Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Rain or shine
Well, I'm finally home. I had a bit of wet bus ride home. Walked back from the climbing gym in a fairly serious Vancouver rain. Not by 50 metres out of the gym I splashed into a big puddle, twice. But finally being home now I kinda enjoyed it. Not sure why, but it felt childish, free of guilt. A little wet, it'll all dry and it was kinda fun. Kinda. The rainy season has started. Four more months of this before the weather turns to the light rainy season.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Sunday, sweet Sunday
If I am going to start blogging again, I thought I'd start on a positive note. I'm working on an old project I did a long time ago to read GPS files into a format I could use to print out on top of maps. I used to host a site where all my hiking trips were overlaid on a map of the area. Unfortunately, whenI got to Canada I discovered that all the maps here must be bought. Because I'm cheap my code went into bit-rot. Lately, I've been working in Python and I love the language, but I figured I'd "spruce" up my old program and sharpen my C/C++ skills.
It has been fun, but frustrating. I forget just how verbose C is. How many pitfalls. How unreadable. It isn't all bad, but somewhat intimidating when I pick it up again after 5 years.
However, that wasn't really the point of this entry. It was Sunday, I had a great relaxing morning and then headed over to Duane's for a code review and a movie. After a casual review Duane pulls out the big guns.... Dorito based nachos. Probably a developer's worst enemy, but *oh* *my* *god*. So we dropped the code and watched the ORIGINAL Superman II. This is the version that Richard Donner orginally filmed, but was never released. Apparently the movie studios didn't want to pay him for his huge success with Superman. He got dumped and the new guy wanted director's credit so he redid the whole film. Now I'm not a big fan of Superman, but I was really impressed at how Donner's Superman II aged. It was still a solid story with good acting. The comedy was great and the violence was tame. Check it out, it was only released to DVD not to theatre, but should be rentable.
To top off a great day I found out my good friend Chris is defending! Duane, Chris and I all started school at the same time and we all had the same difficulty getting from start to finish. There is always "more work" to be done and at some point the student has to just stand their ground and say I'm finished. Well congrats to Chris, Duane and me for finishing! It has been a cool year seeing my buds getting their master's degrees.
Happy Sunday!
It has been fun, but frustrating. I forget just how verbose C is. How many pitfalls. How unreadable. It isn't all bad, but somewhat intimidating when I pick it up again after 5 years.
However, that wasn't really the point of this entry. It was Sunday, I had a great relaxing morning and then headed over to Duane's for a code review and a movie. After a casual review Duane pulls out the big guns.... Dorito based nachos. Probably a developer's worst enemy, but *oh* *my* *god*. So we dropped the code and watched the ORIGINAL Superman II. This is the version that Richard Donner orginally filmed, but was never released. Apparently the movie studios didn't want to pay him for his huge success with Superman. He got dumped and the new guy wanted director's credit so he redid the whole film. Now I'm not a big fan of Superman, but I was really impressed at how Donner's Superman II aged. It was still a solid story with good acting. The comedy was great and the violence was tame. Check it out, it was only released to DVD not to theatre, but should be rentable.
To top off a great day I found out my good friend Chris is defending! Duane, Chris and I all started school at the same time and we all had the same difficulty getting from start to finish. There is always "more work" to be done and at some point the student has to just stand their ground and say I'm finished. Well congrats to Chris, Duane and me for finishing! It has been a cool year seeing my buds getting their master's degrees.
Happy Sunday!
