Greg and Kat's blog

So, I was hanging around the house (Kat’s place in NC) this afternoon. Brushing my teeth, in fact.

I heard this loud smashing noise. I thought maybe the guy upstairs had part of his loft collapse with a bunch of furniture and maybe a toolbox on it. I wandered outside to see what was going on.

It took me a minute to process… a tree had fallen down. That’s bad.

A big tree. That’s worse. Onto the downstairs neighbour’s SUV. Really bad.

The way it fell was quite amazing. There are three cars parked there: upstairs, us, downstairs. The tree was closest to the upstairs car. The trunk fell maybe 8 inches behind his bumper, and our bumper.

Then there was a fork in the tree (so it was wider), and the downstairs SUV (which stuck out more). The SUV got, well, smooshed. I’m guessing that the salvageable parts are: two front tires, a few parts of the engine.

There was no damage to the other two cars. Our car is covered with chunks of window/skylight that kersploded off her car, but that’s it.

I phoned 911 because I wasn’t sure about the gas tank. They sent around a police patrol. He looked at it, wrote some notes for a report, and left a card for her. Then he walked back to his car, came back, and took some pictures with his cell phone.

My thought process: “A phone’s camera isn’t good enough for evidence. Why doesn’t he have a proper camera? Oh! He’s taking the pictures to show his buddies!”

I managed to get a few pictures in the dark with our camera. I’ll try to get some more in the morning.

The frightening thing is that it wasn’t windy or stormy. There was light drizzle, but that’s about it. Pretty much, her car got smote.

I’m heading off to North Carolina momentarily. I’m just killing time until Oli and Tina (who graciously offered to give me a ride to the airport) get here. I’ll be down there until March 6: 12 days, including travel.

Sadly, I’m still going to be trying to work while I’m there. I’m hoping to actually do work on courses and pretend I’m not an administrator. I am committed to some work on a could of distance ed courses. I have been ignoring it because there’s always something else that’s more urgent. If I can get the CMPT 165 revisions done and a good chunk of the way on CMPT 120, I’ll be happy.

Other than that, I haven’t been blogging because there hasn’t been much interesting stuff to say.

It has been all admin all the time. The high school programming contest that I run is well underway. We hosted a pro-d day for some local IT teachers last Friday. All of the calendar changes for 2007/08 are off up the chain. The University has realized that departments other than computing and engineering will be needing students real soon, so all of a sudden “enrollment management” is a hot topic in the halls of power. The fallout from that last one promises to be a lot of fun for a long time.

I’m getting better at Grand Theft Auto, though.

Brief background: The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) sponsors an annual worldwide programming contest. The contest format is 5+ problems, generally all tricky algorithmic problems, solve ’em, GO! Teams with more problems correctly completed in the given time win; ties are broken by penalty points (incorrect submissions and time taken to complete problems).

Brad (our coach) and the UBC coach often organize a spring warmup/practice/fun contest for our students. For the last two years, Ted Kirkpatrick and I have entered as a team.

Competing against students can go one of two general ways:

1. Oh ha ha, you’re better at DDR than me.
2. This contest seems to involve logic/reasoning/intelligence: exactly the stuff I’m supposed to be better at than my students so I can teach them. Failure is not an option.

ACM-like contests are distinctly in the second category.

This presents an interesting challenge. Primarily, the students who are into the ACM contest are really into it and are quite good. Ted and I spend a lot more time writing lecture notes than programs.

Last year, we finished below the really competitive teams, and above the rest of the students. That’s the best we could have hoped for, really.

This year’s contest was today. Once again, two SFU teams bested us, completing 4/6 problems. We completed 3/6.

I cost us 20 minutes debugging a stupid mistake in fraction arithmetic. If not for that, we definitely would have finished a fourth problem (but not changed our ranking because of penalty points).

I’m more annoyed at another problem that neither Ted or I saw how to do. All you had to do was tilt your head the right way and say “Oh, it’s graph theory. I’ll just look up the formula and type it in.” Me and my undergrad in math and masters in graph-theoretic network algorithms didn’t notice that.

I hope Art doesn’t find out. Anyway, we should have had 4/6 and if I had really been on top of my game, it might have been 5/6. [shakes fist]

Day one of the eating-real-food resolution went well. I had salad from the salad bar at the convenience store in Cornerstone for lunch. I could see making a habit out of that. I got some vegetables at the grocery store to save a little money on it.

I made scalloped potatoes (from my mother’s recipe) and spinach for dinner. Scalloped potatoes take far longer than I was comfortable with: there might have been some non-real-food snacking before they cooked. Cooking takes a long time. That’s clearly going to be the limiting factor in this plan.

Eat (real) food: check. Not too much: I miss potatoes, and may have moved into “too much” territory. Mostly plants: check. I feel good about that.

