Pie Palace

I watched the first four episodes of the IT Crowd from England’s Channel Four. (Of course, Channel Four won’t let folks with foreign-looking IP addresses view it, so I had to use Google Video, but that’s neither here nor their)

I’d heard about the show through Cory Doctorow‘s posts on BoingBoing. He called the show hilarious and screamingly funny. I’d call it humourous, and not-boring for about three episodes. Since it was about an IT group, I was hoping to see some of the semi-autistic character traits I’ve seen in myself and other geeks, but no such luck. The send-up of corporate life was close enough to the mark to produce a few gaffaws, however.

I really have to put less weight on Doctorow’s recommendations. His review of Jumper was enough to make me pick up both Jumper and Helm by Steven Gould. The books were terrible: the characters used the same mannerisms and phraseology; the plot twists were cliched; and minor characters were chariciatures of the roles they were seen to fill in society. The only thing that kept me reading Helm was the Super Killer Unstoppable Ninja Aikido Space Powers that the main characters were imbued with: these folks fight their way unarmed through armies of trained soldiers while having brain-dead conversations that would fit perfectly into a perfectly forgettable Hollywood blockbuster. Doctorow: you owe me at least four hours of my life (it was my own fault for reading past that).

I occasionally play pick-up soccer at Carleton. On Thursday I saw two fairly funny plays that I’d never seen before.

The first could only be called “pause”: one of our forwards was storming down the field towards a bunch of their defenders on a break-away. One of their defenders ran forward to challenge him, and our forward booted the ball straight up and stopped on the spot. The ball went up a good forty feet (just shy of the ceiling), before falling back down onto the forward’s laces. In the time that the ball was traversing it’s very own y-axis, the rest of our forwards managed to make up to the neighbourhood of the lone forward.

During the second play, two of our defenders were stuck in our right corner. There were three or four attackers ringing them, and it didn’t look like they were going to get the ball out of there. Grinning like an idiot, one of our defenders stepped behind the other (about five feet behind). The front-most defender had the ball and kept tapping it back and forth between his feet, drawing the attackers in. When the attackers had committed to going for the ball, he passed it back to his grinning compatriot, and stepped to the side. She booted it straight down the field at their goal. I’m not sure if they planned it, but they surprised the hell out of the opposing forwards.

I’ve been wrestling with Bison for the past two days. I don’t mean the four-legged bison, I mean Bison, the parser generator. In a weird twist of meta-ality, I’m trying to trying to create a parser generator using the Bison parser generator.

My mental block comes from how Bison forces me to mix objects. I’d like to have a clear division between the primitive types that I can glean from the grammar (strings, ints, and other bits and pieces) and the domain-specific in-memory representation of the grammar (which consists of rules, cardinality structs, etc). But it doesn’t look like Bison wants to oblidge me. I either have to create a huge %union that contains both my domain-specific representation, and the primitive types; or I have to limit myself to primitive types and construct the domain-specific representation outside of Bison’s otherwise friendly grammar.

Constructing the domain-specific stuff requires maintaining a stack of active rules and groups, which I don’t really want to do. Which pushes me towards the ugly %union approach. Blech.

I recently ran across this image. It describes how computers (occasionally) make me feel.

When you’re lugging $600 sports equipment into your girlfriend’s house, make sure that it actually gets inside, and isn’t left on the lawn due to an administrative error. Then, you won’t have to trudge around the neighbourhood in the rain, putting up pathetic posters begging for the person who took your snowboard to return it.

Update: The story has a happy ending. It turns out my Lovely’s neighbour noticed the snowboard out there and took it inside for safekeeping. The neighbour returned it while I was out putting up posters. It’s probably the best possible outcome for the situation.

Moral of the story: never stop snowboarding; go to the hill and stay there. Never leave. Ever.