Twenty-four hours from now I'll be married and about to start an awesome party with a whole bunch of awesome family and friends. I'm pretty sure everything is ready to go and I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!
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.
Last weekend Kim and I met with our photographer and had our "engagement" photos done. Of course if we had been a bit more organized we might have done that closer to our engagement, but it turned out well because we got great evening sun for the shoot.
Tonight for supper, I made Corn and Black Bean Quinoa Salad and damn it was good. I'm definitely going to make more things with quinoa in the future.
There was a huge thunderstorm tonight just after supper, seems like it swept through all of southwestern Ontario. Lots of tornado warnings and such. It was a pretty crazy storm!! Anyway, after it was done I got a couple photos of the rainbow and the sunset the peaked out from behind the clouds. Good times.
A super crazy storm came through Toronto tonight with a ton of lightning out over the lake and everywhere. I was able to capture a bunch of really cool photos of it all! Check them out below!
Over the civic holiday weekend Matt and I once again ventured to Ottawa with my mom to join our good friends the Williams' on a canoe trip into the interior of Algonquin Provincial Park. My brother and his friend Matt met us there and also came with us. It was a fantastic trip, but it was over too soon. I've written up a mini journal for the it in my trips section with lots of photos, including a macro shot! So, go check out my 2009 Algonquin Trip journal.
I played a bit more with my macro stuff tonight and was even able to fashion a makeshift light box out of some plain white paper to help illuminate a couple shots using my flash. I think I'll build something a bit sturdier that I can just slap on to the camera when necessary.
This weekend I'm going on a canoe trip in Algonquin with lots of fun people. I can't wait!! I should be able to bring back lots of good pictures too.
Here are the best images from tonight, still nothing fabulous, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.
One of the things I would like to get is a nice 105mm macro lens for my camera. Unfortunately that lens costs about $1200. That figure isn't actually that big in the world of lenses, however it is big in my personal world so I had resigned myself to not getting one any time soon.
But, lo and behold, it turns out there is a cheap alternative! You can "reverse" a lens to get macro effects. That is, you can mount it on your camera backwards (given a special mounting ring). And, taking it one step further, if you have two lenses you can mount one backwards on the other and then mount the whole contraption on your camera and get even greater macro effects.
I happen to have two lenses, an 18-200mm zoom and a 50mm fixed. So I looked around on eBay and was quickly able to find the two tiny rings of metal I needed to stick my lenses together. The first is a male-male macro coupler, and the other is a step-down ring. Total price: $17 including shipping. Awesome, but would it actually work??
Well I have both pieces now and although I didn't have much time to play with it tonight I was able to confirm that yes, it will work indeed!! The only problem is that there is heavy vignetting due to the difference in size between the two lenses. I think that if my zoom went to 300mm the problem would go away, so I will be keeping my eyes open for a cheap 70-300mm lens in the future.
Macro photography is hard! First of all, the depth of field is almost non-existent. Millimetres matter in terms of camera position. It took me almost an hour to find the distance needed to place an object from the lens in order to get it in focus. Second, lighting is very hard because the camera tends to get in the way and cast shadows on the object. Ideally I'd have a lens mounted ring flash, but that would defeat the "cheap" part of this project. I may be able to rig something up with white bounce cards and my on camera flash though. I could also really use a tripod to better handle the longer exposure times required by the small aperture values needed to compensate for the shallow depth of field. Phew.
Anyway, here are some sample images and a picture of the whole setup taken with my old Canon A80.
Last night Kim and I went with Chris and John to see the latest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I think they did a really good job adapting the book. Of course lots of stuff was changed and left out, but overall I liked it quite a bit. The effects were great too (yay ILM!).
For supper we hit up The Queen Mother which is always great. I had the Spinach Quinoa salad with grilled chicken and split the chocolate banana Dufflet cake with Kim. Mmmm.
Today Kim made sweet potato soup for lunch and it turned out awesome. For supper we're having a roast chicken. Mmmm again.
