I think I've recovered enough from my marathon Italy blogging to start trying to do regular blog updates again. Stuff has been going well lately, it's been nice to relax a bit since the wedding and not have to think about it anymore. I'm even almost ready for Christmas!

I've been thinking a lot about priorities lately. There's tons of stuff I love to do with my time like climbing, photography, reading, cooking, going to restaurants, exploring Toronto, traveling the world and lots of other stuff too. And that list doesn't even include all the computer-related (personal and professional) activities I do. I also have vague goals for the future like kids, home ownership, LOTS more world travel and total personal fulfillment. You know, easy stuff.

I already have trouble making time for all the things I want to do. It makes me sad that I don't get out to take photos regularly and if I don't climb at least twice a week I don't improve. Everything takes up lots of time and I fill my time so much that I don't have any left to think about future stuff.

So, I've decided to sit down over Christmas and take stock of everything I did last year; what was good and what was bad. I'll make a list of all the things that matter to me and try to prioritize them and see if I can work out a way to fit them all in to a regular week. If this is even a little bit successful I'll try to do it every year and hopefully I'll be able to make constant progress in the areas of my life that matter to me.

And of course, one of the things I'd like to improve is the frequency of my blogging. But I always say that.

Here's a picture of Chris and John's Christmas tree taken at the Christmas party they hosted last weekend:

Chris and John's Christmas tree

I finally finished writing up the journal for our honeymoon in Italy! It's over 12,000 words and has 239 photos so you can maybe understand why it took so long. Also, I couldn't even start until I got my NAS set up so that I had enough hard drive space to deal with the almost 2000 new photos I acquired as a result of the wedding and the trip.

Anyway, check it out by clicking the link above or by going to the Trips section of my site.

I'm still getting small amounts of comment spam. It's always on one of two posts for some reason (no idea why). I've taken action though! If you check out the comments page you'll notice that I've added a reCATCHPA widget to the form. Now to make a comment you need to successfully solve a CATCHPA first. The neat thing about reCATCHPA is that you actually do two: the first is a real CATCHPA and the other is some scanned text from a book that wasn't recognized by OCR. So you're actually helping digitize books by making comments on my site. Go you!

In other news, I'm slowly making progress on my Italy trip journal. If you check out the photos page you can take a look at four of my photos from Rome that I really like.

I've finally started on typing up the journal from our trip to Italy!! I'm not going to publish it until it's done but I thought people would like to know that it is at least started. There seemed to be no end of things preventing me from working on it, but I think most of those are gone now.

My new NAS (network attached storage) is working out pretty well. All of my photos and stuff are on it and I hope to one day re-rip all my music and get that on there too. It comes with a built in BitTorrent client which has worked pretty well so far (although just today it crashed for some reason). If I ever get a fancy new TV and a PS3 the NAS will make a really awesome media server.

Just before starting to write this post I was doing a bit of minor maintenance on this site and I noticed an irregularity in the number of comments I have on some older blog posts. It turns out I've received a little bit of comment spam! Crazy. Comment spam is pretty common on blogs that use standard blogging software because it is easy to target a lot of blogs with an automated script. But for my blog someone would have had to find it and then look at it in order to make a bot able to spam me with comments. Kinda strange and totally not worth the effort. I'm going to make a small modification to the comment stuff and see if I get any more. If I do I'll have to close down the comments feature until I think of some way to deter the spammers. I do collect minimal data (IP address) from commenters and it looks like the spam originates from Russia (with love?).

Yesterday was the first central region Tour de Bloc bouldering competition of the 2009-2010 season, held at Climber's Rock in Burlington. Myself and a bunch of the people I regularly climb with competed in the recreational division in the morning. It was lots of fun and I managed to come in sixth out of maybe thirty competitors. After we finished climbing in the morning, the real competitors climbed in the afternoon. We spent the time going to see the new Christmas Carol movie in 3D (it was ok) and then returned in the evening to watch the finals. As usual, the finals were amazing. I think the women's set of final problems was too hard as none of the competitors managed to complete more than one or two of the four. The men's problems were set at a better level.

Today we took it pretty easy as I am sore basically everywhere and can't move too much. Kim did make apple crisp though and it was yummy.

Other things that have happened recently include: a 24 hour trip to London to open and pick up all of our wedding presents; my birthday supper at Trimurti with Matt, Chris and John; Jeremy's birthday party at Second City and Fionn MacCools (where I ALMOST lost my man bag AND camera!!); and (hopefully) the partial resurrection of wing night, starting this Tuesday.

The day before leaving Italy we found out that Patrick and Toni had not yet left Canada and that we would be able to go see them the day after we returned. So this past Sunday, despite being tired and jetlaggy, Kim and I caught a GO Train (later than we wanted, due to missing the first one) to Oakville to have dinner with Patrick, Toni and Matt at Ryan and Liz's house. Liz made us an awesome supper and we had a nice relaxing time talking about our trip and enjoying the Limoncello I brought back from Cinque Terre.

We also got to look at the photos Patrick and Toni took at our wedding and they turned out great. I'll be posting some soon, but first I need to resolve the fact that I am totally out of hard drive space. Today I ordered the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, a network-attached storage device which I will be filling with a pair of one terabyte hard drives in RAID 1. I got an amazing deal from NCIX in BC...it was half price!! All of the NAS devices they sell are on huge sale at the moment. It's pretty crazy.

We're back from Italy! It was awesome!! I'll be writing up a proper trip journal over the next few weeks with photos and such.

I made a point of ignoring the Internet while I was gone, and so there are over 1000 unread items in my Google Reader, tons of email and facebook messages and I'm sure hundreds of unread emails on my work email account. Damn you Internet!

I am now happily married and equally happily in Italy! Things are awesome!

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.