Ever since I redesigned this site there has been a link to a "Photos" section which was just a page containing the text "Coming Soon." Well soon apparently means slightly more than one year, because the "Photos" section has finally arrived! I plan on using it to show photos I am particularly happy with from an "artistic" point of view. Check it out!
Wow! I wasn't sure how successful my last blog post would be, but when I checked today I found that I'm already at $118/$125!!!! That's amazing. I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who donated. Thank you Mom, John, Mike, and Mrs. Jutan!! You guys are great! I'll definitely be posting my results here. I have to start practicing soon in my building, but between wedding plans and Ireland plans I'm not sure how much time I'll have. I might just have to rely on my natural fitness level (hahahaha, right).
Twice a year there are fundraising events where the participants climb the 1776 steps of the CN Tower. I really want to try climbing it so I've signed up for the event this year along with the friendly people at NeoEdge. I apparently need to raise money to participate though so I'm asking for donations here on my blog. The charity is the World Wildlife Fund and I need to raise at least $125. Any donation is fine, but if you donate $25 or more you will get a tax receipt. The average time for completion is 25-30 minutes and my goal is to be under twenty minutes. We'll see how I do!
Save the pandas! Click here to sponsor me!
For anyone who has to deal with a "nerdish" individual, The Nerd Handbook is great reading and totally describes some key aspects of nerdish personalities. Obviously it doesn't apply 100% to any one individual, but a lot of it is surprisingly accurate. If you are close to me or another nerd, I highly recommend reading it.
On my first read, I took exception to two things in particular. The article suggested that nerds don't like to travel and that nerds don't have any interest in food. As a Computer Science major I can hardly deny nerdish leanings, but travel and food are two of my favourite things. Upon reading further though I realized that in my case I internalize both of those things as "projects." Although I enjoy them thoroughly, I'm pretty sure I enjoy them because of my desire to understand them and to "do them right." When I do things I really like to do them correctly. I often refrain from doing things because I know that I don't have time to do them properly and thus I would be unhappy doing them. At least that's how I justify my procrastination.
I thought I would mention a random C++ programming thinger I came across at work the other day. If you don't work with C++ or don't care about programming you probably want to stop reading now.
Let's say you have a base class, A, which overloads the method "foo" in several ways, like this:
class A
{
public:
A();
virtual ~A();
void foo(int a);
void foo(int a, int b);
};
Further suppose you have a class B which derives from A, and you'd like to overload "foo" in a new way in the derived class, but also maintain the implementations of the base class A, like this:
class B : public A
{
public:
B();
virtual ~B();
void foo(int a, int b, float c);
};
Due to the way C++ does name resolution, the definition of "foo" in B actually hides the other definitions from A. So if you do this:
B* b = new B(); b->foo(3);
the compiler will fail because it can't find a matching method for foo(int). The problem is that as the compiler walks up the class hierarchy looking for a match for "foo" it will stop at the first class that defines a method with the name "foo" regardless of whether or not there is a suitable match for the specified parameters.
I've actually read about this name resolution rule before, but I never thought about it in this context and so I spent a frustrating half hour trying to figure out why my code wouldn't compile. There are several ways to get around the behaviour. You can redefine the methods of A in B, or you can add a "using" statement to the class definition of B, like this:
class B : public A
{
public:
B();
virtual ~B();
using A::foo;
void foo(int a, int b, float c);
};
It's important to add the "using" statement before any new definitions of "foo" though.
Anyway, this learning experience turned out to be not immediately applicable because I ended up having to write the code in an entirely different manner anyway. I'm blogging about it so that the experience wasn't a complete loss. Also, this blog post is the first use of the a new feature I just added to my blog to show code in a blog post. Good times!
Today is World Nutella Day and holy crap that's awesome!!! Well Nutella is awesome at least. I eat it on crackers, bread, crepes or just straight out of the jar. Also, for people selling food items, adding the word Nutella to the name of the food is a good way to get me to buy it. Anyway, I'll have to have a bunch tonight in celebration. I'm thinking of heating some up slightly so it gets runny and then drizzling it over some of the Ben & Jerry's "Half-Baked" ice cream I have sitting in my freezer. MMMMMM!!!
Well, things can certainly change at work. Not for me apparently but for lots of other people I work with.
Last weekend as full! Like there was no more stuff I could have done because I used up all of the non-asleep time. Friday night was dinner at Weezies for Patrick's birthday (mmm...delicious) followed by looking at Patrick's Iceland photos. Saturday I did some chores in the morning including making my muesli, and then Kim and I went to see the classic Euripides play Medea at the Canon theatre. It was pretty good, but as it was a tragedy it didn't exactly have a happy ending. After the play we headed to Chris's house where he and John made us homemade pizza and then we watched the Bourne Ultimatum on BluRay. Sunday I helped Patrick and Toni for the whole day with their wedding website. It was fun, and it taught me a lot of stuff about Ireland, but it was also a very long day.
In climbing news, I'm finally lead climbing again on Wednesdays. I've been pretty lazy the last few months and just doing plain top-rope. But someone at the gym told me that every time you top-rope something you could have lead, God kills a kitten.
A couple people brought cameras to the comp last Saturday, so I have some pictures of me climbing and stuff. The first shows one of the main walls at the comp with a bunch of bouldering problems on it. Problems are marked by different colours of tape and the start and end are marked with boxes. The second photo show me on one the start of problem number 19, which is about midway through the range.
The last two photos show me on problem 22, which was a really fun unique problem that I was super happy to solve. It started with a running jump to get up to the big orange blobby hold and followed by a set of long reaches to more hand holds. It was a lot of fun!
Things have been fairly busy so far this year and I'm sleepy as a result of that. There has already been wedding planning (the date will be October 10, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend) and I had another bouldering competition Saturday. This one was a at a new gym at Lansdowne and Dupont and it went really well. I hurt lots today which means that I worked appropriately hard.
I've also been playing "The Force Unleashed" for the Wii and I thoroughly enjoy it. Basically you're Darth Vader's new apprentice and you run around using the Force for evil (mostly). My only criticism is that it's very easy to beat the game in under ten hours. Does that seem short to anyone else? You have the option to play through again with all of your accumulated powers (which I am doing), but other than that and the two-player duel mode there just isn't that much stuff in the game. I can't imagine putting in all the effort to create the game's framework and to interface with the Wii's unique controller system and then not generate lots of content to go with it.
I also played with the Google Maps API a bit last night to answer some questions for Patrick and his upcoming wedding. It was pretty cool and easy to use. You can do a lot more to a map than I thought you could, including custom overlay drawing. Fun times!
Finally, I left my camera battery charger at my mom's house over Christmas and it's making me sad because I can't take pictures. I need to rectify this situation.
Well, other than eating all of the chocolate I received, the holidays are over. I had a good time at all of my events as usual, but also as usual there were too many of them all in a row. I averaged two Christmases a day for four days straight and then more random stuff until New Years.
The biggest news from the break (and possibly my biggest news ever) is that on the Saturday before Christmas, Kim and I got engaged!
Anyway, here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks.
