Vicki and I went paddling again tonight. It was great.
Continue reading ‘Paddling again’ »
Archive for July, 2004
Well, another Tour de France is over. And it was a great one.
Continue reading ‘Tour de France wrap up’ »
Last night I flew home from Ottawa. Once again I had to stay lower than I liked because of the engine break-in, but this time it was nearly perfect weather. Clear skies, not too bumpy, and a little haze south of the lake. The hardest part was that for the first time ever, I had to refuse a clearance and try to negotiate something different.
Continue reading ‘Flight Home’ »
I went to see “The Bourne Supremacy” today. Not a bad movie, except almost the whole damn movie was filmed with hand-held cameras. Everything was jerky, most of it was out of focus, and so quickly cut that you couldn’t see what was going on during any action scene - and there were a lot of action scenes. I came out with a headache. But in spite of that, I thought it was a pretty decent sequel to “The Borne Identity”.
Has anybody else noticed that Matt Damon has a really weird nose in profile?
I’ve been feeling antsy about the fact that I haven’t flown in clouds since the flight back from Oshkosh last year. So I’ve been thinking about waiting for a day with low ceilings, but not too low, and getting an instructor and going to fly some approaches in real conditions. But we’ve had so many thunderstorms this summer, and I’ve been working so hard that the confluence of the conditions I wanted and the spare time haven’t happened.
So something good happened - I got a chance to get a plane for the weekend, and it was nicely cloudy. The thunderstorms passed through the area a few hours before, and it looked like the nice sorts of clouds.
Continue reading ‘A great flight’ »
Last night, the Good was that Vicki and I went kayaking. I enjoy it so much - being closer to the water than in a canoe, it seems like you’re just flying along. Vicki was a little pissed at me because every time I tried to do a succession of 5 or 10 good technique paddle strokes, I’d end up 20-30 metres in front of her. Towards the end I think I figured out how to do good technique without pulling too hard, so I could paddle well but not too fast. I feel a good sort of pain afterwards - muscle tiredness, but no untoward joint pain that I can detect.
The Bad was that my TiVo recording of the Alpe d’Huez time trial cut out just as Lance Armstrong was about to catch Ivan Basso and Ullrich was still out on the course. Dammit - I wanted to see Lance’s climb on the upper parts.
The Ugly is that after a few hours of feeling that my glasses weren’t working out, I tried a few hours without them, and the net result was horrific eyestrain - not sure if the eyestrain came from the time I had with glasses or the time without them. I know that this morning my eyes are all gunked up, which seems to be happening because of the dryness I feel when wearing my glasses.
Ok, I’ve had the glasses, what, five days now? I still notice a big improvement in my ability to read small type on my computer screen or a page in front of me. But I can’t wear them if I need to switch between near and far, because they don’t work as well in the “down on the nose” position, and if I look far through them, it’s like my eyes grind their gears as they try to switch. And when I wear them for long periods of looking at the screen, my eyes get very dry, as if I were staring. And if my eyes get dry, they seem to get gunk in them and get cloudy until I rub them.
This sucks. I want my young eyes back.
I’m listening to two guys in the next cubicle discuss boolean logic in our product. I’m innately interested in this topic, because I wrote the logic engine. The two guys talking are the guy responsible for presenting the choices to the user and generating the appropriate XML, and the guy responsible for taking the XML after it has been transmitted to the remote sites and stuffing the values into the database so that my logic engine can use that information. Two computer scientists, probably with degrees in computer science, discussing something that is at the very core of computer science. And like everybody else in this office except me, they’re getting it wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And I’m wondering if I’m going to have to run over there and smack one or both of them until they get it right.
Continue reading ‘Cause and Effect’ »
Well, that was fun. Harry and Vicki and Emily have already written about it, and I attempted to write something as a comment in Harry’s blog, but the registration system on his blog stymied me.
Anyway, I enjoyed the weekend immensely. I have to confess, however, that the abundance of kids overwhelmed me and I had to go off by myself to recharge a lot. Fortunately my work project is horribly behind schedule so I had a ready excuse to sneak off into a quiet corner to ponder the wonders of the Observer/Observable classes and the “fireContentChanged” methods in AbstractTableModel classes.
The highlight of the weekend for me was the Saturday evening discussion, mostly because it’s good to find people who are far more politically aware, astute and active than I who are not totally paranoid about the election. My personal feeling is that dirty tricks are going to give us at least 4 more years of this crap (and a good possibility of the complete destruction of democracy in the process), and it’s good to know that Angus and Harry and Misha aren’t totally convinced that this is a done deal. (But I’m not giving up my Canadian passport, either.)
Ok, I’ve been wearing these reading glasses for 20 minutes now, and I have a wicked headache. How long before I get used to them?
As frequent readers of this blog know, I’ve pretty much run out of things I can do that are fun and give me exercise. Running, cross country skiing, orienteering, backpacking, canoing, mountain biking - all have fallen to the wayside as my pain levels continued to increase.
Last night, Vicki and I had a kayak lesson. Back in 1979 I worked at a summer camp and we had really cheap “tupperware boat” kayaks. We called them “tupperware” because they looked like they were made out of the same plastic, and even sounded the same when you thumped them. I played around a little bit in them, but never really learned anything except how to get out of one when you roll upside down and can’t quite get your eskimo roll working. Anyway, I haven’t really looked at kayaks since them because I think of them as downriver whitewater boats, and I’m not all that interested in whitewater. Don’t get me wrong, whitewater is fun, but it’s pure strength, not endurance. When canoeing, I’d prefer to think of whitewater as the prize you got as a reward for paddling for hours up rivers and across lakes.
Vicki and I tried a sea kayak on our cruise last month (sheesh, has it been a month already?), and I loved it. One thing I liked was that it seemed like a more fluid motion than canoeing. And being sea kayaks rather than whitewater boats, they’re optimzed for paddling in mostly straight lines on flat water, which I like. The other thing I liked is that if I can get Vicki involved, then maybe I won’t go out and hammer away at it and get overuse injuries immediately.
So first order of business was to get some lessons to make sure I was doing it right. That we did, and we both enjoyed it. Many of my boat handling skills from canoeing transferred over with little modification. Second order of business is to make sure I’m in no more joint pain after doing it than normal. So far, mostly so good. I’ve got lots of muscle soreness, but that’s the good sort of pain. I’ve also got a twinge in my right elbow, but I often get that from using the mouse, so I’m not sure if that’s paddling related. Vicki says she’s got some pain in her shoulder joint too, so I think we should hold off until next week before trying again, even though my first tempation is to go out today.
Time to wait and see. Keep your fingers crossed.
It looks like the coronation of King George I is proceeding apace.
CNN.com - Officials discuss how to delay Election Day - Jul 11, 2004
Anybody who has looked at a web site or user interface I’ve designed, or indeed at the way I dress, will realize that picking colours isn’t my forte. Normally I rely on finding a site or program whose theme I like and copying it wholesale.
I think I’ve found the answer: ColorMatch Remix. I wonder how it works?
Since I cut off comments on old entries (as I discussed in Rants and Revelations: In other news…), the number of comment spams has gone down from one or two a day to only one comment spam in 12 days.
I think I’m going to shove that command into a daily cron job.
Take that, you spamming bastards!
Are the basic concepts of boolean logic that foreign to people? And I’m not just talking about normal people - I’m talking about computer programmers, managers of computer programmers (former programmers themselves), and quality assurance testers.
Continue reading ‘I’m losing it’ »
