Attempting a greatest
The Sockeye exhibition game last weekend was pretty impressive. Wish I could've made it on time to watch the first half!
Books
8. The Happiest Days of Our Lives: A collection of blog posts/short stories/anecdotes by Wil Wheaton. He's got to be one of the best nerd writers around, along with Scalzi. Or at least, one of the best authors who writes about being a nerd. Really enjoyed reading this one, and it's very convenient to read in short bursts, which is pretty much the only type of reading I've been able to get in recently.
9. The World Without Us: This one you may have heard of; I've seen it mentioned online a few places, at least. As you might guess, it explores what would happen to the Earth if humans were to suddenly vanish. It goes into surprising depth on a number of topics/locations/etc., although it obviously can't cover everything. I personally wondered what would happen to the internet (though I suppose without power, it would be a pretty quick death) and farmland. Some parts were more interesting than others, but the reading required a bit more attention than I could give it. It was definitely much better when I had a nice chunk of time to devote to reading.
Chase against Nord. It's really awesome that ultimate is still such a young sport.
Ultimate
Looks like I'm reduced to pickup during the spring, as my league team doesn't have enough women and I couldn't get into the hat league.
Played in Slog in the Bog on Saturday. It's a pretty casual tournament, and we went 4-1 in C pool, which was definitely pretty sad. Although kind of expected, as it was the last pool. Felt kinda bad about rolling over the high school teams. Beating the athletic team that played ultimate like football/basketball was pretty satisfying, though. Also, winning against Toolbox 13-8 when down 4-7 at half was nice. (I wonder what the heck happened to them in the second half.)
Junior Worlds tryouts were on the same fields, and we spent a good while after watching them during the downtime. They were quite impressive! We also wound up picking up a Riot girl and a couple Voodoo guys. It's scary how good they are, even when playing lazily. (It was sweet that Drew, on Riot, got to play with her older brother Cole, who plays on Voodoo. That's kind of a scary combination.)
And although I managed to get through Slog relatively unscathed, I did somehow tweak my knee today during pickup? Pretty odd. I wonder if I'll be able to go running this week. (I have a few friends who are doing a marathon, and I've been tagging along with their training runs every now and then. There's quite a few of us running with them after work now, although only two or three actually doing the marathon. I'm sure as hell not going to do it!)
Still need to learn to lay out!
I call this one "WTF torque?!".
Dorky stuff
The Ruby Quiz from a couple weeks ago is pretty good for nerd sniping. In short, find the minimum circle that contains a set of random points. It's been hilariously fun to drop on friends at work. You can just kick back and watch those gears turn. Interesting to see how people approach the problem. There's probably an awesome mathematical way to figure this one out, but fortunately, none of my friends are mathematicians! (Or else this wouldn't be such a fun question, now would it?)
Someone recently asked on one of the DLs for the best way in C# to replace a set of words with a set of other words without having the replacement words be modified. In Ruby, I'd do it kinda like this:
hsh = { 'alice' => 'bob', 'bob' => 'alice' }
str.gsub(Regex.new(hsh.keys.join('|'))) {|s| hsh[s] }
I quickly discovered that the equivalent C# code is way longer. I wonder if there's a more C# way to do it than this. (And yes, I am aware that you'd probably want \W's around the regex, and perhaps a /i at the end, but this is just looking at the basic gist of the code.)
No real projects up my sleeve for now, although some of the mini-projects I've been thinking about:
- Fixing my automount in 10.5 (grar, annoying)
- Figuring out how I want to backup with Amazon S3 - this one's actually kind of important, so I really need to do this sometime
- Using Amazon S3 for my gallery webapp? Would make it a heck of a lot faster, though I may as well just use a pregenerated gallery if I were to go this route
- Writing a flickr set download/backup script, since I want to keep my Favorites set on my iPod touch
These out of focus photos are strangely interesting to me. I think this is because I literally can't see the annoying details on the sharp shots.
Random
DST + nap (perhaps Chipotle + Jamba Juice is not the wisest choice of food and drink after pickup) is making me way more awake now than I should be. Sigh.
I really need to clean my place up. Being sick last week (sore throat + foggy head = day sleeping on the couch) was definitely not beneficial.
And... this has gotten pretty long, so I think that's enough for now.