Today Melanie and I spent most of the day unpacking boxes. I focussed on boxes of books and papers. Wow!!! We have a lot of books! I’m trying to get rid of papers so I thought I should put a link to this important paper about the internet as a publicly supported utility.
Today, tucked away in a shelf in a little-visited part of a toy store, I found Lego set #8002 – the “Destroyer Droid”. The box was partially crushed, and opened, but all the little packets of pieces seemed to be in place. On enquiry, I was told that the set was priced at $29.00US. I asked if, given the condition of the box, I might get a discount and a decent 20% was quickly offered. I am now the proud owner of this fabulous model. Over five hundred pieces for only twenty-six dollars (including tax). That’s five cents per piece!
An old aquaintance of mine, Bettina Grassman, has a web site. She’s going to India soon.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for a Valentine’s day present for Melanie, but everything is either really expensive or really cheesy. I suspect that I will have to give her something I have made 🙂
I’m going to try having firesides every Wednesday night at my place in Jersey City. I have to buy furniture first 🙂 Maybe I’ll try Ikea. At the least, I should probably get four chairs and a dinner table. I’d also like a futon bed/couch and a bunch of cushions. A little office furniture would be nice too.
Melanie and I talked this weekend about plans for the 5-year plan. Melanie is going to try to start child friendly devotional gatherings and study circles. I’m going to go to a Ruhi Book One study circle here in Jersey City starting in early March.
This week I’m going to get myself set up so that I have a serious high speed internet connection at home. I will move my servers from Barrie (they are currently with Apexia Voice and Data – excellent people and service, just located inconveniently for me now). I will be getting a 3mbps/640kbps ADSL service from Bell using my current class C IP set. To do this, I need to get a business telephone line, get the ADSL service, cancel my Apexia account, get rid of my current Roger cable (also good but doesn’t allow static IP), and get rid of our residential phone line. All told, doing this will save about $100/month. I’m probably going to have to figure out the transition stuff which could be complicated. I rely on the server for my email so it can’t be down for much more than a day.
Haifa had an adventure today. So for dinner, Kristine and Celine were over. Melanie made stir-fry. Haifa wanted to eat with her chopsticks (I got them for her a few weeks ago) so she did. After dinner, Kristine noticed that Haifa was running around and playing with her chopsticks. Kristine told her to put them down and not play with them. Haifa immediately ran away with them and threw herself down on a pillow. Then she started to cry. Melanie ran over and asked her where it hurt. Her eye! Melanie looked and there was a piece of chopstick sticking out of her eye through her eyelid. Celine asked if she needed to call 911. They decided to drive to the hospital. After a two hour wait, the doctor pulled the chopstick peice out of her eye – apparently, thank God, it had gone in between her eye ball and the bone of her eye socket. Her eyelid bled a bit. The doctor thought that everything was okay. Apparently the piece in her eye was about 1cm long (2/5th of an inch). I guess that’s a pretty good warning to us that we have to pay more attention to safety around the house. Anyone who reads this, please say a prayer for healing so that her eye doesn’t get infected (doctor says there is little chance of that). Ug.
I’ve been forced to work a little bit in C++ and my clearly articulated and carefully considered opinion: RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!!!!! Okay, so this rant has probably been done to death but really, what’s up with virtual methods? What’s up with the really stupid syntax (:: just doens’t do anything for me!)? What’s up with the stupid reliance on preprocessor directives? What’s up with the lack of dynamic typing and reflection? What’s up with the hassle of separate .h files? What’s up with references????!!! Whoever thought this thing up must have been really really twisted! (And this corroborates that.)
I had a great weekend. Christian and I went on Saturday to get a bunch of stuff out of our storage unit in Elmvale. On the way there and back, Chris and I worked on developing an NSpace class in Java. It will allow for data to be organized along an arbitrary (and dynamic) number of dimensions. It will be a sparse data structure so that not all locations in the space must have data. We’ll probably put it up on SourceForge in a week or two. I’ll let you, dear reader, know when that happens 🙂
As for the stuff in storage, we listened to the XXX (US$) (CA$) soundtrack while we were loading the van. Christian acknowledged my superlative skill at packing (due to my extensive experience with moving) :-/ Lots of good exercise lifting those heavy boxes! We also stopped for lunch and did some development work during our meal.
Sunday was packed with Baha’i activities. In the morning we went to Baha’i children’s classes. I watched Haifa in her preschool “class” while Melanie and Justice went to the senior kindergarten class. We met a few people too. We went home then. Melanie’s mom and grandmother stopped by for tea. Melanie was a bit upset about the condition of the house, what with a bunch of boxes and pieces of furniture all over the place from our storage run. We tidied up a bit and things were presentable. Then in the afternoon we went to the Markham Unit Convention. It was very well run, but not as nice as the unit convention in the SF Bay area last October. I asked a question about the process of reflection on the Ruhi training materials and the methods of facilitation to emphasize the need for putting the training into action. I also privately talked with the delegate about the fact that the world is awash in the excesses of materialism, and that future unit conventions might be better should they include the arts to a substantial degree.
After the unit convention we went on a bit of a drive and looked at some mansions
that are near where we live. The rest of the evening was mostly me getting ready
for being back in Jersey City.
I’ve updated my personal gift registry. It now includes links to Amazon.ca for those who want to buy stuff using Canuk bucks such as the “loonie” and the “toonie”. If anyone is interested in the big score, the one gift beyond all other gifts, look no further than here. I don’t really expect anyone to get me that… but I can dream 🙂
Most people have seen the ads for Apple’s switch campaign. Where here’s one for Canada.
I’ve also found some really fabulous Java style guides: “A Programming Style Guide for Java” by Paul Haahr and “Java Programming Style Guidelines” by Geotechnical Software Services. Here’s a good web usability guide.
Here’s a little guide to my name. Depending on if you ask my father or my mother, my first name comes from a different place. Mishkin – as a Farsi (Persian) word, it means “Jet Black” or “Musk Scented”. My first name comes from Mishkin Qalam a 19th century calligrapher who became a follower of Baha’u’llah. My father dreamed that I should be named after Mishkin Qalam while he was on pilgrimage at the Baha’i World Center. Mishkin also refers to “Prince Mishkin” in “The Idiot” by Dostoyevsky. My mother loves the book and the character. Ben-Garry can be thought of two ways as well: “ben” is like “ibn” or “son-of” so that I am the son of Garry, or, “Ben” is the name of my dad’s dad so that “Ben-Garry” describes my lineage. Vyordan is the name of one of my ancestors on my mom’s side, but I don’t remember who exactly. Berteig is Norwegian and means “bear-mother”.
I have always loved my name. I like that it is long. I like that it has meaning but isn’t pretentious. I like that it ties me to my family. I like that it has a bit of a story to it.
I’ve updated my list of important resources for software development. It now includes the new Martin Fowler book (“Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”), and a link to an XML tutorial.
I have a 3-megapixel Olympus Camedia C-3020 digital camera. I also have an old Artec scanner. Guess which one is better for scanning photos? In macro mode, my 2000-ish pixels of horizontal resolution divided by 5 inches = 400 dpi. The focus is better (since the scanner’s quality sucks), and because of that the effective resolution of my camera is better than my scanner. Anybody want a used scanner? In reality because of the wierd sampling that is done with digital cameras, the resolution is more like 133 dpi, but the interpolation software is pretty sophisticated.
I didn’t reach my weight goal… I actually gained a bit and peeked over 200 lbs again briefly. I’m down now to 198, but its tough. Being at home this week is sure to help. Maybe I can get back down to 195 by the end of the week.