Toronto, there are a few locations. The one we went to was in the Eaton Centre, and it was fantastic. I ate the BBQ Tofu sandwich and loved it even though I’m not normally a huge fan of tofu. It was quick and cheap. Like all great vegetarian food, if you didn’t know it was vegetarian you wouldn’t be able to tell.

Sit Down

Fresh Toronto Vegetarian Food Fresh
http://www.freshrestaurants.ca/our_history.asp
Fresh was, without a doubt, our favourite. It’s got great style, it’s busy, it’s fast, and the food tastes fantastic. Amy loved it so much she bought one of the recipe books they offer on sale.

King’s Cafe (Kensington Market)
http://www.kingscafe.com/
This is the sister restaurant to our favourite vegetarian restaurant in Guelph, Zen Garden. Great food and amazing Lychee Black tea.

Spending Money

Posted on July 27, 2011 by John Rockefeller

Shanghai.

I thought of a neat way to curb small purchases of < $15 that one makes daily.

It’s been a long-term goal of mine to travel to China and Taiwan. That costs money. So, I need to save.Cutting back on big purchases like laptops, furniture, and car stereos is easy. And that’s great, because if you don’t have the big you don’t have the small. But, as the old saying goes: “Take care of the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves,” I often find myself picking up $5 worth of coffee during a stay at the cafe or, in the case of today, $12 on an awesome game soundtrack. (Gridrunner Revolution from Turbo)

What if I set a goal of seeing how long I could go without spending any money on a day-by-day basis?

Enter the #spentmoneytoday hashtag. Every time I spend even 1 penny in a day on anything below $15, I will tweet what I bought with the #spentmoneytoday hashtag on Twitter. This is sort of a transparent way of embarrassing myself publicly for pushing my trips to China and Taiwan back by minutes or hours (cents and dollars).

Project Natal + OpenSim = Heaven? Getting there!

Posted on June 1, 2009 by John Rockefeller

: Image by kirainet via Flickr

Microsoft unveiled their new Xbox 360 controller, or, lack-of-controller today at E3. Yes, I’m referring to Project Natal.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, you obviously don’t have a Twitter account. All of the videos I’ve seen thus far are pre-recorded, but if this thing works as good as they make it look, we are all in for a treat. Check it out:

Looks pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.

I have a few questions, which I’m sure you all do as well. Mine are

Will the sensor be a USB device?
If so, has anyone hacked their own drivers yet? :)
How long until someone uses it in a virtual world, like OpenSim?

Combine this with a projection-cube-room like this one, a treadmill floor so you can actually walk, and you’ve got yourself a holodeck, son.

What do you think??

Whatever happened to Virtual Reality?

Posted on May 5, 2009 by John Rockefeller

: Image via Wikipedia

Am I the only late-20-something that’s sorely disappointed that Virtual Reality has basically dropped off the face of the planet?

When I was young, Virtual Reality was supposed to be the “next big thing.” And for a while, it was. I played Dactyl Nightmare with the best of them on a Virtuality machine in a mall in Port Huron and anxiously awaited any tidbit of news to come from Atari about their Jaguar 3D headset.

Then, all of a sudden, VR disappeared.

I think it’s because of the Virtual Boy. I really liked that system, but I guess at the time it made a bunch of people sick and companies got scared to try it again.

Here’s what I want:

A lightweight, high-resolution, full-vision 3D display headset with built-in (at least Stereo) sound. If it needs to take advantage of dual-header DVI graphics cards, so be it.
Two Nintendo PowerGlove-ish devices that let me manipulate objects in 3D.

Can you do it for cheap?

Does anyone know of a high-quality headset like the one described above? Let me know in the comments!

As far as the gloves… I was thinking about getting 10 Nintendo Wii controllers and removing and then mounting the IR units on the tips of my fingers. Take advantage of the many open-source Wii controller drivers around the net to build a PC joystick driver that can work in engines like Torque.

I often fool around with 3D tools like blender and Torque Construction Set. I get frustrated at the interface with my computer. Not only is any size screen too small, a mouse and a flat 2D display just can’t manipulate the objects fast enough. I want to use my hands, damnit!

Just think of how cool it would be to wave your hand and have a forest grow behind it or earth raise into a mountain. The Matrix, here we come!

So I typed ABBA into Last.fm and I was lost for hours…

Posted on December 1, 2008 by John Rockefeller

… in the seemingly un-ending list of great disco / 70s pop songs. If you dislike ABBA, you’ll dislike this post. But, for me, there’s some ethereal quality about late 70s, early 80s pop songs. It was before I was born, so I have no experience with it, but for years I’ve listened to this stuff. It almost seems like the world was coming out of some sort of turtlenecked, bell-bottomed dream-world. Some of these really do deserve a remix. Anyway, enjoy the vids!

Rocky1138

AKA John Rockefeller

Category Archives: Distractions