Patrick and Toni are back in Canada!! They arrived Thursday afternoon and are staying with us at our apartment until after Jeff and Simone's wedding on Sunday. It's been really fun having them around and they'll been in Toronto until at least our wedding so we'll get lots of chances to hang out. Tonight we went to Chris and John's place to have lasagna and a birthday cake for Toni. We also played Carcassonne and watched a couple episodes of the original Wonder Woman television show. Very excellent evening.

We're just about a month from the wedding and things are starting to get tight. It's hard to tell for sure though because I can't keep everything that needs to be done in my head at the same time. Lately I've been mostly focusing on our trip to Italy (ie. the honeymoon). I'm almost done booking accommodations and figuring out where we want to be and when. It would be nice to have a full month and just wander the country at our leisure, but with only two weeks it seemed more prudent to plan it all out to be sure we hit all the things we really want to see. I'm really excited for this trip.

As for actual wedding planning stuff, that is less exciting. Most of it is boring details that make me tired when I try to think about them. I don't think I'm cut out for event planning. Or even assistant event planning. I'm more the kind of person who is happy to lift things and move them around on the day of the event, following the instructions of some other, more useful individual.

One of the things we need to do is create a seating plan for the reception. Of course this is painfully difficult given all the requirements and the fact that the guest list isn't quite final yet. I started thinking about how to write a program to calculate an optimal (or at least acceptable) seating arrangement and I quickly realized that would be a lot of work, but maybe not impossible. However it is probably too much work given the amount of time I have left.

My first thoughts on this problem were to assign each person a list of people they must be seated with and a list of people they cannot be seated with. That alone should be enough information to at least produce a seating arrangement that prevents open warfare. However the hope is that the tables produce happy times for as many guests as possible. This would require more properties for each guest, things like age, whether the guest is from the bride's or groom's side, and more specifically if the guest is a family member. Then it would be important to arrange the tables such that either there is a balance between the people at the table or else the table is completely matching on properties. For example, a table could have an equal balance of older guests and younger guests or it could be all older guests or all younger guests. You don't want a situation where a table is all older guests except for one or two people as that case may lead to the smaller group being excluded from conversation. The other important factor is whether or not people at the table already know each other. If you have a table where everyone is really good friends except for a single individual, then that individual is sure to be excluded (unless they are very outgoing).

One possible concrete implementation of this mess could be a rating system. Given all the properties for all the people, you could compute compatibility scores between any two people (almost like a dating service) and those scores could be used to find the best table to seat a person at. The overall score for a completed table could be the lowest compatibility score at the table and then the optimal solution becomes the one that maximizes the sum of the table scores. This could maybe perform pretty well and would be easy to extend with more properties any time you thought of some.

Given that I haven't tried to implement this I'm sure there are a lot of holes in it and I don't really have an idea at the moment as to a way to implement it that wouldn't have terrible performance. Given that we have a finite number of guests I suppose performance wouldn't be a big deal (unless it's exponential). Furthermore this all makes the assumption that tables are little worlds onto themselves, when in reality adjacent (or even semi-adjacent) tables will provide opportunities for communication between guests. Perhaps this is more like a weird shortest path graph problem where the score is computed as a function of compatibility between guests and distance between those guests attempting to minimize the distance between the most compatible guests.

Anyway, lots of fun ideas to explore, but no real time to do so. And now it's later at night than I intended to stay up. Whoops.

Things have been pretty busy lately, not much time to blog. I did however do something pretty cool on Monday. I went out to Mt. Nemo (part of the Niagara escarpment) with Daren, Peter and Lap to do some real outdoor rock climbing. We completed three sport routes: a 5.9, a 5.10a and a 5.10b. Daren did all the leading and the rest of us just top-roped them but it was still really cool. The views from the tops of the climbs were amazing and it was fun to be on real rock.

However, I definitely had some terror issues. I felt a lot more exposed and in danger when I was on the climbs than I feel when I climb in a gym. I was exhausted after the day just from all the fear-induced adrenalin that I experienced.

The last climb, the 5.10b, was probably the most interesting for me. It had lots of weird overhangs and even a little cave halfway up that you could stop and rest in. The climb itself was probably sixty feet and was just really cool the whole way. As I was the last person to attempt the climb I had to "clean" it as well. This meant removing all the gear from the wall as I descended after finishing the climb. Cleaning is always a bit scary at the top because at one point you actually untie yourself from the rope. Of course you're secured to the wall in several other ways at that point in time, but it's always a bit weird to untie dangling sixty feet over pointy pointy rocks.

I brought my camera, but most of the time I was either belaying or climbing so I didn't have much of a chance to take photos. I've included the few I did take below, but there are none of me climbing.

Also of note, my brother moved to Toronto on Sunday to start his Masters program at U of T next week. That's pretty cool and should allow me to see him a bit more often.

The rope on the 5.9, the route follows the clips

Another view of the 5.9

Daren belaying Lap on the 5.10a

Lap further up the 5.10a

A cool tree growing out of rock

A cool tree growing out of rock

Cliff face with turkey vultures

Rope on the 5.10b

Lap on the 5.10b

Some cool berries and rock