Ice Cream

Last week when I was on-call I had a craving for ice cream, but I didn't have any in my freezer. When I was at the grocery store yesterday I found a flavour called Moose Tracks. It's vanilla with chocolate streaks as well as chunks of chocolate too. Watching Grey's Anatomy and eating ice cream is a good way to end the week.

Great Design

Joel on Software has started a series of articles on Great Design.

Skiing

Yesterday, I went skiing at Summit with Suor (who was snowboarding). It was my first time skiing. Well, that's not quite true. Went I was in grade 6 they took us skiing at Chicopee Ski Hill. But that was like 15 years ago, so I don't remember anything. And Chicopee is a rather desperate foray at downhill skiing. (If you're Waterloo you know what I mean. If you're from Seattle, it's smaller than the hill I live on. Otherwise, note that the emphasis is strongly on hill).

I spend the first two-and-half hours in lessons. They didn't give me poles either. The instructor (Stan) talked about balance, pressure, rotating, and edging for a bit. (Skiing is more complicated that it looks). Then we tried balancing with only one ski on and going down a slight incline. Then with two skis. After that, we made it up the easier slope (Holiday) and went down a few times and that was it for the first lesson. (There are a total of three lessons over three days).

Afterward, I went down Holiday several more times with Suor, which was fun. The chair lift is a bit crazy - I don't like heights, and it took a few tries before I could figure out how get off it without falling. Overall, I had a goodtime, but skiing is hard on your lower legs. Everything from my knees down was quite sore yesterday. And I can't walk too well today - my left-calf muscle is not very happy.

I'll probably go again at the start of March.

Assorted Links

superfluous is a cool word.

Lazy Monday - A parody of the SNL Lazy Sunday (i.e. Narnia) rap video that's worth watching.

Segway creator unveils his next act - Providing electricity and clean water to villages in the Developing World. That's a cool idea.

Calculating Dogs - Apparently dogs can perform Calculus.

Thursday

I'm in good mood. It's almost the weekend, men's hockey has started at the Olympics (Canada beat Italy 7-2 yesterday and played Germany earlier today - I'm currently waiting for CBC to re-broadcast that game), I bought a new pair of New Balance running shoes that are very nice. I'm also planning on trying to cook risotto for dinner tomorrow night. (I've never tried making it before).

Last night I watched the last disc from season one of Lost. I can't believe how good a TV show it is. It's one of the best things since sliced bread. The season finale was even more crazy-mad than usual. (e.g. Pouring gun power in a wound and setting it on fire to suture it. Damn). I can't wait for season two to come out on DVD.

The Pragmatic Programmer

I finished reading The Pragmatic Programmer a couple weeks ago. (And have been meaning to mention it, but kept forgetting). The book outlines an approach to software development summed up by its first "tip": Care About Your Craft - Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?

What you learn in school tends to be either aspects of Computer Science or the syntax and features of various programming languages. Both are useful, but developing software and working with complex systems have many other facets, many of which are best learned though experience. The book is a collection of short chapters that discuss what the authors' have learned about the later.

The engineering process - creating maintainable and testable software, design, documentation, and debugging - receives a lot of coverage. But other engineering topics and skills, including tools, architecture, communication, scoping and estimation, as well as career development, are discussed. The writing style is clear and full of examples, but concise (in a good way).

I highly recommend this book as it will (likely) introduce many new and helpful ideas as well as solidifying things that you may have learned along the way but aren't quite sure how to articulate or reason about.