Lest you think my adriancrook.com self-absorption is a recent phenomenon, I've made available for browsing the precursor to this site - adriancrook.com version 1.

There were other adriancrook.coms, the first of which began as just a single page hosted on a friend's server, but this was the most significant and recent one.

I grew up in Vancouver, B.C., four provinces and thousands of kilometers away from my Dad's side of the family, most of whom live in Southern Ontario. I visited them a handful of times when I was really young, but not enough to ever really get to know any member of the Crook family outside of my dad, the oldest among his siblings at 53. Now that I live in Toronto, I've been able to take two trips out to London and Kitchener to visit the Crooks and it's been great. I now know where to pin the blame for my goofy looks and corny sense of humour.

Photos from both last weekend, and my April trip to Kitchener, can be viewed here.

Or click "read more" to learn more about my newly-discovered family...

My laptop needed a facelift so I searched through some of the hundreds of photos I've taken in the last year and chose several to turn into wallpaper.

Here they are...

Ho-Wood Next Train Bull God

The Canucks lost game 7 to the Minnesota Wild last night. Adding insult to injury, the Canucks had to surrender a three games to one lead in the series in order to make this Miracle On Ice possible. Now obviously it's not just one person who is to blame for the Canucks misfortune and no amount of posting on the ESPN.com message boards can address this properly, so let me break it down, once and for all:

We need a playoff-calibre goaltender.

I recently received a fantastic email from a former colleague of mine who is a videogame programmer working overseas. His easy brilliance and philosophical nature is the kind most often mistaken for eccentricity, but his email here proves his genius.