Gregory McGarry: News and Views

It was a sunny day in Vancouver today, and I walked down to Brentwood to go to Save-On Foods. I'm a bit low on the home-brew supplies and Save-On Foods are the my supplier of ingredients.

While I was in the store, I bought a tub of protein suppliment. I'm still confused how much the tub cost. It usually sells for $24.99, but the sale tag indicated $19.99. At the checkout it registered $27.99. When I commented that the shelf price indicated it was on sale, they despatched someone to check the shelf. Apparently, the sale price was for last week and should have been removed. Instead, they charged me $9.99.

How confusing! But I'm not complaining. I'll be watching when the home-brew supplies are on sale.

Last night the clocks all moved forward for daylight savings. Well, that's what's supposed to have happened. However, nobody bothered to mention it to me, and it wasn't until I turned up at the gym at 5:30pm (actually 6:30pm) that it all becames clear.

It seems a little weird to me. There are actually more days in "daylight savings" or "summer time" days than normal days. Wouldn't it just be easier to call the normal days "daylight wasting", or "winter time" days? Next year the "summer time" will be even longer after the US decided to make "summer time" start 3 weeks earlier and finish 1 week later.

There is now a pool table in the house. I guess I won't be working as hard as usual.

The last couple of days I have been programming in C#. I'm not too quick on the uptake with these technologies. C# is the programming language in the Microsofts .NET framework. And for once, I have to say that Microsoft haven't done too badly with this language.

My perspective comes from trying to re-use existing software written in C and C++. And if you consider how much of a pain it is to get java to integrate with these languages, C# is a breeze. C# isn't terribly different to java either; garbage collection and yet another set of classes to learn. I really like the way "callbacks" have become a basic type in the language, termed a delegate. This makes it so much easier to build event-driven applications.

I am starting to wonder how far C/C++ can be extended. The subtle differences (and inconsistent notation) between C#, java and Objective C are starting to make things just a little difficult.

Hollywood always needs a villian, and in not-so-creative fashion, they always seem to pick on Americas latest political foe. Remember the 80s, when you couldn't watch a film without a storyline based on Russian spies. By the 90s, attention was firmly based on middle-eastern spies.

No more cold war and public weariness of the gulf war means that Hollywood has to find a new villian. And it seems clear that the poor old virus is next to be stereotyped. Poor and defenceless. Look at all the innocent viruses that pine-o-clean has killed, compared to the number of people viruses have killed. It's hardly a match.

Already, the storylines are becoming predictable. "V for Vendetta" was described to me something like this: "It was kinda good for a while, because I didn't understand it. Then this stupid part about the virus happened. And where did all the masks come from?". I haven't seen it. Maybe I won't. This comes on the back of other recent films using the virus idea, such as Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet. And Ultraviolet was really bad. It's worth watching just to see how bad it is! Actually, it's so bad that it's not even worth seeing how bad it is. Take my word for it.

It would be nice if the Hollywood scriptwriters would come up with something original. Maybe we could convince some viruses to attack the scriptwriters.

On the weekend I saw "The worlds fastest indian". This is a New Zealand true story about Burt Monroe, a 60-something year old who built and rode his bike to 190 miles per hour. The story follows Burt Monroe from Invercargil to Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA. Anthony Hopkins plays Burt Monroe. He seemd to do a fair job bunging on the southern scottish NZ accent as far as I could tell. The story is simple and good fun. Check it out if you can. Better than much of the other crap at the movies these days (like that pitiful "Untraviolet" that I shouldn't have watched).

For anyone interested in land-speed records, there is some interesting reading on Wikipedia and a graph of the record over the years.

Another really interesting site is extracted from the New Zealand Veterans and Vintage Motoring Magazine based on Burts own writings.

I've found this nifty little program called Transcribe! It's available for Windows and Mac. It does pitch shifting and scaling of audio signals and will also plot the Fourier transform of selected segments against the musical scale. Basically, the program can be used for slowing down a piece of music to determine the notes being played.

For the last couple of days I have intending to head up to Cypress Mountain and test the skis out. Unfortunately, it's been snowing in Vancouver, which mean visibility up on the mountains has been terrible. Last night I saw the snow coming down and when I saw the potential for sun this morning, I quickly grabbed my snowboard and headed up to Grouse Mountain.

Last year when I was at Grouse Mountain, the conditions were horrible. Not this time. I arrived about midday and there was plenty of untouched snow to be found. The 24 centimetres in the last 48 hours was great. SInce Grouse is such a small mountain, most of the terrain was skiied out by mid afternoon. Bad luck for anyone who wants to ski over the weekend...

A great day out. It's still not a ski day at Cypress, but I might get to that after the spring break ends.