And, while at Save-On-Foods (a necessity, having no “real” food in the house), I’m about 95% sure I saw Fred Ewanuick (Hank from Corner Gas). He had a beard, so I wasn’t entirely sure, but passed him several times in the aisle and got a good look. Apparently he grew up in Port Moody, so it’s not too far-fetched. He bumps Andy Dick out of the top spot in the “celebrities I have seen out in the world” ranking.

I’m still holding out hope for running into fellow Vancouverite Sarah Chalke. Mmm… Sarah Chalke.

I just read Unhappy Meals from the NY Times. It was actually really interesting, and if you’ve got some time on your hands, I’d recommend it. The first line strikes me as something that’s far too simple and obvious to ever catch on:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I have really been eating crap for the last little while. I should definitely get some more real “food” into me.

Clearly I could stand to eat a little less. (Or several of my shirts have spontaneously shrunk.)

On the subject of “mostly plants”, I have been there for a while. But, at the end of the article, I was introduced to a new word: “Flexitarianism“. There’s a word that describes the thing I am! I feel like I should subscribe to a newsletter or something.

So, I’m going to try to get back into the habit of cooking. A late New Year’s resolution.

As most of you know, I take the bus to work every day. I really have no general problem with it, and enjoy the 20 minutes of reading/music every morning and afternoon. But, let’s face it: there are some annoyances.

As such, I present Greg’s (incomplete) Bus Rules:

1. If you’re standing: Look towards the back of the bus. Is there empty space there? Look towards the front of the bus. Is there a clump of people crowded together that can’t get by you? Congratulations, you’re retarded! Move!
2. Don’t wait until the bus comes to a complete stop to start making your way to the door. If you do, don’t be surprised, yell, or bitch when the driver takes off when you’re just about to get to the door after 15 seconds. Exception: You’re old/frail/crippled/have an inner-ear infection, so standing up on a moving bus is a significant danger.
3. Gentlemen: Close the gates. I’m sure you have a large, manly sack. Air it out on your own time, and keep yourself on your seat.
4. If you fail to observe the above rule (or otherwise can’t keep yourself confined to one seat), don’t be surprised if you find me snuggled up to you. Especially if it’s cold. Also don’t be surprised if I shuffle imperceptibly in your direction every time you adjust or shuffle in the slightest.
5. Mothers: Yes, I guess you can flip up those front two seats and park your SUV-style stroller. Don’t then take your bastard offspring out of the stroller and plop them on the seat beside you. You just paid one fare and took four seats. Leave the kid in the stroller. Or put them on your lap. Or walk there. Or find a local crack dealer to babysit the kid. Pick any one, doesn’t bother me.
6. Put your shit on the luggage racks. This seems to be overlooked particularly in the 5-wide bench at the back: there’s a whole big space back there.
7. Okay, this one is pretty minor, but annoying. If you’re standing and two people are trying to have a conversation across the aisle, don’t stand directly between them unless the bus is so crowded you have no choice. Take a half-step.
8. If somebody at the front of the bus gives their seat up to an old person and the old person then gets off, the original occupant has dibs on the seat. No swooping in.

Proposed additions welcome.

I decided I should make better use of my camera. Perhaps it was a New Year’s resolution.

Anyway, I have gone out the last two Saturdays looking for stuff to put in front of my camera. I took a few pictures around, but I’m going to concentrate on the panoramas because I think they’re neat.

Last Saturday was close to home. I started by going up to SFU. I did a full 360° panorama in the AQ (drag around the panoramas to scroll).

Then, I went down to Burnaby Mountain Park. I set up the tripod again and did another 360° among the totem poles.

They day was pretty overcast, so there aren’t exactly any spectacular colours in those, but they aren’t bad.

This week, it was overcast again, so I went downtown to a camera shop. On the way back, I put on my sunglasses. Then I though “hey, sunglasses mean sun!” Sun means light and light means colour.

So, I cranked onto the highway and went to the most obvious place in the city to take a panorama: the Cypress lookout. I got a nice panorama from the lookout, and it even managed to stitch together without much lens flare, which was nice since I wasn’t carrying my lens hood.

I think the last panorama was my favourite. I drive around the north side of Capitol Hill, took the road as far as it goes, parked, and set off on-foot into some kind of mini-port that’s there for the Chevron refinery.

I found a good place and took a panorama facing north towards the Burrard Inlet. It’s a neat viewpoint: the light is good and the water/mountains/sky effect is good. And there’s this weird overgrown houseboat lookin’ thing sitting there.

I showed the picture to Kat who remembered a floating McDonalds at Expo 86 that looked a lot like that. Sure enough, that boat is the remains of the McBarge (!). I found some more McBarge info out there too.